Chapter Text
It all starts when you’re looking for the child’s dinner.
Well really, it starts a bit closer to when the Mandalorian rearranged the Razor Crest’s organisational system (or what little it had of it) to make room for the slowly growing amount of necessities — mostly things the child needed, but your addition as a crew mate came with some shuffling around, too — maximising some space here and there, creating some free room in one cabin or another by, among other things, moving the ship’s rations out of the one place you had known them to be in all your time staying with him — entirely without telling you.
(“I was going to tell you,” he says. You know he’s telling the truth, and you know he’s not dumb — or actively trying to starve you — so of course he would, eventually, but a sigh still falls past your lips.)
It makes perfect sense to you — this is his ship, he decides where everything goes. And besides, he deals with more of the food side of things than you do. It’s an effectively seamless system: while he’s out hunting for his bounty, you’re out hunting for the provisions that will tide the three of you over until Mando gets his next job. The food barely crosses your mind until it’s in front of you again in a completely different state to how you first got it — after he’s done putting his quarry in carbonite and cleaning out his blasters, Mando fills his time preparing the little metal boxes with what serves as your meals for the foreseeable future. He’s mentioned to you once, briefly, that it helps him wind down. Grounds him. You guess it has something to do with putting time into the little, monotonous things to keep you all alive after turning in from a job that constantly wants to kill him. His cooking isn’t the worst you’ve had, and it’s also not the best — but it fills your stomach, and that’s enough.
(The child is whining behind you, a sound so big and so hurt that you wish you could explain to him the painful simplicity of misplacing an item. Neither you nor Mando meant to lose track of the food, but a hungry child might not accept the fact that sometimes, things just happen.)
The week has been a long one, one with almost no time spent in your little de-facto home of the Crest. Mando wouldn’t say it out loud, but you knew when he mentioned both how far out this job would take him and how dangerous this planet was that he was anxious to not have the child under his close watch and care. He didn’t protest when you offered to come along and help. It’s been a week of sleeping in shifts wherever you wouldn’t get ambushed, and eating whatever you could get your hands on that didn’t need to be cooked over a brazen campfire. You were halfway convinced the Razor Crest wouldn’t even be there to greet you once the job was done. Mando seemed just as relieved as you felt upon seeing it still standing, looking as intact as you’d left it — you couldn’t blame him for the sigh that washed over his body once the quarry was quiet and frozen. This job was hardest on him out of all of you. It always is.
(He curses under his breath. You don’t hear it as much as you see a telltale tilt of his helmet that only shows when he’s beyond frustrated. “I didn’t think this job would take so long,” he says, closing a cargo box harder than he needed to. “If I only took the time beforehand to tell you where I put everything…or catalogue it…” He sighs.)
The child was, understandably, immediately relieved to be back on the Crest after a long week of far too much hiding, shooting, and ducking and running for a child to be around, and fell asleep faster than you’d ever seen him before. It was after a couple of hours of travelling in hyperspace that he woke back up, and without a second to spare he made his way to claw at the door behind which the prepared meals usually sat.
The sound of him scratching away at the metal wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to you, and you made your way down from the cockpit with practised ease, straight over to open the door for him. You smiled as he waved his arms up and down at the hiss the door let out.
The smile quickly faded, though, your face taken over by a furrowed brow, at the distinct lack of little metal boxes. The small cabin instead held stacks of medical supplies — you recognised the bacta wipes you had picked up a couple weeks ago, supposedly less intense and more gentle than a bacta spray, for in case the child ever got hurt. You turned towards the hole leading up to the cockpit.
“Hey, Mando?” you called. “Where’s the food?”
Which brings you to now, where it all starts, looking for the child’s dinner. Mando explained to you that he had honestly, legitimately forgot where he put the damn stuff, and quickly joined you in searching high and low for anything the child could snack on.
“It’s a small ship, Mando,” you say. “It’ll turn up.”
He doesn’t respond. He’s even more closed off than normal when he’s like this — you doubt you’ll even get a nod in acknowledgment from him. You keep having to remind yourself how hard the week has been, especially on him, and that he deserves a great deal of slack. It doesn’t stop the beginnings of a headache at the back of your skull.
“I already checked there,” he says when you reach for a panel towards the back of the hull. You bite back a sigh. You can’t tell if you’re exasperated at him or at the situation as a whole, or at the fact that all this looking for food has made it increasingly harder to ignore your own growing hunger. Probably all of the above.
It’s not his fault, you remind yourself, even though it kind of is— You have to push down that part of you that wants to ask why all this shuffling around of resources was remotely a good idea in the first place. The thoughts are, ultimately, just your hunger and irritation talking, and in any case, you don’t like your chances against an equally irritated Mandalorian.
Your priorities recenter themselves when you feel the child grabbing at your pant leg. You look down. The child is so small that you often think his little body can only handle being filled with one emotion at a time, and right now those big dinner plate eyes of his are overflowing with complete and utter exhaustion. Your heart breaks.
“I know, love,” you say as you crouch down, cradling his tiny head in your hand. You bring your other hand up to his, and he grasps your index finger, the digit taking up his whole hand. “I know. I’m sorry. We’ll get you something to eat soon.”
You give him a parting pat on the head. You and Mando have been practically upending this ship for the good part of the past fifteen minutes — where else could those meals be hiding?
You climb up the ladder to the upper deck. You know Mando wouldn’t ever store the rations somewhere in the cockpit — countless scenarios of the child playing around with his food and messing something up with the control panels immediately spring to mind. Opposite the cockpit stand doors that you know you must have opened up at some point or another, although generally they seem to fade into the background. You move to open them and are reminded why they don’t take up so much space in your mind — behind the doors is a shallow chamber filled with miscellaneous handheld weapons, a neatly folded pile of blankets that look a bit more dusty than they do warm, some spare clothes that probably haven’t been worn in a bit more than a while — it feels like an ‘in case we need it’ type of storage space. You’re about to close the doors and start looking elsewhere, when on the very bottom shelf you see it — a glint of textured metal shines into your eyes. You lean down slightly to get a better viewpoint and confirm what you already know — the stacks of little metal boxes holding the Crest’s rations are neatly packed away, not three steps from the cockpit doors.
“Mando!” you call, grabbing three of the boxes before shutting the doors to the chamber. “I found them!”
As soon as you’re on the lower deck, Mando is in front of you.
“Where were they?”
“In the little cupboard across from the cockpit.” You hand him one of the boxes, and his whole posture immediately softens.
He exhales in such a way that you almost mistake it for a chuckle at first. “I’ll note that down, then.”
You smile. “And everything else that you’ve moved around?”
He tilts his head to the side in a way of agreement.
You make your way to the child, who hasn’t strayed far from Mando. His entire face brightens when he sees what you’re holding, his little hands coming up and grabbing at the air for them. You feel a pang of guilt in your gut; normally he doesn’t even like this food that much.
You sit down in front of him, opening one of the boxes. “Here you go, buddy,” you say, offering it to him. The food is already in his mouth by the time the box leaves your hand.
You watch him eat in silence for a moment or two, relief finally coursing through your veins. Briefly the thought crosses your mind that, had the rations somehow not turned up, there was nothing you wouldn’t have done to see the child happy and healthy like this, a full plate of food ready and waiting for him.
Mando is soft when he speaks up. “Thank you, cyar’ika.”
You blink. You’ve never heard that word before, or that language, for that matter — at the very least, it doesn’t sound familiar.
You turn your head back slightly. “Wha— Oh.” Before you can ask what it was that Mando said, the child is batting softly at your hand. You look down at him. The box in front of him lays bare, the rations already digesting in his stomach.
He keeps patting away at your hand holding the dinner you’d intended for yourself, so you quickly open the box up and give it to him. He squeals in delight. You turn back to Mando. “What was that?”
Mando already has a hand and foot each to a rung of the ladder leading up to the cockpit. He pauses. “I said thanks.” He starts climbing.
“Oh. Yeah, but…what did…” your voice gets smaller with each word, because he seems quite set on making his way up and out of the hull. Before you can even finish your thought, he’s out of sight, gone to eat his dinner in solitude. “Okay…”
You look back down at the child. He’s still chomping away at his dinner, although a bit slower now. You hope it’ll be enough to satisfy him; you don’t want to risk going to the upper deck to get more for either of you. You figure Mando probably has the cockpit doors tightly closed, but still — you’d much rather be safe than sorry.
“It’s just you and me, then, huh?” you say to the kid as you settle in properly next to him.
He gives a tiny little coo which you choose to take as overwhelming enthusiasm to be sharing the time with you.
You revel quietly in some sort of satisfaction — it overtakes you whenever you’re reminded that the child might actually enjoy your presence. When you joined him and Mando nearly a year ago, it often felt like he couldn’t care less about you either way. You can’t really blame him — your addition to the Razor Crest was initially one purely of strategy, nothing more. Mando was traversing the system that you called home, and when you first ran into him he was clearly out of his depth. You were decent with a blaster, but even better in a pilot’s chair and knew your way around the place with your eyes closed. Any newcomer to the Helori System, you knew, would get chewed up and spit back out if they didn’t know what they were doing.
Now that you know him better, you realise that Mando is probably one of the few exceptions that could have brute forced his way through, coming out the other side a little banged up, but alive — still, he had no complaints when you offered your help. The monetary compensation he gave you was something you wouldn’t let yourself refuse, and neither was the very convenient ride across the galaxy — you needed to go places and needed money when you got there, and an extra hand on the ship for a cut of the credits was apparently a good enough deal for Mando.
You didn’t exactly know you’d be staying with them for so long. Days turned into weeks turned into months — how long before that turns into years? You always keep quiet about the fact that you’ve long overstayed your usefulness — there isn’t much of the galaxy that you know outside of Helori. You suspect Mando knows this full well too, and doesn’t bring it up or drop you off on the nearest planet simply out of begrudging politeness. And you don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the way, you stopped being scared that you’d lose the money and the transport, and started caring more about being separated from Mando and the child themselves. So you keep quiet.
You can’t help the smile that grows on your face as you look down at the child, now finished with his meal, and knowing that over all this time spent with him, he’s warmed up to you. You’re under no illusions that you could ever hold the same place in his heart that Mando does, but you’re honoured that the little green guy could even consider you part of his family. The Crest feels more and more like a home with every passing day.
It’s a nice sentiment, although you’re not actually sure how to feel about the fact that you’re probably closer to the baby than the only other adult you’ve had significant contact with in the past several months. Mando has also had his fair share of warming up to you, but the problem with the beskar-clad warrior is that he’s a little harder to read than the literal infant on the ship. You’ve learned to pick up on his mannerisms well enough, but that helmet gets in the way of you being entirely sure what he thinks of you. It doesn’t help that his word count per day seems to max out at about fifty.
In any case, you feel perfectly at home with the two of them, and don’t really want anything more. You remind yourself of that as often as you can. You don’t want anything more. You’re happy right now, with your place in the Crest, and your relationship with Mando is just fine where it is. The stirrings you get in your chest, and your gut, and sometimes a bit lower, could stand to quiet down every time you look at him. You don’t want anything more. You’re not sure how well convinced you are.
The child has much more energy after eating his dinner and you’re playing around with him, somewhat absentmindedly, by the time Mando climbs down the ladder.
“Oh, hey,” you say, getting up and handing the child to Mando. “Take him. I gotta get some food.”
Mando adjusts the child in his hold. “More?”
“Well, the kid ate my dinner, so.” You shrug.
Mando nods.
When you return to the lower deck, Mando has the child seated up on a couple of cargo boxes while he looks through a datapad. He turns towards you slightly. “Hey— What else was in the cupboard up there?”
“Some knives, blankets and spare clothes…” You glance over his shoulder. “Are you cataloguing everything?”
He nods.
You put your food down. “I’ll help.” You know where half the stuff is now, anyway, after practically turning the ship upside down.
Mando looks at you. “Eat first.”
You pause. “I’m fine. We should get this done.”
“We will. But you should get your energy back first.” He turns his attention back to the datapad. “Help after you eat.”
He doesn’t leave much room for discussion, and you aren’t really up for arguing — especially after your stomach loudly complains at its emptiness. You sit down and open up your dinner.
Mando talks through his organisation process out loud. You’re not sure how conscious he is of it at this point, but it’s something he does for the child every time the little guy is awake and in front of him. He talks through the take off and landing procedures, he talks through the cleaning of his blasters, he repeats the plan before landing on a given planet a couple more times than he needs to. He isn’t saying anything important, yet you still hang on his every word — these are the times where he speaks the most throughout the day.
He stalls for a second on where the medkits are, and curses quietly in a language you don’t know. You’ve heard that particular swear before, but nothing else in that tongue — you wonder if it’s the same language of whatever word he called you before.
“There were some medical supplies in that cabin down there,” you say, pointing to the old home of the ship’s rations.
He looks to where your gesture leads, then nods. “Thank you.”
“No worries.” He’s silent for a few moments as he takes stock of everything he’s recorded so far. You swallow what’s left of your dinner in your mouth. “Hey, by the way, what was it that you said before?”
He grants you the slightest glance. “When?”
“Before you went to eat your dinner. You called me something. It was like… Shy…something. Share…? Shire…” you fumble out the words.
He’s silent for a few moments more. Well, he’s more…still than silent. Eventually, he corrects you.
“Cyar’ika.”
“Right. That. What is that? I’ve never heard it before.”
He looks back down at the datapad. “It’s Mando’a.”
“Oh,” you breathe. “Is that…the Mandalorian language?”
He nods.
You’ve never heard him speak in that language before — you never even really considered that the Mandalorians would have their own language, although it makes sense when you think about it for longer than two seconds. You make a mental note to look further into it later on. “So… What does it mean?”
He doesn’t respond for so long that you think he didn’t even hear you. He’s just standing, still, looking through the entries in the datapad. Right when you’re about to speak up to repeat yourself, he starts talking. “It means…crew mate.”
You blink.
“Oh.”
Crew mate.
That is technically what you are to him, isn’t it? Even after all this time — more of a colleague than a companion.
“Crew mate,” you repeat.
You look at the child, who’s playing with some latch on the box he’s sat on top of, and chide yourself for the disappointment flowering in your gut. What else did you expect? The time you’ve spent with Mando is a guarantee of nothing, and besides, you wanted to know how he felt behind that helmet — now you do.
Crew mate.
It’s just so…impersonal. Like a rank.
“But it’s—” Mando stutters. You look back at him. “Um.” He puts the datapad down next to the child. “In Mando’a, it’s…” He adjusts his stance, resting an arm next to the child and putting a hand on his hip, apparently considering his words. “A crew mate is someone that you trust to have your back. Both in battle and,” he pauses, tapping his fingers against the cargo box. He looks at the child for a moment before turning back to you, “at home.”
You feel your shoulders relax — you didn’t realise how tense they were — as he explains the term. You furrow your brow. “So…it’s not necessarily just someone you work with?”
Mando looks at you for a few seconds. “Not necessarily.”
“‘Crew mate’ is just…”
“An approximation,” he offers.
“Right.”
That doesn’t really help. An approximation of what? Someone you work with, but maybe it’s a bit deeper than that?
“So,” you start, and already regret speaking up — surely the explanation you’ve been given should be enough for you? — but you push on regardless, “to you, crew mate is closer to…friend?” You want to stay on the safe side here.
He thinks on it for a bit. “You could say that.”
Well, friend is at least somewhat better — that implies a certain level of affection, doesn’t it? And it’s not like you’re an expert on the ins and outs of Mandalorian culture; it would make sense for a race of warriors to value the people they live and fight alongside with. You force yourself to leave your thoughts at that and not indulge in them any further; being friends is exactly what you want with Mando. Nothing more.
You nod. “Okay. Friend. Crew mate. Cyar’ika—” you try, the word not feeling fully formed in your mouth—” is that right?”
He nods. “Cyar’ika.” After a second, he picks the datapad up and gets back to work.
You finish up your dinner, falling into step with Mando as you help him record where everything in the ship is. He was right — you needed your energy back before doing so, and you thank him for making sure you ate. He thanks you (again) for finding the food in the first place.
The whole time the two of you are going through the ship, one persistent thought keeps coming back to your mind: you want to hear more Mando’a. You want to hear more about Mandalorian culture.
You want to know more about Mando.