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- The value of money
Din started running with Ran’s crew when he was twenty four. Not because he wanted to be part of a merc crew, but because the Tribe needed funds and needed them badly. With Din off in the mid rim with Ran’s crew it allowed Paz to operate in the outer rim without raising any eyebrows or risk giving away the covert’s position. Their location has moved three times in the last two years and Din desperately wants more stability for the young ones.
So he goes and joins a merc crew.
Xi’an announces that he's adorable, which Din does not find adorable. She kisses his helmet once, in a surprise attack that finds her spinning towards the floor.
“Don’t touch me again,” he grinds out. Eventually she stops.
Ran’s crew makes decent money. He racks up a several thousand credits Imperial outside of his operating expenses, and a couple of thousand more in other currencies. Imperial spends the best but there’s a lot of value in diversified funds beyond the numerical.
When he’s twenty seven he leaves to find the covert again. The Empire is heating things up in the mid rim, and it’s time to get back out to safety and anonymity of the far reaches of the galaxy. He might be one of a team with Ran’s crew but he’s still a Mandalorian operating after the purge and he has no interest in finding out what happens if he’s arrested.
“Be seeing you, Mando,” Ran calls out.
Mando doesn’t respond as he climbs up the ramp to his ship. With any luck he’ll never see Ran again.
But the money was good. The Razor Crest is his big prize from his time with the mercenaries. It’s a good ship and he plans on keeping it for decades yet. It flies alright and while it isn’t pretty, he has plans for an overhaul.
So he goes to find home, wherever home may be, with a pile of money and a ship, which is a great deal more than he left with.
Finding the covert isn’t easy and takes him a few months of flying from one remote planet to the next, looking for messages in their secret language written on walls, hunting for familiar shadows. He finds them on Tatooine in Mos Espa in the abandoned tunnels Gardulla the Hutt’s old arena, mostly converted to junkyards now and half reclaimed by the desert.
“Welcome home, Mandalorian,” the Armorer says when he reaches them. He sits in front of her forge and breathes deeply for the first time since he left three years ago.
“Thank you,” he says. He places the credits on the table between them. There are no words needed. She counts them, tallies it up, and nods.
“Good. This will feed us for a long while and allow us to foster additional foundlings.” She stands. “This is the way.”
He bows his head. “This is the way.”
- The sentience of non humanoid species
“No.”
The beetle clacks its pincers again, impatient. Din is impatient, too. Impatient to get off this rancid planet. It’s a literal complaint; the place reeks. The beetle people either like the smell or don’t have the neural pathways for it but it’s had Din gagging inside his helmet for the past half hour.
He doesn’t speak the clacking language of the insectoid species that lives here, but it’s not too far off from a few others he’s familiar with. He has no hope of replicating the sounds, but it seems at least a few of them can understand Basic so they manage a low level of communication that, while not ideal, is good enough for their purposes. Looking around the spaceport, which is truly more of a vaguely-leveled area of dirt with a junkyard and a fuel station, he’s pretty sure they don’t get many visitors.
“All I need is a refuel. Just the fuel. Okay?”
Two clacks. Then a chirping pattern. Two clacks again.
“If I come back here and you’ve touched the paint job, I’m gonna be upset.”
Three clacks.
“Okay.”
His business on the planet is short. A pit stop to refuel-- the Razor Crest’s a good ship for a lot of reasons, its age primary among them, but it wasn’t designed for long-haul flights, and he’s had to divert a lot of the energy to the carbonite system when he had it retrofitted into the hold.
And of course, picking up his cargo.
“Oh thank the gods, please, please get me out of here.”
Din sighs, not caring if it’s audible. He’s standing outside one of the larger dirt piles that’s the grand entrance to the insectoid population’s underground city. It’s forbidden to outsiders, so his cargo is sitting on the patch of dirt right outside the entrance, surrounded by beetles clicking and chirping as he stands up. He’s a bipedal humanoid and thus three times the size of the average beetle, yet he looks terrified in his layered robes.
“I’ve been paid to transport you back to Dantooine. Once my ship is done refueling--”
“These... these *things* have held me captive!”
Din breathes in, tries not to smell the planet, and breathes out again. He doesn’t want to be here any longer than he has to. “Come on, let’s go.” He grabs the man, whose name his chip identified as Mel Fringol but whom Din has no particular interest in introducing himself to, by the arm and hauls him forward.
“My savior, I can’t thank you enough.”
Fringol is dirty and reeks just as badly as the planet. It will not be a pleasant flight to Dantooine.
At least he stocked up on ration bars. The beetle people had a whole crate of them they’d salvaged from an old Imperial ship that crashed on their planet a few years back, and it’s not exactly part of their diet.
Three clacks catch his attention. One of the mechanic hive beetles is waving an antennae at him.
“All done?”
Three more clacks and Din moves to follow him back towards the shipyard. His unfortunate cargo simpers the whole way.
“It was a pleasure cruise, but they left me here, and--”
“I don’t care.”
“These horrible... things...”
Din tunes him out as they walk. It’s hot and the sun beats down on his armor. The heat probably contributes to the smell, too. He’s got no idea how Fringol is still talking.
“Just get inside,” he says, when they approach the ship. To his relief, the color of the paint is unchanged. “And don’t touch anything.”
He flips two thousand Imperial credit chits towards the lead mechanic. “Thanks,” he says, and claps his hands thrice to at least try to emulate the clacking. “Might be back through someday.”
A tittering and a few clacks. Most of it he doesn’t get but he does follow the gist. He grins. “Don’t worry, I won’t bring him.”
He turns and climbs the ramp, saying a happy goodbye to the stink and slapping the air refreshers to maximum once the bay is sealed.
“By the gods, thank you for rescuing me from those... those creatures,” Fringol says, unfortunately still speaking. “Truly they were savages.”
Din grunts and climbs the ladder to the cockpit. “I don’t know. Seems to me they kept you alive and didn’t eat you. Even let you use their comm system.”
“They only fed me stale rations, can you believe it? In the core worlds, behavior like that would not be allowed. They would be crushed out of existence like vermin ought to be.”
Din pauses on the top rung, then climbs back down again. He can’t do it. “Here,” he says, and pushes Fringol towards the back of the hold.
“What?”
“You’ll travel here.”
A deft turn of the man’s shoulders, a shove into the carbonite box, and then the hissing gas fills the air and leaves behind blessed silence.
- Ship Maintenance
“Hold on!”
The alarm blaring isn’t reassuring and neither is the nervous sweat gleaming on the humanoid pilot’s bare scalp. Din double checks his harness straps and hopes that the transport cruiser has been inspected recently.
“Thought this was a safe route,” he grits out as their ride jolts. They’re in the planet’s atmosphere, which means they won’t die in vacuum if the hull is breached, but also means they might plummet to their deaths, which is in Din’s opinion a less desirable way to die.
“Yeah, well, so did I. Karga wouldn’t have set us up.”
The pilot is a friend of Greef Karga’s, or so Karga said. “I’m short on bounty pucks, but I do have another job. A professional like you doesn’t mind teaming up, right, Mando?” And Din sighed and said, “Where?”
There’s another jolt, and Din frowns. The ship lurched, but there hadn’t been the expected shriek of a blaster bolt preceding it, and they’re in atmo and should have heard it. “That wasn’t a blast hit.”
He taps three times on his heads-up display and sees heat radiating from below decks.
“You idiot, we’re not under attack!”
“What?”
“Your ship is falling apart!”
Then there is a shriek, this time of tearing durasteel and shearing beams and Din crosses his arms behind his head to protect his neck and holds on for all he’s worth as they plummet out of the sky.
---
He wakes to something dripping on him, a slow ping pling plop against the top of his beskar helmet. His heads-up display tells him it’s water condensation before his eyes are focused and he has to struggle to think of why water would be dripping on him at all.
He doesn’t need the helmet to tell him that he’s got a cracked rib or two under his armor where the harness straps kept him in his chair.
“Shit.”
He looks over to his right. Karga’s pilot is dead. He doesn’t need the heads-up display for that either, what with the beam of durasteel sticking out of him. A corresponding ache in his head indicates where it lanced off his beskar. He gives a quiet thanks for it as he slowly moves out of the seat and staggers through the wreck of the ship.
He gives a silent thanks to the dead pilot, too, for getting them as low to the planet as he did before the whole ship fell apart. What a waste.
He staggers out of what’s left of the ship-- most of the back half is gone completely, the engine room appears to have completely disintegrated. Din makes his exit, perhaps not gracefully, and tips out of the big hole in the ship where the hyperdrive used to be.
The walk into town isn’t pleasant, but he makes it and manages to secure a room for the night along with access to a comm that will make it back to Nevarro and Karga.
“Your pilot’s dead," he says when the comm clicks through.
“What--”
“No more jobs with pilots who don’t know when an engine is about to blow.”
He clicks the comm off, tosses it into the corner of the room, and sleeps for two days.
- Honesty
Naboo isn’t a world Din gets to very often. It’s mid rim and too civilized for most of his work and gets too much attention. But the job-- escorting a noble’s wayward child home-- was a good one, and it came from one of the few contacts he made running with Ran’s crew that he trusts.
“Almost home,” he says to the cargo sitting in his passenger seat.
The kid is in her teens and savvy enough to get off world, but not savvy enough to avoid being caught and brought home like the delinquent she is.
“What are they paying you? I’ll pay you double if you let me become a Mandalorian like you.”
“You don’t have the credits.”
Naboo is pretty, even from space. They’re waiting on landing clearance; apparently it’s a festival day and there are quite a few ships floating with them, and the space lanes are crowded. Even under the Empire’s rule there are still festivals, and Naboo’s have a galactic reputation. Din will not be staying to experience it.
“But if I did, would you take me?”
The trip has been a quiet one for the most part. The kid spent the first half sulking and poking at his ship until he threatened to put her into carbonite. The second half was less peaceful, and involved endless questions about his job, until he threatened to put her in carbonite for that, too.
“No.”
“Why not? Is it because I’m a girl?”
Tragically the space port does not conveniently comm them with a landing bay. “No.”
“So there are girl Mandalorians, then? I know you take kids, there are loads of stories about it. I could be--”
“No.”
“Why not!” The kid is upset, verging on tears, and likely only strapped in because being firmly in the seat was another requirement of not being on carbonite for the rest of the journey. “I don’t want to live my life, why can’t I live like you instead?”
Din bows his head. “You don’t want to.”
“Yes I do!”
“No. You don’t. You want to run away.”
“Isn’t that the same?”
Din remembers the first time he earned beskar. His first helmet had been durasteel: functional and with a basic heads-up display with a malfunctioning green output. He earned his first beskar at the age of twenty for killing a man who found their covert. He killed him with his bare and took a blaster shot to the thigh in doing so. The Mandalorian who fell asleep at his post near the entrance had walked past the body, past Din panting and holding his leg together, and taken off his helmet and given it to the Armorer, and walked into the desert to die.
Din watched that helmet’s beskar melt down and sat, his thigh aching, as the Armorer re-built it into a helm for him and him alone.
“No. It’s not the same. Mandalorians don’t run.”
The comm crackles to life. “Razor Crest, you are cleared to land in the Embassy Port, dock 42G. Do you confirm?”
He punches the button and revs the Razor Crest back to life. “Confirm, 42G, Razor Crest out.”
He flicks the Crest’s engine out of idle and into sub-light, coaxing the ship towards the landing pattern Naboo specified.
“Let’s get you home, kid.”
- Mending
His body mends itself, for the most part, but his kit does not. He’s three days from Tatooine and traveling sub-light since his hyperdrive is leaking coolant and he doesn’t trust it not to blow him into stardust somewhere over the twin suns.
The Razor Crest has a decent autopilot. It’s not good enough to handle unexpected events, not like some of the craft the Empire is spitting out, but it’s good enough to manage sub-light like this and he has alarms set to ping if anything unusual crops up.
Three days to lick his wounds and get himself in order.
His armor detaches from his mail with relative ease; none of the fittings or catches have been damaged. He carefully piles it up in the netting behind his berth and gets to work stiffly peeling himself out of his mail layer, leaving his base layer on against the chill of space.
The mail shirt that contains much of the electronics for his armor is made of a heavy, strong material. It’s not, he’s told, what it would have been made of before the great purge. The mail layer of those Mandalorians was a blend of silk and flexible durasteel alternating on the warp and weft. His shirt, while strong and reinforced with tough stitching, is simply fabric. And it is damaged like fabric, too.
Alone on his ship Din removes his helmet and places it at the head of his bed.
His face is sweaty and he’s pretty sure he’s got blood crusted into his eyebrows. He’ll wash himself later. First he needs to care for his kit. A damaged kit leads to a short life and a painful death. Taking care of one’s kit was one of the first lessons he’d had as a child, back when he’d been given clothing, food, and a new life.
There’s a wound in his padded mail shirt to match the burn line down his side, just skirting between his armor pieces. It was a lucky strike for his opponent, and an unlucky one for him. But Din had won in the end.
Din pulls out the little metal box he keeps by his cauterizer and the pack of hydration salts and opens it up on his lap. Strong black thread and two sharp needles look up at him.
He gets to work, weaving the material together on the front and back and then placing a patch over the whole of it and sewing that down, too. He tests it with a quick jab of the thumb, and then a yank. The stitching holds.
+1
Din stares down at Grogu for the first time without beskar between them. He can feel the baby’s breaths on his face, proof of the little life he holds in his arms.
He’s seen Grogu with his own eyes before, but never up close like this. Never with Grogu looking back. Always from a distance while he eats and Grogu sleeps in another room. Always in secret.
Little claws reach up and touch his skin and the child’s face blurs as tears start to fill Din’s eyes. It’s the first touch he’s felt on his cheek since before he took the Creed. He’s unashamed. Nothing matters but staring at the baby in his hands and letting Grogu stare back.
It’s the only gift he has left in him and he makes it without regret.
When he blinks the child is still there, still reaching out to him, still in his arms.
He offers the final gift he can.
“Don’t be afraid,” he whispers. A father’s benediction.
And he watches Grogu leave with his eyes bare.