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Luke was hiding. He loved to hide. He genuinely thought he was good at it, and Din had consulted Grogu about whether or not to let he carry on believing that falsehood. Grogu had no strong feelings about it, but all Din could think of was scenario after scenario requiring solid cover and concealment.
If Luke didn’t get better at hiding, then when it mattered, someone was going to drag him out by the ankle and stick a blaster in his neck, and that would be the end of that.
Din wasn’t ready to grieve a husband he’d not even had for a year. He was sure that there were at least three milestones that came after marriage, and they’d already fucked up by doing number two (having children) before even getting married and doing number one (sexual intercourse) months after the ceremony. The least he could do was get Luke past the third milestone before leaving him to decide whether or not he wanted to be eaten and/or maimed for subpar stealth skills.
If only Din knew what the third milestone was now.
Maybe it was a dog.
Luke didn’t like the massiff Din had introduced him to the other week. He’d clambered up into Din’s arms and then onto his shoulders in a display of pure Jedi bravery.
Perhaps a smaller dog.
A dog would help Luke realize how terrible he was at hiding. If it found him then Din wouldn’t have to be the one who broke the bad news.
Oh, oh. Duh. Right there. Not a dog.
A loth-cat. That was a good compromise. They were vicious little shits, but with enough training and some food incentives, they could be enticed to be loyal.
This sounded familiar.
Perhaps Luke would see himself in the cat.
Perhaps Grogu would find it entertaining.
Yes. Cat. Done. Time to find a cat.
He went to Lothal and started asking around about their creatures and was met with a load of empty stares. He was asked why he was seeking out vermin.
He explained that he was seeking a gift for his partner, and one woman took pity on him and asked him if he had a trap.
He did not.
She introduced him to a loth-cat trap and told him that he had two options: go to the market and find a breeder or snap one of the feral ones up from behind a dwelling.
He asked which option was more suitable to future cohabitation. She directed him to the market.
The loth-kittens at the market climbed over each other and yowled and hissed and fought. None of them struck Din as being particularly Luke-appropriate. The breeder, plucking kittens off her shoulders and head and depositing them back into their boxes while she spoke, asked him what his spouse was like.
“Underfed, falsely cheerful, and prone to drama,” he told her.
She told him to get a dog. He said he’d already tried that. She told him to try another dog. He explained that he had a sneaking suspicion that another dog might result in his expulsion from the marital bed. She relented and asked what Luke’s name was.
Din saw no problem in giving it to her.
This was a mistake.
The woman told him to fuck off with his bad jokes, and his insistence that he was not telling jokes earned him a long, long stare.
“Oh my god, you’re the Mand’alor,” she said.
Din winced.
“I’m—er. Trying to be,” he said. “But—”
“You’re literally here to get Luke Skywalker a cat.”
“T-trying to?”
“Luke Skywalker. The Luke Skywalker. He doesn’t like cats, Mando. How long have you two been married??”
“Six months?”
“And you don’t know he’s a droid guy???”
Hhhhh.
No droids.
“Listen, lady,” Din said. “It’s a surprise.”
“Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be,” the vender said. “Man, I can’t believe I’m saying this but like, do you have holonet access?”
Din did, yes. How was that relevant?
“Have you tried looking up your uh, Skywalker?”
No. Why would he? He saw Luke in person multiple times a month and over transceiver multiple times a week. If he had a question, he just asked the horse itself. Did he often get a straightforward answer? No. Din was beginning to think that jedis were allergic to them, as a matter of fact. But that was part of Luke’s charm. He was work. He kept Din busy.
“Oh my god, you’re serious.”
Din elected to be patient with this civilian.
“So, a cat,” he tried.
“Is he really like that?” the vendor asked.
Din stared. Then pointed at the box of yowling, chicken-footed animals before him. One reached up and trying to swat at his gloved finger.
“Cat?” he tried.
“Yeah, yeah. Cat. They’re all the same. But Skywalker—everyone says that he’s got no fear. Is that true?”
What? No, Luke had about two hundred fears that he liked to ignore like his life depended on it. One of them, Din now knew, was dogs. A few others included people seeing his scars, the violent demise of his students, and most recently, giant, mountain-sized salamanders. The rest were pretty much a mystery.
The vendor stared at Din like he’d just produced an egg from beneath his helmet.
“Are you joking?” she asked. “Salamanders?”
“Big ones only,” Din said. “Little ones are friends, apparently. Things that we need to shove down people’s shirts because we have the maturity of children.”
What was with all this blinking? Din was just trying to buy a cat.
“Luke Skywalker put a salamander down your shirt,” the vendor repeated.
“His sense of humor is wider than it is deep,” Din said. “I think that a loth-cat would please him.”
“Don’t you want one with a pedigree then? These kits are just sort of, you know, my cat’s babes. They’re scrappy little shits,” the vendor said.
“What’s a pedigree?” Din asked her.
“Are you really the Mand’alor?”
Din was tired of having to go through this everywhere he went. Bo-Katan kept telling him that if he went out of his way to actually wear the ceremonial furs then a good 60% of the bullshit would drop off. But he just—no.
The only person allowed to wear fur was buir. And Din had spent plenty of time as a youth watching her brush, brush, brush away at it to keep it in non-matted, non-disgusting condition. He couldn’t even keep his current cape clean what with all the sticky shit he fell in. Ugh. No. No fur.
“I will trade you this saber for one of these cats,” he said.
The vendor paused and then laughed in his face.
He found a different vendor who was not selling kittens, but who informed him that their abominable creature had had a few that were currently squeaking and stumbling around their floor. This vendor was worried because it was getting hot on the planet and the kittens didn’t do well in the heat.
Din stared at the three creatures before him. One looked like it had rolled in mud; all dappled with browns and whites and grays. The one next to it was the color of Tatooine’s smaller red sun. The last one was black with slightly lighter ears and paws.
It reminded him of Luke’s silver lightsaber hilt. Its eyes were even green.
“How old are they?” he asked.
“Oh my god, you’re the Mand’alor?” the vendor said.
Din looked up just in time to catch the edges of the earlier woman evacuating the current vendor’s shop space. He scowled.
Rumors. They flowed faster than water through these little towns.
“I am,” he said.
“And this cat is for the Luke Skywalker?”
“It is,” Din said. “How old are they?”
“My daughter is obsessed with him. I keep telling her he’s a player, but she won’t have it.”
A what?
Din could count on one hand the number of people Luke had admitted to having relations with. He didn’t even have their names. Luke was too embarrassed to give them. He’d stuffed his face into Din’s armpit and shrieked nonsensically instead.
This had been baffling at first because Luke was more than happy to talk about how he had a crush on a good 70% of the people his age and older that he met, but Din had figured out the code.
Armpit screaming = sexual intercourse.
Off-hand ‘I’d die for you’s = passing romantic interest to full-on unrequited passion.
“He doesn’t cheat,” he said flatly to the vendor.
“Not yet. You’ll find out,” the vendor said. “The kits are a couple months.”
“I’ll take all of them,” Din said.
The kittens were loud and bitey. Din considered naming them Luke, Leia, and Fennec in that order, but refrained.
These were Luke’s kittens now. He was the one who would name them. It was Din’s job to keep them out of the cockpit and away from all chewable wires. They were worthy opponents. Noisy opponents. The dappled one took to tripping after him right on his heels and yowling as though Din was its mother.
Din stopped and informed it seriously that he had not kidnapped it. Its mother could no longer support it and its siblings. The alternative was to be left out in the sweltering summer heat. It would do poorly there. It was already proclaimed to be ‘weirdly domesticated.’
“Luke will teach you your feral instincts,” he told it. “I promise. He and Grogu are professionals at hissing.”
The kitten elected to ignore him and climb his flightsuit instead. It tried to join him under the helmet. The helmet was not big enough for two heads, and Din had claimed it first. He removed the interloper and sat it firmly outside the cockpit door.
“Stay,” he said.
The kitten mewed softly.
He wavered like a chump.
“Stay,” he repeated, as he grabbed the red one when it tried to squeeze past him. “All of you stay.”
Red, orange, and green eyes stared into his visor.
Then a mutiny arose.
Loth-cats were the worst idea. Din should have thought this out better. He should have gone back to the Tuskens and asked for the runtiest runt that ever had runted among the massiffs. At least those things had respect for their fellow cohabitants.
These cats?
Not a damn lick of respect to be found. They would not listen. They would not be trained. No treat was incentive enough for them to stop climbing shit. Nothing was sacred.
Din had put them all in his sleeping quarters and closed the outer panel and they screamed in there unhappily, but it was that or arriving to Yavin with three lightly electrified kittens in hand. That would not do. Luke responded poorly to the mistreatment of animals. He’d been trying to teach Grogu to be more gentle, too, which was going, well, poorly.
It was fine. The child was traumatized. He had time to grow out of such behavior. The kits would be a good starting point for him, even.
Right?
Look on the bright side, Djarin. The alternative is divorce.
Finally, finally, after what felt like days, he arrived back to Yavin. He landed the ship but didn’t lower the ramp. The troublemakers were asleep at last. The ramp’s rattling would wake them for sure. Din wasn’t chancing it; he creaked open the door and scrambled out of it to drop the few feet down into the dirt. He waited a beat after both feet hit the ground. The yowling did not recommence.
Safe.
He turned around to face the school.
It was dark on Yavin, so the school’s windows appeared especially bright and yellow against the surrounding plain. The forests nearby lit up occasionally in little flickers from bugs and creatures. Din nearly stepped on a lizard on his way to the school’s back door.
He never used the front one. He wasn’t sure why. It just didn’t feel right for some reason. Luke’s quarters were closer to the back one, anyways. His room bumped up against a storage room, and he’d hung a layer of canvas over the entrance even though he had a door. This was a very Tatooine thing for him to do—an extra layer to keep out the sand, even when there was no storm upcoming. Din couldn’t help but feel fondness bleeding across his chest anytime he had to push the canvas back. Pushing it away revealed that the room behind was unlit.
Luke was either asleep already or out in the mountains, meditating.
Din hoped that he was home. The cats needed freedom as soon as possible. He nudged open the door and found his high hopes rewarded: Luke’s bed was occupied. As soon as the hinges creaked, too, he rolled over and blinked at Din blearily, all lit up in heat signals on the helmet. Din shut them off and was rewarded with a nearly black room.
“Husband,” he greeted.
“Husband,” Luke greeted back, sounding for all intents and purposes like he’d been awake for hours. “This is a surprise.”
Oh, no, friend. The surprise was for later. This was the opening act.
“Budge over,” Din said.
“You’re not getting into my bed in all that shit on. Who knows where it’s been?” Luke warned him.
Din caught himself and rolled his eyes.
“Budge,” he ordered.
“Off.”
“I’m takin’ it off. Budge.”
Luke shuffled to the side as Din loosened the straps on the side of the chest plate. He left the top straps where they were so that the backplate came off with it. Then went the pauldrons, by which time Luke was already complaining with the back of his prosthetic thrown over his eyes dramatically. Din ignored him to handle the tassets and his belt. He left the flakvest on; he didn’t intend to stay long in this room.
Luke peeked out from under his wrist when Din rested a knee on his mattress.
“Good god, a stranger,” he gasped.
“Very funny,” Din told him.
“I thought so. Get in here, I need to steal your heat.”
Din huffed and let himself lay down. Luke flopped over so that his back fit into Din’s chest. Even through the thick flakvest remained between them, the weight and the pressure was still overwhelming in its comfort.
They’d come so far. Luke didn’t even flinch when Din laid slid an arm under his neck and laid the other one on his side.
“I got you something,” he said into the knob at the top of Luke’s spine.
Luke stiffened.
“How do you even find them?” he asked. “Are you sure you don’t want me to retest you? I got the old books. They’ve got more tests.”
“It’s not a child,” Din said.
“Oh?”
“You’ll see. Come with me?”
Luke rolled over as best as he could with Din’s arms all around him. Din couldn’t see his face very well without the heat signatures.
“If its younger than Grogu, I swear to god, I will end you,” Luke warned. “I don’t have the resources for any more babies.”
Man, you bring a guy two force-sensitive kiddos and all you get from then on out is paranoia. What thanks these are.
“It’s this or a kiss,” Din said.
“I’ll take the kiss.”
“No, you won’t.”
“No, I won’t.”
Luke turned all the way around and leaned up to press the bridge of his nose against the tip of Din’s chin right under the helmet. The brush made Din’s whole body shiver. Luke huffed a tiny laugh.
“Did you miss me?” he asked.
“Get up,” Din told him.
“Mm, what if I didn’t?” Luke asked in a new tone for him.
It was.
Ahem.
Very new.
“C’mere.”
But—wh—n—the cats—
“Din. This is a blue fucking moon. Emphasis on the fucking. Come here.”
And why did it have to be a blue fucking moon when Din had actual kittens rolling around in his ship, hm? Could the blue fucking moon wait, maybe, half an hour?
“Oh,” Luke said in a softer voice after apparently too long a pause. “You don’t want to. That’s okay.”
HHHHHH. NO. No, Din did want to. It was just—there was just—
“I guess I assumed you’d be into it. Sorry.”
“I got you three cats,” Din blurted out.
Luke shot up and locked both hands on Din’s wrists, forcing them up by his head on each side of the pillow. He loomed.
“You did what?” he asked dangerously.
Luke screamed silently into his hands at the sight of the monstrosities chasing each other around the main cabin of the Anchor. Din couldn’t tell if this was a happy scream or a ‘what the fuck have you done’ scream.
He hoped it was the former. The latter would almost certainly wane the blue fucking moon at max speed.
“Hi, hi, hi,” Luke said as he knelt down and was besieged by mewling. All of the kittens must have been force-sensitive because they were suddenly desperate to crawl up into his lap and under his hands.
“I’m gonna cry,” Luke said.
Din panicked.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “I can take them back or find someone else. Boba’s always bitching about the dust rats in the palace so—”
“Try me, Djarin,” Luke snarled with one kit under each arm and the last shoving its flat nose into the edge of his tunic.
Din took a moment to really process the energy.
“You like them?” he asked.
“Jim, Toit, and Kog,” Luke informed him.
These were names. That was fast.
“Hold my child, they need to come inside while the kids are asleep. They can explore unheeded that way.”
Din took the shirt-burrowing kitten when it was held out to him and let his jedi lead the way back to the school.
In the excitement of new additions to the school, the blue moon waned. Din let it go with a touch of regret.
He didn’t want to pressure Luke, but sometimes it was nice to come home to a handjob or the like, especially after spending time in Boba Fett and Fennec’s company.
The mouths on those two were enough to make a monk weep. After sitting through their candid, graphic accounts of their sex lives, Din couldn’t help but feel sometimes like he ought to try a little harder with Luke. Usually, the feeling could be quashed. The night after the kittens had arrived and caused delight and high blood pressure among both students and staff, the feeling proved itself no longer needing to be.
Luke pressed the bridge of his nose into Din’s skin in his room again. This time it was into sensitive strip covering Din’s hip.
“You alright, partner?” Luke asked without lifting his eyelashes.
Din let his head fall back.
“Fine,” he panted.
“Cute sounds.”
Ugh. Shut up.
Luke giggled and wriggled up to flatten himself against Din’s chest. He wormed a hand under the thin cotton layer protecting Din’s skin from his flightsuit. That hand felt strange against the skin. It was almost stiff, a little rubbery, and not quite warm enough to be flesh.
Luke laid his cheek against the cotton on Din’s collarbone. His flesh fingers curled against the side of Din’s shoulder and he let his eyelashes fall again.
“You want me to get you off?” Din asked him.
“No, thanks. You’re warm.”
Yeah, orgasm did that to people.
“Where did you get the little ones?”
Ah.
“Lothal,” Din said, finally feeling with-it enough again to seek out Luke’s waist. Luke twitched at the touch of the gloves against his scars. Din pulled back his hand and started working the glove off with his teeth. Luke scoffed at him lightly after a moment and knocked the helmet back down so that Din’s teeth lost purchase. He sat up enough to start tugging the glove off himself.
“Straight to the source, huh?” he remarked.
“Seemed right,” Din said. “Market’s flooded with cats.”
“They need shots,” Luke said. “I know a guy.”
Convenient.
“Everyone knew you,” Din said. “They didn’t believe me when I said I was lookin’ for a cat for you.”
Luke liberated the glove and tossed it over the edge of the bed to join the rest of the armor.
“Let me guess,” he hummed, “Jedi playboy Skywalker.”
Din let his bare hand find muscle under Luke’s open tunic. He squeezed and Luke leaned into the grip even if his face remained placid.
“Fearless warrior Skywalker,” Din added up at Luke’s chin.
It was dark, but not so dark that Din couldn’t see Luke’s pale irises start to unfocus slightly. His lips found their customary smile.
“Fearless warrior Skywalker,” he said. “How could I forget?”
Luke’s bitterness rolled like wind through a field of grain.
“They didn’t know me, either,” Din told him.
“Their loss is my gain.”
Solo had taught Din a word that he hadn’t known recently. It seemed to him to describe Luke’s pool of feelings around these issues perfectly.
‘Lukewarm,’ Solo had said. It meant ‘tepid,’ which was the feeling of putting your hand into a liquid only to find it barely heated against your skin; when you removed it, it felt colder than it was when it went in. Din had mistakenly gotten this word mixed up with ‘bloodwarm,’ which Solo told him was close but not quite the same in meaning.
Lukewarm also meant ‘to be received with little interest.’
There were always words to be learned in Basic.
“What is it like for so many to know your name?” Din asked.
Luke’s eyes slid to his visor again. They appeared hunted. Din tried to keep disappointment at bay as Luke slipped away from his fingers and off his chest to settle down again at his side.
“It’s like looking at yourself in a mirror and wondering what that other guy sees,” Luke said.
“He sees you,” Din said.
“No. He sees a picture,” Luke said. “A mirror is no better than a drawing. We see what we like and what we hate and everything else is empty space.”
He turned away from Din to watch the wall with his hunted, haunted eyes. Din rolled onto his side and studied the rise and fall of his shoulder, silhouetted faintly by the outside moon.
“They don’t believe that someone like you could ever be associated with someone like me,” Din said.
“What is it like to be someone who nobody knows?” Luke asked without turning around.
The helmet pressed uncomfortably into Din’s ear. He shifted his head around to ease the pressure.
“Sometimes, it’s too quiet,” he admitted.
Without Grogu sleeping in the main cabin, the space between the Anchor’s cockpit and hold and sleeping quarters became an endless cave that traveled back, back, back.
Distances grew greater in the quiet. Sounds louder. The wash of sickness amplified and fear, when it arose, echoed and then crowded the empty space.
“You have your friends,” Luke said.
“You have your family,” Din reminded him.
And yet here they were, he thought, watching Luke’s shoulder shiver.
“No one knew who I was until I was nineteen years old,” Luke said. “Even I didn’t. Then for a minute, I thought I did, but it’s like I looked away for a second and everyone else choose different options for me.”
Din trailed his ungloved hand up Luke’s cold shoulder and let his fingers sink into the delicate skin over his collarbone.
“I didn’t speak for months after the Mandalorians first took me in,” he said.
Luke rolled his shoulders under Din’s hand.
“I don’t blame you,” he said.
“I know nine languages.”
“WHAT.”
Din couldn’t help but laugh. His hand was captured and tossed away from Luke’s shoulder so that Luke could lock laser eyes on the center of his helmet.
“Fifteen if you count the archaic ones and the ones I’m not good at,” Din said.
Luke reached clawed fingers up to scrape the helmet.
“How?” he asked. “We have droids for that.”
“I don’t know. Never questioned it until Paz called me a freak of nature when I was twenty,” Din explained.
“Din, you don’t talk to people.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
“All the words blend together,” Din said. “It becomes soup.”
“Soup?”
“Soup.”
“You hate soup.”
“Wh—where did you get that?” Din asked.
“I made you stew a million years ago and you ignored it. You ignored my stew, sir. It was a peace offering,” Luke told him.
Din honestly had no idea what he was even talking about. This wasn’t unusual, but it was still a little jarring since they’d been doing the feelings-talking-thing just a moment ago.
“I don’t hate soup,” Din said. “I just didn’t see it.”
Luke squinted hard and suspicious. Din almost wanted to touch the tip of his nose, but that was a one-way ticket to being dumped on the floor and left there.
“Word soup,” he reminded Luke. “Hard to wade through. By the time I’ve finally got the words, everyone else has moved on.”
Luke’s ire softened somewhat.
“So you’re saying that you’re too smart for your own good,” he said.
No one had ever said it like that. It sort of dropped a stone in Din’s calm waters.
“Bad at—” he started.
“No,” Luke said. “Too smart. Too many layers to dig through to get to topsoil.”
“Too slow,” Din corrected him.
“No.”
It was exactly like trying to reason with those kittens. Luke wasn’t listening to rational arguments now. He had his kernel of belief tucked there in between two clasped palms, and he was going to bite anyone who tried to take it from him.
It was a battle that no one had taught Din how to fight.
“I know you,” Luke said out of nowhere.
“Do you?” Din asked in a kneejerk reaction.
Luke’s wide face made him want to snatch the words back right out of the air.
Until Luke’s brow dropped anyways.
“You told me about you,” he said. “So unless you’re lying—which I dunno, you might be—then I have the closest thing that I can have to the real you here next to me.”
Din wondered idly if Luke could force the truth out of him. It felt like something that wasn’t beyond him. But you know, the little shit also had an astonishingly good point.
“You could be lying to me, too,” Din said.
“I tried.”
He—he what?
“I always tried. I’m always trying.”
Uh??? That did not make Din feel good?
“It doesn’t make me feel good either, okay? But I have to try. I have to try.”
“Why?” Din asked. “What have I done?”
“Nothing,” Luke told him sincerely. “But if you knew the whole thing, you wouldn’t be here anymore.”
The skin on Din’s chest felt cold now. He folded his undershirt more closely together and slowly sat up to set his feet on the floor. He didn’t know what to do with these words. This was exactly what he was talking about; the words made his whole torso swirl. It was like vertigo. Blood was draining out of his brain and through his neck to his heart, and on the way, it throbbed heart under his chin.
He felt cold and hot at the same time somehow.
“Yeah, see? This is exactly what I mean.”
Luke’s waves of bitterness rolled through the coldness of Din’s cheeks and the heat of his neck and left him feeling like there was metal on every side of his chest, squeezing tighter and tighter. Even armor didn’t feel like this.
“I don’t understand,” Din said.
“I won’t make you,” Luke said simply.
“Are you lying to me?”
“What do you think, Din?”
The vendor had said that nothing had happened yet. Not yet he’d said.
“Are you angry?”
Din didn’t know.
“Are you upset?”
Din didn’t know.
Luke sighed. He didn’t try to touch Din; he kept himself where he was on his bed. He pulled at his blanket until it came loose and he could get it over his shoulder, then turned once again to face the wall.
“There’s a reason that everyone hates the jedi,” he said quietly. “You become one with the Force until it’s the only thing that knows you; anything else feels like gilding.”
Din blinked himself back and something caught in his sternum.
“I know you,” he said sharply.
Luke twisted his head into his pillow.
“No,” Din said. “I know you. You tell me about you. I’m not lying, and you’re not a good liar.”
Luke laughed miserably into the fabric by his head. He didn’t argue, though. That made the flame in the cavern of Din’s ribs grow bolder.
“You’re hope,” he said.
Luke laughed again, harder this time.
“You always were,” Din told him.
“I know,” Luke flung back at him out of nowhere. “I know, alright? That’s what I’m supposed to be. Trust me, that has been more than clear for the last ten fucking years. But it’s not that easy. And if that’s me, then who are you, Din?”
Who was he?
He was a Mandalorian.
“That’s not all, that can’t be all.”
There was nothing else to be.
“If I’m hope, then you’re love,” Luke said. “And that’s shit. That’s hard. You don’t deserve to have to be that.”
Oh.
It was that easy, wasn’t it?
“It’s not easy, aren’t you listening to anything I’m saying? Love hurts people, Din. It’s dangerous.”
Yeah, Din was listening, but he was also sat here, looking right into the eyes of Hope. It was hard to really hear in its presence.
“But I love you,” he said.
Luke’s expression recoiled. He looked away sharply. Din wasn’t letting him run away, though; this wasn’t something to run from.
He lifted his hands, one gloved and one bare, and laid them on each side of Luke’s face to bring it up to meet his own.
“It’s who I am, remember?” he said.
Luke swatted at him.
“Don’t patronize me,” he said.
“I never had hope before,” Din told him. “Or at least, I never knew to call it that.”
Luke’s fingers wrapped around his wrist.
“Well. Now you do. Congratulations. It’s not friendly,” he grumbled.
Din couldn’t help but smile.
“All this because I got you a cat,” he teased.
“Excuse you, you got me three cats.”
“You’re damn right I did, and I’ll live to regret it.”
“Get off of me, buckethead. I’m going to sleep.”
“Can I stay?”
“Whatever.”
“Is that a yes?”
“I guess.”
Another step forward. That was hope.
Hope came with a price. Luke wasn’t kidding. Din should have foreseen this; they had gone too many days without incident since their pillow talk.
“How do you say, ‘three credits for my sister’ in Tusken?”
Fett turned towards Din with a brow that said that firstly, this was not a conversation he anticipated walking in on at the crack of dawn before an ambassador’s visit and secondly, that he would wring this information out of Din by his knuckles if he didn’t answer immediately.
There was a reason that Din tried to keep these people separate.
“By saying, ‘I’ve lost my sister again,’” he told Luke magnanimously.
It would not do, of course. It would never do; even when Luke was all gussied up in his fancy, formal jedi attire. The robes did little to impede his noncompliance.
“But I didn’t lose her,” Luke said as Toit came jogging over to meow at him at an unnecessary volume. Luke picked him up without question.
“He didn’t lose her, Djarin,” Fett agreed relentlessly.
Din had run out of ways to tell him that he was sorry that the cat wasn’t permanent and that if he’d known about Fett’s fascination with loth-cats, he would have brought him the gossiper-vendor’s whole box of kittens. Now, they just had to exist with this jealous tension that could not be acknowledged in front of the jedi for fear of showing cultural weakness.
“Why don’t you take Grogu for a walk?” Din suggested to Luke tightly.
Luke stared at him. Toit kneaded his shoulder and then hissed. Those things learned from their father so quickly, it was abominable.
“We just got back from a walk,” Luke said. “How do I sell my sister in Tusken?”
“You don’t, that’s illegal,” Din reminded him.
“Yeah, see, but the object is for her to want to kill me, so? Tusken? Or Jawa. Can you do Jawa?”
Fett’s eyes were burning a hole through the side of Din’s helmet.
“Can you do Jawa, Djarin?” he asked in a terrifyingly flat tone.
“He’s Force-drunk,” Din said. “He doesn’t know what he’s on about. Darling, I’m begging you, please go lay down to preserve your strength for the ambassador’s arrival.”
Luke and Toit blinked at him at the same time. Din stifled a shudder.
“He called me ‘darling,’” Luke told the cat.
Fett cleared his throat.
“Does he call you ‘darling?’” Luke asked him.
“No,” Fett said. “Might be another secret he’s hiding from his court.”
A-m-a-z-i-n-g.
“I will go get you a cat,” Din said.
“I don’t want your cat,” Fett said loudly.
He did, though. He really, really did. He’d been petting the thing all morning.
“What else are you hiding?” Fett demanded.
Right now? A jedi. Come along, Jedi.
“Don’t think I’m forgetting this, Din. You can’t hide forever,” Fett called after them.
“That sounds like a challenge,” Luke pointed out on the way up the stairs.
“Then take it,” Din told him.