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i. Din
The wind does not keep its rage a secret. It howls a bitter hymn, and it bites its way across any skin unfortunate enough to be exposed.
Din’s soul rampages right alongside it.
It just isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that it’s so cold he can’t tell whether it hurts to breathe from that or from knowing that the loss currently clawing its way over his heart and through his lungs is a permanent thing. There is no escape. He’ll wake up tomorrow, and it’ll be true then, just as it was still true this morning. An orphan. He’s an orphan, and that’s certainly not fair. It isn’t fair that he has to sit through his first memorial service ever, without his parents there to comfort him. It isn’t fair that there aren’t any bodies to properly lay to rest, or that he has to say whatever goodbye he can manage on an unfamiliar planet. It isn’t fair that the stupid embroidery on his red cloak is still crooked, because he couldn’t stomach the thought of anyone getting close enough to fix it. And it isn’t fair that it’s such a gloomy day, today of all days. Though to be frank, he would consider it to be unfair even if it was the sunniest, brightest day he’d ever witnessed.
Din is angry, and he’ll damn well find a way to resent just about anything that crosses his path.
He’s angry, and if the wind can seethe and chafe and roar, he won’t be quiet about it either.
So when the Mandalorian in blue armor—the stranger who had reached out a hand in the midst of chaos and carnage, who radiated reliability enough that Din echoed his movements without even thinking—when he comes to stand beside Din in solidarity, Din pointedly steps to the side as he continues to stare straight ahead.
He half-expects to see a hand fall away out of the corner of his eye, an offering of comfort aborted at his rejection. But it never comes. The Mandalorian takes his cues from Din such that his helmet’s line of sight is leveled in front of him, too. He makes no move to step closer, and his arms remain at his sides.
They stand in silence, the wake of the small tribute fading around them as the crowd disperses. Din doesn’t move, barely registers the movement of the world revolving around him, but he can feel the presence of the Mandalorian. A statue beside him.
The tent has long since cleared out entirely, leaving just the two of them staring off into space, when Din finally sucks in a breath. Still, though, the two don’t look at each other, and Din speaks his words to the emptiness in front of him. “We were in the middle of reading a book,” he says, voice hollow. Hesitant. Perhaps what he’s really trying to say is we were in the middle of life. And isn’t that the way of it? That’s not fair either, but it happened all the same. “We were in the middle of Charlotte’s Web and now we won’t get to—I can’t—“ Din cuts off, the words trapped behind the guttural sob that escapes him, but it’s just the one exhale of weakness before he slams his hand over his mouth and chokes back the rest of them. His head turns even further away from the Mandalorian so that he’s facing the complete opposite direction, and his eyes shut tight for a moment.
The anger, giving way to sorrow.
”It’s just as well,” the Mandalorian says, and Din’s shocked into whipping his head toward him, watery eyes and all. The Mandalorian shrugs and elaborates in a voice far gentler than any who can cut such a foreboding figure should ever be able to muster. “It’s just as well you didn’t finish the book. The ending—“ he huffs a humorous laugh, “—well, you’re not missing out.”
Din forgets himself and snorts out a wet laugh, but it hurts to smile even more than it did to sob and he quickly sobers up. His gaze returns to straight ahead. He shouldn’t. He really shouldn’t open up his heart again, but his mouth parts and the question enters the world, regardless. “You’ve read it then?”
The Mandalorian nods. Din just catches the movement out of the corner of his eye, and he can also see that he’s still looking respectfully away from Din. “Listened to it, actually. I wouldn’t have been able to read it through the tears.”
And this is two strikes, but Din looks at him again at that. He can’t help it. A warrior, crying over a book?
The Mandalorian says no more on the matter that day, but later on, with the help of hindsight, Din wonders if it was him laying the groundwork for the trust and vulnerability that would follow. A passing remark about the shedding of tears, like it’s a completely normal thing, to ease the burden on the shoulders of the child who couldn’t even make eye contact from the shame of submitting to his grief.
—
It’s a slow thing.
Over the course of several months, Din and the Mandalorian grow closer, but it’s a shuffling dance. One step forward, ten steps back.
Din’s anger still boils beneath the surface, and his veins are filled with steam from the red-hot lava of rage he tries to keep contained. On the day that he finally erupts, the sun is warm and the breeze is gentle.
A beautiful day, and it doesn’t even matter. Din will find a way.
And maybe it is Din’s fault, Din will think that night and all the nights thereafter. Or maybe it’s no one person’s fault, but instead an amalgamation of everything, of all that he and the Mandalorian are, finally clashing discordantly. Din doesn’t consider that option. He never has and never will.
On that day, the two wake up in their shared room, the Mandalorian stripped of his more cumbersome armor but still wearing the helmet, and if his vambrace is a little to the left of where he had placed it the night before, Din doesn’t think he’ll notice.
Din doesn’t think he’ll notice his red eyes either. The tears have dried up anyway. They always do, before morning.
The Mandalorian walks Din to his training session, situated a respectable distance away so that he can be careful their arms don’t brush together. Din still shies away from contact, and the Mandalorian doesn’t push him. When he hands Din his practice armor, he positions it so that their hands need never meet, and when he leaves the ring to supervise, he doesn’t clap Din on the back, though Din has seen him do that to other children.
Din is at war. The larger part of him appreciates the respect being given to him, because he had all but shattered apart when the Mandalorian had ruffled his hair earlier, weeks ago. Like his father had done.
A smaller, weaker part of Din aches something fierce with longing, but he resolutely ignores it.
He gets along fine, with just the punches he sustains from training. It’s all he can stomach because it’s unfamiliar, doesn’t have any ties to his parents, and he sinks greedily into it.
The rhythm of spar, parry, block soothes Din, and he can’t tell if the Mandalorians let him train with them because they recognize his need from the twin of it living inside them, or if they think he might choose to join them someday. They never pressure him into swearing the Creed, but perhaps it’s their way of sharing the pieces they can with him, so that he’ll be ready to make the decision on his own when the time comes.
Whatever it is, Din is grateful for the distraction. He loses himself in the fight, and he can pretend nothing exists outside of it. Just him and his fists against the world.
The older kid he’s training with goes to punch the side of Din’s head because they’ve been working on dodges and Din has successfully completed the move several times now. But something shimmering in the ray of sunlight that streams through a crack in the wall catches his attention and he’s whipping his head over to look before he can begin to consider the consequences.
A spider web. Of course.
His breathing picks up, but no one has time to notice because just then, a hand slams into his eye. The kid couldn’t stop his momentum in time to change the positioning of the punch after Din twisted toward it, and it hits home hard.
It takes a second for it to register. All around the room, the moment is suspended, and then the shock cuts out and feeling filters in. Both kids stagger back at the same time. One in guilt, the other in pain.
”Sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—“
The blue-armored Mandalorian steps forward to clasp the older kid’s shoulder. “I know. Go get some ice, please,” he says as he gives the shoulder a little nudge. Footsteps clatter out of the room, then fade away as they head to the mess hall.
The Mandalorian turns to Din. “Can I see?”
Din’s hand is over his eye. He nods but makes no effort to remove it.
”Your hand,” the Mandalorian says, and it sounds like he’s smiling around the words.
Din blows out a breath as his hand slowly lowers back to his side. It reveals an eye already squinted with swelling, and an angry red blooms on the skin around it. Din can tell it’s swollen because his depth perception is all off when he watches the Mandalorian step closer. “So—not bad then?” Din asks sarcastically.
The Mandalorian hums in thought. And in his need to assess and fix, he forgets himself entirely. He closes the distance between the two of them, then takes Din’s chin gently into his hand, tilting it up so that he can see better. At the same time, he brushes the hair off Din’s forehead, away from the wounded eye.
Din forgets himself, too. He leans into the touch, just for a moment. It feels nice. Too nice, and his stomach twists with guilt. Just as the ghost of his father’s hand ruffling through his hair was quieted when the Mandalorian unthinkingly mirrored the action, so too does this replace the memory of his mother’s hand cradling his face. He’s losing them all over again, and what will he have left when he lets others into the voids they’ve left behind?
Din rips himself away from the Mandalorian’s grasp so hard it hurts, then stumbles back a step, and another, until he’s running out of the room.
His shoulder knocks against the doorframe on his way out because he still can’t kriffing see properly, but he keeps going. He ignores the dull clang of what must be the Mandalorian’s head dropping in defeat, helmet hitting against the chestplate, and he also doesn’t stop when other helmets turn to gawk in his direction. He must look half-feral, and he honestly feels it, too.
He can’t do this anymore. The Mandalorians, and his in particular, have been nothing but kind to him, but he doesn’t want them. He wants his old village, where he learned the meaning of home and where he absolutely did not learn to ride a bike. He still has the scar of the gaping gash he’d cut into his knee from falling. He wants his parents and their family pouncing sessions where they’d all pile together on a far-too-small bed on Sunday mornings, talking quietly about mundane things.
Din has half a mind to march right out of the Covert then and there, but he’s forced to acknowledge that he wouldn’t last two days without supplies.
At lunch, then. Din hides himself away in the little nook on the roof, between two windows that jut out and where the paneling creates enough of a level surface that he can tuck himself into it, and he waits. When he’s certain all the clans will be sheltered away in their separate homes so they can remove their helmets, Din sneaks out and heads for the Armorer’s Forge.
The anger sings inside him when he takes a handful of beskar ingots, and it overpowers the voice of reason hiding in the rage’s shadow. Logically he knows this is wrong, but he can’t stop himself. He has to leave, and this is the only way he can see to survive on his own. He’ll sell the beskar for credits, and maybe one day he can trade in the guilt for something else, too.
Though it’s probably not good for much.
He fills his bag with only what he needs of the beskar, and then he dashes off to the mess hall to gather some nonperishable foods to place on top. He’s not sure that what he gets will be enough for very long at all, but he’s starting to feel sick from stealing when they’ve already given him so much. He places just one last ration bar in the bag with a hand that shakes, then calls it good enough. He zips the bag up and throws it over his shoulder.
It feels like it weighs a thousand pounds by the time he reaches the exit, and he’s sure the burden will only grow heavier the farther away he gets. But he trudges on because he has to—he can’t lose any more of his parents. He just can’t.
His feet cross over the threshold and he nearly smacks straight into the Armorer, of all people. The blue-armored Mandalorian stands at her side.
Din drops his eyes to his feet, and he squirms as the anger thrums through his veins. He can’t tell anymore if he’s angry at himself for trying to leave, or angry at the Mandalorians for catching him, and it scares him.
The Armorer’s voice is hard as she addresses him. “We do not tolerate stealing,” she says. “We share what we have, as one, and we barely have enough for that. You will put it back.”
Din finds himself nodding at her tone alone, well before the words have even registered, but once they do, he nods more furiously still and backs up a step to do just that.
But the Armorer speaks again, and he halts all at once to listen. She sounds tired. “Din. If you wish to leave, we won’t keep you here.”
Din’s heart drops to his feet at what he thinks her meaning to be. They’re kicking him out! He deserves it, he knows that, but he won’t survive without help.
His face must have shown his alarm, though, because she continues. “We can make other arrangements. We do not tolerate foundlings to be left on their own, either.” She reaches out for the bag on his shoulder, and Din thinks it’s just as well she doesn’t trust him to put it back himself. She’s probably right to not. He surrenders it willingly, but his shoulders remain hunched, the burden of guilt lingering.
She opens it and retrieves a ration pack, then zips it closed again. She holds out both, and Din, for the first time, lifts his eyes to her visor. “You skipped lunch,” she says by way of explanation. “Keep it, but put the rest back.”
Something in Din shifts then, a crack started by the blue-armored Mandalorian that widens further now, at the Armorer’s forgiveness. “Thank you,” Din chokes out, gratitude tinging the words with a desperate note, and the Armorer nods.
Din doesn’t quite leave fast enough to miss what comes next.
He hears the Armorer say to his Mandalorian, “I just don’t know. He’s reckless, and impulsive, and so angry at the world. Wouldn't he be better off somewhere else?”
Din’s chest is already tight with the sins he has committed, today and otherwise, so he figures there’s no harm in eavesdropping. He stops just inside the building, around the corner where he can listen without being seen, and so it is that he also hears the Mandalorian when he says, “Give him a chance. Please. I just need a little more time with him. He’s hurting and he needs someone to help him, even when he doesn’t want it. Especially then.”
The silence hangs as the Armorer presumably thinks that over, and the Mandalorian continues, voice fierce, “It’s not our choice to make. It’s up to him, whether he joins or not.”
And that, at least, is familiar to the Armorer. “This is the Way,” she says, and the Mandalorian echoes it back to her.
The argument is settled, overridden by the duty they know they must uphold under the Resol’nare.
The Mandalorian rounds the bend so quietly that Din doesn’t hear him coming in time to move, and the Mandalorian sighs when he sees that Din is still there, and heard every word to boot. But all he says is, “Come on, kid. Let’s get you some ice.”
It’s only later, when they’ve returned the beskar and the food and they’re back in their room, that they speak about it.
The Mandalorian has an ice pack in his lap, and his hands twitch around it like he wants to place it to Din’s face himself. But he refrains, instead offering it up for Din to take into his own hands.
”You found it, didn’t you?” The Mandalorian says, breaking the silence.
Din clenches his teeth but doesn’t say anything, so the Mandalorian continues. “The book. You found it through my tech and you’ve been reading it. Right?”
Din shrugs one shoulder half-heartedly and presses the ice pack harder against his face.
”Din?”
”I’m sorry I stole your vambrace, okay? I am!” Din bursts out, and for the record, that is true. He’s not proud of a lot of things he’s done recently, but the world is upside-down and he doesn’t know who he is anymore. “And I’m sorry I’m angry and reckless and impulsive—“
“That’s not what I meant,” the Mandalorian says firmly. “And I never said that.”
”Someone did, though,” Din mumbles out, voice cracking.
”Well. Someone would be wrong.” The Mandalorian sighs again, and now he’s the one that sounds tired. “Din. She shouldn’t have said that. And I think she’ll find that she didn’t mean it, when she calms down.” The Mandalorian sways in place, like one would to knock their shoulder against the one of the person sitting next to them, but he doesn’t actually make contact. “She was angry, too, you know,” he says conspiratorially.
Din smiles, a small, painful-looking thing, but a smile nonetheless.
”Now,” the Mandalorian says, sitting straight once more. “You want to tell me what’s wrong?”
“I finished it,” Din says. The words are practically one united front with how fast they tumble out. He takes in a shaky breath and says, more slowly, “Charlotte’s Web. I finished it last night and now it’s like it’s—final. Everything is ending and I can’t go back and I want—I want—“ Din grinds his teeth together and hunches inward, the hand holding the ice pack to his face falling, defeated, into his lap.
It doesn’t matter what he wants.
“Ner ad’ika,” the Mandalorian says softly, almost to himself. He takes the ice pack from Din and presses it gently to his quickly-blackening eye. Din lets him, sagging forward even more, like all the fight has gone out of him. The Mandalorian chides lightly, “Didn’t I tell you not to read it?”
He always surprises Din, and Din finds himself snorting at the told ya so before he can stop. He pushes at the Mandalorian’s hand playfully. “You did,” he says. “You did.”
—
Life goes on, and Din sees the Mandalorian in a new light after he stood up for him.
Din, for his part, doesn’t try to run away again, but he also doesn’t swear the Creed yet.
He’s caught in the in-between, not yet understanding the Way enough to dedicate himself to it, but also not willing to give up the kindness for other arrangements, whatever that entails.
He trains, and he studies, and he improves. On all fronts. He’s stronger in the ring; he doesn’t shy away from accidental shoulder brushes when they happen, though he doesn’t seek them out either; and he doesn’t wake every night trembling, face wet, from nightmares. Only every other night, now.
Things are—if not good, then certainly looking up.
And then the Mandalorian tells him he’ll be going on the mission that the Covert has been planing for, the one that will go down in a couple weeks.
Reality slams into Din harder than any punch to the gut he’s sustained in training, and he’s taken right back to the rage of Before. It isn’t fair. Someone else could go, surely.
But the Mandalorian shakes his head at any argument Din tries to voice. He has to go, for his Covert and his Creed and, he says, for Din. So that he can make their home safe again, and Din believes him, but he doesn’t have to like it.
That night, the nightmare transforms into something so, so much worse than it has ever been. He’s cursed, in a loop of loss, watching first his parents die and then the Mandalorian, knowing in his heart that it makes him orphaned twice-over and where’s the justice in that?
There is none.
The flashes of death and dark and despair plague him all night. His mother and father, sprawled on the ground, their hands reaching out to each other but doomed, for eternity, to fall short of clasping. The Mandalorian, helmet crushed to the side of him and face laid bare for all to see. Din may not understand everything yet, but he understands enough to know that is the man’s worst fear, even bigger than dying, but Din looks closer and he sees that it doesn’t matter. His death is Din’s worst fear now, and the nightmare doesn’t do it by halves. The Mandalorian’s eyes stare dull and unseeing, and it’s horrific to witness because Din never even got to see them when they were bright with life.
The scene rewinds, so that Din can watch it all over again, knowing the outcome but powerless to stop it. His parents, leaving him by force, and the Covert, leaving him by choice.
When he finally jolts awake, he lets out a heart-wrenching wail from the depths of his soul, and he can’t even find the strength to care. The Mandalorian is at his side in a second, and Din tells himself he doesn’t care about that either. He hunches forward and all his effort is put into taking in another wheezing breath that rattles just as bad as the last, every time.
”It’s okay,” the Mandalorian says desperately, hand hovering in the air. He can’t decide if it would make it better or worse to close the distance, so it hangs, in-between. “Just breathe. You’ve gotta breathe for me, kid. 4-7-8, remember?”
“I’m—trying,” Din grits out.
The Mandalorian huffs out a breath of something like laughter, though it’s half-manic. “And it’s working such a treat,” he says, hoping to calm both their nerves.
But then Din leans, just a fraction, toward the Mandalorian. It’s completely unconscious—he’s just a kid and he’s scared and he wants what he knows he shouldn’t have—and the tears still lining his face catch in the moonlight.
“Din,” the Mandalorian says brokenly.
Din straightens quickly and shakes his head. “I’m fine,” he says, firm, and he pushes away the hand that tries to comfort him. It’s half-hearted, though, and they both know it.
The Mandalorian sighs. “Let me help you.”
“I don’t want you!” Din shouts angrily.
And here they are at the heart of it. Finally. Maybe that’s how it started, but that’s not how it is now. Half a year ago, sure, Din didn’t want anyone to comfort him if it wasn’t his parents. But now?
He loves the Mandalorian like an uncle, or a—a father, maybe, if that’s allowed, and he’s sure it isn’t. He does want the Mandalorian’s comfort, and that’s the problem. Just look at the nightmare Din had, and the fact that he’s going to leave Din, too, in a couple weeks. Din can’t do it again. He can’t have a heart so stupidly, naively full of hope, only for the rug to be ripped out from under him, leaving him falling down the endless well of grief again. It’s better to close himself off. He’s fine on his own.
But the Mandalorian understands the words that Din doesn’t say, and he surprises Din for the hundredth time. He doesn’t say something flippant and callous, something like “I’m all you have.”
No, the Mandalorian squeezes Din’s hand and he says, “But I’m here anyway. And I’m not going anywhere.”
His voice is as fierce as it was that day he fought for Din’s place here, with the Covert, and the final chain around Din’s heart unravels. His face crumples, and he falls against the Mandalorian’s chest. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“Ner ad’ika,” the Mandalorian says gently, and it sounds like a promise. His hand cups the back of Din’s head, pressing it even firmer against him. “I know. It’s alright.”
—
When the rug rips out from under him, it hurts just as bad as he knew it would.
Worse, even.
The Mandalorian does not come back from the mission. He died honorably in battle, and it was quick, they tell him.
Din shuts down a little, after that. He shudders, and he finds himself wishing someone would turn the air down because it must be freezing, but then why is no one else shaking with him? He only catches pieces of what the Mandalorians are saying in front of him, and he thinks he nods. He tries to nod. Maybe he nods too many times, he can’t tell.
Really he’s just fixated on the way the Mandalorian clad in green armor, the one who’s telling him about his Mandalorian’s passing, doesn’t stop fidgeting with his hands the whole time he’s speaking. It makes it hard for Din to believe him. Not about the honor, of course. Din has no doubt it was an honorable death, but he thinks they’re lying, for his sake, about the rest. The ease of it. Din closes his eyes and sees flashes of a bloodied body, trapped beneath a cage of armor that did him no good, there at the end. He hears the labored breathing of a dying warrior, echoing harshly through the helmet’s modulator, and Din doesn’t want to know, but he knows somehow that they’re the shaky exhales of a man—just a regular man—who is in pain and alone and scared, in his final moments.
They can lie all they want, but Din knows the truth. He snaps his eyes back open, desperate to unsee, to unknow, and his sight snags onto those damn fidgeting hands again. Suddenly it’s a hand outstretched to save him from his own battlefield, the real one he survived and the one made of grief he was sucked into after, and Din wonders why no one offered up the same help to his Mandalorian.
Din wonders why he didn’t do it himself.
The droning buzz in the background stops. They must be finished speaking with him, Din thinks, and that’s just as well. He has something he needs to do. He nods one final time, jerky and pained and entirely wrong, but then he freezes up when a helmet is pressed into his hands.
He registers, in some distant part of his brain that they must see him as the Mandalorian’s kid, if they’re leaving his helmet to him, and the knowledge only blacks out the world around him further. He doesn’t remember the interim, but he somehow ends up in the Armorer’s Forge, standing before the Mandalorians’ leader.
”Please,” he says. “I’m ready.” His voice may be wrecked, but his hands are finally steady as he holds out the helmet.
The Armorer tilts her head. “Why?” she asks, and it’s barely framed as a question at all.
Din shuffles through all the responses he might could give—revenge, legacy, loyalty—but none of those are right at all. The Mandalorian, and the rest of the Covert, taught him to love again when he had all but sworn it off. He doesn’t know how to explain that, though, so he says falteringly, “I...I loved him.”
The Armorer nods, and her voice is gentler than he’s ever heard it when she speaks. ”And you didn’t think you could again?”
Din’s eyes widen a little. Is he kriffing transparent to these Mandalorians? But maybe he is, with his face on display. They don’t often have the luxury of reading every emotion as it is felt.
She nods again. “That takes the greatest strength of all, to open yourself back up to love after suffering so great a loss. You are ready. If you choose to swear the Creed, you can be one of us.”
She reaches out a hand, and just like that, he takes it.
—
ii. Grogu
Din doesn’t recognize it at first.
The child’s longing for contact manifests in the complete opposite way Din’s had, but when he really thinks about it, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Din sought out punches so he didn’t have to replace the ghosts of caresses his parents had given. Yet all the child has known recently is violence, so a gentle touch would be just unfamiliar enough to be wanted. Craved.
They’re two sides of the same coin, Din and the child.
Even when they have just met, and neither have any reason to trust the other, there are traces of it.
The night they leave the swirling sand dunes of Arvala-7 behind, Din plots a course for Nevarro and treats the child as he would any bounty. That is to say, he shuts him up inside the pod and then falls asleep sitting in the pilot’s chair, arms crossed in front of him. He never feels safe enough when he has company to venture into his bunk down in the cargo hold. And yes, the child looks about as threatening as a porg and the only time he used his strange powers was to save Din, but old habits die hard.
The child is nothing more than a bounty, anyway.
When he wakes in the middle of the night, he thinks it must be from the apex of his nightmare. He allows himself to fall into the beauty of the shards of light streaming past the Razor Crest from their journey in hyperspace, and it calms his racing heart a little. But then he hears the coo that had manifested in his dream as the cry of a lost little boy, hunching over the lifeless body of his Mandalorian and clutching desperately at a gloved hand with both his own. His birth parents lay a few feet away, but it may as well be a mile for all the good it does Din. He doesn’t have three hands, and he made his choice. He wonders, if given the opportunity to see one of them again, which one he’d choose.
He doesn’t have to wonder hard.
There’s more unfinished with his Mandalorian, and the guilt eats at him, but he would choose him.
He thinks his parents would understand.
The child coos again, and Din registers that it sounds a lot clearer than it should. He whips his gaze back and to the right, to the co-pilot’s chair, and finds that the pod sits open and very much empty.
Din sighs as he pushes to his feet. If the child doesn’t want to be in the pod, Din’s not sure he can keep him there. And that’s not a conscience thing. That’s just the sneaking suspicion that the kid is more stubborn than he is, which is saying something. But still, Din goes off in search of him to make sure he’s not wreaking havoc to the ship, and he finds him sitting in front of a cabinet, forlorn.
Din sighs again, but he’s come this far. He squats in front of the kid and says, “What is it?”
The child squabbles his tiny hands at the edge of the cabinet, claws clacking against the durasteel as he tries to reach underneath it. His ears droop as he pulls back his arm, and he coos again.
“Did you—lose something? Is that it?” Din asks hesitantly. He feels stupid. He’s not sure how much the child can understand of what he’s saying, but he’s damn sure of what he himself catches from the kid, which is next to nothing.
But the child brightens a little and quiets down with his cooing, saying no more on the matter, so Din figures he might have stumbled onto something here.
His hand is really a bit too large to cram underneath the cabinet, but his arm is longer than the child’s and with a bit of scraping and wrangling, he draws back with the prized possession clutched between forefinger and thumb. He takes his first look at what he was called to fetch, and he huffs out a surprised breath. “Kid,” Din says. “Didn’t I say it’s not a toy?” He gestures the little round knob in the air to make his point.
The child tilts his head, but he remains silent.
Din thinks that’s probably as good a response as he can hope to get, so he picks the child up and sets him gently in the pod. The knob is placed back where it belongs, and Din collapses back into his chair to get some more sleep.
He’s jolted awake by a child’s distressed coo, and he looks straight to the control stick once he’s shaken off the disorientation of getting awoken so soon again. Sure enough, it’s without the durasteel sphere that should adorn it. Din hangs his head for a second, defeated.
”Maybe you don’t understand my words, but you would think my actions would come through, huh?” Din says tiredly, mostly to himself, as he stumbles over to the cabinet. “Alright, let’s see then.” He crouches down beside the child and shuffles his hand around blindly until it makes contact with the knob. He hands it to the child, gloved fingers brushing against smaller ones, and the child’s ears perk up at the gift. “Yeah, yeah. You can have it if you promise to be careful. It’s nap time, kid. Please.”
The child gnaws on the knob in reply.
”Good.” Din picks the child up by the hood of his cloak and moves him over a little, to the center of the cockpit where he can play with the sphere without it rolling underneath the cabinet.
Din turns around and takes two and a half steps before—
“Bah?”
The child’s babble doesn’t quite cover up the sound of the knob rolling along the floor, where it finally comes to a stop with a gentle plonk against the wall.
He spins on his heel to find the child tipped over, one hand on the floor in front of him like he tripped on his way back to the cabinet, and the ball slipped accidentally from his grasp when he caught himself.
Din foregoes crouching. He sits cross-legged on the floor beside the cabinet and leans his elbow on his knee, then his cheek on his palm. His other hand searches for the knob, and once he’s placed it into the kid’s waiting hands, he doesn’t make a move to get up.
He just sits there, eyes drifting closed, as he listens to the sounds of the child smacking on the knob. That is replaced by a gentle whistle, and Din imagines the kid must be moving his arm in the air, fast, to feel the air dodge around the object. And then that is replaced by a second of silence, while the ball is presumably soaring through the air, and the sound cuts back in with a little scrape as it rolls under the cabinet.
Din doesn’t even bother to open his eyes as his arm shoots under the cabinet. He latches onto it and squints one eye open just enough to offer it up to the child, and then Din pushes the child’s back gently, shuffling him around so that he’s facing away from the cabinet. The child’s feet kick backward and forward, and he giggles, leaning into Din’s hand.
Din doesn’t remember leaving it there, and he doesn’t remember falling asleep, either, but when he wakes in the morning, he’s got a cramp in his back and his neck and his elbow, and he’s also got a slumbering child pressed up against his hand, knob clutched in his chubby little grasp.
It takes a minute to convince his joints to stand, but then he stoops back down to gather the child into his arms and tuck him into the pod, knob and all.
He leaves it open.
—
Din half-expects the child to pull away a little after they leave Nevarro, because he traded him in like it was nothing. Sure, he came back, but that does nothing to negate the fact that he handed the kid over in the first place.
But the child doesn’t.
Din sees himself giving up the child, but the child only focuses on Din coming back for him. Fighting for him.
Life, Din remembers, goes on, and the shape of it is different now that he’s stood up for the kid. Softer.
When Din is down in the cargo hold shortly after their stop, working on a full round of maintenance for all his weapons, the child finds a way to entertain himself.
He bumbles his way over to Din’s boot and sets his hands on either side of it, boxing in Din’s leg between his hold.
”Not right now, kid,” Din says lightly, without looking up from his work.
His weaponry had done its job when they needed it, back on Nevarro, but if he doesn’t take care of it, it won’t be able to take care of them when they need it again.
The child slumps at his feet, leaned back against his legs. He passes a fair bit of time twirling Din’s shoelaces between his fingers. After a while, he’s so bold as to tug them out of their knot, and then he slings the strings around and makes shapes out of them in his lap.
Din lets him. He dismantles and greases and reloads the amban rifle, in the meantime.
Eventually, the child toddles to his feet and wanders off, leaving Din’s shoelaces in a tangled mess behind him.
Din doesn’t say anything then, either. He can fix them.
When the child returns, he has a pair of Din’s clean, folded up socks in his hands, and Din blows out a breath, surprised. He knows for a fact those were in the top drawer. “How did you—“ Din sighs. “No, I don’t want to know.”
The child smiles to himself. He peels the socks apart and starts to put them on one of his hands.
The same hands with the very long, very sharp claws.
”Hey, hey,” Din says as he lunges for the child. “I don’t have many of those left without holes in them. I’d like to keep it that way.”
The child dances out of his grasp, giggling.
Din catches him anyway, scooping him up into his arms with a flourish. “Come on, kid. Are you interested in making a trade for them?”
The child mumbles out something that lilts up at the end, ears twitching. Din gets the impression they’re in the bargaining phase. Depends. What are you offering?
”I’ll make it worth your while,” Din says. “Don’t you worry.”
And so the child ends up in Din’s lap anyway, nibbling on a cookie and babbling happily between bites.
—
Din creates a monster.
He thought he was thanking the child for handing over the socks when he gave him the cookie, as a treat, but the child has other ideas. The child trains him, and suddenly he’s fetching random items he knows he shouldn’t have whenever he wants a snack.
He wanders back and forth behind the pilot’s chair until Din notices him with the binocs, and where he found them, Din has no idea. He gets the kid his stupid cookie for giving them back, and he sets him in his lap so he doesn’t get into any more mischief.
He nearly has a heart attack one day when the child comes waltzing into the room holding a vibroblade.
”No. No, no, no,” Din says, and he hasn’t moved so fast in a long time. He doesn’t even wait for the child to drop it into his hand this time. He grabs it by the blade, so that he knows the only part that will come in contact with the kid is its handle, even when he pulls it jerkily out of his grasp. “No.” Din says, one last time for good measure, but really he says it because his brain is frozen and he can’t seem to remember any other words.
His heart is still racing as he stashes the vibroblade back in the weapons locker, and he makes a mental note to get a lock—and Ka’ra above, why hasn’t he done that before now?
He walks into his tiny makeshift kitchen on autopilot, in a daze, but he somehow manages to scrounge up a cookie. He scared the kid enough. He probably deserves it for that alone, even if Din would rather not encourage his behavior this time.
Din walks on shaky legs over to a crate and practically falls back onto it. He waits for the child to toddle up to him shyly and then he reaches out. When he tries to place the treat in the child’s hands, though, his ears wilt and he gently pushes Din’s hand back toward his chest. He clambers into Din’s lap and whines a little, a low keen deep in the back of his throat.
Din’s hand automatically comes up to wrap around the child, and the child in turn squeezes Din’s thumb caught in his little grasp.
Maybe it wasn’t about the treats at all.
Maybe the child just wanted attention.
Din holds the kid a little closer at the thought, and his heart shifts and makes room for a new kind of love at the way the child nuzzles into him in response.
—
The child’s past is, admittedly, a mystery, but Din knows anyway that it’s shrouded in darkness.
It’s a wonder that the kid manages to hold so much light inside him, but he does, and he radiates the brightness outward so that Din can share in it, too.
Din doesn’t know the last time he laughed, before he found the child. He makes Din better in every way.
The child might have molded Din into the softer shape of father, but Din is toxic and he brings hope into the child’s world only to snuff it out again and again.
Rescuing him from IG-11, only to turn him over to The Client. Fighting for him then, but planning to leave him again on Sorgan.
Willing to die back on Nevarro, and foisting the kid off to Cara to take care of in his absence.
Well. Bend someone enough and they’ll break eventually.
The child’s anger when they’re back on the ship is familiar, but it’s somehow worse to see it from the parent’s perspective. All the more intense for its righteousness.
The coin, it seems, has flipped, and Din wishes desperately to right it.
It isn’t like the kid at all to twist away from him when Din is holding him, or for his hands to rest carefully on the chestplate so that they don’t have to touch Din’s arm or hand. He stumbles back several steps when Din places him down on the bunk, and he hunches into himself, turns away.
It’s not quite fast enough for Din to miss the way his eyes glisten in the light, though, and Din aches. “Kid,” he says gently. Nothing else follows. Just the name—the nickname, rather, because Din doesn’t even know his real name—whispered between them like a plea.
The child’s face scrunches up, and his ears droop so far down they’re pressed flat to his head.
And Din gets it. He does. It’s easier to go it alone, right? You can’t lose anyone if you don’t let them in.
But no. Din had someone to show him a different way, and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t do the same for the child before him. He hears the echo of his Mandalorian’s voice in his head (I’m here anyway. And I’m not going anywhere), but he thinks there’s something else that would resonate more with the kid.
Action, because words have never been their strongest point of communication, and he wants the child to understand this. If he understands nothing else at all, it will be fine as long as he gets that Din is here for the long haul, to reunite him with his real family.
The leather of his gloves creaks as he reaches out, and the child turns at the noise. His eyes hold the weight of the world inside them, and sorrow pools in them but doesn’t overflow. Din has never seen him cry before, and he’s not doing it now either, but it’s a close thing. The child’s hands hang in front of him, not quite braided together, but not quite reaching out to accept Din’s offering of comfort.
The in-between of wanting what you know you shouldn’t have.
When Din’s hand continues to approach his head, the child tilts the side of it down and away, and his eyes squint in a childish fit of exasperation.
Din keeps going, slowly, until his hand finally makes contact with the child’s head. And oh, the anger. It rears its head with reckless abandon. The child twists his face away and grimaces outright, and his arms fold defensively in front of him. And this is the hard part, to stick around when the going gets tough. I don’t want you plays on repeat in Din’s mind, but his Mandalorian wasn’t swayed by the rage and he doesn’t want to be either. Besides, the child’s crossed arms could be taken as a frustrated rejection of Din’s comfort. Or. It could be a desperate attempt to stop himself from leaning into the touch. Din feels akin to the child in this moment such that he never has before, and he can just tell, somehow, that it’s the latter.
Sure enough, when Din doesn’t pull away despite the child’s outburst, his expression clears into something void of fury, replaced instead with a hesitant hope.
I’m here, Din presses into him gently as he flops his ear around so that he’s cradling it, too.
And they cycle right back around to anguish, the child’s face crumbling so pitifully that it cuts to the core of Din. The child coos, low and heartbroken, and he finally lets himself lean into Din’s hand, eyes clenching shut as he accepts the comfort. His little hands come up to wrap around Din’s wrist, and he nuzzles himself even harder into Din’s palm, ear smushing between them.
A tear squeezes its way past the child’s closed eyes, but he makes no move to swipe it away. His hands stay clenched around Din’s wrist like his life depends on it. Din sighs, heart shattering to pieces—he was right earlier, the kid has never, ever cried before in his care, and it feels like a failure to witness it now—and he brings up his other hand to brush, feather-light, along the child’s cheek.
“Ner ad’ika,” whispers out into the world like a promise echoed down from generations, soft and gentle as a lullaby, and Din doesn’t remember deciding to say it, but it feels right.
It feels like the truest thing he’s ever said.
My kid.
Din rubs his thumb along the crown of the child’s head and hums to himself. “I’ve been thinking,” he says lightly. Din pictures the image of him, fetching the knob out from under the cabinet like an idiot for the child, all those months ago, and then he pictures a hand raised and fire held back as if by an invisible shield. He huffs. “That first day. You could have gotten the knob yourself that whole time, couldn’t you?”
It’s Din’s turn to be the surpriser. The child snorts out a wet laugh despite himself and turns his face into Din’s palm. He sniffles in a steadying breath, and then he levels a grin up at Din, baby teeth on full display. It’s crooked, and a little wobbly, his smile, but Din can still tell that he looks absolutely delighted with himself to have managed to pull one over on Din. Din smiles, too, beneath the helm. He pushes the end of the child’s ear down gently, like one would playfully shove a shoulder, and says, “You little womp rat.”
It is overwhelmingly fond in tone.
And when the kid giggles out his pure, bright, sunshine laughter, Din understands why his Mandalorian chased after Din’s smile so often, with all his jokes to catch Din off guard.
Din would do anything to preserve the kid’s happiness.
A clan of two, indeed.