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The first time Din visits Grogu on the Jedi’s jungle moon, he flubs the touchdown in his new ship and nearly slides off a cliff.
The warning lights scream, and he leaps to retrigger the stabilizers and rights the ship quickly enough.
As he unbuckles from the pilot’s chair, he tells himself his hands are shaking from the near-crash, not any other reason. The last bit of the Razor Crest, the pilot’s knob, burns a hole in Din’s pocket.
The ship’s a modern one, with too many features that can’t be fixed with simple mechanical tools, and homing and guidance systems with too many bells and whistles that provide more distraction than help.
He hates it. Piloting it feels like inhabiting someone else’s skin.
But it gives him freedom, flexibility, and a less-conspicuous set of registrations. More importantly, it grants the ability to visit Grogu whenever he wishes. Or, at least, whenever he can bring himself to visit, in theory. He wants to visit constantly, but tries to quell the urge. Grogu is learning to protect himself; all Din could be is a distraction.
He couldn’t hold himself back any longer, though.
Grogu finds him right away, as if he’s been waiting. Din has barely stepped off the ship’s ramp when the kid is barreling into him. Din stops, tilting on his feet to avoid accidentally stepping into Grogu.
He’s — not bigger. But he feels larger, somehow. More vibrant, more present. He looks up at Din, dark eyes wide, face stretched in the expression than Din has come to call pleased.
“Hey there,” Din says, clearing a certain hoarseness from his throat. “Good to see you, Grogu.”
Grogu reaches up, so Din stoops to lift him.
And then he just… stops.
He’s not sure what to do, now. Their time together has been so driven by need and fear, by running from one disaster to the next. But now Grogu is safe, and Din is here because he chose to come, not because there’s some danger to fend off or crisis to manage.
“What do you… do for fun around here?” he asks, haltingly. It feels strange, a bit discomforting, to realize that Grogu has the answers on this planet, and not him.
Grogu points, which is new.
Din has nothing else to do but follow. So he winds his way through the undergrowth, passing thick trees, wading over streams, ducking under vines and climbing rocky inclines. It’s pleasant, almost — for all its jungle, the planet doesn’t feel humid.
“You better know where we’re going, womp rat,” Din says, after probably twenty minutes of this kind of trailblazing. Grogu just gives him another one of those looks, a bit of reprimand with a tilted ear.
Soon enough, they come to a marshier area. The placid water smells sulfurous, and the reeds blow on the wind. Frogs croak, echoing from side to side in the basin.
Ah. Now Din sees. He’s a snack delivery service, as usual. That’s okay, though. Because Grogu looks delighted.
Din spots a rock near the water’s edge where he can settle down against his cloak, and sets Grogu to the loamy earth.
Grogu gives a quiet chortle, squirms out of his cloak, and scurries into the water, apparently now able to dive. That terrifies Din on some existential level he hasn’t been previously aware of.
Now there’s… nothing else left, really, except to sit, and to watch, and to enjoy the feel of the cool breeze on the back of his neck. He looks around furtively. There were no signs of other humans on these paths, just animal tracks. And he doubts any sentient with half a head on its shoulders would stray into a Jedi’s path, if they could help it.
He can afford to take the helmet off, for a bit. He sets it on the ground beside him and lies a hand on top, then rolls down the neck cowl.
He must have dozed off, because some time later he blinks to consciousness to the wet feel of a slimy hand smearing across his face. Din almost scrambles for the helmet for a moment, before remembering that it’s safe, Grogu’s seen him before, his Creed is already broken, it’s fine. And he relaxes.
It’s just Grogu, with a lizard of some kind. He’s climbed up the rock behind Din to proudly offer the wriggling creature. Somehow he keeps the thing totally within his tiny grasp, though it’s basically the size of his head and resisting vigorously.
“Uh,” Din says, and then, trying to sound genuine, “thank you. But I’m not hungry right now.”
Grogu just blinks at him, then lifts the frog again.
No way Din’s eating a frog. He’s well past those hungry days.
But… It’s the first time Grogu’s tried to share food instead of stealing it. That’s got to be some kind of child developmental mark, Din muses. He should probably reinforce it somehow.
He looks at Grogu, then back to the frog.
Well.
When Din leaves a few hours later, after locating the Jedi and exchanging pleasantries, he rubs his thumb over the pilot’s knob, still in his pocket.
Din hasn’t experienced seasons, really.
So much of the Outer Rim consists of single-biome planets, harsh environments that go from ice to colder ice or sand to hotter sand, and nothing else. He’s made his living in these places, hopping from planet to planet at the whims of puck and contract. How long until the covert starves? and How many days until I run out of fuel? That was the only chrono or calendar he followed.
But he has not found the covert again. So now he categorizes his comings and goings by a different clock: How long he has been away from Grogu?
The next time he visits is maybe a few months later, or maybe a year — it’s hard to track time in hyperspace, sometimes, hopping between time zones and local calendars. Everyone supposedly follows galactic standard time. He knows how to read the technical passage of days. But it feels so easy to look away from the calendar, to follow a quarry through the endless tunnels of hyperspace, and suddenly find yourself months later, so far from where you started.
All he knows is that the next time he lands on Yavin IV it’s hot. The air practically steams, and he feels like he might roast in his armor. Somehow the humid warmth feels so much worse than Tatooine’s dry suns, like he’s drowning in heat and water at the same time. His flightsuit is quickly drenched.
But he gets to see Grogu again.
The next time, everything is cooler, more comfortable.
The Jedi offers to translate for Din that time, and Din tries it, but it just — feels wrong, like he’s talking more to Luke than to Grogu. Din’s simple questions and Grogu’s unspoken reactions feel realer, somehow, more natural. And so after that, the Jedi lets them alone. He becomes nothing but a shadowy presence on the edge of the visits, leading Grogu away when it comes time.
So he arrives, and he leaves. And again. And again.
Din’s not sure how he keeps doing it — this coming and going. Each time, it feels like his iron heart is cracking open.
These are the things he knows: He has a new ship now, older, with more mechanical parts he can repair and replace himself. Grogu is getting brighter, somehow, in ways that Din can’t totally understand. Yavin IV changes in seasons: the cool, dry spring; the wet, hot summer; the brisk green fall; the chilly but snowless winter. He is coming to know the way time passes on this planet better than any he has ever traveled before.
He tries to keep his visits sparse — at least three jobs between each visit. He doesn’t know what to do without a structure like that. He looks for the smallest traces of the covert in between, though he always finds nothing. There is little else for him. Bo-Katan has not called on him to fulfill his debt, yet; the darksaber hangs uselessly on his hip, as if waiting for him to begin deciding what Creed he will follow and what responsibilities he will assume; Boba Fett needs his aid only once every few turns.
But Din always visits Yavin IV for a day, and no longer. If he didn’t, he could see himself falling into the temptation of just… staying. Of passing one night near Grogu, then the next, until he forgot the hum of hyperspace and the pain of leaving and the weight of everything he must do, replacing all that with the things he simply wants.
He doesn’t want to think about what that would mean, either for him or for his tenuous grasp on his Creed.
So he comes, and he goes, and the seasons change, and the lines grow on the Jedi’s face at too quick a pace, and more devastatingly powerful children come to that jungle planet, and Grogu grows stronger and brighter and bolder each passing visit.
Din still keeps the pilot’s knob.
“You could stay for longer,” the Jedi says, one day, after somewhere between two and three years of this. Din’s not sure how long it’s been since his last visit — three bounties, exactly, though. Just that minimum he requires of himself. He used to stretch the wait longer, six bounties or more. But three has become the longest he delays between visits, now, too.
“I’d better not,” Din says, looking down at Grogu, who’s managed to tire himself out by floating hapless creatures out of the trees, then gently releasing them. But Grogu seems to be perking up in his arms, a bit, as if tuning into their conversation.
“He misses you, when you leave,” the Jedi says.
“I thought that’s — bad,” Din says, thinking of Ahsoka’s words. “That it keeps him from learning to protect himself. That it could be dangerous. That you would teach him… not to.”
The Jedi shrugs. “I tried that. I’m not convinced, really, that it would help. That it helps any of them.”
Grogu seems to be fake-sleeping, as if pretending disinterest; Din holds back a smile.
“There’s a phenomenon, here,” the Jedi says, at Din’s hesitation. “A prisma storm. Every morning, the water crystallizes in the air, and it refracts, just for a few instants, if you’re up high enough. It’s a rare and beautiful sight. Can’t see it anywhere else. The moon passes behind Yavin Prime, and then the sun from Yavin catches in the water.”
Din doesn’t know what to make of the abrupt change in subject.
And then the Jedi says, “You could stay for that. It’s hard to see from the temple. It might be good for Grogu to see it.” He doesn’t add with you, but Din gets the idea.
So Din stays the night.
It’s easy to justify when it’s for Grogu, not for himself.
The Jedi suggests Din could see the storm from the temple watch towers, but Din would rather see the whole thing from outside. He’s never had a lot of leisure time, with all his responsibilities. But there’s nothing like watching a natural phenomenon in the chill of the dawn, breaths puffing in the air.
“You ready for this, kid?” Din asks, but Grogu’s already climbing up Din’s leg to swing himself into the sling.
Din has mapped out Yavin IV dozens of times, between all his landings and takeoffs. The geology is burned in his brain, a topological map of holographic peaks and valleys. So he knows the highest point within a day’s walk, and exactly how to get there. He could jetpack, but he doesn’t want to relinquish the quiet companionship of just taking their time.
He trudges endlessly, Grogu a curious presence at his side. He narrates the trip at first, pointing out everything he can think of, then lapses into silence. The kid responds to so much more, now, instead of just watching silently — he reaches for bugs and coos at things that rustle in the undergrowth and burbles at changes in the landscape. Din can’t help but be delighted at how much more Grogu seems to have opened up to the world, as he’s had time to stay somewhere safe and stable.
So unlike the precarious life Din was able to offer him.
But Din is the one who made this happen, he reminds himself. He’s the one who rescued Grogu from the Empire, who cared for him and protected him for months, who took Grogu to Tython so he could call the Jedi, who took him back from Gideon. He too has offered safety, in his own way.
But he wishes, sometimes, that they could share this quiet life on Yavin IV together.
The last few miles of the trek remind Din of some of those older days, when they’d walk through endless wilderness together. At last, and with some uncomfortable climbing, he makes it to the top of the mountain, a thing of craggy rough rock and little gentleness. He sets Grogu down, then starts to build a fire.
Grogu bustles around the small campsite, finding small ways to keep himself entertained.
It feels, again, like a strange version of those harrowing months on the run — or perhaps most like those weeks on Sorgan, where Din felt so relaxed and unguarded, before another hunter came for Grogu’s life. Still, there is a comfort all its own in the repetition of the past, in grabbing sticks and tools away from Grogu’s prying hands as Din tries to build the fire, in settling down before the flames with the child on his lap.
The jungle stretches out beneath them, a canopy of green crowned by jagged peaks. Din watches the treetops until the sun sets, dropping them into shadow.
And then they wait until morning.
The dim glow of the sun wakes Din first. He nudges Grogu awake. The kid takes a moment to glare at him, as if he’s about to roll back to sleep.
“You’ll want to see this,” Din says. “Trust me.”
The rainbows come with the sun’s ascent, catching the crystals of morning dew in the air. It crackles through the atmosphere, snapping like lightning. A million colors burst, registering in Din’s visor in ranges the human eye can’t perceive. But —
He takes the helmet off, and lets the light wash over him.
Grogu coos in his lap and claps, reaching for the sky. The prisms gather above his fingers, breaking and reforming from tiny crystals into a megastructure, throwing off light and color and beauty.
It’s like nothing Din’s ever seen. Grogu turns to him, hands still outstretched, as if saying, Look at what I can do. The valley beneath them seems strewn with colors.
“I see it, Grogu,” Din says. And before he really thinks about it, he takes the pilot’s knob from his pocket, and he holds it up.
The colors bounce from it, painting new rainbows. Instantly, Grogu drops the prism and pulls the knob to him.
And then the sun’s risen, and the colors are gone.
Din packs up the camp slowly, and walks back to the temple, helmet in his hands. He doesn’t say a word on the way back. Grogu seems content to grasp the ball and sneak glances at Din’s face.
The helmet goes back on as they near the temple grounds. But Din leaves the pilot’s knob with Grogu.
He doesn’t wait as long to return, the next time.