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THE ONE WHO FOUND HIM FIRST
In the wine-colored light of the lowering primary, distant rivers of lava could be seen snaking through the flats, climbing brightly into the black hillsides, the sky above them bruised, burning, the first pinpricks of stars just visible. Against it, the Razor Crest sat less than a klick outside of town, reflecting the spectacle of the sunset where Greef’s people had scabbed on shiny new hull plates, flat and dusty where they had not. This is what the Mandalorian watched as he waited for the one following him, giving no indication that he knew he was being followed.
She had been following him since the cantina, ducking behind one pillar or another, beneath the table of this closed stall or that. She was quiet for a child. She was not very quiet at all. But now they were out in the flats and there was no place to hide, only darkening sand and wide open space, and the light of the primary slipping below the roofs of the town behind them.
The Mandalorian waited, walking, until at length the sideways light cast her shadow long enough to catch up with him.
“I don’t need company tonight,” he said, loud enough that she could hear him, and though he didn’t stop walking he could tell that she had. Then the sound of her feet sliding through the sand started again, faster this time.
“The only thing more dangerous than sneaking up behind a Mandalorian,” he said, and this time he did stop, though he did not turn, resting his hand on his blaster, “is running up behind one.”
The night grew silent. He didn’t even hear her breathe. From the corner of his eye he saw an insect alight on a lava flow, then flare and burn up.
“I want to,” the girl shouted, took a step and stopped again. “Can I come and talk to you?”
The Mandalorian sighed and turned. He waited. When she didn’t move after another moment he raised the hand from his blaster and gestured for her.
She was thin but tall, wiry in a way that he thought meant she’d missed a few too many meals. But she had followed him this far, and as she came closer, standing straight, she didn’t seem cowed by his gaze. In his experience that was a sign that either a person was confident in their own skill, or they had nothing left to lose.
When she stood in front of him her hair shone rust-red in the dying light, but he thought it was probably the same dirty ash color of the other street children.
“I want to be one of you,” she said, voice pitched lower than it should have been for her age. When he didn’t respond she continued. “A Mandalorian. There’s more than one, I know. I’ve--" she paused, looked around, briefly as if one of the others might in fact be nearby, "I've watched you. Sometimes there are children, they come and go from below. And I’ve heard stories." She clenched her fists. She carried nothing. She likely had nothing. "I want you to train me, to… to give me one of those helmets, that armor. I don’t want to be myself anymore".
He watched her, shifted his weight. When the silence stretched and he said nothing she only huffed once, spread her fingers impatiently.
"Go home," he said, and turned to the Crest.
"I don't have a home!" she shouted at him, but did not follow him up the cargo ramp, and was still there watching him as it closed.
She was still there in the morning, too. He thought she might be. It was the reason he hadn't already left the system.
She lay on the sand, curled up smaller than he would have imagined. She had sheltered beneath the Crest, likely the only reason a reptavian hadn't swooped down to snatch her up.
He shook her awake and she flinched, struck out an arm, fist clenched as if around the handle of a knife, but The Mandalorian had already taken the knife while she slept.
“Who will look for you?” he asked after she had shimmied from beneath the ship. She brushed herself off. He gave her back the knife.
“No one," she said. "There’s no one. I have a name I gave myself but no one else knows it. I don’t even know how old I am.”
Too old… he didn’t say, but wasn’t sure that was true. In the full light of the primary she looked at once a woman and a child. He saw, too, the things the night had kept him from seeing, what she herself didn't want him to see: the scabbing and bruises on her wrists which she tried to hide by crossing her arms across her body, the scarring on her neck obscured by a ragged collar, the shoes, too small, and her dark eyes, too large in her sallow face.
She squinted up at him and he saw the streaks on her face where tears had washed the dust away.
He looked to the distant mountains instead, a black, broken blade against the white sky.
“Meet me outside the cantina when the moon is high," he said, then took from his satchel a canteen of water and a ration pack.
That night he found her in the alley. She had cleaned herself up as best she could but she did not smile or speak.
“Put this over your eyes,” he said and held out a long, black cloth and she backed away from it as if it was a blaster, more fear now than when he’d threatened her out on the lava flats.
“I won’t hurt you," he said, "but you could hurt us, if you knew too much, if you change your mind.”
“I won’t,” she said, and took the cloth from him, tying it tightly over her eyes. “I won’t change my mind.”
“I think she escaped a slave ship,” The Mandalorian said to the Armorer when the girl had gone, down a dark passage with strangers who were now to be her family, still blind, still determined. “I don't know how long ago. Someone might look for her.”
“They will not find her,” the Armorer said.
“No,” he agreed.
“She is already of age.”
“Yes. She was determined.”
“I see that. She will not need a father; the clan is her father now. But if you wish—“
“I do not.”
The Armorer waited, when he said nothing more she said, “This is the way.”
He saw the girl again, he thought. He must have. He was told by the Armorer that she had sworn the creed only weeks later. She never came to him. He never asked which one she was. There were a few she could have been, several who had sworn the creed while he was off world for several months. Faces he no longer saw playing or training in the long, cold tunnels, like a dream he once had, now only shadows in painted armor, too-small in their cuirasses. If one stopped to consider him longer than the others, it was none of his concern.
THE TWO WHO WERE REUNITED
The Mandalorian watched across the flickering campfire as the two children devoured their supper, something that had once had wings. They shared the meal as if they had shared hundreds of others together, mirror images of each other but for the one's blue tunic and the other's grey. He had found the twins running from their burning village, hand-in-hand, and at first they had thought he was a soldier from the neighboring village, a soldier who might have burnt down their home, killed their parents.
When he had walked with them later, through the smoldering wreckage of huts and stone houses, none of the survivors had recognized the children, the few who had been willing to talk to him, even fewer who could understand him.
"Do you want more?" He asked them and offered another bird, steaming and shining on a spit. They didn't answer; they didn't speak any language he knew, but the one in blue reached for the metal spit instead of the bird, then drew back their hand sharply, hissed and put their fingers in their mouth.
"I'm sorry," the Mandalorian said, cursing under his breath, "I didn't think--here, wait."
He set the bird aside to cool, drew a salve from his pack and held out his hand. The child hesitated only a moment and then gave the Mandalorian their hand for inspection. The other child leaned over to watch the application of the salve and the additions of a long scrap of cloth tied neatly, dark faces glowing warmly in the firelight, framed by the hoods they wore, never removed, so that he didn't know their hair color or if they had hair at all, eyes shining and unnaturally bright.
"There, that should help."
For two more days they journeyed through nearby villages and the Mandalorian delivered the package that had brought him to the planet in the first place and collected his payment. They stopped at every bazaar and auction, every worship gathering and every herder whose paths they crossed out on the plains, the children singing now and then, sometimes arguing. He watched especially for others in the same pale hoods, assuming they were religious in nature, and that perhaps someone from the same sect would know the children, but there were few, and they all had fear in their eyes and were reluctant to stop and speak to him.
On the last day the sky grew dark overhead, clouds crowded out the sun and it began to rain. They took shelter with a dozen other market patrons under an awning, as the vendor assured him the storm would not last; they never did. The sky grew so dark that the Mandalorian wondered if they shouldn't have hurried to the Crest instead, but at his feet the children seemed unconcerned, pushing stones and carved animals through the dirt in what seemed to be a game he didn't know the rules for, or if in fact there were any rules at all.
"Felis! Elis!" someone shouted over the clamour of the hail that had begun to fall and a robed and hooded figure approached the group huddled under the awning. The Mandalorian caught the man by the throat when he moved toward the children, but then a flash of lightning lit the clouds and the man's face so that all gathered could see him more clearly. The children began to shout.
"Oba! Oba!" they said, and abandoned their game to wrap arms around each of the elderly man's legs. The Mandalorian didn't know the word but he knew the inflection; he could guess what it meant, and he released the man hurriedly.
"I'm sorry", he said, but the man only shouted, clearly cursing him, anger more than fear in his face, until he bent to speak to the children, pulling them close to him as if to protect them from the Mandalorian.
There was a protracted and complicated series of gestures between the three of them, and rushed words from the children, including the one in blue making a show of their bandaged finger, until at last the Oba stood and, in clear terms if not clear words, thanked the Mandalorian. He didn't know if the reservation on the man's face was still anger at being assaulted, or grief for the parents of his grandchildren, but the Oba clasped the Mandalorian's hand, bowed several times, and offered him many things from his pack. The Mandalorian declined all but some dried meat.
When the sky began to clear a sudden and brassy sunlight made golden the rooftops, the awnings, the upturned faces, and the Mandalorian knelt before the twins to clasp each of their small hands in the same way that the Oba had done to him. They watched him with their bright eyes, their bright smiles which he had rarely seen, and they spoke to him softly. He stood and nodded at their Oba then walked out into the cobbled streets, now cluttered with ice and items that had been dropped in the rush to shelter, small voices shouting after him. Saying goodbye, he thought, but he didn't know for sure. Perhaps that was not their custom.
THE ONE WHO LEFT
The heat and security of the Armorer's forge had long been a comfort to the Mandalorian, a place of many memories, his and others, tales told to him over weapons training, at hearthfires. A place of creation, unchanged itself for the entirety of the Mandalorian's experience of it, and she, too, unchanged. It was long since the Armorer towered over him, and yet she seemed no smaller now than she had then. No less a part of the forge as it of she. It was long since he had been loath to speak to her for fear of what she might say in return.
"There was a foundling," he said after he had handed over his purse and she had taken it to inspect the contents.
"Was?" she said, without looking up.
"She's gone."
She regarded him, visor reflecting blue flame. "Killed?"
"No... I don't know. She ran away."
"Here, on Nevarro?"
"No."
"Where did they come from?
"I found her bleeding in a swamp on Felucia, next to a downed ship. Everyone else was dead. She wouldn't tell me who they were to her. At first she was meek, frightened. Later... it was all I could do not to freeze her in carbonite. I lost her on Dantooine."
"Lost?"
The Mandalorian sighed. "She stole a speeder from falumpaset herder. By the time I recovered the speeder, the kid was long gone."
The Armorer shook her head, he thought, in amusement. "It was not so long ago that I knew a child with such spirit."
The Mandalorian scoffed. "Spirit? She was a--"
"Fear and uncertainty," she said, cutting him off, "can lead a child of any age to desperate acts."
"Yes," the Mandalorian agreed.
"You were anxious to tell me this, why?"
"I should have kept a better eye on her. She was so young, however skilled on a speeder."
"It is not for you to choose for her. It sounds like she made a choice to find her own clan."
He did not reply, feeling chastised as she stepped away, but she only set his purse aside.
"I am casting new pots for the kitchen," she said, regarding him once again, standing near the furnace, looking even more the same as she ever had in its blue light. "It is a heavy job. Will you help me pour?"
"Of course," he said.
THE ONE HE WAS GIVEN
“Are you sure that he’s dead?” the widow said. The Mandalorian knew that she was a widow. He had just made her one.
“He’s not getting up again,” he said.
She stood in a heavy skin coat that hung almost to her feet, black but for the still-melting snow and the grey fur lining the cuffs, the hem. Her cheeks were red, having just come in from the storm to find the Mandalorian in her home, her husband dead and cooling.
She made a sound and the something she carried in a basket made a sound also. "Hardly bothered getting up when he was alive, don’t see why death should change that.”
“If you’re thinking of seeking vengeance," he said, "I wouldn’t”’
“Vengeance?" she asked. "Why would I want that?" She had stood perfectly still since walking into the room, now she shrugged, shook her head, the light from the fire catching a gleam in her eyes. "I’m free now" she said, but her voice held no joy and no joy showed on her face. "I didn’t put a bounty on him but I would have-- No, even that would have been too kind." She looked at the heap that was her husband's body. The Mandalorian thought she would spit.
Instead she moved toward him, lifted the basket she carried. Inside it, something moved.
"You have saved me from bondage," the Widow said, "this was my chain. It is now yours.”
She pushed the basket into his chest, heedless of the blaster he still held. Inside the basket a child slept.
“What? No, I can’t take this?”
The woman shrugged, then laid her burden at his feet and turned away, toward a shelf where she gathered a few things from the flickering shadows thrown by the hearthfire.
“It’s what you do, isn’t it?" she said as she worked. Taking all that she could stuff into a satchel. Some of what he saw disappear into the bag was food, some had no use he could name. "You take orphans and raise them to hide their faces, to hunt bounties… so I’ve heard.”
The Mandalorian looked down into the basket, the baby's face, moon-round and white as the storm that lashed at the windows. It blinked up at him.
“It’s not an orphan," he said, "it’s yours—“
“I have no use for him," she said, her back still turned. "He was forced upon me same as that one." She pointed sharply at her dead husband and went still, holding herself rigid, as if expecting the body to rise after all. When it did not she went back to packing, this time in another cupboard across the room. "I would have taken my own life in the morning had you not come and given me another option. I cannot feed him without a husband to work the mines. I will not work below the earth, buried for the rest of my life, choking on salt and never seeing daylight. I have been buried long enough."
At last she turned. She looked down at the child. Something passed over her face that was more than firelight but it was gone by the time she addressed the Mandalorian for the last time.
"I am leaving him here," she said. "You may do the same,” and left the way that she had come, suddenly and with a blast of icy wind.
The infant began to cry.
On the Razor Crest, as the engines warmed, melting the ice from the wings, the Mandalorian shook snow from his cape and wedged the basket he had carried through the storm between the jump seat and the bulkead, then took the Crest up the gravity well, the child's cries loud in the small cockpit.
When he could do so, the Mandalorian switched to auto, then stood and lifted the bundled infant from its basket, held it up to regard its wrinkled, angry face. Its blanket was damp from melted snow, so he laid the bundle on the deck and unwrapped it, setting the child aside. On the corner of the blanket, embroidered roughly in script and surrounded by golden stars was the name “Josen.” The Mandalorian looked down at the crying baby, its legs kicking in a crisp, white jumper. Wailing, red-faced, it rocked on its back, turned to its belly and pressed its face wetly against the steel decking, its cries muffled.
“Come here,” he said, and bent to lift the baby to his arms. It was not quieted and it shivered against him. He moved out of the cockpit and sat in his bunk with it cradled in the crook of his arm and tried the bottles he had hastily packed, but it would not eat, it would only cry and shake. He removed a glove and touched its hand, icy and blue in his own. He encircled its small fist with his to warm it, pressed his palm against its small cheeks, wrapped the child in his own blankets. Still it cried its broken cry and shook.
He stood, looking down at that small creature in his bunk, hands hung helpless at his sides.
The Mandalorian cursed, then began to remove his armor until he was only in his soft underclothes and his still-cold helmet and he sat crosslegged on the bunk holding the baby whose cries were growing softer with fatigue or cold or he didn’t know what. It did not open its eyes to look at him.
He opened his tunic and pressed it to his bare chest, its face cold and wet. He made a shushing sound and began to rock. After a while the child warmed and stopped crying. He wrapped a blanket around the both of them together and the child made small noises and lifted its head from time to time, eyes open, shining wetly, grey-blue and alert.
“Hello,” The Mandalorian said, but the baby only stared, and after a while it tired and lay its head against him again, breathing softly.
Later still, they both slept.
“Will you be as his father?” the Armorer asked. She held the baby aloft, its plump cheeks lit blue by the flame of the furnace. It smiled wetly down at her and gurgled.
“No,” The Mandalorian said after a while.
“He will have a place,” she said. “It is rare that we see one so young. You have done well with him. You may be more suited to the task than you think.”
“I ran like hell to get here. I don’t think I could have kept him alive much longer.”
“There is evidence otherwise,” she said, and tickled the child’s rounded belly. “And they are surprisingly strong, even so small. Still, if you are certain, he will be welcomed by others. Your vow to him has been fulfilled.”
“May I…” he said, then shifted where he stood. His gloved hands flexed then relaxed, as if he might reach out but did not.
“Yes?” the Armorer said.
“Here, this was his.” He pulled the blanket from his satchel. “In case he forgoes the creed. He should have something to remind him of his people.”
“Were they worth remembering?”
“That’s not for me to judge.”
“And yet you brought him here, rather than try to find more of them.”
“He was unwanted.”
“He is wanted now.”
"This is the way," the Mandalorian said.
THE ONE HE KEPT
At the first light of dawn the Mandalorian, Din Djarin, and the child, Grogu, walked out into the pinkening sand, the wind going out before them to draw ghost figures in the air, faces he thought he might recognize even as they broke against his cuirass, but it was only the wind and the sand and the rose-yellow light playing tricks.The child cooed and the Mandalorian adjusted the sling that held the child so that he could hold him closer.
"I know, kid. But they'll be here when we come back. Even your big friend. Boba won't let anything happen to him."
In the N-1 they left the system as fast as the sublight engines would allow, not because they had to, but because they could.
Later, Din put the N-1 down on a swath of yellow grassland, not far from a copse of trees and what looked from overhead to be a patch of wetland. He saw no civilization or even sentient life save for a distant group of ragged iriazes to the north near the mountains, grazing amongst the chaparral at the edge of the foothills.
"Not as much leg room as the Crest, huh, kid?" he said, and helped the child down from the astromech pod. It was late afternoon and they had stopped to stretch and relieve themselves and have their supper, but the Mandalorian held the child a little longer.
"You see this?" he asked, and leaned over the cockpit, pointing to something near the controls. "That's someone's name, scratched it right into the chromium. Probably the original pilot…before they died in the war." When the child made a sound he amended with, "...If they died. Maybe they didn't…" and the child moved his small fingers along the scrawlings in the metal. "They might even be your age by now."
Among the trees, in the marshy land, they hunted together for frogs, Din's boots sucking in the mud, Grogu jumping wetly from one promising patch of fern to another.
"Learned a lot of tricks from that Jedi of yours, didn't you? Gotta have a talk with him about sending you off on your own when we see him."
Grogu landed with a heavy splat, less controlled than before, as if the mention of the Jedi caught him off guard. He regarded the Mandalorian with a tilt of his head.
"Don't worry, you're staying with me," Din said, "we're staying together. I promise this time. But you can't tell me what happened, why he sent you back to me, so I guess I'll have to find out myself."
The child looked as if he frowned, but it was the same expression he always wore.
"We're not in a hurry, though," Din said. "Look… there's one."
A frog splashed down in a pool of brown water near Grogu and the child leapt on it, too slowly, so that the frog jumped away toward Din. Grogu hopped after it. Din tried to step back but his boots were stuck tight, and he landed hard in the mud, the frog and the baby mid-leap over him, until Grogu caught the frog in his mouth, and Din caught Grogu who spit out the frog and the frog hopped away.
The Mandalorian laughed, the child whined, and Din held him close.
At dusk they rinsed their clothes in the clear spring that fed the wetland and built a fire near the ship and hung their clothes on the wings of the N1 to dry. The flames reflected in the mirrored chromium and the shining beskar laid out for cleaning might have seemed to any onlookers as if there was a party of travelers camped together, but there were only the two of them and there were no onlookers.
Din, in the driest pieces of his underclothes, sat in the lee of the ship with the child nearby, and removed his helmet. He could not see out beyond the edge of the light cast by the fire but he felt no danger, and his blaster was at hand, and he wanted to see the child with his own eyes, for the child to see him. Grogu gazed up at him curiously, his little green body furred like the top of his head, his belly round as any other baby's under the shimmering mail shirt.
"You wanna help me out, kid?" Din asked, and placed the helmet between them. He pulled his cape down from the wing and began to clean away the mud, to make the beskar shine. The child gulped down the last of his frog and took up an edge of the cloth and began to help.
BONUS: THE ONE WHO WAS A JEDI
“Have you found others, or was he the first?”
The Jedi, Luke, lay in the tall grass, leaning up on one elbow next to where Din sat. Out ahead of them the grass swayed, then rustled, disturbed by more than the wind. Two green ears and the top of a fuzzy head could be seen, behind it, a white and blue droid whirred and beeped.
“I’ve found a few.”
“But none like him?”
“There are none like him.”
Luke smiled. Din didn’t have to look at him to know it, and he didn't feel it through whatever Luke calls the Force, he just knew what to expect from the Jedi by now.
“Your bias aside, I mean none that you took as your own?”
“No. I wouldn’t even have kept him, only—“
When the silence stretched Luke said, "Perhaps you sense more of the Force than you think."
A gust of cool wind moved along the grass like a scythe. Din felt it on his neck, was sorry not to feel it on his face. He did not tell the Jedi that he had tried to give the child away more than once. He wasn't sure that Luke didn't already know that. He did not say that he didn't think it was the Force keeping him with the child.
"It was chance," Din said instead. "Circumstances. He was in danger; I'd made a vow."
Luke made a sound, not a laugh, “I doubt it's that simple. I think the Force would have brought you together in the end. It’s hard to imagine the two of you without each other.”
“I was a foundling,” Din said suddenly, uncertain why.
“I was too," Luke said, looking up at him. "In a way. Perhaps we were all meant to find one another."
Din did not reply. After a long time in which the only sound was that of the wind through the trees and the distant clatter of droids, Luke lay back in the grass, crossing his arms beneath his head and, Din assumed, watched the sky.
Soon the child toddled out of the tall grass and the droid followed, beeping and whistling. When Grogu climbed up into Din's lap tiredly the droid stopped short in front of the Mandalorian, then made a low whistle before redirecting. Luke laughed softly.
Out past the swaying green fields the ant droids still toiled in their spidery patterns, stacking higher the stones that would one day, Luke had said, become a school. One day again it might be Grogu's school, but for now he was only there as a guest, and his father also.
In Din's lap, Grogu turned over, insinuating himself between the spaces where the armor didn't meet, where the Mandalorian was softest, and fell asleep.