Chapter Text
It’s a very average day when Captain Teva finally comes to Nevarro.
Din and Grogu had been into town that morning for supplies. They’d mostly bought food, but had to pick up some spare parts to fix the house’s broken generator - Din had found Grogu sitting beside it looking studiously innocent the evening before and only realised they had no power when he went to cook third meal.
On their way back to the speeder, they’d been ambushed by some of the local children, who carried Grogu off to the playground. Din had followed to keep an eye on him and managed to avoid making awkward small talk with the other parents for the most part, thankfully having been rescued by Greef just as Harro looked like she was finding the courage to approach him. One of these days he knew he’d cave to the other parents’ attempts to include him in the various bake sales, sports clubs, plays, concerts and whatever else they were constantly organising for the children, but he’d like to pretend for as long as possible that it wasn’t going to happen. It turned out Greef was also trying to involve him in a community activity - some kind of cultural festival the city was trying to put on - but it wasn’t quite as uncomfortable coming from him.
They’d returned home about two hours before nightfall, and Din had fixed the generator while Grogu chased frogs. He’d finally managed to teach Grogu not to eat the frogs once he caught them - most of the time, anyway - though he wouldn’t have minded if the kid caught his own dinner that night. After years of eating whatever was cheap and convenient, which usually meant dehydrated rations, having to prepare proper meals every day was exhausting.
He’s not prepared for the rush of excitement that comes with seeing a distant X-Wing sweeping across the black volcanic hills in the waning light, ripples of red and orange flashing off its metal surface. It settles not far from their home, its engines kicking up a cloud of dust that temporarily obscures its pilot, though it can only be Teva. No one else with an X-Wing knows where he lives.
The Captain climbs out of the ship and hits the ground with a hefty thump.
“Nice place!” he calls, looking around as he approaches them.
“Ehh,” Grogu greets him, waving with a frog in his claws.
He floats the frog towards Teva, who looks startled for a moment before declining the offering with a polite “no, thank you.” The frog drops to the ground and hops hurriedly away.
Teva stops when he’s about an equal distance between Din, who is sitting by the front door, and Grogu, who is a few paces from the pond. He’s still a fair way back from the house and looks like he’s not sure if he’s trespassing.
Din is itching to know what the Captain has for them, but he doesn’t want to seem too eager. He’s trying very hard to sound casual when he says “you have a job for us?” and he thinks it sounds suitably mild. Grogu’s ears are twitching and he’s looking at Din with wide, unblinking eyes, so he’s clearly picked up on his father’s excitement.
“Sure do,” Teva confirms, and Din gestures towards the house in invitation before going inside.
****
The house is still fairly sparse. He’s thought about decorating it, since he’s pretty sure you’re supposed to decorate your home, but doesn’t have much of an inclination to. They never have guests and he doesn’t really care what it looks like. It’s open plan - the main room is a kitchen, dining area, and sitting area all in one, with a corridor branching off to the bedrooms and ‘fresher. There’s a table with some chairs around it near the cooking space and a sofa that no one ever sits on on the other side of the room. It’s too soft. Neither he nor Grogu is accustomed to soft furnishings, so it just feels kind of wrong. Still, it was there when they moved in and he didn’t see any particular reason to remove it.
There are weapons hanging on the walls instead of holos or whatever other people hang on those hooks that were already sunk into the walls. He sees Teva eyeing the weapons as he comes in, and he’s surprised by the slight self-consciousness he feels. He hasn’t got around to building a proper armoury for them, so this is the best he can do. Logically he knows Teva doesn’t care that his weapons aren’t very respectfully stored, but he can’t help it. At least they’re not on the floor.
There’s an awkward moment where they stand around in the middle of the room and Din feels like he’s supposed to offer Teva a drink or something, but this isn’t a social call. He’s just never met with a client in his own house before.
He’s never had his own house before.
Thankfully, Teva breaks the silence. “Rolvo Yaffa,” he says, holding up a datapad displaying a hologram of a very unremarkable Mirialan male, “was a very active member of the rebellion. He’s not famous, hasn’t been given any medals, but he did good work. He’s a good man.”
He places the datapad down on the table so that Yaffa’s expressionless face becomes an apathetic observer of their conversation. Grogu hops up onto the table to stare curiously at the flickering blue holo.
“He went missing about three standard months ago,” Teva continues. “Some New Republic agents managed to track him to an Imperial remnant base on a planet called Borous, where they think he’s been held for all that time. The agents who found him put together an extraction plan, but it wasn’t approved. Too risky, apparently. The higher-ups decided the chance of success was too low to justify the cost of the mission.”
“And that’s where we come in,” Din says, not bothering to hide the edge in his tone. Clearly Teva is as unimpressed as he is with the decision to scrap Yaffa’s extraction, so there’s no need to be polite about it. He’d never even heard of the former rebel before a few minutes ago, but the idea of the New Republic leaving one of their own behind like that puts a sour taste in his mouth. “You want us to carry out the extraction.”
“Exactly,” Teva nods. “All the plans are on that datapad, so you can keep hold of that. They’re moving him in three standard days. He’ll be loaded onto a shuttle and taken to a ship in orbit. The imps have been changing up their codes, so we’ve only been able to decode half the intel, but the 20 minutes or so he’s in that shuttle are the most vulnerable his guard will be, so it’s likely the only opportunity we’ll get to swoop in and snatch him back. Most Imperial prisoners don’t last long after they’re transferred.”
Din looks at the hologram of Yaffa, considering Teva’s words. It sounds do-able, but he’ll need to go through the files on that datapad to know if taking this job is going to be a big mistake. He wonders if Teva will let him read everything before accepting the assignment. That was never allowed in the guild - you’d only get a name and a face until you took the puck, so you couldn’t pull out of the contract if it turned out to be more difficult than advertised.
“Do you know him?” he asked, turning back to Teva.
The Captain shrugs. “I met him a few times. He’s not a friend of mine, but he deserves better.”
Teva’s tone hardens on the word ‘better’.
Din looks at Grogu, who is still gazing at Yaffa. “What do you think?”
Grogu coos.
“Yeah, we’ll do it.”
****
They have to rent a ship. Obviously the N1 isn’t suited to this kind of job, and he hasn’t got around to buying anything bigger yet. Greef offers to let him borrow any of Nevarro’s ships for free, but none of them are really appropriate and he doesn’t want to draw that kind of heat back to his friend’s city if the imps track the ship.
To be safe, they fly to a scrap yard he knows a few sectors over to browse what’s available. He gives the ships for sale a quick once over, still quietly hoping he’ll come across another Razor Crest, but there’s nothing decent in his price range. It’s not surprising, but it’s still disappointing. In the end, they rent a run-down but functional gunship just large enough for 3 passengers plus supplies, and just small enough to easily outmanoeuvre an Imperial shuttle. They pay a little too much, and he knows he should be teaching Grogu to haggle, but it never really feels right arguing over credits when he’s in a full suit of beskar and the merchant is basically wearing rags. Business is tough for scrappers these days. The Empire didn’t care to do its own recycling, so there was always plenty of junk free for the taking, but the New Republic’s a different story.
Their next stop is a nearby market port, where they load up enough food and water to last around two weeks, though the job should only take a few days, and plenty of ammunition and medical supplies. He takes care to explain to Grogu the importance of packing more than you think you need - he’s been in enough tight spots over the years to know that’s not a lesson he wants the kid to learn from experience.
Once they’re all packed up, he plots their route in the ship’s navigation system (with some input from Grogu, who’s getting pretty good at reading maps now) and they’re on their way to Borous.
They have no idea how grateful they’ll be for their extra rations in just a few days.
****
Borous is a profoundly uninteresting planet. It’s brown, green and blue, no stand-out features, and they don’t see anyone arrive or leave in an entire day. There doesn’t even seem to be any movement on the surface - no visible cities or towns, no evidence of sentient life at all. It’s the perfect place to hide an imperial base.
They’re orbiting a small moon, watching and waiting for the shuttle to appear. They’d had a quick snack of soup not long ago while staring out of the ship’s viewport at complete stillness, and he can see Grogu starting to doze off in his pod. The kid had been trying really hard today, fighting his boredom for hours without complaint, so Din is happy to let him snooze until something interesting happens. The shuttle is due to leave—
“There it is,” Din says, pointing through the transparisteel window of their borrowed ship. A tiny speck is just visible leaving the atmosphere of the planet below them. “You see that?”
Grogu blinks awake, rubbing a tiny fist against one of his eyes. When he looks up, he gives an enthusiastic coo and moves the pod closer to the control panel to tap the minuscule blip on the radar that corresponds to the shuttle.
“That’s right. It’s small, but it still shows up on the sensors if you know what you’re looking for.” He flicks a few switches on the ship’s controls, powering the engines back up. “We don’t have a lot of time before it jumps into hyperspace, but we don’t need long. We’ve got to be out of here before any reinforcements have a chance to launch.”
As soon as their engines are warmed up enough, he points the ship in the direction of the shuttle and, after a quick glance at Grogu to make sure he’s strapped in, they move. Immediately the distant speck of the Imperial shuttle starts to take shape as they speed towards it, the green bulk of the planet looming closer and closer. He activates the ship’s lasers, targeting the main drive unit on the back of the shuttle.
“We’ve got to take out their engines first if we want any chance of boarding,” he explains to Grogu, who had thrown his little arms up in delight when the ship accelerated. “They’ve got guns, too. Two on the front, one on each wing, and one at the back. We can’t avoid the back one, but we can take it out if we’re fast.”
They’ve got to get close - closer than he’d usually like to be - to get through the shuttle’s deflector shields. He lines up the ship directly behind the shuttle, waits until he can read the serial number painted on its hull, and fires two shots in quick succession. The first hits the drive unit, immobilising the shuttle, but unfortunately whoever is operating the shuttle’s canons is clearly fast on the trigger, and Din has to swerve to avoid return fire just as their second shot fires. The second shot clips the hull instead of taking out the cannon, and sends the shuttle spinning wildly.
“Dank farrik!”
With no engines to right itself and no friction or air resistance in the vacuum of space, the shuttle just keeps spinning. On one hand, it’s got to be making it tricky for the crew to aim at his ship, but equally it’s going to make their job a lot more difficult too. Well, no point crying about it.
It’s not an easy manoeuvre at all, but Din manages to line them up with the top of the shuttle and match its spin, so the two ships are aligned. Under normal circumstances he would probably have just shot the shuttle again from the opposite angle to see if he could reduce the spin, but he couldn’t risk causing too much damage to it with Yaffa inside, so he doesn’t have a lot of options.
There’s no cannon on the top of the shuttle since in theory, no enemy should be allowed to get that close, so he’s able to concentrate on what he’s doing without worrying too much about them getting shot. It’s not easy maintaining their trajectory while activating the boarding clamps, but as soon as they’re clamped on he can let go of the controls and the two ships continue to spin as one. He could stop the spinning now, but decides to leave it. If any reinforcements do launch, it will be hard for them aim at his ship without potentially blowing up the shuttle, and he’s not bothered by the movement. It doesn’t feel like they’re spinning - that’s one of the benefits of artificial gravity - but the constant movement outside the viewport may disorient any less experienced troopers in the shuttle below them. Might as well use the advantage, even if it’s a small one.
He opens the hatch in the floor of the ship and starts cutting an entrance into the imperial shuttle. As the equipment does its job, he turns to Grogu.
“When I go in to extract Yaffa, you stay here, ok? It should only be a few troopers, but I want you to stay where it’s safe,” he says.
Grogu looks a bit huffy, but he nods.
“Good.”
As soon as the hatch chimes to indicate it’s ready, he kicks down hard, forcing the circle he’d cut through the hull to crash down into the shuttle below. There is a muffled shout as it hits a trooper who was apparently stupid enough to stand directly underneath the ring being cut through the top of their ship. Din drops through a second later.
It’s clear very quickly that the Imps weren’t expecting any trouble with this transfer. He shoots two of them the instant his feet hit the floor, before they seem to have even processed that they’ve been boarded. A third, standing behind him, shoots him right in the middle of his back plate - probably the least effective place he could have aimed - and looks startled even through his white helmet when the shot bounces harmlessly off the beskar. Instead of changing his tactics, the trooper continues to shoot at his armour even as he turns around, aims at him, and fires. Stormtrooper armour is essentially useless, and the trooper drops.
For a moment he actually feels a bit bad - these must be brand new recruits to be this ineffective, and while he has no love for the imps or the people who join them, it doesn’t feel great killing soldiers who are barely more than kids. Then the one who got smacked in the head by the falling piece of hull shoves a live shock baton into the back of his leg and all his reservations disappear.
Din’s leg buckles involuntarily and he drops to one knee. He reaches back and seizes the trooper’s wrist, easily twisting the baton out of his hands and snapping his arm. As the trooper screams, he yanks him forward and shoots him in the neck. Standing back up feels weird, but he ignores the fuzzy feeling in his leg and picks up the shock baton. Might be useful.
There’s no sign of Yaffa, and he doubts the four dead troopers lying motionless on the floor are the only ones here. He heads to the front of the ship and shoots the control panel next to the door to the cockpit. It doesn’t open, but the mangled panel hangs off the wall - he rips it off and reaches for the wiring behind it. He’s been on enough of these shuttles to know which wires to tear out to force an emergency door release.
The door swooshes open, and yeah, Yaffa’s in the cockpit, cuffed but otherwise unrestrained. So are two more troopers and an officer, framed by the dizzying spin of space beyond the viewport. Din doesn’t wait for them to recover from their shock at the sight of him. He shoots one trooper, and when he swings his blaster towards the other, things get weird.
Yaffa hurls himself out of his seat to shield the trooper, a desperate and hysterical “NO!” tearing out of his throat.
Din hesitates, not wanting to shoot Yaffa by mistake, and the officer, evidently the smartest imp on the shuttle, immediately pulls her own blaster and aims it not at Din, but at the prisoner.
“Put down your weapons,” the officer says, her voice like ice.
Din doesn’t move. The sudden stillness in the cockpit is at odds with the scenery whipping past outside. Space, moon, planet, space, moon, planet, space, moon, planet.
“This prisoner is scheduled for execution,” she continues. “It doesn’t matter to me if he stays alive, but I think it matters to you.”
Din glances between the officer, Yaffa, and the trooper. Yaffa has stiffened up, his eyes darting between Din and the officer with equal fear.
“All right,” Din says, bending slowly to place his blaster and the shock baton on the floor. It’s not much of a concession given the number of other weapons he has on his person, but the officer doesn’t need to know that.
She doesn’t lower her blaster - in fact, she pushes it further into Yaffa’s side, making him wince. “Now. Let’s see if we can come to an agreement.”
Din tilts his head to express how thoroughly he doesn’t believe that’s what she wants. She seems to get the message because a nasty smile, somewhere between a smirk and a sneer, breaks across her face. “I know what you’re thinking, but the empire is always looking for new allies. Who hired you to retrieve him? His family? Or perhaps another party with a grudge against him?”
“I don’t negotiate with imps,” he says. The officer has clearly called for backup and is trying to buy time until they arrive. He needs to end this and get back to his ship.
“Come now, this could benefit all of us. Put us in touch with your client and perhaps we can organise a more civilised exchange.”
She’d hear it if he activated the whistling birds. Far too much time for her to shoot Yaffa. The flamethrower is too messy - can’t really aim with that.
“There may be more work for you in the long run too.”
He considers just rushing at her. Maybe her sense of self-preservation would make her shoot at him instead of the prisoner.
Before he has a chance to test that theory, a blaster flashes and the officer falls to the ground with a smoking hole in the side of her head. Din’s body is quicker than his mind, and he brings a vambrace up to block a blaster bolt before he’s even processed that the trooper has shot his superior and swung the blaster around to point at Din’s neck, one of the only fatally weak spots in his armour.
He doesn’t have time to pick his own blaster back off the floor, and Yaffa is still in the way, so he launches his whipcord and yanks the weapon out of the trooper’s hand. Then Yaffa - Yaffa, who he’s beginning to suspect lost his mind during his time with the imps - tackles him to the floor. He doesn’t want to hurt him, but the man is really making his own rescue very difficult, so Din grabs the shock baton off the floor and buries it in Yaffa’s side, temporarily incapacitating him.
He shoves Yaffa off him onto the floor just as the trooper comes at him with a knife. He rolls away as best he can in the tight space and grasps the trooper’s ankle, twisting as hard as he can. He hears a snap and a wail of agony, and pushes to his feet. He steps out of grabbing range of the trooper just as Yaffa, who has recovered much more quickly than he would have expected, comes at him again.
That’s enough. Din sidesteps Yaffa, grabs him, and roughly pins him to the console.
“Stop!” he yells, and it crackles menacingly through his vocoder. “I’m trying to save you!”
“What?” Yaffa rasps, and again, for the second time that day, Din feels electricity burning through his nerves as the trooper shoves the shock baton into his side.
It’s an effort, what with the electricity seizing up his muscles, but Din throws Yaffa back into the trooper, shoving them both away from him.
“Stop!” he implores again, leaning heavily against the console as he fights the shaking and twitching caused by the baton. He still doesn’t understand what’s going on with that trooper, but it’s obvious he’s trying to protect Yaffa. If they have the same goal, he can work with that.
Yaffa and the trooper have landed in a heap on the floor. Yaffa rolls aside, propping himself up on an elbow and holding an arm out to stop the trooper from getting up again. “You’re not a bounty hunter?” Yaffa says, incredulous.
“I am. I was hired by the New Republic to extract you,” he explains. He glances at the radar and sees a clump of flashing dots heading towards them. “Dank Farrik, the reinforcements are almost here. We have to go. Now.”
He pushes off the console, only wobbling slightly, and reaches down to pull Yaffa up by the shoulder.
“I’m not leaving without him,” Yaffa says, clinging to the trooper’s arm.
Din sighs heavily, assessing the state of the trooper. Cracked armour, broken leg, breathing irregular. He’s in pain. He could probably still do a fair bit of damage, but they don’t have time to argue about it.
“Fine.”
He walks back into the main body of the shuttle and starts piling crates up to make it easier to get the injured trooper into the ship. Yaffa follows, helping the trooper walk with an arm over his shoulders.
“Do you have medical supplies?” Yaffa asks, making no move to get into the ship.
“Yes. Get in.”
Yaffa doesn’t move.
“Get in. We don’t have time for this.”
Yaffa shakes his head. “You go up. I’ll pass him to you, then I’ll come up.”
It doesn’t seem as though Yaffa has really comprehended the situation they’re in. “Fine. Just hurry up.”
He pulls himself up into the ship and is greeted by a worried coo from Grogu. He doesn’t have time to reassure the kid that he’s ok just yet, so he turns back, leaning out of the hatch to reach down for the trooper, who Yaffa has pulled up onto one of the crates. The man’s not as heavy as he looks, and it’s easy to heft him up into the ship. He goes back for Yaffa, and seals the hatch the second they’re all in.
He wastes no time. He’s in the pilot’s seat, unclamped from the shuttle, and plotting a course before Yaffa and the trooper have realised the three of them are not alone on the ship.
“Oh hey, little guy,” he hears Yaffa say. “What are you doing here?”
The ship lurches. Shots are already being fired.
He immediately adjusts their course to avoid the attack, increasing their speed to match. They need to get out of here now. The number of red dots on his radar keeps increasing, and they’re swarming like angry wasps. Only TIE fighters move like that. That’s the last thing they need.
Suddenly Yaffa is next to him, wide eyes darting between the radar and the viewport. He turns to Din with his lips pressed tightly together. “What’s your plan?”
“To leave.”
“That’s not a plan!”
Din swerves to dodge another few shots, firing back as best he can.
“If you want to help, you can operate the cannons while I fly,” he says. It’s not really a suggestion, and he’s glad Yaffa doesn’t try to argue with him. The Mirialan immediately sits down in the co-pilot’s chair and starts taking aim.
He hears an uneasy whine from beside him, and glances down at Grogu, whose pod has just pulled up next to his seat. “Hey kid, keep an eye on the stormtrooper back there. Make sure he doesn’t try anything.”
They’re hit again, and Din can see on the console that their shields aren’t doing so well. They should be holding up better than that. Piece of junk ship.
He swerves again, trying to make the pattern less predictable. They just need to reach the hyperspace lane and they’re golden. It’s not so far now. Yaffa is doing pretty well with the canons - he’s taken out a good four TIEs now and damaged three more. It’s going ok. It’s going-
They’re hit again and the ship shakes hard. A glance at the console confirms their shields are now useless. They can’t afford another. This job was supposed to be easy. Why did Yaffa have to fight him?
They’re seconds away from hyperspace. The hyperdrive is ready. The second they reach the lane, they’re free. Three more seconds. Two more seconds. One more se-
They jump to hyperspace at the exact moment a laser rams into the back of the ship. For one awful breath he thinks they’re done for. He’s failed. Completely. Killed himself and his son on a job that should have been a walk in the park. Then he sees the blue light of hyperspace, feels himself take another breath, and hears Grogu babbling behind him and he falls against the back of his seat in relief.
He only has a few seconds before Yaffa is shaking his shoulder.
“Medical supplies,” the other man demands.
Din takes a deep breath. He stands, making his way to where the supplies are in the back. He passes the trooper still lying in the exact same spot on the floor with Grogu watching him like a loth-cat watches its prey. Despite the situation, he smiles a little behind his helmet - the kid takes his assignments very seriously. Yaffa is right behind him when he turns around with a med pack in his hands, and snatches it with a glare. He stalks back to the trooper, sitting beside him and placing a gentle hand on the man’s shoulder.
Din watches as Yaffa murmurs something to the trooper and then rests his forehead delicately against the man’s helmet. The gesture hits him like a rampaging blurg. He freezes, feeling like all the air is gone from the room.
Yaffa carefully removes the cracked white armour from the trooper’s broken leg and cuts through the fabric underneath with the medical scissors. The leg is a mess. There’s no bones breaking the skin, but there’s a lot of internal bleeding if the amount of purple bruising is anything to go by. Yaffa looks like he knows what he’s doing, so Din should probably leave him to it. Instead, he slowly approaches, trying to look as non-threatening as possible - not an easy feat in Mandalorian armour.
“I’m sorry,” he says, almost placing a hand on Yaffa’s shoulder but thinking better of it. “I didn’t know.”
Yaffa ignores him for a few moments, busying himself preparing his lover’s leg for re-setting. “I’m sorry too,” he says eventually.
Din wonders what exactly Yaffa is sorry for - is he sorry for attacking Din or sorry that Din attacked the trooper? The man tried to shoot him in the neck and then came at him with a knife. What was he supposed to do?
Well, it’s over now, and he’s tired.
“Come on, kid,” he says to Grogu, gesturing for his son to follow him back to the cockpit. Before he closes the door, he glances back out at Yaffa. “You need anything, we’ll be in here.”
Yaffa doesn’t respond, and Din closes the door. A moment later he hears the trooper cry out as his leg is set back in place. Shouldn’t have tried to stab him then.