Chapter Text
0 ABY
Din isn’t supposed to be here.
He’s on some dirty backwater planet for dirtier business – business that starts and ends with the head of a Gungan spice dealer stuffed unceremoniously into the camtono cinched to his belt.
All that's left now is the rendezvous with the client.
His puck had flashed coordinates and a meeting in thirty minutes’ time, and Din shortly found himself in a shithole cantina with a shitty, noisy jizz band in the middle of nowhere. Wasted time is lost credits, so he’d asked the Keshiri barkeep frantically throwing together orders behind the counter what work he could get on-planet.
The Keshiri’s gaze drops to his armor, the hand curled casually around the handle of his blaster. “You wanna get worked?” The barkeep hollers back over the noise, which is not exactly what Din said, but –
Din shrugs and tips his head. Close enough.
“Suit yourself. Heh,” the Keshiri snorts, then glances at the scuffed ‘fresher door in the back. Din set off, ready to pick up a quick job while waiting on his current client to show. His patchwork beskar’gam and plastoid armor chafe against his happabore kute, sticky with heat and sweat and viscous Gungan blood.
One last job on this planet. Then he’s out of here, and never stepping foot on a desert planet again.
When Din enters the ‘fresher and sees shoes – a man’s, judging by the size – peeking out from under the far right stall, he stiffens but enters the stall next to it all the same. Some clients like doing business “anonymously” like this, as if most bounty hunters gave a flying Bantha poodoo who they work for. Din certainly doesn’t; he’s twenty-seven and trigger-happy with a life-debt to pay and a covert to feed.
As long as the credits come in on time, he doesn’t much care whose hands they went through on their way to his.
Shutting and locking the stall behind him, Din clears his throat and knocks a gloved knuckle against the shoddy divider, a ramshackle of plastoid and platemetal and tin roofing cut down to size. This is a poor planet, which means he can expect the usual: a handful of sweaty credits, a mumbled plea for a discount, why this guy’s ex-wife or ex-husband or ex-whatever deserved the business end of a blaster, and a lot of whining and boot-pissing when Din tells him a hit job costs more credits than he’d expect, and quadruple what he’s prepared to pay.
What he hadn’t expected was the sound of knees hitting the floor, the stiff creak of shifting plastoid as a panel slid over revealing a hole in the wall, nor the flash of pink mouth on the other side.
“Hey there,” a man’s voice murmurs, and Din can hear the strain of it – how its owner tries to pitch his voice lower, deeper, older. “What do you want?”
Din stills. Surely this isn’t what he thinks this is.
“Don’t want to talk? That’s fine, I know what I want. I want you,” the man on the other side interrupts his train of thought, the confidence in his voice stumbling before he can catch it, “To fuck my mouth.”
Oh. This is exactly what he thinks this is. That means Din really shouldn’t be here.
He should say no. He should turn around and walk away and forget this ever happened.
And yet –
Din tilts his head. The thermal scanner in his helmet clicks on with a gravelly crackle clicks on, and he examines every inch of the ‘fresher. Empty, save for the man on the other side of the divider.
This isn’t a set up. It’s a genuine offer. One he should refuse. Keyword: Should.
Din swallows and thinks about the long hours in space alone. Thinks about the last time someone came close to touching him – Xi’an, pressed up against him on the floor of a ship they’d stolen just for the thrill of it, legs locked around his clothed thigh as they rutted angrily against each other fully clothed after surviving something that should have killed them three times over. That was – what, a year ago? Two?
Since then it’s just been him and his hand and the loud schlick schlick schlick of hand over first, alone in his cockpit.
And mentally speaking, Din is fine being alone. As a gatherer, it’s his duty to provide for the covert, and while he’s had his escapades – running with Xi’an’s crew for a few years, dabbling with groups he shouldn’t have when he was younger and more reckless and angrier than he is now at twenty seven – he’s always known that at the end of the day, he will be alone, because it’s what the covert needs, what their safety from the Empire demands.
No, more than that: alone is all Din knows how to be.
But physically speaking, Din is young. He experiences… cravings, that he are harder to ignore than they should be. Cravings that are impractical and useless and troublesome. His mind is both attracted to and repulsed by the idea of being touched and held and loved, but his body aches for release.
He’s never been truly touched by anyone else, not counting Xi’an cupping his cock over his trousers and complaining about his “stupid little rules.” He’s dreamt of it, of course, tried to imagine it more than once alone on long trips through hyperspace – How would a mouth feel, on his cock? Would it be hot? Wet? Would they suck him off or cup his balls in one hand and fist his cock in the other, would their palms be rough or soft or or or or – but he’s never quite visualized any of it. Hasn’t had enough experience to form a full picture. But right now –
It’s been weeks since he’s even fucked his own fist, and right now, staring at the pink lips spread open on the other side of the partition, hearing the soft plap of drool hitting the ground, feeling the empty space in his chest slip away beneath a sudden surge of need that flowers in his belly and spreads creeping vines into his tenting pants, Din’s cautious nature is outweighed by the sudden, heavy throb in his full balls.
Din checks the time. Twenty minutes left.
He’s spent years giving selflessly to the covert. Hasn’t he done enough to buy back twenty shameful minutes for himself?
“Hello?” The man says, confused enough to drop the fake-deepness for a second.
In that hair-thin moment, Din makes a decision.
“Big guy? You still there? You– mmmmphhh! ” As the young man’s whimpers around the heavy cock, Din wordlessly feeds through the gap into his wet, hot, waiting mouth. It takes everything in himnot to cum right there, and he thinks maybe, just this once, he’s made the right choice.
The man sucks once, experimentally, and Din is so close it would be embarrassing if he didn’t feel so good, so hot, like the suns have gone supernova and burned him down to –
9 ABY
Nothing.
It’s the only word that fits.
There’s nothing waiting for him when he wakes up from what he calls The Good Dream again, bleary eyed and stiff from another night asleep in the cockpit of the rebuilt Razor Crest . There’s nothing outside the glass save for the standard blue-white-blur of deep hyperspace, and nothing going on inside the glass, either.
He’s already dressed, save for the helmet – it rests in his lap, a soothing weight against the half-swell in his trousers, the beskar buffed and the happabore kute under it oiled and stretched for maximum range of motion. His rifles have been loaded and reloaded, barrels oiled and ammunition carefully checked over. His bandolier is full. He’s eaten. He’s slept, albeit not well.
He’s taken care of everything but the half-chub filling out his trousers, always the last symptom to resolve after he dreams of that hazy long ago night on a random desert planet, but Din doesn’t care to do it now. He’s content to let it fade unattended to, because he has more important things to focus on.
Today, Din Djarin is going to war.
Urgent, Boba’s message had said, followed by a short explanation of what was happening, but truth be told Din hadn’t bothered to read it until he was already in hyperspace. He’s going to fight beside Boba because that is the Mandalorian Way, to fight alongside those you call ally or kin, but he’s also going because it will be something to do, because Din is tired of feeling nothing , which is all he’s felt since Grogu was taken.
Not taken – left , Din thinks grimly, eyes dropping to the throttle with its missing ball-bearing; the one Grogu used to love playing with. The one he never found even after the kid was gone, turning the throttle into just another thing in Din’s life Grogu had unraveled.
He’d been annoyed by it, in the beginning; was frustrated with all the trouble one tiny, weird looking baby managed to kick up wherever it toddled. Din was a killer for hire in full body armor, and even he hadn’t done this much running and gunning since he was in his twenties.
He’d gotten used to a certain solitary, minimalist life. Then the kid happened, and suddenly he wasn’t just a bounty hunter anymore. He was a nursemaid, and a guardian, and a protector all at once, which rolled up all together basically made him the kid’s fa—
But none of it matters now.
Din rests a gloved finger atop the throttle and runs it along the exposed metal threading. Grogu’s entire hand barely fit over the ball bearing, he remembers. The kid was… is, so small. Powerful in his own way, but also the most vulnerable creature he’s ever encountered. The dark thing in Din’s chest throbs.
He knows Grogu is okay. Grogu is in the hands of the heir to the Jedi – if Jedi have heirs? He isn’t sure – and is far safer with him somewhere green and quiet and far away from the tidal waves of bloodshed and violence and death that define Din’s life.
The tidal wave he’s heading toward right now.
Yet Din can’t help wishing he could check for himself. Make sure the kid is eating his vegetables, that he’s eating at least six eggs every day. Grogu prefers reptile and amphibian eggs, but he’ll accept poultry – does the Jedi know that? He should tell him – except there’s no comms to reach him. Maybe he can turn around and fly there quickly to –
No, he can’t.
He has to help Boba, because the Creed demands it.
He has to stay away from Grogu, because the Jedi, Ahsoka Tano, demanded that, too. Seeing you will make things more difficult for him .
And that… had upset him. Had made the dark thing sleeping behind his ribs, the thing that bristled around droids and the information trader who’d led him to Cobb Vanth strung up from a light pole to be torn apart by wild dogs rear its head, turn its eyes on her, and ask Din the secret question it always asks him, and that he will never say out loud. Had made him want to use his limited, violent repertoire to do–
Do nothing, feel nothing, be nothing , instead of feeling lost and abandon and torn asunder in a way he hasn’t since armored arms wrapped around him and carried him away from Aq Vetina for the very last time, a weeping boy watching his heart burn to ash before the blue sky swallowed him whole.
Din shuts his eyes against the image. Inhales shakily. Forces it out smooth. He is a Mandalorian first and foremost, and his body is a weapon in his control. Control the body, conquer the mind. When he opens his eyes, the image is gone and he can breathe again. He’s back in control.
Lights flicker across the dash. Space outside his viewport ripples and coils, flares white – and then the ship drops out of hyperspace over a grimy red dustball Din hadn’t set foot on in years until the child showed up in his life. Pulling his helmet back on, Din switches the controls over to manual, and brings the Razor Crest down into the atmosphere.
Watching Tatooine's red skin rise to meet him sends a strange jolt down his spine to his cock as fragments of the dream filter back to him: red mouth – spit-slick – pink tongue – laughter, boyish and sweet and out of place in a mouth that good at sucking cock, good enough for Din to want to try –
Din shakes his head and presses the heel of his palm against the base of his cock through his trousers. Inhales. Exhales. Inhales – now is not the time or place. Somewhere, Xi’an is surely laughing at him. Old as balls but a dustjunker like this turns you to a horny teenager. Pathetic.
Din snorts. Only in his dreams would he ever agree with Xi’an.
As the ship breaks through the stratosphere and the pixelated township of Mos Eisley pushes itself up into three dimensional space, Din switches gears to something decidedly unsexual. He thinks about Boba wearing his father’s armor, his dented helmet and the amused lines in his sun-burnt face, and a surge of determination and something else makes his lips twitch.
Whatever trouble Boba has found himself in, Din will bail him out. They aren’t aliit . He’s not even sure they’re friends. But they’re both Mandalorian, and that’s… that’s something .
And with Grogu gone, something – some one – is better than nothing.
“You don’t have to stay,” Boba grunts over a clatter of blasterfire, expertly ducking behind the rubble that was once Mos Eisley’s cantina.
“I know,” Din says.
Boba’s helm whips up toward another stone outcropping a yard away, and Din moves before Boba can insult them both by asking. Din levels his blaster over the soot-black remains of a bar counter and provides cover fire, smokes three Pykes so cleanly he almost huffs, then drops and crawls over to Boba’s new position as Boba covers for him. They fight well together – and Fennec Shand fights better than both of them.
Which is what makes Boba’s sudden change of heart so kriffing aggravating.
“This is my fight, not yours,” Boba says, harder this time.
“I know.” Three shots apiece. Six more Pykes hit the floor, but there’s more gotra members swarming in to fill the gaps of their dead, because of course Boba couldn’t just start a war with one gotra; it had to be all kriffing three of them. “ You invited me here, Boba.”
“And now I’m uninviting you.” Boba switches between commando pistol and cycler as easily as breathing; his movements are slower, aged, but expertly refined, like a fancy vintage liquor. Din would be impressed if he weren’t so annoyed. “Go.”
“I will not break my Creed.” More gotra scuttle from mud colored houses and alleys like spider-roaches. Din fires, and fires, and fires, and it means nothing in the overwhelming tide of combatants, but it makes him feel like he’s doing something useful, and if that isn’t the overarching theme of his life these days he doesn’t know what is. He is going to die here, he knows it, but he is not afraid, because –
“If we fall, we fall together.”
Boba doesn’t laugh, but it’s close. “You really buy into all that bantha fodder?”
It is the only thing Din buys into. Under the helmet Din licks his lips, the skin chapped despite his insulation. “This is the Way.”
Boba turns to him, just slightly. Din looks back. Mos Eisley is at war, and in a swirling storm of Pykes, Aqualish, Klatoonians, Trandoshans, Mods, Boba and Din stand point in the eye of the storm. Here, for a moment, a preternatural quiet reigns under the thick canopy of screams and energy discharge, the air between them so silent and still Din can count the dust flecks floating between their visors, glinting dull silver and brackish gold in the shadowed light.
“Good,” Boba says after a long moment; then again, quietly, to himself: “Good.”
The respect has always been there. Bounty hunter to bounty hunter, warrior to warrior, they saw the blood on each other’s hands and knew they were in like minded company. But that was it. They were two closed books uninterested in being read, and in the short but volatile time they’ve known each other neither had bothered looking any further. Why would they? A skilled bounty hunter knows a weapon by feel alone. But now—
Now, Din can feel the weight of Boba’s gaze behind the old visor, the inaudible click as a thought clicks into place like a plasma round into a blaster. Boba grunts, a clipped sound, and tips his chin up as he looks Din over. Assessing. Calculating. Checking the proof.
Something strange ripples in the air between, something too alive and fragile for them to touch without killing, so they don’t.
Behind them, the staccato chirp of blasterfire. “You messed with the wrong gotra!” A Klatoonian gunner snarls and charges the gap between the cantina rubble and gets his gun up, smirking, ready for blood–
Din and Boba shoot him dead as one, never looking away from each other. The Klatoonian trips forward and falls between the rubble, his short neck hitting the stone lip with a loud crack . He gurgles once, lips slicking with bubbles of blue-black blood, then goes limp. Clotted blood hits the dirt, drip… drip… drip.
Din nods. Boba nods back. It’s trust, simple enough, steady as a breastplate and twice as heavy, and Din is glad for the weight.
Behind the metal, the child-shaped hole in Din’s heart stings a little easier.
A coarse rumble shakes up the red dust beneath their boots, reverberates through stone and silt and bone. Din lays belly down on the dirt and shuffles left, peering between the crack in the rubble. Through a cloud of bloody dust a banged up land-hauler covered in faceless figures careens into the square, swings wide parallel in front of the cantina, and groans to a stop. Beneath a hailstorm of gotra-fire, familiar faces hop down and hit the dirt.
A Weequay with a cycler fires over the edge of the hauler, then glances back between the crack.
“On your feet, Mandalorian,” The Weequay – Taanti , his memory supplies – reaches back. “The people of Freetown are with you.”
Din looks at the hand, then the hauler. It’s old, weathered, and outdated, half-way to falling apart. As are the cyclers and rifles in the hands of the Freetowners. These are weapons and fighters who know this desert like the back of their sand-shorn hands. Even in the face of the gotra’s superior numbers and fancier blasters, Din feels the ground beneath the feet turn solid again. Weapons molded to the hands of their owners, a desert stronghold facing an invading threat. He's been here before countless times, backed into a corner with his own covert. Something in his chest tightens and relaxes.
They still might die here, but at least it will be together.
Din takes the strong hand, reaches back for Boba. Taanti tugs them up as one.
A Mod ducks behind the hauler and sidles beside Boba. “We’ve got reinforcements. Now what?”
Boba huffs and crosses one arm, hugging his cycler against his chest, and Din is surprised to find that he recognizes the gesture – this is Boba digging his heels in.
“Now,” Boba grunts and shifts, his T-visor zeroed in on the oncoming barrage. “We win or die. It’s that simple.”
“This is the Way,” Din nods.
“Oh, yes,” This time Boba does laugh, a short, harsh, ugly bark, and the sound settles around Din’s throat like teeth. “The expressway to hell. Let’s make sure our gotra friends make their flight, eh?”
Din doesn't smile, but it's close.
The tide of battle, like a stripped screw in a worn socket, turns ever slowly.
At some point Boba and Fennec take off in search of help that neither bothered explaining, and Din had been too blasting third eyes in Trandoshan foreheads to consider asking.
The people of Freetown pot-shot gotra cadre like womp-rats during mating season, supported by Mods and Wookies and a few brave townies with a grudge against the gotras older than their hunting rifles, until soon enough the gotra members are turning tail.
The ragtag militia cheers. “You better run, fuckers!” A Mod beside Din crows as a Freetowner spits in the dirt, “Fuck offa our planet!”
Din watches the fleeing gotras, eyes narrowing. The way they’re running is too regulated. It’s less of a frightened abandonment, and more like a –
“They’re not running,” Din says, the hair on the back of his neck standing. “This is a tactical retreat.”
The ground shakes. Close by – too close, far too close; why didn’t he notice over the blasterfire? – giant gears whir and click. Din has barely enough time to curse and shove the Mod out of the way before the blasterbolt rams into his breastplate.
Impossible force slams him off his feet and into an adobe wall with a crunch before he can so much as blink. Stone crumbles against his spine and dust bleeds into the air, choking visibility down to a hazy gasp. His eyes are wide open, but behind the visor his vision flickers between light and dark as something breaks behind him, against his back, his neck, and then all he feels is –
Pain.
White and hot and urgent, pain bursts inside his right shoulder and he feels his arm fall limp against his side, fingers spasming around the empty hole where his rifle should be.
Someone is shouting somewhere, Boba, he thinks, but the ringing in his ears and the sharp-needles in his shoulder and the dull ache in his torso throttle his senses to muted snapshots: Vibrations in the dirt. Steps, heavy ones, marching, thump thump thump.
Wetness smearing the back of his helmet and oozing down his neck and shoulder.
Din blinks, struggling to pull a word from the haze inside his own head. … Wetness?
Dazed, Din reaches up with a shaky left hand, swipes a thumb through the mess, squints at it through kaleidoscope eyes. It’s oil, maybe, black with a strange undertone, almost like –
Blood. A lot of it. Too much of it.
Something heavy and metal and massive slams into the dirt a foot from his head; a foot closer and his skull would be red paste in the dirt. Din bites his lip hard enough to taste blood as the vibration slams through his body and sinks its violence into every broken part. Pain erupts behind shut eyelids like stars gone supernova, but he will not scream. The impulse was beaten out of him long ago on Concordia when he was a boy, and he will not succumb to it here as a man.
More clicks and whirs, louder than starscreams in his rattled head. Whatever it is that took him by surprise is overhead now.
He sucks in a shallow, dusty breath as the dust clears. Four long, metal talons pierce the dirt around him. Din cranes his head up, up, up – into the cold, blazing eye of a Scorpenek Annihilator Droid.
It leans down, and he can hear it calculating the most efficient way to kill him. Back up and blast him? Drop a plasmabang and leave nothing but a silhouette behind? Or maybe–
The soil groans and strains. The Annihilator’s undercarriage dips. With a seismic ripple, the Annihilator rips its front foot clear of hard-packed sand and raises it. The cruel durasteel talon glints royal gold in the evening light.
It’s going to turn his skull into meiloorun pulp. Alright then. The least he can do is return the favor.
His head swims; his lungs flounder. A ragged groan escapes his lips. Shock-numb fingers find the strange, heavy hilt pressed against his hip. Din braces the hilt against his stomach and activates the Darksaber, his blurring eyes fixed on the droid’s heaving undercarriages. The hilt's unnaturally heavy in his hands, but his grip does not tremble; his fingers do not shake. When the droid lowers its leg the undercarriage will dip and Dine will skewer it as the droid skewers him. He will die today, but the people of Mos Espa will walk away a little more freely, and that is honorable enough for him.
He wonders if Grogu would be proud of him. He hopes so.
The undercarriage dips. The talon drops. Din marshals the last of his strength into his arms, flicks on his jetpack, and pushes up with a grunt, shoving the Darksabre’s vibrating point through hot air and reinforced durasteel. The Darksaber slashes through exhaust ports and piping, and through the dark cloud of vaporized oil the last thing he sees is –
Green.
Green like emeralds, green like poisoned water, green like his sister’s eyes that will never open again, green like growing things, green like the child he’d dared to love and let go – green flares to life in the droid’s gut, a pillar of emerald fire in an empty darkness. With a strange buzzing hum it carves a thin ring into the Annihilator’s engine, ignoring the droid’s frantic high-pitched alarm. The engine – or what’s left of it – cuts loose and hits the dirt, hemming Din in a delicate and very melted ring of durasteel.
A shadow falls across his face. Din cranes his neck up, looking through the smoking hole in the droid, following the blazing green blade held in a dark gloved hand. The hooded figure crouches, and Din knows.
The blade retracts and disappears into a belt, and the figure holding it extends their index finger, effortlessly wiping away the choking haze of droid smog and red clay dust with the same gesture a schoolmarm would use to scold a naughty child, and something wild and frantic grips Din’s throbbing body in its teeth and shakes. The Darksaber slips from his cramping hand into the dirt, forgotten, because Din knows.
The figure crouches and pulls their hood down, swinging it forward so a small green face with glassy black eyes can peer out.
The clouds part, and haloed by the blazing light of Tatooine's twin suns, Luke Skywalker smiles.
“See? I told you your dad was fine,” The Jedi laughs, lifting Grogu up and rubbing a thumb teasingly between Grogu’s wrinkled brow. Grogu wriggles and whines and reaches down through the droid’s open belly with tiny hands, and Din can feel something impossible and ethereal and strong cradle his body and holds.
Eyes like crystallized ocean find Din. The lop-sided smile on Skywalker’s face stays as he , but the light in his eyes dims and shifts – curiosity and doubt and something darker turning within them, but Din misses it because there is only one thing in this galaxy that he cares about right now. “Isn’t that right, Mandalorian? …Mandalorian?”
Din doesn’t hear it. His shoulder is a knot of fire and barbed wire, his chest a stuttering tattoo in his aching chest, he can feel his headwound running red, and he should really do something about that before it kills him, but all Din Djarin can think to do is lift his working arm and say –
“Kid," Din croaks, the word a prayer answered and prayer asked tangled together in one shallow choked-up breath, before the blood loss finally takes him, and the world goes dark, dark, dark.