Chapter Text
Din supposed he should have expected a captain of a privateer fleet with a moniker like “The General” to be an ex-Imperial. But the New Republic gave out titles like party favors and The First Order did loosely operate under the auspices of Republic control. They were pirates who hunted down other pirates, bounty hunters of ships and fleets instead of individuals. Din sneered at privateers and larger mercenary companies in the same way that an Armorer would scoff at plate and helmets mass-produced in some soulless factory.
This “First Order” fleet did have a reputation-it was disgustingly profitable, but on the backs of teenagers who ran away from home. Because they were based in Corellia and didn’t ask too many questions of their new recruits (who usually had lifespans measured in months), Din supposed it would be a natural place for Ben Solo to enlist.
“You tell me what to do, I might as well join an army and get paid for it,” Ben used to grumble at Luke. Luke retorted that he’d never witnessed his nephew willingly rising earlier than nine in the morning; he’d not last long. No, Ben wouldn’t become a saber or blaster for hire. Din was mentally kicking himself for considering it.
Especially for this pasty man with a vein twitching by his eye as he fired round after round of a curious blaster that produced no laser trail at Din.
“We meet again, Mando”, the Imp sneered, a hunk of greasy red bangs coming unglued from its hair gel. “I knew you would. You people hold grudges and chase vengeance to the forth generation.”
Din had heard ethnic slurs that sounded less derogatory than “You people”. He shot back at “The General”, who ducked and rolled . He looked too young to be a captain of privateers; perhaps only a few years younger than Paz’s Ragnar. But he had purple bags under his eyes and a worry line between his brows.
“Really? I’ve never heard that one before. And who the kriff are you? I’ve never seen you before in my life.” Din aimed his blaster. Honestly, killing this kid with this mysterious chip on his shoulder and his funky gun would be shamefully easy.
The young so-called General fumbled with a clip and shot again, one of the laser-less rounds piercing the beskar swifter than any spear and exploding into his shoulder, and he dropped to his knees in agony. This was sharper than the laser-burn of a blaster round. The edges of things began to look fuzzy, and he numbly realized that the red shine on his paulron was blood.
The boy stalked over. “This, Mando, is a slug-thrower”, he said, gesturing to the gun. “They were used against your kind in one of the earlier wars. Shoots balls of solid lead. Old-fashioned, perhaps, but effective. Hard to find, though. It took my mother years of searching to find a model, and longer still to restore this piece to its former glory. But she said my protection was worth every credit.”
“I still have no idea what you are talking about,” Din said through gritted teeth.
The boy’s eyes bulged with fury. “You killed my father,” he spat. “And now you have come back to finish the job, even though I never laid a finger on your green baby.”
“I-I’ve killed a lot of people,” Din managed. And then, he took advantage of the younger fighter’s Imperial tendency to monologue and grabbed the Darksaber in the hand attached to his good arm, staggered to his feet, unholstered it, and swung it towards the boy’s chest.
A dagger slithered out of his opponent’s sleeve, but he froze, mesmerized by the humming dark crystal.
“Alright,” he murmured. “But now I have reinforcements.”
“Cap?” Footsteps echoed against the durasteel of the port hangars. Din glanced to the side and realized they were surrounded. Kriff. A tall woman with shiny chromium armor and a silver-veiled face had a blaster trained on Din’s back. Platoons of worryingly baby-faced troopers in scuffed green armor stood, waiting.
“I didn’t come here to kill you,” Din said.
“Oh?”
The Darksaber hummed. The slim dagger shook in a black-gloved hand. Behind them, someone nervously coughed.
“I came to ask if you have a new recruit by the name of Ben Solo. Or Kylo Ren. I am prepared to offer compensation for any credible information.”
The boy’s jaw dropped, then he burst into a hoarse, barking laugh. “Ben Solo. Ben Solo! Stand down, you lot. And Mitaka, come see to his shoulder-he’s got a ball in it.”
A shuddering teen with a med-pack trailed by a droid fell upon him. “I’ve, uh, never actually done this outside sims,” he said, and proved it, but the med-droid delivered enough local numbing agents and fixed this kid’s mistakes efficiently enough that Din didn’t mind too much.
“I honestly thought Solo would be dead or in jail by now,” The General mused, when Din had been cleaned up, deposited on a couch with suspicious stains, and offered a drink. (He declined. One of the many rumors about the First Order was that they poisoned their competitors.”
“What makes you say that?” He still couldn’t place this boy’s face. Then, he remembered the last time Grogu had been captured by Imps. He had shot a redhead then, some potbellied officer. He disintegrated when the pulse of his Amban rifle hit his smarmy bearded face. And there had been someone else in that shipboard office. A very small boy with a black eye, trembling behind a desk. Din had thought to take him back as a Foundling for a second, but the fighting grew more intense on the way to rescue the kid he already had, and when he passed by that corridor the child had disappeared.
“We went to school together,” The General replied. “I was a few years ahead, they assigned me as his Algebra 1 tutor. He was hopeless at it. He wasn’t what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“A rich, spoilt little boy,” he said, sipping a glass of brandy. “And he did deliver on that part. But the way the Force moved around him was surprising and disturbing. I say this as someone who knew a Force-user, before. The one I knew was very different. But I suppose that I’d only known her as an adult in full control of her powers with a history I’d never fully comprehend, and Ben was just a kid. With less structured training than their kind had in previous generations, from what I could gather.”
“You knew other Force users?”, Din asked, shocked. Ashoka never mentioned associating with the Imps. This man-child was too young to have met the main Imperial ones, Pal-Patine or…Veeder. And this one was a she. If Luke’s depression worsened, Grogu would need another instructor.
“Just the one. And she’s retired.”
Din experimentally stretched out his wounded shoulder. It still hurt. “What made her so different than Ben Solo?”
“Like I said; one was a middle-aged woman, the other was a little boy. And my— the Force-user I know had difficulty expressing any sort of emotion at all. She had it mostly drilled out of her, I think. Ben Solo had all of them at once, and we knew it. She thought about things so much that even normal household tasks were a multidimensional game of holochess. Ben Solo just broke things because he liked the noises they made. He–he…” The man gulped.
“He what?”, Din said.
“Once,” The General said faintly, “he forced his way into my memories and goaded me with what he found there until I snapped. I beat him bloody with a Bocce-ball stick behind the dining hall. He lay there and took it, laughing all the while. When I came to my senses and stopped, he choked me and threw me against the wall. One of the teachers found us. He mind-tricked the entire staff of the school into thinking that our injuries were from tripping on uneven flagstones, and to this day every path at Chandrilla Select Academy has two handrails, even the ones on level ground. All he would say when I pressed him is that my anger tasted delicious.”
“Oh.” Din tried to reconcile this image of Ben with the child who levitated toy ships into the air around Grogu’s head, who gamely tried the frogs Grogu caught for him, and cried when it came time to harvest the lettuces they’d grown in the garden because it was cruel to nurture something and then cut it down.
“I hope you find him,” The General muttered. “The Galaxy will be safer with him out of it. Now, what do I owe you?”
“Why would you owe me anything?”
The General rolled his eyes. “You’ve done hits, right? Usually, if someone gets a life insurance policy payout, what’s your cut?”
“ What?”
“My stepmother, Maratelle, took out a very generous policy on my father before he took me and kriffed off to the Unknown Regions. And she’d seen the writing on the wall, so she made sure to go to a politically neutral firm, not using anything connected to the Empire so that even when her assets were confiscated and her accounts were frozen at the end of the war, there was one pot of money they couldn’t touch. They used that money to move off-world, pay for her medical treatments, send me to school. There’s still some left-they wanted me to go to uni and become an engineer or some such thing, but when Maratelle had her first stroke I had to step up and run the business. What do you usually charge?”
“I’m not an assassin,” Din said. “Nothing. And didn’t you want to avenge your father? I did kill him and deprive you of a lifetime of his care.”
The privateer snorted.
“Honestly, I was better off without him. It’s more that we were all annoyed that we couldn’t kill him first, but the timing and clear lack of connection to any of his family members was convenient,” The General explained. “My mother wanted to kill him for a number of reasons. Maratelle wanted to kill him because he cheated on her with my mother, I wanted to kill him because he beat me. We had our own grudges and secret plans. And then you came along, and with one shot he disintegrated into ashes. Nothing is permanent, I realized after that day. Everything goes. But I did have nightmares about you coming back for me. And my mothers had to evict me from the foot of their bed. I dreamed they’d disappear too. I think they had nightmares that I’d turn into him. ” By this time, the brandy glass was empty.
“ Gar taldin ni jaonyc; gar sa buir, ori'wadaasla.” The proverb came to him unbidden.
“What’s that mean?”
“Nobody cares who your father was, only the father you’ll be,” Din translated.
His informant chuckled. “I went and got a vasectomy. My line ends with me. Go home and look after your magic baby. And don’t worry. After what I saw him do to some of the Stormtroopers, I was too scared to look at him.”
“He’s a small child now. Not a baby anymore.”
“Ah. Time flies, Mando. I hope we never meet again.”
“Likewise,” Din said. He staggered up and limped away back to his ship. Slugthrower. If this child of the Empire knew about that archaic but deadly weapons technology, who else did? He’d go and ask Boba Fett about them; he knew lots of obscure things. And after he did his research to determine how many people might have it, he’d need to devise a plan to protect his people from it. A thing that could pierce beskar like a stone through water was an existential threat to every Mandalorian.