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It takes seven extra jumps, three mangled tracking devices and four days of radio silence before Din's shoulders start to come down from around his ears. Hanging in space over what looks like a water world, skimming gently over its shimmering rings of rock and ice, he takes stock. In the old days, before the child, he'd needed very little. He'd had the Crest, and he'd had the covert. It was simple.
He misses that, but he misses the child more.
Ship, kid, covert. And he's already got one out of three.
Din's a hunter. He feels pretty good about his chances.
At least until the comm light winks on.
Just after he'd dug out the last tracker but before he'd blocked Bo-Katan's number, he'd considered shooting it, but you never know when you're going to need to needle a republic traffic cop out of a speeding ticket, so. He squints at it, pulls up the data. Sighs.
He knows that comm code.
It’s not unexpected. Din didn’t think he was going to get away completely clean. But he thought he’d at least get the chance to punch Woves a couple of times before it came to this.
“Mando!” Karga says, in his usual, jovial way. “Or should that be your highness?”
Din wishes briefly to be back on Nevarro, so he can shoot Karga in the kneecap. Just one. As a treat.
“What?” he says, rather than deal with that.
“Right to the point as usual,” Karga says. “Well, I won’t sugar coat it, Mando. She put a bounty out on you.”
Din doesn’t sigh.
“I figured,” he says, evenly.
“Consider this a friendly warning.”
Considered.
“And since we’re such good friends -” there it is - “I’m hurt, Mando, that you didn’t trust me with your secret. If I’d known you were royalty -”
Din hangs up.
A moment later his comm buzzes. Just for that, I won’t tell you who picks up the puck.
Business as usual, then.
Din sinks back in his chair and does not give in to the urge to bang his head against the dashboard.
This is. Not ideal. Not unexpected. But not ideal.
Din has. A lot of enemies. Well, not enemies, exactly. The word implies mutual hostility, and Din simply doesn’t care. A lot of fellow hunters who dislike him, then. Who want to put him in his place, who’ve taken bounties on him before with gleeful abandon and pulse grenades, and likely will again.
He’s not worried. At least, not about any one of them individually. But numbers will subdue anyone eventually. That’s how it had felt with the child - with Grogu. Eventually, Din will get tired. Sloppy. Eventually he’ll slip. And the kid won’t be there to pick him up again.
Din adjusts the controls on the his stolen ship. Starts up the navicomputer.
He doesn’t care who comes after him. He’s not going back.
At first, it’s not too bad. He loses a few obvious tails, fires some warning shots and some not-so-warning shots at various guild regulars and a few young bucks trying to make a name for themselves by bagging a mando. He’s still working, here and there; with no way to get cash back to the covert (no way to find the covert without bringing upon them a world of hurt) and no smaller, more voracious mouth to feed it’s not so urgent as it used to be. Din can afford to take easier jobs, or fewer jobs. Can afford to go hungry a day here, a couple of days there. Stay low. Stay hidden. Lotta uninhabited planets in the outer rim. Lotta quiet.
He’s one of the more solitary people he knows, but it wears on him a little. Enough that when Cara tracks him down on some nowhere moon in nothing system, he returns her hand-clasped greeting with warmth and a hidden quirk of an almost smile, which lasts until she uses her grip on his wrist to put him in a headlock and shove him against a wall.
He fires the jetpack to make her back off, then between the push and the wall runs up and over to land behind, at a reasonable distance, and pulls a gun on her.
Cara saunters in his general direction, tossing - that’s a puck. It’s a guild puck. Dank ferrik - lazily with one hand, undaunted by the gun he’s pointing with unwavering focus at her unguarded throat.
“I can bring you in warm,” she says, smirking with evil, evil glee. “Or I can bring you in cold.”
“OK,” says Din. "So we're doing this, huh?"
He can't believe he was pleased to see her.
Din discovers that Boba picked up the puck when the borrowed speeder he’s on explodes.
He rolls to a stop in a clatter of armour and draws a gun and a knife, looking around for cover and enemies both, and sees a familiar buy'ce poking up over the nearest rock formation.
“Really?” he asks, and ducks as a plasma blast shoots past his head.
There’s a jetpack noise and Din scrambles behind the remains of the speeder, such as they are, and looks desperately for some, any, cover.
“I’m a simple man,” says Boba from where he’s looming, smugly, with a rifle pointed at Din’s helmet, “just trying to make my way in the universe.”
Din hits him with a rock and dives for a pile of dusty boulders that now have speeder shrapnel sticking out of them.
“You don’t even hunt any more!” he howls from this slightly less pathetic excuse for cover. Boba considers this, and shoots at him.
“Don’t you have crimelording to do?”
Wait. He does have crimelording to do. And Fennec’s not here. Din knows this because if Fennec were here, he’d already be trussed up in an electrified net in Slave II’s cargo bay and ruing the day he was born. Fennec showed him the net the last time he was on Tatooine.
He pokes his head up to take three shots at Boba, all of which bounce off his armour whilst forcing him to give Din just a smidge more room, then says (well, screams, it’s gotten loud in this patch of empty scrubland for some reason) “are you playing hooky?"
There is an undignified silence.
Then.
“Djarin -”
“I’m calling Fennec!”
“DJARIN!”
Eventually, of course, Boba catches up. Din is very, very good at his job, but Boba Fett has forgotten more about hunting than Din will ever know. And he’s meaner, too. After some yelling and some shooting and Boba swearing on his armour, his decant tube, whatever the fuck that is, and Fennec’s hair, which is serious business, that he won’t try and collect the bounty until they’ve finished their drinks, they call a brief recess. A temporary truce. A when-my-ears-stop-ringing-ohohoho-then-you’ll-be-sorry break.
Din is pleased that the shooting has stopped. It was giving him a headache.
Unfortunately, what it has been replaced by is talking.
"Good to see you, Djarin."
Din wishes he could say the same.
"That bounty you have on you sure is something. Who'd've thought House Kryze had that much dough left in 'em?"
House Kryze always has exactly enough of whatever resource it needs to masterfully screw Din over at any given moment in time. This is a fact that he has learned.
"You're lookin' skinny. You eating enough?"
Nobody asked you, ba'buir Fett.
“Fennec says you took your helmet off.”
Fennec is a dirty snitch, and if Din weren’t afraid of her he’d tell her so to her face.
"Your people take it ok?"
Din doesn't have people anymore. Or he has too many people, every mandalorian ever, and he doesn't want them. Din never has the people that he wants when he wants them.
Din looks at his drink with a betrayed expression. For that price this shit should be watered to hell and back.
"And the kid?"
With his people. Who aren't Din. This is the way.
"That's rough."
This is the Way.
"You want to talk about it?"
Who are you and what have you done with Boba Fett?
Boba raised his hands in a placatory gesture. It looks surprisingly practiced; daimyo-ing must be going well.
"No pressure, brother. I'm here for you."
Din squints through the visor.
Boba grins, with teeth. "So if you ever want to talk about feelings-"
Din has never felt more betrayed in all his troubled and twisty life.
Luckily, at this point, Fennec finally hones in on the tracker Din stuck to the back of Boba's buy'ce when Boba was trying to throttle him before, and throws a flash grenade through the bar window.
Din flees to the sweet sweet music of Fennec cackling, Boba swearing, and things that don't belong to him catching fire.
Din watches the ship approach with wary interest. It's old, maybe as old as the Crest had been, and it looks like a heap of junk, like any second bits are going to start falling off, or catching fire. It handles a lot better than it looks. Almost suspiciously so.
It lands. Nothing falls off. Din finds himself, reluctantly, impressed. He leans against a tree and waits.
About a minute later, a human and a wookiee walk out. The human saunters like he thinks he's a character in a holo, gun already drawn. The wookiee meets Din’s eyes, or close enough, and makes an expression which seems to read, to Din’s semi-experienced eye, as an apology on behalf of the human, who hasn't been properly house-trained yet. Din nods acknowledgement.
The human catches sight of Din, does a double-take, raises the gun, and then goes on a long and emotional face journey. The wookiee rolls their eyes. Din bit back a laugh.
“That lying son of a bitch,” the man says, throwing up his hands and walking off a little ways, then coming back, as though the face journey hadn’t slewed off enough excess energy.
“You’re not Boba Fett,” says the man, trying very hard not to make it a question.
No sir. He still has all his hair.
“You’re not.” He gestures with the gun, but since the safety’s on Din doesn’t take offence. He does wind down his assessment of the man’s intelligence a point or several.
The man throws up his hands again. “I knew it. I knew that Death Watch-looking nerfherder was lying. Money for Boba Fett, preferably alive, she said, and I said my finely tuned Boba Fett senses weren’t tingling, I said -”
The wookiee says something acknowledging and mildly condescending in Shyriiwook and pats the man on the shoulder. Din likes this wookiee.
“As if Death Watch could ever find their ass with both fucking hands - hey, hey, MANDO!”
Din sighs, and pauses his retreat in a listening manner.
“You know Boba Fett?”
Eh. Can you ever really know another person?
“Carnally?” he asks, just to see what happens.
The man blinks and decides he can’t possibly have heard this. The wookiee turns away, presumably to hide the laughter that’s shaking their brawny shoulders.
“Mean, ugly-looking bastard,” the human continues, “about yay high, shitty armour -”
Woah, hey now. No need to get offensive. It’s very good armour. Din shot at it himself.
“ - got a yen for feeding innocent smugglers to carnivorous plants -”
Now that actually does ring a bell.
“You’re Solo?” Din asks, and very carefully does not let the evil grin spreading across his face appear in his voice.
“Yeah I’m - wait. How do you know that?”
Din’s heard some things. Some drunken, seething things. Mentions of arch-nemesis-ship. Deep, deep mourning for a fine head of hair. Swearings of eternal, painful revenge. Bringing up Solo is one of the few things that can dent Boba’s preternatural post-resurrection calm. It’s Fennec’s favourite game.
“He’s on Tatooine,” Din says. He hopes Fennec takes pictures. He hopes Fennec takes holo.
“He’s on - “ Solo half-turns to the wookiee and then back to Din, “I knew that,” he scoffs. “Of course I knew that." A beat. "Where on Tatooine?”
"Palace," says Din.
“A palace? He’s got a - Boba Fett’s got a palace?”
That’s what I said, pal.
Solo rounds on the wookiee. “You know about this?”
The wookiee says something non-committal and distracted.
Din watches, fascinated, as the smuggler raises a finger and jabs it in the wookiee’s face, and yet somehow remains in possession of both of his arms.
“We’re talking about this later,” says Solo, and the wookiee rolls their eyes and walks back into the ship.
“Unbelievable,” says Solo, deflating.
He turns back to Din. “Sorry for the trouble,” he says, not sounding sorry, “and er, thanks for the tip, I guess.”
You’re welcome, suicidal maniac.
“Not a big talker, huh,” the smuggler mutters, apparently to himself. He starts back into the ship, then says, “that lady is so, so mad at you, by the way. In case you didn’t know.”
Din knows. This is, unfortunately, the Way.
“Watch yourself, shiny,” says Solo, who apparently shares with Bo-Katan, Karga, and every jedi Din’s ever met the need to have the last word, and finally, finally leaves.
Din watches as the heap of junk, contrary to all known laws of aviation, heaves itself off the ground and vanishes into the dawn.
The polite thing to do now, he thinks, would be to comm Boba. Just as a heads up. That would be the neighbourly, nay, the brotherly thing to do.
Din still has bruises from the modified seismic grenade Boba used to blow him off his speeder.
Boba deserves everything he’s got coming to him.
Din doesn’t realise how far the rot has spread until he lands in Mos Eisley looking for repairs. Peli greets him like an old friend, asks after the kid, clucks at him for making bad decisions, and yells at the pit droids until they get themselves in gear and start on the ship. It’s not routine, because hunters don’t have routines, but it is familiar.
Which is why Din doesn’t notice what’s going on until it’s almost too late.
“Easy there Mando,” says Peli, hands out like she’s calming a skittish bantha.
Din looks around, and discovers he’s surrounded, albeit only at knee height.
“Come onnnn,” she says, “this doesn’t have to be difficult! I hand you in, you break out, we split the take, what, 70/30?”
Unbelievable.
“Alright, 60/40,” she says.
Din’s in the air.
“Listen, hear me out -” she yells after him. “We could make some real money this way! Mando! MANDO!”
Aaaaand Din’s gone.
His own mechanic. Is nothing sacred?
Din looks down at the gun. Back up at Cobb.
“You too?”
“Sorry Mando,” says Cobb, enjoying this way too much. “We’re trying to build a school.”
This is the Way.
“Maybe next time!” Cobb hollers, laughing, at his disappearing back.
“Do I know you?” he asks the extremely colourful mandalorian with the exploding spray-paint.
“Nope,” she says, cheerfully.
Finally. One he’s allowed to shoot.
“Really?” Din asks.
Ahsoka shrugs. “Girl’s gotta eat.”
So it’s fair to say that, by the time the Jedi turns up, Din is in a bit of a mood.
This maybe explains why he takes a shot at him as soon as his head pops clear of the X-Wing.
“Woah woah woah -”
Din will not woah woah woah. Din is tired, bruised, exasperated, and beset on all sides. No bond has proven sacred. No ally willing to cut him a goddamn break. Din has lost his covert, his ship and his kid in short order and now everywhere he goes, people shoot at him. He has had enough. He is drawing a line in the goddamn sand. He -
The jedi has ducked down into the cockpit. One hand is visible, and waving. It is holding a white rag.
Din shoots the rag. It catches fire. The hand disappears.
And then a familiar head appears over the edge of the cockpit.
“Kid?” says Din, and without checking in with his brain his knees deposit him in the dirt.
“Patu,” he hears, and then “OK, I’m coming out. Please don’t shoot me while I’m holding the baby.” Then “oh.”
There’s a presence in Din’s space. It puts the kid in his lap and then retreats to a safe distance. It stays in his line of sight, which Din distantly appreciates. He looks down at the kid. The kid looks up at him. His ears twitch.
“Oh,” Din says, and then “hey, kid,” and crumples further into the dirt.
It all goes kind of blurry after that.
There’s some murmuring and quiet noises; the presence - the jedi, Din remembers - moves away and then back again, slow and calm. At one point there’s a clawed, three-fingered little hand at Din’s chin, and he must have tipped the helmet up because there’s an in-drawn breath and a touch on his face, warm and dry and smelling vaguely of frogs, and Din thinks he might cry a little and hopes that the jedi won’t mind much.
Eventually the world filters back in. Quiet, burbling sounds of a forest world riven with water, of the child at rest or scheming, which could look and sound remarkably similar. A little fire with a pot on it, smelling of plants and salt and dirt. A warm soft weight, concentrated through tiny, tough-nailed feet, draped over his knee.
A jedi, sitting quietly beside him, with his eyes closed.
“Thank you,” Din says, and is startled by the rasp of it. Grogu pats his knee, and then there’s a canteen floating in the air in front of his face. Din averts his gaze from the jedi, much good it will do him now, and tips the helmet back again to drink.
“Don’t thank me,” the jedi says, “I’m allergic.”
Din looks at him, startled, and the jedi flaps a hand without opening his eyes, a rueful curl to his mouth.
“Not actually,” he says, “but in any case, no thanks are necessary. I hadn’t realised, when I took the child, that you were his father.”
Din isn’t - that’s. He hadn’t thought. Well.
“We’re clan,” Din says, because he hadn’t said it. There are words to say, and the Armourer said them to him, and her buir said them before her, and their buir and their buir and their buir all the way back under the glass of their planet. But Din hadn’t said them, because he hadn’t known he’d wanted to until it was too late. Until the quest was laid at his feet; to get the child back to his own people. Until he’d known what the right decision really was.
The jedi tilts his head. “Is that agreement or disagreement?”
Din doesn’t know.
“This is the way,” he says, for lack of anything better.
The jedi - Cara had said his name, why can’t he remember? - nods, apparently accepting that. It’s a little thing. Such a little thing. Din appreciates it, all the same.
“Han said he saw you,” the jedi continues, after a while, leaning forward to stir the pot on the fire. “A few weeks back. Said you weren’t looking so hot.”
Han. Han. Why - oh. Solo. Yes.
“Does he have a mirror?” Din asks, and gets a delighted laugh in return.
“It lies to him, I’m pretty sure,” the jedi says, conspiratorial. “Or he’s swapped it for a ten year old mugshot and is in denial about it.”
Din likes this jedi, he thinks.
“Something about a bounty?”
Din has changed his mind.
But before he can go for his gun, the jedi puts his hands up in a pacifying gesture. “I didn’t pick it up,” he says. “Bounty hunting is beneath the dignity of the jedi.”
Somebody needs to tell Ahsoka that. Din’s bruises still have bruises.
“I have a bounty on me too, you know.”
This does not surprise Din at all.
“Actually, I think I have five. Maybe seven? Leia has a spreadsheet.”
OK, this surprises Din a little.
“And parking tickets,” the jedi says. “So, so many parking tickets. And I keep getting fined for speeding. I feel like those should cancel each other out.”
Din feels an unexpected kinship with the incomprehensible space wizard for whom he is supposed to feel undying enmity.
“Fucking traffic cops,” the jedi continues. “I trained half those little fuckers, you know. And still, they give me speeding tickets. Unbelievable.”
“No respect,” Din says.
“None at all,” the jedi huffs.
There is a companionable silence for a moment. Outside their curtain of leaves, rain has started to fall.
“So what did you do?” the jedi asks, eventually.
No.
“Come oooonnnnnn,” the jedi says. “Tell me. It can’t be that bad.”
Oh, sweet summer child. It’s exactly that bad.
“I brought your kid back,” the jedi says, “it’s the least you could do.”
Not funny, space wizard. Not funny at all.
“Pleeeeeassssse.”
It’s quality whining. Almost like being on foundling duty at the covert. Soothing, even.
The jedi pouts. It’s so ridiculous and melodramatic that Din finds himself telling him everything.
“Huh,” says the jedi.
Din listens to the rain on the leaves and adjusts Grogu on his leg.
“So was it the furs that got you or the forks?”
What.
The jedi makes an expansive hand gesture. “Leia - my sister,” he says, “she was a princess, before. And now a senator. She kept making me go to banquets. There were -” he shudders, a little, “so many banquets. And all these formal outfits. And cutlery. Why do they need so much cutlery? They barely give you any food!”
Mandalorian banquets, Din has unwillingly learned, would consider it the height of dishonour to provide anything less than your armoured bodyweight in food. But otherwise, their experiences are very similar. He gives the nod of unexpected camaraderie, to which the jedi grins, clearly pleased.
“I grew up on Tatooine,” the jedi continues, and Din looks up, sharply. “You got a knife. A fork if you were feeling fancy. And if I’d tried to fob a guest off with one of those little pastry things, Aunt - my Aunt Beru would have skinned me.” Din knows that hesitation. That little hitch of grief.
Grogu’s ears twitch, and Din strokes his head without thinking; the kid, he knows, understands this too.
“And then they expect you to be polite to the most ghastly people, and never say what you really think, and everybody is lying all the time,” he continues, and then, “you are dangerously easy to talk to.”
Din shrugs. “Just got one of those faces.”
The jedi laughs, again, and Din tips his chin towards his chestplate, pleased and instinctively hiding it.
They sit in companionable silence for a while, listening to the damp wet sounds of the forest getting damper and wetter, the wind moving restless through the leaves and the grasses.
“So how did you get out of it?” Din asks. He’s not sure it’ll be applicable to him, not being the last remnant of a dying wizard order, but we live and learn. This is, after all, the way.
“Oh,” says the jedi, thoughtfully, “well, eventually I decided we would need a school. A temple. Or a meeting place. Something for force sensitives, for any surviving jedi, or younglings,” he nods to Grogu, “to be safe. To reconnect. To learn.”
Din nods. This is reasonable.
“And I told Leia that it needed to be somewhere peaceful, where the Force flowed, where you could really listen.”
Din doesn’t know the Force, but that also sounds reasonable. Quiet can be useful.
“And then I lied and said there was no way I could do that on Coruscant, and it would have to be some uninhabited jungle planet on the edge of Wild Space, and she absolutely didn’t believe me but she let me get away with it anyway because other senators were listening.” He finishes all in a rush.
Huh.
“You?” the jedi asks, as if this will stop Din from noticing how embarrassed he looks.
Din thinks about it.
“I climbed out a window,” he says, and the jedi grins.
“Now why didn’t I think of that?”
Afternoon passes into evening. They eat, make camp, wend their ways silently between each other’s routines with a familiarity that should worry Din, and that instead he finds soothing. The rain continues. They agree, quietly, not to separate just yet.
The moons are out and the rain tailing off when one of them decides to speak again.
“I wonder if there’s a way to get Kryze off your back,” the jedi says, musingly. “I don’t know much about her -”
Lucky space wizard.
“ - but she sounds stubborn. Strong-willed. Don’t think a mind-trick is going to cut it. And a bunch of “I am the last of the jedi” posturing probably won’t go down well either -”
Din nearly chokes on his own spit. That’s the understatement of the myriad.
“I -” the jedi tilts his head then turns to Grogu with a distant, hazy expression that Din vaguely recognizes from Ahsoka, way back on Corvus.
“That's right,” the jedi says. Grogu chirps, and the darksabre floats away from Din’s belt in that surreal and brainfreezing way that always loses Din a couple of seconds' reaction time whenever the kid does it.
“It’s more complicated than that, Grogu, but I guess it’s not entirely inaccurate - wait!”
There’s a pressure in the air that makes Din’s ears pop, vast and terrible, a stabbing pain behind his eyes and a shriek in his brain that feels almost familiar and then angry and then - there’s a crackling snap that whips a shockwave through the trees and whites out every sensation in a split second - and then the darksabre is a pile of scrap and sparks and Grogu is slumping over into the grass.
Din blinks and dives for him at the same moment as the jedi, which works out fine for Din (once his helmet stops ringing) and less well for the jedi (whose head is presumably going to take a little longer). They sit up, slowly, Din resituating Grogu in his lap in a clingy sort of way that is entirely for the kid’s benefit and not at all to make Din’s brain stop screaming, and turn as one to the centre of the clearing.
“Welp,” says the jedi, blearily, and the smouldering remains catch fire. “That’s one way to do it.”
Din blinks. Looks at the kid.
“Thanks,” he says.
The kid snores. The jedi wheezes.
Oh shit.
“Oh shit,” he says. “Kryze is going to kill me.”
“No,” the jedi says, still kind of fuzzy, “no no no, we can fix this. I have an idea.”
Din has a bad feeling about this.
“So you know how my sister killed Jabba the Hutt?”
His. Sister. Did.
What.
Nobody tells Din anything. He knew Jabba was dead, because news like that gets around. Until he’d met Boba, he’d assumed it was a Hutt thing. And then that Boba had done it, because it seemed like the sort of thing Boba would do. Maybe Fennec dared him, who’s to say.
He didn’t even know the jedi had a sister until about ten minutes and one extremely dramatic explosion ago.
“Well, it’s like that.” The jedi thinks for a moment. “Only with no bikinis.”
…
“Or carbonite.”
?!?
“Or backup.”
Din lets that sit for a minute. The jedi claps his hands on his thighs, then stands up, offering Din a hand and a sunshine smile. Din is not nearly emotionally prepared enough to refuse either.
“Oh, and we’re going to need a really ugly helmet.”
Bo-Katan is on Kalevala, which makes Din itchy. The last time he was here, he was wearing furs, hit an ambassador over the head with a dinner plate, jumped out a window without a jetpack, stole a very nice spaceship, and, most dangerously of all, made Bo-Katan look bad.
Sometimes Din is honestly amazed that the bounty asked for him alive, but he supposes Bo-Katan would much prefer to kill him herself.
It's damp, cold, green and grey. Good frog country. The child would love it.
Din hadn't let himself think about it, before.
He shouldn't think about it now. The planet is crawling with mando'ade, and the plan is so stupid he would have blamed it on Solo if Solo hadn't been frozen in carbonite the first go round.
Din glances at the jedi. His memories of Gideon's light cruiser are fuzzy and disjointed, what with all the durasteel walls his head was lovingly and repeatedly introduced to, but put together with all the times Ahsoka has handed him his ass, it's more than a little reassuring. Besides, they wouldn't be ancestral enemies if the jedi weren't very good at what they did. Mandalorians have more self-respect than that.
The landing platform is full of ships but empty of people; as they get closer to Bo-Katan's horrible palace of elongated triangles, Din starts to hear voices over the wind.
The jedi tilts his head, curious.
Oh, that? That's a sound well known wherever two or more mandos are gathered in glorious fratrimony.
They pass through the barrier keeping the weather out of the hall, and are hit with a wall of sound.
"Even if the sacred waters can be found -"
" - the fuck do we even care about the sword -"
" - since when do we let bounty hunters do our -"
" - can't believe you'd put carrots in uj'alayi, who even raised you -"
" - respect the office of the Mand'alor, not drag him planetside like a recalcitrant child -"
The jedi looks at Din, and Din senses, with the ease of the lifelong helmet-wearer, the raising of an eyebrow.
Din shrugs.
They're spotted immediately, of course, though that doesn't mean the arguing dies down. Several guns are pointed their way, and Din spots some shoulder-mounted missile launchers and other unsavoury things pop up, but mandalorians are dedicated when they've got shit to say and excel in multitasking.
The jedi tilts his head, birdlike, then shrugs and keeps walking, occasionally jabbing his blaster into the armoured spots beneath which lurk Din's kidneys, presumably for verisimilitude.
Din growls, and gets poked extra for his troubles.
"Well, well, well," Bo-Katan's voice cuts through the cacophony like the strike of beskar on rock. "Din Djarin."
"Show the Mand'alor some respect," hisses an elder, but not with any great degree of conviction.
The crowd around the throne clears, and Bo-Katan descends; Din hears the jedi whistle quietly, impressed. Figures he would appreciate a dramatic entrance, Din's yet to see him make any other kind.
Bo-Katan's eyes range over him, and Din simultaneously remembers that the jedi had insisted on dirtying up the armour - "we've gotta make it convincing," he'd said, eyes wide, and Grogu had backed him up, because he never missed a chance to throw mud around, or fire, or electricity, or knives - and that the Armourer is going to skin him from appearing in front of other mandalorians like this. He resists the urge to cringe just as her gaze skips to the jedi.
The sight of Bo-Katan pinching the bridge of her nose in horrified exasperation makes something wiggle with pleasure deep in Din's chest, like the child when they've just swallowed a bug. They're with Boba right now, so they're probably getting all the bugs their green little heart desires. Din's list of trusted babysitters is currently looking somewhat sparse, what with all the betrayal, but Boba has already been punished (Din will treasure the holos for ever) and is also least likely to sell the kid to jawas for spare parts. Even if he were tempted, Fennec would stop him. Probably.
"What. Happened."
"One Mand'alor," the jedi says in Huttese. "As promised. Money now."
"Where is the darksabre?" Kryze grits out. It's music to Din's ears, it really is.
"Bounty is for Mand'alor," the jedi says, butchering the pronunciation so hard Din expects the air to bleed. Several of Kryze's verde wince. "This is Mand'alor. Extras cost extra."
The jedi was right, actually. This is a great idea.
"The sword," Krzye says. "He would have been carrying a sword."
"Ohhhhh," the jedi says. "That sword."
He makes a show of patting his pockets, pouches, bags and boxes; Din had questioned the necessity of these, on planetary approach, and been told to watch and learn. He still doesn't see the necessity, but the comedic value cannot be overstated. It's a pity that the jedi and Boba are nemeses by proxy; Din feels certain that absent this otherwise insurmountable obstacle they would get on like a starship on fire.
"Ah," the jedi says, holding up a finger at a dramatically appropriate moment, i.e. when the sound of Bo-Katan's teeth grinding becomes audible enough to echo, and then selects the correct pouch, opens it, and pours.
Sparkling dust and metal scraps drift to the ground. There's just enough of a shape left to the crushed skeleton of the hilt that there can be no doubt as to what it used to be.
Din senses the familiar intent focus of a bunch of mandalorians all zooming in on the same thing at once. And then the equally familiar armoured body language of a bunch of mandalorians trying not to swear out loud.
Someone, distantly, mutters "hoooo-ly shit," and gets their buy'ce bonked for their trouble.
"Woves," Bo-Katan says, "Koska," and then jerks her chin at the pile of ex-sabre. Maybe she doesn't want to get too close, in case the failure is catching.
The pile of garbage is inspected. The jedi is whistling, tunelessly, hands stuck jauntily in the most accessible of his pockets. Din is resisting the urge to stamp on the nearest buy'ce and run before Bo-Katan gets any closer to the end of her incredibly short rope.
"It's the darksabre," Woves says, grimly. "Or what's left of it."
There is mild uproar.
Koska pushes herself off the ground and retreats to Bo-Katan's shoulder. She looks genuinely crushed.
Din does not feel guilty about this. He does not. He remembers the forks.
"It...broke?" Bo-Katan asks, like she can't believe it. It's the most uncertain Din's ever heard her sound about anything. Din takes his guilt, balls it up real small and crushes it beneath his metaphorical boot. He's not the Mand'alor, it was never his sword, and if she'd just taken it off him like he'd asked none of this would have happened.
You're so close, Djarin. Just a little bit further.
"Broke," the jedi says, dismissively, "fell apart. Discorporated. Dissolved into pieces. A little bit, ehhh, exploded? Exploded. Badly made sword, huh? I barely touched it."
Holy shit, the space wizard has a death wish.
"What...what does this mean?" Koska asks. "If there's no darksabre, how -"
Come on. Somebody say it.
"The darksabre is the weapon of the Mand'alor," Bo-Katan says, through bloodless lips. "The Mand'alor is the one who wields the darksabre. Without the sabre -"
So close. Come on.
"No Mand'alor?" Woves asks.
"No Mand'alor," Koska says, small and wondering. Bo-Katan doesn't answer.
Din feels like cheering. He feels like Boonta Eve fireworks. He feels like kissing Woves and then Koska full on the mouth. He expresses all of this by not moving a muscle and keeping his helmeted face perfectly still.
"Well, that all sounds lovely," the jedi says, in the voice of someone who was neither listening nor room-literate. "Money now, I leave, you keep the nice shiny boy all to yourself, yes?"
Bo-Katan tosses him the money. Din hears the familiar click-whirr of a puck being deactivated. He tenses, ready for flight.
"Can we go back to being pirates now?" Woves asks, and the room explodes.
The jedi vanishes without fanfare. Din fidgets in his unsealed cuffs. Bo-Katan locks eyes with him through the helmet. It's an unsettling feeling. Around them the argument rages on, sprouts legs, runs off in multiple directions, spawns a hundred other arguments. Between them, silence. Hanging on a thread. The endless void of space.
Din waits.
Bo-Katan sighs.
"Mand'alor no more," she says.
"Can I get that in writing?" Din asks.
"Get the fuck out."
“That was fun!” says the jedi, when Din meets him out by the ship. “I should pretend to be a bounty hunter more often.”
No, he really shouldn’t.
“Who knew I was such a good actor?”
It is only by the grace of darksabre-scrap-induced-shock that he walked out of there with all his limbs.
“So what now?” the jedi asks.
Din considers this. He feels light, all of a sudden, like he’d been wearing Paz’s rig on a dare and was suddenly allowed to put it down.
“Kid,” he says, “ship. Covert.”
“I like it,” the jedi says. “Simple. Easy to remember.”
Din’s pretty fond of it, too.