Chapter Text
When it came right down to it, Din hated his new ship. It rattled in parts he expected to be silent, and it was silent in parts that he expected to rattle. It juddered strangely on takeoff but not at high speeds, so he compensated when he didn’t need to and failed to when he did. The hold was a strange shape, the cockpit was a strange shape, the pilot’s seat was uncomfortable, his hands kept automatically drifting to the wrong parts of the control panel.
He hated his new ship, and he hated that it wasn’t the Razor Crest.
But it flew, and that was… something. He was grateful to Karga for finding it for him, and for letting him take it on credit that Din had a sneaking, uncomfortable suspicion would never be called in. The new ship had flown him away from Nevarro, and had flown him elsewhere, too.
He couldn’t quite remember where all he’d been; he’d told Karga he was going to find some work, and he’d made a half-hearted attempt, but he’d mostly just… drifted. He jumped from planet to planet, and from city to city, and from town to town, and everywhere he went he asked if anyone had seen or heard of any Mandalorians, and everywhere he went the answer was no.
He would find work. He would find something to do. When the time was right. When his rations and fuel ran out.
It didn’t even take him that long, though, before he found his new ship flying him back to Nevarro again. As good a place as any. One where he could pick up some information. One where he could get a sense of how things were in the galaxy.
One where he knew people.
As good a place as any.
His new ship, regardless of how easy it was to hate it, brought him back to his almost-home and set him down in the shipyard with no problems. Karga was there waiting for him, arms crossed, Cara next to him. They grinned at him when he stepped off the ship, concern under the expression. They were concerned about him. Of course. He supposed that whole scene aboard Gideon’s ship had been a bit pitiful. He tried not to let it get to him.
“Mando!” Karga said, clapping a hand on Din’s shoulder. “You’re a sight for sore eyes. How’s the ship working out for you?”
“Functional,” Din answered shortly. “How’re things here?”
“Functional,” Cara cut in. Din noticed that the badge of the New Republic was still pinned to her shoulder, and next to it there was another one, a silver and bronze circle showing a star with a leafy crown wrapped around it. Cara saw him looking and her grin got wider, her chest puffing out with pride. “It’s a Republic special commendation,” she said, tapping it. “For bringing in Gideon.”
Din smiled under the safety of his helmet. “Least they could do,” he said.
“Yeah, well, it really was the least,” Karga grumbled. “They didn’t send anyone to back her up, she’s still the only Marshal on Nevarro.”
Cara shrugged. “They’re stretched thin at the moment. Why, you think I can’t handle Nevarro on my own?” She elbowed Karga in the side. “Besides, they did send me a few new toys. New Republic standard, apparently. You should see them, Mando, they’re pretty fancy.”
“I’ll stop in, you can give me the tour,” Din answered. “Look, I’m just here to lay low, pick up some leads.”
“Course you are,” Karga said, gesturing him out of the shipyard, toward the streets of the city. “I got you rooms at the inn. First round’s on me.”
***
One day became two became three, and before he knew it, he’d been on Nevarro, in the same town as always, for a little over a week. The days seemed to slip together, and he still wasn’t sure what he’d do next. His decision-making powers had never deserted him that way before, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do to make his mind work properly again.
He wished he could speak to the Armorer again. He wished he could find the Covert bustling with life, rather than empty and still. He wished the noises of the town would become the sounds of the Razor Crest, and of…
He didn’t finish the thought. He wished a lot of things that were useless and impossible, and he paced his rented room in circles, and he sometimes walked the streets of the city and sometimes visited Cara and mostly did nothing at all.
At least Cara seemed genuinely happy to see him. She told him that most of her day in the Marshal’s office was boring and she’d welcome the company. He sat in the chair across her desk from her and listened to her talk about anything that came into her mind, mostly about Nevarro but sometimes about the wider galaxy.
“They haven’t said anything official,” she said one day, a slight frown on her face, “but I get the feeling that people above my pay grade are worried about something in the Outer Rim. I keep getting messages from the Core Worlds saying that us Marshals out here are important and need to keep our eyes open.”
Din considered that for a moment. “You reported the lab on Nevarro? What they were doing with…” He stopped himself, changed direction. “What they were doing there and on Gideon’s ship?”
“Yeah,” Cara said, and she was watching him closely, as if looking for the reaction under the helmet. He didn’t think about it too closely. “Well,” Cara went on, with a shrug, “they’ll tell me what they’ll tell me. At least they trust me to take care of things here.”
It was pleasant, sitting for a while in Cara’s office, comfortable, even, but he couldn’t keep it going for long. Restlessness would build under his skin, and he’d take his leave, walk around until he made it back to his room, and then he’d pace in circles again until something drove him out of his head.
It was an unsustainable life, but he couldn’t seem to do anything to change it. It was almost a relief, therefore, when Karga, catching him walking on the street outside the cantina one day, the ninth after he’d come to Nevarro, told him that someone wanted to talk to him.
“A job?” Din asked automatically.
“Could be,” Karga answered, a slight frown on his face. “Didn’t say, just wanted to talk to you specifically. Asked for a private room.” He pointed toward one of the rooms at the back of the cantina.
“Give a name?”
“Nothing.”
Din considered it for a moment, then shrugged. “I’ll see what he wants.”
“Call if you need anything,” Karga said, with a significant look at a couple of men at the bar who were obviously Karga’s bodyguards. Din didn’t know whether to be exasperated or grateful that Karga was apparently determined to look out for him.
Din shouldered his way through the crowd in the cantina and stepped through the door into the private room before he could second-guess himself. Could be some ex-Imperial, wanting revenge. Could be someone who’d picked up a bounty on the kid and wanted to extract information. Could be a lot of things. No way to know, so no reason to hesitate.
He shut the door behind him and took stock of the person in front of him, leaning back in the booth with their feet up on the table. Plain shirt, trousers, and boots, plain blaster holstered on a plain belt, and a scratched helmet with full face mask, only a slit for the eyes left uncovered.
So, trying not to be recognized. Maybe they had a reputation on Nevarro.
“You the Mando?” the stranger said, their voice crackling through a modulator that rendered it completely distorted.
“I’m a Mando,” Din answered, sliding himself into the booth across from the stranger. “Might be the one you’re looking for.”
The stranger leveled a long look at him, then shook their head. “That armor still gives me the creeps,” they said, and took their feet off the table. They reached up and pulled off their helmet, setting it down on the table and giving Din an expectant look.
Din ran over the new information in his mind: Human. Male-presenting. Probably about Din’s own age. Clean-shaven, brown hair flattened from the helmet. There was something slightly familiar about the stranger, but, as he couldn’t quite place where he’d seen the face before, he judged it irrelevant.
“Sorry about the mask,” the man said with a shrug. “Wanted to get in and out without being mobbed.”
So, a recognizable face on Nevarro. Must be in some field that didn’t overlap with bounty hunting, though, or Din would have been better able to place him. “You needed something?” he asked.
“Just to be clear,” the man said, leaning his elbows on the table and squinting at Din, “you’re the Mando that had a bit of business with Luke Skywalker six months or so ago?”
Din’s blood did a complicated thing where it ran cold and then blazed hot. “What’s happened?” Din asked, voice gone flat and harsh. He had half-stood, he realized, his hand hovering over his blaster.
The man raised one hand, palm out as though to placate him, although Din didn’t fail to notice that his other hand was over his own blaster. “Nothing, the kid’s fine, I swear. This has nothing to do with him.”
Din relaxed slowly, by degrees, until he was sitting again, his hands on the table. The jagged pulse of dread took a little longer to drain away. He cocked his head at the man, narrowing his eyes behind his helmet. “So what does it have to do with?” he asked.
“The New Republic,” the stranger answered, with a bit of a shrug. “Luke asked me to track you down and give you a message.”
On a first-name basis with that Jedi. Din filed that away. “I don’t have any business with the New Republic,” he said shortly.
“It’s just a message,” the man answered, and slid a holo recording across the table toward him. “Not an obligation.”
“But he does have a job that needs doing?” Din pressed, not reaching for the recording.
The stranger nodded shortly. “He does. And the New Republic will pay for it to get done.”
“Why me?” The Jedi probably had access to more resources than just a bounty hunter, however good that bounty hunter was, and the New Republic certainly did.
The man smiled and leaned back in the booth again. “Your kid speaks very highly of you, apparently.”
Another alternating flash of cold and hot traveled through Din’s body, and he was very glad of his helmet. A slightly alarming lump formed in his throat, and he reached for the recording and turned it over and over in one hand to gain himself a bit of time to get rid of it. Finally, he said, “I’ll watch the message. No guarantees.”
“I didn’t ask for any,” the stranger said, and he picked his helmet up off the table and stood. He headed for the door, leaving Din at the table, staring at the recording and feeling utterly bewildered. “Hey,” the man said, hesitating with his hand on the door controls. Din looked up sharply, wondering whether he’d need to reach for his blaster.
“What is it?” he asked, placing his hand on the edge of the table, ready to push himself to his feet.
If the stranger noticed his tension, he didn’t mention it. He wasn’t even looking at Din, just staring down into the fact mask of his helmet. “You sent your kid with Luke, to train?” he asked, his voice missing the bravado it had carried at the table.
“I did,” Din ground out, feeling as though he had to force the words.
After a moment, the stranger asked, “Do you regret it?”
Din’s hands clenched into fists without his permission, and he had to unclench his jaw to answer. “It was where he belonged.”
The man opened his mouth as though to say something else, then abruptly pushed the helmet back onto his head and left the room.
Din sat for a long minute, looking at the holo recording, before he finally reached out and triggered the playback. The figure of the Jedi, the hood of his robe down across his shoulders and his hands tucked into his sleeves, appeared, flickering blue above the disk of the machine. Din was not ready for the response the sight provoked: a feeling like he’d been punched in the chest. He had to mentally scramble not to remember the last time he’d seen Luke Skywalker.
“To the Mandalorian of Clan Djarin,” the message began, and Din’s hand shot out and paused the recording. He took a deep breath in, out, another, another.
Clan Djarin . As far as there was such a thing, there was only one other member. You are a clan of two. Your kid speaks very highly of you, apparently .
Din had to squeeze his eyes shut, swallow several times, and sit very still for a very long moment. Finally, when he had a handle on himself again, he reached out and started the recording again.
“To the Mandalorian of Clan Djarin. I am sending this message to you in hopes that you will help me and the New Republic. The Empire, for all the victories we’ve achieved, may not be entirely defeated, as you yourself have seen. The New Republic has been trying to gain information about its plans, but has so far been unsuccessful. I think, given what I now know about your skills and your experience, that you might have more luck. This recording contains coordinates for the last known base of operations of an Imperial agent known as Slate. We believe that Slate is behind several suspicious deaths of New Republic citizens, and was in contact with Moff Gideon before his capture. You would do the New Republic a very important service if you would find out everything you can about this agent, their plans, and their current location. I understand that your interests are not the same as those of the New Republic, but I hope that you will take on this task. It may mean the difference between life and death for many.” The Jedi paused, and glanced to the side at something out of the recording’s view, a slight smile on his face. He turned back to the recording. “Grogu is well, and his training is progressing.” The recording ended.
For a very long time, Din found himself completely unable to move, his mind blank. Just the mention of Grogu’s name had forced all his thoughts out of his head. Finally, he reached out slowly and took the recording off the table, slipping it into a pocket at his belt. Then he stood up and made his way out of the room and out of the cantina entirely, moving as if through a fog.
***
“Wait, describe the guy again,” Cara said intently, leaning forward across her desk. Din did so, putting in all the details he could remember. When he’d finished, Cara closed her eyes, took a deep breath in and out through her nose, then opened her eyes again and typed something into her computer. She flipped the screen around so that he could see. “Is this him?”
Din cocked his head at the screen, showing some kind of official image from the New Republic. “That’s him.”
Cara threw up her hands and made a long, wordless sound of utter frustration. “Dank farrik! You met Han fucking Solo and you didn’t even realize it?!”
The name was even more familiar than the face. Din furrowed his brow behind his helmet, thinking. “Rebellion fighter,” he said.
“Rebellion hero ,” Cara corrected. “He helped destroy both Death Stars!”
“Good to know,” Din answered.
Cara shook her head. “I can’t know you. I cannot know you. First you ask Luke Skywalker if he’s a Jedi, now this.”
“Only one of us went out from the Covert at a time,” Din said, a little stung. “I didn’t leave until after the Empire fell.”
“Literally living under a rock,” Cara grumbled, turning her screen back toward herself. “Well, if Skywalker’s right, ‘fell’ might not be the right word.” Cara wrinkled her nose and frowned, her eyes darting around the office, toward the door and the street beyond. “Fuck, if I didn’t have to be here...” She trailed off, sounding wistful.
“I’ll call you if there’s any Imperial heads to be cracked.”
“Thanks, Mando.” Cara leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Take care of yourself out there.”