corellianhounds

[corellianhounds]

Toro Calican Lives AU

Chapter 4 — First Impressions

Media: The Mandalorian

Rating: Gen.

Word Count: 14,119

Warnings: Canon-typical violence

Art Credit: Christian Alzmann, The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian

Series Summary: What would have happened if Toro Calican hadn’t betrayed the Mandalorian? How would the story have changed if he had lived?

Chapter Summary: Things are bound to change when you throw somebody new into the mix.

This chapter, though similar to canon, better develops some of the characters and circumstances leading into “Sanctuary.”

—

Din gingerly stretched his arm up to assess the injuries he’d sustained. Over the past two weeks he’d been in multiple fights, electrocuted, dropped sixty feet onto his back, bodily hit four times by a mudhorn, shot by a modified MK, and had a speederbike shot out from under him going a hundred miles an hour.

The damage was taking its toll.

Purple, blue, and magenta bruises bloomed across his ribs and chest in a number of patterns and intensities. The ones from the Sandcrawler fall and the mudhorn were tinged green with healing around the edges, but newer ones criss-crossed his skin in Venn diagrams of pain. He’d been containing his movement as much as he could since Arvala-7: two ribs felt loose and his back ached with gravity’s pull every time he got out of bed. He hadn’t had proper enough rest after the fall and the tussle with the mudhorn to justifiably say he was back up to par, though for reasons unknown he didn’t feel as bad as he thought he should.

Shand’s second shot had hit the back of his pauldron, and while the blasterfire had been deflected, the force behind it had still traveled through the joint of his shoulder, which was to say nothing of the shot he’d taken square in the chest: the rifle bolt had felt like another hit from the mudhorn. In the privacy of the bunk he rolled his shoulder, taking note of at which angles it hurt most to move as he picked up the hand scanner and hovered it over his ribs to get a reading.

The screen blipped, the readout telling him there was no internal bleeding this time, so he set it aside and sifted through the analgesics in the hidden compartment by the head of the cot. Of the most recent injuries, Shand’s strike to the inside of his knee and the loose ribs concerned him the most. He hated wasting medical supplies, but the knee had been a bother even before the mercenary’s fight and he needed to be able to walk unhindered: with a steadying breath he lifted the lip of his helmet and knocked back the painkillers, then stooped to roll up his pant leg and swab a spot on the outside of his knee, injecting a half dose of bacta with the stimpak. The muscle strain and bruising in his chest and back would have to wait until they found somewhere to settle and he could rest properly— There were too many muscle groups working together for an injection to do much good while they were still on the move. Having his feet under him would have to do.

The kid stirred groggily in the hammock above the cot. Din could feel the critter’s big eyes watching him. It made him uncomfortable, but the kid either couldn’t tell or didn’t care. Instead he rolled over the edge of the hammock to dangle his feet above the cot and drop down onto the bedding. Din watched him from the side as he toddled across the blanket to him, perching by his thigh to peer under Din’s arm.

When the child reached his hand up to Din’s side, Din removed the autoinjector and shifted away from him on the cot, stowing the medical supplies in the compartment and letting his pant leg fall before picking the kid up. He put him back up in the hammock and shoved his boots on.

“Just for a minute,” he told the kid as he fastened his tunic and donned the armor he’d set aside. “We’ll get food when I’m done.”

Out in the hold it appeared the gunslinger had helped himself to a ration pack and was working his way through a biscuit while sat atop a footlocker. His bedroll nearby was still in a state of disarray, his bag half-packed. Toro nodded in greeting before going back to his work on the disassembled heavy blaster pistol in his lap, a torque wrench in one hand and the biscuit between his teeth. Mando passed him to get some food ready for the kid.

Toro rolled the toolkit back up and quickly reassembled the blaster. “So where’re we headed?” he asked.

“Sorgan,” Mando replied. The child took the ration bar Din gave him, happily chowing down.

“Never heard of it.”

“Backwoods planet near Savareen.”

“The old coaxium refinery?”

Din was surprised. “Yeah. It’s four quadrants up on the Core axis though; Sorgan is fairly isolated.”

“Do they have a Lodge?”

“Nope.”

“But you said—”

“I said, passage to the next system, and we’ll see where we go from there.” Mando picked up the pieces of the modified rifle left by the mercenary, looking over the build. He opened the gunlocker, setting them inside on the rack and rearranging other ordnance. “I also said the kid and I are laying low. You won’t always have a go-between for these jobs, and you may have to find different work between commissions. If you’re sticking around, we won’t be meeting with a broker until we’ve recovered and restocked supplies.”

“Yeah, that’s fair. My arm’s in pretty bad shape.” Toro tucked his chin, thumbing the tear in his shirtsleeve aside. Mando glanced out from behind the armory door: Toro had some blistering on his forearm and a shallow wound on his shoulder, probably from one of Fennec’s blades. Toro moved the arm without hindrance and he seemed alert. Mando stared.

“Is it still bleeding?”

“No, it stopped not long after we hit hyperspace.”

“… Can you move your shoulder.”

“Yeah, but it’s still an open wound; you have anything for it?”

Mando bit his tongue, stepping around his new crewmate to rifle through a cabinet attached to the bulkhead near the bow. “Bacta patch if you can’t walk it off.” He sifted through the medical cabinet, searching for the equipment on the charging dock. “Medical-grade expansion foam if it’s deep and you removed whatever you were stabbed with. You’ll have to get back to your base of operations or a med center if you think they hit an organ or artery. Cauterizing suture if it’s a slash as long as they missed any tendons.”

“I thought the point of patching wounds wasn’t to cause more damage,” Toro said with amusement.

Mando returned with the cauterizer, seeing Toro’s face sober instantly.

“Woah, hey, I’m not using that. What happened to good old fashioned stitches?”

Mando stopped in front of him, offering the cauterizer and a patch to cover it. “Each stitch is a potential infection site. Medical-grade cauterizer will kill bacteria and create a suture at the same time, and it’s faster to do in the field.”

“What if the blade was poisoned?”

Mando moved Toro’s torn shirt aside, examining his shoulder. “It wasn’t.”

“But what if—”

“It wasn’t,” Din repeated. “You’d know by now if it was, and you’re stalling. Here; cauterizer feels better if you do it yourself.”

Toro glanced back down to his shoulder before looking at Mando with suspicion. “What about a stab wound? Cauterizer’s not gonna get that deep.”

“We’re burning daylight, kid.”

“Humor me,” Toro argued. “So I know what you plan to zap me with in the future.”

Din sighed. “They’re… harder to repair than slash wounds,” he said. “Plastospray will work on anything except bone. If you’re trying to conserve your medical supplies it’s a waste to use it on a slash when you may need it for something more serious down the road. Blood seeps outward from a slash and you’ll be able to see what you suture back into place. Stabs displace deeper ligaments and tendons on the way in and if they hit an artery, the blood pools inward and you won’t have a gauge for how much you’ve really lost. You’ll die from the pressure buildup before anything else.”

Toro hesitated, looking back down to his shoulder. “You get stabbed often?”

“Enough for it to count.”

Far down on the planet below, a rippling shudder passed through the air and rattled the bones of those in the fishing village, turning eyes skyward for the source. Omera watched as a heavy gunship coasted down beyond the village, skimming the tops of tsuga trees in the direction of Lau. It had been a long time since something of that weight class had entered the area; without a sufficient starport, Sorgan was largely forgettable to the rest of the Outer Rim and to Omera, that had been the appeal. Sorgan wasn’t supposed to be on anybody’s radar.

“Do you think they could help?”

Stoke glanced at Caben. “We don’t know who that could be.”

Caben rested his hand on the dredger, his other arm hanging across it. “It’s worth asking, don’t you think?”

“Not if they’re not planning to stick around long,” Stoke said, going back to his work. “And we’re needed here. The raiders were up at the springs last week. They’re getting closer.”

“We can’t sit here and do nothing,” Caben said seriously. “We need someone to back us up, Stoke.”

“We’re not “doing nothing,” Caben. If anyone leaves now there’s less people for the lookout.”

“What if we just went to Lau to see if the loggers could help? It’s better than not trying at all. Right, Omera?”

Omera surveyed the ponds in thought, realist and idealist arguing behind her. Neela and Fashol were tiredly sifting through dead krill in the eastern quad, chucking them into a bucket to be disposed of. The ash from the fires had clouded and poisoned the pond almost immediately after the attack, the blue-bodied crustaceans being choked out as the water turned grey. Entire ponds would need emptied and filtered, and the phytoplankton recultivated before they could even be reseeded with krill.

Between the ponds she could see the children pulling broken equipment out of walkways, their round faces somber. Winta’s especially had drawn into one of severe contemplation as she rigged up a pulley and rope to have three of the other children pull on it together, hauling one of the destroyed fishing droids out of the water. The expression she had was much too old for her young face.

“Caben’s right.”

Stoke and Caben, shocked for different reasons, jumped up to follow Omera as she wiped her hands on her apron and trekked back to the longhouse. Stoke spoke up first. “Omera, we don’t know who those people could be,” he hissed, looking around them for eavesdroppers. “What kind of crew needs a ship that big? You saw the guns on it.”

”Gunship means they could be mercenaries,” Caben said, perhaps a bit too excitedly. “Which means they could be hired.”

“Or gun us down for even asking…” Stoke said under his breath. “For all we know, the Klatooinians have been hitting Lau too and the loggers called in their own backup.”

“These raids have gone on long enough,” Omera said with finality. “If the bandits continue at the rate they have, we’ll have nothing to set aside for winter. There’s not enough ammunition to rely on hunting— And we need to conserve what defenses we have.” She started up the astromech and checked the power gauge, looking out again across the village. “This is the third time in seven weeks, and every time they attack they come further into the village.”

There was a burst of laughter out by one of the ponds; the three adults turned, seeing the children giggling amongst themselves as they stood from the mud. Winta had released the magnet on the droid once it was above land and the rope slackening sent them all to the ground in a tumble.

“We’ll pool the rest of what we made from the rainy season,” Omera decided. “Tell them it’s all that we have.”

As she readied the wagon, both men packed bread and pemmican into a satchel, listening as she gave them instructions and called on the other elders of the village for an impromptu meeting. Several of them were uneasy at the prospect of sending the men on their own through the woods, a fact Stoke supported, but Caben insisted that they’d bed down for the night in Lau and set out early enough the next morning to be back in the village by sunset. The bandits had only attacked three days ago and it seemed unlikely they would come back that quickly when the village had nothing to offer them.

One of the older men, a grizzled hunter by the name of Kolt, stepped away from the group as they discussed what Stoke and Caben might say to the loggers and potential ship crew. After the rest of them loaded the wagon and finalized the contributions to the purse he returned, a scattershot thrower and case of cartridges with him. He gave both to Stoke, and the solemnity of their mission was finally realized by those among them who’d had their hopes raised.

“Keep it on hand, come nightfall,” Kolt grunted. “Don’t shoot what you can’t see… But don’t hesitate if you need to use it.”

Stoke nodded, and with grim faces he and Caben set off for the long ride to Lau.

Sorgan appeared beyond the viewport as a lush blue-green marvel, a far cry different from the barren Tatooine landscape. As they descended Toro watched meadows, springs, forests, and rivers span out beneath them, more green wilderness than he’d ever seen in one place. The Crest circled a quadrant in the northern hemisphere, made a circuit and doubled-back to land a few kilometers out past a town with communal buildings near a river. The town was purported to be a trading post, one of a few on an otherwise sparsely inhabited planet. The population was spread out, no centralized starports or industrial centers to speak of, but it looked like there were a few outlying rural communities on the scanner. They would be a day’s ride away if and when they picked back up: Toro thought back to the catalogue of picks he’d been given the choice of at the Guild lodge he booked Shand’s commission from, mulling over the names of those he saw on various posting boards for the Outer Rim. Sorgan may have bigger towns east of their location that had a wider variety of local listings. Even provincial farm planets were bound to have trouble.

Mando cycled through the landing procedures, bringing the Crest to stasis before lowering it into a camouflaged clearing surrounded by trees. “You don’t have anyone who’s going to come looking for you, do you?” he asked, pulling the yoke up level with the horizon line. He flipped three other switches and the ship lowered steadily to the ground, settling with a hiss of hydraulics.

Toro shook his head. “You and the kid are the only ones on this crate with criminal pasts chasing them,” he said with amusement. “Still not sure what that one did to warrant Guild interest.”

The child cooed, tapping the arm of his seat. Mando stood and gestured for Toro to move as he went back into the storage compartment behind the cockpit and sifted through supplies. “Anybody with a score to settle? Anyone you owe money?”

Toro snorted and spread his arms with a look that conveyed Please, are you serious? “Definitely not.”

“Parents, headmasters, commanding officers?” the Mandalorian pressed. “Anyone who would recognize you in a port and raise the alarm?”

“… No.”

Mando came back to the ladder descending to the hold with a bag over one shoulder as he picked up the kid. “Don’t sound too sure about that.”

The Mandalorian slid one-handed down to the cargo hold with his boots on the outer rails of the ladder. Toro climbed down after him, skipping the last few rungs to hop down. “No one’s following me. I told you, I’m on my own.”

Mando dropped the subject. He put the kid on one of the footlockers and restocked his munitions from the armory before pressing a command on his bracer to lower the ramp. A warm breeze flooded in with the light, bringing with it the scent of damp earth and moss and a wavering hum that sounded like it was coming from the trees. Mando stepped over Toro’s bedroll, strapping the pronged rifle to his back.

“Get your gear together.”

“You think we’ll camp somewhere else tonight?”

“No,” Mando said. He moved Toro’s bag to the side with his foot before going back to the kid. “It’s in my way; keep it together and out from underfoot.”

It took a moment for Toro to process what he’d said: he scowled and did as he was told. “I’m not a kid, you know. Don’t have to tell me to clean my room.”

Mando turned to stare at him for a moment longer than he really cared for. It was getting annoying.

“I know you’re not a kid,” Mando said flatly. “Which is why I expect you to keep your gear in order. You’ll have to leave at a moment’s notice more often than not and what you carry on your person may be the only resources available to you. If you can’t keep track of your own equipment, what makes me think you’ll be able to handle anything more important?”

“All right, all right, point taken.”

“Good.” The Mandalorian faced him again. “Here’s the plan: I’m going into town to find lodging. I’ll scope out the area and be back before long. Wait here and watch the kid.”

Toro snorted indignantly. “If you only brought me along to be a babysitter, I’m out.” Toro tossed his bedroll and pack to the side, looking expectantly at the Mandalorian.

Mando called his bluff. “Fine by me. Start walking.”

Toro’s eyes narrowed; his patience with the bounty hunter and every taciturn jab that morning was running out. He stepped up to face the Mandalorian, jutting his chin in accusation. “What’s the point in agreeing to work with me if you’re just going to keep me grounded, huh? There’s no reason to waste time with two trips to town. I’m ready to go.”

“I don’t need distractions.”

”You could use another set of eyes.”

”What I could really use,” Mando said through gritted teeth, “Is somebody who can follow basic directions without arguing with me every step of the way.”

Toro was getting frustrated. “I’ve already more than proven myself,” he said. “I had your back on Tatooine.”

“Which is why I trust you to watch the ship and the kid,” Mando bit back. “This is the biggest town in the quadrant— If they can’t sustain us for even a week of laying low, we need to find a better area before nightfall. I don’t want to keep track of more people than I have to, so either you stay here as lookout or you cut your losses and take a hike.”

Toro stared down the Mandalorian for a long minute, but Mando didn’t waver. He glanced over to the kid before he sat back against a crate with a stormy expression and crossed his arms. “Fine. We’ll be here.”

“Good. Lock up if you’re outside for long.”

The Mandalorian left down the gangplank. The child next to Toro immediately shuffled down off his perch and toddled toward the ramp; he hadn’t anticipated that the kid would realize Mando was leaving him behind so quickly and hopped up to snatch the kid before he could go far. The Mandalorian didn’t look back, and the hum from the trees fell silent as he disappeared into the forest. The kid whined as he squirmed in Toro’s grip, small clawed hands reaching out to grasp at air as he babbled something unintelligible.

“Don’t worry, kid, your old man will be back before long,” Toro said. He surveyed the hold for something to put him in to keep him corralled, but arranging the crates would take two hands to get them organized into something that would keep the boy penned in.

The kid continued to wriggle. Toro struggled to keep a grip on him, for the first time worried the kid had no sense of self-preservation when it came to being dropped from several feet in the air. He had to readjust his grip more than once as he distractedly scooted trunks together with his boot.

“Cut it out, kid, he’s coming back, just relax and— Ow!”

The kid dropped to the floor, Toro staring at his bleeding finger in shock. The child had bit him and was now toddling on small but surprisingly quick legs down the ramp into the grass.

“Hey!” Toro hollered again, wiping his finger on his trousers and hopping down to jog after the boy with a grumble. He caught up to the kid and picked him up before he got too far, carrying him under his arm like a sack of potatoes back to the ship and keeping his fingers out of reach.

“Listen,” Toro said, plopping him back on a footlocker. “He’s not just going to leave you, all right? He left the ship here too, so settle down.”

The boy’s long ears drooped like a wilted flower. His big dark eyes were the saddest thing Toro had ever seen, gazing out at the trees.

“What’s with the ears? Cheer up, you look like a Gungan. I told you he’s coming back,” Toro repeated. “Trust me.”

The solemn child huffed, folding his hands inside his sleeves and resigning himself to his position on the trunk.

Toro rolled his eyes, but the plaintive features of the little thing were enough to prod him into rummaging around in the galley for a distraction.

“Here.” Toro fished around in a thin plastifilm bag and held out some dried meat. “Eat something.”

The kid, forlorn until Toro mentioned food, perked up at the proffered snack and took it without a fuss. Toro sat back and stretched his legs, eyeing the boy for any other sign of an escape attempt, but the kid seemed satisfied to sit and gnaw on the jerky so Toro tossed the plastifilm bag aside and crossed his arms, looking around the cargo hold.

It was quiet for a long time, save for the sound of the wilderness as the kid worked his way through the cured meat, and eventually the boy got up to explore his surroundings, curiously poking at foot lockers and cubbies at floor level. Toro watched him explore before the boy eventually got a supply box open and amused himself with rolling the contents around on the floor, stacking them and knocking them down or organizing them into piles and patterns. He was especially intrigued by the folding camp utensils, managing to open them partway and arrange several forks in a feathered display on either side of a cleaning rod for a blaster barrel.

Toro chuckled, surveying the space again and wondering if there was a toolbox he could commandeer for a couple hours. He’d already made note of the head and the galley, as well as the carbonite chamber and racks. The captain’s berth occupied only a fraction of the lower deck in something Toro would closer consider a closet than a cabin, and now knowing where the armories and medical cabinet were he’d fairly mapped the entire hold, save for what utilities lay behind the access panels at the bow. Abovedecks was a different story, but he liked the greenery and breeze the open docking ramp afforded them so he figured he’d save further exploration for another time.

The carbonite chamber had especially been of interest: he’d heard of some bounty hunters transporting live captures in carbonite, but he’d never seen evidence of it for himself. Those were the kinds of rumors that slipped through from the more unsavory relatives who would find their way home on holidays or when they were in need of a loan; it was shared as gossip just as often as it was used as an overexaggerated threat of punishment for bad behavior. Seeing that not only had one been installed on the gunship, but that it had multiple racks for acquired targets validated Toro’s hunch that Mando was the real deal. Shand may have been right about the hunter doing more lying in wait when it came to tracking her, but Toro saw how the Mandalorian fought in the garage on Tatooine, and the Crest boasted a substantial array of weapons compared to that of an average traveler.

The thought of Tatooine brought him back to the kid, who was now shuffling through one of the crates that had been turned on its side. It was mostly clothes or camping gear so Toro left him to play with them. He had no idea what the kid was but he walked upright and seemed alert enough to be sentient, so Toro figured he must be some species from the outlying planets he’d never heard of. Whatever the case was, the Mandalorian was willing to kill for him so Toro would at least see to it that he stayed alive on his watch. Nothing in the woods would clear a dozen yards of the ship without getting a blaster burn for its trouble.

Pulling his pistol, though, Toro looked it over with a frown. It was only operating at about eighty-five percent efficiency, and the trigger wasn’t quite finessed to his liking; originally built with the intent of being pressure-sensitive in the first place, the hair-trigger was touchier now than before. His momentary patch-job would work as long as he was mindful of the sensor, but it was liable to make the housing run hot even without firing concentrated charges. To really fix it he needed a fusioncutter and at least one grounded clamp to keep some of the mechanical pieces inside the receiver from touching while he worked on it some more, and he hadn’t found either while poking around the ship.

Toro stood, going to the gunlocker and jimmying around the casing until he found the release; the doors retreated to the sides and Toro couldn’t help but grin.

”Now that’s more like it…” he murmured to himself. “EE-3 carbine, drum blaster, mortar gun…”

Toro whistled, impressed. His hand glided over the stock of the grenade launcher, and then he looked up to probably the largest pieces occupying the racks. Lifting the two-part assembly free, he latched the MK sniper rifle together, sliding the barrel into place on clean fittings. Long-range weapons didn’t appeal to him as much as short-range action did; he wouldn’t deny that it was a beautiful gun, but what use was an impressive kill if nobody was around to give you the credit?

From what he could tell, the rifle could operate as two different weapons depending on whether the extended barrel was locked in place or not. Without the sniper configuration giving it an additional eighteen inches in length, it could be further disassembled down to what was still a solid blaster rifle for short range combat. He could only imagine what the impact would feel like at close range.

OSS telescopic sight with an infrared detector… Short relay gas primer, reinforced condenser built into the receiver, induction coil in the stock… Modified was an understatement. No wonder the bolts packed a punch.

Toro turned it over. He was surprised by how light it was, considering the length, but he supposed Shand hadn’t been one to linger anywhere long, whatever her jobs were in the past. He could respect the desire to stay on the move.

“What do you think, kid?” Toro asked. He gripped it one-handed with the barrel raised, sitting into one side with the weight of the stock resting against hip. “Think Pops will let me have it? He may be good but even he can’t sight two rifles at once, ha.”

Though he wasn’t expecting a reply, there seemed to be a distinct difference in the kid’s lack of noise that gave Toro pause. He looked back out to the crates.

”Kid?”

The child was gone.

Swearing loudly and creatively, Toro set the rifle back on the rack and darted towards the ramp, jumping down to the grass all in the span of a second. He scanned the clearing for the boy and, not finding him, jogged for the trees.

Nothing.

Toro took a breath and jogged back to the ship, grabbing his gun and belt. He hit the white button to the left of the ramp to initiate its retreat and squeezed outside before it raised, buckling his holster in place and striding back into the clearing. Ship locked, he analyzed his surroundings.

The Razor Crest glinted in the late morning sun. Scrutinizing the gleam, Toro realized the light only reflected from the upper twelve feet or so. He crouched to the ground, surveying the earth. The clearing was almost entirely in the shade— Grass grew in patches here and there, and there was moss around the edges of the brush, but the rest of the ground was packed mud, and damp at that.

Carefully, he matched a line between the Crest and the spot where the Mandalorian had disappeared, and upon closer inspection was able to pick up on some very small, three-toed footprints. His own boots had smeared or obscured a lot of them in his haste, but there were enough for him to find the exact edge of moss the child had disappeared behind. With annoyance settling just this side of trepidation Toro picked his way through the woods.

“He couldn’t have gone far,” he muttered to himself. “But wherrrrrre would he have gone first…”

Whatever hum emanated from the trees rose and fell in varying degrees of pitch as he tracked, effectively drowning out any possibility of hearing a child the size of a mouse droid shuffling through the brush. To make matters worse, the boy had a brown coat and skin the color of foliage, so the chances of spotting him beneath the sun-dappling canopy were further complicated by the unfortunate, coincidental camouflage.

Toro’s shirt clung to his back as he walked, sticky with sweat, and it didn’t seem to matter whether he was in the shade or not because the heat was the same regardless. Wispy mosquitoes whined around him, constantly waiting for him to settle before sticking to his skin with pinpricks of annoyance, and his trousers chafed, snagging on thorns as he continued muscling his way through the brush. When he passed by a tree bearing the same lichen he’d seen twice before, Toro let out a frustrated yell and stomped back to the trail. He kicked a stone out of his way and smacked another mosquito, angrily scratching the welt it left behind.

He’d always hated the idea of camping.

Toro groaned, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes and grinding them in frustration. “It’s really gonna set the old guy off if you lost his kid,” he said absently. “You look away for all of two seconds and he pulls an escape act… Might as well boot the kid outside yourself next time, steal the ship and pray that guy never finds you… Better chance at surviving than having to face him and fess up…”

The kid had to be going after the Mandalorian. There was nothing enticing enough to keep him out here, no berries or animals to draw his attention, and there were more than enough negative incentives to urge him back to the ship— Since Toro had yet to see the kid double back he had to assume he was on the search for the hunter. There was something resembling a foot path between the trees, but Toro didn’t know if the kid would have the intuition to follow it. He could only see it himself because he was at a height to do so.

The gunslinger slowed to a stop, considering that. He crouched down to the forest floor, feeling the earth dampen the knee of his trousers as he ducked his head. Soft, leafy ferns hovered roughly at the boy’s height by Toro’s reckoning, and below that was a shortened view of the look and distance of the trail. It was possible the kid was unaware there even was one; he could have strayed from the dirt path entirely.

That was a problem.

Toro could feel the muscles between his shoulder blades tightening with the tense concern that the kid had no idea where he was going and had simply gotten himself lost in the search for his guardian. Toro didn’t imagine the kid knew any more about the forest than he did, and there was no telling what he might run into.

Toro took a deep breath. Guess it was time to put those tracking skills to work.

He put one hand on his hip and surveyed the greenery, rethinking his strategy. Crouching back down and moving some ferns aside, he could see bits of displaced mud on top of leaves from where the boy’s robe had dragged, and as he moved the plants, individual fiddleheads retreated at his touch. Toro scanned ahead for already-furled stems, following them when they lined up with the child’s small, intermittent footprints. It was odd that though the kid’s path— what he hoped was the kid’s path— had strayed from the dirt trail, it was still going in the same general direction the Mandalorian had. Toro was doing his best to ignore Mando’s more obvious prints, knowing what he really needed to do was find the kid, but there was some relief in knowing he’d come across one of them at some point and at least solve half his problems when he did.

The child brushed another feathery fern out of his eyes, walking on soft moss and enjoying the feeling between his toes. The forest was alive with hundreds of creatures, large chirping bugs singing in the trees and winged creatures hooting between the branches. Once or twice he saw brown, soft-furred animals with stripes peering at him from dens built into the gnarled roots of trees, but he sensed no ill-intent from them, only curiosity. Though he wished he could stay and explore further, he was determined to catch up.

His guardian was somewhere ahead of him, he was sure. The apprentice hunter was still far behind both of them, but the boy paid him no mind, content to see and smell the freshness of the forest. It was far more vibrant than anywhere he had been in a long time, and he hoped they’d be staying there for a while. The air was clear and breathable, the sun warm… He could rest and explore and his guardian would be able to heal.

As the boy climbed over stones and pushed through the thicket of grasses back to the even dirt path, he wondered if his guardian had truly meant what he’d said when he promised he’d come back to the ship. He knew starships weren’t homes for most sentient beings— Perhaps this was his guardian’s home planet and he had a dwelling somewhere away from the ship, and away from him.

The child shook his head, waving away both gnatflies and troubled thoughts. The Mandalorian wouldn’t have made the apprentice hunter stay behind too if that were the case. The young man from-Tatooine-but-not had no reason to remain there either, and he had the sense his armored guardian intended to teach the apprentice the same trade and life he led. The two men had talked briefly after they departed from the desert planet, his guardian pointing to various places and controls on the starship, and he’d seen the younger man picking apart a blaster that morning in the cargo hold similar to how the Mandalorian had maintained his own tools and weapons during hyperspace flights when it had still been just the two of them.

There was a glint up ahead, and he quickened his pace, reaching out with openness through the lights connecting the living creatures of the forest to see more clearly; with a chirp he renewed his pace, happy to have finally caught up on the warrior’s trail.

Only moments later did he realize he wasn’t the only one.

”A-ha! Caught you!”

Drat.

The child was briskly scooped up by the young man with dark hair, raised up into the air and firmly grasped to his side. He frowned, squirming at the handling as the man scolded, until he saw the same gleam through the forest the child had caught only moments before.

The Mandalorian was looking at them, unmoving as the man holding him continued speaking. Dimly he could register a change in tone, the younger man’s pitch rising as he too saw the older hunter, but the boy couldn’t have cared less for the conversation he only understood a part of anyway. The warrior approached with measured strides and the boy reached out, cooing happily as the armored man closed the distance, speaking sternly with his crewmate; said crewmate was still making excuses and holding the child in front of him, as if to ward off any potential retaliation from the Mandalorian.

“What?!” the indignant apprentice was saying. “You should be happy, this means he knows how to find you on his own. Here take him, look he’s tired.”

The Mandalorian sighed but plucked the boy away and settled him comfortably against the cool planes of his armor. The child took hold of the bandolier in one hand and tapped the center of the quiet man’s breastplate, happy to be back where he belonged.

The logging community came into view around midday. Barges were docked upriver on the west side of town near a clearing in the woods; the bridge Mando, Toro, and the kid crossed was well-built with high enough clearance to give both timber rafts and the logger scows passage beneath. The air was clear and smelled of rich, black dirt, thick woods spanning as far as the eye could see.

Without a Guild lodge or more advanced information centers Din doubted Sorgan was used by hunters as a stopover, and he had hoped his and Toro’s presence would stir only curiosity. There were a few turned heads, and though people overall went about their business, something in the air didn’t feel quite right: as Din, Toro, and the child made their way to the common house between wattle fencing, the general chatter of town dissipated almost entirely.

The large rounded building was built of wood and woven, thatched reeds. Inside, a bar and a ring of sand encircled the central hearth, smoke rising to escape from the roof. Small tables were spread evenly around the room, diners and staff of various species milling about and conversing. Din kept his hands visible and his gait relaxed. It was entirely possible the town simply didn’t get many travelers.

A lumberman and a Twi’lek fisher played dice over next to the wall, out of the way of foot traffic. Two women and a man with dark, braided hair were in deep conversation close to the entrance, their boots well-worn and flecked with tsuga tree needles; they matched the muddy hooves of the bordok mules outside hitched to a post by the water trough with stun traps slung over their packs. A young father fed a child sitting on one table, the child’s smile bright despite his arm in a recent sling. At first, most of those in the common house appeared to pay them no mind, but subtle glances around the room traded unspoken words with their fellow townsfolk. The din of the common house hadn’t diminished, but there was a distinct change in what they were communicating.

One other person stood out: a stocky woman in armorweave and worn, blue-green armor sat by herself near the exit, eyeing them over a bowl of soup. Mando watched the rear cam in the head-up display inside his helmet, keeping his stride unhurried as he led the three of them to a table on the opposing wall.

The kid had wriggled down from Mando’s grasp upon entry to the town to walk on his own: Toro herded him to the right with his boot, skirting the felinx beneath a table that could probably eat him. The atmosphere of the pub was comfortable, the kind of place he expected on a planet like this one. It seemed like most people knew each other well enough to not pay them any mind, swapping tales and talking business over their plates. The bartender came to greet them, offering the local brew and asking if they were there for the midday meal before retreating to retrieve soup for the kid and something roasted for Toro. Mando declined anything to eat.

“You know, I’m starting to think you might be a droid,” Toro joked, stretching his legs and lacing his fingers behind his head. “Or do you just subsist off the nightmares of anyone who crosses you?”

The Mandalorian didn’t respond beyond what Toro assumed was a glare, but it still made him grin. The bartender returned with their food, setting down a flagon of swirling blue liquid between them. Toro dug in, pouring himself a cup.

“Really though, Tin Can, do you ever eat?”

Mando ignored him. He pushed the cup of broth over to the kid, helping him take a sip. “Tell me what you saw coming into town.”

“Rustic folk. Farmers and hunters, mostly, probably some fur and scale trappers.” Toro took a bite of meat, chewing around his words. The child pushed his bowl aside, leaning up on the table towards Toro’s plate with open interest. The gunslinger frowned and pulled his plate closer. “There’s probably a sawmill downriver.”

“Anything stand out to you?”

Toro dropped his voice low, confident that he’d landed on something to give the Mandalorian a little faith in him. “You’re in for a treat; you saw the woman at the front?”

Mando nodded.

“Pretty sure she’s an ex-shock trooper from one of the old Republic cleanup crews. Got a price on her head.”

“There’s no such thing as an ex-shock trooper,” Mando said. “Best just to leave her be.”

Toro stared, his food pausing halfway to his mouth. “That’s it? I just found us a job and you don’t want it?”

“Lower your voice,” Mando said. “If you want to confront a drop soldier, be my guest.”

”You aren’t going to back me up?”

Mando continued tearing apart hunks of bread for the kid. ”Do I look like I want to start a fight?”

“You walk in anywhere with armor like that, you’re basically asking for one.”

“We are here to recoup first and find lodging,” Mando said, his voice clipped. “Tangling with someone without a confirmed bounty the second we come into town isn’t a plan with much forethought.”

Toro frowned. “I saw her on the postings back in the Mid-Rim, Republic and ISB. Last name is Dune. If that’s not her she must have a twin.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes,” Toro said confidently, gesturing with his skewer. “You can tell by the tattoos on her— Wait— Where is she?”

The hair on the back of Din’s neck stood up, instinct crowding to the forefront. Snapping around to follow Toro’s line of sight revealed an empty table, the woman nowhere in sight.

“Watch the kid,” he ordered, standing abruptly and brushing past the table. He could hear Toro protest behind him, but he was already unclipping his holster and heading out of the curtained archway.

Outside, the damp air was quiet. Din surveyed the land and switched on the footprint relay in his visor, seeing her tracks round the back of the public house. Cautiously he followed, listening for movement as he passed between two of the buildings. As he rounded the walkway between the fencing, though, the footprints came to an abrupt halt.

He whipped around in each direction, scanning for a heat signature, but as soon as he turned and looked up, two feet hit him square in the chest.

The trooper swung down from a crossbeam, landing as Din’s back hit the outer wall of the cantina with a thud. In a flash her right fist made contact with his faceplate, knocking him back again and dizzying his senses. Her second swing telegraphed broadly and he dodged just in time— Her fist connected with the wooden slats instead, rattling them with a bang. Din twisted to land a hit to a kidney, feeling his fist meet solid muscle, and he heard her grunt in pain. His left hand lashed out to wrap around her throat the same time he shoved off the wall, blocking her left downswing with his vambrace.

The trooper snarled and brought her right arm up, dropping a heavy elbow down to break his grip on her throat— The move sent him off-balance and she used that half-second opening to grab his shoulders and knee him in the gut, hard. Beskar has no give to it and he felt the impact of her thick leg against each and every one of the injuries across his ribs and midsection. Pain exploded across his chest, radiating from the center of his sternum as she hauled him behind her to collide with the opposing wall.

Din shoved off and readied himself, pivoting to face her again. As the woman swung wide her fist connected with the jaw of the helmet, snapping his head to the side. A backhanded swing jerked him back to face her and he growled, blocking the third punch and grabbing her other forearm: with a sharp jut he headbutted her square in the face, hearing bone crack and sending her staggering back, but before he could grab his gun or blade she righted herself with a yell and barreled into him, pinning him to the wall with a crushing grip around his throat.

“Mando!”

Clutching the soldier’s wrists with an iron grip, Din jerked his gaze to the side, eyes wide as Toro came into view with his blaster drawn. Hearing the rookie’s hail, the woman turned too and yanked Din back out into the open with his back to Toro, putting him in the line of fire. Toro’s blaster shot glanced off Mando’s pauldron, jarring his shoulder. Toro cursed behind him and the woman grinned viciously, hauling the Mandalorian back with her by the edge of his breastplate.

Din dug his feet in, lurching back against her grip in anger. In the gap between them he struck out with one boot, shoving her off before drawing his blade the same moment the woman drew hers. Another blast of laserfire sailed narrowly past Mando, this time grazing the woman’s bicep. She cried out in pain, glaring at the rookie as the Mandalorian approached. Din struck out with the dagger, hearing it sing through the air, but his opponent wasn’t so distracted by the apprentice that her attention faltered, and her armored forearm came up to block the vibroblade in a skitter of sparks before she lunged in a downward arc with her own. Mando ducked his head, catching her wrist and twisting it outward, digging his thumb into a pressure point to force the knife out of her hand. The move forced a gasp out of her and in a rage the woman brought her leg up again, kicking him back into Calican.

Toro stumbled under the weight of the Mandalorian, clumsily trying to brace himself to keep both of them from going down, but he only succeeded in coming to a knee as Mando’s impact buckled him. Dune, instead of retreating to draw her own blaster, had followed through with another kick to Mando’s chest and reached out with one hand, grabbing the barrel of Toro’s blaster before bringing her other forearm down against his wrist. Blunt force pain seared up his forearm as she wrenched the gun away.

A plume of fire cut through the air between the Mandalorian and the woman, his flamethrower finally forcing her back. Toro grabbed the trooper’s blade from the ground and darted around the blaze, quickly closing the gap as she turned her aim towards Calican.

When Dune went to fire his blaster, however, the plasma cartridge immediately sent electrical discharge arcing over her hand. The trooper cried out and dropped it, barely having time to grab Toro’s right forearm above her in the incoming jab before Toro swung a sharp left hook across her jaw, dropping the blade from his right hand to catch it midair between them on the pullback with his left. Dune’s eyes widened in shock a half second before Toro slashed again, and this time he felt contact.

The trooper gasped, jerking back and pulling him with her; with a growl bordering on feral she pulled his arm down and twisted her body, dropping into a wide stance and hauling him up over her shoulder as if he weighed nothing. Toro landed square on his back, the air forced from his lungs in a rush, and he had to clumsily hook one leg up over her arm to keep from being pinned. It was a scuffle for status as they grappled with one another, Dune with bulk strength and Toro with sharp reflexes, the two of them rolling across the slick grass before landing in a locked contest of strength, each with a weapon in hand and fire in their eyes.

“Enough.”

The Mandalorian’s voice resounded like thunder, halting the fight with his blaster raised only a few scant feet from the side of the trooper’s head. The vibroblade beneath her chin hummed in the air. Her own blaster was jammed against Toro’s chest. The two of them glared at each other, panting from the exertion, neither wavering.

From behind all three of them came the distinct sound of someone snapping a stick, and all three slowly turned to see the green child perched in the grass behind the common house, half a skewer of roasted meat in each hand. His ears twitched as he chewed loudly, watching the adults with inquisitive eyes.

“… What is that thing?” the trooper asked, curiosity coloring her tone.

The boy took a large bite off the skewer and waved. Toro flexed his hand, still sore where the kid had bitten him.

“I think it’s a carnivore.”

The woman snorted. Mando lowered his blaster.

Toro slowly lowered the knife and clicked the safety on as the tension in the air dissipated. The pain was starting to register past the adrenaline.

Mando shoved his pistol in his holster. “You were supposed to wait inside,” he said irritably.

“This seemed like more fun at the time,” Toro groaned. The drop trooper grinned and pushed off of Toro’s chest none too lightly, standing and offering her hand.

Calican and the trooper both looked marginally worse for wear coming back into the common house behind the Mandalorian. The folks inside seemed more wary than before, and when Toro stopped by the bar to order another plate of food, the cook and the rest of the staff suddenly found work elsewhere and wouldn’t meet his eye. When he tried to get their attention or flag one down there was just enough conversation to say they couldn’t hear him, and the bartender who’d taken their order before was methodically stoking the embers of the fire, facing away from him and turning the spit.

Mando set the child back down at their table as Dune gave the two of them her name, dropping her gloves and helping herself to Mando’s cup and the flagon of spotchka. Toro reluctantly slid what was left of his plate to her.

Cara Dune was built only slightly less solid than a freight train. Her dark hair was short and utilitarian, and the callouses on her knuckles spoke as much to a life of hard work as they did to fighting. She carried herself with the easy confidence of a woman who knew her role in life and had never been given reason to doubt it. Despite the blaster graze and slash from the vibroblade she appeared to be in remarkably good spirits, content to eat with only a casual regard toward both audience and place settings; Toro got the impression bone broth was cheaper than roast grinjer and not near as filling.

“I figured you had a fob on me,” she said, taking a drink and grimacing around the flavor. Toro could still see blood between her teeth while she talked and wondered how bad her fight was with Mando before he’d gotten there. “Not many other reasons for hunters to come out this far.”

“Fair enough,” Mando said.

“How did you get out here?” Toro asked, wrapping his left hand in his handkerchief and resting his knuckles against the cold jug. “This planet hasn’t developed transportation faster than those pack animals out front.”

“Old buddy of mine owed me a favor,” Cara said. “I crashed with him for a while before he dropped me off on his way out of the system.”

Toro looked around, once again unimpressed by scenery that had not changed in the past twenty minutes. “What are you doing in a place like this?”

She gave Toro a lazy smile, settling back comfortably into her chair as she regarded him. “That info’s on a need-to-know basis, Sunshine.”

“Sure, sure, but you’re a shock trooper, aren’t you?” Toro nodded to the bands on her arm. “I heard they were working for the New Republic now, spec-ops on Imperial holdouts, stuff like that.”

“I used to be,” Cara said. The sly smile no longer reached her eyes, and she seemed to regard him the way a dog views surprise company at dinnertime. “At least during the war. Right now I’m enjoying an early retirement. Or, was.”

“Why leave?”

“Well my platoon used to do real work hunting down war lords and arms profiteers,” she said, swishing the spotchka in her cup. “Rooting out the settler compounds while the Alliance hit the big guns. Things changed after Endor though and we got moved to the cleanup crews.”

Toro leaned in, both forearms on the table. “You were a mercenary?” he asked with visible interest. The Mandalorian nudged his boot beneath the table. Toro ignored it.

“Not in as many words,” Cara said. “We did our share of gutting the Imperial settlements. Instead of facing them head on like we were used to, we had to go in quiet and get the job done with as little demo as possible before hauling the worst of them back to Central and calling it a day.”

“Good work if you get it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the trade-off,” Cara said. “The fewer warlords we found, the more we were relegated to being political muscle, protecting diplomats and suppressing riots. They kept pulling us back towards the Core— And I didn’t sign up to be a New Republic guard dog, so I got out.”

“Nothing out here is near as interesting as being a merc.”

“Licensed contractor,” Cara said evenly. “And like I said, I'm retired.”

“Why not stay on the move?” Toro asked genuinely. When she narrowed her eyes in suspicion he poured her another drink.

Cara turned to the Mandalorian. “He always this nosy?”

“Yes.”

Cara snatched up the cup. “Not having to take care of a ship or worry about Guildsmen—,” she nodded to Mando, “— appeals to more people than you think.”

“We hadn’t intended to start a fight,” Mando said. “When you left we thought you might’ve been trying to get the drop on us. We weren’t looking for you.”

“Good,” Cara said. She drained her cup, turning it upside down on the table before standing. “Keep it that way, and move along— I’ve been here two weeks, and if you’ve got your own hounds after you I don’t want them barking up the wrong tree.”

As she readied to leave, Toro realized something and cut her off. “Wait, how’d you know we were Guild?”

Cara gave him a strange look. “Neither of you blend in,” she said, “And there’s only so many jobs a Mandalorian can have.”

The rest of the day was spent buying or trading for what supplies the town was able to offer; waterproofing wax, dry goods, and saddle soap rounded out most of the field supplies, and the Mandalorian picked up an extra canteen, in addition to a holopuck with a local atlas. The latter was difficult to come by since everyone they spoke to in town was reluctant to offer one up, and it took a more substantial fee to convince one of the traders to part with a spare. It was only after they’d received it Mando explained that it was likely only because that trader was from out of town— In most places, those who worked and lived off the land didn’t reveal where they trapped, hunted, or fished, should the people they gave that information to prove greedy or inconsiderate enough to try their own luck there as well.

Mando laid out the plan for the next day on the hike back through the forest, saying they’d find a town farther east in the morning: a territory dispute with the drop trooper wasn’t worth the trouble, and the eastern side of the mountains opened up into a coastline. Whether they stayed at a higher altitude or more towards sea level depended on what resources they could find regarding the Crest; Mando didn’t fancy more than a day’s ride hauling fuel if it came down to it.

Night fell as they traversed the woods back to the ship, supplies carted on a borrowed repulsorlift. Despite the fight with Cara Dune, Toro was restless after a day of menial work, and though the Mandalorian had shared useful information, he was about as talkative as the kid, which was proving to be not much at all.

“So what’re the rules?” Toro asked, finally cracking under the drudgery of stowing supplies. He hefted a canister up the ramp and put it in the hold to be arranged by the Mandalorian later. “With the helmet and all.”

The Mandalorian didn’t spare him a glance, eyeing the woods instead. He picked the kid up and set him down on the stack of storage units he’d commandeered, a lantern, handheld holoprojector, and the rough log set out on top. “It stays on.”

“Yeah, I gathered, but what else? What happens if it comes off?”

“If you try to take it, I kill you,” Mando said mildly.

“Oh big surprise.” Toro rolled his eyes. “You’re a walking armory. My guess is nobody but the kid gets within arm’s reach if they want to keep their limbs intact. C’mon, gimme the specifics. Do you have night vision? Do you eat everything through a straw?”

Mando didn’t respond, but considering Toro was still moving supplies for him he figured he had some wiggle room to poke the bear.

“Can I borrow it?”

The Mandalorian made a point of closing the logbook, finally turning to cock his head at the rookie and stare him down. “Kid, I don’t know you well enough to miss you if you were gone.”

“Ooh, someone’s got a sense of humor. Hey, Womp Rat, did you know your dad has a sense of humor?”

“Excuse us?”

Both Mando and Toro swiveled around at the sound of another voice, hands to their holsters; two men were approaching the clearing, still several yards away under the light of a wagon piloted by a droid. They were dressed in earthy blue and green clothes similar to the townsfolk, fitting in against the backdrop of the provincial planet. Toro eased back, getting his hand back under the crate.

“What do you want?” he hollered down to them.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to sneak up on you. Got dark faster than we anticipated,” the slighter man said, walking quickly towards the ring of lights set up around the ship once it was clear their presence wasn’t going to be welcomed with a blaster shot. “We were wondering if you could help us.”

The Mandalorian picked up the kid and strode away from the pair towards the bow of the ship to lift a panel under the engine, so Toro took it upon himself to meet them at the edge of the ramp.

“Town’s that way,” Toro said, pointing. He wiped his hands on a rag and tossed it aside, hands on his hips. “ ’Bout six kilometers.”

“No, we— Sorry, I’m Caben, this is Stoke— We weren't looking for Lau, we came to see if we could hire you. Our village needs help.”

“We have money,” the second man said.

“The log runners gave us directions,” Caben said, following after the Mandalorian but directing his plea between both of them. “They said we might be able to hire you, and whoever came on the gunship.”

Toro scoffed. He shook his head, going back to his work. “It’s just us,” he said proudly. “And you can’t afford us.”

“You don’t even know what the job is!”

“You wouldn’t have enough,” Toro said. “We’re Guild, we don’t do farm work, and we’re not staying here anyway.”

“It’s raiders,” Stoke said with an edge to his voice. His eyes flicked between Toro and the Mandalorian Caben was still trying to get around to talk to face-to-face. “Our farms have been raided three times in two months. We need them gone. The whole village chipped in everything they could.”

“We’re not mercenaries,” the Mandalorian said finally. He continued to prep the ship for lockdown one-handed, ignoring the farmers as the child watched.

“You’re a Mandalorian though, right?” Caben said, eyes wide as he took in the sight of the bounty hunter. “I’ve heard stories about your people— the legends, the hunters and fighters across the galaxy— If even half of what I’ve read is true—”

“Hey, look,” Toro said, cutting in. “We don’t need money, and I told you, we’re not for hire— At least not for this. Raiders or not, whatever you want us to do isn’t worth our time—”

“No, you look,” Stoke said, standing his ground against Toro’s dismissal. He met Toro in the middle of the clearing with squared shoulders. “We need help, and you’re the only people this area has seen besides tradesmen and trappers for four years. We’re lucky we’ve been able to hold our own in the middle of nowhere, but this is something we can’t fight by ourselves. It took us the whole day to get here, we can’t go home empty-handed—”

“And like I said, we’re not here to run off a few bandits for pocket change —”

Oddly enough it was the Mandalorian to interject next.

“You say you’re farmers?” he asked.

“… Yes?” Caben replied, unsure how to interpret the sudden interest. “Fishers, really. We farm krill.”

“In the middle of nowhere.”

“Yes?”

“Do you have lodging?”

The tone of Mando’s voice made Toro pivot on the spot, suddenly concerned the Mandalorian might actually be considering what the other two were asking of them. “Woah, Mando, you can’t seriously think— I mean I thought we were leaving—?”

Mando strode past him to meet the two farmers in the light. The space he took up made Stoke and Caben shuffle back a step in apprehension. “How large is your village?”

“About three acres in land near the river, a few more in timber,” Caben said excitedly. “A little over sixty people.”

“Any who can shoot?”

“Well— I mean it’s not— We’re mostly farmers,” Caben said, floundering. “We have slug-throwers, maybe a dozen people that can hunt, but even then, not enough ammunition. We can’t fight them in the open.”

The Mandalorian nodded. Toro’s bafflement and irritation rose.

“I can cover for that. You say you’re near the river?”

“Yeah.” The farmers nodded hopefully. “Seventy kilometers north of here at the river bend, give or take.”

“Good. We can take the ship and be there in less than an hour.”

“It’s— There won’t be anywhere to land something this big.” Caben shook his head for the first time, gesturing to the gunship. “The farmland is too soft and the trees are too thick. River runs on two sides past the timber, too. We were going to make camp tonight and travel at first light.”

The Mandalorian hummed in disapproval but weighed his options, assessing the ship.

“We can talk details on the way, but I’d rather not waste a full day traveling.”

“The mech has an autopilot and guidance system,” Stoke offered, gesturing to the wagon pilot. “There’s enough reserve power to get us back by morning, and enough of us to split up the watch and sleep in shifts.”

Mando considered it. “You willing to help load out?”

Caben and Stoke nodded eagerly.

“Good. Toro here will show you what to pack. I’ll need the credits you do have, and I’ll be back soon.”

The Mandalorian took the pouch of credits and finished notating instructions as Toro fumed, following him to the stern where the glow of the work lights cast shadows around them. “Mando what are you doing?” Toro hissed. “You said we weren’t staying here. This is chump change compared to what we can do. You should have told them to take a hike.”

“Let’s get one thing clear,” the Mandalorian said quietly. “You do not speak for me.”

The child’s ears flattened at his guardian’s tone. Toro gestured to the farmers, trying to keep his voice down even as his frustration built.

“Mando, this is insane, you and I can do better than this,” he said. “I thought we were leaving—”

“Calican,” Mando snapped. He loomed in the light of the Crest. “There’s only room on this ship for one captain. The last time you decided to make your own call on a job you nearly got my ship stolen and me and the kid— and yourself— killed. This is downtime built in to recover from that job. If you can’t handle my verdict, start walking.”

Toro ground his teeth at the reprimand, anger and irritation simmering under his skin. He had to tamp down his inclination to argue; this was far from the fast-paced hunting in sprawling cities and crime rings he’d anticipated when he signed on, but the recent memory of their job with Shand— and the tools of the trade he desperately hoped Mando was good for— stayed his tongue.

“What makes you think the job is worth the detour?” he asked, nodding past the hunter to the two farmers.

“Quartering us in the middle of nowhere to act as a deterrent for a week or two is a square deal,” Mando continued. “Can you handle that?”

“Will we move on after that?” Toro pushed. “Because as far as I can tell the only thing this planet has to pass the time is target practice.”

“Assuming you fix your blaster, that’s the idea.”

It’s only been a few days, Toro seethed. And he’s your only way off swamp-ridden rock.

The Mandalorian waited. Toro was coming to realize silent observation may be his mentor’s natural resting state, and it was more infuriating than anticipated. An argument, a fight— those he could navigate. Those were gratifying and gave him more to work with than the pointed stare and cold debate leveled at him now. It wasn’t that he took issue with the Mandalorian’s stubbornness as a character trait— It was the fact there was no telling where he stood in the bounty hunter’s regard at any given time. He had no way of reading the Mandalorian’s expressions, and not only had Mando disagreed with him on nearly everything that day, he seemed to have a more condensed arsenal of frustratingly sound logic backing up how he shut down Toro’s protests, and it frustrated Toro that he couldn’t articulate a strong enough rebuttal to stand his ground when the time came because it felt like he was being kept in the dark.

Mando’s decisions were justified. Toro just didn’t like them.

Toro had a feeling this decision would set the tone of their working relationship moving forward; he couldn’t help but remember what Shand said about the Mandalorian’s lack of personal connections meaning he could easily drop Toro at any time and cut his losses. Mando had clearly survived this far without him. If Toro didn’t suck it up and muscle through the next two weeks on Sorgan, he didn’t think he was going to like being stuck there for an indeterminable future.

After a long moment of deliberation, the tic of Toro’s clenched jaw finally settled.

“Fine,” he muttered. “What do you need?”

The Mandalorian nodded. “Pull this together from the ship.”

He gave Toro the list, some instructions for stowing the necessities, and the security protocols for locking up. Toro must not have been doing as well as he thought in hiding his dissatisfaction because without prompting, the Mandalorian handed the child off to Toro and followed up his instructions with, “Buck up and get moving. And watch the kid until I get back.”

“Hey, where are you going?”

“I’m calling in some backup.”

—

The Mandalorian retraced the trail leading to Lau before branching off from the woods and heading toward a spring. Din circumvented the town, briefly switching to the thermal imaging to orient himself before switching back to night vision. Though grateful for the first uninterrupted seclusion he’d had that day, he wasn’t able to fully relax knowing the kid was still back at the clearing, but he didn’t know what the drop trooper’s temperament would be at an unexpected arrival. Hopefully the rookie kept a closer eye on the kid this time.

Din still wasn’t sure what to make of the gunslinger. He was fairly sure Calican’s brash impulsiveness was a mark of youth and not one of a trigger-happy lust for bloodshed— He’d done surprisingly better in the fight against Cara than he had in the one with Shand (despite the fact Dune had at least sixty pounds on him), and he’d retained enough clarity of mind to hesitate when Din stepped in and brought the scrap to a stall.

However, the rookie’s inclination to jump feet-first into everything instead of hanging back concerned him. Din needed to be able to run point, and Toro had thus far not proven consistently capable of thinking first and acting second.

Din sighed, traipsing through the woods. The irony of taking on an apprentice whose ambition reminded him of his own at that age was not lost on him, and while it was clear Calican wasn’t bereft of talents or smarts, he lacked experience and patience and didn’t know when to apply the skills he had. The risks he took weren’t calculated.

He also didn’t have a near-indestructible suit of armor protecting him like Din had at that age.

As Din navigated the forest, he thought over their experiences and how they measured up to the mixed results of the past four days. Toro was sharp, and if he would just slow down and think, he’d figure out the answers he wanted faster and without having to rely on Din to break them down every step of the way. The arguing, the questions, the not-following instructions…

Toro wasn’t a kid. The immaturity at the core of his actions was the kind that resulted from the rookie still only thinking about himself first. If he couldn’t figure out how to work with Din— or anybody— as a team, he wasn’t going to get very far in life on credits alone.

Still, the gunslinger seemed to have some modicum of sense and a good awareness of his surroundings. He caught on quick to instruction once he relented to it, and he’d surprised Din more than once that day with the connections he’d been able to draw on the scant information available.

Toro had potential. He just had to apply it. Din knew he had high expectations, but if the rookie could prove his merit to him, he’d be able to work for anybody.

Toro didn’t know what to make of the farmers, and he got the impression the stocky one didn’t much care for him either. Caben made small talk at least, enthusiastic as they loaded out the supplies and blasters Mando had left them with and asked several questions about the Crest Toro didn’t have all the answers for. The child had whined softly after the Mandalorian left, his ears drooping and his eyes going all big and sad again, but he thankfully stayed close to where the men were amidst the load out and didn’t wander off.

“So what’s it like working for the Mandalorian?” Caben asked as they strapped down the wagon.

Toro scoffed. “I work with him. We’re hunting partners.”

“Bounty hunters?”

“Yep. Just came from Tatooine before this. Finished up a job concerning Fennec Shand.”

Toro watched them expectantly from the side, but Stoke and Caben exchanged a look and shrugged. “Sorry, no idea who that is.”

“Fennec Shand?” Toro asked, shocked. “The assassin who worked for the Hutts? Wanted in eight systems at least?”

“Already told you, you’re the first outsiders we’ve seen in four years,” Stoke said. “We hardly hear anything as is.”

“Well let’s just say she’s bad news,” Toro said. “Pulled a double cross on her though. She almost escaped, tried to go after the kid here. Mando and I ambushed her and took her down in the middle of the desert. When we dragged her back to Mos Eisley she tried to make a break for it and we ended up in a shootout in the middle of the night.”

Caben was invested. Stoke couldn’t care less.

“What’d you do with her after that?”

“Ah, well we brought in proof that she was dead and the broker paid out the bounty to us,” Toro lied. “Got a pretty penny considering how high profile she was.”

“Thought you said you two weren’t mercenaries.”

“We’re not,” Toro said, looking back to Stoke. Stoke side-eyed him from his seat on the wagon.

“Mercenaries will kill anyone for a buck. Hunters have credentials. We bag the criminals on wanted listings. Verifiable criminals and all.” Toro continued to twirl his blaster in hand. “It gets pretty technical when you get into Guild bureaucracy, I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”

“Sounds cut and dry to me.” Stoke tied up his long hair and stretched his legs, leaning back against the trunks. “Pick a job, chase someone around, catch them and tie ‘em up, drag ‘em back and get paid.”

Toro rolled his eyes. “Yeah, if you simplify it like that.”

Stoke snorted. The croak of amphibians ebbed and flowed from the creek in the woods, the three of them falling quiet. The boy played in the grass with a silver ball, pushing it around the dirt between his feet.

Stoke spoke again. “Let me ask you this: if you two just got paid for a big job, why did you need to take our credits, even though we told you it was all our village had to spare?”

Toro froze, sweat running cool on the back of his neck. “Oh, Mando has his reasons,” he deflected. “He’s bringing backup, so you’re technically paying them, you know? We’re just coming to take a break between now and the next job.”

“Uh huh.”

“Gotta sleep at some point, you know?”

“Sure.”

The awkward silence settled again over the clearing. Toro’s leg bounced impatiently, looking around for something to do. Stoke narrowed his eyes.

“How long did you say you’ve been a hunter?”

“A while.” Toro quickly reached down and nabbed the kid by the back collar of his coat, bringing him up with kicking feet to turn him to the farmers at the back of the wagon. “Hey, do you have any idea what this thing is? Mando picked him up a while ago and we’ve got no idea what he’s supposed to be.”

Cara stood her ground, arms crossed. Both the long-haired trapper and the stout cook from the public house were unarmed, but the argument grew louder, their voices overlapping.

“— don’t want you causing any more trouble!” the trapper barked. “We’re giving you until morning to clear out.”

“I’m far enough from town,” Cara said. “This land’s unincorporated.”

“Move out,” the bald one insisted. His broad hands flexed into fists. “Or you’ll be moved.”

Cara laughed humorlessly. “Try it, Dagosh, see what happens.”

“We’re being civil. This is exactly why we asked you to leave this afternoon—”

“If you hadn’t snuck up on me I wouldn't have shot at you—!”

Somebody off to Cara’s left cleared their throat. The two men jolted in surprise as Cara’s hand went to her hip holster.

The Mandalorian had materialized between the trees like a specter, silent and shimmering. Both men blanched at his sudden appearance, exchanging looks as they stepped back. The Mandalorian cut an intimidating silhouette, the flames reflected in his armor the only motion against the darkness.

The trapper nudged his friend and the two backed away further with a call of “By first light, trooper.” They mounted the speederbike hovering past the light of the campfire and kicked off in a hurry, brush swishing loudly as it was displaced by the retreating hum through the forest. Cara pivoted away from the Mandalorian and grabbed her duffel, shoveling supplies in to break camp.

“You here for a rematch?” she growled. She tore a blanket from the ground and stuffed it into a rucksack, packing the rest of her gear. “Or do you just like to spectate?”

“… They give you trouble?”

“Save your pity,” she snapped. Bedroll and mess kit found their way onto the pile with military efficiency, sparse belongings tacked together and stowed in canvas. The Mandalorian watched her toss the rest of her food over the grass before she shoved past him. “And get out of my way.”

The Mandalorian remained silent as Cara packed, and it unnerved her.

She thought about finding a soft spot between all that armor to shoot him. She needed to find somewhere new to bed down for the night and didn’t feel like watching over her shoulder while she did.

Cara had learned long before that poison nettles and occupied dens were far easier to spot in the daylight. She’d been fortunate enough so far to avoid both, but the creek wound further into the forest away from the cleared footpaths and she’d still need to clear brush before getting a fire going. The rest of the predators stayed away from the light.

He stood there the entire time she packed, but it wasn’t a large campsite— Even half a minute beneath the gaze of black steel made the skin down the back of her neck crawl. He hadn’t moved from the tree, watching her impassively.

If the rookie was waiting in the shadows, she’d shoot him too and not lose an ounce of sleep over it.

“What?” she finally snapped. “Where’s your sidekick? If you came to collect on my hide after all, I’ll give you a real fight.”

The Mandalorian tossed something at her. She caught it automatically.

Credits glinted up from the bag in the firelight.

“I have a counteroffer.”

—

Five humans and a child of indeterminate species trundled through the woods on a wagon with enough space left in the back for two. Toro had shot Cara a saucy grin and winked while they were discussing bedding arrangements, at which she scoffed and tossed her duffle bag onto the pile, climbing up to prop herself against her rucksack. The gunslinger, despite his flirtation, stretched the entirety of his lanky body longways down the wagon bed next to the cases on the other side. The Mandalorian sat upright towards the front near the villagers, and the child perched on his lap, eagerly watching the trees go by as moths fluttered around the hanging lantern.

Something started to unnerve the villagers the farther they traveled into the forest: while Caben directed the droid ahead along the trail, Stoke watched through the trees as fog crept in, clouding the shadows between bark. It was hard not to notice the antiquated slugthrower he carried on his lap, and Din was starting to wonder if there was more to the raids than simple smash-and-grab thefts of food and supplies.

”You plan on bird hunting this time of night?” the Mandalorian asked.

Stoke glanced back over his shoulder while Cara and Toro swapped stories. “Just cautious,” he said. “The raids have had everybody on edge. We’ve tried tracking the bandits, but we think they move camps throughout the week, and we can’t afford to venture too far into the woods— There’s too much work to be done back home, and the raiders have something with them.”

“… Something.”

The farmer’s frown deepened. He tried coming up with the right description and, failing that, nudged his friend. Mando looked to Caben.

“We’re not sure what it is,” Caben hedged as he turned and rested his arm over the back of the bench. “They’ve got something big with them that sounds like a machine, but it has these… big red eyes, I guess, that move through the woods past what we can see, even at midday. It’s big enough to shake the ground, and we keep finding its footprints around the raiders’ old campsites.”

“What do you mean?” Cara cut in. She and Toro were leant in behind them now.

“Just… Big footprints,” Stoke said. “Round like a lotus leaf, with two toes in front like a lizard. Size of this wagon bed. They go all around the forest and overlap the most at their old campsites. There’s branches and bark shorn off the trees too high to be any of the other animals marking their territory or looking for food.”

Mando and Cara glanced at each other, their earlier assessment at what should have been a simple job now morphing into concern.

”Where do the tracks go?” Toro asked.

”Around the outer edges of the village,” Caben said. “We can’t tell if they go into the river or not. The tracks… Well, they keep us corralled toward the ponds. We don’t have enough slugthrowers to fight the bandits, plus whatever that thing is.”

Mando’s own frown deepened. It was one thing to scare off a couple dozen raiders, but it was another thing to go up against something that big and unknown. He didn’t think the villagers were pulling their legs; the loggers in Lau had also been guarded and uneasy. Whatever creature was lurking in the woods had apparently been a problem for some time, and their earlier pleading was starting to take a different light.

“Footprints?” Cara was asking. “Not tire tracks or treads? Nothing like a vehicle?”

“They’re feet,” Stoke said flatly. “If it’s a vehicle, we don’t know what it is or where it could have come from. There’s nothing besides Lau and villages like ours for miles around here. No fuel, no roads.”

“What does it do? During the raids?” Toro asked.

“We’re… not sure,” Caben confessed. “Something explodes and the bandits charge out from the trees, from different directions every time.”

“We’re usually focused on getting people far enough away and taking cover,” Stoke muttered. His hands tightened on the long gun on his lap as he focused on the trail. “The second time they showed up, some of us fought back but not all of us made it. Two were killed in the fight, and another is still recovering from their injuries. We’ve buried more people in two months than we have in five years.”

“… There’s a lot of children,” Caben said softly. He was watching the child on Mando’s lap, who was now gazing up at the stars. “As soon as the blasterfire starts, we’re just trying to get as many people out of the way as we can. The faster we run, the more people there are left by the end of it.”

A flicker of cratered earth filled Din’s memory. He could almost smell the acrid cordite as the farmers talked.

“… I don’t like it,” Cara muttered.

Stoke snorted, unamused. “Yeah, you’re telling us.”

Quiet settled again around them, or as quiet as the soft hooting and buzzing of wildlife would allow. Mando settled the child in on one of the softer bags, covering him with the edge of a blanket.

“Tell us what you can about the village and the bandits themselves,” Din said. “Sound like we’ll need as much intel as we can get.”

Notes:

I know the term ‘Venn diagram’ wouldn’t exist in Star Wars, I just don’t care. It’s a good line and I’m keeping it.

”I don’t know you well enough to miss you if you were gone,” comes from a story Rodney Crowell tells from his past about being completely wasted and meeting his then live-in-girlfriend’s father for the first time; After making a pretty bad first impression, Johnny Cash responded with the above line, and Crowell says it sobered him right up.

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#reblog #tbd

[corellianhounds]

Toro Calican Lives AU

Chapter 4 — First Impressions

Media: The Mandalorian

Rating: Gen.

Word Count: 14,119

Warnings: Canon-typical violence

Art Credit: Christian Alzmann, The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian

Series Summary: What would have happened if Toro Calican hadn’t betrayed the Mandalorian? How would the story have changed if he had lived?

Chapter Summary: Things are bound to change when you throw somebody new into the mix.

This chapter, though similar to canon, better develops some of the characters and circumstances leading into “Sanctuary.”

—

Din gingerly stretched his arm up to assess the injuries he’d sustained. Over the past two weeks he’d been in multiple fights, electrocuted, dropped sixty feet onto his back, bodily hit four times by a mudhorn, shot by a modified MK, and had a speederbike shot out from under him going a hundred miles an hour.

The damage was taking its toll.

Purple, blue, and magenta bruises bloomed across his ribs and chest in a number of patterns and intensities. The ones from the Sandcrawler fall and the mudhorn were tinged green with healing around the edges, but newer ones criss-crossed his skin in Venn diagrams of pain. He’d been containing his movement as much as he could since Arvala-7: two ribs felt loose and his back ached with gravity’s pull every time he got out of bed. He hadn’t had proper enough rest after the fall and the tussle with the mudhorn to justifiably say he was back up to par, though for reasons unknown he didn’t feel as bad as he thought he should.

Shand’s second shot had hit the back of his pauldron, and while the blasterfire had been deflected, the force behind it had still traveled through the joint of his shoulder, which was to say nothing of the shot he’d taken square in the chest: the rifle bolt had felt like another hit from the mudhorn. In the privacy of the bunk he rolled his shoulder, taking note of at which angles it hurt most to move as he picked up the hand scanner and hovered it over his ribs to get a reading.

The screen blipped, the readout telling him there was no internal bleeding this time, so he set it aside and sifted through the analgesics in the hidden compartment by the head of the cot. Of the most recent injuries, Shand’s strike to the inside of his knee and the loose ribs concerned him the most. He hated wasting medical supplies, but the knee had been a bother even before the mercenary’s fight and he needed to be able to walk unhindered: with a steadying breath he lifted the lip of his helmet and knocked back the painkillers, then stooped to roll up his pant leg and swab a spot on the outside of his knee, injecting a half dose of bacta with the stimpak. The muscle strain and bruising in his chest and back would have to wait until they found somewhere to settle and he could rest properly— There were too many muscle groups working together for an injection to do much good while they were still on the move. Having his feet under him would have to do.

The kid stirred groggily in the hammock above the cot. Din could feel the critter’s big eyes watching him. It made him uncomfortable, but the kid either couldn’t tell or didn’t care. Instead he rolled over the edge of the hammock to dangle his feet above the cot and drop down onto the bedding. Din watched him from the side as he toddled across the blanket to him, perching by his thigh to peer under Din’s arm.

When the child reached his hand up to Din’s side, Din removed the autoinjector and shifted away from him on the cot, stowing the medical supplies in the compartment and letting his pant leg fall before picking the kid up. He put him back up in the hammock and shoved his boots on.

“Just for a minute,” he told the kid as he fastened his tunic and donned the armor he’d set aside. “We’ll get food when I’m done.”

Out in the hold it appeared the gunslinger had helped himself to a ration pack and was working his way through a biscuit while sat atop a footlocker. His bedroll nearby was still in a state of disarray, his bag half-packed. Toro nodded in greeting before going back to his work on the disassembled heavy blaster pistol in his lap, a torque wrench in one hand and the biscuit between his teeth. Mando passed him to get some food ready for the kid.

Toro rolled the toolkit back up and quickly reassembled the blaster. “So where’re we headed?” he asked.

“Sorgan,” Mando replied. The child took the ration bar Din gave him, happily chowing down.

“Never heard of it.”

“Backwoods planet near Savareen.”

“The old coaxium refinery?”

Din was surprised. “Yeah. It’s four quadrants up on the Core axis though; Sorgan is fairly isolated.”

“Do they have a Lodge?”

“Nope.”

“But you said—”

“I said, passage to the next system, and we’ll see where we go from there.” Mando picked up the pieces of the modified rifle left by the mercenary, looking over the build. He opened the gunlocker, setting them inside on the rack and rearranging other ordnance. “I also said the kid and I are laying low. You won’t always have a go-between for these jobs, and you may have to find different work between commissions. If you’re sticking around, we won’t be meeting with a broker until we’ve recovered and restocked supplies.”

“Yeah, that’s fair. My arm’s in pretty bad shape.” Toro tucked his chin, thumbing the tear in his shirtsleeve aside. Mando glanced out from behind the armory door: Toro had some blistering on his forearm and a shallow wound on his shoulder, probably from one of Fennec’s blades. Toro moved the arm without hindrance and he seemed alert. Mando stared.

“Is it still bleeding?”

“No, it stopped not long after we hit hyperspace.”

“… Can you move your shoulder.”

“Yeah, but it’s still an open wound; you have anything for it?”

Mando bit his tongue, stepping around his new crewmate to rifle through a cabinet attached to the bulkhead near the bow. “Bacta patch if you can’t walk it off.” He sifted through the medical cabinet, searching for the equipment on the charging dock. “Medical-grade expansion foam if it’s deep and you removed whatever you were stabbed with. You’ll have to get back to your base of operations or a med center if you think they hit an organ or artery. Cauterizing suture if it’s a slash as long as they missed any tendons.”

“I thought the point of patching wounds wasn’t to cause more damage,” Toro said with amusement.

Mando returned with the cauterizer, seeing Toro’s face sober instantly.

“Woah, hey, I’m not using that. What happened to good old fashioned stitches?”

Mando stopped in front of him, offering the cauterizer and a patch to cover it. “Each stitch is a potential infection site. Medical-grade cauterizer will kill bacteria and create a suture at the same time, and it’s faster to do in the field.”

“What if the blade was poisoned?”

Mando moved Toro’s torn shirt aside, examining his shoulder. “It wasn’t.”

“But what if—”

“It wasn’t,” Din repeated. “You’d know by now if it was, and you’re stalling. Here; cauterizer feels better if you do it yourself.”

Toro glanced back down to his shoulder before looking at Mando with suspicion. “What about a stab wound? Cauterizer’s not gonna get that deep.”

“We’re burning daylight, kid.”

“Humor me,” Toro argued. “So I know what you plan to zap me with in the future.”

Din sighed. “They’re… harder to repair than slash wounds,” he said. “Plastospray will work on anything except bone. If you’re trying to conserve your medical supplies it’s a waste to use it on a slash when you may need it for something more serious down the road. Blood seeps outward from a slash and you’ll be able to see what you suture back into place. Stabs displace deeper ligaments and tendons on the way in and if they hit an artery, the blood pools inward and you won’t have a gauge for how much you’ve really lost. You’ll die from the pressure buildup before anything else.”

Toro hesitated, looking back down to his shoulder. “You get stabbed often?”

“Enough for it to count.”

Far down on the planet below, a rippling shudder passed through the air and rattled the bones of those in the fishing village, turning eyes skyward for the source. Omera watched as a heavy gunship coasted down beyond the village, skimming the tops of tsuga trees in the direction of Lau. It had been a long time since something of that weight class had entered the area; without a sufficient starport, Sorgan was largely forgettable to the rest of the Outer Rim and to Omera, that had been the appeal. Sorgan wasn’t supposed to be on anybody’s radar.

“Do you think they could help?”

Stoke glanced at Caben. “We don’t know who that could be.”

Caben rested his hand on the dredger, his other arm hanging across it. “It’s worth asking, don’t you think?”

“Not if they’re not planning to stick around long,” Stoke said, going back to his work. “And we’re needed here. The raiders were up at the springs last week. They’re getting closer.”

“We can’t sit here and do nothing,” Caben said seriously. “We need someone to back us up, Stoke.”

“We’re not “doing nothing,” Caben. If anyone leaves now there’s less people for the lookout.”

“What if we just went to Lau to see if the loggers could help? It’s better than not trying at all. Right, Omera?”

Omera surveyed the ponds in thought, realist and idealist arguing behind her. Neela and Fashol were tiredly sifting through dead krill in the eastern quad, chucking them into a bucket to be disposed of. The ash from the fires had clouded and poisoned the pond almost immediately after the attack, the blue-bodied crustaceans being choked out as the water turned grey. Entire ponds would need emptied and filtered, and the phytoplankton recultivated before they could even be reseeded with krill.

Between the ponds she could see the children pulling broken equipment out of walkways, their round faces somber. Winta’s especially had drawn into one of severe contemplation as she rigged up a pulley and rope to have three of the other children pull on it together, hauling one of the destroyed fishing droids out of the water. The expression she had was much too old for her young face.

“Caben’s right.”

Stoke and Caben, shocked for different reasons, jumped up to follow Omera as she wiped her hands on her apron and trekked back to the longhouse. Stoke spoke up first. “Omera, we don’t know who those people could be,” he hissed, looking around them for eavesdroppers. “What kind of crew needs a ship that big? You saw the guns on it.”

”Gunship means they could be mercenaries,” Caben said, perhaps a bit too excitedly. “Which means they could be hired.”

“Or gun us down for even asking…” Stoke said under his breath. “For all we know, the Klatooinians have been hitting Lau too and the loggers called in their own backup.”

“These raids have gone on long enough,” Omera said with finality. “If the bandits continue at the rate they have, we’ll have nothing to set aside for winter. There’s not enough ammunition to rely on hunting— And we need to conserve what defenses we have.” She started up the astromech and checked the power gauge, looking out again across the village. “This is the third time in seven weeks, and every time they attack they come further into the village.”

There was a burst of laughter out by one of the ponds; the three adults turned, seeing the children giggling amongst themselves as they stood from the mud. Winta had released the magnet on the droid once it was above land and the rope slackening sent them all to the ground in a tumble.

“We’ll pool the rest of what we made from the rainy season,” Omera decided. “Tell them it’s all that we have.”

As she readied the wagon, both men packed bread and pemmican into a satchel, listening as she gave them instructions and called on the other elders of the village for an impromptu meeting. Several of them were uneasy at the prospect of sending the men on their own through the woods, a fact Stoke supported, but Caben insisted that they’d bed down for the night in Lau and set out early enough the next morning to be back in the village by sunset. The bandits had only attacked three days ago and it seemed unlikely they would come back that quickly when the village had nothing to offer them.

One of the older men, a grizzled hunter by the name of Kolt, stepped away from the group as they discussed what Stoke and Caben might say to the loggers and potential ship crew. After the rest of them loaded the wagon and finalized the contributions to the purse he returned, a scattershot thrower and case of cartridges with him. He gave both to Stoke, and the solemnity of their mission was finally realized by those among them who’d had their hopes raised.

“Keep it on hand, come nightfall,” Kolt grunted. “Don’t shoot what you can’t see… But don’t hesitate if you need to use it.”

Stoke nodded, and with grim faces he and Caben set off for the long ride to Lau.

Sorgan appeared beyond the viewport as a lush blue-green marvel, a far cry different from the barren Tatooine landscape. As they descended Toro watched meadows, springs, forests, and rivers span out beneath them, more green wilderness than he’d ever seen in one place. The Crest circled a quadrant in the northern hemisphere, made a circuit and doubled-back to land a few kilometers out past a town with communal buildings near a river. The town was purported to be a trading post, one of a few on an otherwise sparsely inhabited planet. The population was spread out, no centralized starports or industrial centers to speak of, but it looked like there were a few outlying rural communities on the scanner. They would be a day’s ride away if and when they picked back up: Toro thought back to the catalogue of picks he’d been given the choice of at the Guild lodge he booked Shand’s commission from, mulling over the names of those he saw on various posting boards for the Outer Rim. Sorgan may have bigger towns east of their location that had a wider variety of local listings. Even provincial farm planets were bound to have trouble.

Mando cycled through the landing procedures, bringing the Crest to stasis before lowering it into a camouflaged clearing surrounded by trees. “You don’t have anyone who’s going to come looking for you, do you?” he asked, pulling the yoke up level with the horizon line. He flipped three other switches and the ship lowered steadily to the ground, settling with a hiss of hydraulics.

Toro shook his head. “You and the kid are the only ones on this crate with criminal pasts chasing them,” he said with amusement. “Still not sure what that one did to warrant Guild interest.”

The child cooed, tapping the arm of his seat. Mando stood and gestured for Toro to move as he went back into the storage compartment behind the cockpit and sifted through supplies. “Anybody with a score to settle? Anyone you owe money?”

Toro snorted and spread his arms with a look that conveyed Please, are you serious? “Definitely not.”

“Parents, headmasters, commanding officers?” the Mandalorian pressed. “Anyone who would recognize you in a port and raise the alarm?”

“… No.”

Mando came back to the ladder descending to the hold with a bag over one shoulder as he picked up the kid. “Don’t sound too sure about that.”

The Mandalorian slid one-handed down to the cargo hold with his boots on the outer rails of the ladder. Toro climbed down after him, skipping the last few rungs to hop down. “No one’s following me. I told you, I’m on my own.”

Mando dropped the subject. He put the kid on one of the footlockers and restocked his munitions from the armory before pressing a command on his bracer to lower the ramp. A warm breeze flooded in with the light, bringing with it the scent of damp earth and moss and a wavering hum that sounded like it was coming from the trees. Mando stepped over Toro’s bedroll, strapping the pronged rifle to his back.

“Get your gear together.”

“You think we’ll camp somewhere else tonight?”

“No,” Mando said. He moved Toro’s bag to the side with his foot before going back to the kid. “It’s in my way; keep it together and out from underfoot.”

It took a moment for Toro to process what he’d said: he scowled and did as he was told. “I’m not a kid, you know. Don’t have to tell me to clean my room.”

Mando turned to stare at him for a moment longer than he really cared for. It was getting annoying.

“I know you’re not a kid,” Mando said flatly. “Which is why I expect you to keep your gear in order. You’ll have to leave at a moment’s notice more often than not and what you carry on your person may be the only resources available to you. If you can’t keep track of your own equipment, what makes me think you’ll be able to handle anything more important?”

“All right, all right, point taken.”

“Good.” The Mandalorian faced him again. “Here’s the plan: I’m going into town to find lodging. I’ll scope out the area and be back before long. Wait here and watch the kid.”

Toro snorted indignantly. “If you only brought me along to be a babysitter, I’m out.” Toro tossed his bedroll and pack to the side, looking expectantly at the Mandalorian.

Mando called his bluff. “Fine by me. Start walking.”

Toro’s eyes narrowed; his patience with the bounty hunter and every taciturn jab that morning was running out. He stepped up to face the Mandalorian, jutting his chin in accusation. “What’s the point in agreeing to work with me if you’re just going to keep me grounded, huh? There’s no reason to waste time with two trips to town. I’m ready to go.”

“I don’t need distractions.”

”You could use another set of eyes.”

”What I could really use,” Mando said through gritted teeth, “Is somebody who can follow basic directions without arguing with me every step of the way.”

Toro was getting frustrated. “I’ve already more than proven myself,” he said. “I had your back on Tatooine.”

“Which is why I trust you to watch the ship and the kid,” Mando bit back. “This is the biggest town in the quadrant— If they can’t sustain us for even a week of laying low, we need to find a better area before nightfall. I don’t want to keep track of more people than I have to, so either you stay here as lookout or you cut your losses and take a hike.”

Toro stared down the Mandalorian for a long minute, but Mando didn’t waver. He glanced over to the kid before he sat back against a crate with a stormy expression and crossed his arms. “Fine. We’ll be here.”

“Good. Lock up if you’re outside for long.”

The Mandalorian left down the gangplank. The child next to Toro immediately shuffled down off his perch and toddled toward the ramp; he hadn’t anticipated that the kid would realize Mando was leaving him behind so quickly and hopped up to snatch the kid before he could go far. The Mandalorian didn’t look back, and the hum from the trees fell silent as he disappeared into the forest. The kid whined as he squirmed in Toro’s grip, small clawed hands reaching out to grasp at air as he babbled something unintelligible.

“Don’t worry, kid, your old man will be back before long,” Toro said. He surveyed the hold for something to put him in to keep him corralled, but arranging the crates would take two hands to get them organized into something that would keep the boy penned in.

The kid continued to wriggle. Toro struggled to keep a grip on him, for the first time worried the kid had no sense of self-preservation when it came to being dropped from several feet in the air. He had to readjust his grip more than once as he distractedly scooted trunks together with his boot.

“Cut it out, kid, he’s coming back, just relax and— Ow!”

The kid dropped to the floor, Toro staring at his bleeding finger in shock. The child had bit him and was now toddling on small but surprisingly quick legs down the ramp into the grass.

“Hey!” Toro hollered again, wiping his finger on his trousers and hopping down to jog after the boy with a grumble. He caught up to the kid and picked him up before he got too far, carrying him under his arm like a sack of potatoes back to the ship and keeping his fingers out of reach.

“Listen,” Toro said, plopping him back on a footlocker. “He’s not just going to leave you, all right? He left the ship here too, so settle down.”

The boy’s long ears drooped like a wilted flower. His big dark eyes were the saddest thing Toro had ever seen, gazing out at the trees.

“What’s with the ears? Cheer up, you look like a Gungan. I told you he’s coming back,” Toro repeated. “Trust me.”

The solemn child huffed, folding his hands inside his sleeves and resigning himself to his position on the trunk.

Toro rolled his eyes, but the plaintive features of the little thing were enough to prod him into rummaging around in the galley for a distraction.

“Here.” Toro fished around in a thin plastifilm bag and held out some dried meat. “Eat something.”

The kid, forlorn until Toro mentioned food, perked up at the proffered snack and took it without a fuss. Toro sat back and stretched his legs, eyeing the boy for any other sign of an escape attempt, but the kid seemed satisfied to sit and gnaw on the jerky so Toro tossed the plastifilm bag aside and crossed his arms, looking around the cargo hold.

It was quiet for a long time, save for the sound of the wilderness as the kid worked his way through the cured meat, and eventually the boy got up to explore his surroundings, curiously poking at foot lockers and cubbies at floor level. Toro watched him explore before the boy eventually got a supply box open and amused himself with rolling the contents around on the floor, stacking them and knocking them down or organizing them into piles and patterns. He was especially intrigued by the folding camp utensils, managing to open them partway and arrange several forks in a feathered display on either side of a cleaning rod for a blaster barrel.

Toro chuckled, surveying the space again and wondering if there was a toolbox he could commandeer for a couple hours. He’d already made note of the head and the galley, as well as the carbonite chamber and racks. The captain’s berth occupied only a fraction of the lower deck in something Toro would closer consider a closet than a cabin, and now knowing where the armories and medical cabinet were he’d fairly mapped the entire hold, save for what utilities lay behind the access panels at the bow. Abovedecks was a different story, but he liked the greenery and breeze the open docking ramp afforded them so he figured he’d save further exploration for another time.

The carbonite chamber had especially been of interest: he’d heard of some bounty hunters transporting live captures in carbonite, but he’d never seen evidence of it for himself. Those were the kinds of rumors that slipped through from the more unsavory relatives who would find their way home on holidays or when they were in need of a loan; it was shared as gossip just as often as it was used as an overexaggerated threat of punishment for bad behavior. Seeing that not only had one been installed on the gunship, but that it had multiple racks for acquired targets validated Toro’s hunch that Mando was the real deal. Shand may have been right about the hunter doing more lying in wait when it came to tracking her, but Toro saw how the Mandalorian fought in the garage on Tatooine, and the Crest boasted a substantial array of weapons compared to that of an average traveler.

The thought of Tatooine brought him back to the kid, who was now shuffling through one of the crates that had been turned on its side. It was mostly clothes or camping gear so Toro left him to play with them. He had no idea what the kid was but he walked upright and seemed alert enough to be sentient, so Toro figured he must be some species from the outlying planets he’d never heard of. Whatever the case was, the Mandalorian was willing to kill for him so Toro would at least see to it that he stayed alive on his watch. Nothing in the woods would clear a dozen yards of the ship without getting a blaster burn for its trouble.

Pulling his pistol, though, Toro looked it over with a frown. It was only operating at about eighty-five percent efficiency, and the trigger wasn’t quite finessed to his liking; originally built with the intent of being pressure-sensitive in the first place, the hair-trigger was touchier now than before. His momentary patch-job would work as long as he was mindful of the sensor, but it was liable to make the housing run hot even without firing concentrated charges. To really fix it he needed a fusioncutter and at least one grounded clamp to keep some of the mechanical pieces inside the receiver from touching while he worked on it some more, and he hadn’t found either while poking around the ship.

Toro stood, going to the gunlocker and jimmying around the casing until he found the release; the doors retreated to the sides and Toro couldn’t help but grin.

”Now that’s more like it…” he murmured to himself. “EE-3 carbine, drum blaster, mortar gun…”

Toro whistled, impressed. His hand glided over the stock of the grenade launcher, and then he looked up to probably the largest pieces occupying the racks. Lifting the two-part assembly free, he latched the MK sniper rifle together, sliding the barrel into place on clean fittings. Long-range weapons didn’t appeal to him as much as short-range action did; he wouldn’t deny that it was a beautiful gun, but what use was an impressive kill if nobody was around to give you the credit?

From what he could tell, the rifle could operate as two different weapons depending on whether the extended barrel was locked in place or not. Without the sniper configuration giving it an additional eighteen inches in length, it could be further disassembled down to what was still a solid blaster rifle for short range combat. He could only imagine what the impact would feel like at close range.

OSS telescopic sight with an infrared detector… Short relay gas primer, reinforced condenser built into the receiver, induction coil in the stock… Modified was an understatement. No wonder the bolts packed a punch.

Toro turned it over. He was surprised by how light it was, considering the length, but he supposed Shand hadn’t been one to linger anywhere long, whatever her jobs were in the past. He could respect the desire to stay on the move.

“What do you think, kid?” Toro asked. He gripped it one-handed with the barrel raised, sitting into one side with the weight of the stock resting against hip. “Think Pops will let me have it? He may be good but even he can’t sight two rifles at once, ha.”

Though he wasn’t expecting a reply, there seemed to be a distinct difference in the kid’s lack of noise that gave Toro pause. He looked back out to the crates.

”Kid?”

The child was gone.

Swearing loudly and creatively, Toro set the rifle back on the rack and darted towards the ramp, jumping down to the grass all in the span of a second. He scanned the clearing for the boy and, not finding him, jogged for the trees.

Nothing.

Toro took a breath and jogged back to the ship, grabbing his gun and belt. He hit the white button to the left of the ramp to initiate its retreat and squeezed outside before it raised, buckling his holster in place and striding back into the clearing. Ship locked, he analyzed his surroundings.

The Razor Crest glinted in the late morning sun. Scrutinizing the gleam, Toro realized the light only reflected from the upper twelve feet or so. He crouched to the ground, surveying the earth. The clearing was almost entirely in the shade— Grass grew in patches here and there, and there was moss around the edges of the brush, but the rest of the ground was packed mud, and damp at that.

Carefully, he matched a line between the Crest and the spot where the Mandalorian had disappeared, and upon closer inspection was able to pick up on some very small, three-toed footprints. His own boots had smeared or obscured a lot of them in his haste, but there were enough for him to find the exact edge of moss the child had disappeared behind. With annoyance settling just this side of trepidation Toro picked his way through the woods.

“He couldn’t have gone far,” he muttered to himself. “But wherrrrrre would he have gone first…”

Whatever hum emanated from the trees rose and fell in varying degrees of pitch as he tracked, effectively drowning out any possibility of hearing a child the size of a mouse droid shuffling through the brush. To make matters worse, the boy had a brown coat and skin the color of foliage, so the chances of spotting him beneath the sun-dappling canopy were further complicated by the unfortunate, coincidental camouflage.

Toro’s shirt clung to his back as he walked, sticky with sweat, and it didn’t seem to matter whether he was in the shade or not because the heat was the same regardless. Wispy mosquitoes whined around him, constantly waiting for him to settle before sticking to his skin with pinpricks of annoyance, and his trousers chafed, snagging on thorns as he continued muscling his way through the brush. When he passed by a tree bearing the same lichen he’d seen twice before, Toro let out a frustrated yell and stomped back to the trail. He kicked a stone out of his way and smacked another mosquito, angrily scratching the welt it left behind.

He’d always hated the idea of camping.

Toro groaned, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes and grinding them in frustration. “It’s really gonna set the old guy off if you lost his kid,” he said absently. “You look away for all of two seconds and he pulls an escape act… Might as well boot the kid outside yourself next time, steal the ship and pray that guy never finds you… Better chance at surviving than having to face him and fess up…”

The kid had to be going after the Mandalorian. There was nothing enticing enough to keep him out here, no berries or animals to draw his attention, and there were more than enough negative incentives to urge him back to the ship— Since Toro had yet to see the kid double back he had to assume he was on the search for the hunter. There was something resembling a foot path between the trees, but Toro didn’t know if the kid would have the intuition to follow it. He could only see it himself because he was at a height to do so.

The gunslinger slowed to a stop, considering that. He crouched down to the forest floor, feeling the earth dampen the knee of his trousers as he ducked his head. Soft, leafy ferns hovered roughly at the boy’s height by Toro’s reckoning, and below that was a shortened view of the look and distance of the trail. It was possible the kid was unaware there even was one; he could have strayed from the dirt path entirely.

That was a problem.

Toro could feel the muscles between his shoulder blades tightening with the tense concern that the kid had no idea where he was going and had simply gotten himself lost in the search for his guardian. Toro didn’t imagine the kid knew any more about the forest than he did, and there was no telling what he might run into.

Toro took a deep breath. Guess it was time to put those tracking skills to work.

He put one hand on his hip and surveyed the greenery, rethinking his strategy. Crouching back down and moving some ferns aside, he could see bits of displaced mud on top of leaves from where the boy’s robe had dragged, and as he moved the plants, individual fiddleheads retreated at his touch. Toro scanned ahead for already-furled stems, following them when they lined up with the child’s small, intermittent footprints. It was odd that though the kid’s path— what he hoped was the kid’s path— had strayed from the dirt trail, it was still going in the same general direction the Mandalorian had. Toro was doing his best to ignore Mando’s more obvious prints, knowing what he really needed to do was find the kid, but there was some relief in knowing he’d come across one of them at some point and at least solve half his problems when he did.

The child brushed another feathery fern out of his eyes, walking on soft moss and enjoying the feeling between his toes. The forest was alive with hundreds of creatures, large chirping bugs singing in the trees and winged creatures hooting between the branches. Once or twice he saw brown, soft-furred animals with stripes peering at him from dens built into the gnarled roots of trees, but he sensed no ill-intent from them, only curiosity. Though he wished he could stay and explore further, he was determined to catch up.

His guardian was somewhere ahead of him, he was sure. The apprentice hunter was still far behind both of them, but the boy paid him no mind, content to see and smell the freshness of the forest. It was far more vibrant than anywhere he had been in a long time, and he hoped they’d be staying there for a while. The air was clear and breathable, the sun warm… He could rest and explore and his guardian would be able to heal.

As the boy climbed over stones and pushed through the thicket of grasses back to the even dirt path, he wondered if his guardian had truly meant what he’d said when he promised he’d come back to the ship. He knew starships weren’t homes for most sentient beings— Perhaps this was his guardian’s home planet and he had a dwelling somewhere away from the ship, and away from him.

The child shook his head, waving away both gnatflies and troubled thoughts. The Mandalorian wouldn’t have made the apprentice hunter stay behind too if that were the case. The young man from-Tatooine-but-not had no reason to remain there either, and he had the sense his armored guardian intended to teach the apprentice the same trade and life he led. The two men had talked briefly after they departed from the desert planet, his guardian pointing to various places and controls on the starship, and he’d seen the younger man picking apart a blaster that morning in the cargo hold similar to how the Mandalorian had maintained his own tools and weapons during hyperspace flights when it had still been just the two of them.

There was a glint up ahead, and he quickened his pace, reaching out with openness through the lights connecting the living creatures of the forest to see more clearly; with a chirp he renewed his pace, happy to have finally caught up on the warrior’s trail.

Only moments later did he realize he wasn’t the only one.

”A-ha! Caught you!”

Drat.

The child was briskly scooped up by the young man with dark hair, raised up into the air and firmly grasped to his side. He frowned, squirming at the handling as the man scolded, until he saw the same gleam through the forest the child had caught only moments before.

The Mandalorian was looking at them, unmoving as the man holding him continued speaking. Dimly he could register a change in tone, the younger man’s pitch rising as he too saw the older hunter, but the boy couldn’t have cared less for the conversation he only understood a part of anyway. The warrior approached with measured strides and the boy reached out, cooing happily as the armored man closed the distance, speaking sternly with his crewmate; said crewmate was still making excuses and holding the child in front of him, as if to ward off any potential retaliation from the Mandalorian.

“What?!” the indignant apprentice was saying. “You should be happy, this means he knows how to find you on his own. Here take him, look he’s tired.”

The Mandalorian sighed but plucked the boy away and settled him comfortably against the cool planes of his armor. The child took hold of the bandolier in one hand and tapped the center of the quiet man’s breastplate, happy to be back where he belonged.

The logging community came into view around midday. Barges were docked upriver on the west side of town near a clearing in the woods; the bridge Mando, Toro, and the kid crossed was well-built with high enough clearance to give both timber rafts and the logger scows passage beneath. The air was clear and smelled of rich, black dirt, thick woods spanning as far as the eye could see.

Without a Guild lodge or more advanced information centers Din doubted Sorgan was used by hunters as a stopover, and he had hoped his and Toro’s presence would stir only curiosity. There were a few turned heads, and though people overall went about their business, something in the air didn’t feel quite right: as Din, Toro, and the child made their way to the common house between wattle fencing, the general chatter of town dissipated almost entirely.

The large rounded building was built of wood and woven, thatched reeds. Inside, a bar and a ring of sand encircled the central hearth, smoke rising to escape from the roof. Small tables were spread evenly around the room, diners and staff of various species milling about and conversing. Din kept his hands visible and his gait relaxed. It was entirely possible the town simply didn’t get many travelers.

A lumberman and a Twi’lek fisher played dice over next to the wall, out of the way of foot traffic. Two women and a man with dark, braided hair were in deep conversation close to the entrance, their boots well-worn and flecked with tsuga tree needles; they matched the muddy hooves of the bordok mules outside hitched to a post by the water trough with stun traps slung over their packs. A young father fed a child sitting on one table, the child’s smile bright despite his arm in a recent sling. At first, most of those in the common house appeared to pay them no mind, but subtle glances around the room traded unspoken words with their fellow townsfolk. The din of the common house hadn’t diminished, but there was a distinct change in what they were communicating.

One other person stood out: a stocky woman in armorweave and worn, blue-green armor sat by herself near the exit, eyeing them over a bowl of soup. Mando watched the rear cam in the head-up display inside his helmet, keeping his stride unhurried as he led the three of them to a table on the opposing wall.

The kid had wriggled down from Mando’s grasp upon entry to the town to walk on his own: Toro herded him to the right with his boot, skirting the felinx beneath a table that could probably eat him. The atmosphere of the pub was comfortable, the kind of place he expected on a planet like this one. It seemed like most people knew each other well enough to not pay them any mind, swapping tales and talking business over their plates. The bartender came to greet them, offering the local brew and asking if they were there for the midday meal before retreating to retrieve soup for the kid and something roasted for Toro. Mando declined anything to eat.

“You know, I’m starting to think you might be a droid,” Toro joked, stretching his legs and lacing his fingers behind his head. “Or do you just subsist off the nightmares of anyone who crosses you?”

The Mandalorian didn’t respond beyond what Toro assumed was a glare, but it still made him grin. The bartender returned with their food, setting down a flagon of swirling blue liquid between them. Toro dug in, pouring himself a cup.

“Really though, Tin Can, do you ever eat?”

Mando ignored him. He pushed the cup of broth over to the kid, helping him take a sip. “Tell me what you saw coming into town.”

“Rustic folk. Farmers and hunters, mostly, probably some fur and scale trappers.” Toro took a bite of meat, chewing around his words. The child pushed his bowl aside, leaning up on the table towards Toro’s plate with open interest. The gunslinger frowned and pulled his plate closer. “There’s probably a sawmill downriver.”

“Anything stand out to you?”

Toro dropped his voice low, confident that he’d landed on something to give the Mandalorian a little faith in him. “You’re in for a treat; you saw the woman at the front?”

Mando nodded.

“Pretty sure she’s an ex-shock trooper from one of the old Republic cleanup crews. Got a price on her head.”

“There’s no such thing as an ex-shock trooper,” Mando said. “Best just to leave her be.”

Toro stared, his food pausing halfway to his mouth. “That’s it? I just found us a job and you don’t want it?”

“Lower your voice,” Mando said. “If you want to confront a drop soldier, be my guest.”

”You aren’t going to back me up?”

Mando continued tearing apart hunks of bread for the kid. ”Do I look like I want to start a fight?”

“You walk in anywhere with armor like that, you’re basically asking for one.”

“We are here to recoup first and find lodging,” Mando said, his voice clipped. “Tangling with someone without a confirmed bounty the second we come into town isn’t a plan with much forethought.”

Toro frowned. “I saw her on the postings back in the Mid-Rim, Republic and ISB. Last name is Dune. If that’s not her she must have a twin.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes,” Toro said confidently, gesturing with his skewer. “You can tell by the tattoos on her— Wait— Where is she?”

The hair on the back of Din’s neck stood up, instinct crowding to the forefront. Snapping around to follow Toro’s line of sight revealed an empty table, the woman nowhere in sight.

“Watch the kid,” he ordered, standing abruptly and brushing past the table. He could hear Toro protest behind him, but he was already unclipping his holster and heading out of the curtained archway.

Outside, the damp air was quiet. Din surveyed the land and switched on the footprint relay in his visor, seeing her tracks round the back of the public house. Cautiously he followed, listening for movement as he passed between two of the buildings. As he rounded the walkway between the fencing, though, the footprints came to an abrupt halt.

He whipped around in each direction, scanning for a heat signature, but as soon as he turned and looked up, two feet hit him square in the chest.

The trooper swung down from a crossbeam, landing as Din’s back hit the outer wall of the cantina with a thud. In a flash her right fist made contact with his faceplate, knocking him back again and dizzying his senses. Her second swing telegraphed broadly and he dodged just in time— Her fist connected with the wooden slats instead, rattling them with a bang. Din twisted to land a hit to a kidney, feeling his fist meet solid muscle, and he heard her grunt in pain. His left hand lashed out to wrap around her throat the same time he shoved off the wall, blocking her left downswing with his vambrace.

The trooper snarled and brought her right arm up, dropping a heavy elbow down to break his grip on her throat— The move sent him off-balance and she used that half-second opening to grab his shoulders and knee him in the gut, hard. Beskar has no give to it and he felt the impact of her thick leg against each and every one of the injuries across his ribs and midsection. Pain exploded across his chest, radiating from the center of his sternum as she hauled him behind her to collide with the opposing wall.

Din shoved off and readied himself, pivoting to face her again. As the woman swung wide her fist connected with the jaw of the helmet, snapping his head to the side. A backhanded swing jerked him back to face her and he growled, blocking the third punch and grabbing her other forearm: with a sharp jut he headbutted her square in the face, hearing bone crack and sending her staggering back, but before he could grab his gun or blade she righted herself with a yell and barreled into him, pinning him to the wall with a crushing grip around his throat.

“Mando!”

Clutching the soldier’s wrists with an iron grip, Din jerked his gaze to the side, eyes wide as Toro came into view with his blaster drawn. Hearing the rookie’s hail, the woman turned too and yanked Din back out into the open with his back to Toro, putting him in the line of fire. Toro’s blaster shot glanced off Mando’s pauldron, jarring his shoulder. Toro cursed behind him and the woman grinned viciously, hauling the Mandalorian back with her by the edge of his breastplate.

Din dug his feet in, lurching back against her grip in anger. In the gap between them he struck out with one boot, shoving her off before drawing his blade the same moment the woman drew hers. Another blast of laserfire sailed narrowly past Mando, this time grazing the woman’s bicep. She cried out in pain, glaring at the rookie as the Mandalorian approached. Din struck out with the dagger, hearing it sing through the air, but his opponent wasn’t so distracted by the apprentice that her attention faltered, and her armored forearm came up to block the vibroblade in a skitter of sparks before she lunged in a downward arc with her own. Mando ducked his head, catching her wrist and twisting it outward, digging his thumb into a pressure point to force the knife out of her hand. The move forced a gasp out of her and in a rage the woman brought her leg up again, kicking him back into Calican.

Toro stumbled under the weight of the Mandalorian, clumsily trying to brace himself to keep both of them from going down, but he only succeeded in coming to a knee as Mando’s impact buckled him. Dune, instead of retreating to draw her own blaster, had followed through with another kick to Mando’s chest and reached out with one hand, grabbing the barrel of Toro’s blaster before bringing her other forearm down against his wrist. Blunt force pain seared up his forearm as she wrenched the gun away.

A plume of fire cut through the air between the Mandalorian and the woman, his flamethrower finally forcing her back. Toro grabbed the trooper’s blade from the ground and darted around the blaze, quickly closing the gap as she turned her aim towards Calican.

When Dune went to fire his blaster, however, the plasma cartridge immediately sent electrical discharge arcing over her hand. The trooper cried out and dropped it, barely having time to grab Toro’s right forearm above her in the incoming jab before Toro swung a sharp left hook across her jaw, dropping the blade from his right hand to catch it midair between them on the pullback with his left. Dune’s eyes widened in shock a half second before Toro slashed again, and this time he felt contact.

The trooper gasped, jerking back and pulling him with her; with a growl bordering on feral she pulled his arm down and twisted her body, dropping into a wide stance and hauling him up over her shoulder as if he weighed nothing. Toro landed square on his back, the air forced from his lungs in a rush, and he had to clumsily hook one leg up over her arm to keep from being pinned. It was a scuffle for status as they grappled with one another, Dune with bulk strength and Toro with sharp reflexes, the two of them rolling across the slick grass before landing in a locked contest of strength, each with a weapon in hand and fire in their eyes.

“Enough.”

The Mandalorian’s voice resounded like thunder, halting the fight with his blaster raised only a few scant feet from the side of the trooper’s head. The vibroblade beneath her chin hummed in the air. Her own blaster was jammed against Toro’s chest. The two of them glared at each other, panting from the exertion, neither wavering.

From behind all three of them came the distinct sound of someone snapping a stick, and all three slowly turned to see the green child perched in the grass behind the common house, half a skewer of roasted meat in each hand. His ears twitched as he chewed loudly, watching the adults with inquisitive eyes.

“… What is that thing?” the trooper asked, curiosity coloring her tone.

The boy took a large bite off the skewer and waved. Toro flexed his hand, still sore where the kid had bitten him.

“I think it’s a carnivore.”

The woman snorted. Mando lowered his blaster.

Toro slowly lowered the knife and clicked the safety on as the tension in the air dissipated. The pain was starting to register past the adrenaline.

Mando shoved his pistol in his holster. “You were supposed to wait inside,” he said irritably.

“This seemed like more fun at the time,” Toro groaned. The drop trooper grinned and pushed off of Toro’s chest none too lightly, standing and offering her hand.

Calican and the trooper both looked marginally worse for wear coming back into the common house behind the Mandalorian. The folks inside seemed more wary than before, and when Toro stopped by the bar to order another plate of food, the cook and the rest of the staff suddenly found work elsewhere and wouldn’t meet his eye. When he tried to get their attention or flag one down there was just enough conversation to say they couldn’t hear him, and the bartender who’d taken their order before was methodically stoking the embers of the fire, facing away from him and turning the spit.

Mando set the child back down at their table as Dune gave the two of them her name, dropping her gloves and helping herself to Mando’s cup and the flagon of spotchka. Toro reluctantly slid what was left of his plate to her.

Cara Dune was built only slightly less solid than a freight train. Her dark hair was short and utilitarian, and the callouses on her knuckles spoke as much to a life of hard work as they did to fighting. She carried herself with the easy confidence of a woman who knew her role in life and had never been given reason to doubt it. Despite the blaster graze and slash from the vibroblade she appeared to be in remarkably good spirits, content to eat with only a casual regard toward both audience and place settings; Toro got the impression bone broth was cheaper than roast grinjer and not near as filling.

“I figured you had a fob on me,” she said, taking a drink and grimacing around the flavor. Toro could still see blood between her teeth while she talked and wondered how bad her fight was with Mando before he’d gotten there. “Not many other reasons for hunters to come out this far.”

“Fair enough,” Mando said.

“How did you get out here?” Toro asked, wrapping his left hand in his handkerchief and resting his knuckles against the cold jug. “This planet hasn’t developed transportation faster than those pack animals out front.”

“Old buddy of mine owed me a favor,” Cara said. “I crashed with him for a while before he dropped me off on his way out of the system.”

Toro looked around, once again unimpressed by scenery that had not changed in the past twenty minutes. “What are you doing in a place like this?”

She gave Toro a lazy smile, settling back comfortably into her chair as she regarded him. “That info’s on a need-to-know basis, Sunshine.”

“Sure, sure, but you’re a shock trooper, aren’t you?” Toro nodded to the bands on her arm. “I heard they were working for the New Republic now, spec-ops on Imperial holdouts, stuff like that.”

“I used to be,” Cara said. The sly smile no longer reached her eyes, and she seemed to regard him the way a dog views surprise company at dinnertime. “At least during the war. Right now I’m enjoying an early retirement. Or, was.”

“Why leave?”

“Well my platoon used to do real work hunting down war lords and arms profiteers,” she said, swishing the spotchka in her cup. “Rooting out the settler compounds while the Alliance hit the big guns. Things changed after Endor though and we got moved to the cleanup crews.”

Toro leaned in, both forearms on the table. “You were a mercenary?” he asked with visible interest. The Mandalorian nudged his boot beneath the table. Toro ignored it.

“Not in as many words,” Cara said. “We did our share of gutting the Imperial settlements. Instead of facing them head on like we were used to, we had to go in quiet and get the job done with as little demo as possible before hauling the worst of them back to Central and calling it a day.”

“Good work if you get it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the trade-off,” Cara said. “The fewer warlords we found, the more we were relegated to being political muscle, protecting diplomats and suppressing riots. They kept pulling us back towards the Core— And I didn’t sign up to be a New Republic guard dog, so I got out.”

“Nothing out here is near as interesting as being a merc.”

“Licensed contractor,” Cara said evenly. “And like I said, I'm retired.”

“Why not stay on the move?” Toro asked genuinely. When she narrowed her eyes in suspicion he poured her another drink.

Cara turned to the Mandalorian. “He always this nosy?”

“Yes.”

Cara snatched up the cup. “Not having to take care of a ship or worry about Guildsmen—,” she nodded to Mando, “— appeals to more people than you think.”

“We hadn’t intended to start a fight,” Mando said. “When you left we thought you might’ve been trying to get the drop on us. We weren’t looking for you.”

“Good,” Cara said. She drained her cup, turning it upside down on the table before standing. “Keep it that way, and move along— I’ve been here two weeks, and if you’ve got your own hounds after you I don’t want them barking up the wrong tree.”

As she readied to leave, Toro realized something and cut her off. “Wait, how’d you know we were Guild?”

Cara gave him a strange look. “Neither of you blend in,” she said, “And there’s only so many jobs a Mandalorian can have.”

The rest of the day was spent buying or trading for what supplies the town was able to offer; waterproofing wax, dry goods, and saddle soap rounded out most of the field supplies, and the Mandalorian picked up an extra canteen, in addition to a holopuck with a local atlas. The latter was difficult to come by since everyone they spoke to in town was reluctant to offer one up, and it took a more substantial fee to convince one of the traders to part with a spare. It was only after they’d received it Mando explained that it was likely only because that trader was from out of town— In most places, those who worked and lived off the land didn’t reveal where they trapped, hunted, or fished, should the people they gave that information to prove greedy or inconsiderate enough to try their own luck there as well.

Mando laid out the plan for the next day on the hike back through the forest, saying they’d find a town farther east in the morning: a territory dispute with the drop trooper wasn’t worth the trouble, and the eastern side of the mountains opened up into a coastline. Whether they stayed at a higher altitude or more towards sea level depended on what resources they could find regarding the Crest; Mando didn’t fancy more than a day’s ride hauling fuel if it came down to it.

Night fell as they traversed the woods back to the ship, supplies carted on a borrowed repulsorlift. Despite the fight with Cara Dune, Toro was restless after a day of menial work, and though the Mandalorian had shared useful information, he was about as talkative as the kid, which was proving to be not much at all.

“So what’re the rules?” Toro asked, finally cracking under the drudgery of stowing supplies. He hefted a canister up the ramp and put it in the hold to be arranged by the Mandalorian later. “With the helmet and all.”

The Mandalorian didn’t spare him a glance, eyeing the woods instead. He picked the kid up and set him down on the stack of storage units he’d commandeered, a lantern, handheld holoprojector, and the rough log set out on top. “It stays on.”

“Yeah, I gathered, but what else? What happens if it comes off?”

“If you try to take it, I kill you,” Mando said mildly.

“Oh big surprise.” Toro rolled his eyes. “You’re a walking armory. My guess is nobody but the kid gets within arm’s reach if they want to keep their limbs intact. C’mon, gimme the specifics. Do you have night vision? Do you eat everything through a straw?”

Mando didn’t respond, but considering Toro was still moving supplies for him he figured he had some wiggle room to poke the bear.

“Can I borrow it?”

The Mandalorian made a point of closing the logbook, finally turning to cock his head at the rookie and stare him down. “Kid, I don’t know you well enough to miss you if you were gone.”

“Ooh, someone’s got a sense of humor. Hey, Womp Rat, did you know your dad has a sense of humor?”

“Excuse us?”

Both Mando and Toro swiveled around at the sound of another voice, hands to their holsters; two men were approaching the clearing, still several yards away under the light of a wagon piloted by a droid. They were dressed in earthy blue and green clothes similar to the townsfolk, fitting in against the backdrop of the provincial planet. Toro eased back, getting his hand back under the crate.

“What do you want?” he hollered down to them.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to sneak up on you. Got dark faster than we anticipated,” the slighter man said, walking quickly towards the ring of lights set up around the ship once it was clear their presence wasn’t going to be welcomed with a blaster shot. “We were wondering if you could help us.”

The Mandalorian picked up the kid and strode away from the pair towards the bow of the ship to lift a panel under the engine, so Toro took it upon himself to meet them at the edge of the ramp.

“Town’s that way,” Toro said, pointing. He wiped his hands on a rag and tossed it aside, hands on his hips. “ ’Bout six kilometers.”

“No, we— Sorry, I’m Caben, this is Stoke— We weren't looking for Lau, we came to see if we could hire you. Our village needs help.”

“We have money,” the second man said.

“The log runners gave us directions,” Caben said, following after the Mandalorian but directing his plea between both of them. “They said we might be able to hire you, and whoever came on the gunship.”

Toro scoffed. He shook his head, going back to his work. “It’s just us,” he said proudly. “And you can’t afford us.”

“You don’t even know what the job is!”

��You wouldn’t have enough,” Toro said. “We’re Guild, we don’t do farm work, and we’re not staying here anyway.”

“It’s raiders,” Stoke said with an edge to his voice. His eyes flicked between Toro and the Mandalorian Caben was still trying to get around to talk to face-to-face. “Our farms have been raided three times in two months. We need them gone. The whole village chipped in everything they could.”

“We’re not mercenaries,” the Mandalorian said finally. He continued to prep the ship for lockdown one-handed, ignoring the farmers as the child watched.

“You’re a Mandalorian though, right?” Caben said, eyes wide as he took in the sight of the bounty hunter. “I’ve heard stories about your people— the legends, the hunters and fighters across the galaxy— If even half of what I’ve read is true—”

“Hey, look,” Toro said, cutting in. “We don’t need money, and I told you, we’re not for hire— At least not for this. Raiders or not, whatever you want us to do isn’t worth our time—”

“No, you look,” Stoke said, standing his ground against Toro’s dismissal. He met Toro in the middle of the clearing with squared shoulders. “We need help, and you’re the only people this area has seen besides tradesmen and trappers for four years. We’re lucky we’ve been able to hold our own in the middle of nowhere, but this is something we can’t fight by ourselves. It took us the whole day to get here, we can’t go home empty-handed—”

“And like I said, we’re not here to run off a few bandits for pocket change —”

Oddly enough it was the Mandalorian to interject next.

“You say you’re farmers?” he asked.

“… Yes?” Caben replied, unsure how to interpret the sudden interest. “Fishers, really. We farm krill.”

“In the middle of nowhere.”

“Yes?”

“Do you have lodging?”

The tone of Mando’s voice made Toro pivot on the spot, suddenly concerned the Mandalorian might actually be considering what the other two were asking of them. “Woah, Mando, you can’t seriously think— I mean I thought we were leaving—?”

Mando strode past him to meet the two farmers in the light. The space he took up made Stoke and Caben shuffle back a step in apprehension. “How large is your village?”

“About three acres in land near the river, a few more in timber,” Caben said excitedly. “A little over sixty people.”

“Any who can shoot?”

“Well— I mean it’s not— We’re mostly farmers,” Caben said, floundering. “We have slug-throwers, maybe a dozen people that can hunt, but even then, not enough ammunition. We can’t fight them in the open.”

The Mandalorian nodded. Toro’s bafflement and irritation rose.

“I can cover for that. You say you’re near the river?”

“Yeah.” The farmers nodded hopefully. “Seventy kilometers north of here at the river bend, give or take.”

“Good. We can take the ship and be there in less than an hour.”

“It’s— There won’t be anywhere to land something this big.” Caben shook his head for the first time, gesturing to the gunship. “The farmland is too soft and the trees are too thick. River runs on two sides past the timber, too. We were going to make camp tonight and travel at first light.”

The Mandalorian hummed in disapproval but weighed his options, assessing the ship.

“We can talk details on the way, but I’d rather not waste a full day traveling.”

“The mech has an autopilot and guidance system,” Stoke offered, gesturing to the wagon pilot. “There’s enough reserve power to get us back by morning, and enough of us to split up the watch and sleep in shifts.”

Mando considered it. “You willing to help load out?”

Caben and Stoke nodded eagerly.

“Good. Toro here will show you what to pack. I’ll need the credits you do have, and I’ll be back soon.”

The Mandalorian took the pouch of credits and finished notating instructions as Toro fumed, following him to the stern where the glow of the work lights cast shadows around them. “Mando what are you doing?” Toro hissed. “You said we weren’t staying here. This is chump change compared to what we can do. You should have told them to take a hike.”

“Let’s get one thing clear,” the Mandalorian said quietly. “You do not speak for me.”

The child’s ears flattened at his guardian’s tone. Toro gestured to the farmers, trying to keep his voice down even as his frustration built.

“Mando, this is insane, you and I can do better than this,” he said. “I thought we were leaving—”

“Calican,” Mando snapped. He loomed in the light of the Crest. “There’s only room on this ship for one captain. The last time you decided to make your own call on a job you nearly got my ship stolen and me and the kid— and yourself— killed. This is downtime built in to recover from that job. If you can’t handle my verdict, start walking.”

Toro ground his teeth at the reprimand, anger and irritation simmering under his skin. He had to tamp down his inclination to argue; this was far from the fast-paced hunting in sprawling cities and crime rings he’d anticipated when he signed on, but the recent memory of their job with Shand— and the tools of the trade he desperately hoped Mando was good for— stayed his tongue.

“What makes you think the job is worth the detour?” he asked, nodding past the hunter to the two farmers.

“Quartering us in the middle of nowhere to act as a deterrent for a week or two is a square deal,” Mando continued. “Can you handle that?”

“Will we move on after that?” Toro pushed. “Because as far as I can tell the only thing this planet has to pass the time is target practice.”

“Assuming you fix your blaster, that’s the idea.”

It’s only been a few days, Toro seethed. And he’s your only way off swamp-ridden rock.

The Mandalorian waited. Toro was coming to realize silent observation may be his mentor’s natural resting state, and it was more infuriating than anticipated. An argument, a fight— those he could navigate. Those were gratifying and gave him more to work with than the pointed stare and cold debate leveled at him now. It wasn’t that he took issue with the Mandalorian’s stubbornness as a character trait— It was the fact there was no telling where he stood in the bounty hunter’s regard at any given time. He had no way of reading the Mandalorian’s expressions, and not only had Mando disagreed with him on nearly everything that day, he seemed to have a more condensed arsenal of frustratingly sound logic backing up how he shut down Toro’s protests, and it frustrated Toro that he couldn’t articulate a strong enough rebuttal to stand his ground when the time came because it felt like he was being kept in the dark.

Mando’s decisions were justified. Toro just didn’t like them.

Toro had a feeling this decision would set the tone of their working relationship moving forward; he couldn’t help but remember what Shand said about the Mandalorian’s lack of personal connections meaning he could easily drop Toro at any time and cut his losses. Mando had clearly survived this far without him. If Toro didn’t suck it up and muscle through the next two weeks on Sorgan, he didn’t think he was going to like being stuck there for an indeterminable future.

After a long moment of deliberation, the tic of Toro’s clenched jaw finally settled.

“Fine,” he muttered. “What do you need?”

The Mandalorian nodded. “Pull this together from the ship.”

He gave Toro the list, some instructions for stowing the necessities, and the security protocols for locking up. Toro must not have been doing as well as he thought in hiding his dissatisfaction because without prompting, the Mandalorian handed the child off to Toro and followed up his instructions with, “Buck up and get moving. And watch the kid until I get back.”

“Hey, where are you going?”

“I’m calling in some backup.”

—

The Mandalorian retraced the trail leading to Lau before branching off from the woods and heading toward a spring. Din circumvented the town, briefly switching to the thermal imaging to orient himself before switching back to night vision. Though grateful for the first uninterrupted seclusion he’d had that day, he wasn’t able to fully relax knowing the kid was still back at the clearing, but he didn’t know what the drop trooper’s temperament would be at an unexpected arrival. Hopefully the rookie kept a closer eye on the kid this time.

Din still wasn’t sure what to make of the gunslinger. He was fairly sure Calican’s brash impulsiveness was a mark of youth and not one of a trigger-happy lust for bloodshed— He’d done surprisingly better in the fight against Cara than he had in the one with Shand (despite the fact Dune had at least sixty pounds on him), and he’d retained enough clarity of mind to hesitate when Din stepped in and brought the scrap to a stall.

However, the rookie’s inclination to jump feet-first into everything instead of hanging back concerned him. Din needed to be able to run point, and Toro had thus far not proven consistently capable of thinking first and acting second.

Din sighed, traipsing through the woods. The irony of taking on an apprentice whose ambition reminded him of his own at that age was not lost on him, and while it was clear Calican wasn’t bereft of talents or smarts, he lacked experience and patience and didn’t know when to apply the skills he had. The risks he took weren’t calculated.

He also didn’t have a near-indestructible suit of armor protecting him like Din had at that age.

As Din navigated the forest, he thought over their experiences and how they measured up to the mixed results of the past four days. Toro was sharp, and if he would just slow down and think, he’d figure out the answers he wanted faster and without having to rely on Din to break them down every step of the way. The arguing, the questions, the not-following instructions…

Toro wasn’t a kid. The immaturity at the core of his actions was the kind that resulted from the rookie still only thinking about himself first. If he couldn’t figure out how to work with Din— or anybody— as a team, he wasn’t going to get very far in life on credits alone.

Still, the gunslinger seemed to have some modicum of sense and a good awareness of his surroundings. He caught on quick to instruction once he relented to it, and he’d surprised Din more than once that day with the connections he’d been able to draw on the scant information available.

Toro had potential. He just had to apply it. Din knew he had high expectations, but if the rookie could prove his merit to him, he’d be able to work for anybody.

Toro didn’t know what to make of the farmers, and he got the impression the stocky one didn’t much care for him either. Caben made small talk at least, enthusiastic as they loaded out the supplies and blasters Mando had left them with and asked several questions about the Crest Toro didn’t have all the answers for. The child had whined softly after the Mandalorian left, his ears drooping and his eyes going all big and sad again, but he thankfully stayed close to where the men were amidst the load out and didn’t wander off.

“So what’s it like working for the Mandalorian?” Caben asked as they strapped down the wagon.

Toro scoffed. “I work with him. We’re hunting partners.”

“Bounty hunters?”

“Yep. Just came from Tatooine before this. Finished up a job concerning Fennec Shand.”

Toro watched them expectantly from the side, but Stoke and Caben exchanged a look and shrugged. “Sorry, no idea who that is.”

“Fennec Shand?” Toro asked, shocked. “The assassin who worked for the Hutts? Wanted in eight systems at least?”

“Already told you, you’re the first outsiders we’ve seen in four years,” Stoke said. “We hardly hear anything as is.”

“Well let’s just say she’s bad news,” Toro said. “Pulled a double cross on her though. She almost escaped, tried to go after the kid here. Mando and I ambushed her and took her down in the middle of the desert. When we dragged her back to Mos Eisley she tried to make a break for it and we ended up in a shootout in the middle of the night.”

Caben was invested. Stoke couldn’t care less.

“What’d you do with her after that?”

“Ah, well we brought in proof that she was dead and the broker paid out the bounty to us,” Toro lied. “Got a pretty penny considering how high profile she was.”

“Thought you said you two weren’t mercenaries.”

“We’re not,” Toro said, looking back to Stoke. Stoke side-eyed him from his seat on the wagon.

“Mercenaries will kill anyone for a buck. Hunters have credentials. We bag the criminals on wanted listings. Verifiable criminals and all.” Toro continued to twirl his blaster in hand. “It gets pretty technical when you get into Guild bureaucracy, I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”

“Sounds cut and dry to me.” Stoke tied up his long hair and stretched his legs, leaning back against the trunks. “Pick a job, chase someone around, catch them and tie ‘em up, drag ‘em back and get paid.”

Toro rolled his eyes. “Yeah, if you simplify it like that.”

Stoke snorted. The croak of amphibians ebbed and flowed from the creek in the woods, the three of them falling quiet. The boy played in the grass with a silver ball, pushing it around the dirt between his feet.

Stoke spoke again. “Let me ask you this: if you two just got paid for a big job, why did you need to take our credits, even though we told you it was all our village had to spare?”

Toro froze, sweat running cool on the back of his neck. “Oh, Mando has his reasons,” he deflected. “He’s bringing backup, so you’re technically paying them, you know? We’re just coming to take a break between now and the next job.”

“Uh huh.”

“Gotta sleep at some point, you know?”

“Sure.”

The awkward silence settled again over the clearing. Toro’s leg bounced impatiently, looking around for something to do. Stoke narrowed his eyes.

“How long did you say you’ve been a hunter?”

“A while.” Toro quickly reached down and nabbed the kid by the back collar of his coat, bringing him up with kicking feet to turn him to the farmers at the back of the wagon. “Hey, do you have any idea what this thing is? Mando picked him up a while ago and we’ve got no idea what he’s supposed to be.”

Cara stood her ground, arms crossed. Both the long-haired trapper and the stout cook from the public house were unarmed, but the argument grew louder, their voices overlapping.

“— don’t want you causing any more trouble!” the trapper barked. “We’re giving you until morning to clear out.”

“I’m far enough from town,” Cara said. “This land’s unincorporated.”

“Move out,” the bald one insisted. His broad hands flexed into fists. “Or you’ll be moved.”

Cara laughed humorlessly. “Try it, Dagosh, see what happens.”

“We’re being civil. This is exactly why we asked you to leave this afternoon—”

“If you hadn’t snuck up on me I wouldn't have shot at you—!”

Somebody off to Cara’s left cleared their throat. The two men jolted in surprise as Cara’s hand went to her hip holster.

The Mandalorian had materialized between the trees like a specter, silent and shimmering. Both men blanched at his sudden appearance, exchanging looks as they stepped back. The Mandalorian cut an intimidating silhouette, the flames reflected in his armor the only motion against the darkness.

The trapper nudged his friend and the two backed away further with a call of “By first light, trooper.” They mounted the speederbike hovering past the light of the campfire and kicked off in a hurry, brush swishing loudly as it was displaced by the retreating hum through the forest. Cara pivoted away from the Mandalorian and grabbed her duffel, shoveling supplies in to break camp.

“You here for a rematch?” she growled. She tore a blanket from the ground and stuffed it into a rucksack, packing the rest of her gear. “Or do you just like to spectate?”

“… They give you trouble?”

“Save your pity,” she snapped. Bedroll and mess kit found their way onto the pile with military efficiency, sparse belongings tacked together and stowed in canvas. The Mandalorian watched her toss the rest of her food over the grass before she shoved past him. “And get out of my way.”

The Mandalorian remained silent as Cara packed, and it unnerved her.

She thought about finding a soft spot between all that armor to shoot him. She needed to find somewhere new to bed down for the night and didn’t feel like watching over her shoulder while she did.

Cara had learned long before that poison nettles and occupied dens were far easier to spot in the daylight. She’d been fortunate enough so far to avoid both, but the creek wound further into the forest away from the cleared footpaths and she’d still need to clear brush before getting a fire going. The rest of the predators stayed away from the light.

He stood there the entire time she packed, but it wasn’t a large campsite— Even half a minute beneath the gaze of black steel made the skin down the back of her neck crawl. He hadn’t moved from the tree, watching her impassively.

If the rookie was waiting in the shadows, she’d shoot him too and not lose an ounce of sleep over it.

“What?” she finally snapped. “Where’s your sidekick? If you came to collect on my hide after all, I’ll give you a real fight.”

The Mandalorian tossed something at her. She caught it automatically.

Credits glinted up from the bag in the firelight.

“I have a counteroffer.”

—

Five humans and a child of indeterminate species trundled through the woods on a wagon with enough space left in the back for two. Toro had shot Cara a saucy grin and winked while they were discussing bedding arrangements, at which she scoffed and tossed her duffle bag onto the pile, climbing up to prop herself against her rucksack. The gunslinger, despite his flirtation, stretched the entirety of his lanky body longways down the wagon bed next to the cases on the other side. The Mandalorian sat upright towards the front near the villagers, and the child perched on his lap, eagerly watching the trees go by as moths fluttered around the hanging lantern.

Something started to unnerve the villagers the farther they traveled into the forest: while Caben directed the droid ahead along the trail, Stoke watched through the trees as fog crept in, clouding the shadows between bark. It was hard not to notice the antiquated slugthrower he carried on his lap, and Din was starting to wonder if there was more to the raids than simple smash-and-grab thefts of food and supplies.

”You plan on bird hunting this time of night?” the Mandalorian asked.

Stoke glanced back over his shoulder while Cara and Toro swapped stories. “Just cautious,” he said. “The raids have had everybody on edge. We’ve tried tracking the bandits, but we think they move camps throughout the week, and we can’t afford to venture too far into the woods— There’s too much work to be done back home, and the raiders have something with them.”

“… Something.”

The farmer’s frown deepened. He tried coming up with the right description and, failing that, nudged his friend. Mando looked to Caben.

“We’re not sure what it is,” Caben hedged as he turned and rested his arm over the back of the bench. “They’ve got something big with them that sounds like a machine, but it has these… big red eyes, I guess, that move through the woods past what we can see, even at midday. It’s big enough to shake the ground, and we keep finding its footprints around the raiders’ old campsites.”

“What do you mean?” Cara cut in. She and Toro were leant in behind them now.

“Just… Big footprints,” Stoke said. “Round like a lotus leaf, with two toes in front like a lizard. Size of this wagon bed. They go all around the forest and overlap the most at their old campsites. There’s branches and bark shorn off the trees too high to be any of the other animals marking their territory or looking for food.”

Mando and Cara glanced at each other, their earlier assessment at what should have been a simple job now morphing into concern.

”Where do the tracks go?” Toro asked.

”Around the outer edges of the village,” Caben said. “We can’t tell if they go into the river or not. The tracks… Well, they keep us corralled toward the ponds. We don’t have enough slugthrowers to fight the bandits, plus whatever that thing is.”

Mando’s own frown deepened. It was one thing to scare off a couple dozen raiders, but it was another thing to go up against something that big and unknown. He didn’t think the villagers were pulling their legs; the loggers in Lau had also been guarded and uneasy. Whatever creature was lurking in the woods had apparently been a problem for some time, and their earlier pleading was starting to take a different light.

“Footprints?” Cara was asking. “Not tire tracks or treads? Nothing like a vehicle?”

“They’re feet,” Stoke said flatly. “If it’s a vehicle, we don’t know what it is or where it could have come from. There’s nothing besides Lau and villages like ours for miles around here. No fuel, no roads.”

“What does it do? During the raids?” Toro asked.

“We’re… not sure,” Caben confessed. “Something explodes and the bandits charge out from the trees, from different directions every time.”

“We’re usually focused on getting people far enough away and taking cover,” Stoke muttered. His hands tightened on the long gun on his lap as he focused on the trail. “The second time they showed up, some of us fought back but not all of us made it. Two were killed in the fight, and another is still recovering from their injuries. We’ve buried more people in two months than we have in five years.”

“… There’s a lot of children,” Caben said softly. He was watching the child on Mando’s lap, who was now gazing up at the stars. “As soon as the blasterfire starts, we’re just trying to get as many people out of the way as we can. The faster we run, the more people there are left by the end of it.”

A flicker of cratered earth filled Din’s memory. He could almost smell the acrid cordite as the farmers talked.

“… I don’t like it,” Cara muttered.

Stoke snorted, unamused. “Yeah, you’re telling us.”

Quiet settled again around them, or as quiet as the soft hooting and buzzing of wildlife would allow. Mando settled the child in on one of the softer bags, covering him with the edge of a blanket.

“Tell us what you can about the village and the bandits themselves,” Din said. “Sound like we’ll need as much intel as we can get.”

Notes:

I know the term ‘Venn diagram’ wouldn’t exist in Star Wars, I just don’t care. It’s a good line and I’m keeping it.

”I don’t know you well enough to miss you if you were gone,” comes from a story Rodney Crowell tells from his past about being completely wasted and meeting his then live-in-girlfriend’s father for the first time; After making a pretty bad first impression, Johnny Cash responded with the above line, and Crowell says it sobered him right up.

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#reblog #tbd

[corellianhounds]

AO3 Link: Here

Toro Calican Lives AU

Chapter 4 — First Impressions

Media: The Mandalorian

Rating: Gen.

Word Count: 14,119

Warnings: Canon-typical violence

Art Credit: Christian Alzmann, The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian

Series Summary: What would have happened if Toro Calican hadn’t betrayed the Mandalorian? How would the story have changed if he had lived?

Chapter Summary: Things are bound to change when you throw somebody new into the mix.

This chapter, though similar to canon, better develops some of the characters and circumstances leading into “Sanctuary.”

—

Din gingerly stretched his arm up to assess the injuries he’d sustained. Over the past two weeks he’d been in multiple fights, electrocuted, dropped sixty feet onto his back, bodily hit four times by a mudhorn, shot by a modified MK, and had a speederbike shot out from under him going a hundred miles an hour.

The damage was taking its toll.

Purple, blue, and magenta bruises bloomed across his ribs and chest in a number of patterns and intensities. The ones from the Sandcrawler fall and the mudhorn were tinged green with healing around the edges, but newer ones criss-crossed his skin in Venn diagrams of pain. He’d been containing his movement as much as he could since Arvala-7: two ribs felt loose and his back ached with gravity’s pull every time he got out of bed. He hadn’t had proper enough rest after the fall and the tussle with the mudhorn to justifiably say he was back up to par, though for reasons unknown he didn’t feel as bad as he thought he should.

Shand’s second shot had hit the back of his pauldron, and while the blasterfire had been deflected, the force behind it had still traveled through the joint of his shoulder, which was to say nothing of the shot he’d taken square in the chest: the rifle bolt had felt like another hit from the mudhorn. In the privacy of the bunk he rolled his shoulder, taking note of at which angles it hurt most to move as he picked up the hand scanner and hovered it over his ribs to get a reading.

The screen blipped, the readout telling him there was no internal bleeding this time, so he set it aside and sifted through the analgesics in the hidden compartment by the head of the cot. Of the most recent injuries, Shand’s strike to the inside of his knee and the loose ribs concerned him the most. He hated wasting medical supplies, but the knee had been a bother even before the mercenary’s fight and he needed to be able to walk unhindered: with a steadying breath he lifted the lip of his helmet and knocked back the painkillers, then stooped to roll up his pant leg and swab a spot on the outside of his knee, injecting a half dose of bacta with the stimpak. The muscle strain and bruising in his chest and back would have to wait until they found somewhere to settle and he could rest properly— There were too many muscle groups working together for an injection to do much good while they were still on the move. Having his feet under him would have to do.

The kid stirred groggily in the hammock above the cot. Din could feel the critter’s big eyes watching him. It made him uncomfortable, but the kid either couldn’t tell or didn’t care. Instead he rolled over the edge of the hammock to dangle his feet above the cot and drop down onto the bedding. Din watched him from the side as he toddled across the blanket to him, perching by his thigh to peer under Din’s arm.

When the child reached his hand up to Din’s side, Din removed the autoinjector and shifted away from him on the cot, stowing the medical supplies in the compartment and letting his pant leg fall before picking the kid up. He put him back up in the hammock and shoved his boots on.

“Just for a minute,” he told the kid as he fastened his tunic and donned the armor he’d set aside. “We’ll get food when I’m done.”

Out in the hold it appeared the gunslinger had helped himself to a ration pack and was working his way through a biscuit while sat atop a footlocker. His bedroll nearby was still in a state of disarray, his bag half-packed. Toro nodded in greeting before going back to his work on the disassembled heavy blaster pistol in his lap, a torque wrench in one hand and the biscuit between his teeth. Mando passed him to get some food ready for the kid.

Toro rolled the toolkit back up and quickly reassembled the blaster. “So where’re we headed?” he asked.

“Sorgan,” Mando replied. The child took the ration bar Din gave him, happily chowing down.

“Never heard of it.”

“Backwoods planet near Savareen.”

“The old coaxium refinery?”

Din was surprised. “Yeah. It’s four quadrants up on the Core axis though; Sorgan is fairly isolated.”

“Do they have a Lodge?”

“Nope.”

“But you said—”

“I said, passage to the next system, and we’ll see where we go from there.” Mando picked up the pieces of the modified rifle left by the mercenary, looking over the build. He opened the gunlocker, setting them inside on the rack and rearranging other ordnance. “I also said the kid and I are laying low. You won’t always have a go-between for these jobs, and you may have to find different work between commissions. If you’re sticking around, we won’t be meeting with a broker until we’ve recovered and restocked supplies.”

“Yeah, that’s fair. My arm’s in pretty bad shape.” Toro tucked his chin, thumbing the tear in his shirtsleeve aside. Mando glanced out from behind the armory door: Toro had some blistering on his forearm and a shallow wound on his shoulder, probably from one of Fennec’s blades. Toro moved the arm without hindrance and he seemed alert. Mando stared.

“Is it still bleeding?”

“No, it stopped not long after we hit hyperspace.”

“… Can you move your shoulder.”

“Yeah, but it’s still an open wound; you have anything for it?”

Mando bit his tongue, stepping around his new crewmate to rifle through a cabinet attached to the bulkhead near the bow. “Bacta patch if you can’t walk it off.” He sifted through the medical cabinet, searching for the equipment on the charging dock. “Medical-grade expansion foam if it’s deep and you removed whatever you were stabbed with. You’ll have to get back to your base of operations or a med center if you think they hit an organ or artery. Cauterizing suture if it’s a slash as long as they missed any tendons.”

“I thought the point of patching wounds wasn’t to cause more damage,” Toro said with amusement.

Mando returned with the cauterizer, seeing Toro’s face sober instantly.

“Woah, hey, I’m not using that. What happened to good old fashioned stitches?”

Mando stopped in front of him, offering the cauterizer and a patch to cover it. “Each stitch is a potential infection site. Medical-grade cauterizer will kill bacteria and create a suture at the same time, and it’s faster to do in the field.”

“What if the blade was poisoned?”

Mando moved Toro’s torn shirt aside, examining his shoulder. “It wasn’t.”

“But what if—”

“It wasn’t,” Din repeated. “You’d know by now if it was, and you’re stalling. Here; cauterizer feels better if you do it yourself.”

Toro glanced back down to his shoulder before looking at Mando with suspicion. “What about a stab wound? Cauterizer’s not gonna get that deep.”

“We’re burning daylight, kid.”

“Humor me,” Toro argued. “So I know what you plan to zap me with in the future.”

Din sighed. “They’re… harder to repair than slash wounds,” he said. “Plastospray will work on anything except bone. If you’re trying to conserve your medical supplies it’s a waste to use it on a slash when you may need it for something more serious down the road. Blood seeps outward from a slash and you’ll be able to see what you suture back into place. Stabs displace deeper ligaments and tendons on the way in and if they hit an artery, the blood pools inward and you won’t have a gauge for how much you’ve really lost. You’ll die from the pressure buildup before anything else.”

Toro hesitated, looking back down to his shoulder. “You get stabbed often?”

“Enough for it to count.”

Far down on the planet below, a rippling shudder passed through the air and rattled the bones of those in the fishing village, turning eyes skyward for the source. Omera watched as a heavy gunship coasted down beyond the village, skimming the tops of tsuga trees in the direction of Lau. It had been a long time since something of that weight class had entered the area; without a sufficient starport, Sorgan was largely forgettable to the rest of the Outer Rim and to Omera, that had been the appeal. Sorgan wasn’t supposed to be on anybody’s radar.

“Do you think they could help?”

Stoke glanced at Caben. “We don’t know who that could be.”

Caben rested his hand on the dredger, his other arm hanging across it. “It’s worth asking, don’t you think?”

“Not if they’re not planning to stick around long,” Stoke said, going back to his work. “And we’re needed here. The raiders were up at the springs last week. They’re getting closer.”

“We can’t sit here and do nothing,” Caben said seriously. “We need someone to back us up, Stoke.”

“We’re not “doing nothing,” Caben. If anyone leaves now there’s less people for the lookout.”

“What if we just went to Lau to see if the loggers could help? It’s better than not trying at all. Right, Omera?”

Omera surveyed the ponds in thought, realist and idealist arguing behind her. Neela and Fashol were tiredly sifting through dead krill in the eastern quad, chucking them into a bucket to be disposed of. The ash from the fires had clouded and poisoned the pond almost immediately after the attack, the blue-bodied crustaceans being choked out as the water turned grey. Entire ponds would need emptied and filtered, and the phytoplankton recultivated before they could even be reseeded with krill.

Between the ponds she could see the children pulling broken equipment out of walkways, their round faces somber. Winta’s especially had drawn into one of severe contemplation as she rigged up a pulley and rope to have three of the other children pull on it together, hauling one of the destroyed fishing droids out of the water. The expression she had was much too old for her young face.

“Caben’s right.”

Stoke and Caben, shocked for different reasons, jumped up to follow Omera as she wiped her hands on her apron and trekked back to the longhouse. Stoke spoke up first. “Omera, we don’t know who those people could be,” he hissed, looking around them for eavesdroppers. “What kind of crew needs a ship that big? You saw the guns on it.”

”Gunship means they could be mercenaries,” Caben said, perhaps a bit too excitedly. “Which means they could be hired.”

“Or gun us down for even asking…” Stoke said under his breath. “For all we know, the Klatooinians have been hitting Lau too and the loggers called in their own backup.”

“These raids have gone on long enough,” Omera said with finality. “If the bandits continue at the rate they have, we’ll have nothing to set aside for winter. There’s not enough ammunition to rely on hunting— And we need to conserve what defenses we have.” She started up the astromech and checked the power gauge, looking out again across the village. “This is the third time in seven weeks, and every time they attack they come further into the village.”

There was a burst of laughter out by one of the ponds; the three adults turned, seeing the children giggling amongst themselves as they stood from the mud. Winta had released the magnet on the droid once it was above land and the rope slackening sent them all to the ground in a tumble.

“We’ll pool the rest of what we made from the rainy season,” Omera decided. “Tell them it’s all that we have.”

As she readied the wagon, both men packed bread and pemmican into a satchel, listening as she gave them instructions and called on the other elders of the village for an impromptu meeting. Several of them were uneasy at the prospect of sending the men on their own through the woods, a fact Stoke supported, but Caben insisted that they’d bed down for the night in Lau and set out early enough the next morning to be back in the village by sunset. The bandits had only attacked three days ago and it seemed unlikely they would come back that quickly when the village had nothing to offer them.

One of the older men, a grizzled hunter by the name of Kolt, stepped away from the group as they discussed what Stoke and Caben might say to the loggers and potential ship crew. After the rest of them loaded the wagon and finalized the contributions to the purse he returned, a scattershot thrower and case of cartridges with him. He gave both to Stoke, and the solemnity of their mission was finally realized by those among them who’d had their hopes raised.

“Keep it on hand, come nightfall,” Kolt grunted. “Don’t shoot what you can’t see… But don’t hesitate if you need to use it.”

Stoke nodded, and with grim faces he and Caben set off for the long ride to Lau.

Sorgan appeared beyond the viewport as a lush blue-green marvel, a far cry different from the barren Tatooine landscape. As they descended Toro watched meadows, springs, forests, and rivers span out beneath them, more green wilderness than he’d ever seen in one place. The Crest circled a quadrant in the northern hemisphere, made a circuit and doubled-back to land a few kilometers out past a town with communal buildings near a river. The town was purported to be a trading post, one of a few on an otherwise sparsely inhabited planet. The population was spread out, no centralized starports or industrial centers to speak of, but it looked like there were a few outlying rural communities on the scanner. They would be a day’s ride away if and when they picked back up: Toro thought back to the catalogue of picks he’d been given the choice of at the Guild lodge he booked Shand’s commission from, mulling over the names of those he saw on various posting boards for the Outer Rim. Sorgan may have bigger towns east of their location that had a wider variety of local listings. Even provincial farm planets were bound to have trouble.

Mando cycled through the landing procedures, bringing the Crest to stasis before lowering it into a camouflaged clearing surrounded by trees. “You don’t have anyone who’s going to come looking for you, do you?” he asked, pulling the yoke up level with the horizon line. He flipped three other switches and the ship lowered steadily to the ground, settling with a hiss of hydraulics.

Toro shook his head. “You and the kid are the only ones on this crate with criminal pasts chasing them,” he said with amusement. “Still not sure what that one did to warrant Guild interest.”

The child cooed, tapping the arm of his seat. Mando stood and gestured for Toro to move as he went back into the storage compartment behind the cockpit and sifted through supplies. “Anybody with a score to settle? Anyone you owe money?”

Toro snorted and spread his arms with a look that conveyed Please, are you serious? “Definitely not.”

“Parents, headmasters, commanding officers?” the Mandalorian pressed. “Anyone who would recognize you in a port and raise the alarm?”

“… No.”

Mando came back to the ladder descending to the hold with a bag over one shoulder as he picked up the kid. “Don’t sound too sure about that.”

The Mandalorian slid one-handed down to the cargo hold with his boots on the outer rails of the ladder. Toro climbed down after him, skipping the last few rungs to hop down. “No one’s following me. I told you, I’m on my own.”

Mando dropped the subject. He put the kid on one of the footlockers and restocked his munitions from the armory before pressing a command on his bracer to lower the ramp. A warm breeze flooded in with the light, bringing with it the scent of damp earth and moss and a wavering hum that sounded like it was coming from the trees. Mando stepped over Toro’s bedroll, strapping the pronged rifle to his back.

“Get your gear together.”

“You think we’ll camp somewhere else tonight?”

“No,” Mando said. He moved Toro’s bag to the side with his foot before going back to the kid. “It’s in my way; keep it together and out from underfoot.”

It took a moment for Toro to process what he’d said: he scowled and did as he was told. “I’m not a kid, you know. Don’t have to tell me to clean my room.”

Mando turned to stare at him for a moment longer than he really cared for. It was getting annoying.

“I know you’re not a kid,” Mando said flatly. “Which is why I expect you to keep your gear in order. You’ll have to leave at a moment’s notice more often than not and what you carry on your person may be the only resources available to you. If you can’t keep track of your own equipment, what makes me think you’ll be able to handle anything more important?”

“All right, all right, point taken.”

“Good.” The Mandalorian faced him again. “Here’s the plan: I’m going into town to find lodging. I’ll scope out the area and be back before long. Wait here and watch the kid.”

Toro snorted indignantly. “If you only brought me along to be a babysitter, I’m out.” Toro tossed his bedroll and pack to the side, looking expectantly at the Mandalorian.

Mando called his bluff. “Fine by me. Start walking.”

Toro’s eyes narrowed; his patience with the bounty hunter and every taciturn jab that morning was running out. He stepped up to face the Mandalorian, jutting his chin in accusation. “What’s the point in agreeing to work with me if you’re just going to keep me grounded, huh? There’s no reason to waste time with two trips to town. I’m ready to go.”

“I don’t need distractions.”

”You could use another set of eyes.”

”What I could really use,” Mando said through gritted teeth, “Is somebody who can follow basic directions without arguing with me every step of the way.”

Toro was getting frustrated. “I’ve already more than proven myself,” he said. “I had your back on Tatooine.”

“Which is why I trust you to watch the ship and the kid,” Mando bit back. “This is the biggest town in the quadrant— If they can’t sustain us for even a week of laying low, we need to find a better area before nightfall. I don’t want to keep track of more people than I have to, so either you stay here as lookout or you cut your losses and take a hike.”

Toro stared down the Mandalorian for a long minute, but Mando didn’t waver. He glanced over to the kid before he sat back against a crate with a stormy expression and crossed his arms. “Fine. We’ll be here.”

“Good. Lock up if you’re outside for long.”

The Mandalorian left down the gangplank. The child next to Toro immediately shuffled down off his perch and toddled toward the ramp; he hadn’t anticipated that the kid would realize Mando was leaving him behind so quickly and hopped up to snatch the kid before he could go far. The Mandalorian didn’t look back, and the hum from the trees fell silent as he disappeared into the forest. The kid whined as he squirmed in Toro’s grip, small clawed hands reaching out to grasp at air as he babbled something unintelligible.

“Don’t worry, kid, your old man will be back before long,” Toro said. He surveyed the hold for something to put him in to keep him corralled, but arranging the crates would take two hands to get them organized into something that would keep the boy penned in.

The kid continued to wriggle. Toro struggled to keep a grip on him, for the first time worried the kid had no sense of self-preservation when it came to being dropped from several feet in the air. He had to readjust his grip more than once as he distractedly scooted trunks together with his boot.

“Cut it out, kid, he’s coming back, just relax and— Ow!”

The kid dropped to the floor, Toro staring at his bleeding finger in shock. The child had bit him and was now toddling on small but surprisingly quick legs down the ramp into the grass.

“Hey!” Toro hollered again, wiping his finger on his trousers and hopping down to jog after the boy with a grumble. He caught up to the kid and picked him up before he got too far, carrying him under his arm like a sack of potatoes back to the ship and keeping his fingers out of reach.

“Listen,” Toro said, plopping him back on a footlocker. “He’s not just going to leave you, all right? He left the ship here too, so settle down.”

The boy’s long ears drooped like a wilted flower. His big dark eyes were the saddest thing Toro had ever seen, gazing out at the trees.

“What’s with the ears? Cheer up, you look like a Gungan. I told you he’s coming back,” Toro repeated. “Trust me.”

The solemn child huffed, folding his hands inside his sleeves and resigning himself to his position on the trunk.

Toro rolled his eyes, but the plaintive features of the little thing were enough to prod him into rummaging around in the galley for a distraction.

“Here.” Toro fished around in a thin plastifilm bag and held out some dried meat. “Eat something.”

The kid, forlorn until Toro mentioned food, perked up at the proffered snack and took it without a fuss. Toro sat back and stretched his legs, eyeing the boy for any other sign of an escape attempt, but the kid seemed satisfied to sit and gnaw on the jerky so Toro tossed the plastifilm bag aside and crossed his arms, looking around the cargo hold.

It was quiet for a long time, save for the sound of the wilderness as the kid worked his way through the cured meat, and eventually the boy got up to explore his surroundings, curiously poking at foot lockers and cubbies at floor level. Toro watched him explore before the boy eventually got a supply box open and amused himself with rolling the contents around on the floor, stacking them and knocking them down or organizing them into piles and patterns. He was especially intrigued by the folding camp utensils, managing to open them partway and arrange several forks in a feathered display on either side of a cleaning rod for a blaster barrel.

Toro chuckled, surveying the space again and wondering if there was a toolbox he could commandeer for a couple hours. He’d already made note of the head and the galley, as well as the carbonite chamber and racks. The captain’s berth occupied only a fraction of the lower deck in something Toro would closer consider a closet than a cabin, and now knowing where the armories and medical cabinet were he’d fairly mapped the entire hold, save for what utilities lay behind the access panels at the bow. Abovedecks was a different story, but he liked the greenery and breeze the open docking ramp afforded them so he figured he’d save further exploration for another time.

The carbonite chamber had especially been of interest: he’d heard of some bounty hunters transporting live captures in carbonite, but he’d never seen evidence of it for himself. Those were the kinds of rumors that slipped through from the more unsavory relatives who would find their way home on holidays or when they were in need of a loan; it was shared as gossip just as often as it was used as an overexaggerated threat of punishment for bad behavior. Seeing that not only had one been installed on the gunship, but that it had multiple racks for acquired targets validated Toro’s hunch that Mando was the real deal. Shand may have been right about the hunter doing more lying in wait when it came to tracking her, but Toro saw how the Mandalorian fought in the garage on Tatooine, and the Crest boasted a substantial array of weapons compared to that of an average traveler.

The thought of Tatooine brought him back to the kid, who was now shuffling through one of the crates that had been turned on its side. It was mostly clothes or camping gear so Toro left him to play with them. He had no idea what the kid was but he walked upright and seemed alert enough to be sentient, so Toro figured he must be some species from the outlying planets he’d never heard of. Whatever the case was, the Mandalorian was willing to kill for him so Toro would at least see to it that he stayed alive on his watch. Nothing in the woods would clear a dozen yards of the ship without getting a blaster burn for its trouble.

Pulling his pistol, though, Toro looked it over with a frown. It was only operating at about eighty-five percent efficiency, and the trigger wasn’t quite finessed to his liking; originally built with the intent of being pressure-sensitive in the first place, the hair-trigger was touchier now than before. His momentary patch-job would work as long as he was mindful of the sensor, but it was liable to make the housing run hot even without firing concentrated charges. To really fix it he needed a fusioncutter and at least one grounded clamp to keep some of the mechanical pieces inside the receiver from touching while he worked on it some more, and he hadn’t found either while poking around the ship.

Toro stood, going to the gunlocker and jimmying around the casing until he found the release; the doors retreated to the sides and Toro couldn’t help but grin.

”Now that’s more like it…” he murmured to himself. “EE-3 carbine, drum blaster, mortar gun…”

Toro whistled, impressed. His hand glided over the stock of the grenade launcher, and then he looked up to probably the largest pieces occupying the racks. Lifting the two-part assembly free, he latched the MK sniper rifle together, sliding the barrel into place on clean fittings. Long-range weapons didn’t appeal to him as much as short-range action did; he wouldn’t deny that it was a beautiful gun, but what use was an impressive kill if nobody was around to give you the credit?

From what he could tell, the rifle could operate as two different weapons depending on whether the extended barrel was locked in place or not. Without the sniper configuration giving it an additional eighteen inches in length, it could be further disassembled down to what was still a solid blaster rifle for short range combat. He could only imagine what the impact would feel like at close range.

OSS telescopic sight with an infrared detector… Short relay gas primer, reinforced condenser built into the receiver, induction coil in the stock… Modified was an understatement. No wonder the bolts packed a punch.

Toro turned it over. He was surprised by how light it was, considering the length, but he supposed Shand hadn’t been one to linger anywhere long, whatever her jobs were in the past. He could respect the desire to stay on the move.

“What do you think, kid?” Toro asked. He gripped it one-handed with the barrel raised, sitting into one side with the weight of the stock resting against hip. “Think Pops will let me have it? He may be good but even he can’t sight two rifles at once, ha.”

Though he wasn’t expecting a reply, there seemed to be a distinct difference in the kid’s lack of noise that gave Toro pause. He looked back out to the crates.

”Kid?”

The child was gone.

Swearing loudly and creatively, Toro set the rifle back on the rack and darted towards the ramp, jumping down to the grass all in the span of a second. He scanned the clearing for the boy and, not finding him, jogged for the trees.

Nothing.

Toro took a breath and jogged back to the ship, grabbing his gun and belt. He hit the white button to the left of the ramp to initiate its retreat and squeezed outside before it raised, buckling his holster in place and striding back into the clearing. Ship locked, he analyzed his surroundings.

The Razor Crest glinted in the late morning sun. Scrutinizing the gleam, Toro realized the light only reflected from the upper twelve feet or so. He crouched to the ground, surveying the earth. The clearing was almost entirely in the shade— Grass grew in patches here and there, and there was moss around the edges of the brush, but the rest of the ground was packed mud, and damp at that.

Carefully, he matched a line between the Crest and the spot where the Mandalorian had disappeared, and upon closer inspection was able to pick up on some very small, three-toed footprints. His own boots had smeared or obscured a lot of them in his haste, but there were enough for him to find the exact edge of moss the child had disappeared behind. With annoyance settling just this side of trepidation Toro picked his way through the woods.

“He couldn’t have gone far,” he muttered to himself. “But wherrrrrre would he have gone first…”

Whatever hum emanated from the trees rose and fell in varying degrees of pitch as he tracked, effectively drowning out any possibility of hearing a child the size of a mouse droid shuffling through the brush. To make matters worse, the boy had a brown coat and skin the color of foliage, so the chances of spotting him beneath the sun-dappling canopy were further complicated by the unfortunate, coincidental camouflage.

Toro’s shirt clung to his back as he walked, sticky with sweat, and it didn’t seem to matter whether he was in the shade or not because the heat was the same regardless. Wispy mosquitoes whined around him, constantly waiting for him to settle before sticking to his skin with pinpricks of annoyance, and his trousers chafed, snagging on thorns as he continued muscling his way through the brush. When he passed by a tree bearing the same lichen he’d seen twice before, Toro let out a frustrated yell and stomped back to the trail. He kicked a stone out of his way and smacked another mosquito, angrily scratching the welt it left behind.

He’d always hated the idea of camping.

Toro groaned, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes and grinding them in frustration. “It’s really gonna set the old guy off if you lost his kid,” he said absently. “You look away for all of two seconds and he pulls an escape act… Might as well boot the kid outside yourself next time, steal the ship and pray that guy never finds you… Better chance at surviving than having to face him and fess up…”

The kid had to be going after the Mandalorian. There was nothing enticing enough to keep him out here, no berries or animals to draw his attention, and there were more than enough negative incentives to urge him back to the ship— Since Toro had yet to see the kid double back he had to assume he was on the search for the hunter. There was something resembling a foot path between the trees, but Toro didn’t know if the kid would have the intuition to follow it. He could only see it himself because he was at a height to do so.

The gunslinger slowed to a stop, considering that. He crouched down to the forest floor, feeling the earth dampen the knee of his trousers as he ducked his head. Soft, leafy ferns hovered roughly at the boy’s height by Toro’s reckoning, and below that was a shortened view of the look and distance of the trail. It was possible the kid was unaware there even was one; he could have strayed from the dirt path entirely.

That was a problem.

Toro could feel the muscles between his shoulder blades tightening with the tense concern that the kid had no idea where he was going and had simply gotten himself lost in the search for his guardian. Toro didn’t imagine the kid knew any more about the forest than he did, and there was no telling what he might run into.

Toro took a deep breath. Guess it was time to put those tracking skills to work.

He put one hand on his hip and surveyed the greenery, rethinking his strategy. Crouching back down and moving some ferns aside, he could see bits of displaced mud on top of leaves from where the boy’s robe had dragged, and as he moved the plants, individual fiddleheads retreated at his touch. Toro scanned ahead for already-furled stems, following them when they lined up with the child’s small, intermittent footprints. It was odd that though the kid’s path— what he hoped was the kid’s path— had strayed from the dirt trail, it was still going in the same general direction the Mandalorian had. Toro was doing his best to ignore Mando’s more obvious prints, knowing what he really needed to do was find the kid, but there was some relief in knowing he’d come across one of them at some point and at least solve half his problems when he did.

The child brushed another feathery fern out of his eyes, walking on soft moss and enjoying the feeling between his toes. The forest was alive with hundreds of creatures, large chirping bugs singing in the trees and winged creatures hooting between the branches. Once or twice he saw brown, soft-furred animals with stripes peering at him from dens built into the gnarled roots of trees, but he sensed no ill-intent from them, only curiosity. Though he wished he could stay and explore further, he was determined to catch up.

His guardian was somewhere ahead of him, he was sure. The apprentice hunter was still far behind both of them, but the boy paid him no mind, content to see and smell the freshness of the forest. It was far more vibrant than anywhere he had been in a long time, and he hoped they’d be staying there for a while. The air was clear and breathable, the sun warm… He could rest and explore and his guardian would be able to heal.

As the boy climbed over stones and pushed through the thicket of grasses back to the even dirt path, he wondered if his guardian had truly meant what he’d said when he promised he’d come back to the ship. He knew starships weren’t homes for most sentient beings— Perhaps this was his guardian’s home planet and he had a dwelling somewhere away from the ship, and away from him.

The child shook his head, waving away both gnatflies and troubled thoughts. The Mandalorian wouldn’t have made the apprentice hunter stay behind too if that were the case. The young man from-Tatooine-but-not had no reason to remain there either, and he had the sense his armored guardian intended to teach the apprentice the same trade and life he led. The two men had talked briefly after they departed from the desert planet, his guardian pointing to various places and controls on the starship, and he’d seen the younger man picking apart a blaster that morning in the cargo hold similar to how the Mandalorian had maintained his own tools and weapons during hyperspace flights when it had still been just the two of them.

There was a glint up ahead, and he quickened his pace, reaching out with openness through the lights connecting the living creatures of the forest to see more clearly; with a chirp he renewed his pace, happy to have finally caught up on the warrior’s trail.

Only moments later did he realize he wasn’t the only one.

”A-ha! Caught you!”

Drat.

The child was briskly scooped up by the young man with dark hair, raised up into the air and firmly grasped to his side. He frowned, squirming at the handling as the man scolded, until he saw the same gleam through the forest the child had caught only moments before.

The Mandalorian was looking at them, unmoving as the man holding him continued speaking. Dimly he could register a change in tone, the younger man’s pitch rising as he too saw the older hunter, but the boy couldn’t have cared less for the conversation he only understood a part of anyway. The warrior approached with measured strides and the boy reached out, cooing happily as the armored man closed the distance, speaking sternly with his crewmate; said crewmate was still making excuses and holding the child in front of him, as if to ward off any potential retaliation from the Mandalorian.

“What?!” the indignant apprentice was saying. “You should be happy, this means he knows how to find you on his own. Here take him, look he’s tired.”

The Mandalorian sighed but plucked the boy away and settled him comfortably against the cool planes of his armor. The child took hold of the bandolier in one hand and tapped the center of the quiet man’s breastplate, happy to be back where he belonged.

The logging community came into view around midday. Barges were docked upriver on the west side of town near a clearing in the woods; the bridge Mando, Toro, and the kid crossed was well-built with high enough clearance to give both timber rafts and the logger scows passage beneath. The air was clear and smelled of rich, black dirt, thick woods spanning as far as the eye could see.

Without a Guild lodge or more advanced information centers Din doubted Sorgan was used by hunters as a stopover, and he had hoped his and Toro’s presence would stir only curiosity. There were a few turned heads, and though people overall went about their business, something in the air didn’t feel quite right: as Din, Toro, and the child made their way to the common house between wattle fencing, the general chatter of town dissipated almost entirely.

The large rounded building was built of wood and woven, thatched reeds. Inside, a bar and a ring of sand encircled the central hearth, smoke rising to escape from the roof. Small tables were spread evenly around the room, diners and staff of various species milling about and conversing. Din kept his hands visible and his gait relaxed. It was entirely possible the town simply didn’t get many travelers.

A lumberman and a Twi’lek fisher played dice over next to the wall, out of the way of foot traffic. Two women and a man with dark, braided hair were in deep conversation close to the entrance, their boots well-worn and flecked with tsuga tree needles; they matched the muddy hooves of the bordok mules outside hitched to a post by the water trough with stun traps slung over their packs. A young father fed a child sitting on one table, the child’s smile bright despite his arm in a recent sling. At first, most of those in the common house appeared to pay them no mind, but subtle glances around the room traded unspoken words with their fellow townsfolk. The din of the common house hadn’t diminished, but there was a distinct change in what they were communicating.

One other person stood out: a stocky woman in armorweave and worn, blue-green armor sat by herself near the exit, eyeing them over a bowl of soup. Mando watched the rear cam in the head-up display inside his helmet, keeping his stride unhurried as he led the three of them to a table on the opposing wall.

The kid had wriggled down from Mando’s grasp upon entry to the town to walk on his own: Toro herded him to the right with his boot, skirting the felinx beneath a table that could probably eat him. The atmosphere of the pub was comfortable, the kind of place he expected on a planet like this one. It seemed like most people knew each other well enough to not pay them any mind, swapping tales and talking business over their plates. The bartender came to greet them, offering the local brew and asking if they were there for the midday meal before retreating to retrieve soup for the kid and something roasted for Toro. Mando declined anything to eat.

“You know, I’m starting to think you might be a droid,” Toro joked, stretching his legs and lacing his fingers behind his head. “Or do you just subsist off the nightmares of anyone who crosses you?”

The Mandalorian didn’t respond beyond what Toro assumed was a glare, but it still made him grin. The bartender returned with their food, setting down a flagon of swirling blue liquid between them. Toro dug in, pouring himself a cup.

“Really though, Tin Can, do you ever eat?”

Mando ignored him. He pushed the cup of broth over to the kid, helping him take a sip. “Tell me what you saw coming into town.”

“Rustic folk. Farmers and hunters, mostly, probably some fur and scale trappers.” Toro took a bite of meat, chewing around his words. The child pushed his bowl aside, leaning up on the table towards Toro’s plate with open interest. The gunslinger frowned and pulled his plate closer. “There’s probably a sawmill downriver.”

“Anything stand out to you?”

Toro dropped his voice low, confident that he’d landed on something to give the Mandalorian a little faith in him. “You’re in for a treat; you saw the woman at the front?”

Mando nodded.

“Pretty sure she’s an ex-shock trooper from one of the old Republic cleanup crews. Got a price on her head.”

“There’s no such thing as an ex-shock trooper,” Mando said. “Best just to leave her be.”

Toro stared, his food pausing halfway to his mouth. “That’s it? I just found us a job and you don’t want it?”

“Lower your voice,” Mando said. “If you want to confront a drop soldier, be my guest.”

”You aren’t going to back me up?”

Mando continued tearing apart hunks of bread for the kid. ”Do I look like I want to start a fight?”

“You walk in anywhere with armor like that, you’re basically asking for one.”

“We are here to recoup first and find lodging,” Mando said, his voice clipped. “Tangling with someone without a confirmed bounty the second we come into town isn’t a plan with much forethought.”

Toro frowned. “I saw her on the postings back in the Mid-Rim, Republic and ISB. Last name is Dune. If that’s not her she must have a twin.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes,” Toro said confidently, gesturing with his skewer. “You can tell by the tattoos on her— Wait— Where is she?”

The hair on the back of Din’s neck stood up, instinct crowding to the forefront. Snapping around to follow Toro’s line of sight revealed an empty table, the woman nowhere in sight.

“Watch the kid,” he ordered, standing abruptly and brushing past the table. He could hear Toro protest behind him, but he was already unclipping his holster and heading out of the curtained archway.

Outside, the damp air was quiet. Din surveyed the land and switched on the footprint relay in his visor, seeing her tracks round the back of the public house. Cautiously he followed, listening for movement as he passed between two of the buildings. As he rounded the walkway between the fencing, though, the footprints came to an abrupt halt.

He whipped around in each direction, scanning for a heat signature, but as soon as he turned and looked up, two feet hit him square in the chest.

The trooper swung down from a crossbeam, landing as Din’s back hit the outer wall of the cantina with a thud. In a flash her right fist made contact with his faceplate, knocking him back again and dizzying his senses. Her second swing telegraphed broadly and he dodged just in time— Her fist connected with the wooden slats instead, rattling them with a bang. Din twisted to land a hit to a kidney, feeling his fist meet solid muscle, and he heard her grunt in pain. His left hand lashed out to wrap around her throat the same time he shoved off the wall, blocking her left downswing with his vambrace.

The trooper snarled and brought her right arm up, dropping a heavy elbow down to break his grip on her throat— The move sent him off-balance and she used that half-second opening to grab his shoulders and knee him in the gut, hard. Beskar has no give to it and he felt the impact of her thick leg against each and every one of the injuries across his ribs and midsection. Pain exploded across his chest, radiating from the center of his sternum as she hauled him behind her to collide with the opposing wall.

Din shoved off and readied himself, pivoting to face her again. As the woman swung wide her fist connected with the jaw of the helmet, snapping his head to the side. A backhanded swing jerked him back to face her and he growled, blocking the third punch and grabbing her other forearm: with a sharp jut he headbutted her square in the face, hearing bone crack and sending her staggering back, but before he could grab his gun or blade she righted herself with a yell and barreled into him, pinning him to the wall with a crushing grip around his throat.

“Mando!”

Clutching the soldier’s wrists with an iron grip, Din jerked his gaze to the side, eyes wide as Toro came into view with his blaster drawn. Hearing the rookie’s hail, the woman turned too and yanked Din back out into the open with his back to Toro, putting him in the line of fire. Toro’s blaster shot glanced off Mando’s pauldron, jarring his shoulder. Toro cursed behind him and the woman grinned viciously, hauling the Mandalorian back with her by the edge of his breastplate.

Din dug his feet in, lurching back against her grip in anger. In the gap between them he struck out with one boot, shoving her off before drawing his blade the same moment the woman drew hers. Another blast of laserfire sailed narrowly past Mando, this time grazing the woman’s bicep. She cried out in pain, glaring at the rookie as the Mandalorian approached. Din struck out with the dagger, hearing it sing through the air, but his opponent wasn’t so distracted by the apprentice that her attention faltered, and her armored forearm came up to block the vibroblade in a skitter of sparks before she lunged in a downward arc with her own. Mando ducked his head, catching her wrist and twisting it outward, digging his thumb into a pressure point to force the knife out of her hand. The move forced a gasp out of her and in a rage the woman brought her leg up again, kicking him back into Calican.

Toro stumbled under the weight of the Mandalorian, clumsily trying to brace himself to keep both of them from going down, but he only succeeded in coming to a knee as Mando’s impact buckled him. Dune, instead of retreating to draw her own blaster, had followed through with another kick to Mando’s chest and reached out with one hand, grabbing the barrel of Toro’s blaster before bringing her other forearm down against his wrist. Blunt force pain seared up his forearm as she wrenched the gun away.

A plume of fire cut through the air between the Mandalorian and the woman, his flamethrower finally forcing her back. Toro grabbed the trooper’s blade from the ground and darted around the blaze, quickly closing the gap as she turned her aim towards Calican.

When Dune went to fire his blaster, however, the plasma cartridge immediately sent electrical discharge arcing over her hand. The trooper cried out and dropped it, barely having time to grab Toro’s right forearm above her in the incoming jab before Toro swung a sharp left hook across her jaw, dropping the blade from his right hand to catch it midair between them on the pullback with his left. Dune’s eyes widened in shock a half second before Toro slashed again, and this time he felt contact.

The trooper gasped, jerking back and pulling him with her; with a growl bordering on feral she pulled his arm down and twisted her body, dropping into a wide stance and hauling him up over her shoulder as if he weighed nothing. Toro landed square on his back, the air forced from his lungs in a rush, and he had to clumsily hook one leg up over her arm to keep from being pinned. It was a scuffle for status as they grappled with one another, Dune with bulk strength and Toro with sharp reflexes, the two of them rolling across the slick grass before landing in a locked contest of strength, each with a weapon in hand and fire in their eyes.

“Enough.”

The Mandalorian’s voice resounded like thunder, halting the fight with his blaster raised only a few scant feet from the side of the trooper’s head. The vibroblade beneath her chin hummed in the air. Her own blaster was jammed against Toro’s chest. The two of them glared at each other, panting from the exertion, neither wavering.

From behind all three of them came the distinct sound of someone snapping a stick, and all three slowly turned to see the green child perched in the grass behind the common house, half a skewer of roasted meat in each hand. His ears twitched as he chewed loudly, watching the adults with inquisitive eyes.

“… What is that thing?” the trooper asked, curiosity coloring her tone.

The boy took a large bite off the skewer and waved. Toro flexed his hand, still sore where the kid had bitten him.

“I think it’s a carnivore.”

The woman snorted. Mando lowered his blaster.

Toro slowly lowered the knife and clicked the safety on as the tension in the air dissipated. The pain was starting to register past the adrenaline.

Mando shoved his pistol in his holster. “You were supposed to wait inside,” he said irritably.

“This seemed like more fun at the time,” Toro groaned. The drop trooper grinned and pushed off of Toro’s chest none too lightly, standing and offering her hand.

Calican and the trooper both looked marginally worse for wear coming back into the common house behind the Mandalorian. The folks inside seemed more wary than before, and when Toro stopped by the bar to order another plate of food, the cook and the rest of the staff suddenly found work elsewhere and wouldn’t meet his eye. When he tried to get their attention or flag one down there was just enough conversation to say they couldn’t hear him, and the bartender who’d taken their order before was methodically stoking the embers of the fire, facing away from him and turning the spit.

Mando set the child back down at their table as Dune gave the two of them her name, dropping her gloves and helping herself to Mando’s cup and the flagon of spotchka. Toro reluctantly slid what was left of his plate to her.

Cara Dune was built only slightly less solid than a freight train. Her dark hair was short and utilitarian, and the callouses on her knuckles spoke as much to a life of hard work as they did to fighting. She carried herself with the easy confidence of a woman who knew her role in life and had never been given reason to doubt it. Despite the blaster graze and slash from the vibroblade she appeared to be in remarkably good spirits, content to eat with only a casual regard toward both audience and place settings; Toro got the impression bone broth was cheaper than roast grinjer and not near as filling.

“I figured you had a fob on me,” she said, taking a drink and grimacing around the flavor. Toro could still see blood between her teeth while she talked and wondered how bad her fight was with Mando before he’d gotten there. “Not many other reasons for hunters to come out this far.”

“Fair enough,” Mando said.

“How did you get out here?” Toro asked, wrapping his left hand in his handkerchief and resting his knuckles against the cold jug. “This planet hasn’t developed transportation faster than those pack animals out front.”

“Old buddy of mine owed me a favor,” Cara said. “I crashed with him for a while before he dropped me off on his way out of the system.”

Toro looked around, once again unimpressed by scenery that had not changed in the past twenty minutes. “What are you doing in a place like this?”

She gave Toro a lazy smile, settling back comfortably into her chair as she regarded him. “That info’s on a need-to-know basis, Sunshine.”

“Sure, sure, but you’re a shock trooper, aren’t you?” Toro nodded to the bands on her arm. “I heard they were working for the New Republic now, spec-ops on Imperial holdouts, stuff like that.”

“I used to be,” Cara said. The sly smile no longer reached her eyes, and she seemed to regard him the way a dog views surprise company at dinnertime. “At least during the war. Right now I’m enjoying an early retirement. Or, was.”

“Why leave?”

“Well my platoon used to do real work hunting down war lords and arms profiteers,” she said, swishing the spotchka in her cup. “Rooting out the settler compounds while the Alliance hit the big guns. Things changed after Endor though and we got moved to the cleanup crews.”

Toro leaned in, both forearms on the table. “You were a mercenary?” he asked with visible interest. The Mandalorian nudged his boot beneath the table. Toro ignored it.

“Not in as many words,” Cara said. “We did our share of gutting the Imperial settlements. Instead of facing them head on like we were used to, we had to go in quiet and get the job done with as little demo as possible before hauling the worst of them back to Central and calling it a day.”

“Good work if you get it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the trade-off,” Cara said. “The fewer warlords we found, the more we were relegated to being political muscle, protecting diplomats and suppressing riots. They kept pulling us back towards the Core— And I didn’t sign up to be a New Republic guard dog, so I got out.”

“Nothing out here is near as interesting as being a merc.”

“Licensed contractor,” Cara said evenly. “And like I said, I'm retired.”

“Why not stay on the move?” Toro asked genuinely. When she narrowed her eyes in suspicion he poured her another drink.

Cara turned to the Mandalorian. “He always this nosy?”

“Yes.”

Cara snatched up the cup. “Not having to take care of a ship or worry about Guildsmen—,” she nodded to Mando, “— appeals to more people than you think.”

“We hadn’t intended to start a fight,” Mando said. “When you left we thought you might’ve been trying to get the drop on us. We weren’t looking for you.”

“Good,” Cara said. She drained her cup, turning it upside down on the table before standing. “Keep it that way, and move along— I’ve been here two weeks, and if you’ve got your own hounds after you I don’t want them barking up the wrong tree.”

As she readied to leave, Toro realized something and cut her off. “Wait, how’d you know we were Guild?”

Cara gave him a strange look. “Neither of you blend in,” she said, “And there’s only so many jobs a Mandalorian can have.”

The rest of the day was spent buying or trading for what supplies the town was able to offer; waterproofing wax, dry goods, and saddle soap rounded out most of the field supplies, and the Mandalorian picked up an extra canteen, in addition to a holopuck with a local atlas. The latter was difficult to come by since everyone they spoke to in town was reluctant to offer one up, and it took a more substantial fee to convince one of the traders to part with a spare. It was only after they’d received it Mando explained that it was likely only because that trader was from out of town— In most places, those who worked and lived off the land didn’t reveal where they trapped, hunted, or fished, should the people they gave that information to prove greedy or inconsiderate enough to try their own luck there as well.

Mando laid out the plan for the next day on the hike back through the forest, saying they’d find a town farther east in the morning: a territory dispute with the drop trooper wasn’t worth the trouble, and the eastern side of the mountains opened up into a coastline. Whether they stayed at a higher altitude or more towards sea level depended on what resources they could find regarding the Crest; Mando didn’t fancy more than a day’s ride hauling fuel if it came down to it.

Night fell as they traversed the woods back to the ship, supplies carted on a borrowed repulsorlift. Despite the fight with Cara Dune, Toro was restless after a day of menial work, and though the Mandalorian had shared useful information, he was about as talkative as the kid, which was proving to be not much at all.

“So what’re the rules?” Toro asked, finally cracking under the drudgery of stowing supplies. He hefted a canister up the ramp and put it in the hold to be arranged by the Mandalorian later. “With the helmet and all.”

The Mandalorian didn’t spare him a glance, eyeing the woods instead. He picked the kid up and set him down on the stack of storage units he’d commandeered, a lantern, handheld holoprojector, and the rough log set out on top. “It stays on.”

“Yeah, I gathered, but what else? What happens if it comes off?”

“If you try to take it, I kill you,” Mando said mildly.

“Oh big surprise.” Toro rolled his eyes. “You’re a walking armory. My guess is nobody but the kid gets within arm’s reach if they want to keep their limbs intact. C’mon, gimme the specifics. Do you have night vision? Do you eat everything through a straw?”

Mando didn’t respond, but considering Toro was still moving supplies for him he figured he had some wiggle room to poke the bear.

“Can I borrow it?”

The Mandalorian made a point of closing the logbook, finally turning to cock his head at the rookie and stare him down. “Kid, I don’t know you well enough to miss you if you were gone.”

“Ooh, someone’s got a sense of humor. Hey, Womp Rat, did you know your dad has a sense of humor?”

“Excuse us?”

Both Mando and Toro swiveled around at the sound of another voice, hands to their holsters; two men were approaching the clearing, still several yards away under the light of a wagon piloted by a droid. They were dressed in earthy blue and green clothes similar to the townsfolk, fitting in against the backdrop of the provincial planet. Toro eased back, getting his hand back under the crate.

“What do you want?” he hollered down to them.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to sneak up on you. Got dark faster than we anticipated,” the slighter man said, walking quickly towards the ring of lights set up around the ship once it was clear their presence wasn’t going to be welcomed with a blaster shot. “We were wondering if you could help us.”

The Mandalorian picked up the kid and strode away from the pair towards the bow of the ship to lift a panel under the engine, so Toro took it upon himself to meet them at the edge of the ramp.

“Town’s that way,” Toro said, pointing. He wiped his hands on a rag and tossed it aside, hands on his hips. “ ’Bout six kilometers.”

“No, we— Sorry, I’m Caben, this is Stoke— We weren't looking for Lau, we came to see if we could hire you. Our village needs help.”

“We have money,” the second man said.

“The log runners gave us directions,” Caben said, following after the Mandalorian but directing his plea between both of them. “They said we might be able to hire you, and whoever came on the gunship.”

Toro scoffed. He shook his head, going back to his work. “It’s just us,” he said proudly. “And you can’t afford us.”

“You don’t even know what the job is!”

“You wouldn’t have enough,” Toro said. “We’re Guild, we don’t do farm work, and we’re not staying here anyway.”

“It’s raiders,” Stoke said with an edge to his voice. His eyes flicked between Toro and the Mandalorian Caben was still trying to get around to talk to face-to-face. “Our farms have been raided three times in two months. We need them gone. The whole village chipped in everything they could.”

“We’re not mercenaries,” the Mandalorian said finally. He continued to prep the ship for lockdown one-handed, ignoring the farmers as the child watched.

“You’re a Mandalorian though, right?” Caben said, eyes wide as he took in the sight of the bounty hunter. “I’ve heard stories about your people— the legends, the hunters and fighters across the galaxy— If even half of what I’ve read is true—”

“Hey, look,” Toro said, cutting in. “We don’t need money, and I told you, we’re not for hire— At least not for this. Raiders or not, whatever you want us to do isn’t worth our time—”

“No, you look,” Stoke said, standing his ground against Toro’s dismissal. He met Toro in the middle of the clearing with squared shoulders. “We need help, and you’re the only people this area has seen besides tradesmen and trappers for four years. We’re lucky we’ve been able to hold our own in the middle of nowhere, but this is something we can’t fight by ourselves. It took us the whole day to get here, we can’t go home empty-handed—”

“And like I said, we’re not here to run off a few bandits for pocket change —”

Oddly enough it was the Mandalorian to interject next.

“You say you’re farmers?” he asked.

“… Yes?” Caben replied, unsure how to interpret the sudden interest. “Fishers, really. We farm krill.”

“In the middle of nowhere.”

“Yes?”

“Do you have lodging?”

The tone of Mando’s voice made Toro pivot on the spot, suddenly concerned the Mandalorian might actually be considering what the other two were asking of them. “Woah, Mando, you can’t seriously think— I mean I thought we were leaving—?”

Mando strode past him to meet the two farmers in the light. The space he took up made Stoke and Caben shuffle back a step in apprehension. “How large is your village?”

“About three acres in land near the river, a few more in timber,” Caben said excitedly. “A little over sixty people.”

“Any who can shoot?”

“Well— I mean it’s not— We’re mostly farmers,” Caben said, floundering. “We have slug-throwers, maybe a dozen people that can hunt, but even then, not enough ammunition. We can’t fight them in the open.”

The Mandalorian nodded. Toro’s bafflement and irritation rose.

“I can cover for that. You say you’re near the river?”

“Yeah.” The farmers nodded hopefully. “Seventy kilometers north of here at the river bend, give or take.”

“Good. We can take the ship and be there in less than an hour.”

“It’s— There won’t be anywhere to land something this big.” Caben shook his head for the first time, gesturing to the gunship. “The farmland is too soft and the trees are too thick. River runs on two sides past the timber, too. We were going to make camp tonight and travel at first light.”

The Mandalorian hummed in disapproval but weighed his options, assessing the ship.

“We can talk details on the way, but I’d rather not waste a full day traveling.”

“The mech has an autopilot and guidance system,” Stoke offered, gesturing to the wagon pilot. “There’s enough reserve power to get us back by morning, and enough of us to split up the watch and sleep in shifts.”

Mando considered it. “You willing to help load out?”

Caben and Stoke nodded eagerly.

“Good. Toro here will show you what to pack. I’ll need the credits you do have, and I’ll be back soon.”

The Mandalorian took the pouch of credits and finished notating instructions as Toro fumed, following him to the stern where the glow of the work lights cast shadows around them. “Mando what are you doing?” Toro hissed. “You said we weren’t staying here. This is chump change compared to what we can do. You should have told them to take a hike.”

“Let’s get one thing clear,” the Mandalorian said quietly. “You do not speak for me.”

The child’s ears flattened at his guardian’s tone. Toro gestured to the farmers, trying to keep his voice down even as his frustration built.

“Mando, this is insane, you and I can do better than this,” he said. “I thought we were leaving—”

“Calican,” Mando snapped. He loomed in the light of the Crest. “There’s only room on this ship for one captain. The last time you decided to make your own call on a job you nearly got my ship stolen and me and the kid— and yourself— killed. This is downtime built in to recover from that job. If you can’t handle my verdict, start walking.”

Toro ground his teeth at the reprimand, anger and irritation simmering under his skin. He had to tamp down his inclination to argue; this was far from the fast-paced hunting in sprawling cities and crime rings he’d anticipated when he signed on, but the recent memory of their job with Shand— and the tools of the trade he desperately hoped Mando was good for— stayed his tongue.

“What makes you think the job is worth the detour?” he asked, nodding past the hunter to the two farmers.

“Quartering us in the middle of nowhere to act as a deterrent for a week or two is a square deal,” Mando continued. “Can you handle that?”

“Will we move on after that?” Toro pushed. “Because as far as I can tell the only thing this planet has to pass the time is target practice.”

“Assuming you fix your blaster, that’s the idea.”

It’s only been a few days, Toro seethed. And he’s your only way off swamp-ridden rock.

The Mandalorian waited. Toro was coming to realize silent observation may be his mentor’s natural resting state, and it was more infuriating than anticipated. An argument, a fight— those he could navigate. Those were gratifying and gave him more to work with than the pointed stare and cold debate leveled at him now. It wasn’t that he took issue with the Mandalorian’s stubbornness as a character trait— It was the fact there was no telling where he stood in the bounty hunter’s regard at any given time. He had no way of reading the Mandalorian’s expressions, and not only had Mando disagreed with him on nearly everything that day, he seemed to have a more condensed arsenal of frustratingly sound logic backing up how he shut down Toro’s protests, and it frustrated Toro that he couldn’t articulate a strong enough rebuttal to stand his ground when the time came because it felt like he was being kept in the dark.

Mando’s decisions were justified. Toro just didn’t like them.

Toro had a feeling this decision would set the tone of their working relationship moving forward; he couldn’t help but remember what Shand said about the Mandalorian’s lack of personal connections meaning he could easily drop Toro at any time and cut his losses. Mando had clearly survived this far without him. If Toro didn’t suck it up and muscle through the next two weeks on Sorgan, he didn’t think he was going to like being stuck there for an indeterminable future.

After a long moment of deliberation, the tic of Toro’s clenched jaw finally settled.

“Fine,” he muttered. “What do you need?”

The Mandalorian nodded. “Pull this together from the ship.”

He gave Toro the list, some instructions for stowing the necessities, and the security protocols for locking up. Toro must not have been doing as well as he thought in hiding his dissatisfaction because without prompting, the Mandalorian handed the child off to Toro and followed up his instructions with, “Buck up and get moving. And watch the kid until I get back.”

“Hey, where are you going?”

“I’m calling in some backup.”

—

The Mandalorian retraced the trail leading to Lau before branching off from the woods and heading toward a spring. Din circumvented the town, briefly switching to the thermal imaging to orient himself before switching back to night vision. Though grateful for the first uninterrupted seclusion he’d had that day, he wasn’t able to fully relax knowing the kid was still back at the clearing, but he didn’t know what the drop trooper’s temperament would be at an unexpected arrival. Hopefully the rookie kept a closer eye on the kid this time.

Din still wasn’t sure what to make of the gunslinger. He was fairly sure Calican’s brash impulsiveness was a mark of youth and not one of a trigger-happy lust for bloodshed— He’d done surprisingly better in the fight against Cara than he had in the one with Shand (despite the fact Dune had at least sixty pounds on him), and he’d retained enough clarity of mind to hesitate when Din stepped in and brought the scrap to a stall.

However, the rookie’s inclination to jump feet-first into everything instead of hanging back concerned him. Din needed to be able to run point, and Toro had thus far not proven consistently capable of thinking first and acting second.

Din sighed, traipsing through the woods. The irony of taking on an apprentice whose ambition reminded him of his own at that age was not lost on him, and while it was clear Calican wasn’t bereft of talents or smarts, he lacked experience and patience and didn’t know when to apply the skills he had. The risks he took weren’t calculated.

He also didn’t have a near-indestructible suit of armor protecting him like Din had at that age.

As Din navigated the forest, he thought over their experiences and how they measured up to the mixed results of the past four days. Toro was sharp, and if he would just slow down and think, he’d figure out the answers he wanted faster and without having to rely on Din to break them down every step of the way. The arguing, the questions, the not-following instructions…

Toro wasn’t a kid. The immaturity at the core of his actions was the kind that resulted from the rookie still only thinking about himself first. If he couldn’t figure out how to work with Din— or anybody— as a team, he wasn’t going to get very far in life on credits alone.

Still, the gunslinger seemed to have some modicum of sense and a good awareness of his surroundings. He caught on quick to instruction once he relented to it, and he’d surprised Din more than once that day with the connections he’d been able to draw on the scant information available.

Toro had potential. He just had to apply it. Din knew he had high expectations, but if the rookie could prove his merit to him, he’d be able to work for anybody.

Toro didn’t know what to make of the farmers, and he got the impression the stocky one didn’t much care for him either. Caben made small talk at least, enthusiastic as they loaded out the supplies and blasters Mando had left them with and asked several questions about the Crest Toro didn’t have all the answers for. The child had whined softly after the Mandalorian left, his ears drooping and his eyes going all big and sad again, but he thankfully stayed close to where the men were amidst the load out and didn’t wander off.

“So what’s it like working for the Mandalorian?” Caben asked as they strapped down the wagon.

Toro scoffed. “I work with him. We’re hunting partners.”

“Bounty hunters?”

“Yep. Just came from Tatooine before this. Finished up a job concerning Fennec Shand.”

Toro watched them expectantly from the side, but Stoke and Caben exchanged a look and shrugged. “Sorry, no idea who that is.”

“Fennec Shand?” Toro asked, shocked. “The assassin who worked for the Hutts? Wanted in eight systems at least?”

“Already told you, you’re the first outsiders we’ve seen in four years,” Stoke said. “We hardly hear anything as is.”

“Well let’s just say she’s bad news,” Toro said. “Pulled a double cross on her though. She almost escaped, tried to go after the kid here. Mando and I ambushed her and took her down in the middle of the desert. When we dragged her back to Mos Eisley she tried to make a break for it and we ended up in a shootout in the middle of the night.”

Caben was invested. Stoke couldn’t care less.

“What’d you do with her after that?”

“Ah, well we brought in proof that she was dead and the broker paid out the bounty to us,” Toro lied. “Got a pretty penny considering how high profile she was.”

“Thought you said you two weren’t mercenaries.”

“We’re not,” Toro said, looking back to Stoke. Stoke side-eyed him from his seat on the wagon.

“Mercenaries will kill anyone for a buck. Hunters have credentials. We bag the criminals on wanted listings. Verifiable criminals and all.” Toro continued to twirl his blaster in hand. “It gets pretty technical when you get into Guild bureaucracy, I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”

“Sounds cut and dry to me.” Stoke tied up his long hair and stretched his legs, leaning back against the trunks. “Pick a job, chase someone around, catch them and tie ‘em up, drag ‘em back and get paid.”

Toro rolled his eyes. “Yeah, if you simplify it like that.”

Stoke snorted. The croak of amphibians ebbed and flowed from the creek in the woods, the three of them falling quiet. The boy played in the grass with a silver ball, pushing it around the dirt between his feet.

Stoke spoke again. “Let me ask you this: if you two just got paid for a big job, why did you need to take our credits, even though we told you it was all our village had to spare?”

Toro froze, sweat running cool on the back of his neck. “Oh, Mando has his reasons,” he deflected. “He’s bringing backup, so you’re technically paying them, you know? We’re just coming to take a break between now and the next job.”

“Uh huh.”

“Gotta sleep at some point, you know?”

“Sure.”

The awkward silence settled again over the clearing. Toro’s leg bounced impatiently, looking around for something to do. Stoke narrowed his eyes.

“How long did you say you’ve been a hunter?”

“A while.” Toro quickly reached down and nabbed the kid by the back collar of his coat, bringing him up with kicking feet to turn him to the farmers at the back of the wagon. “Hey, do you have any idea what this thing is? Mando picked him up a while ago and we’ve got no idea what he’s supposed to be.”

Cara stood her ground, arms crossed. Both the long-haired trapper and the stout cook from the public house were unarmed, but the argument grew louder, their voices overlapping.

“— don’t want you causing any more trouble!” the trapper barked. “We’re giving you until morning to clear out.”

“I’m far enough from town,” Cara said. “This land’s unincorporated.”

“Move out,” the bald one insisted. His broad hands flexed into fists. “Or you’ll be moved.”

Cara laughed humorlessly. “Try it, Dagosh, see what happens.”

“We’re being civil. This is exactly why we asked you to leave this afternoon—”

“If you hadn’t snuck up on me I wouldn't have shot at you—!”

Somebody off to Cara’s left cleared their throat. The two men jolted in surprise as Cara’s hand went to her hip holster.

The Mandalorian had materialized between the trees like a specter, silent and shimmering. Both men blanched at his sudden appearance, exchanging looks as they stepped back. The Mandalorian cut an intimidating silhouette, the flames reflected in his armor the only motion against the darkness.

The trapper nudged his friend and the two backed away further with a call of “By first light, trooper.” They mounted the speederbike hovering past the light of the campfire and kicked off in a hurry, brush swishing loudly as it was displaced by the retreating hum through the forest. Cara pivoted away from the Mandalorian and grabbed her duffel, shoveling supplies in to break camp.

“You here for a rematch?” she growled. She tore a blanket from the ground and stuffed it into a rucksack, packing the rest of her gear. “Or do you just like to spectate?”

“… They give you trouble?”

“Save your pity,” she snapped. Bedroll and mess kit found their way onto the pile with military efficiency, sparse belongings tacked together and stowed in canvas. The Mandalorian watched her toss the rest of her food over the grass before she shoved past him. “And get out of my way.”

The Mandalorian remained silent as Cara packed, and it unnerved her.

She thought about finding a soft spot between all that armor to shoot him. She needed to find somewhere new to bed down for the night and didn’t feel like watching over her shoulder while she did.

Cara had learned long before that poison nettles and occupied dens were far easier to spot in the daylight. She’d been fortunate enough so far to avoid both, but the creek wound further into the forest away from the cleared footpaths and she’d still need to clear brush before getting a fire going. The rest of the predators stayed away from the light.

He stood there the entire time she packed, but it wasn’t a large campsite— Even half a minute beneath the gaze of black steel made the skin down the back of her neck crawl. He hadn’t moved from the tree, watching her impassively.

If the rookie was waiting in the shadows, she’d shoot him too and not lose an ounce of sleep over it.

“What?” she finally snapped. “Where’s your sidekick? If you came to collect on my hide after all, I’ll give you a real fight.”

The Mandalorian tossed something at her. She caught it automatically.

Credits glinted up from the bag in the firelight.

“I have a counteroffer.”

—

Five humans and a child of indeterminate species trundled through the woods on a wagon with enough space left in the back for two. Toro had shot Cara a saucy grin and winked while they were discussing bedding arrangements, at which she scoffed and tossed her duffle bag onto the pile, climbing up to prop herself against her rucksack. The gunslinger, despite his flirtation, stretched the entirety of his lanky body longways down the wagon bed next to the cases on the other side. The Mandalorian sat upright towards the front near the villagers, and the child perched on his lap, eagerly watching the trees go by as moths fluttered around the hanging lantern.

Something started to unnerve the villagers the farther they traveled into the forest: while Caben directed the droid ahead along the trail, Stoke watched through the trees as fog crept in, clouding the shadows between bark. It was hard not to notice the antiquated slugthrower he carried on his lap, and Din was starting to wonder if there was more to the raids than simple smash-and-grab thefts of food and supplies.

”You plan on bird hunting this time of night?” the Mandalorian asked.

Stoke glanced back over his shoulder while Cara and Toro swapped stories. “Just cautious,” he said. “The raids have had everybody on edge. We’ve tried tracking the bandits, but we think they move camps throughout the week, and we can’t afford to venture too far into the woods— There’s too much work to be done back home, and the raiders have something with them.”

“… Something.”

The farmer’s frown deepened. He tried coming up with the right description and, failing that, nudged his friend. Mando looked to Caben.

“We’re not sure what it is,” Caben hedged as he turned and rested his arm over the back of the bench. “They’ve got something big with them that sounds like a machine, but it has these… big red eyes, I guess, that move through the woods past what we can see, even at midday. It’s big enough to shake the ground, and we keep finding its footprints around the raiders’ old campsites.”

“What do you mean?” Cara cut in. She and Toro were leant in behind them now.

“Just… Big footprints,” Stoke said. “Round like a lotus leaf, with two toes in front like a lizard. Size of this wagon bed. They go all around the forest and overlap the most at their old campsites. There’s branches and bark shorn off the trees too high to be any of the other animals marking their territory or looking for food.”

Mando and Cara glanced at each other, their earlier assessment at what should have been a simple job now morphing into concern.

”Where do the tracks go?” Toro asked.

”Around the outer edges of the village,” Caben said. “We can’t tell if they go into the river or not. The tracks… Well, they keep us corralled toward the ponds. We don’t have enough slugthrowers to fight the bandits, plus whatever that thing is.”

Mando’s own frown deepened. It was one thing to scare off a couple dozen raiders, but it was another thing to go up against something that big and unknown. He didn’t think the villagers were pulling their legs; the loggers in Lau had also been guarded and uneasy. Whatever creature was lurking in the woods had apparently been a problem for some time, and their earlier pleading was starting to take a different light.

“Footprints?” Cara was asking. “Not tire tracks or treads? Nothing like a vehicle?”

“They’re feet,” Stoke said flatly. “If it’s a vehicle, we don’t know what it is or where it could have come from. There’s nothing besides Lau and villages like ours for miles around here. No fuel, no roads.”

“What does it do? During the raids?” Toro asked.

“We’re… not sure,” Caben confessed. “Something explodes and the bandits charge out from the trees, from different directions every time.”

“We’re usually focused on getting people far enough away and taking cover,” Stoke muttered. His hands tightened on the long gun on his lap as he focused on the trail. “The second time they showed up, some of us fought back but not all of us made it. Two were killed in the fight, and another is still recovering from their injuries. We’ve buried more people in two months than we have in five years.”

“… There’s a lot of children,” Caben said softly. He was watching the child on Mando’s lap, who was now gazing up at the stars. “As soon as the blasterfire starts, we’re just trying to get as many people out of the way as we can. The faster we run, the more people there are left by the end of it.”

A flicker of cratered earth filled Din’s memory. He could almost smell the acrid cordite as the farmers talked.

“… I don’t like it,” Cara muttered.

Stoke snorted, unamused. “Yeah, you’re telling us.”

Quiet settled again around them, or as quiet as the soft hooting and buzzing of wildlife would allow. Mando settled the child in on one of the softer bags, covering him with the edge of a blanket.

“Tell us what you can about the village and the bandits themselves,” Din said. “Sound like we’ll need as much intel as we can get.”

Notes:

I know the term ‘Venn diagram’ wouldn’t exist in Star Wars, I just don’t care. It’s a good line and I’m keeping it.

”I don’t know you well enough to miss you if you were gone,” comes from a story Rodney Crowell tells from his past about being completely wasted and meeting his then live-in-girlfriend’s father for the first time; After making a pretty bad first impression, Johnny Cash responded with the above line, and Crowell says it sobered him right up.

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#reblog #AO3 Link

[corellianhounds]

Toro Calican Lives AU

Chapter 4 — First Impressions

Media: The Mandalorian

Rating: Gen.

Word Count: 14,119

Warnings: Canon-typical violence

Art Credit: Christian Alzmann, The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian

Series Summary: What would have happened if Toro Calican hadn’t betrayed the Mandalorian? How would the story have changed if he had lived?

Chapter Summary: Things are bound to change when you throw somebody new into the mix.

This chapter, though similar to canon, better develops some of the characters and circumstances leading into “Sanctuary.”

—

Din gingerly stretched his arm up to assess the injuries he’d sustained. Over the past two weeks he’d been in multiple fights, electrocuted, dropped sixty feet onto his back, bodily hit four times by a mudhorn, shot by a modified MK, and had a speederbike shot out from under him going a hundred miles an hour.

The damage was taking its toll.

Purple, blue, and magenta bruises bloomed across his ribs and chest in a number of patterns and intensities. The ones from the Sandcrawler fall and the mudhorn were tinged green with healing around the edges, but newer ones criss-crossed his skin in Venn diagrams of pain. He’d been containing his movement as much as he could since Arvala-7: two ribs felt loose and his back ached with gravity’s pull every time he got out of bed. He hadn’t had proper enough rest after the fall and the tussle with the mudhorn to justifiably say he was back up to par, though for reasons unknown he didn’t feel as bad as he thought he should.

Shand’s second shot had hit the back of his pauldron, and while the blasterfire had been deflected, the force behind it had still traveled through the joint of his shoulder, which was to say nothing of the shot he’d taken square in the chest: the rifle bolt had felt like another hit from the mudhorn. In the privacy of the bunk he rolled his shoulder, taking note of at which angles it hurt most to move as he picked up the hand scanner and hovered it over his ribs to get a reading.

The screen blipped, the readout telling him there was no internal bleeding this time, so he set it aside and sifted through the analgesics in the hidden compartment by the head of the cot. Of the most recent injuries, Shand’s strike to the inside of his knee and the loose ribs concerned him the most. He hated wasting medical supplies, but the knee had been a bother even before the mercenary’s fight and he needed to be able to walk unhindered: with a steadying breath he lifted the lip of his helmet and knocked back the painkillers, then stooped to roll up his pant leg and swab a spot on the outside of his knee, injecting a half dose of bacta with the stimpak. The muscle strain and bruising in his chest and back would have to wait until they found somewhere to settle and he could rest properly— There were too many muscle groups working together for an injection to do much good while they were still on the move. Having his feet under him would have to do.

The kid stirred groggily in the hammock above the cot. Din could feel the critter’s big eyes watching him. It made him uncomfortable, but the kid either couldn’t tell or didn’t care. Instead he rolled over the edge of the hammock to dangle his feet above the cot and drop down onto the bedding. Din watched him from the side as he toddled across the blanket to him, perching by his thigh to peer under Din’s arm.

When the child reached his hand up to Din’s side, Din removed the autoinjector and shifted away from him on the cot, stowing the medical supplies in the compartment and letting his pant leg fall before picking the kid up. He put him back up in the hammock and shoved his boots on.

“Just for a minute,” he told the kid as he fastened his tunic and donned the armor he’d set aside. “We’ll get food when I’m done.”

Out in the hold it appeared the gunslinger had helped himself to a ration pack and was working his way through a biscuit while sat atop a footlocker. His bedroll nearby was still in a state of disarray, his bag half-packed. Toro nodded in greeting before going back to his work on the disassembled heavy blaster pistol in his lap, a torque wrench in one hand and the biscuit between his teeth. Mando passed him to get some food ready for the kid.

Toro rolled the toolkit back up and quickly reassembled the blaster. “So where’re we headed?” he asked.

“Sorgan,” Mando replied. The child took the ration bar Din gave him, happily chowing down.

“Never heard of it.”

“Backwoods planet near Savareen.”

“The old coaxium refinery?”

Din was surprised. “Yeah. It’s four quadrants up on the Core axis though; Sorgan is fairly isolated.”

“Do they have a Lodge?”

“Nope.”

“But you said—”

“I said, passage to the next system, and we’ll see where we go from there.” Mando picked up the pieces of the modified rifle left by the mercenary, looking over the build. He opened the gunlocker, setting them inside on the rack and rearranging other ordnance. “I also said the kid and I are laying low. You won’t always have a go-between for these jobs, and you may have to find different work between commissions. If you’re sticking around, we won’t be meeting with a broker until we’ve recovered and restocked supplies.”

“Yeah, that’s fair. My arm’s in pretty bad shape.” Toro tucked his chin, thumbing the tear in his shirtsleeve aside. Mando glanced out from behind the armory door: Toro had some blistering on his forearm and a shallow wound on his shoulder, probably from one of Fennec’s blades. Toro moved the arm without hindrance and he seemed alert. Mando stared.

“Is it still bleeding?”

“No, it stopped not long after we hit hyperspace.”

“… Can you move your shoulder.”

“Yeah, but it’s still an open wound; you have anything for it?”

Mando bit his tongue, stepping around his new crewmate to rifle through a cabinet attached to the bulkhead near the bow. “Bacta patch if you can’t walk it off.” He sifted through the medical cabinet, searching for the equipment on the charging dock. “Medical-grade expansion foam if it’s deep and you removed whatever you were stabbed with. You’ll have to get back to your base of operations or a med center if you think they hit an organ or artery. Cauterizing suture if it’s a slash as long as they missed any tendons.”

“I thought the point of patching wounds wasn’t to cause more damage,” Toro said with amusement.

Mando returned with the cauterizer, seeing Toro’s face sober instantly.

“Woah, hey, I’m not using that. What happened to good old fashioned stitches?”

Mando stopped in front of him, offering the cauterizer and a patch to cover it. “Each stitch is a potential infection site. Medical-grade cauterizer will kill bacteria and create a suture at the same time, and it’s faster to do in the field.”

“What if the blade was poisoned?”

Mando moved Toro’s torn shirt aside, examining his shoulder. “It wasn’t.”

“But what if—”

“It wasn’t,” Din repeated. “You’d know by now if it was, and you’re stalling. Here; cauterizer feels better if you do it yourself.”

Toro glanced back down to his shoulder before looking at Mando with suspicion. “What about a stab wound? Cauterizer’s not gonna get that deep.”

“We’re burning daylight, kid.”

“Humor me,” Toro argued. “So I know what you plan to zap me with in the future.”

Din sighed. “They’re… harder to repair than slash wounds,” he said. “Plastospray will work on anything except bone. If you’re trying to conserve your medical supplies it’s a waste to use it on a slash when you may need it for something more serious down the road. Blood seeps outward from a slash and you’ll be able to see what you suture back into place. Stabs displace deeper ligaments and tendons on the way in and if they hit an artery, the blood pools inward and you won’t have a gauge for how much you’ve really lost. You’ll die from the pressure buildup before anything else.”

Toro hesitated, looking back down to his shoulder. “You get stabbed often?”

“Enough for it to count.”

Far down on the planet below, a rippling shudder passed through the air and rattled the bones of those in the fishing village, turning eyes skyward for the source. Omera watched as a heavy gunship coasted down beyond the village, skimming the tops of tsuga trees in the direction of Lau. It had been a long time since something of that weight class had entered the area; without a sufficient starport, Sorgan was largely forgettable to the rest of the Outer Rim and to Omera, that had been the appeal. Sorgan wasn’t supposed to be on anybody’s radar.

“Do you think they could help?”

Stoke glanced at Caben. “We don’t know who that could be.”

Caben rested his hand on the dredger, his other arm hanging across it. “It’s worth asking, don’t you think?”

“Not if they’re not planning to stick around long,” Stoke said, going back to his work. “And we’re needed here. The raiders were up at the springs last week. They’re getting closer.”

“We can’t sit here and do nothing,” Caben said seriously. “We need someone to back us up, Stoke.”

“We’re not “doing nothing,” Caben. If anyone leaves now there’s less people for the lookout.”

“What if we just went to Lau to see if the loggers could help? It’s better than not trying at all. Right, Omera?”

Omera surveyed the ponds in thought, realist and idealist arguing behind her. Neela and Fashol were tiredly sifting through dead krill in the eastern quad, chucking them into a bucket to be disposed of. The ash from the fires had clouded and poisoned the pond almost immediately after the attack, the blue-bodied crustaceans being choked out as the water turned grey. Entire ponds would need emptied and filtered, and the phytoplankton recultivated before they could even be reseeded with krill.

Between the ponds she could see the children pulling broken equipment out of walkways, their round faces somber. Winta’s especially had drawn into one of severe contemplation as she rigged up a pulley and rope to have three of the other children pull on it together, hauling one of the destroyed fishing droids out of the water. The expression she had was much too old for her young face.

“Caben’s right.”

Stoke and Caben, shocked for different reasons, jumped up to follow Omera as she wiped her hands on her apron and trekked back to the longhouse. Stoke spoke up first. “Omera, we don’t know who those people could be,” he hissed, looking around them for eavesdroppers. “What kind of crew needs a ship that big? You saw the guns on it.”

”Gunship means they could be mercenaries,” Caben said, perhaps a bit too excitedly. “Which means they could be hired.”

“Or gun us down for even asking…” Stoke said under his breath. “For all we know, the Klatooinians have been hitting Lau too and the loggers called in their own backup.”

“These raids have gone on long enough,” Omera said with finality. “If the bandits continue at the rate they have, we’ll have nothing to set aside for winter. There’s not enough ammunition to rely on hunting— And we need to conserve what defenses we have.” She started up the astromech and checked the power gauge, looking out again across the village. “This is the third time in seven weeks, and every time they attack they come further into the village.”

There was a burst of laughter out by one of the ponds; the three adults turned, seeing the children giggling amongst themselves as they stood from the mud. Winta had released the magnet on the droid once it was above land and the rope slackening sent them all to the ground in a tumble.

“We’ll pool the rest of what we made from the rainy season,” Omera decided. “Tell them it’s all that we have.”

As she readied the wagon, both men packed bread and pemmican into a satchel, listening as she gave them instructions and called on the other elders of the village for an impromptu meeting. Several of them were uneasy at the prospect of sending the men on their own through the woods, a fact Stoke supported, but Caben insisted that they’d bed down for the night in Lau and set out early enough the next morning to be back in the village by sunset. The bandits had only attacked three days ago and it seemed unlikely they would come back that quickly when the village had nothing to offer them.

One of the older men, a grizzled hunter by the name of Kolt, stepped away from the group as they discussed what Stoke and Caben might say to the loggers and potential ship crew. After the rest of them loaded the wagon and finalized the contributions to the purse he returned, a scattershot thrower and case of cartridges with him. He gave both to Stoke, and the solemnity of their mission was finally realized by those among them who’d had their hopes raised.

“Keep it on hand, come nightfall,” Kolt grunted. “Don’t shoot what you can’t see… But don’t hesitate if you need to use it.”

Stoke nodded, and with grim faces he and Caben set off for the long ride to Lau.

Sorgan appeared beyond the viewport as a lush blue-green marvel, a far cry different from the barren Tatooine landscape. As they descended Toro watched meadows, springs, forests, and rivers span out beneath them, more green wilderness than he’d ever seen in one place. The Crest circled a quadrant in the northern hemisphere, made a circuit and doubled-back to land a few kilometers out past a town with communal buildings near a river. The town was purported to be a trading post, one of a few on an otherwise sparsely inhabited planet. The population was spread out, no centralized starports or industrial centers to speak of, but it looked like there were a few outlying rural communities on the scanner. They would be a day’s ride away if and when they picked back up: Toro thought back to the catalogue of picks he’d been given the choice of at the Guild lodge he booked Shand’s commission from, mulling over the names of those he saw on various posting boards for the Outer Rim. Sorgan may have bigger towns east of their location that had a wider variety of local listings. Even provincial farm planets were bound to have trouble.

Mando cycled through the landing procedures, bringing the Crest to stasis before lowering it into a camouflaged clearing surrounded by trees. “You don’t have anyone who’s going to come looking for you, do you?” he asked, pulling the yoke up level with the horizon line. He flipped three other switches and the ship lowered steadily to the ground, settling with a hiss of hydraulics.

Toro shook his head. “You and the kid are the only ones on this crate with criminal pasts chasing them,” he said with amusement. “Still not sure what that one did to warrant Guild interest.”

The child cooed, tapping the arm of his seat. Mando stood and gestured for Toro to move as he went back into the storage compartment behind the cockpit and sifted through supplies. “Anybody with a score to settle? Anyone you owe money?”

Toro snorted and spread his arms with a look that conveyed Please, are you serious? “Definitely not.”

“Parents, headmasters, commanding officers?” the Mandalorian pressed. “Anyone who would recognize you in a port and raise the alarm?”

“… No.”

Mando came back to the ladder descending to the hold with a bag over one shoulder as he picked up the kid. “Don’t sound too sure about that.”

The Mandalorian slid one-handed down to the cargo hold with his boots on the outer rails of the ladder. Toro climbed down after him, skipping the last few rungs to hop down. “No one’s following me. I told you, I’m on my own.”

Mando dropped the subject. He put the kid on one of the footlockers and restocked his munitions from the armory before pressing a command on his bracer to lower the ramp. A warm breeze flooded in with the light, bringing with it the scent of damp earth and moss and a wavering hum that sounded like it was coming from the trees. Mando stepped over Toro’s bedroll, strapping the pronged rifle to his back.

“Get your gear together.”

“You think we’ll camp somewhere else tonight?”

“No,” Mando said. He moved Toro’s bag to the side with his foot before going back to the kid. “It’s in my way; keep it together and out from underfoot.”

It took a moment for Toro to process what he’d said: he scowled and did as he was told. “I’m not a kid, you know. Don’t have to tell me to clean my room.”

Mando turned to stare at him for a moment longer than he really cared for. It was getting annoying.

“I know you’re not a kid,” Mando said flatly. “Which is why I expect you to keep your gear in order. You’ll have to leave at a moment’s notice more often than not and what you carry on your person may be the only resources available to you. If you can’t keep track of your own equipment, what makes me think you’ll be able to handle anything more important?”

“All right, all right, point taken.”

“Good.” The Mandalorian faced him again. “Here’s the plan: I’m going into town to find lodging. I’ll scope out the area and be back before long. Wait here and watch the kid.”

Toro snorted indignantly. “If you only brought me along to be a babysitter, I’m out.” Toro tossed his bedroll and pack to the side, looking expectantly at the Mandalorian.

Mando called his bluff. “Fine by me. Start walking.”

Toro’s eyes narrowed; his patience with the bounty hunter and every taciturn jab that morning was running out. He stepped up to face the Mandalorian, jutting his chin in accusation. “What’s the point in agreeing to work with me if you’re just going to keep me grounded, huh? There’s no reason to waste time with two trips to town. I’m ready to go.”

“I don’t need distractions.”

”You could use another set of eyes.”

”What I could really use,” Mando said through gritted teeth, “Is somebody who can follow basic directions without arguing with me every step of the way.”

Toro was getting frustrated. “I’ve already more than proven myself,” he said. “I had your back on Tatooine.”

“Which is why I trust you to watch the ship and the kid,” Mando bit back. “This is the biggest town in the quadrant— If they can’t sustain us for even a week of laying low, we need to find a better area before nightfall. I don’t want to keep track of more people than I have to, so either you stay here as lookout or you cut your losses and take a hike.”

Toro stared down the Mandalorian for a long minute, but Mando didn’t waver. He glanced over to the kid before he sat back against a crate with a stormy expression and crossed his arms. “Fine. We’ll be here.”

“Good. Lock up if you’re outside for long.”

The Mandalorian left down the gangplank. The child next to Toro immediately shuffled down off his perch and toddled toward the ramp; he hadn’t anticipated that the kid would realize Mando was leaving him behind so quickly and hopped up to snatch the kid before he could go far. The Mandalorian didn’t look back, and the hum from the trees fell silent as he disappeared into the forest. The kid whined as he squirmed in Toro’s grip, small clawed hands reaching out to grasp at air as he babbled something unintelligible.

“Don’t worry, kid, your old man will be back before long,” Toro said. He surveyed the hold for something to put him in to keep him corralled, but arranging the crates would take two hands to get them organized into something that would keep the boy penned in.

The kid continued to wriggle. Toro struggled to keep a grip on him, for the first time worried the kid had no sense of self-preservation when it came to being dropped from several feet in the air. He had to readjust his grip more than once as he distractedly scooted trunks together with his boot.

“Cut it out, kid, he’s coming back, just relax and— Ow!”

The kid dropped to the floor, Toro staring at his bleeding finger in shock. The child had bit him and was now toddling on small but surprisingly quick legs down the ramp into the grass.

“Hey!” Toro hollered again, wiping his finger on his trousers and hopping down to jog after the boy with a grumble. He caught up to the kid and picked him up before he got too far, carrying him under his arm like a sack of potatoes back to the ship and keeping his fingers out of reach.

“Listen,” Toro said, plopping him back on a footlocker. “He’s not just going to leave you, all right? He left the ship here too, so settle down.”

The boy’s long ears drooped like a wilted flower. His big dark eyes were the saddest thing Toro had ever seen, gazing out at the trees.

“What’s with the ears? Cheer up, you look like a Gungan. I told you he’s coming back,” Toro repeated. “Trust me.”

The solemn child huffed, folding his hands inside his sleeves and resigning himself to his position on the trunk.

Toro rolled his eyes, but the plaintive features of the little thing were enough to prod him into rummaging around in the galley for a distraction.

“Here.” Toro fished around in a thin plastifilm bag and held out some dried meat. “Eat something.”

The kid, forlorn until Toro mentioned food, perked up at the proffered snack and took it without a fuss. Toro sat back and stretched his legs, eyeing the boy for any other sign of an escape attempt, but the kid seemed satisfied to sit and gnaw on the jerky so Toro tossed the plastifilm bag aside and crossed his arms, looking around the cargo hold.

It was quiet for a long time, save for the sound of the wilderness as the kid worked his way through the cured meat, and eventually the boy got up to explore his surroundings, curiously poking at foot lockers and cubbies at floor level. Toro watched him explore before the boy eventually got a supply box open and amused himself with rolling the contents around on the floor, stacking them and knocking them down or organizing them into piles and patterns. He was especially intrigued by the folding camp utensils, managing to open them partway and arrange several forks in a feathered display on either side of a cleaning rod for a blaster barrel.

Toro chuckled, surveying the space again and wondering if there was a toolbox he could commandeer for a couple hours. He’d already made note of the head and the galley, as well as the carbonite chamber and racks. The captain’s berth occupied only a fraction of the lower deck in something Toro would closer consider a closet than a cabin, and now knowing where the armories and medical cabinet were he’d fairly mapped the entire hold, save for what utilities lay behind the access panels at the bow. Abovedecks was a different story, but he liked the greenery and breeze the open docking ramp afforded them so he figured he’d save further exploration for another time.

The carbonite chamber had especially been of interest: he’d heard of some bounty hunters transporting live captures in carbonite, but he’d never seen evidence of it for himself. Those were the kinds of rumors that slipped through from the more unsavory relatives who would find their way home on holidays or when they were in need of a loan; it was shared as gossip just as often as it was used as an overexaggerated threat of punishment for bad behavior. Seeing that not only had one been installed on the gunship, but that it had multiple racks for acquired targets validated Toro’s hunch that Mando was the real deal. Shand may have been right about the hunter doing more lying in wait when it came to tracking her, but Toro saw how the Mandalorian fought in the garage on Tatooine, and the Crest boasted a substantial array of weapons compared to that of an average traveler.

The thought of Tatooine brought him back to the kid, who was now shuffling through one of the crates that had been turned on its side. It was mostly clothes or camping gear so Toro left him to play with them. He had no idea what the kid was but he walked upright and seemed alert enough to be sentient, so Toro figured he must be some species from the outlying planets he’d never heard of. Whatever the case was, the Mandalorian was willing to kill for him so Toro would at least see to it that he stayed alive on his watch. Nothing in the woods would clear a dozen yards of the ship without getting a blaster burn for its trouble.

Pulling his pistol, though, Toro looked it over with a frown. It was only operating at about eighty-five percent efficiency, and the trigger wasn’t quite finessed to his liking; originally built with the intent of being pressure-sensitive in the first place, the hair-trigger was touchier now than before. His momentary patch-job would work as long as he was mindful of the sensor, but it was liable to make the housing run hot even without firing concentrated charges. To really fix it he needed a fusioncutter and at least one grounded clamp to keep some of the mechanical pieces inside the receiver from touching while he worked on it some more, and he hadn’t found either while poking around the ship.

Toro stood, going to the gunlocker and jimmying around the casing until he found the release; the doors retreated to the sides and Toro couldn’t help but grin.

”Now that’s more like it…” he murmured to himself. “EE-3 carbine, drum blaster, mortar gun…”

Toro whistled, impressed. His hand glided over the stock of the grenade launcher, and then he looked up to probably the largest pieces occupying the racks. Lifting the two-part assembly free, he latched the MK sniper rifle together, sliding the barrel into place on clean fittings. Long-range weapons didn’t appeal to him as much as short-range action did; he wouldn’t deny that it was a beautiful gun, but what use was an impressive kill if nobody was around to give you the credit?

From what he could tell, the rifle could operate as two different weapons depending on whether the extended barrel was locked in place or not. Without the sniper configuration giving it an additional eighteen inches in length, it could be further disassembled down to what was still a solid blaster rifle for short range combat. He could only imagine what the impact would feel like at close range.

OSS telescopic sight with an infrared detector… Short relay gas primer, reinforced condenser built into the receiver, induction coil in the stock… Modified was an understatement. No wonder the bolts packed a punch.

Toro turned it over. He was surprised by how light it was, considering the length, but he supposed Shand hadn’t been one to linger anywhere long, whatever her jobs were in the past. He could respect the desire to stay on the move.

“What do you think, kid?” Toro asked. He gripped it one-handed with the barrel raised, sitting into one side with the weight of the stock resting against hip. “Think Pops will let me have it? He may be good but even he can’t sight two rifles at once, ha.”

Though he wasn’t expecting a reply, there seemed to be a distinct difference in the kid’s lack of noise that gave Toro pause. He looked back out to the crates.

”Kid?”

The child was gone.

Swearing loudly and creatively, Toro set the rifle back on the rack and darted towards the ramp, jumping down to the grass all in the span of a second. He scanned the clearing for the boy and, not finding him, jogged for the trees.

Nothing.

Toro took a breath and jogged back to the ship, grabbing his gun and belt. He hit the white button to the left of the ramp to initiate its retreat and squeezed outside before it raised, buckling his holster in place and striding back into the clearing. Ship locked, he analyzed his surroundings.

The Razor Crest glinted in the late morning sun. Scrutinizing the gleam, Toro realized the light only reflected from the upper twelve feet or so. He crouched to the ground, surveying the earth. The clearing was almost entirely in the shade— Grass grew in patches here and there, and there was moss around the edges of the brush, but the rest of the ground was packed mud, and damp at that.

Carefully, he matched a line between the Crest and the spot where the Mandalorian had disappeared, and upon closer inspection was able to pick up on some very small, three-toed footprints. His own boots had smeared or obscured a lot of them in his haste, but there were enough for him to find the exact edge of moss the child had disappeared behind. With annoyance settling just this side of trepidation Toro picked his way through the woods.

“He couldn’t have gone far,” he muttered to himself. “But wherrrrrre would he have gone first…”

Whatever hum emanated from the trees rose and fell in varying degrees of pitch as he tracked, effectively drowning out any possibility of hearing a child the size of a mouse droid shuffling through the brush. To make matters worse, the boy had a brown coat and skin the color of foliage, so the chances of spotting him beneath the sun-dappling canopy were further complicated by the unfortunate, coincidental camouflage.

Toro’s shirt clung to his back as he walked, sticky with sweat, and it didn’t seem to matter whether he was in the shade or not because the heat was the same regardless. Wispy mosquitoes whined around him, constantly waiting for him to settle before sticking to his skin with pinpricks of annoyance, and his trousers chafed, snagging on thorns as he continued muscling his way through the brush. When he passed by a tree bearing the same lichen he’d seen twice before, Toro let out a frustrated yell and stomped back to the trail. He kicked a stone out of his way and smacked another mosquito, angrily scratching the welt it left behind.

He’d always hated the idea of camping.

Toro groaned, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes and grinding them in frustration. “It’s really gonna set the old guy off if you lost his kid,” he said absently. “You look away for all of two seconds and he pulls an escape act… Might as well boot the kid outside yourself next time, steal the ship and pray that guy never finds you… Better chance at surviving than having to face him and fess up…”

The kid had to be going after the Mandalorian. There was nothing enticing enough to keep him out here, no berries or animals to draw his attention, and there were more than enough negative incentives to urge him back to the ship— Since Toro had yet to see the kid double back he had to assume he was on the search for the hunter. There was something resembling a foot path between the trees, but Toro didn’t know if the kid would have the intuition to follow it. He could only see it himself because he was at a height to do so.

The gunslinger slowed to a stop, considering that. He crouched down to the forest floor, feeling the earth dampen the knee of his trousers as he ducked his head. Soft, leafy ferns hovered roughly at the boy’s height by Toro’s reckoning, and below that was a shortened view of the look and distance of the trail. It was possible the kid was unaware there even was one; he could have strayed from the dirt path entirely.

That was a problem.

Toro could feel the muscles between his shoulder blades tightening with the tense concern that the kid had no idea where he was going and had simply gotten himself lost in the search for his guardian. Toro didn’t imagine the kid knew any more about the forest than he did, and there was no telling what he might run into.

Toro took a deep breath. Guess it was time to put those tracking skills to work.

He put one hand on his hip and surveyed the greenery, rethinking his strategy. Crouching back down and moving some ferns aside, he could see bits of displaced mud on top of leaves from where the boy’s robe had dragged, and as he moved the plants, individual fiddleheads retreated at his touch. Toro scanned ahead for already-furled stems, following them when they lined up with the child’s small, intermittent footprints. It was odd that though the kid’s path— what he hoped was the kid’s path— had strayed from the dirt trail, it was still going in the same general direction the Mandalorian had. Toro was doing his best to ignore Mando’s more obvious prints, knowing what he really needed to do was find the kid, but there was some relief in knowing he’d come across one of them at some point and at least solve half his problems when he did.

The child brushed another feathery fern out of his eyes, walking on soft moss and enjoying the feeling between his toes. The forest was alive with hundreds of creatures, large chirping bugs singing in the trees and winged creatures hooting between the branches. Once or twice he saw brown, soft-furred animals with stripes peering at him from dens built into the gnarled roots of trees, but he sensed no ill-intent from them, only curiosity. Though he wished he could stay and explore further, he was determined to catch up.

His guardian was somewhere ahead of him, he was sure. The apprentice hunter was still far behind both of them, but the boy paid him no mind, content to see and smell the freshness of the forest. It was far more vibrant than anywhere he had been in a long time, and he hoped they’d be staying there for a while. The air was clear and breathable, the sun warm… He could rest and explore and his guardian would be able to heal.

As the boy climbed over stones and pushed through the thicket of grasses back to the even dirt path, he wondered if his guardian had truly meant what he’d said when he promised he’d come back to the ship. He knew starships weren’t homes for most sentient beings— Perhaps this was his guardian’s home planet and he had a dwelling somewhere away from the ship, and away from him.

The child shook his head, waving away both gnatflies and troubled thoughts. The Mandalorian wouldn’t have made the apprentice hunter stay behind too if that were the case. The young man from-Tatooine-but-not had no reason to remain there either, and he had the sense his armored guardian intended to teach the apprentice the same trade and life he led. The two men had talked briefly after they departed from the desert planet, his guardian pointing to various places and controls on the starship, and he’d seen the younger man picking apart a blaster that morning in the cargo hold similar to how the Mandalorian had maintained his own tools and weapons during hyperspace flights when it had still been just the two of them.

There was a glint up ahead, and he quickened his pace, reaching out with openness through the lights connecting the living creatures of the forest to see more clearly; with a chirp he renewed his pace, happy to have finally caught up on the warrior’s trail.

Only moments later did he realize he wasn’t the only one.

”A-ha! Caught you!”

Drat.

The child was briskly scooped up by the young man with dark hair, raised up into the air and firmly grasped to his side. He frowned, squirming at the handling as the man scolded, until he saw the same gleam through the forest the child had caught only moments before.

The Mandalorian was looking at them, unmoving as the man holding him continued speaking. Dimly he could register a change in tone, the younger man’s pitch rising as he too saw the older hunter, but the boy couldn’t have cared less for the conversation he only understood a part of anyway. The warrior approached with measured strides and the boy reached out, cooing happily as the armored man closed the distance, speaking sternly with his crewmate; said crewmate was still making excuses and holding the child in front of him, as if to ward off any potential retaliation from the Mandalorian.

“What?!” the indignant apprentice was saying. “You should be happy, this means he knows how to find you on his own. Here take him, look he’s tired.”

The Mandalorian sighed but plucked the boy away and settled him comfortably against the cool planes of his armor. The child took hold of the bandolier in one hand and tapped the center of the quiet man’s breastplate, happy to be back where he belonged.

The logging community came into view around midday. Barges were docked upriver on the west side of town near a clearing in the woods; the bridge Mando, Toro, and the kid crossed was well-built with high enough clearance to give both timber rafts and the logger scows passage beneath. The air was clear and smelled of rich, black dirt, thick woods spanning as far as the eye could see.

Without a Guild lodge or more advanced information centers Din doubted Sorgan was used by hunters as a stopover, and he had hoped his and Toro’s presence would stir only curiosity. There were a few turned heads, and though people overall went about their business, something in the air didn’t feel quite right: as Din, Toro, and the child made their way to the common house between wattle fencing, the general chatter of town dissipated almost entirely.

The large rounded building was built of wood and woven, thatched reeds. Inside, a bar and a ring of sand encircled the central hearth, smoke rising to escape from the roof. Small tables were spread evenly around the room, diners and staff of various species milling about and conversing. Din kept his hands visible and his gait relaxed. It was entirely possible the town simply didn’t get many travelers.

A lumberman and a Twi’lek fisher played dice over next to the wall, out of the way of foot traffic. Two women and a man with dark, braided hair were in deep conversation close to the entrance, their boots well-worn and flecked with tsuga tree needles; they matched the muddy hooves of the bordok mules outside hitched to a post by the water trough with stun traps slung over their packs. A young father fed a child sitting on one table, the child’s smile bright despite his arm in a recent sling. At first, most of those in the common house appeared to pay them no mind, but subtle glances around the room traded unspoken words with their fellow townsfolk. The din of the common house hadn’t diminished, but there was a distinct change in what they were communicating.

One other person stood out: a stocky woman in armorweave and worn, blue-green armor sat by herself near the exit, eyeing them over a bowl of soup. Mando watched the rear cam in the head-up display inside his helmet, keeping his stride unhurried as he led the three of them to a table on the opposing wall.

The kid had wriggled down from Mando’s grasp upon entry to the town to walk on his own: Toro herded him to the right with his boot, skirting the felinx beneath a table that could probably eat him. The atmosphere of the pub was comfortable, the kind of place he expected on a planet like this one. It seemed like most people knew each other well enough to not pay them any mind, swapping tales and talking business over their plates. The bartender came to greet them, offering the local brew and asking if they were there for the midday meal before retreating to retrieve soup for the kid and something roasted for Toro. Mando declined anything to eat.

“You know, I’m starting to think you might be a droid,” Toro joked, stretching his legs and lacing his fingers behind his head. “Or do you just subsist off the nightmares of anyone who crosses you?”

The Mandalorian didn’t respond beyond what Toro assumed was a glare, but it still made him grin. The bartender returned with their food, setting down a flagon of swirling blue liquid between them. Toro dug in, pouring himself a cup.

“Really though, Tin Can, do you ever eat?”

Mando ignored him. He pushed the cup of broth over to the kid, helping him take a sip. “Tell me what you saw coming into town.”

“Rustic folk. Farmers and hunters, mostly, probably some fur and scale trappers.” Toro took a bite of meat, chewing around his words. The child pushed his bowl aside, leaning up on the table towards Toro’s plate with open interest. The gunslinger frowned and pulled his plate closer. “There’s probably a sawmill downriver.”

“Anything stand out to you?”

Toro dropped his voice low, confident that he’d landed on something to give the Mandalorian a little faith in him. “You’re in for a treat; you saw the woman at the front?”

Mando nodded.

“Pretty sure she’s an ex-shock trooper from one of the old Republic cleanup crews. Got a price on her head.”

“There’s no such thing as an ex-shock trooper,” Mando said. “Best just to leave her be.”

Toro stared, his food pausing halfway to his mouth. “That’s it? I just found us a job and you don’t want it?”

“Lower your voice,” Mando said. “If you want to confront a drop soldier, be my guest.”

”You aren’t going to back me up?”

Mando continued tearing apart hunks of bread for the kid. ”Do I look like I want to start a fight?”

“You walk in anywhere with armor like that, you’re basically asking for one.”

“We are here to recoup first and find lodging,” Mando said, his voice clipped. “Tangling with someone without a confirmed bounty the second we come into town isn’t a plan with much forethought.”

Toro frowned. “I saw her on the postings back in the Mid-Rim, Republic and ISB. Last name is Dune. If that’s not her she must have a twin.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes,” Toro said confidently, gesturing with his skewer. “You can tell by the tattoos on her— Wait— Where is she?”

The hair on the back of Din’s neck stood up, instinct crowding to the forefront. Snapping around to follow Toro’s line of sight revealed an empty table, the woman nowhere in sight.

“Watch the kid,” he ordered, standing abruptly and brushing past the table. He could hear Toro protest behind him, but he was already unclipping his holster and heading out of the curtained archway.

Outside, the damp air was quiet. Din surveyed the land and switched on the footprint relay in his visor, seeing her tracks round the back of the public house. Cautiously he followed, listening for movement as he passed between two of the buildings. As he rounded the walkway between the fencing, though, the footprints came to an abrupt halt.

He whipped around in each direction, scanning for a heat signature, but as soon as he turned and looked up, two feet hit him square in the chest.

The trooper swung down from a crossbeam, landing as Din’s back hit the outer wall of the cantina with a thud. In a flash her right fist made contact with his faceplate, knocking him back again and dizzying his senses. Her second swing telegraphed broadly and he dodged just in time— Her fist connected with the wooden slats instead, rattling them with a bang. Din twisted to land a hit to a kidney, feeling his fist meet solid muscle, and he heard her grunt in pain. His left hand lashed out to wrap around her throat the same time he shoved off the wall, blocking her left downswing with his vambrace.

The trooper snarled and brought her right arm up, dropping a heavy elbow down to break his grip on her throat— The move sent him off-balance and she used that half-second opening to grab his shoulders and knee him in the gut, hard. Beskar has no give to it and he felt the impact of her thick leg against each and every one of the injuries across his ribs and midsection. Pain exploded across his chest, radiating from the center of his sternum as she hauled him behind her to collide with the opposing wall.

Din shoved off and readied himself, pivoting to face her again. As the woman swung wide her fist connected with the jaw of the helmet, snapping his head to the side. A backhanded swing jerked him back to face her and he growled, blocking the third punch and grabbing her other forearm: with a sharp jut he headbutted her square in the face, hearing bone crack and sending her staggering back, but before he could grab his gun or blade she righted herself with a yell and barreled into him, pinning him to the wall with a crushing grip around his throat.

“Mando!”

Clutching the soldier’s wrists with an iron grip, Din jerked his gaze to the side, eyes wide as Toro came into view with his blaster drawn. Hearing the rookie’s hail, the woman turned too and yanked Din back out into the open with his back to Toro, putting him in the line of fire. Toro’s blaster shot glanced off Mando’s pauldron, jarring his shoulder. Toro cursed behind him and the woman grinned viciously, hauling the Mandalorian back with her by the edge of his breastplate.

Din dug his feet in, lurching back against her grip in anger. In the gap between them he struck out with one boot, shoving her off before drawing his blade the same moment the woman drew hers. Another blast of laserfire sailed narrowly past Mando, this time grazing the woman’s bicep. She cried out in pain, glaring at the rookie as the Mandalorian approached. Din struck out with the dagger, hearing it sing through the air, but his opponent wasn’t so distracted by the apprentice that her attention faltered, and her armored forearm came up to block the vibroblade in a skitter of sparks before she lunged in a downward arc with her own. Mando ducked his head, catching her wrist and twisting it outward, digging his thumb into a pressure point to force the knife out of her hand. The move forced a gasp out of her and in a rage the woman brought her leg up again, kicking him back into Calican.

Toro stumbled under the weight of the Mandalorian, clumsily trying to brace himself to keep both of them from going down, but he only succeeded in coming to a knee as Mando’s impact buckled him. Dune, instead of retreating to draw her own blaster, had followed through with another kick to Mando’s chest and reached out with one hand, grabbing the barrel of Toro’s blaster before bringing her other forearm down against his wrist. Blunt force pain seared up his forearm as she wrenched the gun away.

A plume of fire cut through the air between the Mandalorian and the woman, his flamethrower finally forcing her back. Toro grabbed the trooper’s blade from the ground and darted around the blaze, quickly closing the gap as she turned her aim towards Calican.

When Dune went to fire his blaster, however, the plasma cartridge immediately sent electrical discharge arcing over her hand. The trooper cried out and dropped it, barely having time to grab Toro’s right forearm above her in the incoming jab before Toro swung a sharp left hook across her jaw, dropping the blade from his right hand to catch it midair between them on the pullback with his left. Dune’s eyes widened in shock a half second before Toro slashed again, and this time he felt contact.

The trooper gasped, jerking back and pulling him with her; with a growl bordering on feral she pulled his arm down and twisted her body, dropping into a wide stance and hauling him up over her shoulder as if he weighed nothing. Toro landed square on his back, the air forced from his lungs in a rush, and he had to clumsily hook one leg up over her arm to keep from being pinned. It was a scuffle for status as they grappled with one another, Dune with bulk strength and Toro with sharp reflexes, the two of them rolling across the slick grass before landing in a locked contest of strength, each with a weapon in hand and fire in their eyes.

“Enough.”

The Mandalorian’s voice resounded like thunder, halting the fight with his blaster raised only a few scant feet from the side of the trooper’s head. The vibroblade beneath her chin hummed in the air. Her own blaster was jammed against Toro’s chest. The two of them glared at each other, panting from the exertion, neither wavering.

From behind all three of them came the distinct sound of someone snapping a stick, and all three slowly turned to see the green child perched in the grass behind the common house, half a skewer of roasted meat in each hand. His ears twitched as he chewed loudly, watching the adults with inquisitive eyes.

“… What is that thing?” the trooper asked, curiosity coloring her tone.

The boy took a large bite off the skewer and waved. Toro flexed his hand, still sore where the kid had bitten him.

“I think it’s a carnivore.”

The woman snorted. Mando lowered his blaster.

Toro slowly lowered the knife and clicked the safety on as the tension in the air dissipated. The pain was starting to register past the adrenaline.

Mando shoved his pistol in his holster. “You were supposed to wait inside,” he said irritably.

“This seemed like more fun at the time,” Toro groaned. The drop trooper grinned and pushed off of Toro’s chest none too lightly, standing and offering her hand.

Calican and the trooper both looked marginally worse for wear coming back into the common house behind the Mandalorian. The folks inside seemed more wary than before, and when Toro stopped by the bar to order another plate of food, the cook and the rest of the staff suddenly found work elsewhere and wouldn’t meet his eye. When he tried to get their attention or flag one down there was just enough conversation to say they couldn’t hear him, and the bartender who’d taken their order before was methodically stoking the embers of the fire, facing away from him and turning the spit.

Mando set the child back down at their table as Dune gave the two of them her name, dropping her gloves and helping herself to Mando’s cup and the flagon of spotchka. Toro reluctantly slid what was left of his plate to her.

Cara Dune was built only slightly less solid than a freight train. Her dark hair was short and utilitarian, and the callouses on her knuckles spoke as much to a life of hard work as they did to fighting. She carried herself with the easy confidence of a woman who knew her role in life and had never been given reason to doubt it. Despite the blaster graze and slash from the vibroblade she appeared to be in remarkably good spirits, content to eat with only a casual regard toward both audience and place settings; Toro got the impression bone broth was cheaper than roast grinjer and not near as filling.

“I figured you had a fob on me,” she said, taking a drink and grimacing around the flavor. Toro could still see blood between her teeth while she talked and wondered how bad her fight was with Mando before he’d gotten there. “Not many other reasons for hunters to come out this far.”

“Fair enough,” Mando said.

“How did you get out here?” Toro asked, wrapping his left hand in his handkerchief and resting his knuckles against the cold jug. “This planet hasn’t developed transportation faster than those pack animals out front.”

“Old buddy of mine owed me a favor,” Cara said. “I crashed with him for a while before he dropped me off on his way out of the system.”

Toro looked around, once again unimpressed by scenery that had not changed in the past twenty minutes. “What are you doing in a place like this?”

She gave Toro a lazy smile, settling back comfortably into her chair as she regarded him. “That info’s on a need-to-know basis, Sunshine.”

“Sure, sure, but you’re a shock trooper, aren’t you?” Toro nodded to the bands on her arm. “I heard they were working for the New Republic now, spec-ops on Imperial holdouts, stuff like that.”

“I used to be,” Cara said. The sly smile no longer reached her eyes, and she seemed to regard him the way a dog views surprise company at dinnertime. “At least during the war. Right now I’m enjoying an early retirement. Or, was.”

“Why leave?”

“Well my platoon used to do real work hunting down war lords and arms profiteers,” she said, swishing the spotchka in her cup. “Rooting out the settler compounds while the Alliance hit the big guns. Things changed after Endor though and we got moved to the cleanup crews.”

Toro leaned in, both forearms on the table. “You were a mercenary?” he asked with visible interest. The Mandalorian nudged his boot beneath the table. Toro ignored it.

“Not in as many words,” Cara said. “We did our share of gutting the Imperial settlements. Instead of facing them head on like we were used to, we had to go in quiet and get the job done with as little demo as possible before hauling the worst of them back to Central and calling it a day.”

“Good work if you get it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the trade-off,” Cara said. “The fewer warlords we found, the more we were relegated to being political muscle, protecting diplomats and suppressing riots. They kept pulling us back towards the Core— And I didn’t sign up to be a New Republic guard dog, so I got out.”

“Nothing out here is near as interesting as being a merc.”

“Licensed contractor,” Cara said evenly. “And like I said, I'm retired.”

“Why not stay on the move?” Toro asked genuinely. When she narrowed her eyes in suspicion he poured her another drink.

Cara turned to the Mandalorian. “He always this nosy?”

“Yes.”

Cara snatched up the cup. “Not having to take care of a ship or worry about Guildsmen—,” she nodded to Mando, “— appeals to more people than you think.”

“We hadn’t intended to start a fight,” Mando said. “When you left we thought you might’ve been trying to get the drop on us. We weren’t looking for you.”

“Good,” Cara said. She drained her cup, turning it upside down on the table before standing. “Keep it that way, and move along— I’ve been here two weeks, and if you’ve got your own hounds after you I don’t want them barking up the wrong tree.”

As she readied to leave, Toro realized something and cut her off. “Wait, how’d you know we were Guild?”

Cara gave him a strange look. “Neither of you blend in,” she said, “And there’s only so many jobs a Mandalorian can have.”

The rest of the day was spent buying or trading for what supplies the town was able to offer; waterproofing wax, dry goods, and saddle soap rounded out most of the field supplies, and the Mandalorian picked up an extra canteen, in addition to a holopuck with a local atlas. The latter was difficult to come by since everyone they spoke to in town was reluctant to offer one up, and it took a more substantial fee to convince one of the traders to part with a spare. It was only after they’d received it Mando explained that it was likely only because that trader was from out of town— In most places, those who worked and lived off the land didn’t reveal where they trapped, hunted, or fished, should the people they gave that information to prove greedy or inconsiderate enough to try their own luck there as well.

Mando laid out the plan for the next day on the hike back through the forest, saying they’d find a town farther east in the morning: a territory dispute with the drop trooper wasn’t worth the trouble, and the eastern side of the mountains opened up into a coastline. Whether they stayed at a higher altitude or more towards sea level depended on what resources they could find regarding the Crest; Mando didn’t fancy more than a day’s ride hauling fuel if it came down to it.

Night fell as they traversed the woods back to the ship, supplies carted on a borrowed repulsorlift. Despite the fight with Cara Dune, Toro was restless after a day of menial work, and though the Mandalorian had shared useful information, he was about as talkative as the kid, which was proving to be not much at all.

“So what’re the rules?” Toro asked, finally cracking under the drudgery of stowing supplies. He hefted a canister up the ramp and put it in the hold to be arranged by the Mandalorian later. “With the helmet and all.”

The Mandalorian didn’t spare him a glance, eyeing the woods instead. He picked the kid up and set him down on the stack of storage units he’d commandeered, a lantern, handheld holoprojector, and the rough log set out on top. “It stays on.”

“Yeah, I gathered, but what else? What happens if it comes off?”

“If you try to take it, I kill you,” Mando said mildly.

“Oh big surprise.” Toro rolled his eyes. “You’re a walking armory. My guess is nobody but the kid gets within arm’s reach if they want to keep their limbs intact. C’mon, gimme the specifics. Do you have night vision? Do you eat everything through a straw?”

Mando didn’t respond, but considering Toro was still moving supplies for him he figured he had some wiggle room to poke the bear.

“Can I borrow it?”

The Mandalorian made a point of closing the logbook, finally turning to cock his head at the rookie and stare him down. “Kid, I don’t know you well enough to miss you if you were gone.”

“Ooh, someone’s got a sense of humor. Hey, Womp Rat, did you know your dad has a sense of humor?”

“Excuse us?”

Both Mando and Toro swiveled around at the sound of another voice, hands to their holsters; two men were approaching the clearing, still several yards away under the light of a wagon piloted by a droid. They were dressed in earthy blue and green clothes similar to the townsfolk, fitting in against the backdrop of the provincial planet. Toro eased back, getting his hand back under the crate.

“What do you want?” he hollered down to them.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to sneak up on you. Got dark faster than we anticipated,” the slighter man said, walking quickly towards the ring of lights set up around the ship once it was clear their presence wasn’t going to be welcomed with a blaster shot. “We were wondering if you could help us.”

The Mandalorian picked up the kid and strode away from the pair towards the bow of the ship to lift a panel under the engine, so Toro took it upon himself to meet them at the edge of the ramp.

“Town’s that way,” Toro said, pointing. He wiped his hands on a rag and tossed it aside, hands on his hips. “ ’Bout six kilometers.”

“No, we— Sorry, I’m Caben, this is Stoke— We weren't looking for Lau, we came to see if we could hire you. Our village needs help.”

“We have money,” the second man said.

“The log runners gave us directions,” Caben said, following after the Mandalorian but directing his plea between both of them. “They said we might be able to hire you, and whoever came on the gunship.”

Toro scoffed. He shook his head, going back to his work. “It’s just us,” he said proudly. “And you can’t afford us.”

“You don’t even know what the job is!”

“You wouldn’t have enough,” Toro said. “We’re Guild, we don’t do farm work, and we’re not staying here anyway.”

“It’s raiders,” Stoke said with an edge to his voice. His eyes flicked between Toro and the Mandalorian Caben was still trying to get around to talk to face-to-face. “Our farms have been raided three times in two months. We need them gone. The whole village chipped in everything they could.”

“We’re not mercenaries,” the Mandalorian said finally. He continued to prep the ship for lockdown one-handed, ignoring the farmers as the child watched.

“You’re a Mandalorian though, right?” Caben said, eyes wide as he took in the sight of the bounty hunter. “I’ve heard stories about your people— the legends, the hunters and fighters across the galaxy— If even half of what I’ve read is true—”

“Hey, look,” Toro said, cutting in. “We don’t need money, and I told you, we’re not for hire— At least not for this. Raiders or not, whatever you want us to do isn’t worth our time—”

“No, you look,” Stoke said, standing his ground against Toro’s dismissal. He met Toro in the middle of the clearing with squared shoulders. “We need help, and you’re the only people this area has seen besides tradesmen and trappers for four years. We’re lucky we’ve been able to hold our own in the middle of nowhere, but this is something we can’t fight by ourselves. It took us the whole day to get here, we can’t go home empty-handed—”

“And like I said, we’re not here to run off a few bandits for pocket change —”

Oddly enough it was the Mandalorian to interject next.

“You say you’re farmers?” he asked.

“… Yes?” Caben replied, unsure how to interpret the sudden interest. “Fishers, really. We farm krill.”

“In the middle of nowhere.”

“Yes?”

“Do you have lodging?”

The tone of Mando’s voice made Toro pivot on the spot, suddenly concerned the Mandalorian might actually be considering what the other two were asking of them. “Woah, Mando, you can’t seriously think— I mean I thought we were leaving—?”

Mando strode past him to meet the two farmers in the light. The space he took up made Stoke and Caben shuffle back a step in apprehension. “How large is your village?”

“About three acres in land near the river, a few more in timber,” Caben said excitedly. “A little over sixty people.”

“Any who can shoot?”

“Well— I mean it’s not— We’re mostly farmers,” Caben said, floundering. “We have slug-throwers, maybe a dozen people that can hunt, but even then, not enough ammunition. We can’t fight them in the open.”

The Mandalorian nodded. Toro’s bafflement and irritation rose.

“I can cover for that. You say you’re near the river?”

“Yeah.” The farmers nodded hopefully. “Seventy kilometers north of here at the river bend, give or take.”

“Good. We can take the ship and be there in less than an hour.”

“It’s— There won’t be anywhere to land something this big.” Caben shook his head for the first time, gesturing to the gunship. “The farmland is too soft and the trees are too thick. River runs on two sides past the timber, too. We were going to make camp tonight and travel at first light.”

The Mandalorian hummed in disapproval but weighed his options, assessing the ship.

“We can talk details on the way, but I’d rather not waste a full day traveling.”

“The mech has an autopilot and guidance system,” Stoke offered, gesturing to the wagon pilot. “There’s enough reserve power to get us back by morning, and enough of us to split up the watch and sleep in shifts.”

Mando considered it. “You willing to help load out?”

Caben and Stoke nodded eagerly.

“Good. Toro here will show you what to pack. I’ll need the credits you do have, and I’ll be back soon.”

The Mandalorian took the pouch of credits and finished notating instructions as Toro fumed, following him to the stern where the glow of the work lights cast shadows around them. “Mando what are you doing?” Toro hissed. “You said we weren’t staying here. This is chump change compared to what we can do. You should have told them to take a hike.”

“Let’s get one thing clear,” the Mandalorian said quietly. “You do not speak for me.”

The child’s ears flattened at his guardian’s tone. Toro gestured to the farmers, trying to keep his voice down even as his frustration built.

“Mando, this is insane, you and I can do better than this,” he said. “I thought we were leaving—”

“Calican,” Mando snapped. He loomed in the light of the Crest. “There’s only room on this ship for one captain. The last time you decided to make your own call on a job you nearly got my ship stolen and me and the kid— and yourself— killed. This is downtime built in to recover from that job. If you can’t handle my verdict, start walking.”

Toro ground his teeth at the reprimand, anger and irritation simmering under his skin. He had to tamp down his inclination to argue; this was far from the fast-paced hunting in sprawling cities and crime rings he’d anticipated when he signed on, but the recent memory of their job with Shand— and the tools of the trade he desperately hoped Mando was good for— stayed his tongue.

“What makes you think the job is worth the detour?” he asked, nodding past the hunter to the two farmers.

“Quartering us in the middle of nowhere to act as a deterrent for a week or two is a square deal,” Mando continued. “Can you handle that?”

“Will we move on after that?” Toro pushed. “Because as far as I can tell the only thing this planet has to pass the time is target practice.”

“Assuming you fix your blaster, that’s the idea.”

It’s only been a few days, Toro seethed. And he’s your only way off swamp-ridden rock.

The Mandalorian waited. Toro was coming to realize silent observation may be his mentor’s natural resting state, and it was more infuriating than anticipated. An argument, a fight— those he could navigate. Those were gratifying and gave him more to work with than the pointed stare and cold debate leveled at him now. It wasn’t that he took issue with the Mandalorian’s stubbornness as a character trait— It was the fact there was no telling where he stood in the bounty hunter’s regard at any given time. He had no way of reading the Mandalorian’s expressions, and not only had Mando disagreed with him on nearly everything that day, he seemed to have a more condensed arsenal of frustratingly sound logic backing up how he shut down Toro’s protests, and it frustrated Toro that he couldn’t articulate a strong enough rebuttal to stand his ground when the time came because it felt like he was being kept in the dark.

Mando’s decisions were justified. Toro just didn’t like them.

Toro had a feeling this decision would set the tone of their working relationship moving forward; he couldn’t help but remember what Shand said about the Mandalorian’s lack of personal connections meaning he could easily drop Toro at any time and cut his losses. Mando had clearly survived this far without him. If Toro didn’t suck it up and muscle through the next two weeks on Sorgan, he didn’t think he was going to like being stuck there for an indeterminable future.

After a long moment of deliberation, the tic of Toro’s clenched jaw finally settled.

“Fine,” he muttered. “What do you need?”

The Mandalorian nodded. “Pull this together from the ship.”

He gave Toro the list, some instructions for stowing the necessities, and the security protocols for locking up. Toro must not have been doing as well as he thought in hiding his dissatisfaction because without prompting, the Mandalorian handed the child off to Toro and followed up his instructions with, “Buck up and get moving. And watch the kid until I get back.”

“Hey, where are you going?”

“I’m calling in some backup.”

—

The Mandalorian retraced the trail leading to Lau before branching off from the woods and heading toward a spring. Din circumvented the town, briefly switching to the thermal imaging to orient himself before switching back to night vision. Though grateful for the first uninterrupted seclusion he’d had that day, he wasn’t able to fully relax knowing the kid was still back at the clearing, but he didn’t know what the drop trooper’s temperament would be at an unexpected arrival. Hopefully the rookie kept a closer eye on the kid this time.

Din still wasn’t sure what to make of the gunslinger. He was fairly sure Calican’s brash impulsiveness was a mark of youth and not one of a trigger-happy lust for bloodshed— He’d done surprisingly better in the fight against Cara than he had in the one with Shand (despite the fact Dune had at least sixty pounds on him), and he’d retained enough clarity of mind to hesitate when Din stepped in and brought the scrap to a stall.

However, the rookie’s inclination to jump feet-first into everything instead of hanging back concerned him. Din needed to be able to run point, and Toro had thus far not proven consistently capable of thinking first and acting second.

Din sighed, traipsing through the woods. The irony of taking on an apprentice whose ambition reminded him of his own at that age was not lost on him, and while it was clear Calican wasn’t bereft of talents or smarts, he lacked experience and patience and didn’t know when to apply the skills he had. The risks he took weren’t calculated.

He also didn’t have a near-indestructible suit of armor protecting him like Din had at that age.

As Din navigated the forest, he thought over their experiences and how they measured up to the mixed results of the past four days. Toro was sharp, and if he would just slow down and think, he’d figure out the answers he wanted faster and without having to rely on Din to break them down every step of the way. The arguing, the questions, the not-following instructions…

Toro wasn’t a kid. The immaturity at the core of his actions was the kind that resulted from the rookie still only thinking about himself first. If he couldn’t figure out how to work with Din— or anybody— as a team, he wasn’t going to get very far in life on credits alone.

Still, the gunslinger seemed to have some modicum of sense and a good awareness of his surroundings. He caught on quick to instruction once he relented to it, and he’d surprised Din more than once that day with the connections he’d been able to draw on the scant information available.

Toro had potential. He just had to apply it. Din knew he had high expectations, but if the rookie could prove his merit to him, he’d be able to work for anybody.

Toro didn’t know what to make of the farmers, and he got the impression the stocky one didn’t much care for him either. Caben made small talk at least, enthusiastic as they loaded out the supplies and blasters Mando had left them with and asked several questions about the Crest Toro didn’t have all the answers for. The child had whined softly after the Mandalorian left, his ears drooping and his eyes going all big and sad again, but he thankfully stayed close to where the men were amidst the load out and didn’t wander off.

“So what’s it like working for the Mandalorian?” Caben asked as they strapped down the wagon.

Toro scoffed. “I work with him. We’re hunting partners.”

“Bounty hunters?”

“Yep. Just came from Tatooine before this. Finished up a job concerning Fennec Shand.”

Toro watched them expectantly from the side, but Stoke and Caben exchanged a look and shrugged. “Sorry, no idea who that is.”

“Fennec Shand?” Toro asked, shocked. “The assassin who worked for the Hutts? Wanted in eight systems at least?”

“Already told you, you’re the first outsiders we’ve seen in four years,” Stoke said. “We hardly hear anything as is.”

“Well let’s just say she’s bad news,” Toro said. “Pulled a double cross on her though. She almost escaped, tried to go after the kid here. Mando and I ambushed her and took her down in the middle of the desert. When we dragged her back to Mos Eisley she tried to make a break for it and we ended up in a shootout in the middle of the night.”

Caben was invested. Stoke couldn’t care less.

“What’d you do with her after that?”

“Ah, well we brought in proof that she was dead and the broker paid out the bounty to us,” Toro lied. “Got a pretty penny considering how high profile she was.”

“Thought you said you two weren’t mercenaries.”

“We’re not,” Toro said, looking back to Stoke. Stoke side-eyed him from his seat on the wagon.

“Mercenaries will kill anyone for a buck. Hunters have credentials. We bag the criminals on wanted listings. Verifiable criminals and all.” Toro continued to twirl his blaster in hand. “It gets pretty technical when you get into Guild bureaucracy, I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”

“Sounds cut and dry to me.” Stoke tied up his long hair and stretched his legs, leaning back against the trunks. “Pick a job, chase someone around, catch them and tie ‘em up, drag ‘em back and get paid.”

Toro rolled his eyes. “Yeah, if you simplify it like that.”

Stoke snorted. The croak of amphibians ebbed and flowed from the creek in the woods, the three of them falling quiet. The boy played in the grass with a silver ball, pushing it around the dirt between his feet.

Stoke spoke again. “Let me ask you this: if you two just got paid for a big job, why did you need to take our credits, even though we told you it was all our village had to spare?”

Toro froze, sweat running cool on the back of his neck. “Oh, Mando has his reasons,” he deflected. “He’s bringing backup, so you’re technically paying them, you know? We’re just coming to take a break between now and the next job.”

“Uh huh.”

“Gotta sleep at some point, you know?”

“Sure.”

The awkward silence settled again over the clearing. Toro’s leg bounced impatiently, looking around for something to do. Stoke narrowed his eyes.

“How long did you say you’ve been a hunter?”

“A while.” Toro quickly reached down and nabbed the kid by the back collar of his coat, bringing him up with kicking feet to turn him to the farmers at the back of the wagon. “Hey, do you have any idea what this thing is? Mando picked him up a while ago and we’ve got no idea what he’s supposed to be.”

Cara stood her ground, arms crossed. Both the long-haired trapper and the stout cook from the public house were unarmed, but the argument grew louder, their voices overlapping.

“— don’t want you causing any more trouble!” the trapper barked. “We’re giving you until morning to clear out.”

“I’m far enough from town,” Cara said. “This land’s unincorporated.”

“Move out,” the bald one insisted. His broad hands flexed into fists. “Or you’ll be moved.”

Cara laughed humorlessly. “Try it, Dagosh, see what happens.”

“We’re being civil. This is exactly why we asked you to leave this afternoon—”

“If you hadn’t snuck up on me I wouldn't have shot at you—!”

Somebody off to Cara’s left cleared their throat. The two men jolted in surprise as Cara’s hand went to her hip holster.

The Mandalorian had materialized between the trees like a specter, silent and shimmering. Both men blanched at his sudden appearance, exchanging looks as they stepped back. The Mandalorian cut an intimidating silhouette, the flames reflected in his armor the only motion against the darkness.

The trapper nudged his friend and the two backed away further with a call of “By first light, trooper.” They mounted the speederbike hovering past the light of the campfire and kicked off in a hurry, brush swishing loudly as it was displaced by the retreating hum through the forest. Cara pivoted away from the Mandalorian and grabbed her duffel, shoveling supplies in to break camp.

“You here for a rematch?” she growled. She tore a blanket from the ground and stuffed it into a rucksack, packing the rest of her gear. “Or do you just like to spectate?”

“… They give you trouble?”

“Save your pity,” she snapped. Bedroll and mess kit found their way onto the pile with military efficiency, sparse belongings tacked together and stowed in canvas. The Mandalorian watched her toss the rest of her food over the grass before she shoved past him. “And get out of my way.”

The Mandalorian remained silent as Cara packed, and it unnerved her.

She thought about finding a soft spot between all that armor to shoot him. She needed to find somewhere new to bed down for the night and didn’t feel like watching over her shoulder while she did.

Cara had learned long before that poison nettles and occupied dens were far easier to spot in the daylight. She’d been fortunate enough so far to avoid both, but the creek wound further into the forest away from the cleared footpaths and she’d still need to clear brush before getting a fire going. The rest of the predators stayed away from the light.

He stood there the entire time she packed, but it wasn’t a large campsite— Even half a minute beneath the gaze of black steel made the skin down the back of her neck crawl. He hadn’t moved from the tree, watching her impassively.

If the rookie was waiting in the shadows, she’d shoot him too and not lose an ounce of sleep over it.

“What?” she finally snapped. “Where’s your sidekick? If you came to collect on my hide after all, I’ll give you a real fight.”

The Mandalorian tossed something at her. She caught it automatically.

Credits glinted up from the bag in the firelight.

“I have a counteroffer.”

—

Five humans and a child of indeterminate species trundled through the woods on a wagon with enough space left in the back for two. Toro had shot Cara a saucy grin and winked while they were discussing bedding arrangements, at which she scoffed and tossed her duffle bag onto the pile, climbing up to prop herself against her rucksack. The gunslinger, despite his flirtation, stretched the entirety of his lanky body longways down the wagon bed next to the cases on the other side. The Mandalorian sat upright towards the front near the villagers, and the child perched on his lap, eagerly watching the trees go by as moths fluttered around the hanging lantern.

Something started to unnerve the villagers the farther they traveled into the forest: while Caben directed the droid ahead along the trail, Stoke watched through the trees as fog crept in, clouding the shadows between bark. It was hard not to notice the antiquated slugthrower he carried on his lap, and Din was starting to wonder if there was more to the raids than simple smash-and-grab thefts of food and supplies.

”You plan on bird hunting this time of night?” the Mandalorian asked.

Stoke glanced back over his shoulder while Cara and Toro swapped stories. “Just cautious,” he said. “The raids have had everybody on edge. We’ve tried tracking the bandits, but we think they move camps throughout the week, and we can’t afford to venture too far into the woods— There’s too much work to be done back home, and the raiders have something with them.”

“… Something.”

The farmer’s frown deepened. He tried coming up with the right description and, failing that, nudged his friend. Mando looked to Caben.

“We’re not sure what it is,” Caben hedged as he turned and rested his arm over the back of the bench. “They’ve got something big with them that sounds like a machine, but it has these… big red eyes, I guess, that move through the woods past what we can see, even at midday. It’s big enough to shake the ground, and we keep finding its footprints around the raiders’ old campsites.”

“What do you mean?” Cara cut in. She and Toro were leant in behind them now.

“Just… Big footprints,” Stoke said. “Round like a lotus leaf, with two toes in front like a lizard. Size of this wagon bed. They go all around the forest and overlap the most at their old campsites. There’s branches and bark shorn off the trees too high to be any of the other animals marking their territory or looking for food.”

Mando and Cara glanced at each other, their earlier assessment at what should have been a simple job now morphing into concern.

”Where do the tracks go?” Toro asked.

”Around the outer edges of the village,” Caben said. “We can’t tell if they go into the river or not. The tracks… Well, they keep us corralled toward the ponds. We don’t have enough slugthrowers to fight the bandits, plus whatever that thing is.”

Mando’s own frown deepened. It was one thing to scare off a couple dozen raiders, but it was another thing to go up against something that big and unknown. He didn’t think the villagers were pulling their legs; the loggers in Lau had also been guarded and uneasy. Whatever creature was lurking in the woods had apparently been a problem for some time, and their earlier pleading was starting to take a different light.

“Footprints?” Cara was asking. “Not tire tracks or treads? Nothing like a vehicle?”

“They’re feet,” Stoke said flatly. “If it’s a vehicle, we don’t know what it is or where it could have come from. There’s nothing besides Lau and villages like ours for miles around here. No fuel, no roads.”

“What does it do? During the raids?” Toro asked.

“We’re… not sure,” Caben confessed. “Something explodes and the bandits charge out from the trees, from different directions every time.”

“We’re usually focused on getting people far enough away and taking cover,” Stoke muttered. His hands tightened on the long gun on his lap as he focused on the trail. “The second time they showed up, some of us fought back but not all of us made it. Two were killed in the fight, and another is still recovering from their injuries. We’ve buried more people in two months than we have in five years.”

“… There’s a lot of children,” Caben said softly. He was watching the child on Mando’s lap, who was now gazing up at the stars. “As soon as the blasterfire starts, we’re just trying to get as many people out of the way as we can. The faster we run, the more people there are left by the end of it.”

A flicker of cratered earth filled Din’s memory. He could almost smell the acrid cordite as the farmers talked.

“… I don’t like it,” Cara muttered.

Stoke snorted, unamused. “Yeah, you’re telling us.”

Quiet settled again around them, or as quiet as the soft hooting and buzzing of wildlife would allow. Mando settled the child in on one of the softer bags, covering him with the edge of a blanket.

“Tell us what you can about the village and the bandits themselves,” Din said. “Sound like we’ll need as much intel as we can get.”

Notes:

I know the term ‘Venn diagram’ wouldn’t exist in Star Wars, I just don’t care. It’s a good line and I’m keeping it.

”I don’t know you well enough to miss you if you were gone,” comes from a story Rodney Crowell tells from his past about being completely wasted and meeting his then live-in-girlfriend’s father for the first time; After making a pretty bad first impression, Johnny Cash responded with the above line, and Crowell says it sobered him right up.

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#The Mandalorian #Din Djarin #Baby Yoda #Toro Calican #Toro Calican Lives AU #Omera #Cara Dune #Caben #Stoke #my writing #AO3 Link in reblog #Star Wars au #fanfic #Star Wars fanfiction #The Mandalorian fanfiction

[corellianhounds]

What word count would you consider too long for a tumblr post? The next chapter of the Toro Lives AU has ~14k words, but if I were to split it the first portion would still be ~10, and the latter 4.7k

My opinion is that chapters are however long they need to be. As is, the chapter takes place over the course of a day, and if I made the latter portion it’s own chapter it feels incomplete and not as interesting on its own. I already had a hard time finding something that felt like a decent ending for it, and if I were to separate it it would almost have to continue on into the next full chapter

#My inclination is to say ‘Read it or don’t idc’ and move on #Personally it doesn’t FEEL like a long read #But 14k words SOUNDS like too much

[corellianhounds]

Baby Yoda // The Mandalorian

#reference #dividers #the mandalorian #baby yoda

[corellianhounds]

— art deco dividers

———

[Free] Masterlist Headers & Dividers!

Please consider liking or reblogging if you use 💕

#reference #dividers

[corellianhounds]

◈ Escape from The Sarlacc Pitt

Return of the Jedi, 05/25/1983 -The Book of Boba Fett, 12/29/2021 x x

#original trilogy #boba Fett #the book of boba fett #gifs #flashing lights

[corellianhounds]

THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT | CHAPTER 2: THE TRIBES OF TATOOINE

#op your colorssssss #the book of boba Fett #gifs #Tuskens #Tatooine #fennec shand #boba fett #black krrsantan #Do we know is there a term for the hallucinogenic brain lizard #Where’s that Tusken meme hold on I’ll find it

[corellianhounds]

Peli Motto in The Mandalorian 01.05 | The Gunslinger The Book of Boba Fett 1.03 | The Streets of Mos Espa

#Ms Motto I’m fixing you too #peli motto #the book of boba fett #gifs

[corellianhounds]

Danny Trejo in "Chapter 3: The streets of Mos Espa"

#the book of boba fett #gifs #Give it up for another short king of Tatooine

[corellianhounds]

DIN DJARIN and the X-WING PILOTS

in THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT

#Mr Teva I’m gonna fix your character too. you also deserved better #the book of boba Fett #gifs #Carson teva #din djarin #that other x wing guy looks like a young Sam Rockwell

[corellianhounds]

DIN DJARIN VS PAZ VIZSLA

The Mandalorian, Chapter 3: The Sin | The Book of Boba Fett, Chapter 5: Return of the Mandalorian

#yeah sorry but they’ll always be bickering brothers to me #the book of boba fett #gifs #Paz vizsla #din djarin #The way Big Blue just yeets him into the void #Legend

[corellianhounds]

Sorry for the constant sketch spam I’m just 🕯manifesting🕯

#the mandalorian #din djarin #art #baby yoda #I need to change his tag

[corellianhounds]

Star Wars, but make it Mad Max?

#the book of boba fett #art #din djarin #boba fett

[corellianhounds]

Din Djarin + Chapter 5: The Gunslinger

#fun fact! same cantina that had a no droid policy in A New Hope is now run by droids #Specifically! the droid torture master from Jabba’s Palace 😂 #gifs #din djarin #the mandalorian #ALSO fun fact this scene is pivotal to fixing/rewriting TBoBF

[corellianhounds]

JULIA JONES as OMERA

The Mandalorian - Season 1 (2019)

#SHE!!!! #I’m just going to post the next chapter #miss her #Omera #gifs #op the color and clarity of these is so good