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nicad13 · 1 year

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Crossroads: Chapter 5

The Price of Beskar

Summary: "Alright, kiddo, let’s commit some blasphemy."

Rayne skirts the edge of the Way to save Din's life. Her enemy sorcery can only bring him so far, and he has some Dark Moments. Lessons in Mandalorian culture and history are exchanged, and Din must atone to the Child for his past decisions. Rayne revisits a dark place of her own, and Din starts to figure out how to do the "comfort" side of hurt/comfort.

It's a mess.

Notes: Canon-compliant through Season 1, alt version of Season 2. Posting some old fic before the sequel, which will hopefully be complete by the end of Season 3. Start now so you're ready! AO3 link in the Source at the bottom.

Another beautiful illustration by @catstanbulite.

Tags/Warnings: whump, hurt/comfort, blackouts, blood/injury, flashbacks, Order 66

Rating: Mature

---

Oh, a storm is threat’ning

My very life today

If I don’t get some shelter

Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away

War, children, it’s just a shot away

Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter

---

The deck thumped under her as the Razor Crest’s guns fired on swarming Imps.

Her teeth buzzed in her skull as the engines burned. They sounded good. They sounded strong.

Din’s body twitched between her knees as he seized. He was not good. Already, she was covered in his blood, the back of his helmet heavy against her sternum.

Rayne’s vision grayed out, sound fading to a sharp, high whine as she tied the torn-off sheet strip around the upper part of her left arm with her teeth and her right hand. Blood loss, combined with her earlier efforts at Force-controlling a platoon of Imps, threatened to drain the consciousness from her mind.

Another round of gunfire brought her back.

It was just as well there was no table big enough to put his body on. They couldn’t fall off the floor.

Her eyes rolled to the left and down, catching Din’s son at her side. She knew Din had been in rough shape when they first arrived at her hangar a few days ago, knew he’d been suffering through intermittent headaches, knew that the two shots he’d taken to the back of the head would normally not have phased him. “What happened?” she asked the baby. “Can you show me? What happened before?”

Taking her meaning, the kid leaned into her, wound her shirt into his hands, and closed his eyes.

Rayne saw it all from the kid’s perspective.

Saw his father mow the Imps down with an enormous gun. Saw Gideon shoot his father in the back of the head. Saw Gideon take aim for the cannon battery. Saw the explosion throw his father twenty feet in the air. Saw the Shocktrooper drag his father to cover. Saw her pull her hand away, covered in his father’s blood. Saw her try to save his father’s life.

Saw his father refuse.

Oh Din, you idiot.

Saw his father later, somehow, stagger to the front of a boat, swing the jetpack over his shoulders to clip in, launch himself into the air, snag a TIE fighter with his vambrace whipcord, and get flung across the sky.

Oh Din, you ginormous idiot.

The engines changed in pitch as Beta took evasive action, and Rayne was glad for the extra grav she’d installed in the hold, G-forces holding steady. She took the bed sheet in her teeth again and ripped off another strip. “Ok, buddy, time for the blindfold. Sorry about this.” To her great relief, the kid did not object as she wrapped the strip around his head, looping it around his ears to hold it securely over his eyes. “Please don’t squirm out of this like you squirm around locked doors.” That done, she ripped off one more strip, held one end in her teeth, closed her eyes, wrapped it around her head, and tied it off.

She was blind.

“Alright, kiddo, let’s commit some blasphemy.”

She felt around the bottom edge of the helmet and found the release catch on the right side, breaking the seal around Din’s neck. Reaching down his arms, she grabbed the vambraces at his wrists, pulled his hands up, worked her hands up to his wrists, and used his own hands to lift the helmet from his head.

She set the helmet down to her right, the kid still at her side to her left. She slid her right hand up the back of Din’s head, frowning as she felt a shard of his skull protruding through his scalp, slick under his blood and hair. She wrapped her left hand around the front of his head. Concentrating, she mapped out the damage in her mind, feeling the kid next to her, watching, not interfering, but offering strength where he could.

The ship jumped to hyperspace.

The roar of the engines died away as the Razor Crest split the seams between space and time.

With the noise gone, she could now hear Din’s breathing, shallow and labored and rough. Unmodulated by the helmet. Stupid thoughts crossed her mind.

His head is so round.

I’m glad the engines held up.

He really does need a haircut.

She bit her lip and forced herself to focus. Seeing his fractures in her mind, seeing the swelling at both the front and back of his brain, she bled the Force into him, first draining the swelling, repairing the vascular damage, then shifting her right hand to fit his skull back to the right shape, putting the pieces back together, knitting them closed. She sealed the laceration last, killing off any invasive bacteria, smoothing over the scar.

His breathing stabilized.

His body relaxed, seizures ending with the repair of neural tissue.

She felt the kid sag at her side.

She reached for the helmet to her right, but her hands were numb, and she only ended up pushing it out of reach. The high-pitched whine returned to the center of her head, and she felt her arms and legs go heavy and limp. With her vision already blacked out, she did not have the warning of it narrowing to a pinpoint before it winked out entirely with her consciousness.

Gamma, the bot that had shuttled Din and the baby to the safety of the hold, crouched in the corner and shivered as it watched three living beings lay unconscious in a drying puddle of blood.

---

The first thing Din was aware of was the hum of his ship in hyperspace.

A familiar sound.

A comforting sound.

Few things could hurt him here.

He was safe.

He was just sleeping.

Was he sleeping? He was at a weird angle. He tasted blood in his mouth. He smelled blood. Heavy iron. He turned his head, feeling his hair stick to whatever he was on top of.

No helmet. He felt the rest of his armor weighing him down, but no helmet.

He forced his eyes open and sat up. Looking down, he saw boots that weren’t his at his hips.

Someone was still in them.

Sucking in a breath, he rolled to a crouch, drew his sidearm, and turned.

Goddammit.

Rayne and his son were passed out against the bulkhead, blindfolded. Rayne was soaked in blood. He put his hand to the back of his head, felt a drying, caking mess back there, and realized she was covered in his blood. He saw the bandage on her left arm, soaked with her blood as well.

The world tilted sideways for a moment. He closed his eyes, placed his hands on the floor to steady himself, and opened them again, holstering his sidearm.

He moved toward them, not recalling the last thing he remembered, not caring how they’d all gotten to where they were. The past could wait. He checked his son first, finding no wounds, his breathing and pulse were normal. None of the blood on his robe was his. Din picked him up and put him in his crate.

He turned his attention to Rayne.

Her breathing was shallow; her pulse was thin, but steady. He peeled her shirt off, up and over her head, threading her arms through the holes. One thing that sleeping with a crew member actually managed to make less awkward was getting them out of their clothes to check for blaster wounds. Nothing he hadn’t already seen twice over, and he knew where the old scars were by now. No major wounds other than her arm; most of the blood on her shirt was his, then. He did the same with the leggings, frowning at the bruise rising at her hip. He pulled a tracking fob out of a pocket and set it aside, not thinking about it. He cleaned the blood and dirt off of her as well as he could, treated the wound on her arm with bacta from his medkit, along with the scrapes on her face, hands, elbows, and knees. He felt almost as if he was being piloted from far away, not entirely present in his tasks, disassociated from it all. The one exception was when Rayne tensed at the sting of the bacta, which loosened some of the tension in him, knowing she had enough left in her to at least respond to something. Not knowing where she’d stowed her clothes and not yet comfortable with rummaging around in her stuff, he pulled out one of his shirts, a pair of shorts, and a pair of socks, then set about the task of wrestling her into all of it. At long last, he had her bundled up in the bunk with what was left of the sheet, the blanket, plus an extra blanket for good measure.

Winded, he turned his attention to the puddle of blood smeared on the deck.

A little goes a long way, he told himself, but… still. It looked like a lot. He had no way of telling how much of it was his and how much of it was Rayne’s. He was wiped out. He couldn’t just leave it there, and he still had to get himself squared away, but… still. He put his back to the bulkhead and slid down to the floor next to the bunk, where Rayne had him before. He reached for his helmet, just barely within his arm span, and slipped it over his head. Uh. More blood in there, too. He’d get to it in a minute. Just…

He let his eyes slip closed.

Just for a minute.

Gamma sat in the corner and watched.

---

The ship dropped out of hyperspace.

Din snapped awake.

They coasted for a moment, then jumped back to lightspeed.

Right. Their first decoy stop.

They’d been going in the wrong direction on purpose for five hours.

Five hours? Had he really been sitting on the deck of his own ship, in a puddle of his own blood, for five hours?

He pulled his feet in and pushed himself up to standing. It finally occurred to him to wonder what had happened to put them all in this state of affairs. The fob on the floor caught his eye and he picked it up.

It all came back.

He’d watched from the rooftop as Rayne convinced a Stormtrooper to hand the fob to her, and then he’d fallen like a load of bricks. And then the rest of them had fallen like dominos.

He remembered taking a bolt to the shoulder.

He turned and saw his jetpack on the floor, scraped up and covered in dirt.

He would never remember the two bolts to the back of his head, but he could figure it out well enough. He sighed, putting it all together.

He would deal with the picture the pieces made later. He still had a lot more work to do.

His son was snoring in his crate. Rayne was a quieter sleeper and he had to lean into the bunk and check her pulse at her neck before he was satisfied that she was ok. He turned and sat at the end of it, taking a moment to key his vambrace to receive the biometrics from her wristband. He set it to a light tap-buzz at the back of his wrist synched with her pulse so he would know if anything changed.

He removed their blindfolds. Something in his gut tightened at the sight of them in his hand, the realization that Rayne had taken the time for them before removing his helmet. He felt a mix of relief, gratitude, and betrayal at what she had done. Too exhausted to make any headway with it, he continued with his work.

He changed his son’s robe, dealt with the dried swath of blood on the deck, and then pulled the armor off. Cleaning that was a chore that would keep until later; the blood on it was his own, some of it might have been Rayne’s but the armor was not desecrated with the blood of enemies. Stepping into the fresher, he finally shucked himself out of his blood-soaked clothes, and, removing the helmet, took a look in the mirror.

The image of IG-11 flashed in his vision.

He closed his eyes, counted to ten, and tried again.

Just his own face this time, but the same bloody mess he had been after Nevarro.

He watched as the E-Web cannon battery blew up in his face.

The next time he opened his eyes, he was on the floor, the metal bulkhead cold against the bare skin of his back, arms covering his head.

Get your shit together. He pulled himself up. Don’t look in the mirror. He brushed his teeth to get the taste of blood out of his mouth, closing his eyes until he rinsed the basin so he wouldn’t see it. He forced himself into the cramped shower, got it as hot as he could stand it, and again kept his eyes closed so he wouldn’t see the blood run off. He chanced running his hand over the back of his head and found that things felt normal back there, the odd bump that had been with him for the past week and a half no longer present. When his fingers started to prune up, he shimmied out, dried off, and set about cleaning his helmet out the best he could without looking at what came out of it. When he had resigned himself to the idea of putting it back on over wet hair, his eye happened to catch Rayne’s hairdryer in the rack where he’d stowed it earlier.

Oh thank god.

The one chore in this whole waking hell of a day that would feel good.

The pure frivolousness of warm, blowing air nearly broke him down. He didn’t care. The tears came and he didn’t care. He’d cracked his skull open for the second time in less than two weeks, nearly died of a head injury for the second time in less than two weeks, lost what looked like two pints of blood, apparently got put back together again by an enemy sorcerer who was now passed out in his bunk, probably assisted by his enemy sorcerer child who was also passed out, had changed everyone on board out of blood-soaked clothes, and having dry hair before putting the helmet back on was the best fucking thing to happen to him in decades and he had no more fucks to give about the fact that his face was spewing tears over it.

Rayne was right about needing downtime. He was ready to sleep for a hundred years.

Thoroughly dry, he slipped the helmet back on, stepped out of the fresher, dressed in clean clothes, put his vambraces back on, scooped up all of the blood-soaked items littering the deck, and stuffed them in the clothes unit.

Done.

He turned to the bunk and stopped. Crawling in there with Rayne didn’t feel quite right, at the moment. He needed some space, at least until they had another discussion about helmet rules. Flight deck it was, then. He picked up his son’s crate and headed up the ladder.

He froze when he got to the top to find the bot on the flight deck, jacked into the droid port, flying his ship.

Would this shitshow of a day never end?

The bot turned and greeted him with a chirp.

“Get. Out.” His voice sounded like snapping ice. The bot made a sad-sounding noise as it set the ship to autopilot and jacked out. Din sighed and tried again. “Get out, please.” The bot chirped once more, then headed down the ladder.

Finally, Din put his son’s crate in the starboard jump-seat and eased himself into the pilot chair. Taking the sleeping child into his lap, he strapped himself into the chair so he wouldn’t fall out if it, turned to prop his feet up on the port jump-seat, and eased back.

The blue-white ripple of hyperspace flowed above them.

His body ached, even as his head was finally free from pain.

He could feel his son’s heartbeat through his hand. He could feel Rayne’s pulse through the vambrace on the back of his wrist. As Din dozed off, he realized that the two were perfectly synchronized, Rayne’s heart beating once for every three of the baby’s.

Together, they had saved his life, today.

He wondered if, together, they would be his undoing.

---

She woke up disoriented, not knowing where she was, alarmed at the blurry image of an armor-clad figure seated in a chair at the foot of the bunk. When her brain finally caught up and she realized it was Din, she relaxed, rubbing her eyes. When her vision cleared, she noticed the tension in his shoulders. Her eyes dropped to see that he had drawn his sidearm blaster and was holding it in his lap.

Ok, back to being alarmed.

She sat up and slid so her back was against the rear wall. “How’s the kid?”

“Fine.” His voice was low, menacing.

“The customary response to someone who saved your life is to say ‘Thank you.’“

“You removed my helmet.” In that moment, she saw the cold-blooded killer he often was. He knew she was claustrophobic. She knew he cornered her in here on purpose. A small part of her hated him for it.

She schooled herself back, knowing his reaction came from a place of self-defense, and possibly, some gaps in his memory. She looked at her arms, clad in a shirt that wasn’t hers. “Why am I wearing your clothes?”

His head cocked to the side.

“Where did you wake up?”

“Flight deck.”

“Do you remember how you got up there?”

“… No.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Waking up on the deck with my helmet off.”

“Are blackouts a thing for you?”

“It’s against the Creed.” Rage still drove the words, but his voice cracked with uncertainty.

“You’re telling me you would choose to die for your religion over living for your son?”

Is that what I did before?

Despite the fact that he literally had her backed into a corner, her eyes drilled into him, daring him to tell her she was wrong. Daring him to use the weapon in his hand. He took a deep breath and holstered his sidearm.

His vambrace began its tap-buzz against the back of his wrist once more, set to activate for half an hour after any change in Rayne’s pulse rate, and her heart was hammering, now. It startled him, the memory of setting it only now returning.

And then the rest of it came back.

Running from the Imps. Taking a shot in the shoulder. Waking up on the floor without his helmet on. His jetpack, scraped up and covered in dirt. Cleaning an enormous amount of blood off the deck. Unwrapping blindfolds from her and his son. Changing them both out of blood-soaked clothes. Having a hallucination or two in the fresher.

Out of all that, why had he blacked out all but the most incriminating bit?

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and put his head in his hands, shaking. “I’m sorry.” His voice cracked over the modulator.

Rayne slid forward. The space between Din’s knees and the bunk was enough for her to get her legs out, sit on the edge, and reach for his hands. He accepted, gripping her hands in his, pressing them back against the top of the helmet. Realization, guilt, and confusion rolled off of him in waves.

She let him ride it out, and when it subsided after a minute or two, she pulled his hands away from his head, sitting up. “You had a pre-existing skull fracture.”

“Yes.” He sat back.

“How did it happen?”

“I was standing next to an E-web cannon battery when Gideon fired on it. It detonated.”

“How did you treat it?”

“I let a droid use bacta.”

“What else did you do before it had a chance to heal?”

“I… tethered Gideon’s TIE fighter in mid-air and blew it up.” He tilted his head. “Why do I get the feeling you know all this already?”

“I knew everything except for the bit about the droid. I asked your kid what you did to yourself. I didn’t actually expect an answer, but he gave me one.” She released one of his hands to tap the side of her head with her own. “It was quite a show.” She took his hand again. “I asked you point-blank if your headaches were ok, and you said yes. You lied to me. You don’t get to jeopardize an op like that anymore. You don’t get to withhold information, put me in the position to make life decisions for you, and then play the religion card when I save your life. You have to be honest with me if this is going to work.”

He nodded his understanding. “Is that what he thinks I did before? Does he think I chose an honorable death over living for him?”

“Sure looked like it.”

“Do you understand what it means for me to take this off in the light? To show my face to anyone?”

“Not entirely.”

“When I swore the Creed, I swore my soul to the manda. While we live, it’s a balance of the mind, body, and spirit.” He brought his right hand to his forehead, dropped it to his heart, then back up to the side of his head. “We pass to it when we die to become part of the oversoul. Our collective conscious.”

Rayne smiled. “Sounds suspiciously like the Force.”

Din let out a sharp exhale. “You were born with sensitivity to the Force. Mandalorians have to earn the manda. Live by the Resol’nare. The Six Actions. Wearing the armor is the first action. Our secrecy is our survival. I’ve sworn my soul to the manda. If I break the Resol’nare, if I remove my armor and reveal my face, reveal that secret, I don’t get it back. I become dar’manda.”

“Soulless,” Rayne said.

He tilted his head at her familiarity with the term. “Yes.” He paused there, taking a long sigh. “I thought I was already dead on Nevarro. I was paralyzed from the waist down. I was blind in my left eye. Deaf on the left side. I knew I couldn’t keep breathing for much longer.” His tone was edged, the memory was a powerful one, and she felt it almost as her own, tasting the blood in his mouth as it kept filling, swallowing it back down so as not to drown in the helmet with it. “I knew I was leaving him no matter what anyone did for me and that terrified me. Losing my soul at the same time… dar’manda the moment before joining the manda…” His voice hitched, unable to continue.

“I blindfolded myself. I blindfolded your son. I used your hands to pull the helmet off. I didn’t touch your face.”

“You saved my life without destroying my soul. Thank you.”

“What happens if I have to look you in the eye to save your life?”

Another deep sigh. “He’s my son, now. If it comes down to it, living to be his father is worth the price of my soul.” His voice was heavy.

A small squeak sounded from the bottom of the ladder and they both turned to see the baby with those huge eyes shining, arms up, wanting to be held.

“Ad’ika,” Din pushed back in his chair and got up, sweeping the baby up in his arms. Rayne took the opportunity to escape the confines of the bunk, standing in time to see the baby turn his face into Din’s cowl and let out a sob, tiny fingers digging into the material around his neck.

“Whoa…” She took a step back, one hand at her forehead.

Din did a double-take between her and his son, the memory of Cara’s hands at her own throat clawing at the back of his mind. “What? What’s he doing?”

“It’s ok,” she closed her eyes, running her hand through her hair. “He’s just… angry about it. About Nevarro.” She opened her eyes and held Din’s gaze, brow furrowed. “This kind anger in a Force-sensitive kid… as powerful as he is…” She shook her head. “You have to talk to him. Now.”

The baby let out another sob, and Din tried to soothe him with a hand on his back. “Will he understand?”

She stood in the hold, wearing his clothes, one hand still in her hair, the other at her hip, holding up the shorts that were too loose on her frame, her face a study of worry for his son, and that tightness returned to his chest.

“I think maybe I can help translate.” Not trusting herself to stand, she took a seat in the chair and held her hands out. “Come here, kiddo. Your dad needs to tell you something.” The baby turned to her as Din handed him off and took his own seat at the edge of the bunk. Once again, she met Din’s gaze through the visor. “You need to say the words, but what you feel will be more important. I probably won’t have to do much. Just re-interpret if he misunderstands anything.”

Din nodded as Rayne turned the baby in her lap to face him. Din leaned forward, elbows on his knees so he was closer to eye-level with his son.

And then he closed his eyes and lowered his head, because it was too much to look his son in the eye and say the words at the same time.

“I’m sorry… about before. I thought I was dead. I didn’t choose my religion over you. I didn’t think I had a choice at all. Leaving you was the last thing I wanted. I did everything I could to make sure you wouldn’t be alone. I was… scared. Of all the things that scared me about dying, leaving you alone was the worst. Of all the things I never wanted for you, I never wanted for you to be alone.”

Din’s guilt and sorrow washed over them both, and the baby’s ears flattened against his shoulders, tiny body trembling. Tell him how things will be different, Rayne pushed the thoughts at him. Don’t make any promises you can’t keep, but tell him you love him.

Din once again brought his hands to the top of his head and another wave of guilt rolled off of him as his shoulders shook. “I will always choose you…” His voice choked off, and Rayne was assaulted by simultaneous memories from both of them of the same moment, a vision of Din clad in mis-matched armor, standing before a container of beskar ingots, as the baby was led away.

Oh god, she realized. He did go through with it. He traded the baby for the beskar.

Din’s breathing was labored through the modulator. “I won’t ever forgive myself for that. I won’t ever ask you to forgive me for it. Every time I put this armor on, I…” He broke off again, the pain of the memory gripping him in a visceral way, and the child’s body was rigid in Rayne’s hands. “I do it so I can protect you. It doesn’t belong to me. I bought it with your life. It belongs to you. I belong to you.”

The child sat in the lap of his father’s new friend, the woman he had saved so she could save his father, felt her hands around him, steady him, give him the buoyancy he needed to survive the flood of his father’s guilt, keep him from drowning in his father’s sorrow.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”

His father’s voice was raw, and the child knew it was too soon for his father to love. His father was still too damaged, no matter how much he may have wanted to provide it. That part of him simply had not worked for a long time, had shattered apart under the force of a concussion blast while huddled in a bunker, and it would be a while yet before it would work again.

But his father’s new friend was good at fixing things. Had brought new life to their ship, their home. Had kept his father’s life from spilling out of the broken parts of him. Maybe she could find his other broken parts and fix those, too, and then his father could love him.

Maybe she could love him, too.

And so the child reached up to his father, knowing that his father wanted to be better, knowing that his father would no longer betray him, no longer abandon him, hoping that, in time, his father would be able to love him. And when his father swept him up, he cried with happiness. He cried with acceptance. He cried with his own love, that someday might be reciprocated.

Din held his crying son in his arms, tiny body trembling, hearing that the tone in his son’s cries was different but not knowing how. Looking to Rayne with a silent question, her eyes shining, she gave him a nod and a tired smile.

Good enough.

---

Din and the baby retired to the bunk, Din still wiped out from all the blood loss and needing some sleep without the helmet. So long as the door remained closed and the lights off, it was ok for the baby to remain with him.

Rayne was famished, so after finding her clean clothes and changing into them, she fixed herself a huge plate of noodles and meat and settled down at the small table in the hold to eat it, enjoying some time alone and the hum of the ship around her.

The tracking fob keyed to Din and the baby’s chain codes lay on the table before her.

They’d pulled it off.

The cost had almost been insurmountable, but they all managed to hold it together.

Gamma crept up to her, sounding a timid warble.

“Whoa, hey, I forgot all about you. I’m sorry about that. You probably need to get charged up, huh?”

It chirped an affirmative.

Rayne frowned. “You’ve been down here the whole time?”

Yes.

“You saw Din’s face? Without the helmet?”

Yes.

“You have a record of it?”

Yes.

“You can play it back?”

Yes.

She sighed, casting a glance at the closed door of the bunk. “Go grab my spanner, will you?” The bot did as it was told, returning with the tool. She directed it to have a seat on the floor before her so she could open the access panel to its memory core.

“Sorry, buddy. I gotta wipe your memory from launch time.”

Okay.

---

Several hours later, the door to the bunk slid open and Din grunted his way out. He nodded to Rayne as she looked up from her work at the table, having pulled the fob apart, sorting through the pieces. She nodded back and returned to her task.

He headed up the ladder to the galley and warmed up a bowl of soup, slipping the helmet off to down a bottle of water. He had no idea what time it was. Didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that they were safe, his son seemed to have more-or-less forgiven his transgressions, and his head felt a hell of a lot better. He took his time with the soup, his son occupied with sleep, Rayne occupied with the fob, and was somewhat astonished at how good the soup tasted now that he could actually focus on what he was eating.

He still felt woozy from all the blood loss and knew it would be a week or two before that went away, but his head was remarkably clear.

Sometimes you didn’t realize how broken something was until it got fixed.

He stepped onto the flight deck. Another five hours until they dropped out of hyperspace for the second time. They would coast a bit again, then fold back in. They would arrive at Methuselah in about a day.

He headed back down to the hold and joined Rayne at the table. The scrapes on her face were almost gone, responding well to the bacta. “How’s the arm?”

She sat back and looked down to the bandage wrapped just below the Rebel Starbird tattoo. “It’s good. Thanks for taking care of that for me.”

He shrugged. “I owe you a few. Stormtooper bolt?”

“Yeah.”

“I saw the bruise on your hip.”

“Yep. Goes all the way from by butt to my knee, now.”

“Wanna fill me in?”

“You took two bolts to the back of the head, lost consciousness, and your jetpack took you on a nice little joyride before plowing you in the dirt. Gamma got you and the kid back to the ship. I got back a little late. Your kid had to pull me through the door and wound up throwing me into the hull on the other side.”

“Lost some skin somewhere.”

She shrugged. “Dodged a bolt and tripped.”

Satisfied that she was ok, he turned his attention to her work. “How’s it going with the fob?”

“It’s not quite what I expected, but it all makes sense. I’ll be able to work with it. The fact that it doesn’t work on the ship means I got the ship-scrambler right, anyway.”

He nodded. “You were distracted by something before we left. Said we could talk about it later.” He leaned back in his seat. “It’s later.”

She looked at the visor for a few moments, then packed up the fob and all of its pieces into the box she had procured for it. She got up, crossed the hold to the locked drawer he had given her, placed the fob in it, retrieved something else, crossed back, and placed an eight-inch metal cylinder on the table as she sat back down.

Din recognized it as a weapon, but one that he did not understand how to handle, so he refrained from picking it up.

Rayne seemed to look at it with trepidation, not quite knowing where to start.

“Start at the beginning,” Din prompted.

“I was raised at the Jedi temple on Coruscant,” she began. “Our first rite of passage was the Gathering. They took us to a temple where we faced our greatest fears, and if we succeeded, we were able to find our kyber crystal. We then build our first lightsaber around that crystal.” She nodded to the object on the table. “Despite starting early, I wasn’t all that promising, so they wouldn’t let me participate in a Gathering until I was ten. Up until that point, we’re raised by lower-level masters, and the clones hung out with us a lot so we could get used to them. They taught us some Mando’a. They called us ad’ika. We called them ba’vodu. The Jedi Order eschewed family, but the clones were our uncles. Some of us had favorites. Mine was CT-24EGL. Eagle. He called me Mir’sheb verd.”

Din huffed a laugh. “Smartass warrior. Fits.”

She was turned sideways to the table, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, turning a spanner over and over again in her hands. With few exceptions, she had not been particularly emotive in the short time Din had known her, but now her affect seemed especially flat, as if she was reading from a grocery list instead of talking about what was shaping up to be a pivotal moment in her life. He recognized her disassociation, remembered it in the other foundlings growing up, recognized it in himself from how he had described the droid attack on his village to her earlier.

“He never teased me about being a late bloomer. Always said it was better to wait until I was ready and do it right than try too soon and fail. So I finally went when I was ten. I faced down my worst fears, and I succeeded. A yellow crystal lit up in front of me and I picked it up. When we got back to Coruscant, Eagle was the first person I found and I showed it to him. He was at dinner late. I found him in the caf, and… he was proud of me.”

She paused again, turning the spanner over and over again in her hands, gaze focused on the floor.

“And while we were sitting there, eating dinner, talking about my first Jedi rite of passage, Order 66 came through.”

Another pause, and Din took a long, shaky breath.

“He had his helmet on the table and I heard it over the com. He… started to act weird. Something… the Force, told me to run, and I did.” Her hands let go of the spanner and it clattered to the deck. She brought her right hand to the top of her left shoulder, and Din remembered the scar there.

“Your uncle shot you.” His voice was rough.

“Yeah. One second, he’s congratulating me on the most important moment of my ten-year-old life, the next, he’s trying to end it. On a single order. No questions asked.”

She was still outwardly calm, but Din’s vambrace once more began to buzz her pulse against his wrist, sensing the increase in her heart rate. He’d forgotten to turn it off.

“I managed to get out of the caf and crawled up the ventilation shaft to wait things out. I listened to everyone else get slaughtered by the clones. I stayed in that shaft for three days until I thought it was safe to leave.”

“That explains the claustrophobia.”

“Yeah.”

“And the armor thing.”

“Yeah.”

Din suppressed a shiver. “Between my blackout and your phobias, we almost killed each other earlier.”

“I had it under control.”

“I’m glad one of us did.”

“Yeah.” She turned to face the table and picked up the cylinder. “Anyway. I had my crystal, so I eventually built my lightsaber. The traditional weapon of the Jedi.” She indicated the end with the yellow tape around it. “This is the pointy end. Don’t be on it.” She got up, stepped away from the table, and activated the saber.

Din tilted his head in awe.

He never saw a bright, noisy weapon that he didn’t like.

She moved through a couple of positions, and Din noticed how differently she handled it from the sparing saber, like she actually knew what she was doing with this one. She deactivated it and returned to the table. “I’ll give you one guess as to the one and only material a lightsaber can’t cut through.”

“Beskar?”

“Chicken dinner to the man in the shiny hat.”

He allowed himself a small laugh.

“You keep projecting a phrase at me. Enemy sorcerer. Why?”

“You can hear that?”

“You repeat it in your head all the time when I’m right next to you.”

“I’m… sorry. The armorer at Nevarro. She said the Jedi were enemies of Mandalore.”

Rayne nodded. “Our history is… complex. The short version is that many Mandalorian weapons, beskar in particular, were designed to thwart Jedi tactics, use of the Force, and lightsabers. Mandalorian weaponry is what it is as a result of the Jedi.”

“What does that mean for us?”

Rayne shrugged. “Only that you have a better chance at killing me than most.”

“I was thinking the same about you.”

She smiled. “That’s very sweet of you. The trick is, the two are not mutually exclusive. There was, at one time, a Mandalorian Jedi. Tarre Vizsla.”

Vizsla. Din almost choked at the name.

“Like all Jedi, Vizsla built his own lightsaber. Being a Mandalorian, he decided to completely alter the design and make his a mashup between a lightsaber and a vibroblade. It became known as the Darksaber. It bounced around after Vizsla passed and was eventually used as a symbol to unite Mandalore. Have you heard of it at all?”

“No.”

“They keep you under a rock or something?”

“History wasn’t a focus in the Fighting Corps.”

“Well, you’re gonna to want to brush up. Guess who has the Darksaber now?”

“Gideon.” Din’s voice was ice cold.

“Yeah. I saw it on the news before we left. They broadcasted a video of him beheading three people with it. My lightsaber and your beskar are the only things we have that can stop it.”

---

Rayne came down the ladder after tucking the kid in his crate on the flight deck for the night. He was still wiped out from helping her heal Din and the emotional ordeal after that, so he fell asleep quickly.

She reached the bottom to find Din pulling his shirt off over his helmet and tossing it in the clothes unit, already shed of the beskar, boots, and gloves. He approached with caution, hooking one of her fingers with one of his own. “I… wasn’t sure what you wanted, tonight. I knew what you didn’t want…”

“Thank you.” He was correct in that she had not wanted the shared ritual of removing his armor at the moment. As for what had come after that the two times before, though…

“I… lost a lot of blood.”

“I know.”

“I’m not sure I can-”

“Me neither.” She gave him a wan smile.

He breathed a relieved sigh through the modulator. “Will it be ok for you in here?” He indicated the cramped bunk.

“I’ll be fine.”

He slid in behind her, and the only light came from the control panels out in the hold. He lay a hand on her ribs, unsure of what she wanted, relieved when she took his hand and pulled his arm around her. Only then did it all finally come down on her, and he felt hot tears on his hand as her breath became ragged. He was my uncle. The words pressed into his mind, and he wasn’t sure if she’d meant to do it or not. Why did my uncle try to kill me? She lost it, an angry sob tearing through her, and he could feel her rage buzz through his helmet. He wanted nothing more than to take it off so he could press his head to hers, provide the comfort she needed, at the very least, just be there without wearing the very thing she couldn’t stand to look at or touch in this very moment. He had to settle for tightening his arm around her.

He couldn’t imagine it, to not ever know his own parents, to eke out the most rudimentary kind of family, only for it to turn around and attempt to end his life. Her image of him at the foot of the bunk when she had woken up flashed into his mind, and he saw himself as she had seen him then, another armor-clad figure with a gun, ready to kill her. God, he hated himself for it, felt his stomach turn, knowing he deserved all the pain she threw at him tonight. “I’m sorry,” he said, his own voice wet with tears. “I won’t ever do that again. I won’t ever draw a weapon on you again.”

She had warned him about not making promises he couldn’t keep to his son.

It had not occurred to her to warn him not to make promises he couldn’t keep to her.

It was a promise he would break.

#the mandalorian #grogu #din djarin

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