Chapter Text
It was a particularly good smoke and beer, Cobb thinks. That was why it was doomed to be interrupted; nothing this good could be enjoyed fully from start to finish.
He’s sitting on his back porch, body pleasantly tired from a good day’s work in the sun. His feet are up, his beer is cold, his smoke is as delicious as rare indulgences usually are.
And when he hears footsteps in sand and a conscious clearing of a throat, he sighs a full-bodied sigh.
“Yeah, Jo?” he doesn’t open his eyes, doesn’t move his head from where it’s tilted back against his ramshackle patio chair.
Maybe, if he doesn’t look, she won’t actually be there, and he can go back to enjoying the last few moments of the violently pink and orange twinned sunset by himself.
“So… Taanti says I wasn’t supposed to get you, and I wasn’t going to come, and I know you did say you were off the clock-”
Cobb groans and sits up, opening his eyes and looking at his young deputy. In her bland desert armour, the most remarkable thing about her is that strapped to her back is a gun about as big as she is.
“Just say it, I don’t have the energy to keep up with all this preamble. What happened?”
Jo grimaces like she’s dreading the words she has to speak.
Cobb shrugs and makes a show of settling back into his chair, eyes sliding shut and getting comfortable again.
“Fine. Can’t be that bad, I’m going back to my nap.”
Jo drags in a huge breath and blurts out, all at once and in one long sentence,
“ Only the Mando from before is here and he’s in the bar and I think he’s in a real bad way and I think you should come see him and see if he’s okay and maybe talk to him.”
Cobb’s eyes fly open and he goes from recumbent to standing all at once.
“ That Mando? He’s in the bar here ?”
Jo nods a small nod.
Cobb lets out a long breath, reminds himself not to yell.
Don’t yell at the eager kids trying to help.
Cob plops down his unfinished beer and then sets off at a brisk march, tossing his three quarters finished cigarette into the sand. His house is at the very edge of town, and Taanti’s bar is about halfway along the main drag. He can see the lights inside from here.
“Next time, how about, we don’t hesitate, and we just get me first, okay?” Cobb says over his shoulder at Jo, who has to jog a bit to keep up with his long strides.
“Well I wanted to, marshal, but Taanti said specifically he wanted to be alone. The Mando, I mean. So it wasn’t just you, I didn’t tell no one that he’s here.”
Cobb hesitates a bit at that, but also feels worry and paranoia crawl up the back of his neck like a cave spider.
Last time he saw the Mandalorian, he was speeding off into the sunset with Cobb’s armour and perhaps a not inconsiderable amount of his admiration as well. It wasn’t every day you were around someone with that kind of battle prowess and physical capabilities, let alone able to witness firsthand the legendary skill of a lifelong Mandalorian warrior. Cobb counts it as one of his life’s greatest privileges, really he does.
He’s not sure now, however, if it bodes well that he’s appeared out of nowhere in their tiny beaten-up bar and apparently wants to be left alone by everyone.
Including Cobb.
They’re almost at the door of the bar when Cobb stops and glances at Jo.
“You said he’s in a bad way? He hurt?” Cobb imagines the Mandalorian slumped over the chair, leaving a trail of blood and carbon scoring, armour dented but still resolutely in place and smoking slightly.
Jo makes a strange face, one he’s never seen her make before, and to his utter shock, she blushes a little, only barely visible in the dull low light.
“Uh. Well. He. Uh.” She points at her head and grimaces.
Cobb has absolutely no idea what that’s supposed to imply, so he just gives up.
He sighs and waves her off.
“Thanks, Jo. I’ll take it from here.
Cobb enters the bar, which is dead quiet and devoid of patrons, and looks around.
And he stops mid stride.
Because yes, the Mandalorian is indeed sitting at the bar. Cobb knows it’s him because he recognizes the ascetic statuesque symmetry of his bright silver helmet.
Only the helmet is sitting on the bar top next to where the Mandalorian, barefaced, is glaring down into a cup of spotchka.
Cobb tries not to stare as he approaches, eyes flicking away but getting dragged back to the dishevelled head of thick dark hair, which is long, long enough to fall almost into his eyes while curling lazily over his forehead, into the sharply formed brow and noble curve of his nose.
He’s not sure what he was expecting under that helmet. Maybe he wasn’t even expecting a human.
He’s not sure he was prepared for definitely handsome , but here he is. He understands Jo’s blush now though.
“You doing alright over here, partner? Long time, no see.” Cobb hazards, staying a good distance away but leaning casually on the bar with an elbow.
Mando doesn’t move really. Just says “Vanth.” And takes a sip of his drink.
It’s incredibly bizarre to hear the familiar quiet voice unmodulated by electronic filters.
Cobb glances at Taanti the Weequay, who shrugs at him.
Cobb hesitates, then comes closer, moving around behind the seated figure and sitting next to him on a stool.
He doesn’t stare, at either the disembodied helmet or the face right next to him. He does, however, find his eyes drawn to the bare hands holding the drink.
Scarred knuckles, roughly hewn fingers. Fighter’s hands. Hands like Cobb has.
“You know, of all the things I was expecting to find here in town tonight, I think you sittin’ here and drinkin’ spotchka like it owes you money was probably dead last on the list.”
Mando just stares into his drink.
“Wasn’t sure where else to go.” He says.
Cobb isn’t sure if he was aware of it before, but the Mandalorian is very soft spoken.
“Nah, I ain’t complaining. Just hoping you’re doing alright, considering you look about as miserable as a man’s able to look.”
Mando heaves a big breath and finally looks up at Cobb.
Cobb’s chest feels tight as they look at each other. His eyes are dark, dark brown and set deep in his head, beautifully shaped and creased at the sides. And he’s got a fucking mustache .
How could it be possible that under that impenetrable, intractable silver mask, sits this face? Cobb had expected maybe some grizzled old mercenary face, scarred and tired. He absolutely hadn’t reckoned on a mop of curly hair and eyes so soft they hide not a single thing.
They are also laden with anguish. And he also, if Cobb isn’t mistaken, looks kinda drunk.
“Wanted to lay low for a while. Off the beaten track. Where better on Tatooine than here?”
“And you’re absolutely welcome to it, Mando, just say the word. This whole town would jump in front of a charging herd of Banthas for you should you ask.”
Mando just looks at him for a few long seconds, before looking back down into his drink.
His eyelashes are long and distracting.
“Thanks.” He says quietly.
Cobb suddenly has a realisation, and he swivels in his chair, looking around the bar, and then bends to look down on the floor at the Mandalorian’s feet.
“Where’s the kid? He asleep in a bucket somewhere?”
Silence. Then, in an even quieter voice,
“He’s not here.”
Horror rises in Cobb suddenly, tragedy unfolding in his mind, and he automatically reaches out to place a hand on Mando’s arm.
“What? What happened?”
Mando ignores the hand on him and takes another, substantially larger sip of his drink.
“I completed my mission. He’s with the Jedi now. He’s as safe as it’s possible for him to be in the whole galaxy.”
Cobb wants to sag in relief, but he stops himself. He can see the grief in the lines by Mando’s eyes, in the clench and unclench of his sharp unshaven jaw. Emotions usually hidden from the world, on display for the whole planet to see.
Cobb wants suddenly to hide him away so he can be upset in peace.
“I’m sorry. I know he meant a lot to you. It’s hard to walk away.”
“Yeah.”
Cobb glances up at Taanti, jerks his chin towards the door. The Weequay only pauses for a moment before shuffling out, leaving the entire barroom empty.
“So,” Cobb says, leaning over the counter and grabbing a bottle and glass for himself, “we drinkin’ a toast to the little troublemaker, then?”
Cobb pours himself a stiff one and lifts it to the light, watching the side of Mando’s face.
After a moment, the mostly empty cup lifts.
Cobb taps their glasses together and quickly tosses his back, setting it down with a solid thump. Then he pours himself a second, for sipping.
They sit in busy silence, Cobb’s shoulder bumping the cool Beskar pauldron next to him. He can hear the man next to him breathing, slow and even, but he can also see his hands are tense and wrists tight. One of the neatly trimmed fingernails Cobb can see is black and blue at the base, a souvenir from a fight he hasn’t heard about.
It’s almost three whole minutes before Mando says, a tad sharply, “If you’re going to ask, ask.”
Cobb pauses, then lets his gaze travel to the helmet; the sturdy silver brow and narrow black visor regarding him. He lifts a hand and taps it gently, and it makes a light ringing noise.
He sips his drink.
“Honestly, I was waiting till you mentioned it. I was a bit concerned that maybe you were so deep in your cups that you took it off and didn’t even notice.”
An incredulous and nonplussed little laugh explodes out of the Mandalorian’s mouth, and he shakes his head. The light catches on the shiny skin of a very old, healed scar on his jaw, darting down onto the softer, exposed skin of his neck.
Cobb tries hard not to look at the skin of his neck.
“You don’t gotta tell me. Ain’t my business when it went on, ain’t my business when it comes off.”
“I took it off for the kid. When we said goodbye. I wanted him to see.”
Cobb’s heart gives a little jerky ache at that. Goddamn.
“Hell, you can’t regret that .”
“I don’t,” the Mandalorian says, and his eyebrows lift a bit as he says it, though he’s still staring at nothing, “That’s the thing. I’m supposed to feel guilty. But I don’t. And I had to take it off before that too, show other people my face. But it was necessary, so I did it. For him.”
Understanding dawns.
“But you feel guilty for not feeling guilty.” Cobb says, and tilts his drink apologetically, “That is a bitch, I ain’t gonna lie to you.”
Mando stays quiet now, shoulders hunched around his ears.
“That what’s got you sitting in my bar and moping? Guilt, or lack thereof?”
Mando sighs before he answers, looks into his empty glass, “Among other things.”
“Can they wait until morning? Cuz I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I’ve got a real nifty couch for drifters so inclined to need a place to crash.”
The Mandalorian smiles, a little smile but still a smile, and it transforms his face from handsome to oh no .
Cobb barely hears him when he says “Yeah, it can wait until morning.”
⟴⟴⟴⟴⟴
Din wakes up on the marshal’s couch, and he stares at the low plaster ceiling.
His body is a symphony of aches and pains, previously dulled by adrenaline and then, more recently, spotchka. But now…. Yup.
Getting thrown around like a ragdoll by that damn behemoth Dark Trooper is really starting to catch up with him.
He’s getting too old for this.
He levers himself upright, blissfully unencumbered by the weight of his armour. The envirosuit he wears underneath it all is light and climate controlling, but definitely not the most flattering of garments to be caught in someone’s living room in.
Vanth’s house, like every private dwelling on Tatooine, is meant to keep sun and heat out, and hunkers low into the earth to capitalize on the coolness hidden underground. It’s a series of domes, squished together, with many small windows easily shaded in the day and opened at night.
It’s nice, Din thinks. Considering he’s never had a house, or had much of a chance to foster any sort of taste for these domestic things, he knows his opinion isn’t worth a heap of bantha shit. Nonetheless, the collection of desert detritus, personal memorabilia, woven carpets and flapping faded curtains feels a lot more like a home than the metal hold of the Razorcrest ever did.
He still misses it, though.
His armour regards him from a tidy pile on a nearby chair. The helmet glares at him from the very top, and he picks it up in his bare hands.
It’s strange to look at it like this. It’s both like looking at himself in the mirror and looking at a complete stranger. The sensation is extremely disconcerting, and holding it like this is even worse.
The helmet used to feel as safe and natural as breathing. Now, it feels like it’s mocking him.
He sets it aside and pulls out his overshirt from the pile, which normally lays under the Beskar as a buffer. He tugs it over his head, then jumps into the trousers. He wouldn’t normally have slept dressed this vulnerable, certainly not this far from all his weapons, but the alcohol combined with the self pitying had made an exception.
He tenses up when he hears movement elsewhere in the dwelling, trying to swallow the familiar rising gorge of anxiety of being caught unmasked. This anxiety is one of the oldest parts of him, and now it feels like a loose bit flapping in the wind.
“You awake in there? Thought I heard clanking.” Vanth rounds the corner, his easy smile already in place and just as disarming as usual. He’s wearing a billowy sort of shirt, just as red as his other shirts Din’s seen, only this one is undone and shows a strip down the centre of his lean torso.
He’s absolutely at ease, and Din could swear there isn’t a pore on this man that doesn’t ooze charm.
“Breakfast?” the marshal says, motioning with his hands absently as he always does. His shirt flaps a little like folded wings and Din notices he has both old scars and old tattoos scattered across his body.
“Yes. Thank you.” He follows Vanth into his tiny kitchen with mismatched repaired chairs and a scrap metal table. He tries to ignore the drag of the helmet, demanding he cover his face.
He can almost hear the armourer.
Din Djarin…
“I got frozen grillcakes, could do those up for you. I got some jam here somewhere, and I got this weird cereal the Tuskens traded me for a box of spikefruit…I think I signed the words wrong, because I wanted this nifty silencer they had, but they gave me this instead.”
… have you ever removed your helmet?
Vanth takes his silence for acquiescence and makes him a strange grey porridge which Din does actually recognize as Tusken gruel. He also sets a cup of tarry black caf in front of him, which might be a godsend considering how his body feels like he was just thawed out of carbonite.
The marshal sits opposite him on a chair with very obviously uneven legs and spreads some sort of mysterious goo on an equally dubious flatbread.
Din has been all over the galaxy, and there’s a version of this sort of breakfast in pretty much every corner.
They eat in silence for a while. The gruel tastes like nothing, but that’s probably for the best considering he probably wouldn’t notice anyway.
“Is it weird? Eating without the, uh,” Vanth gestures to his own head.
“When I was alone, I ate with it off all the time. When I had the kid, I ate with it on. It’s just second nature. But if you mean is it weird to have someone watching me eat, then, yes.” Din sips his caf and tries not to feel incredibly conscious of being watched.
“Hell, Mando, I’ve been drunk in and thrown out of pretty much every cantina in Mos Eisley and Mos Espa. I’ve seen all types and species eat and drink, and I’m here to tell you, partner, you ain’t got nothin’ that’s gonna surprise me.”
Vanth is grinning at him and Din can’t help but smile back just a little. And Vanth smiles wider because, Din realizes, he’s reacting to his face.
That’s new.
The silence is generally more genial as they eat, and the marshal finishes first, walking around doing up his shirt while holding the last flatbread in his mouth. He saunters over to Din’s pile of cast aside armour and weapons, humming as he looks down at them, and glances at the Beskar spear leaning ominously against the adjacent wall.
“What, you trade in that rifle of yours for a stick?”
Din sighs a bit, looks down into his half-eaten meal.
“The spear is pure Beskar. That’s how it survived when Moff Gideon blew up my ship and everything in it.”
Vanth goes still, then gives Din an almost comical look of disbelief.
“You’re telling me an Imp Moff blew up all your gear?”
Din sips his caf. “Yup.”
The marshal puts his hands on his narrow hips, accentuating the slim long line of him silhouetted against the dusty windows.
“I gotta say, Mando, even with that helmet off, it’s real hard to tell if you’re joking or not.”
Din glances at the shape of his shoulders under the well worn, airy material of his shirt, then back to his face.
“It’s Din. Din Djarin.”
Vanth looks even more confused. “What is?”
“My name. You can call me Mando if you want to, but my name is Din.”
Vanth’s face melts into another one of those huge, blindingly charming smiles that makes it seem as though Tatooine must have three suns, not two.
“Your name and your face? Well damn if you don’t make a guy feel special, coming all this way with so many gifts.”
Din knows he’s being teased, but he grins anyway. It’s not much, but his heart feels lighter than it has since he lost Grogu to the dark troopers on Tython. He’s pretty sure it’s got a lot to do with the man grinning at him from across the room…but he doesn’t want to look a gift bantha in the mouth.
Vanth is back to examining the pile of Din’s meagre possessions, and he inevitably hones in on the Dark Sabre.
Din doesn’t blame him, it’s a weird looking thing.
“And this thing? The hell is this thing?” He picks it up and seems visibly surprised by the illogical weight of something so small and unremarkable.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
⟴⟴⟴⟴⟴
Cobb leaves the Mandalorian… Din?... at home while he goes to work; today he’s speaking with a survey team about prospective mining in the local mountains, as well as scouting sites for new moisture condensers to accommodate the growing population of Freetown. It’s boring bureaucratic work that he’s fairly certain doesn’t need a Mandalorian watching over it.
Cobb’s not certain of much when it comes to Din Djarin, though. The loss of the kid has clearly taken the wind out of his sails and a chunk out of his soul, but there’s something else hounding him. There's a miasma of uncertainty whispering around the edges of what used to be a confident man, and Cob doesn’t want to push him to reveal it.
Actually, that isn’t true; he wants to know everything there is to know about the man now sitting in his house, who is both a total stranger and a familiar friend. Cobb wants to hear every story he has to tell, wants to peel back the layers and know so much more.
And he wants to try figure out this strange, hot, hungry little thing that thrashes about in his chest when the Mandalorian smiles at him with his endearing moustache and sad dark eyes.
By early afternoon it’s too hot to be outside without shade or shelter from the sand and wind, so Cobb returns home for a cold drink and a rest.
The house is empty, but the pile of priceless Beskar armour has been neatened up and remains on its chair in the den. The helmet stares at him with silent menace.
“Mando? Uh, Din?” Cobb corrects himself, leaning around corners and finding no one. He pauses for a moment, then hears the sound of metal on metal out the side door towards his workshop lean-to and goes out to investigate.
Din is sitting on a short stool, elbows propped on his knees, hands black with oil as he cleans a compression valve. He’s got the whole shrouding of Cobb’s pod speeder off, and there's now a large hole where there used to be a series of cylinders.
“Should misfire less and keep out the sand for longer.” He says, and Cobb has no idea how he heard him. Didn’t the guy usually have a helmet on? Maybe it gave him natural super-hearing without it, who knows.
The hot wind blows through the lean-to, and Cobb can’t help but watch as Din’s hair flutters a bit, how his shirt adheres to his body and then is loose at intervals. The hairs at the back of his neck are lightly damp with sweat.
“That suit of your climate controlled? Cuz that set you took off me sure wasn’t. Hotter than a gun barrel in a firefight under that helmet.”
Din doesn’t turn, just keeps spinning a rag inside the cylinder.
“To a degree. It was designed to keep you warm, less to keep you cool. On planets like this we tend to operate at night. Draws less attention too.”
Cobb moves from leaning in the door to leaning on the side of the speeder hull. He sees Din’s profile now, the shape of his arms. Cobb may be a whisper taller, but the Mandalorian is built for compact power and speed. Even without an ounce of Beskar, there’s a low undercurrent of threat that makes it clear he could have Cobb beaten and bloody in about three moves or less.
“And what’s the verdict? Tatooine; more pleasant without armour, or less?”
Din pauses and looks up at Cobb. He raises an eyebrow, in an expression Cobb thinks is strange coming from someone who up until recently had never shown their face to a living thing.
“How about I get in a three-hour fire fight with a squad of stormtroopers, then I’ll tell you how they compare.”
Cobb bursts out laughing, pats the Mandalorian on the shoulder. His shoulder is round and firm and warm under his palm when he lets it slide off.
“I’ll leave you to it, partner, just don’t let yourself get too hot. I’ll bring you a cold drink, and don’t think twice about coming in. There’s a reason we tend to slow down around midday out here.”
Din grunts in acknowledgement, goes back to his tinkering.
Cobb knows the look of a man trying to distract himself from the present. Hell, it’s been him out here enough times, all hours of the day or night. He begrudges him not a single thing.
There is however a small part of him that wants to try to dig deeper into that impossibly stoic façade, try extract information. The man is an enigma within an enigma even without the helmet on, and Cobb is nothing if not curious and nosey.
He wants to peel back all the layers, one by one, and examine all the hidden bits and pieces.
He’ll settle with just having conversations with the man, for now.
It’s not until after Cobb has left and returned again hours later in the evening that the Mandalorian comes back inside, blinking in the low light at Cobb, who’s set a whole meal and two glasses of water out for him.
“All for you. Drink up, you’ve been out in the heat all day. Take it from someone who knows; don’t get enough water on Tatooine and you feel like the morning after a weeklong whiskey bender.”
Din huffs a small laugh, washes his hands and tucks in without protest, draining his water glasses in their entirety. Cobb watches him over the top of his holobook, takes in the ripple of his exposed forearms as his fingers move, how the collar of his shirt opens to show a sliver of his chest. There’s a single curl, thick and lazy and extremely stubborn, that hangs over his brow and almost into his eyes, but he doesn’t seem to mind or even notice it.
“You know, I don’t know why it is, but I guess I just wasn’t expecting you to have so much hair under that tin can of yours.”
Din pauses with a piece of rehydrated bread part way to his mouth and looks at Cobb.
Cobb wasn’t expecting giant dark eyes that looked right through him either, but he isn’t about to say so.
“My…hair? My hair is what surprised you the most?”
Cobb grins and shrugs carelessly.
“Figured you’d be bald under there; guess I thought it would be more practical, in my mind. Seems a waste to hide it, I gotta say.”
Din blinks, and one of his eyebrows twitches. “A waste?” he repeats.
“Waste of a handsome face, too.” Cobb figures he might as well try , just to see what reaction he gets, “Should share your good fortune with the world.”
The Mandalorian gives a sort of strangled, surprised laugh, but keeps his gaze level with Cobb’s.
“Well you’d be the authority, then, wouldn’t you.” he says, and his mustache twists as he smirks a tiny smirk. His lips are extremely distractingly shaped.
Goddamn, Cobb wasn’t expecting that. But his momma didn’t raise no quitter, so he just grins wider and says “Damn right I am.”
Din goes back to his meal, cheeks a whisper pinker than they were before, and Cobb returns to his book, trying to pretend his face isn’t in exactly the same state.
⟴⟴⟴⟴⟴
The marshal is an incorrigible flirt, but there’s something so utterly nonthreatening about it that Din finds himself basking in it a tiny bit. He’s never had any room for vanity in his life, just ruthless practicality, and so Vanth’s grinning, bright eyed, white toothed attention is a novel sensation.
His own attractions to others have been… furtive. Fleeting, to say the least. However long it took to get to the nearest non-public space, that was usually how long his attention span for flirting ran. Sex scratched an itch, and he moved on. He never had time for any of that drawn out courtship between individuals, playing at a saccharine, disingenuous game of keep away.
It was difficult to even consider, when his face was an immobile Beskar mask that gave nothing and invited even less.
But now…
Now he feels the air change when Vanth strides by, unbelievably at ease and self assured. He tastes a strange and unfamiliar longing for something he really has no name for, creeping up the back of his throat every hour spent in the man’s presence. He had felt the whisper of electric current between them immediately when they’d met all those months ago, but now the whisper has grown and begun demanding attention.
The whole affair feels dangerous and stupid, but between losing the kid, losing his Creed and loosing his ship, he’s too worn out to try fend off his own poor judgement.
He’ll let Cobb Vanth flirt with him, if for no other reason than to give him something else to think about beyond himself and his many¸ many failures. Eventually, Din reasons, the marshal will realise he’s just a miserable and tired waste of time. Someone as good looking and charismatic as Vanth has much larger womp rats to fry than a failed Mandalorian.
That being said, when the marshal gives him one of those big, genuine smiles of his that crinkle the skin around his beautiful bright grey-green-gold eyes, a man can’t be blamed for encouraging it just a little .
Life in Mos Pelgo, or “Freetown” as Vanth insists its name is now, is not particularly difficult or complicated. There are little issues, like broken old equipment, small interpersonal spats, delayed shipments of food or repair materials.
Din doesn’t mind the slow pace one bit. He stays indoors mostly, tinkering with the marshal’s many strange electronics and little complicated apparati. Like many people who lived in the dunes their whole life, Vanth seems to collect junk and old ship parts just in case they prove handy at some unknown point in the future. He’s got a whole room in his house full of odds and ends, almost as cluttered and confusing as the inside of a Jawan sand crawler. He’s got tools for things he doesn’t have, electronics off ships that haven’t existed for a hundred years. It’s a bit of a treasure trove, for the right kind of treasure hunter.
When Din does muster up the courage to go out into the town proper, he puts the helmet back on. It feels achingly, sweetly familiar yet also like a gut clenching taboo to slide it back over his head, as if he’s indulging in some sort of illicit addiction he’d sworn off. Perhaps it’s not an inaccurate description, but his sober self still can’t stand the feeling of unseen naked eyes sliding all over his exposed skin. He knows a bunch of the townsfolk got an eyeful when he first arrived, but in the cold light of day, it’s just too damn much.
So far, none of them have even looked at him sideways for his sudden clandestine reappearance, not even the scrappy deputy Jo or the nervous Weequay bartender, which Din thinks probably means Vanth told them to pretend like it never happened.
It seems like the thoughtlessly kind sort of thing the man would do.
At home… or rather, Vanth’s home, he takes off all his armour and carefully piles it back on its chair. It’s almost a relief to have a safe zone to be bare without judgement. A safe person he can be seen by. He may not deserve to have the helmet back on. But maybe… he can deserve to have it off? It’s a working theory, swirling in his head among many since speaking with Bo Katan and her crew.
“I learned something about the Mandalorians.” He blurts out, sitting opposite Vanth, who drinks beer and dozes happily on his couch.
It’s just after nightfall, and Din is twiddling with a pre-Empire long range hyperspace calibration module, but is actually watching the marshal’s chest rise and fall under his threadbare shirt.
“And what’s that?” the man in question replies, not moving beyond lifting the beer to his lips and sipping.
“My Creed. My clan. We belong to a… subset of the Mandalore called The Watch.”
Vanth’s eyes open at that, and he looks up at the rough ceiling.
“Subset? Like you ain’t all the same, you mean?”
“I met a group of Mandalorians. They…. One of them was of Clan Kryze, one of the oldest and most powerful clans. She was heir to the throne of Mandalore. Fett called her “princess.” I guess she was, technically.”
Vanth grins slyly as he looks over, and his eyes glitter at Din from across the room.
“A princess you say? Well, now you have my attention.”
Din can’t help the little laugh that escapes his lips before he continues.
“She took her helmet off. All of her clan did. They did not adhere to our ways, and never had. But she was undoubtedly a Mandalorian, not even a foundling like me, but born to the Way. The Way of her people,” His voice fades as the reality of it emerges in his head, like it has over and over in the weeks since, “the way of our people.” he finishes, almost to himself.
Vanth is silent for quite some time, watching him curiously. Then he looks up at the ceiling and shifts, puts an arm behind his head.
“But I’m guessing you thought that to be a Mandalorian, there was only one way. Your way. And now you’re realising that maybe the galaxy’s a little bigger and more complicated than you thought.”
A perturbed, surprised sort of half-laugh comes out of Din’s mouth before he can stop it, and he shakes his head down at the electronic device in his lap.
“I come across pretty naïve when you say it like that.”
“No.” Vanth sits up then, faces him, and his expression is harder now, “No, not naïve. Of all the words to describe you, naive isn’t even on the damn list. Living your life ain’t naïve, and letting yourself change, learn new things, ain’t naïve. We all gotta live with ourselves at the end of the day, and that’s what you’re doing. It’s one step at a time, can’t rush it, can’t go back. You’re a good man who tries every day to be even better, and fuck anybody who’ll call that naïve.”
Din just watches the marshal for a while, a bizarre fizzing happening between his ears.
Vanth relaxes a bit, seeming to realise he got a bit hot. He adjusts his kerchief and lays back down, goes back to his beer.
“And just cuz she’s the princess don’t mean she’s necessarily right either. You wanna be a Mandalorian? Then goddamn well be one. I’d call you uniquely qualified to decide if you are or aren’t. No judgement here, partner.” He sniffs, scratches his beard then suddenly makes a face, “Wait, you said she was the princess? What, you kill her or something?”
Din hesitates, then slowly places the module on the floor. He goes over to his tidy pile of armour, unclips the Dark Saber, and wordlessly hands it to Vanth.
The marshal looks at it, then back up at him.
“This supposed to be an answer?”
Din returns to his seat, goes back to his module tinkering absently.
“Point it away from you and press the button.”
There’s a beat of silence, then the bizarre, uncouth hum of the Dark Saber blade extending.
Vanth swears and jolts upright, holding it away from his body.
“The hell?! Is this one of those Jedi weapons?”
“It’s called the Dark Saber. It’s like a Jedi weapon in many ways, but in this case, whoever wields it is the rightful leader of all of Mandalore.”
Vanth goes still, and slowly turns to look right at Din.
“Are you telling me that this whole damn time, you been the king of Mandalore? ”
Din sighs. “Not willingly. I won it off Moff Gideon in combat. That’s the only way it can change hands; through victory in combat.”
Vanth’s eyes are drawn back to the shimmering black hole in his hand.
“What’s this gotta do with the princess?”
“It’s supposed to be hers. She’s the rightful ruler.”
Vanth presses the button that retracts the blade, and Din finds himself relaxing infinitesimally.
“You can’t just give it to her? I mean, assuming you want to, of course.”
“I tried. But it has to be legitimately won, not given.”
Vanth lays back down again, deftly twirling the dormant Dark Saber around in his fingers like a baton, examining it closely.
“Damn, and here I was, fancying myself the new King of Mandalore.”
Din raises an eyebrow at him, finds himself smiling at the grin on Vanth’s face.
“Be my guest, marshal. Just as long as you know that one day, a Mandalorian princess is going to show up and beat you like a rented dewback.”
Vanth bursts out laughing, and purposefully puts the Dark Saber aside, instead picking up his half-finished beer. When he laughs, his whole face is ridiculously handsome, and Din keeps forgetting he doesn’t have the helmet to hide where his eyes go, and where they stick.
Vanth gives him a falsely stern look and says, eyebrows waggling, “Point taken. And by the way, Mustache, if you don’t start calling me Cobb and knock off this “marshal” nonsense, you and I are going to be in a disagreement.”
⟴⟴⟴⟴⟴
Life on Tatooine, if you’re lucky, can be extremely peaceful. It can also, if you’re unlucky, be a hellscape from which there is no escape and no end.
Cobb knows through experience that often life is both of those things, in a constant pendulum swing between fierce pride and abject hatred for this planet. He knows the horror and the beauty firsthand. The desert here is fierce and unfeeling and wicked and beautiful.
And when Tatooine, the beautiful asshole of a planet that it is, delivers on her treacherous legacy, Cobb isn’t surprised, but he is heartbroken.
And fucking furious.
It’s quiet in town, early afternoon doldrums keeping everyone indoors out of the sun. Cobb is running through requisitions with two older women, who want him to go to Mos Eisley for a whole weaving loom. It’s a nice idea, and Cobb loves a homemade textile as much as the next guy, but damn if he wants to shlep that huge monstrosity back through the desert.
Din, he can see, is kneeling in the sand next to a moisture condenser down the road, being supervised and “assisted” by older two men who Cobb knows are full of “ideas” and very little actual useful instructions. He tries not to laugh at the idea of their continuous questioning and advice bouncing off the gleaming silver helmet without even registering.
Cobb keeps typing his lists into his holopad, humming an aimless tune, and he doesn’t hear the yelling at first.
He’s in the middle of counting in his head how much ammo and how much engine coolant he needs when he hears the first strain of a child screaming, carried on the dry wind.
He squints into the sun, shades his eyes and blinks.
There’s a tiny lone figure, running as fast as it can, from the outskirts of town. The shimmering mirage above the sand resolves itself as the running child, who is shrieking wordlessly, reaches the edge of town and keeps coming. People are emerging from their houses, and Cobb feels the panic rising in himself and everyone around him and he steps out into the road.
The child, a human one, belongs to Harah, who is jogging out to meet her, arms outstretched. They crash together and immediately the child is babbling, sobbing too loudly to be understood.
Cobb approaches quickly in large strides, eyeing the many faces watching this exchange.
As he gets closer, he hears “Took, they took-” and the quivering sensation of dread in his stomach solidifies into stone.
He squats next to the child, who Cobb knows as Ledo, and catches Harah’s eye.
She’s white as a sheet.
“She was with five friends and Molus; the children wanted to play at the boulder pile.”
Molus was a miner, like everyone in Mos Pelgo at some point, and he taught at the school. He often would serve as caretaker of the small group of children, was a fast gun when needed and endlessly patient, which made him a valuable asset to the town.
Cobb looks at the shell shocked child and then back at Harah. She swallows.
“Ledo says she ran away because men in armour came and grabbed the others.”
Cobb closes his eyes, takes a steadying breath that still shakes when it comes out his nose. He looks over his shoulder and sees Din, a gleaming spot of silver in a haze of beige. Cobb stands, keeps his posture as still and unchanged as he can, holds the flat gaze of the eyes behind the helmet. He jerks his head in a beckoning motion, and immediately the Mandalorian breaks from the shade and approaches.
Before he can even get halfway through, the other parents of the missing children have figured out what’s going on, and they swarm in a screaming, demanding gaggle that swarms Cobb, Harah and Ledo. The questions and yelling overwhelm them immediately, and chaos descends.
A father is grabbing Harah’s arm, shaking her, demanding to know what had happened, and two mothers are right in Cobb’s face, grabbing his arms and shirt.
“We don’t know anything , everybody take a breath here.” Cobb extricates himself, tries to be comforting, and speaks in a calm voice he absolutely doesn’t feel. He parts the grasping, yelling crowd as he strides towards Din, who has paused his approach a few metres away.
“Speeders. Right now.” Cobb mutters as he strides past, then raises his voice, pointing at Taanti who stands in his doorway like the rest of the town, “Go find Jo, get her here and keep everybody calm till I’m back. And for god’s sake, someone get Harah and her kid and get ‘em inside.”
Cobb keeps walking, itemizing weapons in his head.
Din is right behind him like a gleaming silver shadow.
“Bad?” he asks, voice pitched low.
“Bad.” Cobb replies.
They’re on their way and bristling with weapons in under five minutes. The boulder cluster is barely a half kilometre, rising out of the sand like a mangled fist, an obvious local landmark. It’s a logical place for kids to play, as the network of little caves and tunnels under and around the massive stones make for a superb clubhouse and play structure.
As they arrive, the tracks in the sand are damning, as is a spatter of blood and drag marks. Cobb swears under his breath as he jumps off his speeder, eyes scouring the chaotic array footprints, small and large.
Din pulls out a spotter scope from somewhere about his person, holds it up to his visor and examines the horizon. Then, in a familiar hissing roar, his jetpack lifts him into the air and he alights on the very peak of the boulder pile, once again lifting the scope to eye level.
There’s blaster marks on the rocks here and there, and Cobb runs his fingers over them enough to feel that one or two of the pits are still warm. His toe catches something, and he looks down to see a child’s shoe, partially covered by sand.
“Fuck.” He says, kneeling and picking up the shoe. Probably belonged to one of the younger kids, about six or seven years old. Kids that Cobb has known since the day they were born, and has seen every day since.
Kids whose safety is his responsibility.
“Vanth.”
He stands up and looks up at Din on his perch, shades his eyes with the little shoe.
Din points to the ground just out of sight around the corner of one of the larger rocks, and Cobb dutifully ducks under the nearest little crevice and emerges on the other side.
There’s a body laying face down in the sand, and Cobb doesn’t have to roll it over to know it’s Molus.
“ Fuck .” He says again.
This is only getting worse. He’s trying to stay calm, but fury is rising in his body like lava in a volcano, and even he isn’t sure what’s going to happen when it erupts.
Someone took the fucking kids .
There’s the low roar of the jetpack firing briefly, and Din lands heavily next to him. He’s watching Cobb carefully; he can feel the weight of that stare.
“No ships I can actually see, but a mess of leftover thermal signatures. And there’s only so many directions someone could go from here.”
Cobb nods shortly, looks down at the shoe in his fist.
The fucking kids .
He could ask “who would do something like this?” but he doesn’t have to, because he was born here.
He was kept as a slave to wealthy oligarchs for almost thirty years.
He knows exactly what kind of person would do this, and they aren’t few in number on Tatooine.
The Mandalorian passes him, helmet tilted as his eyes are trained on the ground. He walks slowly, carefully, methodically. He stops a few times, and squats briefly, before moving on.
Cobb knows he should join him and be useful, but he feels like a single step might make pieces of him go flying off, like a rickety engine belt under too much tension. He thinks he might be vibrating.
Din circles back after a few minutes, occasionally keying his wrist control as he looks around. He kneels next to Molus, examines his wounds, gets back to his feet with the same slow caution as Cobb has to these days, being gentle with the back and knees.
He approaches Cobb slowly, comes to a stop, and says nothing.
“Well?” Cobb says, and it comes out exactly as curt as he knew it would.
Din is quiet for only a beat too long before he says, with the professional tone of someone who’s done this a hundred times, “Old Imperial blasters, probably a stormtrooper retrofit. Boots are all sizes, nonstandard, so not uniforms. Hired guns, likely. But that’s not the bad part.”
Cobb turns to look at the emotionless silver mask, and he can feel a muscle ticking in his forehead.
“There’s a Trandoshan with them. Can tell by the feet.” Din says flatly.
Cobb’s face twitches as his brain processes.
“Trandoshans are bounty hunters, aren’t they?”
“Not always. But out here on the Outer Rim, and on this planet, yes. Almost certainly.”
“You wanna tell me why a bounty hunter is paying goons to kidnap children from a mining town? If he ain’t selling them to a slaver or a Hutt, I don’t see the fucking point .” Cobb is gesticulating angrily again.
Din shakes his head. “I don’t know. But I think we can get them back.”
Cobb feels the shaking build in his hands and wrists, and even in his knees. He’s so mad he feels like he might crack his own teeth with how hard he’s clenching his jaw.
“I’m hoping you’re going to tell me you’ve got some ideas on that front.”
Watching Din set to work would, on a normal day, be thrilling, like it had been when they dealt with the krayt dragon. But Cobb is strung way too tight and feels much too impotent to appreciate the sight of him truly being a Mandalorian in his element.
Din watches the ground around them as they do large circles around the boulder pile, occasionally keying buttons on his wrist. He finally stops at the top of a dune and beckons Cobb over.
“There’s a more recent thermal signature of a larger vessel heading this way.” He gestures with one arm, and the silver bracer glints bright white, “It’s leaking radiation, meaning it’s likely an old model pre-Imperial freighter, badly repaired. Makes it easier to follow.”
Cobb nods sharply.
“Only thing in that direction is the canyons, lots of places to hide out, but at least it’s a start.”
They drive fast, and speak very little beyond curt instructions for navigation. Cobb is trying and entirely failing to remember what it was like when he was young and cared so much less about everyone around him. When his only responsibility was to stay alive another day, live long enough to not be a slave, and then live long enough to enjoy his freedom.
When did he suddenly become absolutely attached by every molecule in his body to other people? To his town? Was it the day he put on the armour? And when did he decide it was his town?
“Left.” The Mandalorian says as they crest a long sweeping dune and plummet the steep backside of it, curving into the gentle hot wind that buffets Din’s cape and Cobb’s hair and clothes. There are jagged toothy rocks now, reaching out of the sand, and it’ll only get rougher as they near the canyons.
They come to a stop after many more rolling miles of sweeping dunes, now and then weaving and ducking large rock formations. Din takes out his little scope to scan the horizon. He presses more buttons on his wrist, then says “That way.” And points with one gloved finger.
Cobb, despite his body feeling like a high tensile wire about to snap, is curious and a little annoyed at Din’s magical ability to navigate the desert.
“I gotta ask. How in the hell are you doing that?”
“Doing what?” as if it’s absolutely nothing.
“It takes decades for people born and raised on Tatooine to be able to navigate with any confidence across the dunes, never mind track a flying ship across it. You got a super special nose I ain’t heard about or something?”
Din watches him, that blank, impassive silver face regarding him motionlessly. Then he approaches Cobb, feet confident in the loose sand. He stops only a few feet away and says “Hold still.”
He reaches up and there’s a quiet hiss of pressurised air flow as he lifts the helmet off his head. Cobb blinks, as does Din, who squints a bit against the bright light. His hair is both flattened and unruly, in a way that even in Cobb’s current duress is terribly endearing. Din steps closer still, reaches out and with his movements clearly broadcast, places the helmet over Cobb’s head.
It’s warm and pitch dark inside, then the HUD lights up and the entire 180-degree plane of vision is visible as clear as day, the resolution so high it makes Cobb wonder if his own eyes are starting to go in his old age.
“ Son of a bitch .” He says, looking around, “That helmet you took off me didn’t have anything like this!” As he focuses on rocks near and far, a small readout appears measuring distance.
“This is thermal bleeding.” Din taps a button on his wrist, and the HUD switches to extremely detailed and confusing thermal vision, “It measures density of temperature in the atmosphere relative to static. So it shows me where there’s been temperature changes, and how long ago, once you learn to read it right.”
“Goddamn, but it would have been nice if that green garbage can did all this.”
“I’ll tell Boba Fett that you disapprove of analog.” Cobb doesn’t have to look at the Mandalorian’s bare face to know he’s smirking a little.
Cobb keeps looking around, and sure enough, he sees the blurry, murky wisp of the trail arcing off left into the rock fields.
“I’ll be damned.” He mutters.
“This reads radiation changes.” Another button and the HUD changes again, showing another, broader, more bizarre looking trail following the previous one.
“You know, I’d almost be inclined to say wearing this thing is cheating. No wonder Mandalorians make such good bounty hunters; you can track the poor bastard no matter how hard he tries to get away.”
Din doesn’t reply, just watches as Cobb pulls the helmet off and shakes his bangs out of his eyes.
Cobb realises, as he cradles the silver helmet in his fingers and feels the sharp cut of the cheek under his thumb, that a line has been crossed. He hadn’t even been paying attention, but an intimacy so profound was offered to him and he took it without a thought.
The helmet. The centre of his life, his religion, his identity. And he put it on me like I was a kid entering a pod race.
Din just waits and lets Cobb place it in his gloved hands, not mentioning the sudden reverential manner Cobb takes when he does it. He lifts it up to his head, easy as can be, and on it goes, completing the ensemble. He’s back to being The Mandalorian.
It’s Cobb’s turn to stare now, and stare he does.
“I supposed that was a bunch of great big rules we just broke, wasn’t it?”
Din just looks down at his wrist as he presses a few buttons, and he keys in various impossible to discern codes. “Doesn’t really matter anymore.” he says.
And that’s that.
As he swings back onto his speeder, Cobb yet again feels that strange fug of discord hovering over the Mandalorian’s shoulders the same as his cape, but he’s damned if he’s about to mention it.
He’ll just think about the feeling of the residual warmth of Din’s face and skin, gently cradling his cheeks and jaw and scalp like the soft hand of a lover, and do his best not to crash.
⟴⟴⟴⟴⟴
Din knows the marshall is strung tight, can feel it souring the air, can see the barely covered anger and helplessness quivering in his eyes. Maybe placing the helmet on his head was a stupid idea, just a waste of valuable time. But it had felt correct, like a hand reaching out to help a drowning man out of the water. And the most bizarre part is, the guilt Din knows he should feel is a nonentity.
The canyon yawns open to their left as they race along the top edge of it, the rocky crags and sheer faces offering a thousand hiding places. Din knows many a Tatooine bandit would love to take pot shots at them as they pass by overhead, and so he keeps the speed high and keeps an eye on his HUD for movement. He may have Beskar to protect him, but Cobb is entirely uncovered, and even the idea of him being shot off his speeder… it doesn’t bear thinking about.
The thermal trail and radiation leak follows the canyon bottom. He knows of a couple bolt holes and gang hideouts along the inside of this particular canyon system, and he’s pretty sure he pulled a bounty out of here a few years ago. He slows down enough to be able to hold a conversation, turns to Cobb.
“There’s a descent up here we can go down, but if we go too far the sound will carry down the canyon further, so they’ll be able to hear us coming for a longer distance. I’d prefer to sneak up on them, and you don’t have any armour, so we should try avoid a straight siege if we can.”
Cobb nods, his normally good-natured face set in a sharp scowl.
“This is your arena, Mando, I trust your judgement. I’m just an amateur playing in the big leagues.”
Din is pretty sure that isn’t actually the case considering the man single handedly threw a herd of thugs out of Mos Pelgo armed with a single blaster, but he doesn’t question him.
“Then we’ll descend and hide the speeders, and go ahead on foot. It’ll take longer, but it’ll stop anyone panicking and potentially hurting any of the kids. There’s nowhere else for them to go; we won’t lose them.”
“You trying to reassure me? Or yourself?” Cobb says, and levels Din with a look that’s so direct it makes the back of his neck prickle inside the helmet.
“Both. But mostly you. You look like you need it.”
Cobb gives a dry, humourless huff of laughter.
The canyon bottom is littered with a million tracks, be it animals, Tuskens, Jawas, or any number of bipedal citizens. Din has to switch entirely to radiation readout, as the thermal bleed is a mess of mixed trails. As he knew it would be, the canyon works as a funnel and aggregating device for virtually everyone in the area. If the Trandoshan went this way from town, this is the only place he and his crew can be hiding out.
Din watches Cobb pull his rifle off his speeder and shoulder it with a solid shrug, watches his mouth set in a frown. Din can’t help but feel a sick sense of irony as Cobb stalks closer on his long legs.
It would be a lot better if Cobb had some Mandalorian armour right now.
“If we get in a firefight, you grab cover first thing. Don’t try any hero shit.”
Cobb’s eyebrows shoot up, and he’s momentarily surprised enough to choke out a startled laugh.
“Why, Hero Shit is my middle name, Mando; don’t you take that away from me now.”
“What I mean is that you aren’t protected. You’ll be covering fire while I advance, got it?”
Cobb gives a wry smile as dry as the canyon around them. “You know, I used to have pretty good armour. Some silver son-a-bitch came through town and stole it right off me.”
Din sighs and lifts his scope to his visor, scouring down the canyon as far as he can see.
“Right off you?”
“Yup.” Cobb replies and lifts his gun, adjusts the butt of the rifle into his hand and rests the weight of the barrel over one shoulder, “But to my surprise? Turns out he wasn't so bad.”
They travel in silence, footsteps muffled to almost nothing on the loose sand. The walls of the canyon glow bright burned orange in the light of the suns, and occasionally a lizard type animal will shoot out from a rock crevice near them and make them both flinch. The walking is tiring on the legs, but Cobb doesn’t seem to notice or even be breathing heavily. Born and raised on Tatooine, Din guesses he’s so used to walking in sand he doesn’t even register the extra labour.
It's late afternoon, but the heat stored in the rock surrounding them is still enough to be taxing. They stop to share swigs from the little canteen Cobb has looped over his shoulder, and the marshall also dampens down his ubiquitous red scarf with the water and ties it tighter around his neck. For his part, Din runs an air circulation program on his helmet and cuirass and hopes it's enough to stave off heatstroke.
It’s almost half an hour before they reach the first bolt hole Din knows to look for, and he holds up a hand to stop Cobb right behind him, crouching behind a boulder.
It doesn’t completely work, because he ends up right next to him, including leaning a pointy elbow on Din’s knee to peer around the rock as well.
“You hear something?”
“No, but I pulled a bounty out of here years ago. There’s a hideout around the corner, and my HUD is telling me there’s a heat signature bleed from recent vehicles of some kind.”
“Nifty trick. Now, if only it could see through walls or around corners.”
Din pulls out his scope again and eyes the face of the canyon beyond, looking for possible lookouts. The last thing they need is a sniper picking them off or alerting a group of thugs to their presence.
“There. At the almost top of the canyon rim. See where the red stone bleeds a little in the shape of a hand?” Din hands Cobb the scope, and Cobb leans even closer, almost directly in Din’s lap. He has to grab the boulder in front of them to hold them both up, and he wouldn’t be surprised if there were breaths fogging his right cheek.
“There’s… what? What am I looking at?”
Din considers shifting away and putting a little air between them, and then gives up when Cobb just drops a knee down and presses one skinny thigh right along the outside of Din’s.
“A lookout. Possibly a sniper, hard to say. I’ll have to get closer to see.”
“ We’ll have to get closer.” Cobb corrects him. He’s shifted his elbow and some of his weight onto Din’s shoulder, and he uses that dangling hand to gesture between the two of them.
Din sighs.
“Need I remind you that you aren’t wearing any armour, so if it is a sniper…” he trails off.
“If it is a sniper, they’ll see you first; you and all your polished to a mirror-shine armour, long before they see me. Hell, I’m amazed they ain’t shootin’ at you already.”
Din taps his fingers on the rough surface of the boulder, considering his options.
“Fine. Stay behind me. Stay down. If I say hide, hide. Understand?” He turns his head to look at the marshal, who is considering him from only a few inches away.
“Loud and clear, partner.” He does a small mock salute with two fingers.
They slink from one cover blind to another, working their way closer. They’re able to stick to the deeper shadows of the canyon, one shadow silver, the other dusty red. Din stops several times and tries to get a read on who or whatever is in the spotter nest, but the scope can only read so well at that range. It takes them a few quick scurries, the whole while Din hearing the imaginary report of a sniper bolt echoing in the canyon, but they finally get within range.
More of the canyon compound is revealed as they get closer, including a solid looking blast door covering the mouth of a wide, squat cave. It has a smaller man door, dangling open on rent and twisted hinges. Dusty, beaten crates litter the area, but no one lingers outside.
And, much to his annoyance, the sniper nest is occupied by what appears to be a powered down RG-T sentinel droid.
“Empty?”
“Just an old dead droid.”
“So I can stand up straight then?”
“Yeah.”
They walk among the old crates and the detritus cast off from ships, mostly garbage, broken equipment, twists of battered metal. Cobb looks in a few boxes, kicks a piece of broken old water jug. He shades his eyes and looks around. With his wet scarf looped tight around his neck, his loose rusty red shirt flaps open in the breeze, showing a few scars, a few rough tattoos and sparse chest hair. Din isn’t sure, but he appears to have a busty female twi’lek dancer, luxuriating just over his heart.
“They ain’t here, I guess. That fancy headwear of yours giving us any hints as to where they might be?”
“Further down. This canyon essentially dead ends in another mile. They’ll be here somewhere.”
Cobb still has a hand up, shading his eyes, but looks right at Din. His eyes are dark and hard to read in the shade of his palm.
“You promise?”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did.”
The interior of the cave is much the same; devoid of life or stored goods to be salvaged. Cobb flips a big knife out of a hidden holster and levers open a few boxes, one of which has two small but still full tubes of bacta, hidden away and forgotten under a mound of dirty gauze and rusty field surgery tools.
They continue on their way, the canyon getting narrower but the walls taller and the corners tighter. The HUD on the helmet tells them the radiation leak continues onwards, and soon the audio pickups are pinging that they detect faint voices.
“There’s talking, up ahead.” Din says, and Cobb’s face twitches in confusion. He points at his own ear.
“I may be old, Mando, but I ain’t deaf just yet. You can hear talking?”
“There’s hypersensitive audio pickups on the helmet. Can filter for speech at a distance, or a specific language in a crowd.”
“Uh huh. I’m going to revisit my opinion vis a vis that helmet and cheating: it definitely still is.”
Another few hundred yards in, the voices fuzzing and popping in the speaker at Din’s ear, and then Cobb grabs his wrist from behind.
He points at his ear again, nods and jerks his chin up ahead.
There’s a corner the voices are coming around, and it’s a slower curve, eliminating any chance they have of getting close before they see their prey. Din flattens himself to the canyon wall as best he can without scraping the rough stone with the spear and his Beskar backplate. Cobb is right next to him, rifle slung over his shoulder but blaster in hand. They shuffle slowly and carefully, guns drawn, until finally the voices suggest that their advance has reached its end. Din motions with two fingers to his own eyes and then around the corner, indicating his intentions, and Cobb nods sharply and squares his lanky frame.
There’s four thugs, three of whom are human, all in serviceable armour and holding large weapons. They don’t seem ill at ease, but rather are sharing a gourd of some sort of liquor between them. They’re lack of concern is likely due to the fact that beyond them are two much larger thugs; hulking creatures with scaly skin and small, nasty eyes. They’re wearing crude composite plate armour, but their bodies look naturally blaster repellent as well.
Din takes a step back out of view and considers, well aware of Cobb watching him and waiting. He jerks his head back the way they came and they retreat a ways, shuffling awkwardly along the canyon wall. A little leathery lizard thing dashes out of a crack as they pass and directly between the marshal’s feet before skittering away, and the look of shock-turned-annoyance on Cobb’s face and in his wide eyes is almost enough to make Din laugh.
Once they’re safely out of earshot, Din holsters his blaster and levels a look at Cobb.
“You’re not going to like this, but I think we need to hang back and wait until after dusk.” He speaks quietly, both to avoid alerting the thugs and to try keep Vanth calm.
Cobb blinks, and then irritation and impatience contorts his handsome features.
“The hell we are!” he hisses, “I ain’t leaving a bunch of kids under ten with a bunch of morons and a Trandoshan bounty hunter any longer than I absolutely have to.”
Din raises a placating hand.
“I know. And I promised you we would get them, and we will. But they’ve got two voolgar as henchmen, and we can’t deal with them and the morons with guns at the same time. And that’s only what I saw- there could be more just out of sight.”
Cobb chews his lip, puts his hands on his hips. He glares back at Din, brows bunched.
“Voolgar? The hell is a voolgar?”
“Big, mean, sentient but dumb, from the Dagobah system. Naturally covered in thick scales, they like big weapons and throwing things. Strong as hell but bad vision, almost blind in the dark.”
Cobb walks a small circle, runs a hand through his windblown hair, then drags it down his face, rasping over his tidy beard, and then finally rounds back on Din.
“You know for sure?”
Din nods.
Cobb closes his eyes and goes back to chewing his bottom lip, which was pink but is now trending towards red. His tongue runs along it, there and gone, but its passage is noted nonetheless.
“And what would you do, if I said I wasn’t going to wait and I walked right on in there, guns blazing?”
“I’d be right behind you.”
Cobb just stares at him, eyes searching, staring, cutting right through the Beskar. In the glowing orange of the canyon, they’re a mossy sort of green, and hell but isn’t Cobb Vanth a beautiful man.
“You would, wouldn’t you?” Cobb mutters, and then shakes his head as he drops his gaze. “But you’re the damn professional. And you say-”
“That we wait til after dark.”
The moment the marshal accepts the plan is a visible sagging of his shoulders, his skinny frame relinquishing some of its hard tension, and he nods to himself. Din has a momentary flash of guilt for the tired, defeated look on his face.
“Then we wait til after dark. You’re the boss, Mando. And if you getting yourself swallowed by a krayt dragon did anything, it at least made it clear you know what you’re doing.”
Din can’t help the huff of laughter that escapes his lips, and clearly it registers enough to be heard outside his helmet, because Cobb gives him a look.
Din continues walking, and as Cobb falls into step beside him, he says “I’m just wondering if now is the time to tell you that that was probably the moment I least knew what I was doing.”
“Sure. Because then that just means you’re lucky, and I think we could use some luck too.”
They sit with their backs to the canyon wall, tucked away out of the sun under an overhang. Cobb has his rifle across his knees, and Din his spear. The silence between them is companionable, the desire to fill it inconsequential in the face of the quiet noises of the canyon around them.
Cobb’s head is tilted back against the rock wall, his eyes closed. He looks comfortable, and yet again Din finds himself envious of a man entirely at peace with his place and purpose in this galaxy. What wildly different lives they’ve led, and what wildly different men they have become, just to reach this strange crossroads. It makes Din want to interrogate him, beg for the secret to not be wondering all the time if this path, winding and switchback and seemingly endless, has a purpose.
If Cobb is fumbling in the dark just as much as Din is.
He’s so busy watching Cobb’s lean chest rise and fall, he doesn’t see that Cobb’s eyes have opened, and are looking straight ahead, their focus a thousand miles away.
“What did you mean? When you said “It doesn’t matter anymore”?” his brows furrowed as he appeared to ponder deeply.
“What?” Din tries to drag himself back to the here and now.
“I asked if we broke a bunch of rules, you putting your helmet on me, and you said it didn’t matter.” Cobb’s head lolls against the rockface, finally turning to look at Din.
Din doesn’t move, just lets his eyes slide closed in the hidden sanctum of the helmet.
Because that’s how it feels. It all feels like none of it matters, and it never did.
Din reaches up and the helmet releases with a hiss, letting in the unfiltered dry desert air to his nostrils. He lifts it off, and slowly, firmly, places it on the sand facing away.
“Because of that.” He says, his own unmodulated voice still bizarre in his ears, “I took off my helmet. I was seen. Multiple times, by different people. Some strangers, some not. Some enemies. I’m no longer a Mandalorian.”
“But you said , that princess, she took hers off.”
“She did. But I was raised differently. If I were to approach the head of my covert, who I respect more than anyone else in the galaxy…” he swallows hard, because his mouth doesn’t want to speak her name to the free air.
Din Djarin; Have you ever removed your helmet?
“She would cast me out. I would no longer be a Mandalorian in her eyes. Not part of the family I was raised to, no longer part of any clan. An outcast.”
They sit in silence for a while, and different irritated expressions move across Cobb’s face like the shadows of clouds on sand dunes. Finally, he shifts a bit and adjusts his seat, wincing a little.
“You know, Mando, I reckon that’s a whole lotta bullshit.” He says.
“Which part?”
“Every goddamn part. You told me, when I found you in the bar, that you didn’t feel guilty. That you felt bad , and like you should feel guilty, but you didn’t. Because showing your little kid your face, letting him see you … that was the right call. That little guy, out there in this big scary galaxy, knowing you’re out there? That was the right call. I don’t care what your covert leader would tell you. If there’s really no nuance at all, then it’s bullshit. I’ve lived a long, tough, weird life, and I can tell you on one hand the times that being unwilling to compromise actually helped anyone.”
Din lets out a long breath. He isn’t sure he wants to get into this now, but the earnest look on Cobb’s face, folded into the lines around his eyes and the sharp angle of his brows, is coaxing it out of him with surprising ease. Even the goddamn mole on his cheek is sincere.
“It’s the Way. It’s always been our Way. It’s all I’ve known.”
“And maybe it worked for everyone before this, even you. But you reached the point where your Way had to bend. You realized that when it comes down to what really, really matters, you had to bend . And the reason you don’t feel guilty is because you shouldn’t, and you know it. Your soul knows it.”
Din isn’t sure how he feels about being seen so thoroughly. It’s as exhilarating as it is mortifying, but the bizarre part is that there’s nothing threatening in the way that Cobb sees him. There’s no veiled intent, no agenda. It doesn’t make Din want to shrink back, being seen like this.
It makes him want to move closer. It makes him want to reach out, feel the heat of Cobb’s heart under his hand. He wants to feel skin against his skin, and that desire is not terrifying. It has been terrifying before, and subsequently sharply curtailed. But now it feels honest and fair.
He realizes he and Cobb are staring at each other, and some of the anger has drained out of his face, so now he just looks, if anything, a little hesitant, as if worried he’s crossed an unseen line.
“I don’t know about my soul.” Din is aware of the soft tiredness in his voice, “But if I’m not a Mandalorian, I don’t know who or what I am.”
Cobb stares at him, and then a slow smile slices across his face. At this distance, his charm is inescapable; a Death Star beam, pointed right at Din.
“I can tell you what you are. You’re sitting there, head to toe Beskar armour, holding a solid Beskar spear. You can out-draw, out-shoot, out-fight just about anyone in the galaxy, and you got yourself swallowed by a krayt dragon just to blow it up. You got slapped down by an Imp with a grudge and just came right back at him, and in the process of beating his ass, you stole his ancient Mandalorian death blade kingmaker thing. So no, you aren’t just a Mandalorian. You’re a Mandalorian God . The only reason, Din , that I think your covert leader would turn you away is that she’s scared of you. You’re more now. More Mandalorian even than her. Than anyone else.” Cobb reaches out, his rough cut fingerless gloves closing around Din’s bicep and giving him a gentle little shake, “That’s what you are.”
Din can feel his fingers shaking on the spear in his lap, so tight are his hands clenched. He’s afraid to look away from Cobb, afraid to break the spell. He knows that if he looks away, he might not believe him anymore. But looking at him like this, hearing his words crash over him, is like flying into an exploding sun. It’s too much, too fast, too sharp, too hot.
Cobb is still smiling, and his eyes are so warm and unflinchingly kind. He tilts his head and very carefully reaches up and bumps Din under the chin with his knuckle. He doesn’t linger, but the touch sears hot as if he did.
“All this doubt and heartache, just for showing the world this pretty face. I wish you could see from the outside, how the rest of us see you.”
“How do you see me?” His voice is a rasp, and to his ears it almost seems like he’s begging.
“You’re a hero. Maybe not in the conventional sense, but you are to me, to everyone I know. I told you that everyone in town would step in front of a charging bantha for you, and I wasn’t lying. So, if it helps, even if you don’t feel like you’re a Mandalorian to yourself, you are to them.”
Din finally tears his eyes away from Cobb’s, looks down at the back of the helmet in front of him. It shines innocently, reflecting his own strange face right back at him. He looks like a bizarre brown blob that moves and shifts disconcertingly, which, right after looking at the effortless symmetry that is Cobb Vanth’s face, feels rather rude and unfair.
“Thank you.” He says, looking up and tries one of Cobb’s half smiles. It must work, because Cobb grins right back, all perfect teeth and sharp jaw.
He relaxes back against the rock face, tugs his now dry scarf loose from around his neck, lets it hang. His silver hair flops over his forehead, and his eyes slide closed.
“What a shame it is, hiding that cute face away. Damn shame.” He sighs deeply, then opens one eye again and points accusingly at Din with one finger, “And I should know, I was cute as hell about, oh, a thousand years ago. I know what I’m talking about.”
Din knows he’s probably obligated to tell Cobb that no, he isn’t all that old and that he’s definitely still whatever “cute” means, but he’s too flustered at being called “cute” himself to be able to do anything beyond blush sheepishly.