Archive of Our Own ^beta

They were barely out of sight of Corvus when the bounty hunter’s ship dropped out of hyperspace practically on top of them. The ship was Rodian, but with more than a few parts that didn’t look original, and whoever was in it was a good shot, Din had to admit, as the Razor Crest took some fire.

Whoever was in the cockpit was also a pretty good pilot, too, keeping up with Din as he tried and failed twice to evade them long enough to get in a few shots of his own. Cannon fire continued to pour onto the Crest no matter how deftly Din maneuvered, there were alarms going off all over the console, and the hyperdrive wasn’t responding. There was no way Din was going to fly his way out of this. It was going to be a shootout.

“Hang on,” he told the kid, who was enjoying the thrill of looping and barrel rolling at high speed. There’d been no attempt to contact them over the comm. The other bounty hunter had no intention of taking them alive. “Time for the reverse thrusters trick.”

“Muh!” the kid exclaimed, and then shrieked with a full-throated burst of glee that made Din smile as he dropped them behind the Rodian ship and opened fire.

They always fall for it, Din thought to himself, smoothly dodging the debris field left by the bounty hunter’s ship--and some of the bounty hunter, too. He probably should have just tried that first, given the alarming number of diagnostic warning lights currently flashing around him.

“We’ve got some work ahead of us,” he told the child as he shut down everything but basic life support and let the Crest drift. This would have been a great time to have a mechanic or flight tech on board to help with this stuff, but there was only him and the kid, who was good company, but not much help when it came to repairs. Din stood up with a groan, rolling his head to make his neck crack. It was starting to feel like he spent more time repairing this thing than he did flying it.

“Buh?” the child asked, already holding his arms up in a plea to get out of his seat. There was no point in trying to keep him in there--and given his penchant for messing with the controls, just a plain bad idea to leave him in the cockpit alone--so Din unstrapped him and set him down on the floor before he opened the cockpit door.

A cloud of smoke rolled in as the door slid open, and Din heard a tiny cough behind him, followed by an inquisitive sound. “I don’t know,” he replied. “But that can’t be good.”

It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The hull hadn’t been breached, at least, and the smoke wasn’t from an actively burning fire--just some scorched electrical panels. They weren’t in imminent danger, though they’d be in real trouble if another bounty hunter showed up now.

As he expected, the kid followed Din around and watched avidly as he inspected the damage, ran some more diagnostics, and started working on the most pressing of the problems. They discussed the issues in-depth, Din keeping up a running commentary of what was wrong, how he was going to fix it, what he definitely couldn’t fix out here, what he could fix if he had the right tools. Every once in a while the child would hand him a tool or hold a couple bolts, but mostly he just wanted to watch and feel included, wants that were easy enough to meet, and it kept him out of trouble.

Din used to go days without saying a word, traveling alone, speaking only when necessary. Now he found himself talking constantly, and it was to someone who couldn’t even talk back in the traditional sense. There was an unending stream of noises from the child, but it was mostly coos and giggles, peppered with some vocalizations he repeated often enough that Din had learned to interpret: Muh. Deeboo. Buh. Bahtoo.

Din wasn’t sure if they were words in the child’s language or just infant sounds, but either way his tone and his body language conveyed enough, and by now it was second nature for Din to hold entire conversations with him. It didn’t matter at all what the kid’s side of the conversation sounded like--Din enjoyed talking to him, and hearing his little burbles in return.

“What do you think?” he asked the kid as they stared into the guts of the nav relay. “You think we can solder that good enough to make it somewhere safe?”

“Buh!” said the child, in full agreement. He turned to the cargo crate of tools, which was almost as tall as he was, and stood on his tiptoes so he could see over the side and rummage around in it.

“That’s a torque wrench,” Din said, when he finally produced something. “But that was a good try.” He flipped the latches on a different crate. “Let’s see if it’s in here.”

Once the child was gone, Din was probably going to be one of those weird old men who constantly talked to themselves. The good news was that he was going to go back to being alone most of the time, so no one would ever know.

Several hours later the Crest was mostly functional, but the hyperdrive was on borrowed time, and the cooling system didn’t look great, either. Din was confident he could keep the ship running long enough to make it somewhere for repairs, but wasn’t willing to risk traveling like this for an extended period of time.

“Looks like we’re going back to Tatooine,” he told the kid as he put the last of the tools away.

“Deeboo?” he said, ears perking up. He shuffled over and handed off the stray strip of solder he’d been carrying around, which was trash, but Din put it in the crate anyway, because it was so conscientiously given. “Muh?”

“Yeah, I know. We were just there.” Din closed the crate, secured it under the cargo net, and then picked the kid up. “Feels like we’re flying in circles, huh?”

“Buh!” the kid agreed and nestled his face against Din’s neck, just below his helmet. There wasn’t much room there, and Din had to tilt his head the other way to avoid pinching him with the edge of his helmet, but they made it work.

The child was so sweet and trusting that it was easy to forget what he could do, and how he could be dangerous, and why that made him a target. Sometimes Din wondered if, somewhere in his little baby mind, the kid looked past those things about Din, too.

Mos Eisley Hangar 3-5 was just as dusty and cluttered as always, and Din had never been so relieved to see it. The child started babbling excitedly as soon as Din lowered the Crest’s ramp, clearly happy to be back, too.

They were halfway down the ramp when Peli Motto came hustling out of her office, yelling at her pit droids, hair looking even bigger than usual. Din had expected her to be happy to see them--or to see the kid, at least--and was in the process of proffering the child to her to hold when he realized she wasn’t happy to see them at all.

“You’ve got a real problem here,” Motto said brusquely, wiping her hands on a dirty rag. The pit droids were jabbering and squeaking excitedly, but hanging back, looking ready to bolt if Din so much as glanced their way.

“I know,” Din said. “That’s why I came back.”

“No, I mean, this place has been crawling with Imperial troops for days. They’re probably on their way here right now.” She looked over her shoulder and yelled, “Treadwell! Go keep watch. Make yourself useful for once!”

The droid beeped a reply and then whirred away. Peli watched it for a moment before turning back to Din, shaking her head. “I don’t know why I have to keep repeating myself.”

“Imperials are here?” Din asked. That was a surprise. All those stormtrooper helmets on pikes should have been enough of a warning for them. If they’d dare return, they must have been really desperate, or really dumb.

“Ah, they’ve hired a bunch of Alkharans to be their boots on the ground, but everyone knows who they’re working for,” she snorted. “They’ve been asking about you.” She leaned sideways to take a look at his ship. “If you can get this thing in the air, you better scram. I would bet they’ve been monitoring transmissions. Probably heard the tower ID you before you landed.”

That was all Din needed to hear--he turned on his heel and walked back up the ramp. The child made a sad sound as he realized they were leaving already, and Din could have sworn he heard one of the pit droids echo it. He stopped just inside the ship and looked back. “Thank you,” he said. “I hope I didn’t cause trouble for you.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, waving at the kid, who waved morosely back. “Hurry, now. You’re on borrowed time.”

“You break it again already?” Greef Karga asked him, before Din’s boots had even touched Nevarro soil. He and Cara Dune were waiting to greet them, just like the last time he’d shown up here running on good luck and hasty repairs. The kid cooed a greeting at them.

“Ran into a Rodian bounty hunter,” Din said. “I hate to risk it, but we had no choice. Any fallout from that last adventure?”

“Not much,” Greef said, taking the child from where he hung in the homemade baby carrier on Din’s hip. “Imperials showed up, but didn’t seem very interested in looking around.” He shot a knowing look at Cara, who had reached over to playfully tug on the kid’s ear. “Someone may have mentioned you were headed for Tatooine.”

“That explains a lot,” Din said. “I just came from there.”

“Ooh, sorry about that,” Cara said, wincing. “We thought you were headed the other way.”

“I was.”

“Marshal Dune here and I were just about to meet with the Planning Council.” Greef handed the kid back to Din with obvious reluctance. “Why don’t you two get something to eat and we’ll meet up later once my mechanics have a chance to look at your ship?”

“That’ll be fine,” Din said, wrangling the kid back into the carrier. “You hungry?” he asked him.

“Buh!” the kid said.

Din tilted his head at Cara as he settled the kid back at his side. “Planning Council? Sounds like you’re getting pretty respectable.”

“What they don’t know won’t hurt ‘em,” she said wryly. “And it turns out I’m pretty good at being respectable when I need to be.”

“Say goodbye, baby,” Greef said, wiggling his fingers at the kid.

“His name is Grogu,” said Din, belatedly remembering that bit of news.

“Bahtoo?!” the kid said immediately, turning to look at him, like he always did when Din said his name.

Greef and Cara both made a face.

“Grogu?” Greef said, with a tone of disbelief, which prompted the kid to turn toward him and make a questioning noise.

“Well...that’s a choice,” Cara said.

“I didn’t choose it,” Din clarified. “A Jedi told me that is his name. He responds to it, so I believe her.”

“Wait, you found a Jedi?” Cara asked. She gestured questioningly at the kid Din was clearly still carrying around after finally finding a Jedi.

“Wrong Jedi. Long story,” Din replied.

“Grogu,” Greef said again, watching the kid.

“Muh?” the kid said, tilting his head.

“Huh. You’re right,” Greef said. “I think that is his name.”

“He doesn’t look like a Grogu,” Cara said, which made the kid look over at her, then back up at Din. He was probably wondering why everyone kept saying his name and then not talking to him.

“You’ll get used to it,” Din told Greef and Cara, even though he himself was still not used to it. “We’ll be back.”

Din wove his way through the bazaar, the kid swaying beneath his arm in the baby carrier, gnawing on a skewer of meat Din bought to keep him busy. The shopping district had certainly been a lot smaller when he’d been a regular here, but seemed to be flourishing now that the last Imperial presence had been wiped out and Karga had taken back the role of magistrate. He saw a few familiar merchants he had visited before, but many new ones, with a greater variety of goods than he was used to on Nevarro. Greef had been right--destroying the last Imperial base had changed things for the better here, in a very short period of time.

Luckily, his usual merchant was still in the same place, and he stocked up on rations for the ship, then made a few other stops to fill in some gaps in the ship’s toolkit, and pick up a couple other items like soap and beskar polish. Not sure how much these latest repairs were going to cost him, he erred on the side of caution with his purchases. He wasn’t broke by any means, but he tried to never leave a planet having spent more than he earned, taking jobs to offset any repairs or supplies. That wasn’t going to happen this time, unless Greef had another Imperial outpost that needed blowing up, and that was hopefully not the case.

He arranged to have everything delivered right to the Crest and then found a place where they could sit and get some food for the child. Din, still nervous about being here again so soon, sat with his back to the wall and held the child in his lap while he gulped down a bowl of soup, but after a few minutes started to feel like he was being paranoid. There were no Imps, no Alkharans, not even any other bounty hunters. Greef and Cara had really made this place respectable.

The crates full of supplies were stacked up next to the Razor Crest when Din and the kid eventually got back to the landing field, and standing next to them was Greef Karga, animatedly talking with one of the mechanics, and not in a good way. The mechanic looked like he’d rather not be having this particular conversation, even more so when he glanced over Greef’s shoulder and noticed Din.

“What’s going on?” Din asked.

Greef turned toward him, something clutched tightly in his hand. “New development,” he said unhappily. He held up a blackened cylinder with a bunch of frayed wires sticking out of it.

“Tracking beacon?” Din guessed.

“Yeah,” Greef said. “They took it off your ship. Not working anymore, thankfully.”

Din took it from him and flipped it around in his fingers, double-checking that it was indeed not functioning anymore. “Buh!” the child said, reaching for it with grasping hands. Din let him have it.

“Looks like it’s shorted out,” Greef said, watching the kid mimic Din, turning the beacon over like he was examining it. “Probably happened when you took the damage. Lucky.”

“Where did it come from?” The way everyone was acting, Din knew they knew.

“I think one of our guys,” Greef admitted. “I’m all of a sudden short a mechanic. Disappeared a few hours ago, right about the time you showed up again, and I’d bet my two shiny bars of beskar those two things are connected. He worked on your ship last time.”

“No one saw him do anything,” the mechanic rushed to add. “But it’s sure not a coincidence.”

“Give me his chain code,” Din told Greef. A score to be settled later, if the opportunity arose.

“I’ll make sure you get it,” Greef said grimly. “But I’ve got more bad news.”

There was always more bad news, it seemed. “What?”

“We don’t have all of the parts you need. And these things -- “ he reached up and thumped his hand on the side of the Crest ”--are rare. I’ve got a crew out looking for them, but it’ll probably end up being a matter of finding the right Jawas. Could be a while.”

Din didn’t know how long “a while” would be and didn’t care. He didn’t have a while. “Can you fix it enough to get me to Tython?”

Greef cast a glance at the mechanic, who shook his head vehemently.

“Listen, I’ve got an idea. It’s perfect for you and this little one,” Greef said, leaning closer to boop the kid on the nose, which made him sneeze. “Let my people look for those parts. You can stay here for a bit. That tracking beacon is busted, and they’re looking for you in the opposite direction. We’ll find you some lodging, give you some work--”

“Not possible. I have to get to Tython and--” Din said, but before he even finished the thought he was struck by how tantalizing the idea of spending just a few days here was to him. A chance to just lay low for a bit, like he had originally planned when they first went on the run together. A chance to spend some time with the child before…

He only hesitated a beat, but Greef picked up on it and pounced. “So stay, my friend,” he said heartily, like it was all settled. He smiled and reached for the child, who was still giving Greef a betrayed look after the nose boop, but went to him willingly enough. “There’s always a place for you here.” The last was spoken to the kid in a sing-songy voice. He looked at Din. “And you, too.”

Greef turned and started to walk toward the city gates, and since he had the kid, Din had no choice but to follow.

“What kind of work?” Din asked, dodging a Jawa carrying what looked like the pieces of six different kinds of droids on his back. He had to hurry to catch up to Greef, who was cutting through the crowd like he was on a mission.

When he did catch up, Greef was deep in baby talk with the child, who was staring solemnly up at him. “What kind of work?” Din asked again. He wasn’t used to repeating himself, but he was getting used to taking a backseat to the kid with a lot of people.

“We could use an assistant marshal,” Greef said after he settled the child in the crook of his arm. “Cara’s taking more of a hand in the administrative side these days. Wouldn’t hurt to have someone around to free her up for a bit while I show her how we do things.”

Marshal work. That was what Din had expected, given what Cara was doing. The idea of either of them as marshals was preposterous, but she was making it work.

“I’m not leaving him alone to go hunt down someone’s stolen bantha,” Din said thinly. “Where I go--”

“Yeah, we know,” Greef cut in. “Where you go, he goes. We all know, Mando. You can send him to the school,” he suggested. “He seemed to like it, and he’ll be safe there. That protocol droid runs a tight ship. No unauthorized visitors.” He gestured vaguely behind them in the direction of the Razor Crest. “And you can earn some credits in the meantime.”

“I’m not sending him to a school run by a droid,” Din said. He’d softened toward them a lot recently, but the idea of leaving him there for hours on end...

“Deeboo?” the kid chimed in.

“Yes!” Greef responded, with the overt cheerfulness that always seemed to overcome him when he talked to the kid now. Sometimes Din couldn’t believe this was the same guy who used to run the Guild here. “You want to go to school, don’t you? See the other younglings?”

“Buh!” the kid said, with a decidedly positive emphasis. Even without actual words, his meaning was clear as day. Din wasn’t sure he even knew what “school” meant, but seeing him right then, he would have bet good credits that he did.

Too late, Din realized that Greef had led them to the actual school, which was just letting out for the day. Some of the schoolchildren, recognizing the kid, swarmed around Greef, talking excitedly at the baby, who waved and cooed back just as excitedly. One of them even handed him a small treat, which disappeared into his mouth after only the tiniest investigative sniff. Din felt himself starting to cave.

It was a bad plan. Even with Greef’s misdirection of the Imps to Tatooine, and the lucky destruction of the tracking beacon, this was probably the worst place to lay low, given what had just happened with the Imperial outpost. Moff Gideon would be sure to…

But would he? Would he look here? Or would he assume Din had already spirited the child somewhere far away? That would be the logical move, and exactly what Gideon expected Din to do. Maybe hiding in plain sight was the answer.

“Mando here would like to enroll this adorable little bogwing,” Greef called to the teacher, the same protocol droid Din remembered from last time. It acknowledged him and then turned and disappeared back into the school.

“I’m not sure--” Din started to say, but the words dried up as Greef turned toward him to hand the kid back and he saw the delight on the child’s face, the sheer joy he took in being surrounded by other children.

The kids took one look at Din and scattered, calling out hasty goodbyes to the kid as they fled. The child’s ears drooped and he made the smallest disappointed sound imaginable as the other younglings walked away, talking animatedly amongst themselves as they melted into the crowd on the street. Leaving him behind.

The child had been happy on Sorgan--so much so that Din had been prepared to leave him there. He wasn’t sure what awaited the child once they found another Jedi, aside from training. He had no idea if that meant in the company of other younglings. Din, whose own childhood had ended so abruptly, wondered if he could give him just a few days more of being a kid.

“Please register your child,” the teacher droid said, startling him. It was standing next to him, holding out a datapad.

Din looked back down at the child, who was staring wistfully in the direction the other kids had gone. He looked over at the datapad again.

“Please register your child,” the droid repeated.

Well, that could be a problem. The last thing he wanted was some official record of where they were. “I’m not sure--”

“Muh?” the kid said sadly, blinking up at him with his huge eyes. And just like that, the last of Din’s resistance deserted him.

“Fine,” he huffed, taking the datapad. The cursor blinked in the first field of the registration form. He was probably going to regret this, but...

First Name was easy. GROWGOO, he wrote. No, that was terrible. No one wanted the word “goo” in their name. He deleted it and tried again. GROGU. Still not great, but better. Sometimes he wished he’d thought to give him a nickname before Corvus. Maybe the kid would have liked it better and decided to use it. Well, whatever. Soon it wouldn’t matter.

He stared at the Last Name field for a minute then hastily filled in DJARIN and tapped the button in the corner of the screen.

ACCEPTED, the form blinked at him. WELCOME, GROGU DJARIN, it said, in big red letters.

“Buh?” the kid said, patting the screen with one hand. His other hand had mysteriously acquired a stick of sparklemint that Din hoped had been freely offered.

“Yeah, that’s you,” he said absently, and tapped the arrow at the bottom of the screen, which took him to the next set of questions.

Dietary Preferences, read the next section. Din started typing. FROGS. EGGS. BUGS. FISH. SQUID. MALMAC BUNS. COOKIES. Well, they already knew about the cookies, if what the teacher had told Din the last time they were here was accurate. Getting notes sent home from school before he was even officially enrolled. A trouble-maker already.

Dietary Restrictions was next. As far as Din knew, there were none. He’d yet to find anything the kid wouldn’t eat, including a lot of things he shouldn’t.

Emergency Contact. That was easy enough. He typed his name, and after a moment opted to add a second one: GREEF KARGA. If something happened to Din, he knew Greef--who had conveniently vanished at some point in the last few minutes--would take care of him.

“Very good,” the teacher said approvingly when he handed the datapad back, like he was one of its students. “Please remember to check daily for Action Items.”

“Sure. Will do,” Din said, not having any idea what she meant.

Greef put them up in an empty house in a quiet part of the city. It was small and unassuming, but Din had spent his foundling years living in a barracks, and then splitting his time between the Nevarro sewer and a series of squatters’ holes as a nomad before settling into the Crest, so it was posh by his standards.

“What do you think?” Din asked the child as he did a quick recon of the place, checking every room, pleased to see there was only one entry point to worry about. The kid chewed silently on his candy and didn’t offer an opinion.

The house had a compact kitchen with a window over the sink, a sunken family area anchored by an aging mainframe terminal on one wall, a surprisingly spacious refresher, and a narrow bedroom with a bed in the corner that took up most of the floorspace. The cupboards and shelves were stocked with everything they’d need, from dishes to bedding to basic hygiene items, and Greef had also arranged for the crates from Din’s trip to the bazaar to be delivered to the house.

When Din started to unpack everything he realized there was one additional box in the mix, full of food--including some things Din had passed on earlier as being too expensive, too perishable, or too frivolous. The child watched with avid interest as Din dug through it and showed him each parcel. There was an assortment of fruits and vegetables in the box, plus some kind of milk, and a package of meat. Greef had been generous.

“Looks like we’ll have a feast tonight,” he told the kid, who was standing on the table, peeping over the edge of the box.

At the bottom was the real prize: a packet of uj'alayi - one of Din’s favorites. He’d always had a sweet tooth, especially as a child, and hadn’t had them in years. He held them up and away from the child’s searching hands; he had a sweet tooth, too, and could probably smell the syrup that soaked the cakes.

“Later,” he told the kid, setting the package aside. “And you’re going to have to share,” he warned, earning a grunt in reply.

It had been a while since he’d used an actual kitchen, but he managed to not burn everything, and soon enough he had a plate of food ready for the kid. Din put one of the supply crates on a chair so he could sit at the table and then left him to it while he made the bed with some bedding he found in a drawer. When he was done, he strung the child’s make-shift cargo net hammock in the corner above the bed and put his blue blanket in it. He had no intention of getting too comfortable here, but there was no harm in making use of the place.

A squawk from the other room told him the kid’s dinner was finished, so Din went back to him and proffered a piece of uj cake. Just the smell of it, even through the helmet’s air filtration, reminded him of his own childhood with the Mandalorians, and how much he’d loved these cakes, which had always been a special treat.

“Good?” Din asked him, even though it was obvious. The piece was fast disappearing.

“Mmm,” the child agreed around the last mouthful.

Later, after he’d cleaned up both the kitchen and the baby, Din lingered for a minute during bedtime, watching the child nestle himself down into the hammock. He was usually good about going to bed, sometimes nursing himself to sleep on the mythosaur pendant, and being in a new place made no difference to him.

“Get some sleep. You’re going to school tomorrow,” Din told him, swaying the hammock a bit with his hand.

“Buh,” the kid mumbled sleepily, eyes already drifting closed.

There was a green light flashing on the console when Din came back out of the bedroom, and when he investigated it he discovered a transmission from the school.

The first document was a calendar with different school activities noted on it. The second was a long list of rules and policies that reminded him to check the child’s datapad--which he didn’t even have--every day after school, to send a blanket with him for naptime, and pack him a lunch every day plus two snacks. Din hadn’t thought of any of that.

Back to the kitchen he went, where he opened one of the ration boxes he’d bought for the Crest and piled the contents on the counter. No sense in sending the child to school with that kind of stuff when they had fresh food available. He filled it back up with some of the dinner leftovers, plus a pouch of jogan fruits for the snacks.

By then he was feeling the last few days catch up to him, having gotten very little rest since the run-in with the Rodian, and he still hadn’t eaten, or had a chance to clean up at all. He ate his own dinner quickly, not even bothering to warm it back up, and lingered only over the uj cake, which he wanted to savor a little. It tasted exactly how he remembered, rich and fragrant, and just sweet enough.

After he washed up a bit he couldn’t resist making one last circuit around the place before turning in for the night. It felt strange to be in a real house, and he didn’t like it. It was too quiet and too still, and he could only hope he wasn’t making a huge mistake staying here.

He double-checked the security on the door, stashed a bunch of weapons around the place just in case, and decided that was going to have to be good enough.

As enthused as the child had acted about the prospect of school the day before, he was not enthused to be roused in the morning to actually go to school, grumping his way through getting washed up and settled at the table to eat some leftovers for breakfast. He was so out of sorts that Din contemplated using that as an excuse to keep him home, but was derailed by the appearance of Greef Karga at his door.

“Who’s ready for the first day of school, huh?” Greef sing-songed, picking the child up and tickling him under the chin with a finger. The child, seeming to drop his dark mood in an instant, cooed back at him, which Din did not feel betrayed by, if anyone should ask. “It’s a big day.”

“I don’t think he wants to go,” Din said, though the cheerfulness the kid was displaying now in the face of Karga’s baby-talking made that a hard sell. “Maybe the big day should wait.”

“Oh, come now. There’s no need to be scared,” Greef said cajolingly, grinning at the child as he swayed back and forth with him in his arms. “Is there? No!”

“He’s not scared,” Din said.

“Oh, I’m not talking about him,” Karga said, tossing the child lightly into the air to make him squeal. When the kid was safely back in his arms he flicked an eyebrow at Din. “I’m talking about you.”

“I’m worried about his safety,” Din said stiffly. “I’m supposed to protect him.”

“And protect him you shall, my friend,” Karga said, clapping Din on the shoulder. “Now, where’s his lunch? It’s time to go.”

In the time it took Din to grab the child’s lunch and retrieve his blanket from the bedroom, Greef was already out the door with the kid. Din wrapped the blanket around the ration box to make a neat package and met them out in the street. Karga clearly had plans to personally escort the kid to his first day of class. Probably, Din suspected, to make sure Din left him there.

Many of the other younglings were also arriving as they approached the school, some walking with parents, some of the older ones traveling in small groups, unescorted by adults.

Greef handed the child off to Din. “Meet us at the landing field when you’re done here, and bring that fancy rifle of yours. I’ve got a job for you,” Karga said, and then his attention was hailed by someone else and he walked away.

There was a small cluster of adults--parents, Din assumed--lingering outside, holding steaming flagons of caf and chatting animatedly, but the conversation died when they noticed him. The looks they gave him ran the gamut from curiosity to trepidation, and he supposed he didn’t blame them. Even when the covert had still been here it was relatively rare to see a Mandalorian walking around in the daylight, and most of them had probably never seen one appear in their midst carrying a wrinkled green baby before.

The kid’s arrival generated a more positive kind of excitement among the schoolchildren, though, and he wiggled happily and chirped at them as Din carried him into the building and put him in his seat. Din set the blanket bundle on his desk, then realized it blocked his view--he could barely see over the desk as it was--and put it under his butt as a booster seat instead.

The teacher bustled over and greeted them, and then, too soon, was urging Din out of the way and back out of the building. He tried to say goodbye to the child, and reassure him he’d be back to get him soon, but the kid was distracted by the other children and barely acknowledged him, giving only the tiniest wave. There was no point in lingering.

The group of parents had already dispersed by the time Din walked out of the building and down the steps. One last youngling dashed up and squeezed through the door at the last second, and then the teacher closed it, leaving Din standing out on the suddenly deserted street by himself, feeling strangely bereft.

The sun was already higher than he liked by the time Din scaled the building and settled on the roof with his rifle, which wasn’t the best timing--the sun glinting off the beskar would surely give him away--but a quick scan of the sparsely populated street below showed that no one was paying any attention to what was happening up above. He unclipped his rifle and flattened himself onto his belly and inched forward a bit more, using a ventilation duct as partial cover.

He plucked the scope off the rifle and peered through it as he aimed it at the building across the street, adjusting it until he could pick up audio as well. Multiple heat signatures inside, as he expected. He held still for a minute, listening.

“...they are used as pack animals on many worlds, but especially by Tusken Raiders, who, despite their hostility toward other peoples, are especially devoted to their banthas and never harvest them for meat. Many different foods can also be made from bantha milk. Does anyone know what color a bantha’s milk is?”

Huh. A bit of editorializing there, Din thought, but overall a good inclusion in the curriculum.

Suddenly, the view through the scope went dark and blurry, and he lowered it to see Karga standing in the street below, hands on his hips.

“Mando!” he yelled, drawing the attention of everyone on the street. Great. “Get down from there! I told you he’s fine. No one’s going to attack the school!” He waved an impatient hand. “Come on! You were supposed to meet us at the landing field. We’ve got work to do!”

The “work” Greef had for him did indeed turn out to be hunting down a stolen bantha. Din didn’t even get to arrest anyone, as it turned out to be a misunderstanding. After that there were more meetings, and reports that needed to be filed, and thankfully he was not asked to participate in either, so he swung by the Razor Crest to see if there was any word on parts, which there was not. He grabbed a few items from the ship and headed back to the house, where he couldn’t seem to sit still, so he disassembled his rifle and gave it a good cleaning.

When he picked the child up from school that afternoon, he was carrying a backpack almost as big as he was, with his name stamped on it. The only things in it were a datapad and his empty lunch box. Din stuffed it all back in, then picked the kid up and put him in the backpack, too, for the walk to the house.

“Did you have a good day at school?” he asked as he wove between the other pedestrians with the backpack in his arms.

“Buh!” the kid said. “Buh?”

“My day was fine,” Din said, though in reality it had been long and boring after the bantha. Even that had been pretty boring, too. He’d spent most of it waiting for school to be over so he could go get the kid.

The child was blinking drowsily in his arms by the time they got back to the house, but livened up when Din put together a little snack for him at the kitchen table. While the kid ate, Din took the datapad out of the backpack and fired it up. He was treated to a report of the kid’s first day of school and what must have been some kind of art project--a bunch of illegible scribbles on the screen.

The child must have known what it was, because he chittered when he saw it and leaned over to peer at it, then up at Din’s face, like he was looking for a reaction.

“Not bad, kid.”

There was a red dot blinking in the upper corner of the screen, which turned out to be an alert that there was a message from the school.

“Again?” he said to the kid. “You’re two for two, now.”

When he tapped the red dot the words ACTION ITEM appeared on the screen. Ah. So that was what the teacher had meant. There was only a short message: Perhaps Grogu needs a bigger lunch.

“Uh oh. What happened?” he asked, looking down at the child, who stared back at him innocently. “You didn’t help yourself to someone else’s lunch, did you?” His own lunch box had been completely empty, so maybe Din needed to send something more substantial. “Looks like we’re going shopping.”

The bazaar was busier than it had been on his last visit, and there seemed to be a lot more people hanging out and socializing at this time of day. He dodged the cloud of smoke coming from a small crowd milling around a cigarra stand, and was debating which way to head when the seamstress shop caught his eye.

The seamstress was the only person in the pleasantly cluttered shop when Din entered. She was sitting on a stool near a small window, working on something that appeared to be elaborately and colorfully stitched. Her dark hair was held back from her face with a band that had similar embellishments on it, and her top was a cheerful shade of yellow.

Her hands paused mid-stitch and she cast him a wary eye, taking in his armor and his weapons, so he hefted the child up where she could see him and said, “We require your services.”

Just like--almost--everyone else who encountered him, the seamstress took one look at the kid and was completely disarmed.

“Oh, how precious!” she said, setting down her work and rising from her stool.

The child greeted her with a joyful warble, so Din helped her lift him out of the carrier so she could hold him. She wasted no time taking Din up the offer, cuddling the baby to her chest and smiling at his happy noises.

“He needs some new clothing, like what he has on,” Din said. “And we also need some repair work.”

“That should be simple enough,” she said, holding the kid at arm’s length so she could look at his romper, which had seen better days. “Come, let’s see, little one.”

“His name is Grogu,” Din said, then, “I didn’t choose it,” just to head that off at the pass.

He followed her to a large work table that had several bolts of fabric stacked at one end, where she set the child down and started examining his romper. It was quiet in the shop, and there was a soft chair in the corner where Din could sit and wait, watching as she looked intently at what the kid was wearing, humming and muttering to herself, nodding approvingly at the soft cowl around his face, tsking over a poorly mended tear.

Once that was done, she made quick work of measuring the child with a handheld scanner, turning it into a game, singing a silly song to him as she worked. She even did a quick fix on a hole in the foot without taking it off of him.

“There you go, all done!” she said brightly, tapping him on the nose with her finger, provoking an unhappy grunt. “Back to your father, now.”

“He doesn’t like nose boops,” Din said as the child glowered. Din scooped him up and held him, letting him work through his disgruntlement while she repaired a loose seam on the baby carrier. They both watched her while she worked.

“Did you make this yourself?” she asked him as she gave it a once-over, looking for any other spots that needed help. There were several.

He had, actually, stitching it together from an old cape that had been split right down the middle by a Gamorrean axe. It had become clear to him pretty quickly that that hover prams weren’t always the answer, so he’d improvised.

“Yes. I have no plans to take it on as a career, so you’re safe from competition,” he said, and she laughed, her dark eyes sparkling. Not everyone could tell when he was joking. Din decided he liked her.

“You did a good job,” she said. She regarded him for a moment. “Especially if you had to do it with that helmet on.”

“Thank you,” Din said, feeling absurdly grateful for her kind words for such a small task.

“Does he sleep in that, as well?” the seamstress asked him, nodding at the romper.

“Yes,” Din said, then, “Oh. He needs a blanket, for school.” The teacher droid hadn’t put his blue one in the backpack with his lunch box, likely not realizing it was his only blanket. If they bought another one now, the child could use it tonight.

She had a few small, colorful blankets for sale, so Din let the child choose. He picked a green one this time, with stripes around the edges. Before they left, she quickly stitched his name into one corner. “So you always know which one is yours,” she said, smiling at him.

“I would like to bring you some of my things, as well,” he said as he paid her. While the beskar was durable and easily swapped between sets of clothing, the fabric beneath tended to need frequent attention, and it had been a while since he’d had a professional do the work. He had a small pile of items that had seen better days stashed in the Razor Crest.

“Of course,” she said. “I should be done with the little one’s new clothes in a few days, but you can drop yours off whenever you like.”

By the time they left, the kid seemed to have forgotten her transgression against his nose, and waved cheerfully at her before they stepped back out into the street. It was getting late, now, and some of the merchants were already starting to close up for the day. No time to waste.

Unlike the prior shopping trip, where he’d been working within the limits of life on the Razor Crest, this one was almost overwhelming in its choices. In the end, Din let the child help, loading his rucksack with pretty much everything he showed an interest in--a few different fruits and vegetables, noodles, some milk, and a couple different kinds of juice. He couldn’t resist more uj cakes, plus a box of sparklemint candies. For himself he added some caf, and then at the last minute a packet of the infamous blue cookies, which did not wash out of clothing easily, Din had learned.

The butcher was already starting to close up for the day and barely concealed his annoyance at Din’s arrival, clicking his claws together impatiently.

“Do you have any frogs?” Din asked, rather than waste time looking around.

The butcher gave him an exasperated look. “Buddy, this ain’t Dagobah.”

“What about eggs?”

“Sure,” the butcher said, waving a feeler expansively toward the back of the shop. “I’ve got ermak, krikpip, lavahopper. Take your pick.”

The eggs labeled “ermak” were almost as big as the kid, so Din passed on those. Lavahopper looked like a good size, and sounded like they would grow into something cute and small, so maybe they were delicious in egg form, too. Maybe they were some kind of bird or furry animal.

The butcher grudgingly took his credits, and Din thought he was done, but then on his way out of the bazaar spied a fishmonger. Unlike the butcher, the fishmonger was happy to have his business, and eagerly showed off the various tanks of live seafood, which got the kid pretty excited. She also had bins of dried items, and small fish cakes that reminded Din of gihaal. He would happily never eat it again, but he was pretty sure the kid would love it, so he got a few of those, too.

Back at the house, he set to work breaking up the dried fish cakes in a pot of boiling water and adding some vegetables and milk to make a creamy fish porridge. It didn’t smell great to Din, but the kid was drawn to it as soon as it started bubbling, standing on Din’s boots while he stirred, until he picked him up and let him peer into the pot. The child leaned into the cloud of steam coming from it and sniffed, warbling with happiness.

When it was done, he ate two porringers and still had room for a piece of uj cake, but he must have been worn out from his first day of school plus a shopping trip--he started yawning before he’d even swallowed his last bite of cake. Din hustled through washing his face and hands and put him to bed a little early, and he was asleep before Din even closed the bedroom door.

After Din had finished his own meal, he stripped down to give his gear a much needed cleaning--everything was way overdue for a wash or a shine or even just an airing out. Especially his helmet.

When it had been just him in the Razor Crest he’d been able to take his helmet off whenever he wanted, but bringing the child onboard had ended all that. He spent long hours in his full armor now, and slept in his helmet a lot more, too. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to do it, but even as used to it as he was, it was nice to get a break from it now.

As long as he was out of the armor, he decided to go all-in and shave, trim his hair, everything. Things were getting pretty wooly under the helmet.

There was a soaking tub in the refresher, taller than it was long, and too deep for the kid, who got his bath in the kitchen sink. On impulse, Din turned the water on and let it fill up while he finished cutting his hair and then climbed in, sinking down until the water came up to his chin. He closed his eyes and tipped his head back, letting out an actual groan as the hot water warmed up all the sore and stiff spots on his body.

He was getting older, and feeling it. His left knee was swollen all the time now, and his back made a lot more noise than it used to when he woke up in the morning. One ankle was still aggravated from a wrong step he took on Sorgan, and he was, as usual, covered in fading bruises, some he could identify the cause of, others not. This break could be good for him, too, a pause in the punishment his profession inflicted on him every day. A chance to heal all his wounds.

He toweled off once the water started to cool, and opted for only a clean pair of underwear to sleep in, carrying his helmet with him to the bedroom. The child was still asleep, so Din set the helmet on the small table next to the bed, just in case, and slipped under the covers. It had been a long time since he’d slept like this, barely clothed, no helmet. The sheets were smooth, the bed was soft and roomy.

Still feeling relaxed from the soak, free to stretch out as much as he wanted, he sprawled across the sheets and rolled his head across the fluffy pillow.

It wasn’t smart to get used to these things. It would only make it harder to go back to living in the Razor Crest after this. But a lot of things were going to be harder after this.

The next morning, the kid’s backpack was so loaded down with his oversized lunch and his new blanket that when Din strapped it onto him he promptly fell over.

“Whoops,” he said, plucking him off the floor. “You okay?”

“Bleh,” the kid said, grizzling a little. He hadn’t been particularly enthused about getting up this morning, either, and had been unusually subdued during breakfast. Din was starting to wonder if going to school every day would be too much for him. Their schedule had been much more free-wheeling before this, with a lot more opportunities for downtime and naps.

When Din ventured to say that out loud, though, the kid looked so disappointed Din decided to send him anyway. He opened the backpack up so he could dig out the datapad and hand it to him.

“Here,” he said. “Why don’t you carry that? That should give you some counterbalance.”

“Buhzuh?” the kid ventured uncertainly as he grasped it in his little hands, still tipping backwards at a precarious angle.

By now they were running behind, so Din carefully propped him up against the door while he got the jetpack on. That changed the kid’s attitude in a flash, and a much happier child squealed in Din’s arm all the way to school.

“Not so crabby now, are you?” Din asked, doing a quick barrel roll above the city, just to make the kid laugh.

The street out front was mostly empty, but they still created a bit of a commotion when they arrived at the school. Din could see the younglings inside gathered at the window, pointing and exclaiming, and one small boy who just happened to walk up as Din landed was clearly impressed.

The teacher droid was already calling for the stragglers to take their seats, and came to the kid’s rescue by taking the backpack off of him at the door. The child scooted inside just in time, dragging his datapad behind him, giving Din an indifferent wave on his way in, which stung a little less this time, but not by much.

“The jetpack? Really, Mando?” Greef said, eyebrows raised, when Din walked into Greef’s office a short while later. Greef and Cara were sitting at their desks, probably doing more of the endless data entry that seemed to be the bulk of their jobs. A lot of people looked down on bounty hunting as a profession, but at least he didn’t spend most of his time filing reports.

“We were running late,” Din said. He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “Word travels fast. Or are you keeping tabs on me?”

“You flew over my house,” Cara said without looking up from her screen. “Are you done with that yet?” she called to the Mythrol, who was in the corner fighting what appeared to be a tense battle with the caf machine.

“I’m trying! I just--this thing should go on the scrap heap--not even a Jawa would--” he muttered, then gave it a firm whack with his open hand, at which point caf began sputtering out of it into the carafe. "Finally!”

He turned around, one steaming flagon in his hand. “Ok, boss. First one is for y--” he started to say, then stopped short when he saw Din. “Oh. Hi,” he said nervously. Then: “I didn’t do anything.”

“He’s not here for you,” Greef said, sounding irritated. “He’s the new assistant marshal.”

“He giving you any trouble?” Din asked Greef, tilting his head at the Mythrol.

“All day, every day,” Greef sighed. “But not the kind you can help me with.”

The Mythrol scooted by to set the caf on Greef’s desk, giving Din a wide berth while trying unsuccessfully to look like he wasn’t.

“What about you?” he asked, turning to Din. “You want some?”

“No, thank you,” Din said.

“He can’t eat or drink in front of other people,” Cara said. Din shot her a look, which she didn’t even notice.

“Ever?” the Mythrol asked.

“He can’t take his helmet off in front of anyone,” Cara said.

The Mythrol snapped his fingers and pointed at Din. “Oh! Right! I asked you about that when you and I…” He trailed off without completing that sentence and focused really intently on making his way to his own desk.

“I remember,” Din said.

“Has the baby ever seen you without your helmet?” Greef asked, but before he could answer the Mythrol said, “You still have that thing?”

“He’s not a thing,” Din said, leveling a stare at the Mythrol. Unlike Cara, he noticed, and it had the desired effect of making him look repentant.

“His name is Grogu now,” Cara said. Apparently she was going to just spill everything she knew about them.

The Mythrol frowned and opened his mouth. “I didn’t name him,” Din said. The Mythrol closed his mouth. “And how do you know about him?” He couldn’t recall ever being around him with the kid.

The Mythrol pointed at Greef. “He told me all about him. Saved his life. Hey, do you think it’s safe for him to be around the other kids at the school?” He gestured toward Cara, who must have told him that, too, because the Mythrol grabbed his own throat with both hands and made a noise like he was being strangled.

Din straightened up, bristling, and took a step toward the Mythrol, who immediately stopped what he was doing and took a step backward, collapsed into his chair, and almost fell off the seat.

“Safer than it is for you to say that to me,” Din said through gritted teeth. The kid was never vicious, only using his powers when he thought someone--usually Din--was in danger.

“All right, time to get moving!” Greef interjected. “You,” he said, pointing at the Mythrol, “Should just stop talking.”

“Sure thing, boss,” the Mythrol said meekly.

“Come on, boys,” Cara said, getting to her feet. “We’ve got some pirates to find.”

Later that day, when Din picked the kid up, he was carrying his blue blanket and a sloppily painted lump of dried clay.

Din took the blanket from him, because it was dragging on the ground, and tied it around his bandolier. “You ready to go?” he asked the child.

“Buh!” the kid said, holding the lump out to Din while hanging onto his boot with the other hand. Din carefully took the lump from him. The paint was still a little sticky, and left a bright green smudge on his glove.

“Very nice,” he said, nodding approvingly as he looked at it from every angle, because the kid was watching how he reacted to it. “Did you make this?”

“Nahmah,” the child confirmed, and then lifted his arms to be picked up, swaying precariously in the process. Even when mostly empty, the backpack was a bit of a challenge for him.

Back at the house, the datapad told Din the lump was an art project, and the child was definitely proud of it, following him around the house and offering it to him to hold again and again, no matter how much fuss Din made over it.

“We’ll put it right here, where everyone can see it,” Din said finally, placing it carefully in a place of honor on the shelf by the door. No one ever came to the house--which was fine with Din--but that was beside the point. That seemed to do the trick, and Din was finally able to get his snack ready and start dinner without juggling the lump at the same time.

The next few days were a lot busier on the marshaling front, and if his list of tasks meant Din had to walk past the school multiple times, well, who could blame him for casually checking on things through the window?

He wasn’t really sure what the value was in the actual schoolwork for the kid, who seemed far younger than the other students. Too young to do any of the actual lessons, clearly. From what Din could tell he spent most of the lectures methodically making his way through the food in his backpack, or silently watching the other kids. Twice a day he and several of the other younger children napped while the older ones worked on more advanced lessons, which alarmed Din the first time he arrived and found the kid’s seat empty, until he located his pointy ears sticking out of a soft green lump of blanket in an alcove.

Recreation time seemed to be his favorite, when he could play freely with the other younglings, and art class clearly interested him--the small shelf by the door was quickly filling with his creations. Once a week a Kitonak showed up for a music lesson, which the child mostly spent gnawing on his school-issued flute.

But the reports from the teacher were mostly positive, and he came home from school happy and tired every day, and napped for a bit while Din made dinner. The socialization seemed to be good for him, and after a few days Din stopped lurking around the school so much, though he was never going to let his guard down completely.

Grogu is well-liked by his classmates and excels at problem-solving, the report on the datapad read one evening. Din wasn’t sure he wanted to know exactly what “problem-solving” meant. He had a feeling the teacher was being tactful, if that was possible for a droid. He is still working on sharing and waiting his turn.

Well. Mandalore wasn’t built in a day, as the saying went.

“You’re doing good, buddy,” Din said, patting him on the back.

There was also an Action Item, informing him that in two days it was the kid’s turn to bring a treat to class, appended with a list of forbidden foods based on the other students’ allergies and dietary restrictions. It seemed to Din it would have been easier to attach a list of what was allowed.

He had definitely underestimated how much work school was for the parents of the younglings. It seemed like there was always another extra thing to be done, in addition to keeping the kid supplied with lunches and snacks. His assistant marshal pay was barely keeping up.

“Looks like you’re getting more cookies,” Din said, because he was drawing the line at homemade baked goods.

The next night a lava meerkat followed them home from the bazaar. At first Din thought it was simply capitalizing on the cookie crumbs the kid was trailing behind them, but when they got to the house it scampered right in and then walked around and investigated the place like a potential buyer.

Din didn’t know much about lava meerkats, except that people sometimes ate them, and sometimes kept them as pets, and sometimes being the latter didn’t exclude one from becoming the former. This one didn’t look like it was anyone’s pet at the moment. It was thin, with a tail that looked like something had chewed on it.

The child was entranced, and toddled around after it, exclaiming every time it sniffed the floor or stood on its hind legs to investigate a piece of furniture, like those were amazing feats. Once or twice he got within touching distance of it, but it would scamper away at the last second, much to his disappointment.

“Not food,” Din told the kid firmly, just in case, though the meerkat was almost as big as he was and could probably fight back a bit better than a frog. Though some of those frogs had been pretty big, too, and the kid had gotten them down his gullet in two gulps.

“Deeboo?” the child asked, pointing at the meerkat, like he wanted Din to do something about the fact that it wouldn’t play with him.

“Sorry, kid,” Din said. “Nothing I can do about it. You’ll just have to hope it wants to play with you.” The child stared at Din for a moment, then gave the meerkat a calculating look. “And no using your powers,” Din added, pointing a stern finger at him. The child huffed in annoyance.

The meerkat got much friendlier come dinner time, weaving around Din’s legs and making a high-pitched begging noise while the kid ate. Din knew it was a bad idea to feed a stray, but in the end he put some scraps in a bowl for it and they watched it bolt the bits of food like it was starving, which it probably was. Then it curled up in a perfect circle in the corner and went to sleep.

Din and the kid had gotten into the habit of sitting together in the family area after dinner, going through the stuff in his datapad. He never seemed to get tired of looking at his drawings, which were possibly starting to resemble actual things instead of just scribbles. More and more they seemed to consist of a small green blob and bigger grey blob, which could have been the two of them, if you squinted, or maybe Din was just doing some wishful thinking.

The kid was in his lap hooting and cooing and waving his hands--maybe mimicking a song he’d learned at school, Din wasn’t sure. He did it often enough that Din had started to recognize it, but it wasn’t anything he remembered from his own childhood. He knew it well enough now that he could drum his fingers to the rhythm, tapping lightly on the kid’s shoulder, or the beskar on his own thigh, whatever was handy, which the kid seemed to enjoy. He’d often pat Din’s arm insistently if he failed to join in, or dared to stop too soon.

They were on their third rendition when the meerkat hopped up into Din’s lap like he’d been invited and started making a strange chirping noise that was maybe its version of a purr. The kid reached out and tentatively touched its ear, which seemed to eliminate the last of its wariness, and it started rubbing its face all over the kid’s face, making him giggle.

“See? I told you. You just had to wait,” Din said softly, watching the child squirm under the meerkat’s attentions.

With that, the song was totally forgotten, and instead Din spent the evening watching the child and the meerkat chase each other across the floor, stopping occasionally to tumble in a heap when the meerkat pounced on the kid and sent him rolling. The kid’s attempts to tackle the meerkat weren’t nearly as successful, but just as entertaining to Din.

Din put it outside before they went to bed, where it raised such a fuss that he promptly opened the door and let it back in, much to the child’s delight. An attempt to keep it out of the bedroom was similarly unsuccessful. Din hadn’t made it this far in life without knowing how to choose his battles. He opened the door bedroom door and let it into the room, where it promptly hopped up on his bed and settled on his pillow.

A problem to deal with after he ate, Din decided, but in the end he didn’t have to. When he came back from the refresher later, yawning and ready for bed himself, he found the meerkat curled up in the kid’s hammock with him. They were both fast asleep.

This was probably another bad idea, another thing they’d just have to leave behind eventually, but he was so far down that slippery slope now it was getting easier and easier to just ignore the cliff that was coming.

He slipped his helmet off and rolled over and enjoyed the feel of the pillow against his face for a moment before he drifted off.

The meerkat stuck around, and it and the child quickly became inseparable. Lacking the will to think of anything better, Din just called it “Meerkat” and it started responding when he called it. It soon had its own designated bowls for food and water in the corner of the kitchen, though it mostly subsisted on the bits of food the kid liked to drop onto the floor next to his chair while he ate. He thought it was endlessly entertaining, laughing over it every time, and the meerkat got fatter by the day.

It got into everything, and once it was well-nourished and lost any residual shyness--if it ever had any--it became a force of chaos in the household, often teaming up with the child to wreak havoc. Meerkat was nimble and could squeeze into the tiniest spaces, and the child could move things with his mind. Together, they were hard to contain. Nothing was safe from their curiosity--the kitchen cupboards, Din’s boots, the terminal in the family area that was somehow triggered to play a hologram message from a previous tenant’s passive-aggressive mother over and over for two days straight without pause.

Every so often Din would inquire about the parts for the Razor Crest, and every time Greef told him “still no luck,” he would feel a mixture of anxiety and relief. They needed to move on, he knew that, but also it felt like he’d been given a reprieve, gifted a few more days before reality came to call again. He started asking less and less.

The mornings became routine, Din stumbling around the kitchen in his pants and helmet, the kid tugging on his dangling suspenders when he wanted his attention, Meerkat squawking when it got underfoot. They were seldom late for school anymore, and Din only forgot to send his lunch with him once.

Still, there was much trial and error. One morning he made flatcakes soaked with uj'ayl syrup for breakfast, and then quickly realized that should be reserved for days the kid didn’t have to go to school. The syrup got everywhere, and Din had to dunk him in the sink and put him in fresh clothes before they left for school, and somehow there was still a large sticky spot on the front of his fresh romper when they left the house.

The child started boycotting the hammock, dropping down onto Din’s stomach--or worse--in the middle of the night to snuggle with him, so it was partly self-preservation that made him relent and let the kid sleep in the bed with him. Meerkat wasn’t about to be left behind in the hammock, so Din got used to sleeping with both the child and Meerkat on top of him, or nestled against his side with their surprisingly pointy feet digging into his ribs. Everyone snored and he didn’t care.

Din didn’t report for marshal duty on the days the child wasn’t in school. Instead, they spent time together, sometimes just going to the landing field to putter around in the Crest. Those were the days he most missed the travel, flying around, just the two of them in their own little bubble. He couldn’t remember when he’d last spent this much time on the ground--years, surely.

Other days they filled the time by going to the bazaar and walking around, stopping for a bit to get the child a bite to eat and watch the people go by. The child seemed to have settled into the pattern of the school, and liked to nap in the afternoons even when he was home with Din, and Meerkat was always up for a nap, so Din started lying down with them, occasionally dozing himself, but mostly just watching them sleep. The days, numbered as they were, felt like sand running through his fingers, and just like sand, there was no way to hold tight to them and make it stop.

The marshal work continued to be mundane and spotty. More than once he spent the afternoon napping on the couch with Meerkat, killing time until he could go pick up the child. He often disliked the downtime, but he was more rested than he’d been in years, and that was actually a good thing. His back hurt less, his knee wasn’t quite as puffy, and his ankle had finally healed completely. It was a pleasant life, and he didn’t take a moment of it for granted, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he didn’t belong in it, especially around the parents of the other schoolchildren.

You are as a father to him, the Armorer had said, but he wasn’t really the kid’s father, and he didn’t know much about being a parent, and seeing the kid’s schoolmates with their families drove home how far from that he really was. He was a protector, a guardian. Family, in a way. A clan of two. But being around the parents at the school was a reminder he was not a father.

They were all perfectly nice to him, and welcoming, if a little wary. Din exchanged greetings and nods with them every day, and one or two of them tried to include him in their morning chats outside the school, inquiring about the child, or about Din’s job. But they all seemed to know each other, and each other’s kids, so their idle chatter went over his head for the most part, and he himself had little to contribute. The small talk, never his strong suit anyway, only served to shine a light on how much of an outsider Din was, and how much he struggled sometimes to fill an unfamiliar role.

Din was accustomed to having eyes on him. Walking the universe as a Mandalorian, especially now that there were so few left, meant always being the focus of curiosity. Being a bounty hunter meant provoking fear and respect. Being both at the same time made him a rarity. His armor served not just to protect him, but had also, his entire adult life, kept him at a distance from others, and not just in the physical sense. He existed at a certain degree of separation from everyone else, and had been happy to do so. He was used to being different, and used to being an outsider, but he wasn’t used to it mattering.

He had never lacked for self-confidence when it came to his job. It was true what Greef had said--he was the best bounty hunter in the sector. It wasn’t often he had felt clueless and in over his head, but taking care of the child was a study in just how much he didn’t know. When he was around the other adults, who all seemed so competent, and knowledgeable about what it took to raise a child, all he could see was the holes in the kid’s romper, which always appeared faster than he could have them mended, and the hand-me-down backpack that was too big for him.

But every afternoon the kid pattered out the door with the rest of the class and made a beeline for Din, happy to see him, eager to be held, and none of that mattered. It was always best when it was just the two of them. The kid didn’t see any of it the way Din did.

Din had been lucky to be taken in by the Mandalorians, to have food, and a place to sleep, and be surrounded by people who were invested in his survival, who cared enough to teach him and train him. He’d been raised to be a good foundling, steeped in the ways of the Creed, loyal and trustworthy and willing to die for those who took him in.

In the beginning, when he’d first taken the child, Din had thought he was honoring his clanspeople, carrying on tradition, by taking in a foundling. But now, with time to stand still and think about it, he could see that it was the child who chose him, not the other way around. The child knew, before Din did, starting with that first night in the dunes, when this little one had tried to heal him.

Then there was the mudhorn, the incident with Cara, and the stand-off right here on Nevarro in the very building that was now his school. Ahsoka Tano had told Din that the child had hidden his powers for years, and he had balked at even demonstrating them to her, but he’d never hesitated to use them when he thought Din was in danger or needed help. Again and again, the child had treated Din as his own, his chosen.

Just like the Mandalorians had chosen him, the child had chosen him, and just like Din lived every day to be worthy of the Creed, he would now live every day to be worthy of the child.

Once again, Din had been lucky. He was, for the second time in his life, a foundling.

It was starting to not be a surprise at all when there was an Action Item alert on the datapad.

Show and Tell Day! it announced cheerfully. Please have your student bring a small, non-living, non-sentient personal item to class to present to the other students, such as a favorite toy or other possession.

“Muh?” the kid said questioningly, looking up at Din.

“Oh, boy,” said Din.

The child...didn’t have any toys or possessions. He had the knob from the Razor Crest, which was currently in the Razor Crest, per the rule. The only thing he really played with was Meerkat, who was disqualified due to being a living creature.

Toys had disappeared from Din’s own life along with his parents. Foundlings his age played at games that doubled as training: model blasters that fired soft pellets, wooden staffs, organized games that included foot races and hand-to-hand sparring. It hadn’t occurred to Din to buy the kid any toys, as this was all supposed to be temporary, and also he’d just been trying to keep them both alive long enough to find a Jedi. Once again, school was shining a light on another of Din’s shortcomings.

Back to the bazaar they went, with both the child and Meerkat in the baby carrier this time.

Din had no clue what was age appropriate for a fifty-year-old baby, so he strolled along, occasionally picking things up and proffering them. The child didn’t care about the holocards, and was scared of the tooka-cat dolls. The stuffed banthas were greeted more favorably, but were bigger than he was, which didn’t seem ideal. He liked shiny things, and things with knobs and buttons and levers he could move. Meerkat liked it all, but didn’t get a vote.

They eventually left the bazaar with an orbit ball and a small X-wing with lights that blinked, plus a Bordok bath toy that had appealed to Din more than the kid, though he happily played with it that night while Din was washing him in the sink.

The next morning, while they were eating breakfast, Din set all the new toys on the table, said, “Time to pick your show and tell thing, buddy,” and got zero response.

“Hey,” he said pushing the X-wing a little closer. “Show and tell, remember?”

Still nothing.

Time to pull out the big guns: “Grogu.”

That got his attention. “Bahtoo?!” he said, finally looking up from his fish porridge. He always responded so enthusiastically when Din said his name. He should probably try to use it more, but old habits were hard to break.

“You need to decide what to take for show and tell.” He held up the little X-Wing up. “What about this?”

“Pffft,” the kid said dismissively, and slurped up another spoonful of porridge.

“C’mon. You don’t want to be the only kid there who doesn’t bring something, right?”

“Buh,” he agreed, but kept eating.

Din ran through the whole line-up of toys, holding them up one at a time, and each one was rejected. In desperation, he started offering random things in the house. Ladle? No. Toothbrush? Nope. Dead potted plant? Deck of laro cards? Calamari flan? No, no, and no.

By then the kid had finished his breakfast, so Din put the bowl down for Meerkat, who had been waiting under the table. When he sat back up, the child was holding something up to him in his fist: the mythosaur pendant.

The kid tilted his head and cooed, blinking at Din, which was what he did when he was waiting for him to catch on. “Ah,” Din said, when the pieces finally fell into place. “That’s what you want to show and tell?”

“Buh!” the kid said happily, then dropped it so it dangled by the string outside his robe, and held his arms out to be picked up.

It was such a silly little thing, but it got to him. Din said nothing for a moment, feeling the weight of it, and the kid’s ears drooped and he made an inquiring, anxious sound.

“No, it’s okay. That’s a good choice,” he said gruffly as he picked him up. He hugged him as tightly as he dared--he was so tiny--and cupped the back of his head with his hand. “That’s a good choice.”

Before they left the house, Din used the datapad to send a quick note to the teacher with a little bit of information about the pendant, since the kid obviously wasn’t going to be able to tell the class anything about it.

That night Din saw the teacher had provided a recap of the day: Grogu was very excited to show the other students his mythosaur pendant, and the class enjoyed hearing about the history of the mythosaur and the Mandalorians. Grogu also enjoyed seeing everyone else’s items.

Din read it out loud to him, like he did all the teacher’s notes, and looked down to see him sucking on the pendant. It had been a comfort to Din himself a time or two in his life, though not quite as literally. It meant something that the child felt it was special, too.

A clan of two. Soon, Din would be a clan of one, for all intents and purposes. As long as the child carried his sigil they’d always be a clan, even if they never saw each other again, but Din would finish his time in this world alone. There would never be a third.

Din started dreaming about his birth family, which he hadn’t done in years. Fleeting dreams of peaceful, domestic scenes, some that had actually happened, some that he could only wish had, and some that he wasn’t even sure. It had always seemed a cruel joke to him that what he still remembered most vividly was their final, terrifying moments together.

One night he had a dream his mother and father were in the house on Nevarro when he brought the child home from school, not aged a day since they’d died. Din was older now than they had been when they were killed, but they were forever frozen in time, young and vibrant. They stood in front of him, side by side, just as they had died.

Din tried to speak, but his throat refused to work when his father took the kid from Din’s arms and rocked him. The child gurgled happily and waved his hands as Din’s mother smiled softly down at him and touched his cheek with a gentle finger. The sight of them all together was simultaneously painful and wonderful. Something Din hadn’t even realized he longed for until it was in front of him. Something that could never, ever be.

“We’re so proud of you,” Din’s mother said, turning her smile towards him.

“You’re doing a good job,” Din’s father said, beaming down at the child as he swayed back and forth and gently patted his butt.

His mother bent to kiss the child’s fuzzy, wrinkled forehead, then stretched up to kiss Din’s as well, and he was shocked to realize he wasn’t wearing his helmet.

He woke from the dream with a jolt, eyes stinging, his throat so tight he could barely swallow.

He knuckled his eyes and shifted a bit underneath the child, who was still sound asleep on top of him, busy making a little puddle of drool in the center of Din’s chest. Maybe it was the dream, maybe it was the safety of the darkness, or maybe it was how small and vulnerable the baby looked, but Din suddenly felt so fiercely tender toward him that it made his eyes sting again.

We’re so proud of you.

You’re doing a good job.

Would they be? Was he?

Much of Din’s life had been hard, and adding a child to the mix had, in many ways, only made it harder, but the most difficult task of all was feeling deserving of this child’s affection. Feeding him and keeping him alive were the most immediate challenges, but there were so many other, less obvious tasks that he bumbled his way through every day. Din had a tendency toward single-mindedness, which didn’t mesh well with caring for a child, and often made him feel like he was constantly failing at one part or another of it.

There was a Mandalorian saying, "Nobody cares who your father was, only the father you'll be," but it did matter, at least a little, because those two things were connected for him. The Mandalorians had saved his life, provided for him, taught him skills that had enabled him to survive and make a living. But there had been nothing soft and loving about living in the foundling barracks. Those things he had only known with his birth parents, so long ago it was sometimes hard to remember it was real.

He could honor them all, the people who had brought him into this world and the people who had taken over for them, by doing right by this child. What he’d learned from the Mandalorians--to fight, to persevere, to protect your clan--had come easily enough for him with the kid, familiar from the ease of long practice.

What he’d been given by his birth parents, who had loved and nurtured him in a hundred small ways every day, was further back in time and fuzzy. That was coming along more slowly, but he was getting it. Little by little, he was getting it.

It was starting to feel like deja vu. Din dutifully checked the kid’s datapad after dinner, flipping through the notes from the teacher and the art projects while the child alternated looking at what was on the screen and playing with Meerkat, and found another Action Item. Geez, it was always something with this school.

This Action Item was a bit different, though: a permission slip.

Do you grant GROGU DJARIN permission to visit the Crystal Sea of Nevarro?

A field trip?

Din swore under his breath. He wasn’t sure he was okay with the teacher taking the child outside the city, even for a few hours, and was tempted to say no. He could just keep him home that day, but the kid would probably be upset if he had to stay behind--he loved going to school. Sort of. The classwork and the getting up in the mornings, not so much. But he loved seeing the other kids.

Well. Maybe Din could just...follow at a discreet distance. After another moment of hesitation, he tapped Yes.

To his surprise, a second question popped up, one that solved the problem neatly: Do you wish to chaperone?

They arrived at the landing field early the day of the field trip, the kid mumbling grumpily in Din’s arms, still gnawing on a fish cake he hadn’t managed to finish before they left the house. Din had the child’s backpack looped over his other shoulder, bulging with his lunch and his canteen and extra snacks and his datapad, and minus Meerkat, who had crawled into it this morning and almost become a stowaway. Din was still not totally comfortable with this whole idea, but grimly resigned to making it happen for the kid.

Greef Karga was there, for some reason. Din had already told him he was unavailable for marshaling today, and why. Maybe he just wanted to see this for himself.

“There he is!” Greef said, face full of merriment when he laid eyes on Din. He was definitely here just to see a Mandalorian going on a school field trip. Din couldn’t even really blame him.

After Greef greeted the child, he eyed the rifle strapped to Din’s back. “Do you really think that’s necessary for a field trip? What could go wrong?”

“If you think it’s too much, you can always chaperone instead,” Din suggested.

“No thanks,” Greef said, holding both hands up in front of himself to ward off even the idea of it.

“That’s what I figured,” said Din.

“I’ll be curious to hear what you think of the place,” Greef went on. “With the Empire gone for good and trade booming, we might be able to make something of those crystals, attract some visitors. The Planning Council already made some small upgrades to turn it into a park, but we could still do more.”

“Looking for tourist credits?” Din asked. He wouldn’t have pictured Nevarro being able to pull that off, but he never would have pictured it thriving the way it was now, either. Maybe Karga could make it happen.

“Those are the best kind,” Greef said, laughing. He was already backing away, probably late for another meeting. “Have fun,” he said to the child. “Try not to kill anyone,” he said to Din.

Din said nothing. The whole point of him going along was in case someone needed to be killed.

The rest of the children began to arrive, some with their parents, who doled out hugs and kisses and instructions to behave that were sure to be ignored the second the adults were out of sight. It didn’t escape Din’s notice that all the other adults were dropping off their kids and leaving. The list of chaperones was starting to look pretty short. It was starting to look like he was the whole list, in fact.

The noise level on the landing field grew steadily as the crowd increased, the kids chasing each other and playing games while shouting at top volume. Soon, the child started fussing to join them, and Din was just about to let him when the teacher appeared.

It had never occurred to Din to wonder before this what the teacher droid did when it wasn’t teaching. Did it just stand in the school building until it was needed again? The thought of it in there all night, powered down, silent and waiting, was unnerving. He shuddered a little just picturing it. The kid turned to look up at him and made a small, nervous peep.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Din assured him, putting a reassuring hand on the top of his head for a moment.

The teacher wasted no time organizing the younglings into two lines for the short walk to the passenger ship. Din had just taken up a spot at the end of one line when someone who looked like they were probably the ship’s pilot walked up and had a brief exchange with the teacher, who then gestured toward Din. The pilot looked at Din, nodded at the teacher, and walked away.

“There is a small problem,” the teacher said as she approached Din.

Din sighed. Of course there was. There was always a problem. “What’s the problem?”

“I’m afraid the ship we booked for transport has had a technical malfunction. We will now be traveling in two ships.”

“All right,” Din said, relaxing a notch. That didn't sound so bad.

It was bad.

“Here is your assigned group,” the teacher droid said, handing him a datapad. “Each student must be accounted for every time they enter or exit the ship. Thank you for your assistance.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait. My group?” Din protested, but the teacher was already waddling away, and Din was left standing on the landing field next to a passenger ship, looking at a ragtag group of four of the kid’s classmates.

“Traveling in two ships” apparently meant the bulk of the class and the teacher were in one, while Din and a handful of kids were in a second, much smaller ship, piloted by a droid, because that was his luck.

He looked down at the datapad and saw five names, briefly panicked that he’d already lost a kid, then realized one of them was Grogu Djarin. So far, so good.

The other, larger group of students was already boarding their ship, filing up the ramp in a nice, even line, backpacks neatly in place over their shoulders, as the teacher did her headcount. Din looked back at his group. They were standing in a loose huddle, backpacks hanging off their elbows or resting in the dirt, looking like they would have preferred to be left in the care of just about anyone else but him. So Din had that in common with them, at least.

He could hear shuffling feet and uneasy whispers coming from his group as he looked from the kids to the datapad and back again. Any of the parents he saw outside the school every morning would probably know all these kids by name on sight, but Din was at a loss. There was a human girl with a pair of dark goggles across the top of her head; a pale green girl who appeared to be half Twi’lek, if Din had to guess; a male Mythrol who looked like he wanted to disappear into his humidity vest; and a black-haired, black-eyed boy whose skin was so pale he was practically clear.

“Are you coming with us?” the girl with the goggles asked nervously.

“I’m the chaperone,” he said, a little irritated he was the only one. He’d planned to mostly hang around, ready to shoot anything that looked threatening, not actually be in charge of children. “I thought there would be others.”

“Everyone else’s parents have jobs,” the Twi’lek girl said breezily.

“I have a job,” Din protested, then instantly regretted how defensive he sounded.

“Really?” she asked in a skeptical tone. “What?”

“I’m a marshal.”

“Cara Dune is the marshal,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. He got the distinct feeling she thought he was lying. He was not going to stoop to pulling out his badge to prove it to her.

“I’m also a bounty hunter,” he said.

That got their interest, especially the youngling in the goggles. “Have you ever killed anyone?” she asked in an awed voice.

“Yes,” he said flatly.

Everyone was quiet for a long moment. The Mythrol glanced over at the other ship with what could only be described as longing.

“Are you going to take away my mom?” the Twi’lek piped up.

“What?” Din asked, taken aback. The other younglings glanced between him and the Twi’lek girl uneasily. “Why would I take your mom?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“Is there a bounty on her?” Din asked. You never knew.

“No,” the girl said, rolling her eyes, like he’d asked a stupid question. “But my grandfather said when you came to town that everyone better keep an eye on their wives.”

Wearing a helmet all the time had a lot of advantages. Like hiding the look on your face. Seldom had Din been as grateful for it as he was now. “That doesn’t mean what you think it means,” he said, after he took a moment to absorb that.

The girl with the goggles said something and jostled the pale kid, who stuck his tongue out at her. It was also black, and forked. Din had never seen anyone who looked like him before. He wasn’t even sure the kid should be outside in the daylight.

“That’s Dux. They don’t like it when people stare,” the Twi’lek girl said pointedly.

“They?” Din said, confused.

“Dux is a boy and a girl right now,” goggles kid told him.

Ah. “Okay, Dux,” Din said, nodding as he ticked Dux Mazar off on the datapad list.

“I will settle into my final form later,” Dux said in an eerily monotone voice, lisping a bit with their forked tongue, “It will be announced on my first Life Day after my quickening.”

“Uh, good for you,” Din said, not sure he wanted to talk about “quickening” with a bunch of younglings. That seemed like the kind of thing that ended with your face in a bounty puck. “Get in the ship, Dux.” Din motioned them up the ramp, and they went without complaint.

The little Mythrol was watching all of this and not saying a word. When Din looked at him he froze in place, not even blinking his eyes. “What’s your name?” Din asked him, finger poised over the datapad.

The Mythrol’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.

“Can you talk?” Din asked.

“Yes,” the Mythrol said faintly, still staring at Din with wide eyes. The fins on the sides of his face were twitching.

“What. Is. Your. Name?” Din asked again.

“Otik,” the kid gulped.

Din checked him off the list. “Are you related to the fledgling who works for Greef Karga?” he asked.

“He’s my uncle,” the Mythrol said with obvious reluctance, as if he wasn’t thrilled to admit it. “My mom says he has some growing up to do, but my dad says he’s never going to get his head out of his thorax.”

Din thought the dad might be right, but refrained from mentioning it. “Okay, Otik. Get in the ship.” He had barely gotten the words out when Otik scurried past him and disappeared into the ship’s belly.

That left only the two girls: Jee’da the Twi’lek, and Karpa the goggles girl. He checked them off after verifying their names and followed them up the ramp into the ship.

The passenger area was small, and there were only a few empty seats left, so Din strapped the kid into one and took the other for himself after stowing his rifle, which he preferred not to have rattling around loose in the passenger hold, in a locker next to the cockpit door. He chucked the datapad in with it.

“Prepare for departure,” the pilot droid said over the comm. Din checked to make sure the child was still strapped in, then made all the other younglings show him their seatbelts were fastened properly, too.

The engines fired up. Din took his seat, kicked his legs out in front of him, crossed his arms, and braced himself for what was hopefully going to be a very dull three hours of looking at chunks of crystal.

The Crystal Sea was further away than Din had thought. Far enough that the kids worked their way through “99 Flagons of Spotchka on the Wall,” not once, but twice. The only thing that saved it from being completely excruciating was watching the child bop his head to it, chiming in with upbeat exclamations now and then. Still, Din was glad when they touched down and prepared to disembark.

The kids came out of the ships much the way they’d gone in: the teacher’s group marching out in orderly lines, Din’s group running pell-mell down the ramp in no order whatsoever. Din checked them off on the datapad without doing a headcount, being pretty sure no one had disappeared during the trip.

He left the ship last, carrying the child with one hand and his backpack with the other. By then the other younglings were already lined up in fidgeting rows, ready to enter the park, enduring a lecture from the teacher on the rules.

Din had never been here, or even flown over this part of Nevarro, and was surprised by how beautiful it was--instead of the lava plains, ugly rocks, and black sand that covered the rest of the planet, the ground here was composed entirely of sparkling blue and green crystals. Some were small enough to fit in his hand, others the size of the Razor Crest, and everything in between.

Someone--the Planning Council, Din assumed--had taken the time to install a path through part of it, except instead of dirt or gravel it was made of finely crushed crystal. Worried about the child walking on it, Din took off his glove and crouched to grab a handful. It wasn’t sharp at all--more like coarse sand. He let it run through his fingers, watching it catch the light, until the child started grousing, anxious to join the other kids. Din put him down on the path, but kept the backpack, so he could actually move.

“Go on,” he said. “But be careful.”

“Buh!” the child called toward the group, making a few of the younglings turn and watch as he scurried toward them.

“Come on, Grogu! You can walk with us!” the Mythrol said, hanging back to let the child catch up, and then walking slowly beside him. Dux fell into place on the other side, and even as most of the other children raced ahead they seemed content to go at the child’s pace. That was fine with Din, as those two were easy to keep track of, the Mythrol’s bald blue head and Dux’s spiky black hair bobbing along in the ebb and flow of the group.

Din was impressed with the work Greef’s people had done to make this area into a park. In addition to the new path there were informational hologram kiosks along the way that explained the history of the Crystal Sea and the science behind it. Some of the crystal formations had been given names based on their shapes or color or size, which the kids seemed to get a kick out of, based on their excitement.

At the first kiosk, Din had to stop and dig the kid’s datapad out of his backpack--the students had an activity they had to complete, stopping at the various kiosks and scanning a code to confirm they watched the hologram. It sounded like there was some kind of prize or reward for completing the activity, and most of the students seemed keen to collect on it.

The child carried his datapad himself, but was too short to scan the codes, so Dux and the Mythrol took turns picking him up and helping him reach it. Din hung back and didn’t get involved or try to help. He was here to chaperone, not insert himself into the kid’s friendships with his classmates. He simply ambled along behind, keeping an eye out for any threats that might be lurking around. So far there was nothing.

Well, almost nothing.

While the path was safe and not going to cut anyone, the areas beyond the path were another story. Some of the pieces of crystal jutting up out of the ground were sharp and jagged looking, and there was no fence or other barrier to keep visitors confined to the path, except common sense, which most of the kids seemed to be lacking completely. Being children, they were immediately drawn to the most dangerous areas, and not worried at all about what might happen, and most of them were incapable of walking sedately. Instead, they yelled and sprinted and shoved and leapt, breaching the path boundaries with impunity.

“Stay on the path,” the educator droid said, over and over, apparently happy to keep repeating itself while getting no results. “Stay on the path.”

Eventually the inevitable happened, and one of the kids--not one from Din’s group--was roughhousing too close to the edge of the path and tripped. Thankfully, it happened right in front of Din, who managed to stick an arm out in front of him before he fell face first onto a particularly deadly looking crystal.

“Stay on the path if you don’t want to bleed to death,” Din said, pushing him back upright and moving him out of harm’s way. The color drained from the youngling’s face as he tilted his head back to look up at Din. “That applies to all of you,” Din added, turning to take in the rest of the group.

No one said anything. The entire group had come to a halt and was staring at Din, some now nervously eyeing the crystals they’d so blithely cavorted around a minute ago.

“Let’s continue on,” the teacher said at last, and the class got moving again, but at a much more sensible pace this time.

The rest of the walk through the park was uneventful, which was just how Din wanted it. Even the worst offenders kept a respectful distance from the edge of the path after that, occasionally glancing back to see if Din was still watching, which he was. The nice thing about the helmet was that it was hard for them to tell exactly who he was looking at, which meant every kid seemed to think he was looking at them.

The path was a loop, and soon enough it brought them back to the landing field, where the kids ate their lunches at a group of tables in the shade of an absolutely massive blue crystal that was supposed to look like a bantha, according to the kiosk. No matter how much he squinted, Din could not see a bantha.

One more headcount after lunch, and that was it, they were all done. Din boarded the ship first and got the child squared away in his seat, then grabbed the school’s datapad and stood at the hatch, waiting to check the kids off as they passed by.

The little Mythrol was first in line, but took a stumble step at the top and nearly fell off the ramp. Din grabbed him by the collar just in time and hauled him back to safety, but the Mythrol’s datapad tumbled from his webbed grip, hit the ground, and managed to bounce under the ship and fall down into a crack in the lava rock.

“My datapad!” he exclaimed, trying to wriggle out of Din’s grasp.

“It’s probably melted,” the goggles kid said.

“Everyone inside,” Din ordered, dragging the Mythrol away from the edge of the ramp, despite his protests. “I’ll get your datapad. But everyone has to get inside and strap in.”

The Mythrol reluctantly obeyed, casting one last glance over the edge of the ramp before going inside, and the rest of the group filed after him in silence. Din hurriedly checked off the other younglings on the datapad--a formality, since he was more than capable of counting to five--and then followed them into the ship and made sure they were all strapped in. He took a moment to triple-check the little one, who was probably the most likely to ignore his order to stay put.

The other group lifted off just as he came back down the ramp, and was out of sight by the time he crawled under the ship and found the datapad, which was miraculously not melted or cracked or even scratched. The kids let out a cheer as he entered the ship with it, like he was some kind of hero.

He handed it off to a grateful Mythrol, stowed his rifle and his datapad in the locker again, and thumped the cockpit door with his fist. “We’re ready, let’s go.”

Take-off went fine. Gaining altitude went fine. The first few minutes went fine, and then it all went sideways.

First the proximity alarm started beeping. Din, who had just gotten settled and started to relax--clearly a mistake--shot up out of his seat and headed toward the cockpit.

“What’s going on?” he yelled, reaching to palm the door open, but the ship suddenly started climbing at a steep angle and he slid backwards before he could hit the control panel. His second attempt was thwarted when the ship jigged sharply to the side, tossing him against the hull.

Those were evasive maneuvers. There was something out there coming at them.

He glanced back at the younglings to make sure they were all still okay. Their eyes were all glued on him, the looks on their faces running the gamut from fear to shock to confusion. More than one small hand was gripping the seatbelts with clenched fingers. Even the child, who loved a wild ride, was hunkered down into the cowl of his romper as far as he could get. He knew something wasn’t right.

Din turned back to the cockpit door just as a jarring impact rocked the ship, making him stumble. The door slid open with perfect timing, giving them all a close-up view as the cockpit roof was peeled off the ship with a deafening metallic screech and a giant boney beak reached in and bit the head right off the pilot droid.

Oil started spraying everywhere and the younglings started screaming and the ship started to nosedive. Din half-lunged and half-fell toward the co-pilot seat and that was what saved him from becoming the second casualty as the thing with the beak came back for another bite. It clipped his boot heel as its jaws came slashing down into the exposed cockpit, but otherwise missed him. He managed to slide into the seat and grab the controls, hauling back on them to pull the ship out of the dive.

The nose came up, but the ship bobbled and dipped, the whole thing feeling ungainly and unbalanced, refusing to respond to his commands. For a second Din wondered if the controls had been damaged, but then he heard a screech behind him and looked up to see a big reptavian—the same thing that had attacked their camp and almost killed Greef--clinging to the jagged edge of the cockpit roof with its claws, leathery wings spread wide. It was throwing the ship off balance.

It stabbed its beak in his direction again, and Din jerked to the side to avoid it, still struggling to fly the ship. Both his visor and what was left of the shattered viewport were splattered with oil and he could barely see. He held onto the controls with one hand and fumbled for the seat’s safety harness with the other, getting one side up over his shoulder. That would have to be enough.

“Everybody hang on!” he yelled back toward the younglings, and jammed his legs hard under the console to brace himself. He dropped the ship as low as he dared and did a barrel roll, slamming the reptavian against the ground. It screeched as it made impact, a deafening sound this close. The ship jolted and Din almost came out of the seat, but the strap held and the armor on his thighs took the impact as he fought with the throttle.

A mixture of black sand and reptavian blood splattered over him as he dragged the creature over the lava rock, and the sound of bones shattering replaced the screeching. The claws clinging to the edge of the cockpit went limp, and the reptavian fell away.

Din instantly felt the difference in the controls, which now responded to the smallest adjustment without the burden of the reptavian creating resistance. He took the ship a little higher and righted it, leaving the creature behind on the ground in a bloody heap of broken bones and torn wings.

Worried about clearance out here where the terrain was unpredictable, he pushed the ship a little higher still and swung in a wide arc, trying to orient himself. The nav screen was coated with oil, but was still lit up. As long as he could navigate back to the city, they’d be okay.

And then both engines died.

The ship started dropping like a stone, and through the glaze of muck on his visor Din could see the problem, flashing on the console--no fuel. A ruptured line, maybe, but the cause didn’t matter. What mattered was they were about to go down hard.

Din tried to make the best of it, but with no reverse thrusters to slow them down there wasn’t much he could do to soften the landing. They bounced off the ground a couple times--teeth-rattling impacts that made the kids in the back scream with fright. The next time they came down they stayed there, but the whole ship went into a skid, careening wildly over the uneven ground, a shower of sparks flying from the underside. All Din could do was hang on and hope they stopped before they slammed into a rock or fell into a pool of lava.

They eventually came to a groaning halt on a relatively flat area, and Din finally unclenched his hands from the controls and slumped back into the seat, heart thundering from adrenalin. He was unhurt, but a mess, splattered with oil and blood, which was coated with black lava sand, creating a thick layer of greasy grime. He used the corner of his cape to swipe at his visor, which mostly just smeared everything around, but at least he could see a bit better.

The door to the passenger compartment was still open, but the roof had been badly dented and he had to bend over to get through it. The hull was still intact, thankfully, and everyone was still in their seats, their faces pale and lined with fear. Well, most of them were pale. The child was still the same shade of green, and Din wasn’t sure how you would even know if that Dux kid was turning white.

“Is everyone okay?” he asked, and got some nods in return. They seemed fine, aside from being scared. “Nobody move. Stay in your seats,” he ordered. He wanted a minute to get his rifle and assess the situation without the kids underfoot. The last time he’d encountered those creatures they’d been traveling in a group--there might be more out there.

“I thought those things were nocturnal,” he muttered to himself as he tried to open the locker door to get his rifle. The whole locker was bent and buckled in, and the door refused to budge.

“You’re thinking of nightprowlers,” the girl with the goggles piped up. “Those come out at night. That was a lavahopper, and they only come out during the day.”

“That’s a lavahopper?” He had definitely been picturing them all wrong. “Are they poisonous?” he asked her.

“Very,” she said solemnly.

“Great,” Din sighed.

“First it paralyzes you,” she went on, warming to the topic. “Then you start convulsing, then your skin turns black and fa--”

“OK, I get it,” he said. She was clearly into morbid stuff, but from the looks of it, the other kids didn’t appreciate hearing about it. They looked even more scared, if that was possible.

Din was looking around for something to pry the locker door open with when a shadow passed over the open cockpit and he saw another lavahopper--this one even bigger than the first one, possibly--land a short distance away from the ship. It looked so much like the nightprowlers he’d encountered before he could barely believe they were different species. Also, he could not fathom how something that big could hatch from an egg small enough for the kid to eat whole.

“Oh no,” one of the younglings said in a high-pitched voice.

“Everyone be quiet,” Din hissed as he gave the locker door another tug. He really wanted his rifle.

“They don’t usually eat people, but they’re really territorial,” the goggles girl whispered, even though he had just told everyone to be quiet. “That’s why they attacked the ship in the air.”

“Good, maybe it’ll just go away,” Din whispered back, but it turned out to be a futile wish. It spread its huge wings and sprang into the air, circling over the ship once before disappearing from view. Then the whole ship shuddered as the thump of something big landing on the roof jostled them around.

“I don’t think it went away,” the little Mythrol whimpered.

“I want everyone to get under the seats,” Din said quietly as he drew his blaster, eyes on the ceiling as he edged toward the child, who would need a little help.

The other kids rushed to unbuckle their seatbelts, but fear was making their fingers clumsy, and no one managed to take shelter before a beak punched through the ceiling into the aisle, the punctured metal forming a ring of sharp curls around it. The kids started screaming again, frantically trying to get out of their seatbelts and under their seats as the lavahopper’s beak snapped at nothing, twisting and turning as it searched for something to grab.

Din opened fire on it with his blaster, but that beak was made with some tough stuff, and all he seemed to do was annoy it, making it thrash around even more until it withdrew. He heard the ceiling creak as it moved, and the wince-inducing scrape of its claws on the metal. The ship tilted back and forth under its weight as it moved.

At least he had provided the younglings some time to hide. The other kids were cowering under their seats now, and the child had somehow gotten out of his harness himself, too. Din saw him dangling half off his seat just as the lavahopper opened another hole right above him, barely missing the child’s head. The baby squawked and went tumbling to the floor as Din fruitlessly fired his blaster at the lavahopper again. The tip of its beak grazed the child’s romper as he scuttled away, but it could reach no further--its horns were preventing it from getting its head all the way in.

When the kid was safely out of range Din torched the lavahopper in the face with his flamethrower, which only made it turn its open mouth toward him, jaws clacking. He tried again, this time shooting a plume of fire right into its mouth, and it screeched at him in fury but didn’t withdraw.

“I don’t think fire is going to hurt something that lives in the lava fields,” the goggles girl yelled from under her seat.

“It worked on the other ones!” Din yelled back, but she was right--this was doing nothing but distracting it. Time to try something else.

When it twisted its beak toward him again Din was ready with a detonator in his hand and tossed it into its gaping maw, then watched in dismay as the lavahopper promptly spit it back out. He snatched it up and went back for a second try, this time shoving his arm halfway down its throat before letting go of it. He only had a few seconds left, but that was enough time to fire a whipcord bolt into the side of its face and wrap the cord around its mouth, sealing it shut.

The lavahopper jerked its head free and took to the air, barely making it off the roof of the ship before it exploded in a shower of blood and gore that rained down through the holes in the roof, plopping onto the seats and making puddles on the floor. The ship rocked unsteadily as a larger piece landed on the wing with a wet THUNK.

The other younglings were all still safe under the seats, and Din could hear the child whimpering, but he was nowhere to be seen. Surveying the mess around him while trying to keep one eye on the sky through the holes in the roof, Din finally spotted the tip of one ear in the corner, peeking out from behind a chunk of twisted metal.

“Hey, you okay?” he asked, carefully pushing it aside to see the kid. Miraculously, he didn’t look hurt, only frightened. Din was bent over, just about to pick him up, when suddenly the roof caved in above him and a beak closed around Din’s middle and lifted him up off his feet. The child squawked and ducked back into his hiding place as Din was jerked toward the ceiling.

He heard the flap of the thing’s wings as it tried to take to the air, but Din was too big to fit through the hole in the roof, and the creature’s upward trajectory came to a jarring halt as Din was slammed against the ceiling with a teeth-rattling thump. He couldn’t reach his holster to get his blaster, so he twisted his arm around and managed to catch the side of its beak with his flamethrower without setting himself on fire, but the lavahopper wouldn’t give up. It repeatedly tried to pull him through the hole as he struggled to fight his way free, bashing him against the sharp pieces of the ceiling that ringed the opening. He tried the flamethrower again, then he tried punching it as hard as he could, but the pressure around his chest made it hard to breath, and his vision was starting to go dark around the edges. He could hear the younglings screaming in terror.

Frustrated, the lavahopper shook him from side to side, sparks flying from his helmet as it dragged across the ceiling, then dropped him so suddenly he couldn’t brace himself. He landed on the floor with an ungainly thud.

Din rolled away with a groan, gasping for air, trying to get out of reach so he could regroup, but there wasn’t far to go in the aisle, and he ended up face-to-face with the goggles girl, who was flat on her belly under the seat. Her terrified face was streaked with tears.

“Don’t die!” she hiccupped between big, gulping sobs. “Don’t leave us!”

“I’m not going to,” Din wheezed, sucking in another painful breath. One thing he’d been really good at so far in his life was not dying.

The sound of crumpling metal drew his attention back to the ceiling. This lavahopper was a bit smarter than the others, it seemed, because it had torn at the hole in the roof with its claws until it could stick its entire head into the ship. Maybe not so smart, because that meant for the first time Din could see its eyes.

He reached for his knife as he surged to his feet and it obliged him by snaking its head toward him, presenting him with the perfect target. He leapt toward it, landing on its face, holding on to one of its horns for leverage as he plunged his knife deep into its eye.

The knife went in right to the hilt, and thing’s eye made a squelching noise as it burst under his blade. The lavahopper reared back, slamming Din against the ceiling one more time, and then he let go and fell to the floor as the lavahopper jerked its head back out of the hole.

It screamed, batting at its face with the claws of one foot, trying to dislodge the knife, as Din crawled away, propping himself up against the wall of the hull. Through the hole he could see it thrashing, its weight rocking the ship back and forth until it collapsed on top of the ship, groaned weakly, and died.

There was no sound for a moment except Din’s panting breaths and the muted crying of the younglings. Nothing moved. No more lavahoppers appeared.

“Is it dead?” one of the younglings asked in a small voice.

“Yes,” he panted, deciding he’d just sit here for a few seconds. “I think that might be the last one.”

He gave himself a quick once-over, remembering the poison. The nightprowler’s venom had seemed to come from its claws, not its beak, but those hadn’t been immune to fire, so there were obviously some differences, but either way the beskar and the plastoid had saved him. There were some tears in his clothing, and he was going to have some impressive bruises later, but there were no open wounds that he could see. His ribs hurt, but didn’t appear to be broken. Not bad, really, given what he’d just been through.

What was left of the ship’s roof creaked under the weight of the dead lavahopper, and Din could hear metal groaning throughout the hull, straining under the load. One of the walls buckled a bit and the ceiling dropped a few inches, but held.

The locker door popped open with a loud and sudden twang, and his rifle fell across his knees.

Once he had a chance to catch his breath, Din slowly climbed to his feet and stumbled to the cockpit, but nothing was moving outside. There was one dead lavahopper still sprawled on top of the ship, another half demolished on the ground nearby, and the third one was nothing but a jumble of tattered flesh in the distance. He hoped there wasn’t a fourth.

He sat back down in the copilot seat and flipped switch after switch on the console, but nothing came on--nav, comms, life support. All dead. No fuel, no backup power. They were stranded, with no way to get back to the city and no way to tell anyone where they were. Din had no idea how far off course they’d traveled when they were attacked in the air--maybe too far for a rescue party to spot them while doing a survey of their expected route. They’d have to rely on the emergency beacon for rescue.

When he ducked back into the cabin the child was staring silently at him from his hiding spot. Din kicked a bunch of wreckage out of the way so he could pick him up. He was dirty, with some smudges on his face, and his little romper flecked with lavahopper blood and black dust, but unscathed.

The ship was a complete mess. There were pieces of metal scattered around, sparking wires hanging from the ceiling, bits of stuffing from the seats slowly sopping up the lavahopper blood on the floor. Worst of all, Din could see what remained of the ship’s emergency beacon dangling from a panel in the hole-pocked roof, a mangled mess, not a single light on it blinking. There was no way it was transmitting a signal.

“Everyone okay?” he asked, as the other kids slowly started coming out of hiding, looking around them in shock at the destruction.

“Jee’da is hurt!” someone suddenly yelled in a panicked voice, and Din felt his stomach drop as he watched the Twi’lek girl crawl out from under the seat, one hand clamped tightly over her forehead. There was dark blue blood running down her face, dripping off her elbow onto her shirt.

Din used his free hand to clear away some debris so she could sit up, and squatted down next to her to look at the wound. Head wounds always bled a lot, so maybe it wasn’t too bad. Her eyes, when she looked up at him, were scared. There were tear tracks on her face, but she wasn’t actually crying at the moment. Probably too shocked.

“Your name is Jee’da?” he said, setting the child down between his knees to free up his hands. The other younglings had gathered around them, silently watching.

“Yes,” she said. She wiped her nose with the back of her other hand. It was shaking.

“Can I see it, Jee’da?” he asked.

“Okay,” she said in a wobbly voice.

She didn’t move, so Din reached out and gently lifted her hand away to reveal a cut above her brow bone, still leaking blood at a good rate.

“I’m going to be sick,” the Mythrol kid said.

“Don’t look at it,” Din ordered, but the kid didn’t budge. Din reached out and grabbed the top of his head and turned his face away. “Don’t look. Think about something else.”

“Okay,” the Mythrol said weakly, but his eyes kept darting toward Jee’da, then away.

“You’ll be fine,” Din told Jee’da, reaching for the pouch on his belt. “It’s just bleeding a lot because of where it is. I’ll cauterize it so the bleeding stops.”

“Doesn’t that mean burn it?” the goggles girl asked, with what Din had come to recognize as her terrible, terrible penchant for unvarnished truths. Jee’da’s face crumpled and she covered the cut with her hand again and started crying in earnest.

“Hey. Hey, hey,” Din said, patting her on the arm. “Crying won’t help.”

“I know, but I’m scared,” she sniffled, blinking up at him through wet eyelashes. She looked at the cauterizing pen in his hand, then back up at him. “Will it hurt?”

“Yes,” he said. There was no point in lying. ”But it will feel better after.”

“Okay,” she said, hesitantly lowering her hand and squeezing her eyes shut. Her lower lip was still quivering, and tears were still leaking from her eyes, but she didn’t try to move away when he took her chin in his hand.

As he flicked the pen on an ear-splitting wail rose up, this one from the Mythrol, startling both Din and Jee’da, who flinched away from him.

“Why are you crying?” Din asked him, exasperated. “And I told you not to look.”

“I can’t help it!” the Mythrol sniffled.

“Maybe he’s an empath,” goggles kid suggested. “Sometimes they get so overwhelmed by other people’s emotions they go insane.”

“I don’t care what he is,” Din said. “He’s not helping.”

“I’m sorry,” the Mythrol said, clamping his hand over his mouth, which at least muffled the crying sounds.

Din turned back to Jee’da, only to find the child had toddled forward and was leaning against her knee, reaching up with a splayed hand, making sympathetic cooing noises.

Din reached to pluck him up and set him out of the way. “No,” he said, but the kid objected, feet kicking against Din’s arm as he struggled, hand still reaching out toward Jee’da. “I said no.” He absolutely did not want anyone else to know what the kid could do. He was already a target. If word spread...

The child was not to be denied, though, whining as he fought to be put down. Both the Mythrol and Jee’da were continuing to cry, and now bravery was deserting the others as well, who were either starting to leak tears again or trying hard to hold them back. Everyone in the ship except him was either crying or about to, and that wasn’t going to solve anything for anyone.

“Okay, fine,” Din said wearily. “But only if she wants you to,” he told the kid. “Got it?”

“Buh,” the child agreed.

“He can help you, if you want,” Din said to Jee’da. “He has a...power that can heal you. It won’t hurt.” Then he realized he didn’t actually know that. “I don’t think it hurts.”

Jee’da looked at the child, who chirped at her and lifted his hand again.

“Okay,” she said shakily, and then squeezed her eyes shut again as Din lifted the baby so he could reach.

She flinched when his little hand touched her forehead, just above the cut, but didn’t move away or try to stop him. Just like with Greef, the child closed his eyes and scrunched his face in concentration, and the skin started to knit itself back together.

“Whoa,” one of the younglings said softly.

Din, who had not been holding the child the last time, had not expected that he would be able to feel it, like a low vibration surrounding him and the child, making his teeth itch and his hands tingle where they touched the child’s little body. It got stronger and stronger, until it felt like it was pressing on him, freezing him in place, like one of those dreams where you couldn’t move, no matter how hard you tried. The pressure started to get uncomfortable, a heavy weight on his back and chest, and then all of sudden it stopped. It all stopped. Din nearly fell over as whatever it was he’d been braced against vanished, and he wobbled a bit before he could regain his balance, ears ringing in his helmet.

The kid lifted his hand away with a little grunt, but even after he broke the contact the healing continued, until there was no mark on Jee’da’s forehead, nothing but the drying blood left to show there had been a cut at all. The child’s eyes started to drift closed as he slumped back into the curve of Din’s arm with a little sigh.

There was a moment of awed silence as everyone, including Din, was impressed by what the kid had done. Jee’da cautiously reached up to touch her head where the cut had been and then stared at her fingers when she found nothing but healed skin.

“You okay?” Din asked her.

“Yes,” she said, but she didn’t quite look like it. She looked like everything that had just happened was catching up to her. Din had seen it before with injuries. “I got blood on my shirt,” she said in a small voice, plucking at the purple fabric.

He reached out to give her another comforting pat or two, but as soon as he lifted his arm she tipped forward into his chest and threw her arms around him, turning it into a hug. She was shaking. Din tentatively put his arm around her, shifting the child out of the way a bit to give her more room. She made a short, broken noise when he tightened his hold on her, pulling her a little closer into the shelter of his body.

“You did good,” he said to her. “You were very brave.”

“Is she okay?” the Mythrol asked in a tearful voice.

“Yes, just give her a minute,” Din said, giving her another squeeze.

It was a touching moment that ended abruptly when Jee’da said, in a muffled voice, “This is kind of uncomfortable.”

Din bit back a laugh as he let her go--she was clearly going to be just fine. She pulled away from him and sat back on her heels, looking more like her usual self already. Even her lekku seemed to have perked up.

“Your hugs are pointy,” she said, rubbing a spot on her cheek that had an imprint on it from the corner of his breastplate. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Din said. He looked down at the child, who had gone limp in his other arm. His eyes were closed, and he wasn’t moving at all.

That seemed to remind everyone else that the child was still there, and the goggles girl asked, in a worried voice, “Is Grogu dead?” and a collective wail rose up from the group as everyone burst into tears again.

“He’s not dead,” Din said, raising his voice to be heard over all the crying. “He’s just sleeping. Everyone needs to calm down.” He was trying for “slightly stern” but must have overshot, because the crying only got worse.

Sighing, he stood up and managed to find the kid’s backpack and gently maneuver his snoring body into it, and stash him safely on a seat to sleep off his Jedi powers hangover.

“All right,” he said, turning back to the other kids. “No more crying. Everybody’s fine.” He gave them a minute to compose themselves, which they actually did, to their credit. When the tears had subsided to random sniffles he said, “By now they already know we didn’t make it back, so we’ll just wait here until someone comes to get us. We’re together, and we have shelter. We’ll be fi--”

There was a sharp CRACK and the ship suddenly tilted to the side, sending everyone sliding against the hull. Din only just managed to get a hand out and stop the kid from rolling off the seat. The smell of smoke and red hot metal began to fill the hull.

“Wait here,” Din said, grabbing his rifle. “No one leaves the ship. Understood?”

They all nodded, and he ducked back into the hole where the cockpit had been to see what the hell was happening now.

“That’s not good,” Din said to no one but himself and the dead lavahopper still hanging half off the ship. He was standing under one of the engines, watching what had been the starboard landing gear compartment slowly melt in a pool of hot lava.

The problem was obvious--the weight of the ship plus the weight of the dead lavahopper was causing the crust to crack open, exposing the molten lava underneath. The whole ship was going to be swallowed in minutes, and them with it. They were going to have to abandon it. So much for their shelter.

He did a quick check for anything that looked like it might want to kill him, including cracks in the ground, then cautiously stepped far enough away from the ship to get a good look around. There was nothing here that could be of any help to them: no plants, no fauna, no wood, no water. They were going to have to travel across the lava plains on foot to reach anything.

There was an outcropping not too far in the distance, and the scope revealed what might have been a small opening in the rock, hopefully a cave. It was their only option for shelter. He’d just have to hope there was nothing living in it already.

When he climbed back into the ship, goggles girl was ready with the good news, as usual. “We’re gonna be burned alive,” she announced.

“We are not going to be burned alive,” Din said, irritated. Not only was the doomsdaying getting a little old, but he was starting to take it personally. “I’m going to keep us safe until someone comes to get us, but we have to stay calm and work together. Got it?”

There were some nods, some mumbled words of agreement. Not exactly the buy-in he wanted, but he’d take it. They were going to have to get organized to evacuate, and if it also kept their minds off what was happening, all the better.

“Dux,” he said, pointing at the pale kid. “I need you to find the emergency kit. It should be a red box, probably in one of the compartments in the rear.”

The Mythrol was next. “Otik, you get some of the seat cushions and put them in a pile by the door, at least one for each of you. This is a passenger ship, so they should be detachable.”

“Jee’da,” he said, turning to the Twi’lek girl next. “You find some blankets or cargo nets, anything we can use to carry stuff.”

There was only one kid left without a task. “You, with the goggles,” he said to the morbid girl. “Karpa, right?”

“Yes,” she said, standing up a little straighter, like a soldier awaiting orders.

“I’ve got a special job for you,” he said.

Her expression brightened and she leaned forward eagerly. “What is it?”

“I want you to go get my knife.” It was still in the lavahopper’s eyeball.

“Ew,” Otik muttered, but Karpa looked, predictably, thrilled by this assignment.

“Just be careful climbing up there,” he called after her, as she darted around him toward the cockpit.

The rest of the younglings followed suit and got to work, too, trying not to slip in the bloody puddles on the floor as they moved around the passenger compartment. Jee’da seemed to be fine, not suffering any lingering effects from her injury, which was reassuring.

Din checked on the kid, who was still snoring away, and then got to work himself. He tore the panel off the wall of the privy closet and was pleased to see the water tank for the sink was half-full, so at least they would have water. He yanked it out and tied off the hose to seal it up, and by the time he’d finished that the kids were done with their assigned tasks and were standing around the pile of supplies they’d scavenged, complaining about the stink from the lavahopper’s tail, which had dropped into the lava and was burning.

“Everyone get your backpacks,” he said, sending them all scrambling to find them. “We’re leaving.”

Watching Otik shove his datapad into this backpack made Din remember the one the teacher droid had given him, so he retrieved it from the locker, fired it up, and navigated to the message function. This one had a much longer list of available recipients than the child’s, so Din chose the school, then decided this was not the time to worry about etiquette and went back and selected everyone on the list.

He tapped out a short and to the point summary of what had happened and sent it on its way, only to be instantly greeted with ERROR: CONNECTION UNAVAILABLE. Maybe the thing needed to be near a hub or mainframe in the city to transmit messages--Din wasn’t sure how the system worked. Whatever the case, it was another dead end. He tossed the datapad into the pile of stuff they were taking with them.

The kid was starting to wake up already, eyes half open, when Din picked him up, backpack and all, and strapped him to his front. He climbed out onto the nose of the ship and then dropped down to the ground, hopeful he wouldn’t break right through, but the crust seemed fine, nice and thick, and the cracks radiating from the hole under what was once landing gear hadn’t gotten this far yet.

After that it was just a matter of directing the younglings to lower the supplies down to him using the cargo net, and then catching them one by one as they jumped down. That was where the power of distraction started to wane a bit, as they all stood under the nominal protection of the ship’s nose, staring out into the lava flats. There was a whole lot of intimidating emptiness out there, and probably more things that wanted to kill them.

Din looked around, scanning the sky and the land. He detected no other life forms, but the lavahoppers had come out of nowhere, it seemed. He and the kids would be exposed to attack out in the open until they got to the rocks, but they had no other choice. Staying with the ship was a death sentence.

“We’re gonna head for that cave over there,” he said, pointing toward it. “I’ll protect you, but we have to move fast. Understand?”

“It seems pretty far away,” Otik ventured, squinting in the direction of the rocks.

“It is,” Din said. No use sugarcoating it. “And we need to make it before the suns go down, so we have to go now. Everyone carries something.”

They weren’t taking much, so it didn’t take long to divvy it up. He gave Dux the emergency kit, and then had Jee’da and Karpa pile the cushions in a cargo net and gave them each an end to carry.

“And you,” he said, handing the kid--who was still half-drowsing in his backpack--off to Otik, “You carry the baby.”

“Ok,” Otik gulped. He looked down at the child like he was holding a detonator, which was just what Din wanted. If something went wrong while they were out in the open, best to have the kid in the worrywart’s hands. He’d try to save his own hide, and the kid’s in the process.

Lastly, Din grabbed the ends of his cape to make a sling on his back next to the rifle and put the ship’s water tank in it. The load was uneven, and the water sloshed when he moved, exacerbating it, but he’d managed worse.

“Ready?” he asked, giving everyone a once-over. No one looked particularly enthused by the idea of heading out into the lava flats, and Din couldn’t really blame them, but they all nodded.

“We’re ready,” Karpa said. She pulled her goggles down and set them over her eyes with a little snap.

It was Dux who stepped out from under the ship first and then paused, tipped their head up and flicked their tongue out like they were tasting the air. Maybe they could. Din didn’t rush them, curious to see what they’d do next. The youngling looked around, gave a few more tongue flicks, and then nodded at Din, apparently satisfied that there was nothing dangerous nearby. Handy skill, if that’s what it was.

Din walked a short ways away and used his knife to scratch an arrow into the rock, pointing toward the cave, should anyone find the wreckage before the lava consumed it. Then he waved the rest of them out into the open and got them moving.

It was hot out on the lava flats, and tough going. Unlike the nicely groomed path through the Crystal Sea, the ground out here was rugged, uneven and slippery, and pockmarked with holes and crevices, some with steam coming out of them, and striped with fissures of molten lava.

His main fear was that someone would break through the crust. It seemed plenty stable, not giving at all under their feet, but he made them travel with a bit of distance between each child, just in case. He was probably the one at most risk, being a full-sized adult wearing armor and carrying a water tank, and if he died, they would all probably die. He knew he should have brought the jetpack.

“You should have brought your jet pack,” Jee’da shouted back toward him at that exact moment, pouring salt directly into that wound. Din thought maybe she had some kind of power that enabled her to zero in on a sore spot and point it out to you.

Every time Din looked back, the ship had sunk a little further into the lava, so he knew it was the right call to leave it, but that didn’t make the walking any easier. The idea of traveling this terrain by blurrg seemed almost luxurious now.

Some of the kids were struggling more than others, and Din stopped periodically to let them rest, using the opportunity to carve more arrows into the ground. He had thought the pale kid would suffer the most out in the open, but they seemed unfazed by it, while Otik the Mythrol seemed to be slowly wilting, looking more and more listless as his face began to take on a purple tinge.

During one rest stop Din noticed the child, now mostly awake, looking up at Otik and then at Din, like he was asking, Are you seeing this?

“Your humidity vest holding up?” Din asked Otik, and got a weary nod.

“Are you still moist?” Dux inquired, asking him basically the same question Din had, but in a much more revolting way. Why was everything that kid said slightly horrifying, Din wondered.

“One last push,” Din said. “We’ll be there soon.”

“Okay,” Otik panted. “One last push.”

The next stretch was the hardest, several lava pools forcing them to backtrack and go around, and for a while it felt like they were never going to get there, but the ground cooled off and firmed up as they closed in on the rocks, and they crossed the last of the open ground at a faster pace.

The kids dropped their burdens in front of the entrance, except for Otik, who kept the child in his arms but sank down to sit on the ground, slumped wearily to one side. Din gratefully set the water tank down, groaning as he straightened his protesting back. His ribs weren’t happy about the current state of affairs, either.

It was a stroke of luck that there actually was a cave and it didn’t turn out to be just a shadow. Din made everyone wait outside while he made sure it was empty, but—another stroke of luck—there was nothing living in it, ready to kill them for trespassing. Just a bunch of sand, some loose rocks, and a few scattered bones that had been stripped clean long ago.

It wasn’t even so much a cave as it was the sheltered lip of an underground cliff that dropped down to a bright orange river of lava below. It was wide but shallow, still big enough to hold them all. The floor of it was flat, and the air was warm, which would come in handy if they were stuck here overnight.

By now the ship they’d left behind was thoroughly on fire, sending flames shooting high into the sky, and rolling clouds of black smoke into the air. Even with the wind taking it the other way, the stench still drifted toward them. They all stood outside the cave for a bit and watched it burn, blazing against the setting suns. If there was an upside to losing the ship, maybe someone would see the fire and come find them.

“Let’s get you guys some water,” Din said finally, after they’d gawked at the fire long enough.

He filled their canteens from the water tank’s hose so they could drink, and took the child from Otik so he could quench his thirst unimpeded, letting each of them have their fill. Din held the kid’s canteen for him to sip from until he had had enough, then helped Otik replenish the water supply in his humidity vest, which seemed to help him look a little less dried out.

The next order of business was clearing away the loose rocks and old bones in the cave so they could get settled before dark. Din set the child down against the wall, where he wormed his way out of the backpack and sat on top of it rubbing his eyes. He’d be hungry now, Din knew. He always woke up ravenous after using his powers, and they’d been walking a long time.

With the kids gathering the materials, Din started making two rock piles at the back of the cave, one on each side of the opening. His plan was to string the cargo net between them to form a barrier at the edge of the drop-off. The last thing he needed was to let someone’s kid fall into a lava river.

“A skull!” Karpa exclaimed, holding up a dusty skull she’d uncovered in the dirt. “What do you think it is?”

“Probably a meerkat,” Din said, hazarding a guess based on the size and shape.

“Deeboo?” the kid asked worriedly, looking over at Din.

“Not our meerkat,” Din told him.

“You have a meerkat?” Otik asked. He was definitely acting more lively now that he’d had some water, and his color was returning to normal.

“Buh!” the kid said, and it was pretty clear the other younglings had gotten the hang of decoding the child’s sounds, because the questions came pouring out: “What’s its name?” and “Can we see it?” and “Grogu should bring it to school!”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Din said, with absolutely no intention of letting Meerkat go to school. He could only imagine the havoc. “Someone bring me the cargo net.”

A short while later the cargo net was strung up, a lot of the bones seemed to have made their way into Karpa’s backpack, and Din had set his lantern up in the center of the cave so the kids could arrange their cushions around it. Night had fallen with the usual swiftness he was used to on Nevarro; it was already fully dark, and they had a long night ahead of them.

The child had moved to Dux’s lap while Din’s was unavailable and was for the moment happy to sit and wait to be fed. Dux was sitting stiff as a statue, staring over the top of the kid’s head at the lantern on the ground.

“You fine with holding him?” Din asked, because he honestly couldn’t tell.

“Yes,” Dux said. Their tongue flicked out into the space between the child’s ears. “His scent is earthy.”

“Good to know,” Din said, as neutrally as possible.

Now that they were all settled, he flipped the hasps on the emergency kit and checked it out. The container was only half-full, like some of the stuff had been removed, or used and not replaced. What was left was a standard assortment of medpacs, some rations, a couple of crinkly disposable blankets, and what he was really looking for: an emergency beacon.

Unfortunately, the kit had not been well-maintained and when he turned the beacon on the indicator light only blinked for a minute or two before it slowly faded and died. He could only hope it had actually transmitted a signal, and done so long enough for someone to pick it up.
Maybe it would give a rescue party a general idea where they were. The beacon in the ship certainly wasn’t going to be of any use right now.

The rations were still in good condition, at least, and not expired.

“All right,” he said. “Lunches in the middle.” He opened the kid’s backpack and upended it next to the lantern, and then nodded at the other younglings to follow suit. Din wasn’t the only one who had overdone it when packing the lunch box this morning, and everyone still had a little something left. Din tossed the emergency rations onto the pile as well, and then divided it all equally between the kids, who immediately undid all his careful portioning by trading with each other.

The kid wanted to sit in Din’s lap while he ate, so Din sat down in the circle around the lantern with him, lowering himself gratefully onto the child’s abandoned cushion. Today seemed to have undone all those hot soaks. His spine felt like it was made of gravel.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Jee’da asked, noticing there was nothing set aside for him.

“I’m not hungry,” Din said, which was his standard answer. Led to fewer questions than saying he couldn’t eat in front of anyone, and usually worked, as long as someone like Cara wasn’t there to ruin it with the truth.

His stomach chose that moment to growl--unlike the kids, he hadn’t had lunch. But he was used to going long stretches without eating, and it was a quiet growl. No one heard it.

Almost no one. The kid looked down at the malmac bun in his hand, then up at Din, then back at the bun. Then he lifted his hand and offered it to Din.

It wasn’t necessary, and Din didn’t need it, and he didn’t even really like malmac buns all that much, but he popped his helmet and lifted it enough to take a bite, aware of what an enormous gesture this was coming from a child who ate everything that wasn’t able to get away from him. And Din had been working on encouraging him to share.

“Thank you,” he said after he let his helmet fall back into place. As he chewed, he realized all the kids except the one in his lap had stopped eating and were staring at him.

“What?”

“Don’t you ever take that off?” Jee’da asked him. He wasn’t surprised at all to get the question from her. She was eerily perceptive for a kid.

“Yes,” he said, and then shook his head when he was offered another bite of malmac bun. They were worse than he remembered. “But not in front of anyone.”

They all turned to look at the kid. “You’ve never seen your dad’s face?” Karpa asked in clear disbelief.

“Buh!” the kid said, and shoved the rest of the malmac bun into his mouth.

“It’s forbidden,” Din said, declining to elaborate.

They all looked like they wanted to ask him more about it, but no one actually did, which Din found a little surprising.

“Well, the man who fixed our air purifier said he didn’t care what you looked like under your helmet,” Jee’da said finally, like she was trying to boost his self-confidence. “So I guess people will still be your friend, no matter what you look like.”

“That’s...very nice,” Din said. “Anyone want some more water?”

When they were done eating, Din stood watch for a bit at the opening of the cave while the younglings huddled around the lantern and entertained themselves. Despite all they’d been through that day, there was soon a constant stream of laughs and happy sounds filtering into his helmet, which made what he was looking at feel a little less desolate.

There was nothing else alive out there that he could see, which was a good thing, given their last encounter with the local wildlife. But there were also no ships in the sky, no sign of any rescue parties. If no one found them by morning, he’d have to decide if they were better off staying put and waiting for rescue, or trying to walk out. He wasn’t thrilled by either option.

More pleasant was watching the kid with his classmates, which made Din feel that he’d done the right thing in letting him attend the school, even if it was doomed to be short-lived. He obviously adored the other kids, and they were all kind to him, including him in their games even when he couldn’t really participate.

Din was doing another scan of the surrounding area when a familiar tune plucked at his brain, and he turned back toward the cave, where the younglings were singing a song. The child was cheerfully warbling along with his own version of the lyrics while Jee’da held him in her lap and moved his hands with hers, animated motions to match the words:

Four little greepers jumping on the bed
One fell down and cracked his head

Din recognized it immediately--not the words, but the tune. It was the song he’d been tapping along to every night for weeks, not knowing there was more to it than an idle tune. He hadn’t realized the child had been trying to play with him, to teach him this game he enjoyed so much, so they could do it together.

As the pieces clicked into place in his mind he was blindsided by the same rush of feelings he’d had the night of the dream about his parents, so intense it made him swallow hard against the sudden urge to cry. He stood still and made himself feel every bit of it, watching the child’s hands move, listening to his tiny giggles, aching inside with how badly he wanted him to be happy and safe, always.

The game ended with one final, loud clap. Din walked over to the younglings, who were barely paying attention to him, discussing what song to sing next. The child was watching the conversation with interest, idly clapping his hands together even though the greeper song was over. He didn’t notice Din, either.

“Grogu,” Din said.

The child’s head tipped back instantly to look up at Din. “Bahtoo?”

The other kids were watching Din now, too. He sat down on the empty cushion, knee protesting a little but not enough to make him stop, and leaned over to take the baby from Jee’da, turning him in his lap so he could hold onto his little hands. He tilted his head at the other children. “Show me.”

There was a second of silent surprise before they picked up the song, but once they got going they clearly enjoyed the novelty of teaching Din the hand motions that went with the words.

He let the kids carry the tune--no one wanted to hear Din’s singing voice--but he knew the rhythm of it well enough by now, and the hand motions were simple to learn. It was a reverse counting song, like the one they’d sung on the ship, though thankfully it did not start with so many greepers.

After a verse or two he had it memorized, and managed to get through the other eight renditions without having to pay too much attention to anything except the warm weight of the child in his lap, how fragile the bones in his wrists felt in Din’s grip, and the obvious happiness in his voice as he hooted along with the song.

When Din brought their hands together for the final clap, the kid shrieked delightedly and turned in Din’s arms, digging his feet in to climb up Din’s belly until he could hug him around his neck.

Din cupped the back of the child’s head with his hand, holding him close. “You like that, huh?” he said, laughing a little. The kid was practically quivering with excitement. Din was trembling too, but for a different reason. “That your favorite song?”

“Buh!” the kid said, leaving no doubt.

“Thank you,” Din said to the other younglings. They had no way of knowing what they’d just done, and Din had no desire to explain it to them, but that didn’t make him any less grateful.

No one protested when Din declared it bedtime. He helped the younglings arrange the cushions into a bed near the back of the cave, where it was warmer, with their backpacks for pillows. There was some jockeying for position as Din got them settled, because everyone wanted to sleep next to the child, but Din eventually solved that problem by lifting him out of the pile completely, making everyone lie down, and then letting him choose his own spot.

Once everyone was in place he opened up the packets of crinkly blankets for them to share, but they were so old they disintegrated in his hands. He knelt down and detached his cape and spread it over the younglings instead. It was filthy from the events of the day, but better than nothing at all, and they weren’t much cleaner themselves, anyway.

“Are we going home in the morning?” Otik asked softly, peeking up at Din over the frayed edge of his cape. “I miss my mom and dad.”

“You’ll be home soon,” Din replied, not wanting to put a timeline on it. He could feel the other children looking at him. They were all probably lonely for their families. “I’m sure they’re out looking for us.”

Once he’d tucked his cape securely around them to keep out any drafts, he settled with his back against the wall near the entrance and turned the lantern off. There was a faint orange glow coming from the lava river at the back of the cave, enough to stop it from being pitch dark. He intended to stay awake and keep watch, but they’d never know that.

The child was, unsurprisingly, the first to abandon the cushions, toddling over to climb into Din’s lap, snuggling down to sleep in his arms. Din thought the beskar couldn’t be that comfortable, and Jee’da had confirmed that fact, but the child never seemed to mind, was just as happy to cuddle with Din in the armor or out. This was not the time or place to take any of it off. They’d both have to deal with it.

Dux was next, pushing one of the cushions against Din’s outstretched legs so they could curl up on it, propping their backpack against Din’s knee. Jee’da took one look and shuffled over with her cushion and backpack, too. She took a spot on the other side.

“You might as well come over here,” Din said, when he saw the other two were sitting up, looking his way. “Bring his backpack with you.”

Otik and Karpa brought over the rest of the cushions, Din’s cape, and the kid’s backpack, which Din used to pillow the child’s head against the armor. While the other younglings sorted out who got which spot next to Din’s legs--negotiations that rivaled the previous “who gets to sleep next to Grogu” debate of a few moments ago--Din moved his rifle out of the way, but left it within reach, just in case.

Once everyone was in their spot, Dux helped spread Din’s cloak out again to cover them all. They looked like a pile tooka kittens.

Din relaxed back against the rocks, thinking now everyone would finally go to sleep, but they weren’t done with him yet.

“Can you tell us a story?” Otik whispered.

“Yeah, we need a bedtime story!” Karpa enthusiastically agreed.

Din had never once told anyone a bedtime story in his entire life, and every single heroic tale and inspiring fable he’d ever heard deserted him at that moment. But now they were all on board with the idea. Even the kid was looking up at him expectantly. He was going to have to improvise.

Din cleared his throat. “There was a bounty hunter,” he began, trying to quickly decide what job could best be adapted to story form. “He was on Tatooine, and there was a krayt drag--”

“What was his name?” Jee’da interrupted.

“Uh,” Din said, drawing a blank. Calling him “Mando” seemed too obvious. “His name was...The Bounty Hunter.”

“You’re not trying very hard,” Otik said, voice dripping with disappointment.

“Is this story about you?” Jee’da asked, clearly suspicious.

“Does anyone die in this story?” Karpa asked, yawning, like she wasn’t going to bother to stay awake for it otherwise.

“Absolutely,” Din said. Tusken Raiders, banthas, eventually the dragon. If the kid wanted death, she was about to get her fill. “Do you want to hear it or not?”

“I guess,” Otik said grudgingly, like he was some kind of connoisseur of bedtime stories, lowering himself to listen to Din’s less-than-stellar attempt.

“Please continue,” Dux said. “The violence will lull us.”

Din had no doubt that was true for Dux and Karpa, anyway.

As Din worked his way through the tale of The Bounty Hunter Who Was Absolutely Not Din Djarin, the child sat in his lap mouthing the mythosaur pendant, occasionally interjecting with an emphatic noise, like he was helping to tell the story. Din decided to let the kids think it was because he’d heard it before, not because he’d lived it.

Din’s delivery tended to be forthright and to the point, and he found himself trying to elaborate more to draw the tale out a little longer, because he didn’t have it in him to do this twice. Jee’da and Otik dozed off halfway through, but Karpa was still listening raptly, occasionally asking for more gory details.

“Is it true they spit acid?” she asked, when Din got to the dragon fight part of the story.

“Yes,” Din confirmed. “A lot of it. And you don’t want to get in the way of it.”

“The flesh will sizzle,” Dux said, staring at Din with their black eyes.

“Right. Uh huh,” Din said, suppressing a shudder. Dux had actually been the most drama-free of the kids through all of this, which Din was grateful for, but their word choices were...really something.

Eventually he reached the part where he killed the thing. The child did not like that part at all, huffing derisively when Din told them about getting swallowed by the dragon, but Karpa, predictably, was intrigued.

“What was it like inside?” she asked him, eyes bright with curiosity. Everyone had long given up the pretense that Din hadn’t actually done this himself. “Did it smell?”

Dux, as usual, was there to tag in with, “Was there mucus?”

“It was hot, and it smelled, and there was a lot of mucus,” he told them, trying not to think about how long the stink had lingered on his clothing and equipment. Getting swallowed by a krayt dragon was not something he’d recommend.

By the time he got to the discovery of the pearl, they had all succumbed to sleep except for the baby, but even he looked like he wasn’t going to last much longer.

“Time for sleep, buddy,” Din whispered to him, giving him a finger to hold onto, which he sometimes liked to do in the night.

“Muh,” the child said muzzily, blinking up at him.

“You need to get your rest so you grow up big and strong,” Din said, something his parents had said to him often when he’d been in revolt against bedtime.

Din didn’t actually know if the child would get bigger. It was easy to forget, most of the time, that he was already older than Din was, and would presumably outlive Din by a wide margin. Knowing this child had altered the course of Din’s life forever, but would the child even remember Din, once he was grown? He was so little now.

There were surely dozens of moments he’d be likely to remember about their time together, scary things, exhilarating things. Moments of violence and pain. Din knew well enough how firmly those could lodge in a child’s memory, much more tenaciously than the happy times. Maybe, though, the child would also remember the man in the beskar who had learned the greeper song for him.

The baby was still silently watching him, eyes stubbornly open.

It wasn’t exactly a soothing lullaby, but it was the only song they both knew, so Din hummed it softly under this breath until the child’s eyes drifted close and his grip on Din’s finger loosened.

Din sat perfectly still in the golden glow of the lava river, anchored by the soft warmth on his lap, against his legs, and in his heart.

The nightprowlers were nearly silent, just like the last time. And just like the last time, they attacked with speed, landing at the mouth of the cave in a flurry of leathery wings, jabbing their sharp beaks into the opening.

Din bolting to his feet woke all the kids up and they scattered, confused and frightened, tripping over the cushions, his cape, and themselves, until Din could shove them all behind him and thrust the little one into Otik’s trembling arms. Someone had accidentally kicked his rifle out of reach, and when he lunged for it he almost lost his arm to a snapping beak.

“Get back!” Din yelled at the kids, then, “Not that far back!” as they all careened into the makeshift cargo net fence at the back of the cave. He had no idea how much force it could withstand, but it wasn’t likely to be the weight of four kids and a baby.

The cave entrance wasn’t big enough for the creatures to get inside, but the cave wasn’t deep enough for Din and the kids to get out of reach, either. Din drew his blaster and fired a shot into the nearest nightprowler’s mouth. Unlike when he tried it on the daytime version, this time it did drive the thing back, a gurgling noise coming from its wounded throat. It stumbled backwards, wings flapping like it was trying to take off, but it failed, flopping onto the ground, blood gushing from the hole in its throat.

There were still three of them remaining, and Din had two detonators left, so he thumbed one and tossed it out of the cave, where it landed right under one of the creatures.

“Duck!” he yelled, turning his back to the entrance. He dropped down with his arms over his head, hoping the kids would mimic him. He had just enough time to glance over to see that they had, Otik hunched protectively over the child, before the detonator went off, blowing chunks of nightprowler in all directions and bringing most of the cave entrance down in a pile of rocks.

The sound was horrendous and terrifying, and the screams of the kids were choked off by coughing as a cloud of black lava dust filled the cave. Outside, one of the creatures was shrieking in pain, so at least one was wounded in addition to the one he’d blown up.

“Stay down!” he told the kids as they rode out the tail end of the collapse. Small rocks continued to thud to the ground and ping off of Din’s beskar, sending up more plumes of dust, as the debris started to settle. He could still hear the wounded nightprowler outside, and inside the cave at least one kid was crying.

Din slowly pushed himself up to standing, shaking off the sand and pebbles. “Don’t move,” he said to the kids. All was silent outside now. He hoped he’d managed to take all three nightprowlers out with the detonator and some help from the falling rocks. He also hoped they weren’t trapped in the cave now.

Some good luck--the entrance wasn’t completely blocked. There was still an open spot on one side, big enough for him and the kids to squeeze through. He hated the thought of being out there in the dark, especially if there were more of those things around, but he didn’t trust the cave anymore. The whole thing could have been destabilized, and come down on them at any moment. He edged slowly toward the opening, blaster at the ready.

The nightprowler struck suddenly, its giant head plunging through the opening and ramming right into Din, knocking him backwards onto his butt. He tried to get his blaster up for a shot, but it swung its head and knocked him over, sending the blaster skittering away in the sand. Rocks started to break free from the pile blocking the entrance as the creature tried to force its way in, triggering a small landslide inside the cave. A rock bigger than Din’s head thudded to the ground, rolled right past him, and crashed into the cargo net, pulling it over the cliff, leaving the kids cowering on the edge with no barrier.

Din had one last detonator left, but he really didn’t want to use it. It could bring everything down, killing them all. Instead he reached for the flash charge, which would pack an extra punch on the thing’s nocturnal eyes. All he wanted to do was get rid of it long enough to get his rifle.

“Cover your eyes!” he yelled at the kids, and when the nightprowler came at him again he squeezed his own eyes shut and set it off right in the thing’s face and then blindly dove out of the way. He heard the creature howl, and the clatter of more rocks falling as it thrashed in pain. A rock bounced off Din’s helmet with a clang that left him disoriented for a moment, feeling like the ground was spinning beneath him.

When he opened his eyes again the nightprowler was gone, but he could still hear it moving outside. He rolled onto his belly and started crawling toward his rifle, or where he hoped his rifle was, at least. It was probably sheer luck he put his hand right down on it. He gave it a yank to dislodge the dirt and rocks covering it, and checked to make sure it still worked. All good.

He had just staggered to his feet with it in his hand when he heard the distinct whine of a ship’s engines, and then the even better sound of cannon fire. Help had finally arrived--hopefully.

“What is that?” one of the kids asked shrilly.

“It’s ok,” Din yelled back. “I think it’s the rescue party. Just sit tight.”

Din sidled up to the opening in the rocks until he could see outside. The area in front of the cave was lit up like it was daytime by the ship’s lights, the flash from the laser cannons giving everything a surreal strobe effect as the ship hovered in the air and fired on the nightprowler. Din recognized the ship as one he’d seen around the landing field before. They’d been found.

The nightprowler screamed and thrashed as the ship fired on it again and again. Din watched it take a shambling step backwards, and then it collapsed on the ground right in front of the opening, blocking his view, and didn’t move again.

Din leaned against the wall of the cave and slowly sank down to sit in the sand, rifle still in his hand, wincing at a pain in his shoulder that hadn’t been there a few minutes ago. He heard the ship land and the engines power down, and then Greef’s voice.

“Mando, you in there?” he yelled from behind the dead nightprowler. It was blocking most of what remained of the cave entrance--no one was getting in or out until they could move it.

“We’re all here!” Din shouted back, and heard what sounded like several people cheer.

“Hang on, we’ll clear the entrance,” Greef said. “Are the kids okay?”

Din rolled his head to look at them, huddled together at the back of the cave, clinging to each other. They were dirty and bedraggled, Otik was missing a shoe, most of them were crying again, and Jee’da had dried blood all over her face. But they were all alive. He was probably in the worst shape, actually, but what else was new.

“A little shaken up, but okay,” he said, setting his rifle aside and stretching his legs out in front of him--his hip didn’t feel so great, either. No sooner had he done so when the child barreled into him, wanting to be held. Din picked him up and cradled him in one arm while he swiped at the dust covering his visor with the other.

While the rescue party worked on dragging the dead nightprowler away with the ship’s winch, Din stumbled around the cave and gathered his cape and his blaster and his lantern, then got all the kids’ backpacks on. They never did find Otik’s other shoe.

And then, just like that, they walked out of the cave into the circle of light from the ship’s floodlights, where Greef and Cara and a whole bunch of other people Din didn’t know were waiting for them.

The scene around them was absolute butchery. Din had actually taken out two nightprowlers with that detonator, and there were pieces of them strewn everywhere, limp pieces of their guts shining in the floodlights. The other two were still mostly whole, but just as dead. The sand under Din’s feet was soaked with blood, and the smell was disgusting. The child, observing the scene from the comfort of Din’s arm, gave a judgmental huff at the stench.

Greef was standing with his hands on his hips, shaking his head.

“What could go wrong?” Din said pointedly, gesturing at the carnage.

Greef snorted with laughter. “Only you, Mando,” he sighed. “Only you could end up on a field trip that turns into a bloodbath.”

“I’m just glad you got here when you did,” Din told him.

“Buh!” the child agreed.

“We got here as fast as we could,” Cara said. “We picked up the emergency beacon, but it stopped transmitting before we could do more than narrow down your location. When we got close enough, though, the ship started picking up the kids’ datapads.”

“Power pack on the beacon was dead,” Din said. “I tried to send a message with the datapad but it wouldn’t go through. I didn’t know the datapads themselves could be tracked.”

“Not over long distances, but once we got close enough we picked them up.” She gave him a once over, taking in the blood and the dirt. “You okay?”

“Blood’s not mine,” he said. He was sure to be beaten black and blue under his armor, and felt a bit like he’d been pulled limb from limb, but overall he’d escaped relatively unscathed, especially given what he’d been up against.

The rescue party had lined the children up to sit against the rocks and were handing out blankets and hot drinks, checking their vital signs. Din saw one of the medical personnel frowning at Jee’da, turning her head from side to side, searching for the source of the blood on her face. Another turned and gestured toward the kid, still snug in the crook of Din’s elbow.

“He’s fine, but he’ll take one of those drinks,” Din said, hefting him upright so he could drink without spilling.

“Buh,” the kid said, taking the offered cup in his hands and giving it a sniff. Din leaned wearily against the rocks and listened to him gulp down his drink, waiting for everyone to get organized so they could get the hell out of here. He was tired.

Greef wandered over and reached out to touch the child, giving his foot a little tug. “You had quite the adventure, didn’t you?” he said to the kid, who couldn’t be bothered to take his face out of his cup long enough to acknowledge him.

“You’ve got some work to do if you’re hoping to attract tourists,” Din said to Greef, nodding at the dead nightprowlers.

“I hate those things,” Greef scowled, kicking aside a random bloody chunk of bone with his boot.

“Me, too. And I’m not fond of the daytime version, either,” Din said. “That’s what took us down. Then the lava field ate the ship.”

Greef’s eyebrows shot up. “Good thing you had your rifle with you. I stand corrected,” he admitted.

“You never know,” Din agreed, and refrained from mentioning that he hadn’t even used it once.

An eternity or two later by Din’s reckoning, the rescue personnel were finally packing up their equipment and getting the weary children up and moving, preparing to leave. The kids looked even smaller than they actually were with blankets draped around their shoulders. Dux’s hair was flattened on one side, and Karpa had a cracked lens in her goggles.

“Let’s get you younglings home,” Greef said, clapping his hands. “I bet Mando took good care of you, but you probably want to see your families.”

“I asked him if he ever killed anyone and he said yes,” Karpa volunteered.

“Still going with the brutal honesty approach, I see,” Cara said, but she was smiling at him.
Some of the rescue party were choking back laughter, others exchanging horrified looks.

“Mando, these are kids,” Greef groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers.

The ship they took back to the city was roomy and comfortable, and barely half full, even with the rescue party in it, too. Din wondered where it had been that morning.

There was a cluster of overjoyed and tearful parents waiting when they landed, and Din winced to himself. He’d been so focused on keeping everyone alive and in one piece that he hadn’t given much thought to the adults back home and what they might be going through with their children missing. The wait must have been agonizing.

If he hadn’t volunteered to chaperone for this trip, and the group had come back without the child, Din would have burned down the whole planet to get him back—it wasn’t in his nature to deal with that kind of thing with anything but immediate action and brute force. He had committed violence for the child before, and would likely do it again. Another reminder that these people weren’t like him. The gulf between them seemed to widen even further.

The other younglings raced down the ramp into their parents’ arms, Din bringing up the rear, carrying the child. Everyone was talking at once, and hugging. The kids, now that they were home safe, were suddenly wide awake, and more elated than scared. They all seemed eager to talk about what had happened.

“Grogu’s dad saved us!” Otik yelled, before he was even off the ramp, running toward his parents, both Mythrols.

Jee’da was indeed half Twi’lek, on her father’s side. Her human mother was actually one of the parents Din recognized from the mornings outside the school, one of the adults who had tried to include him in the group. She was crying happy tears as Jee’da bounded into their arms, covering her face in kisses.

“He never takes off his helmet! I asked!” Jee’da said, like she was delivering important intel. She frowned at her mother, who was cupping her face in her shaking hands. “You said his voice makes you tingle, but that didn’t happen to me at all. Mostly when he talked it seemed like he was annoyed.”

Jee’da’s father turned toward her mother with his eyebrows--or what passed for Twi’lek eyebrows, anyway--raised, looking amused. Her mother glanced at him and laughed nervously. Din looked away and acted like he hadn’t heard, for everyone’s sake.

Karpa had two human mothers waiting for her, arms around each other. “He blew up a nightprowler and its guts went everywhere,” Karpa informed them, clearly relishing all of it.

“They glistened,” Dux added, from where they stood between two people who were immediately recognizable as their parents, because they looked like larger versions of Dux, and were just as pale. The whole family practically glowed in the dark.

“And I found a skull!” Karpa bragged, digging around in her backpack for it. About six other bones fell out in the process. One of her mothers immediately knelt down, picked one up, and said, “Oooh, a femur!” That jogan hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

Once all the hugging was over the adults turned their attention to Din, approaching him. “Thank you,” they said, one after another, a few of them clutching his hand tightly in gratitude. He was at a loss as to what to say in return, aside from, “You’re welcome.”

One of Karpa’s moms hugged him, so quickly he wasn’t ready for it and just stood there with the kid trapped between them and his free arm pinned to his side. She didn’t seem to care at all that he was coated in oil and dust and blood.

“We’re so lucky you were there,” she told him through a watery smile, and several other parents nodded, or made sounds of agreement. When she swiped at a tear on her cheek, her fingers left behind a smear of grime from Din’s clothing.

“Greef Karga told us the kids were fine as long as they were with you,” Jee’da’s father said, now carrying her in his arms. Her head was resting on his shoulder, one hand clutching the front of his shirt. “We were all hoping that was true.”

“I’m glad I could help,” Din said, a little overwhelmed by the thought of these people, who barely knew him, waiting here in the city, putting their faith in him to bring their children back alive. Maybe he was the strange bounty hunter guy standing around staring at everyone most of the time, but today that had worked to everyone’s advantage.

Otik’s mother descended on him next. “Your baby is adorable,” she said, making nonsense sounds and wiggling her webbed fingers in the child’s face.

“He doesn’t like nose boops,” Din warned her, just in case. She looked like a nose booper.

“Awww,” she said. “But his nose is so cute!”

“They are so precious when they are fresh from the loins,” one of Dux’s parents chimed in, making Din grimace inside his helmet. Dux clearly came by it genetically. Din really was dying to know which planet these people were from.

Din let Otik’s mother take the baby, and the parents all passed him around, gushing over him while they talked. Din wasn’t normally a small talk kind of person, but with all of them eager to profess their gratitude, and marvel over the child, it was only polite to go along with it.

“Dux talks about Grogu often,” one of Dux’s parents said, which was surprising only because Dux didn’t seem to talk much at all compared to the other younglings.

“He likes Dux as well,” Din said. “They seem to be good friends, and I was glad to have someone watch out for him.”

“Otik drew a picture of them riding a bantha. Show Grogu’s dad the picture,” Otik’s dad said to Otik, who obediently shrugged out of his backpack and got his datapad out.

“Otik was very helpful,” Din told Otik’s father, after he’d admired the picture. “Both to me and the baby.”

Otik smiled bashfully as his father gazed upon him with pride. “He’s a good child,” Din said to Otik’s parents. “And has a kind heart.”

“Oh,” Otik’s mom said quietly, looking like she might start crying again. Otik’s father put his arm around her and gave her a comforting squeeze.

This was the kind of conversation, standing around chatting about their kids, Din had heard outside the school, but never participated in before. It was like getting a glimpse at another version of himself, one that would never really exist except in this moment, this stolen sliver of time where he and the child were living a life that was otherwise not possible for them. A gift from Greef Karga, from the universe, from all of these people, children and adults, who had made it possible. A taste of what could never be.

But it had been a long day for everyone, and soon all the younglings were starting to look a bit wilted. Jee’da was practically asleep on her father’s shoulder. Even the kid, who had been wallowing in all the fuss being made over him, started leaning sideways in Karpa’s mom’s arms, reaching toward Din and making the fussy “eh eh eh” sound that meant he wanted Din to hold him. Normally he’d be in bed already, snoring with Meerkat.

“He’s getting tired. He wants his dad,” someone said in a fond voice, and everyone turned to look at Din, who stepped forward in silence, for fear his voice would shake if he tried to speak.

The child always wanted Din when he was tired or afraid or sad, just as Din had turned to his parents when he was small, and why wouldn’t he? These people saw what Din had denied himself all this time.

The baby quieted once he was back in the crook of Din’s arm, holding tightly to Din’s thumb, but it was clear it was time to leave. “Time to go,” Din told him. His voice was rougher than usual, but no one seemed to notice. “Say goodbye to your friends.”

Din had meant that more in a “wave goodbye” way, but each of the children approached, and Din had to hold him so he could lean down and accept hugs and head pats, and even a tongue flick on his forehead from Dux that made him laugh.

“Thanks for letting me pull your knife out of the lavahopper’s eye!” Karpa said to Din after she’d hugged the child. “That was awesome.”

“You’re welcome,” said Din. “You did a good job.” Not only had she retrieved it for him, she’d cleaned it off, too.

“Karpa is very knowledgeable,” Din said to her mothers. “Especially about the lavahoppers.”

“She’s definitely fascinated by deadly creatures,” one of her moms said warmly, the same one who had admired the femur.

The families were already starting to disperse, moving toward the city gate, holding tightly to their children. At the last second, Otik came back for a second pass, walking unevenly due to the missing shoe, and surprised Din by hugging him around his waist. Din hadn’t been hugged as much in his entire adult life as he had in just the last eight hours.

“Your dad is cool!” Otik said to the child, and then hobbled away after his parents, backpack bouncing against his humidity vest.

Din laughed as he settled the kid back in his arm. “You hear that, kid? Your dad is cool.”

“Buh!” the kid said.

Din was bending over to pick up the kid’s backpack, which had been abandoned on the ground, when Greef walked over. “I’ve got good news, Mando. My people found your parts today while you were gone. The Razor Crest is ready to go.”

Din slung the backpack over his shoulder and hefted the child up so he could burrow under Din’s helmet with his face. He felt one little hand clutch at his cowl, right under his chin, and he very well could have been digging his claws into Din’s heart, based on how it made him feel.

“That...is good news,” Din said, trying to keep his voice steady, and not really succeeding. And it was good news. It should have been. It didn’t feel like it, entirely. But this was what he’d been waiting for. “We’ll leave in the morning,” he said, thinking of how, against his better judgment, they had become settled in the little house and accumulated so many things. That would all need to be dealt with before they could leave.

It was always going to end like this, something Din had known, but increasingly pushed further and further into the back of his mind. But there could be no more stalling. Even though the child was not a Mandalorian, Din had always tried to model Mandalorian values for him--to be respectful, to be brave, to keep his word. Now, there could be no shying away from the final, most painful demonstration of what it meant to keep his word: giving the child up to the Jedi.

“Stop by before you leave and we’ll settle up,” Greef said before he walked away, leaving Din standing alone on the landing field with the child snuffling into his neck.

He wants his dad, one of the other parents had said, and with four little words had made Din realize that while the other parents had maybe been intimidated by him, they’d never thought he wasn’t fit to care for this child. They had always seen him as Grogu’s father, even when Din himself hadn’t. So had the seamstress, the other younglings, and the child himself. Din was, perhaps, the last to realize.

His tone and bluntness--bedside manner, Cara had called it--was sometimes too much for the other kids, but the child wasn’t fazed by it at all. And what had been an extraordinary, and at times terrifying, event for the other children was just another day in the life for Din and the kid. They weren’t the same as the other younglings and their parents, in a lot of ways, but that wasn’t a bad thing.

The kid needed an adult to protect him and help him find his way back where he belonged, someone willing to fight whatever came their way in the process. Din needed a child who didn’t care about his parental lapses and his pointy hugs, and wouldn’t shrivel at the way he spoke to them. Somehow, they had managed to find each other. Right now he was the perfect father for this kid, and it didn’t really matter if he’d be a miserable failure parenting any others.

It was exhausting work, and at times had left him reeling, but for everything he had done for the child, he had been given a far greater gift in return. Din had spent decades in this armor, perfectly happy to let it keep everyone else out, but the child had found his way in, had crawled inside it with him, gotten through to the flesh and blood mess that lived beneath the beskar.

He had burrowed his way right into feelings Din had long forgotten, soft ones from his youth, buried by grief and hardened by a life lived under the Creed. It was terrifying and horrible and overwhelming, it had made Din vulnerable, and it would cause him pain when it was over. But it had changed him for the better, and he’d never let himself regret it.

Soon, this would all be over, and he’d have nothing but memories of the way the child felt nestled under his chin, a few earnestly produced craft projects, a smear of green paint on his glove. All destined to wear away eventually. But what would never change was this: for a time, he had been a father. He had provided a child safety and comfort. He had loved, and been loved in return.

“Let’s go home,” he said softly, patting his kid on the back. He got a sleepy answering coo in reply, and they turned and headed home one last time.

The End