The Whole Way

by balloonstand

Summary:

Din Djarin thinks of the Armorer's words often enough that he has memorized them: "By Creed, until it is of age or reunited with its own kind, you are as its father. This is the Way." And Grogu is with his own kind. Din is no longer as his father. This is the Way.

Din wishes that he was the Jedi. He wishes he could pour himself into the Jedi and live his life with Grogu. He can't stop thinking about the Jedi.

When he’s watching the cloaked figure on the screen with that glowing blade, his only thought is: so that’s Jedi. He can’t muster up a feeling about it that’s loud enough to be heard over the smothering hollowness inside of him. That’s Jedi, and Jedi is coming for his child. 

And that’s as it should be, he says to himself. He tells it to himself like he always tells himself this is the Way. 

When the Jedi pulls back his hood, Din feels a prickle of a feeling brushing up on the edge of his hollowness. Like feeling a bug crawling on his skin during a gunfight. Vastly and wholly unimportant, but registered nonetheless. 

He can’t stop looking at the Jedi though. He wants to pour his whole being into that man- that’s right, he is a man. When the Jedi was a figure on the screen he was only the myth and the rumor of the Jedi, but when he pulls his hood back, he is a man. Real, living. And Din wishes he was the Jedi. He wants to have that glowing sword and all those unknowable powers- powers that his child needs to learn. He wants to be the one to cut his way effortlessly to Grogu and to lift him out of danger. 

He does not want to be himself. The one with empty arms and the permanent memory of helplessly watching those dark troopers carrying the child into the heart of the remaining Empire. 

He wishes the Jedi was an Iyra, a Geonosian, a Fosh, a Wookie– even a damn Mon Calamari. Anything but this, a Jedi who is a man in the same way that Din is a man. Who invites comparison that Din could never compete with. 

When Grogu reaches for his face and Din pulls his helmet back, he knows that it’s only an echo of the Jedi pulling back his hood. Everything he can ever do for Grogu now is a shadow of what the Jedi will do for him. But Grogu’s hand on his cheek is so real and so precious to him that he does not think about that. His eyes fill with tears and his heart speaks to Grogu’s, even though neither of them say a word aloud. 

He won’t come any closer to the Jedi. He sets Grogu on the ground and lets him decide when it is time for him to go. He can’t look down when he feels his child’s little hands tugging on his pant leg. 

He looks at the Jedi instead. He wears no armor because he needs no armor. His build is lean and compact. He is serene and polished. The ordeal of eliminating a platoon of dark troopers is not enough to even ruffle his hair. 

The Jedi gazes back at him and Din – with a shock so acute that the feeling is more physical than it is emotional – realizes that the Jedi is looking at his face. No helmet. The Jedi is seeing his eyes, his nose, his ears, his mouth, his jaw, his hair, his tears. Every movement, every little expression. His throat. 

The hand holding his helmet twitches, like he might shove it back onto his head. But that erases nothing and Din wants Grogu to be able to take a last look at his face when the Jedi carries him away. 

He and the Jedi share a gaze until the Grogu covers the distance between them and the Jedi bends down to pick him up. He looks at Grogu curiously, with kindness and warmth layered blatantly beneath it. Din can almost see himself in the Jedi’s place, Grogu in his carrier and the lifeless robotic shell smoking on the ground beside him; this is his own meeting with Grogu played out on a grander scale, with dark troopers instead of a small hideout of mercenaries. 

Din watches his child until the door closes between them- no, until the moment just before the door closes between them. At the very last second, his eyes rise to the face of the Jedi. The Jedi is looking back at him with those cool, deep eyes. 

----

Later, when he has settled with Bo-Katan everything that Mandalore needs them to settle, he goes looking for information about Luke Skywalker. He tells himself that everything he learns is part of a passive collection of gossip and legend, that people are talking about the war hero and he just happens to overhear it. But he goes looking for it. He travels inward from the Rim to chase down an ex-pilot who flew in Luke Skywalker’s squadron when he destroyed the first Death Star. He doesn’t tell the man that’s why he settles down on this particular seat in this particular cantina. He gets the story he came for anyway. Everyone who has known Luke Skywalker wants to talk about it. 

When he learns that Luke Skywalker grew up on Tatooine, he goes back to the planet and stays there for the longest he has stayed anywhere in years. A few times, he takes a speeder to the burnt-out wreck of Luke Skywalker’s childhood home and sits there until the suns go down. He heard from a scholar on Yag Dhul that the old Jedi connected to the force through meditation, so he tries to pacify his mind and reach out. 

It’s a coincidence – sheer luck – that he’s on Bestine when Luke Skywalker’s sister arrives to inspect the new embassy. It is unlike him to stray so far from the Outer Rim. But there were things to learn, and he had let the information-dense Corellian trade spine draw him closer and closer to the heart of civilization until he was within earshot of the face of the New Republic. 

The Face of the New Republic’s honor guard doesn't like the look of a Mandalorian in full Beskar, it is plain to see. They let the magnetic threat of him pull them out of formation. The Face is exposed to the north, and if Din had two more allies with him, they could eliminate the Face and make a clean escape to top it off. Then he sees the saber dangling from her belt and he knows that the Face will never be wholly vulnerable, no matter the inattention of her honor guard. 

He keeps his hands visible and his movements subdued as he gets closer to her. Light arcing off of his armor catches her eye and she does that double-take that everyone does when they first see a Mandalorian. She takes a long look at him, then waves away her guards, who reluctantly but silently back away. 

“Are you him?” she asks him without preamble or explanation. 

“Am I who?” Din asks back, but he already knows. 

“Luke told me about you. Every time the New Republic seizes a light cruiser, Luke talks about the Mandalorian who commandeered one practically on his own.” She smiles and shakes her head in amusement, but her eyes are sharp, sizing him up like she’s trying to decide if he really is that dangerous. 

Din doesn’t know what to say to that. He lets the helmet speak silently for him. 

“He also said you have brown eyes,” she says. She lets her gaze rest conspicuously on his helmet. Din feels his shame rear up in his chest, feels the crush of the disappointment of generations of Mandalorians. 

“How is the child?” he asks quickly. 

Her words vividly conjure Grogu before him. He is well, she says. He is a handful, a sweet and stubborn little adrenaline fiend who hasn’t learned all of his manners yet. He got a diplomatic party to Nothoiin in trouble because he kept summoning food off of their Commander’s plate when he wasn’t looking. He is loved and watched over and cared for. 

Din can’t wipe away his tears through his helmet, so he has to feel them roll down his face. The tear tracks will be itching his cheeks for the next few minutes until they dry.

“You can visit him you know,” Leia tells him. “You can visit them both. Luke wants to know more about the man who kept Grogu safe for so long.” When he doesn’t answer she says, “He went to Nevarro and talked to Greef Karga about you.”

Din knows even less what to say to that. Her guards are moving in his peripheral vision. They are getting antsy. He nods to her respectfully. “It was nice to meet you.”

“I meant it, Mando. You can visit Grogu.”

----

He crash-lands on an empty planet that has nothing but fossilized spires, and it’s a bad situation. The ship is trash – it was trash when he bought it and now it’s trash that can’t even fly. He leaves it behind, taking only the silver ball, a data stick, and his weapons. He didn’t have any rations left on board. 

He’s not sure what leaving the ship gets him, but staying with it makes him feel even more trapped here. He always manages to find his way out of tight spots. 

He climbs a spire to get his bearings, and then just sits there. He hasn’t sat still like this in a while. Probably not since he camped out in front of Luke’s old home on Tatooine. He pulls out that silver ball and rolls it around in his hand. He holds it out in front of himself, willing Grogu to appear and pull the ball from his hand with those powers of his- the Force. He stays like that until his arm aches and he’s worried he might drop it off the spire. 

He climbs down and goes back to the ship to sleep. 

He dreams about them. Luke and Grogu, standing in front of him. Luke is holding the child with one hand and reaching out to Din with the other. Grogu has one hand on Luke’s arm and he’s reaching out to Din too with the other. Din reaches out his hands to them, and sees that he isn’t wearing his gloves. He isn’t wearing any of his armor, nor his helmet. He tries to take a step toward them, and he wakes abruptly. 

The dream felt so real, but when he wakes it’s only him, his breathing echoing around the room. Din lays back down and closes his eyes. He tries to hold onto the image from the dream. Grogu’s big eyes. How little he is. Din just wants to wrap his arms around him. He thinks about Luke too. His hand, reaching out for Din. His ungloved hand. Din wants to wrap his arms around him. 

Din’s eyes snap open and he jolts upright. He slides out of bed and shoves his helmet on his head. 

He goes looking for something he can eat, and discovers that this planet may not have intelligent life on it, but it does have big, huge life. Life that is half the size of his ship, and with big, huge teeth and claws. Din has his armor, his blaster, the darksaber, and his spear. Might be a fair fight, he thinks as he turns heel and sprints away. 

He’ll probably have to find out. He can slip through small openings and dodge around tightly-packed spires that the beast cannot, but it continues to hunt him. The jet pack would be nice right now, but it ran out of charge days ago. Din needs to get himself on defensible ground before-

There. He won’t get a better option than this. A series of smaller spires form a tight circle that he can move in and out of when he needs shelter. He draws the darksaber and ignites it, the blade growing out of the handle. 

He targets the beast’s legs first. He dances in and out of his protected circle, trying to flow with the grace of that figure on the screen with the glowing green blade. Jedi Master Luke Skywalker had no wasted movement. Din tries to economize his own movements the same way. A blow needs to be a dodge at the same time. A block needs to spring into an attack. He pushes, retreats, strikes, ducks, blocks, all as one. 

And he gets hit, too. He almost doesn’t mind. It sends him flying each time; he’s like a doll to this beast. His body is aching and his head is spinning, but he doesn’t mind. And there’s no dent in the Beskar. He jumps up each time ready to chase that fluid, graceful style of fighting once more. For each hit that the beast lands on him, he manages five strikes of his own. 

He has tried to do this before. Back on Gideon’s cruiser, he downloaded the footage of Luke fighting the dark troopers to the data stick and pocketed it. He has rewatched the fight countless times by now. During the upheaval on Mandalore with Bo-Katan, he tried to replicate those movements that he had memorized with the saber, but he was never challenged adequately. He never needed more than a few strikes to end a fight. 

This is the challenge he needed. This is the enemy who needs to be beaten with a superior style of fighting. This is working. 

This is the Way. 

He stumbles. This isn’t the Way. And that moment when he stumbles is the opening that the beast needed. It rushes him while he is off-balance and pins him to the spire that he was trying to dodge behind. Din can’t breath. He drops the darksaber. His feet kick uselessly against empty air. The weight of the beast is crushing him. Under his cuirass, the silver ball and the data stick that he had tucked into a pouch are pressing hard into his ribs, and he wills his ribs to break before his treasures do. He feels his armor shift and he wonders – as his vision starts to darken around the edges – if it will crack. 

The last thing he sees – or imagines seeing; it’s so hard to tell with his mind floating away – is a faint green glow. 

----

He feels like he is awake, but he knows that he is dreaming. He is laying on an unfamiliar bed, and he can hear Grogu’s little noises of contentment from somewhere nearby. He smiles to himself, pleased to be in this dream. 

Since Grogu had left him, Din had found himself drifting unhappily back into his old silence. He had gotten so used to talking with Grogu, explaining everything to him as Din did it, that he had forgotten that he used to say nothing at all unless it was necessary. Now he has to stop from narrating himself because there is no one there. 

Since he’s dreaming, he doesn’t have to stop himself. He says, “I don’t remember falling asleep, but I must be dreaming.” He reaches out a hand and there’s Grogu. Din rubs his ear between his fingers and Grogu coos happily. Din never wants to wake. He doesn’t even want to open his eyes. 

“You’re not dreaming,” someone else says. 

Din opens his eyes curiously. He is in a bed in a room that he doesn’t recognize. No windows, but it doesn’t feel claustrophobic. Grogu is sitting on the bed, his sweet face the most welcome sight in the world. And across the room, Luke Skywalker leans against the wall. 

Din checks to make sure that his helmet is on. It is. 

“I’m not dreaming?” he says. He looks down at Grogu. “You’re here?” It’s coming slowly back to him. The crash, the beast. The green light. His eyes find Luke’s saber hanging from his belt. “You saved me, didn’t you kid?” he asks, looking back at Grogu. He strokes his ears and drinks in the sight of him. He knows better than to ask how they knew he needed rescuing. He’s so happy to see Grogu that he practically doesn’t notice his shame. 

“Look at you,” he murmurs. “Look at you, look at you.” He puts Grogu in his lap and drinks in the sight of him. Grogu grabs one of Din’s fingers and holds it tight. “I missed you so much,” Din says. His voice betrays all of the emotion that he feels.

When the peak of the emotion has subsided, he looks at Luke. “Luke. Thank you,” he says. He means for Grogu. For saving his life too, but mostly for this moment he gets to spend with his son. 

“It was Grogu’s idea,” Luke says. “He would’ve gone without me if I hadn’t agreed to it.” This rings untrue, but Din can’t put his finger on why. 

Din spends the rest of the day in a happy daze. Grogu shows him everything he has learned of the Force, sending the contents of the ship – they’re on a New Republic ship, it turns out – sending them flying around in a coordinated chaotic display. Din throws something up into the air every time it seems like Grogu might be getting bored and lets him add it to his orbiting detritus. Din can’t believe how much stronger he is now. Even after an hour of this, Grogu doesn’t seem tired. 

All the while he is aware of Luke’s presence. He feels it like he feels the ache in his ribcage. Luke says almost nothing to him, talking mostly to Grogu. And Din does the same. They have their conversation through their remarks to their little ambassador. 

Eventually Grogu does wear himself out. His eyelids and ears droop and Din wraps him up in the blanket from the bed when he’s asleep. Luke steps up next to Din as he watches him sleep. 

“This ship is going to Chandrila,” Luke says. The capital planet. Din doesn’t want to go there. “But we are stopping to refuel on Mataou first.” Din stiffens, unsure if that is an offer or a command for him to leave them at Mataou. “It’s your choice,” Luke says quietly. 

Din wants to laugh at that. His choice. But the sincerity is rolling off of Luke in waves and Din wants to believe him. Do you really want me underfoot? he wants to ask. Do you want a nobody bounty hunter who you just had to rescue, war-hero Jedi?

“Thank you for coming for me,” he says again. 

Luke shakes his head. “I’m not sure you needed it. I saw you fighting that thing. If it hadn’t gotten lucky you would’ve had it.”

Din flushes, remembering how he had been mimicking Luke’s style of fighting. “It wasn’t lucky. It had to fight you.”

They talk idly for the rest of the flight. Mostly telling stories about Grogu, sometimes talking about the recent upheaval with Mandalore or a new peacekeeping maneuver of the New Republic. Din doesn’t ask Luke anything about himself, and Luke asks Din nothing in return. 

When Din hears the landing array begin to grind into position, he returns to Grogu’s bedside to say another goodbye to him. He’s glad that his boy is asleep this time. He touches Grogu’s hand with his finger and Grogu grabs it in his sleep. 

Din swallows around the emotion rising in his throat. "Does he feel like I abandoned him?" Din whispers. He keeps his eyes on their hands. 

"No," Luke says firmly. Din turns his head to look at his face. He wonders if Jedi can lie. Luke's mouth opens and closes. "He misses you," Luke says finally. "He loves you." 

Din looks back to their hands. He strokes Grogu's little claw with a finger. 

"You can stay, you know," Luke says quietly. 

Din shakes his head. "He is where he's meant to be. This is the Way."

----

Walking away on Mataou feels impossible. He walks away. He goes straight into the first cantina he sees and buries himself in enough work to cover the cost of a new ship. It isn’t until he’s sitting in the cockpit that he realizes that there is nowhere he wants to go.

He keeps having that dream where Grogu and Luke are reaching out to him. 

----

A pirate nearly gets his helmet off of him. There were six of them who ambushed him for his Beskar, and one of them had a prod that zapped Din’s armor. Every time he moves it electrocutes him. He is holding his own, but he can’t move fluidly, and that is how he is accustomed to fighting now. 

One of them gets his fingers under the helmet and he’s trying to rip it off. Din grabs him and jumps, letting the kinetic energy of the armor shock the pirate senseless. They’re easy enough to deal with after that. He kills all of them. He had seen the pile of stolen Mandalorian armor they had already claimed off Mandalorian bodies.

When he gets back to the ship he has to take all of his armor off to repair it, his helmet too. There’s no one around to see, but it still makes him feel guilty. He looks at his helmet and thinks that’s me. Isn’t it? This is the Way; he is his armor. He hadn’t even thought of himself as Din in years- just Mando, like everyone calls him. It wasn’t until Gideon said Din Djarin that he even realized he was doing it. When he passed the insignia to Cara Dune and told her to seek out the Mandalorian covert in his true name to enlist their help with the child, that’s the first time he started to think of himself as Din again. 

Unbidden, his mind replays the first time he met Luke. His helmet in his hand by his side. Luke had seen him. Seen him. 

His mind finds another memory: Luke saying, “You can stay, you know.”

----

It feels strange taking bounties again after everything that had happened, but it feels less strange than he thought it would. There is nothing else to do. Sometimes he remembers Bo-Katan saying not all Mandalorians are bounty hunters, some of us serve a higher purpose, but Grogu is safe and there’s nothing else to do. 

He notices how X-wings have left him alone since Gideon’s cruiser. He notices how his chain code draws no attention when he enters a New Republic establishment. With this new blind-eye to his activities, he can linger on the fringe ends of the Core systems. He keeps an ear open for any news from Chandrila. 

A new agent of the Guild gets ambitious and sets up shop in the Abregado system, and Din takes work from him. That agent is the one who summons Din when he gets a particularly sensitive bounty. 

“This better have been worth the trip,” Din says as he slides into the booth. 

“Trust me, you’ll be glad you’re the first one to hear about this,” he says. He activates the bounty puck’s holographic image.

Din looks at it. He looks back up. “I’ll take it.”

“You haven’t even negotiated your price,” the Guild agent says in surprise.

“You know what I charge,” Din says, already getting to his feet. “And don’t give out any more tracking fobs for this. He’s mine.” 

He grabs the fob and flips the hologram off. Luke Skywalker’s face blinks out and Din tucks the bounty puck and the fob into his pouch. 

----

The whole time he is tracking, Din’s gut is in knots and his heart beats so hard he thinks it’ll dent his armor. This sick feeling burrowing into his core- this is how he felt when Gideon took the child. The Guild agent swore up and down he wouldn’t give out any more fobs, but Din doesn’t trust him for shit. Din probably wasn’t the even first one to get the fob. 

He’ll be fine, he’s a Jedi Master. He killed the Emperor, and Vader too. You saw what he did to those dark troopers. Din tells this to himself over and over again. It doesn’t help. He tells himself all the stories he has heard about Luke from everyone who said Luke had saved their life or killed their enemy. It doesn’t help. 

He keeps the puck on, sitting on his controls with the hologram on, so Luke’s face is hovering just to the right of his hands. 

When he sleeps – and he has to sleep, he tells himself, he can’t help Luke if he’s behaving like a rookie on his first hunt who is too invested in the catch to get the rest that he will need in order to make it – when he sleeps he dreams that Luke and Grogu are reaching for him, but this time they are falling. They’re calling for him and he can’t make it to them in time. 

He sleeps less than he should. 

Luke’s tracking fob leads him out into the sticks, some planet that’s technically just barely part of the Outer Rim, but one he’s never heard of. The onboard computer says it’s called Dagobah.

He lands half in a bog, but he doesn’t care. He follows the tracking fob, his blaster drawn and his whole body tense and ready. He tries to look for tracks and other signs that there are already bounty hunters here, but this planet is covered in markings he can’t parse. All he can do is stay alert. 

In the distance, he hears the beep of another fob. He whips around toward the direction it came from. Two figures move between the trees. Sullustans. Din turns off his fob so that the sound won’t give him away. He holsters his blaster and unhooks his spear. Careful of where he is placing his feet, he silently pursues the Sullustans. 

As he gets closer, he recognizes them as the Bruckher brothers. He has only run into them once, when they stole a bounty out from under him years before, but he knew them well by reputation. They weren’t the hunters you went to if you wanted your target brought in alive. 

Din taps one of them on the shoulder with his spear. When he turns around, Din smashes him in the face with the butt of it. He collapses to the ground in a heap. His brother turns around at the noise and Din lunges at him with the spear. The Bruckher jumps out of range and grabs a small orb from his belt. He throws it into the ground and it bursts into a ball of blue energy that expands to hold all three of them. Gravity weakens within the energy sphere and Din finds himself floating into the air. 

He tries to jab at the Bruckher with his spear, but the anti-gravity is making it hard for him to control his movements. He draws his blaster, but not in time. The Bruckher disarms him with a single shot. He fires two bolts at Din, and when they bounce harmlessly off the Beskar, he grins and holsters his gun. 

“We can talk about this,” Din says. 

The Bruckher pulls out an ion blaster, still grinning. “We came prepared for a Jedi, Mando. You think you’re a bigger threat than that?” He pulls the trigger. The ion blast locks up his armor, which he was expecting. He wasn’t expecting the searing heat of it. 

The blue energy wears off and Din slams back onto the ground as gravity returns, landing on all of his new and sensitive burns. He tries to move, but his armor is still locked. The Bruckher lands next to him. He checks his brother’s pulse, then raps on his chest with his knuckle. He sighs. “I’ll come back for you,” he tells his unconscious brother. 

“Wait,” Din wheezes. “You need me. These little tricks aren’t going to work. That Jedi doesn’t need gravity to kill you. He’ll squeeze you with the Force until your bones crack and your organs burst.” The Bruckher looks uneasy and Din presses on. “You haven’t seen what one of these Jedi can do with their sabers. It can cut through anything- anything except Beskar. You need me to distract him for you until you can chain him.”

The Bruckher smiles again, but his eyes are scared. “Anything except Beskar? Sounds like I don’t need you. I just need your armor.” 

“You’ll have to take it off my corpse,” Din growls. The ion blast is wearing off. A few more moments, that’s all he needs. 

The Bruckher still looks scared. He draws his blaster again, and comes up close to press the barrel against Din’s throat. “Agreed.”

The joints of Din’s armor loosen and he knocks the barrel down just in time. He catches the blast in his cuirass and the force of it is like getting kicked in the chest by a bantha, but the Beskar holds up. Din wrenches the blaster out of his grasp and it goes flying. 

The Bruckher curses and draws back. The blaster and the spear are too far away, so Din pulls his knife out of his greaves. The Bruckher takes a handful of pellets from his pouch. He throws them one at a time at Din, each one exploding with minimal force, but a blinding flash that disorients him. And every time one of them explodes, he feels his burns and the bruises from the pointblank blaster shot intensify. 

He only has so many of those, Din thinks. He hunts the Bruckher through the flashes and the bangs. He catches him as he’s scrambling in his pockets looking for his next trick. Din leaves him with his throat cut open. 

Din goes back for his spear and his gun, but they’re both gone. Along with the other Bruckher. Din barely has time to register this when he feels his own spear stab into a small gap between his plates of armor on his side. There isn’t much room, so the spear can’t go deep in him. Din grabs onto it and yanks it out of the Brucker’s hands. No movement wasted, he whirls it around and stabs the Brucker straight through his chest. No movement wasted, he pulls it right back out before the Bruckher has the chance to die from it, and spins around to strike at the source of a sudden noise behind him. 

The Beskar spear strikes against a green lightsaber, sending sparks flying. 

“Luke,” Din gasps. “Luke!” He drops the spear and grabs Luke’s arms with both hands. “There’s a bounty. I don’t know how many hunters got fobs, but we have to get out of here before more show up.”

“Another bounty?” Luke’s face tightens. 

“Another? What do you mean- no, not Grogu. This bounty is on-” Din stops cold. “It’s on you,” he says slowly, feeling so, so foolish. A bounty hunter, racing to the aid of a Jedi knight.

“On- me?” Luke says. “You came here for me?”

It takes him a moment before he can speak. “For- for both of you. If there’s a bounty on you, then you’re both in danger.” He looks around. “Where is the child?”

Luke looks down at his arms, where Din is still holding him. “He’s at the house, come on.”

Din follows Luke through the swamp, trying to step where he steps. Before long, he can see a little hut-looking structure in the distance. 

Before they reach it, Luke stops and turns to him. “Why didn’t you use your flamethrower?”

Din stares at him. “Why didn’t I- what?”

“Your flamethrower,” Luke says. “Or your grappling hook. You could’ve used both of them in the anti-gravity. Why didn’t you use your armor in that fight?”

“We’re in a hurry,” Din reminds him. “Let’s go.”

“I noticed it before, when you fought that thing in the spires. You only used your saber. In the stories I’ve heard, Mandalorians use their armor as a weapon.”

“It’s not just armor, it is part of my religion,” Din says sharply. “And Mandalorians fight with many weapons.”

Grogu is in the hut, eating. When Din walks in, Grogu waves his arms excitedly. Din picks him up and presses their foreheads together. Grogu babbles and holds up the frog-thing that he is eating to show Din. 

“That’s great, kid,” Din says. “You can bring it with us on the ship.”

“We can’t leave Dagobah yet,” Luke says. “There’s something Grogu needs to do first.”

“He won’t be able to do it if you’re both dead.”

“The swamp is dangerous. It will protect us, and anyone who makes it to the house will have to face you and I,” Luke says with finality. 

Din grinds his teeth. He knows he cannot argue with a man who he gave up his child to.

----

Luke joins Din outside, where he is trying to keep watch. They sit silently for a few minutes. Then Luke begins to explain that the hut belonged to another being of Grogu’s species, one of the Jedi who trained him. 

“He taught me how to think and move like a Jedi,” Luke says, “but mostly he taught me the old way of the Jedi order.”

Din had been trying to maintain his aloofness, still on edge and irritated that Luke won’t leave this planet, but he can’t help but lean in when Luke says this. 

“The old Way of the Jedi?” he asks when Luke doesn’t elaborate.

“The code by which they lived and fought. The Jedi forbid attachments. They do not allow their emotions to cloud their judgment. When a Jedi succumbs to emotion, they let themselves become vulnerable to the dark side.” 

“You’re forbidden to feel?”

“No. No, Jedi feel deeply. But we are taught to separate those feelings from our decisions and our actions. We are meant to serve a greater purpose than ourselves.”

Din bites back on an urge to argue. He wants to say how can the Jedi Way be so blind but he tries to understand it instead. Every time he has strayed from the Way or from the code of the Guild, it has been strong emotion tempting him away from it. If a Jedi, with all their power, was to turn to self-indulgence- he can see how dangerous it could be.

This is what he tells himself, anyway. It all sounds false, even in his own mind. This Jedi Way only makes him feel sad. He looks at Luke. It must be such a lonely way to live.

“Even feelings that are good?”

Luke laughs. “Which feelings are good?”

“Solidarity. Compassion, joy,” Din says. “Love.”

When Din says love, Luke looks at him for a moment, then looks back to the house. Grogu’s head is silhouetted in the window. Luke is quiet for a minute, then he says. “Pursuing any of those could lead a Jedi to the dark side.”

Din thinks about this. So lonely, he thinks. This untouchable Jedi. “It must be a difficult thing,” he says, “to take this Jedi creed.”

Luke says nothing. After a while, he goes back inside without another word. Din stays where he is, his eyes and ears attuned to his surroundings, his mind whirling with far-away thoughts. He hopes more bounty hunters come tonight. He is itching to fight.

----

The next day, Luke brings them to a cave. Din snorts when Luke tells him it might be better for him to go back to the house. 

“This is an ordeal that Grogu must undergo alone,” Luke warns him. 

“Then I’ll wait right here.”

Luke doesn’t like it, but he says nothing to Din. He tells Grogu to go into the cave and face whatever awaits him there. Din tenses up next to them. Jedi may not be permitted to act on feelings of attachment, but he will die before letting harm come to Grogu. Luke quells him with a hand on his arm and tells Grogu not to be afraid of the cave. 

“Is he in danger?” Din asks. Grogu tilts his head up at him, smiling. 

“It’s not that kind of test,” Luke says. Din does not relax. Luke sees this and he says, “The cave is close to the dark side of the Force. The dark side will try to tempt him. When I went in, I had a vision where I fought my enemy in anger, and in doing so I destroyed myself. I had to understand that flaw before my training could really begin.”

So, in this cave he truly learned the Jedi way. Din is compelled to step aside and let Grogu enter. 

It takes a very long time, as Luke had warned him that it might. Luke sits in meditation nearby and Din paces at the mouth of the cave, trying to listen for any sounds from Grogu at the same time that he listens for bounty hunters. 

He wishes he knew what Grogu was learning about himself in the cave. He is learning the Way of the Jedi, he thinks, but that makes his heart clench. He thinks of them often enough that he remembers the Armorer's exact words: "By Creed, until it is of age or reunited with its own kind, you are as its father. This is the Way." And Grogu is with his own kind. Din is no longer as his father. This is the Way. 

The ache in his chest is his own fault. He had let himself begin to say wherever I go, he goes instead of saying this is the Way.

He glares at Luke for being able to sit there so calmly. For being an untouchable Jedi who can choose not to feel his own feelings. For being able to follow his Way so easily. For taking Grogu to this place where he will learn how to reject attachment and begin to drift ever further out of Din’s reach. 

"So, you don't love him." 

Luke opens his eyes and looks at him in surprise. "What?" 

"The Jedi Way, it won't allow you to love the child." 

"I love him as you do," Luke says slowly. 

"But you said, when you swore to the Jedi Way-" 

"Mando," Luke cuts in. Din flinches back at that. He has not told Luke his name, but somehow it still surprises him to hear Luke call him Mando the way everyone else does. "Mando, I never swore to anything. I rejected the way of the Jedi. I chose to leave without finishing my training. And I love him, I do."

“You rejected the Way?”

“Yes.”

“But you are still a Jedi.”

Luke lifts his chin. “I am.”

Din stares at him. “A Jedi who rejects his Creed cannot be a Jedi.”

“That is the old Jedi order, and it’s gone now. I choose what it means now to be a Jedi. And I choose to be this.”

Din feels the words brand themselves onto his memory; he will never forget Luke saying I choose to be this. There’s a rising feeling in him that he doesn’t fully understand- he feels like he has to say something to explain himself and his life and his helmet. 

A ship passes low overhead. Not low enough to spot them, Din thinks. But low enough that it is looking for a place to land. Low enough for him to see the Guild markings on it.

“Stay with the child!” he calls to Luke as he runs after it. While he’s still in Luke’s eyesight, he lets the jetpack burn and he flies above the canopy. 

He’s on the ship before it can touch the ground. His Beskar spear could pierce the ship’s engine that is nestled on the wing that he landed on. But he uses one of his charges instead. He will only, only use his armor. Let the Jedi watch that. 

Din uses every weapon on his armor to bring that ship crashing down into the bog. He doesn’t know this hunter; he never even sees them before the ship is a smouldering, sinking wreck. Once the ship has sunk from view, he flies back to the cave. 

Luke is climbing down from a tree that would have given him a vantage that would let him see everything Din had done to the ship. He gives Din a thoughtful look, but before he speaks, Grogu comes toddling out of the cave, rubbing his eyes. 

“Come here, come here,” Din says to him. He scoops him up in his arms. “Can we get off this planet now?” he asks Luke.

Luke nods. 

----

Luke takes the pilot’s seat of his ship, so Din falls asleep in the hold. When he wakes up, Grogu is sleeping on his chest. Din strokes his head and pats him on the back. He doesn’t want to move, but eventually he lifts Grogu off of him so he can go see where they are. He pauses in the doorway to take another look back at the child. Every time he sees him, it feels like it could be the last. 

They’re in hyperspace when he gets to the cockpit. 

“We’ve had some interested parties,” Luke says. He nods at the lightspeed tunnel out the window. “I thought we would try to lose some of them before we go to Chandrila.”

Din shakes his head as he sits down. “I thought you were from Tatooine.” 

“I am,” Luke says, confused.

“You can’t be. You’re too comfortable going to the Core worlds to be from the Rim.”

Luke laughs. Din smiles under his helmet. He’s almost sorry that Luke can’t see it. It feels like he’s hiding something. He forces a little chuckle so Luke will know. 

“You wouldn’t say that if you grew up there. I couldn’t wait to get off that pile of sand. I don’t think I’ll ever go back.” Luke cocks his head at Din. “Is that why you never visited? Because we’ve been in the Core systems?”

Din would go to the heart of the Empire at its peak to see Grogu. “No,” he says. Luke takes a breath and opens his mouth, and Din doesn’t want to hear this question. He quickly says, “Is Chandrila your home now?”

Luke looks at his gloved hand. “Not really. Where is your home? Mandalore?”

Din is looking at Luke’s hands too. “N- uh, no, I’m a foundling.” Luke makes a noise like what’s a foundling? “The Mandalorians saved me when I was a boy, then they raised me in the fighting corps.” 

He doesn’t know why he says what he says next. He says, "Everyone says that Mandalorians are the best warriors in the galaxy, and I thought so too." He remembers the pile of Mandalorian armor in the sewers of Navarro. "Then I met you."

Luke gives a long look and it is the same look Luke had given him on Gideon’s cruiser. Din can’t meet his eyes this time. He looks over his shoulder, back toward the hold. 

“I wonder where his home is.”

“Grogu’s?”

Din nods. 

“I asked him that when he called to me from the seeing stone.”

“What did he say?”

“I’m not sure it is his home, but he did show me something. He showed me a pre-Empire ship. A Razor Crest.”

----

Din has a plan. He is going to make sure that Luke and Grogu are safely settled on Chandrila, then he is going to hunt down whoever placed the bounty. That’s what worked last time. 

When they land on Chandrila, his plan falls apart. The New Republic already has the man in chains, awaiting his trial in a prison that Din is not even allowed to know the location of. It is no big scheme of the Empire, just a lone man acting maliciously. 

Once, during training when he was young, Din had seen another human foundling tear a ligament in his elbow, and his biceps muscle rolled up on itself like a window shade. That is how this feels, like a tether has been cut and he is suddenly useless, smaller, and unnatural. 

He thinks of his ship, abandoned back on Dagobah, and curses. 

He almost leaves without saying goodbye. He’s on his way out of the New Republic building and walking toward the starport when his conscience catches him. Shamefaced under the Beskar, he turns around and walks back to find Grogu. 

When he finds him, Grogu is cross. It’s like he knows that Din was planning to leave without a goodbye. And maybe he does know that, maybe he could sense it with the Force. Din feels that hollowing grief in his chest from their first goodbye. 

“You’re so special, kid,” he whispers to Grogu. “I can’t wait to see what you do. I’ll find you again soon. Believe me, I will.”

Grogu forgives him, and Din leaves without finding Luke to say goodbye to him. It isn’t until he’s back on Dagobah that he finds the comm link that one of them slipped into his pocket. He isn’t sure which of them, or when. 

----

Back to cantina meetings with Guild agents, the bounties and the boredom. The missing, missing, missing. It’s always on his mind, tucked away back in a corner. Like a constant, nagging feeling that he has forgotten something. 

One job sends him to a bail jumper who has amassed a medium-sized stash of Beskar in neat and tidy Imperial bars. Din doesn’t bother bringing the bail jumper in. He leaves the body and takes the Beskar to Mandalore. 

He leaves the whole stash at the new foundry for the foundlings or whoever else might need it, and he declines anything other than a pauldron. He’s been needing one for a few cycles now. The armorer pulls off the mudhorn signet and goes to set it down. Din holds out his hand for it. He wants to hold it. The armorer nods approvingly and hands it to him.

Din sits as the armorer begins his work. He turns the signet over in his hands, running his fingers along the edges absentmindedly.  As the sparks fly and the hammer sings, Din sees blaster bolts and hears explosions. His memories mob his thoughts and he lets them roll over him. 

The mercenary hideout on Arvala-7. Din and the IG-11 getting pinned down and IG threatening to self-destruct. Din jumping on the gun. Blasting a hole through the IG’s head and hearing it fall to the ground next to him. 

There is silence. The armorer has finished his work.

Grogu reaching out of the basket for him. 

Din’s eyes open. He gives the signet to the armorer and watches him graft it to the new pauldron. The armorer puts the pauldron on Din and Din’s mind whirls, trying to understand why he was thinking of his child when he usually thinks of his parents. 

Bo-Katan finds him as he’s leaving. She jogs to catch up with him and she takes her helmet off when she reaches him. Din’s eyes follow her helmet as she tucks it under her arm. He checks her expression for any lingering resentments, but he doesn’t see any. Unless she has gotten more diplomatic, they are on safe ground now. 

“Leaving already?” she asks. There is still no trace of resentment, and Din relaxes. 

“Yeah.”

“You should stay,” she says. “The wielder of the darksaber belongs on Mandalore.” She has to smile to show she is joking because her tone is serious.

“If that’s what you want, you should’ve taken the saber when I offered it to you,” Din says, trying not to sound irritated. He doesn’t want her to ask for it now; he can no longer offer it to her. But she knows this, and she wouldn’t damage the peace by demanding it.

“I told you, there is a higher purpose that Mandalorians can serve than bounty hunting,” she says. 

Din says nothing, letting her waste her breath.

“Mandalore has returned from the brink of extinction, and it needs to feel strong again. It needs a leader who will lend their strength to the planet. The darksaber is a symbol of that strength.” 

“You want it,” Din says. 

Bo-Katan’s eyes narrow and Din sees the glitter of greed in them. But her voice is steady and true when she says, “I have refused the saber scores of times. I would never have sought it out, but then the Imperials purged our culture for the sake of their empire; I have only ever wanted to make Mandalore too formidable to suffer the control of outsiders.” Din says nothing, and she cocks her head to the side. “What if I told you that this is the Way?”

Din clenches his jaw. 

“If I said it was Resol’nare? Our central tenets? Education, armor, language, fighting, tribe- and leader.” She shrugs. “Your armor, do you call it beskar’gam? Listen carefully. Do you hear anyone speaking Mando’a? When was the last time you heard it?”

Din doesn’t say that he wouldn’t recognize it if he did hear it. Other than a few words, he can only read it.

“And leader,” she repeats. “I’ve seen pacifists govern Mandalore and I’ve seen a Sith on the throne. I’ve seen Mandalore turn on itself and eat itself from the inside out. And what about our tribe? I’ve seen the Jedi turn from our greatest enemy to our saviors. I was there, fighting, when our planet fell to the Empire and our tribe was almost erased completely. Everything has changed. And then changed again and changed again. Tell me- what is the Way?”

She holds out her hand with her palm up and nods to the darksaber hanging from Din’s belt. His heart pounding, he unclips it and slowly holds it out to her. She flips her hand over and covers his hand with hers, her fingers closing his around the handle of the saber. “I only wanted to see this in the hands of a true Mandalorian. And now I do.” 

----

Din sits in the cockpit, turning the saber over in his hands. He sets it in his palm and then wraps his fingers around it the way that Bo-Katan had done. He does it again, and again. A true Mandalorian. 

He ignites the saber; turns it off. He paces around the hold of the ship. He sits on his bed and pretends to try to levitate the saber with the Force. He is distracting himself from the loudest and most present thought in his mind: Everything has changed. Tell me- what is the Way?

She had still called him a true Mandalorian after that, and she didn’t believe in the Way. Or she believed in many ways- he can’t tell. She told him that he is a true Mandalorian, and she said it with her helmet tucked under her arm. 

Resol'nare. He had heard some of the covert use that word before when they were speaking of the Way. Education, armor, fighting. Following the purge, only three of the Six Actions were even still possible. So he should cling to these even tighter? Or- was the old Way dead along with the millions of Mandalorians who were killed in the Purge?

For a moment, he lets himself imagine it. If untethered himself from the Way, what choices would he make? Would he take his helmet off? It makes his skin crawl to think about it, so maybe not. Would he put away his weapons forever? The idea makes him laugh. No, he would not. The Way, perhaps, is his way. 

There is something though, a thought that creeps in. If he had not been yoked to the Way, he would not have sought out a Jedi to train Grogu. He would have kept his child for himself, and protected him for the rest of his life. He would still be himself, but he would be with his child. 

And Luke, he wants to see Luke again. He wishes Luke was here now. There is so much that Din could say, that he wishes he could ask. 

----

He tells himself, when I’ve run five bounties, I’ll find Luke and Grogu. When he has run all five, he tells himself, five more. Then it’s five more and he wonders what exactly he’s afraid of. Five more, then I’ll find them. 

He turns the comm link on sometimes. He doesn’t speak, he just opens the channel. He listens to the dead air as he falls asleep. Without fail, those are the nights when he dreams of them most clearly. 

Greef Karga is the one who tips him off about the situation on Kintoni. Trade lines to and from the planet were abruptly severed, and there were whispers of the planet’s old Imperial footholds sheltering some of the remaining Imperial force. 

“I’ll pay you,” Greef says, pulling a drawstring bag from his pocket in demonstration, “just to go see if that’s the case. Not asking you to do anything else. Just go take a look for me. I need eyes that I can trust.”

It feels somehow like a setup, but Din has to trust Greef and he only has two more bounties to go before he said he would go find Luke again. This isn’t a bounty, so it doesn’t count, he reasons. And he just wants to go, in a way that he can’t explain. So he says yes.

He plans on landing quietly in a town near the old Imperial base. He’ll use an old fob to make it look like he’s tracking, and he’ll discreetly gather information from the locals without ever getting too close to the base. 

As he’s circling the town’s landing bay, he sees the plasma cannon on the Imperial base begin to fire. He instinctively barrels his ship, but the cannon wasn’t firing at him; it wasn’t firing aerially at all. There is a small speeder in the distance, zooming toward the base and dodging around the cannon blasts. Both of the base’s cannons are firing. Din can see troopers forming ranks. All for that one little speeder. 

Fuck it, Din thinks. My kind of odds. 

He pulls up out of his landing pattern and flies toward the base. He starts firing off his guns early, trying to draw some of the attention away from the speeder. He grins when both of the cannons refocus on him. Then he swears as he realizes that both of the cannons refocused on him. In a lucky hit, he takes one of the cannons out. He weaves and rolls through the blasts, but the remaining cannon manages a crucial hit on him. 

“I never liked this ship anyway,” Din mutters to himself as he locks the ship into a collision course with the cannon. The silver ball and the data stick are tucked into his pouch, along with his money and the comm link. He opens the door and jumps out into the air. 

He’s grinning again now, savoring the falling-flying-falling feeling of riding gravity down to the planet’s surface, and then burning up, up, up in an arc when he ignites his jet pack. He forces himself to fly lower; he took out the cannons, but they could have other weapons that could hit him up here. 

He flies down low, drawing up even with the speeder, which is now in a sort of holding pattern in front of the base, like its driver can’t find the way in. Din is not sure who or what he was expecting, but-

“Luke?” he yells. “Luke?”

Luke is just as shocked to see him, Din can see that all over him. But he pulls it together and yells back, “I just need to get inside the wall. I can do the rest.”

Din stares at him for another beat, then peels off. “Goddamn Jedi,” he snarls to himself as he lands inside the walls of the base. The darksaber in one hand, his blaster in the other, he begins his work. “No plan,” he grouses as he cuts down two troopers in one motion. “No backup!” he yells as the two charges that he planted at the gate explode, leaving behind a gaping hole. “Thinks he’s invincible,” he tells the cluster of troopers who are being killed by his whistling birds. 

Luke’s speeder comes flying in through the opening in the wall- without Luke on it. Din turns in time to see Luke flipping through the air, then landing with his lightsaber drawn and impaling a trooper in the same movement. “I have backup,” Luke says. “They’re just not here yet.”

Din glares at him for overhearing and for- well, all of it. He channels that into the squadron of troopers who are running in. He is hit in the Beskar twice and once on his arm just above his gauntlet, but he doesn’t even feel it. When the last trooper falls, he turns to say something tactical, but he forgets what he was going to say when he sees Grogu sitting on Luke’s speeder. 

“You brought,” he yells to Luke, “the child?!”

“You used to take him everywhere,” Luke calls back. He uses the Force to fling a trio of troopers over the wall. 

“Not everywhere, not Imperial bases! I’d leave him with friends!” 

On the other side of the fighting, Grogu lifts an Imperial speeder with the Force and brings it down on a fresh squad of arriving troopers. 

“We’ll talk about this later,” Din says. 

That backup that Luke mentioned arrives quickly. New Republic ships roar into the airspace and unload wave after wave of backup. Din grabs Grogu and lets them be brushed off to the back, out of the fighting. He leans up against a wall and checks Grogu for injuries. He’s fine, and Din gives him the silver ball to play with. 

His eyes find Luke in the crush. Even if he wasn’t looking for him, his eyes would be drawn in like a magnet. Everything about Luke is contained, controlled, and tamed. Each precise movement is calculated and he pragmatically, methodically eliminates his enemies. He is like a coiled spring that never, ever releases. Din wants to see him uncontrolled, wants him fierce. His placid expression gives nothing of himself away. 

Din can’t look away from him, and he can’t quiet his thoughts. There is a warmth thrumming through him and each time Luke lunges, stabs, crushes, flips, deflects- it thrums a little louder and a little hotter. 

Right before they breach the interior doors, Luke pauses and looks back across the way at Din. Something slips in his expression and for a moment they are looking at each other with wide, wild eyes, flushed cheeks, and parted lips. Then the mask slips back over Luke’s face and he is a perfect Jedi once again.

----

When the fighting is well and truly over, Din goes looking for Luke. He’s easy to find once Din realizes that Grogu has one arm sticking out and pointing the way to him like a living compass. Luke looks uncertainly at Din and lets Grogu wrap his little hand around one of his fingers. 

“I didn’t really expect to see you here,” Luke says. “Greef told you I was going to take the base?”

“Greef? Why did Greef know- no, he just told me to look into the trade being interrupted between here and Nevarro.”

Luke opens his mouth to say something else, but a sudden quiet falls over the crowd of New Republic soldiers. Din and Luke look up. Princess Leia has arrived. 

She walks over to them, her anger written all over her face and body language. New Republic troops quickly and discreetly begin to withdraw from the hall. Din wonders if he should leave too, but by the time the thought occurs to him, it’s too late. 

“Leia,” Luke begins, but she cuts him off with a look and an accusatory finger pointed in his face. “Leia,” Luke tries again, much more weakly. 

“Don’t even start,” she warns. “How could you be so stupid, Luke? Rushing in here like that, with no-” This time it is Leia who stops short. She has just seen Din. “No support,” she finishes slowly. She takes a long look at Din and then turns to Luke, her irritation flaring back up. “You could have at least shared your plan with me. I’m the commanding officer of this operation, Luke, and you didn’t even tell me that Mando was coming.”

“I wasn’t sure that he was,” Luke says quietly. “And I knew I could breach the gates. That way, we wouldn’t lose men trying to get in.”

Leia takes a deep breath. “You are not an army- you are a Jedi. Act like one.” She looks at Din. “Thank you. Stay as long as you want.” Then she’s gone. 

Luke looks frustrated. “I was only trying to help.”

Din chews his lip, considering. He can understand why Leia is so upset, but Din’s heart is almost glowing with warmth when he thinks about Luke’s bone-headed, single-handed charge on a fully-staffed Imperial base. If it had been any other fool, Din would’ve been disgusted at the arrogance. But with Luke, Din is just happy that he was around to see it happen. Finally, he says, “There is more than one way to help.”

Luke thinks about it, then nods. He shakes his shoulders and swings his arms, like he’s physically shaking off his mood. “Come on,” he tells Din and Grogu. "Let’s see where our commanding officer is bunking her troops.”

----

Din leaves Grogu and Luke to get settled and he walks back to the small town to see if he can buy a ship. He’s tired of not having the Razor Crest. As he walks, he replays the fighting in his mind, trying to remember exactly what Luke did. He pulls the darksaber off of his belt and – without igniting it – mimics some of what he can recall. He leaves shuffle marks in the dirt behind him. 

It’s easier to get a ship than he thought it would be in this little town. They have a clump of abandoned ships from merchants who gave up on them when they broke down on the trade route, and Din has an advance from Greef on the money he is supposed to earn for doing this job. 

Din picks out the one that reminds him the most of the Crest and he settles himself in the cockpit. He toys with the idea of just flying off, but he can’t make himself want to leave. And Grogu still has that little silver ball, so he has to go back for it. He turns the nose of the ship toward the former Imperial base. He lands right in the courtyard, because why not? And Luke is laughing at his audacity as Din walks down the ramp. 

Luke and Grogu have found New Republic accommodations for the night, and Din chooses to spend it in his new ship. He sets up his bunk down in the hold. When he’s done with that, he strips off his armor. He doesn’t usually take it all off to sleep, in case he needs to wake quickly, but tonight he feels safe.

He always does it in the same order: gauntlets first, then he sits and takes off his boots, greaves, and cuisses. He puts them away before taking off his pauldrons. Those get put away too, and Din takes his habitual moment lingering on the mudhorn signet. Then, his cuirass. He takes off his cape and folds it. He takes his gloves off. The last thing he takes off is his helmet. 

He feels so light he can float. The armor is heavier even than it looks, and taking it off is like being on a planet with reduced gravity. It’s like being naked. 

Din begins to put his weapons away in their spots. He hesitates with the darksaber in his hand. He closes his eyes and summons the memory of Luke today. The coiled control tightening around his every move. Din copies the movements. His muscles tense to hold his body under that tightly-held restraint. He practices stopping himself from landing a blow on a bottle, just an inch away. Then half an inch. Then a quarter. At last, thinking of that naked look that Luke had given him, he lets the swing follow through and the darksaber slices through the bottle, spraying its contents out onto the floor. His forearm aches from gripping the saber’s handle, and his body is covered with sweat. 

He sleeps soundly through the night.

----

He finds Grogu and Luke in the mess hall the next morning. It’s the first place he looks for them, and he smiles when he sees that he guessed right. 

Grogu has a dozen bowls clustered in front of him and he is happily eating from them all. When he sees Din, he holds out one of the bowls to him and waves it around. Din takes it from him and sits. “Thanks, kid,” he says. 

There’s no one else around besides the two of them, so Din raises his helmet just enough to bring the bowl to his lips. Luke is looking down at the table. Din drinks it in a gulp and sets the empty bowl down. He says, “So now what?”

“What now, what now?” Luke muses. “Grogu?”

Grogu burbles. 

Din can’t remember the last time he felt so happy. 

Luke takes them to a field nearby and tells Grogu to center himself with the Force. Grogu sits down and closes his eyes. Din glances at Luke to see if he will do the same. Luke unhooks his lightsaber from his belt and makes it float and spin. 

"Aren’t you going to teach him, you know,” Din makes a rolling movement with his hand, “flips?”

Luke laughs. “He’s still so young. I want him to get familiar with the Force before I teach him the–” he makes the rolling motion with his lightsaber “–flips.”

Din smiles, then laughs aloud so Luke will know he’s smiling. 

They stand shoulder to shoulder, contentedly quiet for a few minutes. Din’s smile stays as he watches Grogu connect with the Force, and nature makes almost no noise around them, just the swish of the tall grass. 

It is Luke who breaks their silence. “So, what now?” he echoes Din’s question from earlier. 

Din gestures toward Grogu. “We wait until he’s done, I guess.”

“What’s next for you?”

Din shifts from one foot to the other as he thinks. 

“You’re leaving.” Luke says it as a fact.

“I’m not sure what else I can do,” Din says.

“You could stay.”

Din wants to laugh. “People keep telling me that.”

“I guess at some point they’ll stop,” Luke says. “If you really don’t want to. I just-” Luke pauses to swallow. “I thought you might like it.”

Din is overwhelmed with a sharp desire to take his helmet off, so he and Luke can speak face-to-face. He tamps it down. He says, “I don’t think about it. Luke, even if I did want to, I don’t belong.”

“You don’t belong with the child?” Luke scoffs. 

“With- with Jedi. I’m a Mandalorian.” 

A breeze sighs through the tall grass, making it whisper and dance around them. Luke’s hair is ruffled in the breeze and Din thinks with a pang of that first time that they had met, when not even taking down a platoon of dark troopers had managed to muss his hair. 

Din looks at Grogu, sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed and his ears twitching, like he’s listening very closely to the Force. Din hates that he’s growing accustomed to the heartbreak of leaving him. Hates that he expects to feel it now. 

"The more I see you with him, the less I understand how you let him leave with me."

"I miss him," Din says quietly. It aches to get the words out. 

"I can feel it," Luke says. "I can feel how much you miss him." There is an edge of desperation to his words, like he's trying to convince Din of something.

Din's chest is tight. He has to force each word out. "I miss loving him."

Luke flinches, like he almost moves but catches himself at the last second.

Din says quickly, "Not that I don't love him from far away. I love him all the time. But I miss being able to show him."

"He knows you love him, even when you're not here," Luke whispers. 

"He can feel it? In the Force?"

"He feels it without the Force. It is plain to see." And still, you won’t stay with us. Luke doesn’t say it, but Din can hear those words booming in his mind. Luke’s expression doesn’t change and Din knows the expression on his helmet doesn't change either.

Luke leans in toward him until their shoulders bump. Din swallows and looks down. He tries to memorize everything that Luke just said. 

Din and Luke stay exactly where they are until Grogu is finished. Din goes to pick him up as soon as his eyes open. Grogu taps Din’s arm. He looks down and sees Grogu looking with concern at the blaster bolt wound there. Din had almost forgotten about it by now. “It’s fine, don’t worry about that,” Din tells him. 

Grogu puts his hand over the wound and screws his eyes shut. 

“Hey, come on, it’s fine. You don’t have to do that,” Din says. But he can already feel the wound closing and the heat around it starting to fade. He hugs Grogu in against his chest. “Thanks, pal.” Grogu pats Din’s helmet and he pretends not to notice.

Luke grabs Din’s arm and pulls it toward him. He runs the pad of his thumb over the freshly healed area and it sends warmth shooting up Din’s arm. Din wonders for one empty-headed second if Luke is using the Force, but no, that’s just his own reaction to feeling Luke’s skin on his skin. He stays still and lets Luke turn his arm back and forth. 

“He healed you?” Luke asks, in awe. “How?”

Din frowns. “With the Force,” he says. “How else?”

Luke looks at Grogu with wonder in his eyes. “I didn’t know that was possible.”

Luke is quiet for the whole walk back to the base. Din wonders who he is thinking about- who he would have healed if he had known that Jedi can do that. 

----

When he looks for Luke and Grogu the next morning, he finds only a note: 

So you don’t have to make this choice again. 

Din sits alone in his cockpit for half the day, trying to decide where the fuck to go next.

----

Din learns regret over the months that follow. He thought he had known it before, but that was only a handful of sand in comparison to the desert that he finds himself in now. 

Every day, he thinks of a score of things that he should have said instead of what he did say. He builds intricate scenarios in his mind where he gets the chance to explain himself better. He keeps the comm link on at all times now, not that he has been hailed on it yet. 

And he keeps working. He takes bounties, collects on them, and takes more bounties. Greef jokes that he hardly needs other bounty hunters with all the work that Din does for him. Sometimes when he says this in front of too many of his other hunters, Din gets a surprise visit from one of them in the middle of the night and he does his work on them too. 

And he starts taking off his helmet every time that he’s alone. Every time he takes it off, he feels like he’s dancing on the cliff’s edge of an epiphany. But he never quite knows what it is. The frustration keeps him awake at night, tossing and turning. 

When sleep does find him, his dreams are dense and confusing. Luke talks with Mayfield about the old ways, and the Imperial officer from the rhydonium refinery chimes in with taunts about order and peace. Grogu heals Din’s parents and Din flies over all of it without his jetpack. 

Every morning he dons his helmet, even when it feels neck-breakingly heavy. 

----

He does finally try the comm link, only to find that it doesn’t work properly. He thinks at first it’s because he’s so far out on the Rim. He had tracked a bounty all the way out here and is going home empty handed. 

It was one of those bounties that hunters like him called ghost bounties. They were old, at least a decade old mostly, and if you took one, you were probably hunting down a ghost. But finding proof of death still lets you collect on the ghost bounty. So when work is slow-coming, Din will go look for a ghost. 

He had tracked the ghost all the way to this system and then hopped between planets looking for leads. Ghost bounties were never quick work. This time, however, it’s quicker than Din expected; he was ready to sink two months into this fool’s errand. But he had gotten word on his third week of a man with a farm just up the road who matched that description. 

Din had walked the distance between the farms, wanting the man to have plenty of warning from his neighbor. He had expected to be met with a drawn blaster, or the back of a fleeing fugitive, but the man had just been sitting on his porch. 

“Suppose you’re here for me, Mando,” he had said. When Din didn’t reply, he had gotten to his feet slowly. “Could I have a moment- to say goodbye?” Din had nodded, and followed him into the house. 

A woman and three children were huddled together. The family fell into a hug and Din had to look away. One of the children was crying, and telling Din that her father used to be bad but now he was good. 

“It’s not his job to care about that, sweet one,” the man had told her, wiping up her tears. “He’s just here to help keep order in the galaxy.”

And Din’s blood had run cold. What people really want is order. He had pulled the man outside and pointed to his little finger. “I’ll just take that.”

“Proof of death?” the man had asked, his expression like the sun dawning. “That’s all you want?”

The farm seemed like the most peaceful place imaginable as Din had stood with that man on the porch. Din had gone for the knife, but changed his mind and drew the dark saber. “Like your little girl said, people change.” The saber had cauterized the wound as he made it. 

Din had run the whole way back to his ship, had gone straight for the comm link. And now he’s sitting there laughing at bad luck. He messes around with it until it lets him send and receive pre-recorded messages. He connects it to the hologram link on the ship and records a message for Luke: 

“I fixed the comm link. Not sure where I’m going next. Tell Grogu hello from me.” And he sends it before he overthinks. 

----

He gets a message back the next day, while he’s still flying back to a Guild outpost. Luke’s hologram-blue face and shoulders blink into life and Luke’s voice says, “Took you a while. Not good with all of the fancy Core systems tech, huh?” Luke’s smile takes up the whole message. 

And that’s how it is after that. Din spends all day looking forward to Luke’s reply so that he can reply back to get Luke’s next reply. He starts getting a physical reaction every time his comm beeps telling him that Luke’s message is waiting for him back on the ship. His heart beats faster and his hands start to sweat in his gloves. 

Din tells Luke about the ghost bounty, but otherwise they don’t talk about where they are or what they do. Luke talks abstractly about the politics in the Core systems and more concretely about Leia’s ideological tightrope walk between political leader and Jedi. Din tells Luke everything about his day that he used to tell Grogu. 

“Can I ask you something?” Luke says when Din is on Tatooine. 

“Sure.”

Din’s on Ord Cetus by the time he gets Luke’s message: “I’ve met other Mandalorians.”

“Not a question.”

Din is surprised when his comm link beeps again that same night. He opens the message right away.

“They weren’t wearing helmets,” Luke says. "And the first time I met you, you weren’t wearing one either. But Greef Karga told me that you would die before you took it off.” 

Din heart is beating fast. No, it’s beating slow, and each beat is twice as long as it usually is. “Not a question,” he half-whispers. 

Only a minute later, Din gets another message. “Can you explain it to me?”

Din doesn’t know anymore. He says, “This is the Way. Not every Mandalorian lives by the Way.”

“But you do,” Luke says quietly.

Din swallows around the familiar rush of shame. Somehow, it’s a smaller swallow than he’s used to. “It is the Way.” Silence stretches out as he tries to think of what else to say. Eventually, he stops the recording and sends it.

It’s only a hologram, and a prerecorded message at that. But somehow Luke’s hologram eyes look at Din intently, weighing something in his thoughts. Then he says, "You've been in love before, haven't you?"

Din stiffens. His mind grinds to a halt as he grasps for an answer that won’t come to him.

Luke doesn't wait for an answer anyway. His next message comes rushing in and he says, "When you were in love, you loved them unconditionally, didn't you? And you found yourself loving everything about them, right? They would do things that would've irritated you to death if someone else had done them, but since it was- since it was them, you didn’t mind. And you even loved them for it, because it’s them. That's why I can't accept absolutes. There are forces in the galaxy that are too transformative."

Din is paralyzed, pinned by his words. His finger hovers over the record button. 

"It's comfortable to think that there's a correct way to live your life. That if you can follow certain rules, you will be living correctly. But then you start loving someone for things that would annoy you in other people and you see that there's nothing that is unassailably true all the time."

Din waits to record until he can control his voice and keep it steady, "You mean like the old Jedi Order?"

Luke tilts his head, sending scanlines ripping down the hologram. “Like the old Jedi Order. Like the old ways of the galaxy under the Empire and before it. Like,” he takes a deep breath and very gently says, “like the Way, perhaps.”

Din can’t agree with him, but he won’t lie to him either. So he says nothing. 

“Or perhaps not,” Luke says after a few minutes. “That’s up to you, Mando.”

“Din.” He sends the one-word message. 

Long minutes pass as Din waits for Luke to send him a reply. When it comes, Luke’s smile is a balm. “That’s up to you, Din.”

----

New bounties start appearing within the Guild. No fobs or pucks, just a general bounty posted by the New Republic calling for any Imperial officers that Guild members can find. It’s a new kind of hunt, and Din latches onto it with both hands. He wants it to mean something, that in a slanted way he works for the New Republic now.

And he’s good at it too. His reputation grows quickly enough that when he walks into a Guild cantina on an Outer Rim planet he’s never been to, the Guild agent holds up his hands in defeat and says, “I don’t have much money on hand. I can’t pay all of your bounties, Mando.” 

Din doesn’t let it break his stride. “You sure?” He slides into the booth.

The Guild agent pats his vest down. “The Jedi cleaned me out.”

Din feels, for a moment, like he is falling. “Jedi?” He keeps it all out of his voice.

“A Jedi Knight,” the Guild member says smugly. “Didn’t catch his name, though.”

The falling feeling rolls over him again and when it has passed, Din laughs. And laughs. He drops his collected Imperial stripes on the table between them and says, “Open a credit line. I’ll be back.”

----

Once again he finds himself asking about Luke Skywalker wherever he goes. This time, though, he travels deeper into the Rim rather than away from it. This time, though, he doesn’t pretend that he isn’t asking about Luke. This time, though, every story he hears feels like a step closer to Luke and not a blow from him. 

He hears on Toola that a Jedi had been tracking there, but left empty-handed because he hated the cold. Din strikes up a conversation on Horuz with a bartender who tells him about a Jedi who had taken on five Imperial platoons on his own. Din knows it must be an exaggeration, but he blooms with pride at the awe in the man’s voice. He’s back on Tatooine for repairs when he gets laughed at by a hunter who he had just asked if he knew anything about a Jedi.

“That’s funny,” the hunter says. 

“Why?"

“This time it’s a Mandalorian asking about the Jedi. Last time, it was a Jedi asking about the Mandalorian.”

Din thinks that no one has ever understood him like Luke does. And he thinks that maybe no one has ever understood Luke like Din does. 

----

Din goes back to Nevarro. He has been down in the sewers since Gideon’s siege on the city, and there hadn’t been any sign of the Armorer. But he goes back now anyway, because he wouldn’t know where else to begin to look for her. 

She isn’t there. No one is there, except for Din. He closes his eyes and tries to remember the sights and sounds of these tunnels when they were full of the Tribe. He can’t. His lone footsteps echo around him. 

Din kneels in front of her forge, as he used to do while she prepared his armor or his weapons for him. Both armor and weapons were sacred, and an armorer was their conduit to each Mandalorian. It had been his duty and his honor to kneel here as she had worked. The muscle-memory of that honor and duty makes his throat want to close up around and swallow down the words that he came here to say. And she isn’t even here. But Din knows he has to say them anyway. 

He begins quietly. “You told me once that to choose to be a Mandalorian, I choose to be both hunter and prey. I accepted this. You told me that to choose to be a Mandalorian, I choose to wear this helmet and never let a living being see me without it. I accepted this. You told me that to choose to be a Mandalorian, I choose to seek out a new guardian for the child. I-” his voice cracks. “I accepted this. I accepted everything because you told me that it was the Way, and that to choose to be a Mandalorian, I must obey the Way, always.”

As a memory, Din can see her there, standing impassively before him. He can see her hammers in her hands. He stands so that his eyes are level with hers. 

“If we try to live off of the fruit of dead trees we’ll starve. We can’t live by the Way of an exterminated civilization. We have to build a new one or we’ll never live aboveground, we’ll never get out of the sewers. We have to choose what it is to be Mandalorian now.” He takes a breath. “I have to choose. And I choose this.”

Perhaps there is more to be said, but Din feels light enough to float. So he turns and walks away. He does not plan to come back.

----

Luke is waiting for him in the cantina. Din shouldn’t be surprised, and in a way he’s not. But it would never do to overestimate his understanding of the Jedi, Din thinks and smiles to himself. 

When he sits down, Luke touches his arm in greeting and leaves his hand there. The warmth of Luke’s hands heats Din’s whole arm, his heart and his cheeks. He brushes his hand along Luke’s knuckles and lets his hand come to rest on the table. 

“Where’s the child?” he asks. 

“At the school.” Din gives him a look and Luke shrugs. “He wanted to go.”

Din thinks of the blue cookies that Grogu had been eating the last time Din picked him up from that school. “Can’t imagine why.”

“I never went to school,” Luke says, smiling. 

Din thinks of the training he had gone to as a child and a teenager. He thinks of Resol’nare and its demand for education. He thinks of Luke being trained as a Jedi on Dagobah. He says, “Me neither.”

He and Luke smile at each other and Din is about to make himself laugh to make sure that Luke knows he is smiling. He changes his mind and instead asks, “Can you tell when I’m smiling? With the Force?”

Luke bites down on his lip but his own smile is uncontainable. “You don’t know what the Force is, do you?”

Din shrugs. “It’s magic.”

Luke throws his head back and laughs. This is why Din said it, and he grins widely under his helmet. When Luke catches his breath he says, “It’s the universe’s energy, all together and all at once. It’s the life force of everything, and connects the thoughts and feelings of every living thing.” Luke’s voice takes on a different tone when he describes the Force. Almost a different tenor and pitch. For a moment, Din thinks that it is reverence. Then he understands that it is awe. “So yes, I can tell when you’re smiling.”

Din laughs. He says, “You can tell what I’m feeling?” He thinks about what he is feeling. Peace, joy, belonging. Love, love, love. He wants Luke to feel all of it. Luke nods, and Din sees his feelings reflected in Luke’s expression. 

Then Din lets his mind wander purposefully and directionally. He walks his thoughts to his memories of Luke fighting, of his tensed and control movements that are asking to be unspooled. And he lets himself feel everything that it makes him feel. He warms himself on the memories, and the heat snakes down his body. “Can you still tell what I’m feeling?” he asks Luke. His voice is low. 

Lips slightly parted, Luke nods. Din wonders how he could have ever thought of Luke’s eyes as cool. They are burning through Din’s helmet; he feels them on his face. He wants to take the helmet off. 

Getting out of the cantina and into Luke’s nice and private New Republic ship is a joyous rush. Half-walking, half-jogging, half-laughing the whole way. When the door closes behind them they pause to hold each other. Arms twine around waists and they rest their foreheads together. Din can almost not believe it is happening. He feels like he’s dancing in and out of the dream where Luke and Grogu reach out for him. 

Luke pulls away and slowly, cautiously puts his hands on the sides of Din’s helmet. His eyes try to meet Din’s through the Beskar. Din covers Luke’s hands with his own. 

"It's not a bad thing to wear this helmet,” Din says.

"No," Luke agrees. "Be proud of it." 

Din nods. He takes a breath and says, "It is not a bad thing to take the helmet off, either." 

"No," Luke agrees, and even in that one word, Din can hear the tenor and pitch of awe that Luke’s voice took on when he described the Force. Din dips his head slightly. Luke's fingers find the latch and the helmet releases. He pulls it off and places it down beside them.

Naked. He feels so naked. Laid bare for Luke. He fights the coward’s impulse to turn and hide his face. I choose this, he thinks to strengthen himself. The vulnerability is gut-clenching, but to be vulnerable for Luke feels- it just feels so right. Maybe this is the Way, Din thinks without thinking. 

Luke’s hands find his face again, this time with no helmet between them. Din’s eyelids flutter shut as Luke runs his thumbs along the curves of Din’s jaw and cheekbones. His hands tighten around Luke’s waist. He turns his face into Luke’s ungloved hand and presses a kiss into his palm. 

Their mouths find each other and Din understands what Luke meant about the Force being the universe’s flow of energy. He can feel the kiss on his lips and his tongue and the inside of his mouth. He feels it in the way his heart races and his arms close reflexively around Luke. And then beyond the physical there is more to the kiss. He feels in his mind and then he feels it in his heart, and that is the energy of him kissing Luke being sent into eternity as part of the living Force. Their tongues touch and write new lines of history into the galaxy. 

Luke takes his armor off all wrong. He does it out of order and he leaves it where it falls on the ground, not put away nicely, reverently. Din loves him all the more for it. Luke isn’t thinking of the armor. He is only, only thinking of Din. 

They fall into each other like they’ve known one another’s bodies for a lifetime. Din teases away all of Luke’s coiled control and watches him surrender himself to his impulses. And when Din can’t take the buildup anymore, he opens himself up to Luke. That first time he had met Luke, he had wanted to pour himself into him, to inhabit him and be him- be better, be everything. And he still wants that, in a new and different way. But first he wants this, he wants to welcome Luke into himself in every sense. He wraps his legs around Luke’s waist and pulls him in. He wants him deeper and deeper. He wants him to touch every part of him, inside and out. 

The ecstasy, when it comes, is total. They share the moment as they shared everything else, and Din swears that he can feel what Luke feels as it happens. When it is done, they don’t untangle from each other’s embrace. Din could stay like this forever. 

----

Putting his armor back on, it feels lighter than it ever has. He slips the helmet back on last and glances back at Luke, only a little worried of what he might be thinking. Looking at Luke’s face, that small fear dissipates. 

Din goes to the school to find Grogu. He and Grogu and Luke have a life to begin together. 

Notes:

The number of Outer Rim planet names I had to look up on Wookiepedia........ outrageous