Chapter Text
The first time Grogu saw the Shiny Man, he knew that everything was going to be better now.
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Everything had been bad for a long time. Longer than everything had been good, before. The people Grogu saw either hated him and tried to hurt him, or didn’t care about him at all, even when they were feeding him and helping him. Sometimes people who didn’t care about him tried to hurt him, which were the scariest kind of people. And no matter whether a person was helping him or hurting him, they got worse whenever he used the Force around them.
The people Grogu was with now didn’t try to hurt him, but they weren’t really nice either. They didn’t like it when he made noise or chased frogs, and they made him take naps way more often than he was tired. None of them could feel the Force, so they didn’t understand him when he said so. They just felt annoyed at him when he tried to stay up.
Grogu was lying down in his pram during one of these naps, pouting and restless because he wasn’t tired at all, when things changed. He felt the people in the courtyard in front of the building get really focused all of a sudden, and then he felt them start dying.
Grogu hated when people started dying. It usually meant he was going to be with different people, and sometimes the new people hurt him. He got really quiet and huddled under his blanket, and a moment later his pram moved. He knew the person who had moved it was putting something over the top, but then the person went away really quickly. They joined a group of people on the roof. Grogu stopped listening to people with the Force as soon as he felt that, though. He pressed his hands over his ears and tried not to hear the blaster fire outside.
It only took a few minutes for the noises to stop. They had stopped a couple times in the middle, but Grogu could tell that this time was different because he heard a loud noise like something big fell down. There were two more quick blaster shots, and then Grogu knew for certain that he would be with new people, because he couldn’t all the way stop hearing the people he was familiar with, and they were all dead now.
A voice came from the room outside Grogu’s pram. “Anyone else?” it said. It was a mechanical voice, but not a droid voice. Grogu took his hands off his ears and blinked up into the darkness. It was a nice voice. It sounded like it belonged to a nice person.
“The tracking fob is still active,” said another voice after a moment. This one was definitely a droid voice. “My sensors indicate that there is a lifeform present.”
There were the sounds of footsteps and beeping, and then Grogu’s pram moved forward and up. The top slid down, one half to either side. Grogu blinked in the sudden light, and the nice voice spoke again.
“Wait. They said 50 years old.”
“Species age differently. Perhaps it could live many centuries.”
The nice voice sounded kind of confused, but the droid voice was completely flat. Grogu sat up, pushing his blanket aside, and that was when he saw the Shiny Man for the first time.
The Shiny Man was shiny! He was wearing armor that gleamed on his head and shoulder, and armor that was shiny where it wasn’t painted red on the rest of him. And he was shiny in the Force, too! Grogu hadn’t felt anyone like that since the good times, and that was forever ago. He didn’t remember what it meant when people were shiny in the Force, but he liked it.
“Sadly, we’ll never know,” the droid voice continued. Grogu looked towards the voice and saw a weird droid. It was tall and all dull metal and red lights and holes, and it tried to point a blaster at Grogu but the Shiny Man hit its hand so it put it back down.
“No. We’ll bring it in alive.” The nice voice was coming from the Shiny Man! Grogu knew right then that the Shiny Man was going to help him, and not like the people who were dead now had helped him. The Shiny Man was going to make things good.
“The commission was quite specific,” said the droid. Grogu turned to look at it again. “The asset must be terminated.” It raised the blaster, pointing it straight at Grogu’s head – but before Grogu had the chance to be scared again, the Shiny Man had pulled a different blaster from a holster on his hip and shot the droid straight through the chest!
The droid collapsed, and the Shiny Man put his blaster back. His helmet had a dark visor that was shaped like a T, and the visor was pointed right at Grogu. The Shiny Man hadn’t even looked at the droid while he stopped it from hurting Grogu. He stretched out one finger, slowly, towards Grogu. Grogu reached back, reaching out with the Force at the same time. Their fingers didn’t quite touch, but Grogu felt the Shiny Man anyway.
Grogu didn’t understand the feelings that were coming from the Shiny Man. There were a lot of them, more than Grogu had known one person could feel at one time! But none of the feelings were cold. Grogu knew that cold feelings were bad for him. They meant that the person might hurt him, or forget to feed him, or do bad things. All of the Shiny Man’s feelings were warm, and some of them were confused, but none of them made Grogu feel bad.
Grogu made a happy sound with his mouth and tried to say hi to the Shiny Man with the Force. He said it as loud as he could, straight at the Shiny Man’s head, but the Shiny Man didn’t seem to hear. He just stood there for another few seconds before dropping his hand and turning away. Grogu made a quieter sad sound, but he wasn’t too disappointed. He hadn’t had anyone he could talk to in a long time anyway. It didn’t matter, since the Shiny Man was definitely good, and was definitely going to help Grogu.
The Shiny Man pressed some buttons on the red armor on his arm, and then pressed a button on the front of Grogu’s pram. When he turned and walked out of the room, over the door that was lying on the ground for some reason, Grogu’s pram followed along a few feet behind. Grogu cooed in excitement and stood up. He had some trouble, because the pram was moving, but he got right up against the front and stood clutching the rim, looking all around. He hadn’t been outside the building since he’d been with different people, and it had been a long time.
This whole planet was colored red, just like the Shiny Man. There were big cliffs all around the building, and the Shiny Man walked right into a ravine between the cliffs. Grogu looked all around at the blue sky, and the red rock of the cliffs curving overhead, and the red dirt in the ravine, and the grey back of the Shiny Man. He had a cape! Grogu thought it looked cool, swinging along behind the Shiny Man, with those little holes near the bottom.
Grogu was excited to be outside, but the Shiny Man kept walking for a long time, and the ravine didn’t change at all. Sometimes there would be an intersection with other ravines, and the Shiny Man would look up at the sky and down at his red arm armor and pick a way and keep walking, and the new ravine wasn’t ever any different. Grogu was just starting to get really bored when he noticed something moving out of the corner of his eye.
He turned his head and spotted a lizard, about the size of a frog, following Grogu and the Shiny Man. It was a dull yellow with brown spots, and it blended into the red everything really well. Grogu thought it looked like it would be really good to eat, especially because it was frog-sized. Nothing could be as good as a frog, though. Grogu was just thinking about how to maybe get down from his pram while it was moving when he saw another lizard – and another one! And another one!
Grogu babbled in excitement as a whole swarm of lizards came running out of the rocks and down onto the floor of the ravine. There were so many of them! If Grogu focused, he could feel them with the Force, tiny little specks of life like stars but on the ground. They were all following Grogu and the Shiny Man, until suddenly they all scattered and the Shiny Man abruptly stopped walking.
There was a different feeling coming off of the Shiny Man now – not the confused feelings from the building or the contemplative feelings from the long walk, but a tense sort of feeling that Grogu was familiar with from other people in other places. The Shiny Man slowly turned his head to look backward, and while he was looking away Grogu saw some people jump across the top of the ravine. By the time the Shiny Man had turned back, though, they were gone again. Grogu huddled in his pram a bit and whimpered.
Grogu only felt the new person a second before they jumped down from the top of the cliff and tried to hit the Shiny Man with a big axe. The Shiny Man seemed to also know the new person was there, though, because he turned and tried to point his blaster at them. Their big axe knocked it out of his hand, and then the Shiny Man made a gesture like he was pushing Grogu’s pram backwards and the pram went. Grogu wasn’t ready for the movement, and when it stopped by the side of the ravine, he fell over backwards.
By the time Grogu had struggled upright again, there were a lot of people lying around in the mud. But not the Shiny Man! One person was running right at Grogu, big axe hoisted above their head, and the Shiny Man calmly raised his rifle and disintegrated them right before they reached Grogu. Then he just stood there, his chest rising and falling like he was panting, and stared at something that had fallen out of the disintegrated person’s clothes. Grogu looked down and saw that it was a squareish thing with a little triangle antenna. There was a red light flashing on the front.
After a few moments, the Shiny Man flipped his rifle over his shoulder and did something that attached it to the strap across his chest. He was feeling complicated things again, although Grogu couldn’t feel them as clearly as he had in the building. What Grogu did feel loud and clear was a tiny seed of anger beginning to grow in the Shiny Man’s chest. That was scary. Nothing good ever happened when the people Grogu was with got angry. Grogu huddled down in his pram and watched with wide eyes as the Shiny Man found and smashed every little rectangle with a flashing light, then made another gesture towards the pram and stalked off. The pram followed.
It took a very long time for anything to happen after that. Long enough that Grogu stopped being so scared of the Shiny Man’s anger, which had gone out of focus anyway, and started paying attention to the world around him again. They had left the ravines behind a short while before, and now they were just on a big flat red muddy dusty plain. The sun was also starting to go down. There was a ridge of rock far off in the distance in front, but it seemed like the Shiny Man didn’t think he could walk that far tonight, because it wasn’t long before he stopped and got a lamp out from… somewhere… and sat down with it.
Now that the Shiny Man was sitting still and concentrating on it – he got out something that sparked at one end and started poking at it – Grogu could feel that he was injured. There was a wound on his left arm, below where the red shoulder plate ended, that Grogu could see through a rip in the Shiny Man’s clothes. The Shiny Man also radiated pain, that spiked in little bursts whenever the sparky thing sparked. Grogu spent a few seconds thinking about it, but he decided that he was going to help the Shiny Man not hurt any more. The Shiny Man was good, and he hadn’t done anything bad when he was angry, and he shouldn’t be hurt.
Grogu carefully climbed out of his pram and dropped to the ground. He made a little thump when he hit the dirt, but the Shiny Man didn’t seem to notice. He had taken a break from using the sparky thing on his wound to look in the other direction, panting a little. Grogu walked up close and reached out his hand and started to close his eyes and reach out with his mind, but then the Shiny Man’s helmet turned and the T-visor landed on Grogu and the Shiny Man batted Grogu’s hand down and picked him up and put him back in the pram.
Grogu pouted a little, because didn’t the Shiny Man want to stop hurting? Plus, wounded people had trouble fighting. Grogu knew this. The Shiny Man didn’t seem to, though, or didn’t care, because he just went and sat back down and picked up the sparky thing again. He didn’t start using it on his wound again – he picked up his chest armor that he must have taken off when his back was turned earlier and started using the sparky thing on that instead. That was good because he wasn’t making himself hurt more, but it was bad because it wasn’t helping his wound. Grogu resolutely got out of his pram again and went over to heal the Shiny Man.
Once again, the moment the Shiny Man noticed Grogu standing on the ground, he picked him up and put him back in his pram. Grogu felt a flash of annoyance from the Shiny Man, and then he pressed a button on his arm armor and the pram’s top slid closed.
Grogu pouted again, at the dark inside of the pram and the closed top and the feeling of the Shiny Man outside doing things. He thought maybe the Shiny Man hadn’t understood what Grogu was trying to do, since he couldn’t feel the Force. Grogu thought about trying to use the Force to press the right button to open the pram up again, but he could feel that the Shiny Man was already lying down and starting to try to sleep. Grogu hadn’t had a nap all day and he was pretty tired, so he decided that the Shiny Man had the right idea. He got under the blanket that was still in the pram and laid back and closed his eyes, and before he knew it he was asleep.