Work Text:
Buir is afraid.
Grogu has felt his fear before, but never like this. This isn’t something he can wrestle into submission like he has so many times in the past. No – this fear looms larger than a mudhorn ever could.
That’s why buir is hiding him in the walls. He holds Grogu with the same gentle firmness he always has, but his imprecise movements give his fear away. He struggles to remove a panel from a wall with one hand, but he refuses to relinquish his hold on Grogu. This version of the man is so different than the one Grogu knows: buir sneaks, he plans, but he doesn’t hide, and he definitely doesn’t panic. This is all wrong. Even the Force around them trembles with the horrors to come.
As the panel finally comes loose, Grogu whines, long but low, recognizing the danger they are in. There are creatures he can sense here – and creatures he cannot. Hollow metal monsters filled with wires, like the vents inside of their ship. Grogu wishes they were on the ship right now, far away and flying. But no, he is here, where monsters hunt him, like they always have and always will.
A familiar and warm hand cups his chin, and Grogu feels better and worse all at once. None of this makes any sense.
“It’s okay, kid.” A voice like warm rocks and turbulent rivers washes over him, settling him a little. Grogu tilts his head forward, and buir leans in, just like he hoped he would. Buir had done this many times after his nightmares. Many sleepless hours have passed with a helmet gently pressed to his forehead, and a steady voice reminding him to breathe.
Grogu squeezes his eyes tight. Maybe when he opens them, buir will be cradling him in their ship, far away from here. When he opens them again and feels the cool metal pull away from his forehead, his ears droop.
He presses something small and blinking into Grogu’s hands, and then pauses, for just a moment. There are so many words buir wants to say. He can sense his longing through the thick cloud of fear.
“Be brave for me, ad’ika.”
Then, the metal slides in front of him, and all is dark.
Pain is relative. Din has known this for a long time, almost for as long as he can remember. He’s used that fact as a precise tool to school himself against it. He’s built up resistance to it, slowly and surely, and even now, there’s little in the way of physical threats that faze him.
Unfortunately, Moff Gideon knows this, too. He can see it in the dark gleam of his eyes that rove over his hanging body. Trapped in a standing position, magnetic manacles force his arms out from his sides, and he hates how vulnerable the position makes him feel. Like he’s a creature caught in a trap. To walk the way of the Mandalore is to be both hunter and prey. Din knows how it feels to be hunted, but he’s never been caught. Not for long, and not like this.
Gideon walks up to the platform he’s suspended from, face carefully blank, but Din can still see the inquisitive cruelty in his eyes as they wander over each piece of beskar that’s attached to him. Like he’s taking inventory. His eyes slide back towards Din’s visor, and all at once, he knows exactly what this Imp is going to do to him to get the information he wants.
He struggles to keep his breathing even. His worse fear looms over him, and they both know it, but Din refuses to give him the satisfaction of a physical reaction. Din knew this was a possibility when he let himself get captured, and he had let it happen anyway because at least it would give Grogu a chance.
At the reminder of the kid, something in Din’s chest loosens. He’s doing this for Grogu. He just needs to stay alive long enough for Cara to hone in on the tracking beacon and get him out. The memory of his little green body strapped down to a medical machine still haunts him: he almost left Grogu to that fate. No, he’d rather be taken apart here, bit by bit, than have Grogu suffer the same.
Gideon asks where the asset is. Din doesn’t answer. So, Gideon gets to work.
He starts small. He casually reaches for the glove on Din’s hand, and it takes everything in him not to flinch when he makes contact. Even this small breach of conduct feels intentionally violent. Gideon’s fingers clasp around his cuff, then slowly, meticulously, he peels the leather away to reveal the soft skin underneath.
Suddenly, a violent shock runs down his arm, and he barely has the time to bite down on his lip to muffle a cry of pain. From his fingertips and down his body, all he can feel is a sharp, searing pain that blinds him to anything else.
When it fades, Din is left hanging limp from his magnetic restraints, too rattled to even guess where the shock had come from. All he sees is the imperceptible smile on Gideon’s face, terrible and mocking. Then, his beskar vambrace is peeled off his arm, and the wave of electric, brilliant pain returns with a vengeance.
Something is terribly wrong.
The whispers from the Force grow more forceful, more insistent, and Grogu is overwhelmed with the urge to cry. When he cries, buir comes. It’s one of the basic tenants of the universe: if Grogu is in trouble, buir will be there.
But the universe is off-balance. The Force is trembling like a leaf on a windy day, and Grogu has not felt anything like this since –
Burning golden eyes. Screams, cries, pleas for help. Friends disappearing, one by one by one –
No. The word rattles in Grogu’s mind, and sits up straight, invigorated with a resolve he hasn’t felt before – but he’s seen it in another.
He will not do this again. He will not hide as buir disappears back into the Force, like everyone else he once knew. This time, Grogu will stop it.
He will not lose his buir. He refuses.
With a gentle push of his mind, the metal panel keeping him hidden clangs to the floor.
Pain is relative –
- his arm spasms like it’s been hit by a raw wire, and maybe it has been, but all he can truly feel is the scrape of his beskar against the thin fabric as it’s pried off his chest. They want him to watch as it’s peeled away like scales off some desert creature, they want him to feel that surgical removal of a sacred object from his skin, and he hates that he does, hates that it hurts worse than the electricity running under his skin, hates that his fingers grasp at nothing as his arm lays limp, useless, and he prays he does not look as scraped open and raw as he feels -
Gideon asks again. Din Djarin gives the same answer. So, they start again.
Pain is nothing.
Just as long as Grogu is safe.
Grogu sees the familiar beskar first.
It’s piled up in the corner by the door, carelessly discarded and smeared with blood. Grogu doesn’t know a lot about the Way yet, but the sight of his buir’s armor treated with such disrespect instantly fills him with a twisted sense of dread. It pervades the whole room, where the monsters in white and black keep their backs to the door and their attention focused on the center of the room. A man is kneeling there, arms hanging limply from some invisible tether, and the exhaustion and fear that he emits are so strong and pungent, Grogu doesn’t recognize their source, not at first.
Then, he realizes. The man everyone is looking at, the man with nothing on him but scraps of clothing and a Mandalorian helmet, the man that’s practically radiating despair through the Force around him: that is his buir. That is his protector, that is his best friend, that is the one he loves more than anyone in the entire galaxy.
And they’re taking his helmet off.
Grogu doesn’t know what is worse: his buir’s misery and terror that crashes over him like a wave in the Force, or the sight of his face, twisted in shame and anguish. That is his buir’s face. He’s never seen it before, but he knows the shape of his father in the Force, and he knows without a doubt that this is his true form.
He’s wanted to see his buir’s face for so long. But not like this. Never like this.
Something horrified and horrible bubbles up in Grogu’s body, and it spills out of him like a fountain. It burns all that it touches, twisting those monsters in all the wrong shapes, pulling noises of agony from behind their own helmets.
They try to shoot him, but he reaches out and deflects them all, letting that thing in his chest simmer to a boil. The noises around him and inside him get louder and louder, and all he wants to do is let everything he’s holding back go.
But something stops him.
“Grogu, wait.”
His voice is softer without the helmet. Softer than Grogu had ever heard it before, even though the awful man has his arm wrapped around his neck. The lack of breath he feels in his buir’s chest only makes him angrier, but buir keeps talking, anyway. His nose is broken, and his face is coated with blood, but he keeps his eyes on Grogu, telling him that it’s okay, like he has a million times before. It isn’t the truth — but it’s what buir tells him. So Grogu believes him.
Slowly, Grogu lowers his claws. All of a sudden, loud noise erupts from behind him, and the awful man falls on his back. Gone. Back to the Force that he came from.
The world fades out around him very quickly after that, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. But the last thing he hears is his father’s voice, calm and reassuring, and he knows in his heart that everything will be okay.
Din’s journey to consciousness is slow and rugged. All he can process at first is the pain, and it’s everywhere. He’s not a man, he is one massive nerve, pulsing in agony.
At some point, though, the pain subsides enough for awareness to slip back to the forefront of his mind, and memories come trickling in, as much as he wishes they wouldn’t: the feeling of cold air against his neck for the first time in decades. Gideon’s fingers clutching his naked chin. The terrible little cry lilting in the air, both strange and familiar, and when Din follows the sound, he finds his worst nightmare made real: the child, his face twisted in terror, and surrounded by the enemy.
At the memory of the kid, Din forces his eyes open, ignoring the sharp pain from the lights as he struggles to adjust. Something loud beeps next to him, and he absently realizes it must be his heart rate jackrabbiting into orbit, because what happened to the kid -
Suddenly, thankfully he remembers: Cara saved them. She had taken out Gideon, and the kid passed out shortly after from all the energy he extended taking out the Stormtroopers. Din had never seen the kid like that before; he’d nearly wiped out a platoon.
The memories subside, little by little, and the beeping beside him slows down. Din recognizes that he must be in some medical bay, but he can’t even begin to guess where. He’s alone in a bed, bacta patches on practically every inch of exposed skin.
Exposed. Din sits up so fast that his chest seizes up, and suddenly, he struggles to breathe. It’s almost an impossible effort to raise his hand to his head, all of his muscles heavy as stones, but he has to, he has to know –
His fingertips touch the unshaven tip of his chin, and something in him shatters.
Gideon had done it. He’d taken his soul.
Someone is at his side, telling him to lay back and breathe, but Din’s body isn’t obeying. Without his armor, his body was just that: a body. A pathetic husk. A useless, empty man with no purpose, no meaning, no soul.
Everything. He lost everything.
There’s a different texture touching his forehead, drawing him out of his panic. He realizes that he’s closed his eyes, but he can’t bring himself to open them, to face the empty future ahead of him. A small sound beckons him, though. Even crawling with self-loathing and shame, Din could never turn away from that sound.
When he opens his eyes again, Grogu is right there. His big eyes are closed, and he's taking slow, deep breaths. His tiny claws carefully touch the top ridge of his cheek, and his wrinkly forehead is pressed against his. Din can feel every tiny breath the little one takes with their forehead touching like this, and every time Grogu breathes in and out, it feels purposeful, practiced.
It takes him a moment to recognize the gesture, but when he does, he's struck completely still. This was exactly what Din did with Grogu after a bad nightmare to help calm him down. And now, here’s Grogu, doing the same for him.
His eyes well up with tears, but he doesn’t pull away. Instead, he closes his eyes and breathes with Grogu, and slowly, the terror and the shame fall away into the background. Not gone, but set aside. Din can work with that.
When Din opens his eyes again, Grogu is watching him. There’s something hesitant in his expression, something that speaks of his own shame and fear, and that’s unacceptable, so Din pulls him in close, not caring at all about how much it hurts to move.
“Ad’ika,” Din mutters, his voice wet and uneven, but he can’t find it in him to care. “Thank you, Grogu.” He presses his lips against the little one’s head, something he’s been yearning to do for months.
“I love you. I love you so much.”
And with his little one nestled in his bruised and beaten arms, warbling pitifully against his neck, Din realized that whatever else he might have lost, he still had his son, and he would always be worth more than his soul.