Work Text:
Fett is an intensely private and isolated person. He doesn’t speak about much at all, even to Shand. Din can understand - you get hurt enough times, you stop opening up.
Which is why it surprises him that the first thing Fett does when he gets his armour back is pull a miniscule holodisk from his vambrace and clutch it as though his life depended on it. The normally impassive face is soft with relief, and he activates it with the fearful hope of one who braces themselves for the next wound. When it works, Fett slumps with relief, his eyes drinking in the image it holds.
It shows three people sitting on a couch, with dark storm clouds looming behind them through the floor-to-ceiling windows - a man, with dark hair and eyes, in beskar’gam, and he looks an awful lot like Fett would if he hadn’t been swallowed by the Sarlaac. His arm is looped around the shoulders of a small woman with blue-green eyes and coppery hair, soft brown robes gently draping about her and a little boy who looks like a tiny version of Fett on her lap.
They all look content, leaning into each other with little smiles, and Din swallows an ache in his throat for his own long dead buir’e.
“Who’re they?” Fett jumps, and snaps the disk off.
“No one.” His face is closed off again. “Just some...contacts, from years ago.”
*************
Fett speaks to him a few days later, awkward and almost reluctant.
“You want a Jedi to train your ad.”
Din considers protesting that the Child is not his ad, but it’s useless by now to keep denying it. No one believes him anyway.
“Elek.”
Fett swallows, and then, almost as though he doesn’t want to, leans forward. His voice is low, and it sounds like he is imparting a great and precious secret. “Out in the Jundland Wastes, is a ramshackle old hut. It belonged to...it belonged to a Jetii I...knew, once, a long time ago. There should be something to help you train the ad there.”
It takes Din two days of searching the sandy expanse to find a little hut, perched on the top of a hill.
And indeed, hidden in the tiny two-room house, Din finds books of Jedi stories, little jetii’kad’e, strange droids that shoot out little blaster bolts randomly, and manuals and learning texts. Old things, remnants of a people long gone, most likely rescued at the last minute from their massacre by this survivor. It is a treasure trove here, something that can tide him over until he finds a Jedi to help the Child control his powers.
But that is not all he finds. Din also finds a vambrace that looks like it belongs to the man in Fett’s picture, and a wardrobe of the long brown robes the woman wore. And he finds beautiful sketches, done on flimsy, some of a young Fett, some of someone who looks like he could be Fett, some of Fett and obviously-not-Fett together. A few of people who are different altogether. Another not-Fett shows up a lot, with a curling scar around one eye.
Little rocks and shells and pieces of metal lie in a battered old box, the infinitely treasured mementoes of a childhood long gone. Maybe the jetii’s childhood, maybe the jetii’s ad, if they had one. Maybe even Fett himself. On one shelf, placed high up and sealed, are tiny boxes of teas, Sapiir, Tzai, and others, ordered and neatly arrayed like soldiers. A note in a curling, scripted hand says, for Force’s sake don’t steep the tea too long you uncultured heathens, do you know how hard it is to get out here.
Under what he assumes was the Jetii’s hard mattress he finds a ragged piece of flimsy, the lines drawn on it fading - it shows an eclectic group of people that only a Mandalorian would recognise as a family. At the bottom, is written in a firm, elegant script, my beloved idiots messing around as usual OWK. Something about it makes his eyes blur, looking at the simple lines that show so much love, love a Jedi felt for their family long ago, in a time long lost. It is a beautiful sketch, but it feels steeped in sadness and loss. Maybe the Jetii was the only one to survive the massacre. Then Din shakes himself. He’s a bounty hunter not some maudlin swooning romantic. And anyway, Fett lived didn’t he. The bastard. The thought doesn’t hold much heat - it must have been hard for Fett to direct him, a near stranger, to rummage around in what Din is certain was his buir’s house, in a lifetime long past.
He doesn’t bring back much other than the jetii things for the Child. Somehow, he gets the feeling that Fett wouldn’t enjoy him bringing the contents of the mysterious Jetii’s house back with him. There is a strange kind of sad peace to it, one that taking what he was not meant to would destroy. Still, he brings the flimsy, and hands it to Fett without a word. “Thanks Fett.”
And they don’t speak of it again.
*************
There is a strange kind of emptiness to his life now.
The Chi- Grogu is gone, and so much of the adventure in his life seems to have been taken with him. There are no more weird spider infestations, no more egg fiascos, significantly fewer near death experiences. He feels bereft, in that part of him that is Din, rather than a bounty hunter.
“Here.”
Din glances down to see that Fett has shoved a bottle of terrible alcohol into his hand.
“Drink, Djarin. It helps you live with it.”
And he drinks.
They drink again and again and again, two sad, drunk Mandos on the edge of the world.
“My buir,” Boba (as of half an hour ago) slurs, “would be very disappointed in me.”
“The Jetii?”
“Nah,” he flips an errant hand, “not for this. Buir always said I should never get drunk in the open, in case I got snipered.” He gestures expansively at the wide desert around them. “Not closed is it.” Then he shrugs. “Buir was always overprotective.”
Din thinks back to his own buir’e. “Yeah that fits. What about the jetii?”
“Mathair?” There is a strange twist to how Boba pronounces the name. “She’d be disappointed in my life choices, not drinking.” Then he laughs, drunk and uncontrolled, but somehow fond. “Mathair’d join me, as long as I wasn’t getting alcohol poisoning.”
“Sounds like a fun buir.”
“Not,” Boba waggles a finger in his face, “not a buir. Mathair.”
Potayto potahto. Din doesn’t see the difference. “Where’s she now?”
Boba slumps. “Gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone.” There is a horrible finality to his voice. “She joined the ka’ra nearly ten years ago.” He sighs. “Mathair was the last of my aliit. They’re all marching ahead now.”
“All of your aliit?” The Fetts were numerous - they can’t be all gone.
Boba doesn’t seem to be listening. He’s staring at the stars, a wistful grief in his eyes. “She told me, look at a star, and think of someone you’ve lost. That way, whenever you look at the sky, you know they’ll always be with you.” He points at one. “That’s Mathair’s. In the middle of that galaxy.” It’s a gentle star, with a gentle light. Din thinks that it would be a warm sun, the kind that made a beautiful green world. “She was one of the last of the Jetiise.” Boba sighs and lowers his finger. “She watched her home crumble and burn, and her family die at the hands of their own. Sometimes you can’t fix things, and Mathair broke long before she died.” His voice cracks a little, and he lapses into the remembrance. “Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jango Fett...”
Their voices join in an overlapping harmony, whispering the names of their dead into the wind, that sweeps their words out into the empty desert.