:Lyra-Sol:

Din stops you, though, a hand across your hips to pull you back with a gentleness you shouldn't be surprised by anymore. 

"It's not a home for two," he murmurs, his voice halting. Vulnerability isn't something that comes easily to either of you. "It… it doesn't have to be."

"You want me to stay?" you prompt, your voice devoid of its usual teasing lilt. Din nods, his arm tightening around your waist. You look at him pointedly. He sighs.

"Yes. I want you to stay."

"You know what that means, don't you?" You step away from him. His fingers twitch as he reels himself in, stopping himself from reaching for you. "This is… commitment. This is serious. This is different."

"My love…" Din begins, a layer of hurt seeping into his voice that makes you dig your nails into your palms. Always hurting, you think to yourself. You will always hurt him. "I understand commitment more than anything else. This is what I want… with you. With our son." Din's voice is sombre as he speaks, his words prompting you to glance at where Grogu's chasing frogs in front of his new home - in front of your new home, if you let it be.

"Your son," is what you fire back, though, the panic of having something good clouding your rationality - the fear of having something that can be taken away.

"Our son," Din corrects firmly, stepping towards you. You tense like an animal ready to bolt, but you don't run. Progress, Din supposes. "This is your family as much as it's mine. This is your home, as much as it's mine. I wouldn't say that unless I understood the severity of it."

You sigh, your shoulders dropping as your fists unclench. There's a solidness about him, a resoluteness that turns him into a fixed point for his family to lean on when they need to. He has never stumbled underneath your weight, and you think it might be unfair to expect that he suddenly will now. You look at him through his helmet and let your brows furrow as you try to gauge his reaction to your snapping, to your walls closing up. He seems to take your relaxing posture as a sort of victory, though, because he steps towards you again, reaching forward to brush his gloved fingers against yours. You let your fingers intertwine with his, holding his hand firmly enough to convince yourself that he won't disappear from in front of you - that this good thing is here to stay.

"I'm sorry," you murmur gently, letting your head thump against his shoulder. He relaxes at the feeling of you pressing your face to his neck and breathing him in, squeezing your hand gently in his while his other strokes up and down your back.

"There is nothing to forgive, my love," he assures with a softness that's reserved for you alone. "This isn't easy for either of us. What matters is that we do it together."

"Together," you mumble in agreement, nodding as you keep your face pressed against him. He huffs out what's almost a laugh, letting you take your time in extracting yourself from him. Once you're standing tall again, chin lifted and eyes regaining their confidence, he squeezes your hand once more.

"Where do we go from here?" is all Din asks, gaze fixed on you.

"Home, I suppose," is your airy response as you stare at the little house you can now call yours. Din feels his heart thump in his chest at your declaration of home, of sharing something like that with him. He breathes deeply, steadying himself against the onslaught of emotions that are thrown at him by those simple words.

"I always had a home in the covert," he says, shifting uneasily on his feet. It's rare for him to divulge anything too personal, even this far into your relationship. You look at him earnestly, the breeze settling around the two of you as you watch Grogu chase frogs out of the corner of your eye.

"Even when I was… an apostate," Din continues, "then it was about finding a way back to that home. But it was always there - always something to fall back on. You…?" He doesn't continue, just stares at you through the slit of his helmet and you know he's giving you an out. You know he won't force you to talk about your past, about where you came from or what you left behind.

"I think it was about… finding one," you say eventually. "I never - I didn't a home to fall back to. But I wanted one, even when I couldn't really admit that to myself." You turn back towards your house - your home, now. One that you would share with your family. "Didn't think I'd ever actually get one, though," you add quietly, a confession whispered so softly Din almost doesn't hear it. 

𖹭 I headcanon that zabraks have the instinct to protect their babies by not letting anyone near them for the first week or two, so don't expect many visits, if any at all.

𖹭 Surprisingly instinctive about a lot of things. After all, nightbrothers raised male children on their own, since the nightsisters didn't care for them (at least as far as I googled).

𖹭 The child actually helps him with nightmares. He tends to struggle with his grip on reality and feeling out of his body after particularly intense ones, feeling as if he's hallucinating, and he's still on Lotho Minor. It's not that you don't ground him, you do. But a child, HIS CHILD, is something entirely else — especially since he didn't really want kids before Lotho Minor. You'll sometimes find him sitting at the crib and staring at the baby, it's little fist closed around Maul's finger. And when the child gets older, he'll slip into their bed and hug them while they sleep.

𖹭 Cries when his baby first calls him "dada". Will deny it, though.

𖹭 Does NOT use baby voice

𖹭 Loves making funny faces to make his baby laugh (only does it when he's sure no one else is looking, but his kid's laugh, especially when they're still a baby, makes his chest tighten with a pleasant feeling).

𖹭 Used to waking up often due to nightmares, so doesn't mind getting up at night when his kid(s) need it, no matter whether they're babies or even adults

𖹭 Also he DOES properly parent his kid, thank you very much. He feeds them, changes them, washes them, plays with them, the whole pack.

𖹭 Not really a helicopter parent, but very protective; especially if Sidious is still around

𖹭 Sends Spybot after them whenever they go out alone, just in case

𖹭 There WILL be murder and torture — or at least some threats — if someone hurts his kid, even just verbally

𖹭 Teaches them how to defend themselves

𖹭 He didn't have a normal childhood, so he might sometimes overestimate his kid's abilities and maturity. Why are they playing with toys? At their age, he was out killing people and getting tortured. Why are they crying over a dead ant?

𖹭 Secretly a girl dad

𖹭 His kids WILL respect you, very much so. He'll make sure of it. He'll snap very fast if they ever disrespect you in any way, shape, or form.

𖹭 His horns are perfect handles for when he puts the kid on his shoulders

𖹭 Very set on not continuing the cycle of abuse, therefore there will NEVER be any physical punishments, or mind games, for that matter

𖹭 Doesn't yell much either. Not that he NEVER does, but it's not as often as you would think

𖹭 A bit awkward sometimes, especially when it gets emotional

𖹭 Has THE death stare

𖹭 Not emasculated at all by typically "girly" activities

𖹭 And actually enjoys doing makeovers with his kid(s)

𖹭 There will be no stupid gender norms in his house. He grew up in a matriarchal society — which sucked — for a while, and then had his fair share of experiences with patriarchal societies as well — which also sucked — so he's very equal in how he treats people

𖹭 Actually, he's surprisingly progressive in general. He's the type of guy to give a whole annoyed speech about how gender is a social construct lol

𖹭 So his kids will feel supported no matter what

𖹭 Very tired and so over the teenage drama, though. Have you seen him with Devon? 😂

𖹭 Immediately takes his kid's side, no matter what

𖹭 Scared to mention what he does around his kids (running the Shadow Collective), and especially terrified to mention his past. He worries his kids will hate him for it.

𖹭 Eventually introduces them to what he does — especially since he plans on leaving the Shadow Collective to them — but does it slowly and hesitantly.

𖹭 Also really confident that his kids are great and capable, though.

⛔️ No signet (therefore, no clan)…

At the beginning of the show, he didn’t have a signet. So he was clanless. That means he wasn’t adopted (he says, “they raised me in the fighting corps”) because he would’ve had his adoptive clan’s signet if he had been. All he got was the mythosaur, which, as the Armorer said, “belongs to all Mandalorians”, so he belonged to the tribe but not any particular clan.

We know foundlings don’t have to be adopted because Grogu was called a foundling in seasons 1 and 2 when Din was only his caretaker. But at that stage, he’d been ordered to return the kid to his own kind, so he couldn’t adopt him. And he did eventually. So why didn’t anyone adopt Din? What was wrong with him? Why did nobody want this poor foundling in their clan? Or was there a reason they couldn’t, like with Grogu?

But also, Grogu was still considered part of Din’s clan and allowed the mudhorn signet even before the official adoption, so what in the galaxy’s name did Din do so wrong that meant he was denied the opportunity to be in any way associated with a Mandalorian clan, and was denied a clan signet all the way up to his late thirties when he had to “earn” one by battling a mudhorn??

⛔️ A lack of proper beskar…

Din also didn’t start off with a complete set of beskar armour, and while that’s not uncommon for kids (as we saw with Ragnar – beskar helmet only), it’s a little odd for adults. Din’s old cuirass and vambraces buckled easily on Arvala VII, so they must have been a poor-quality beskar alloy. We know from the beating his helmet takes from the Darktrooper that beskar should be much more robust, and he even tells the Armorer, “My armour has lost its integrity.” That wouldn’t happen if it were of acceptable quality.

But surely by the time Din had been with the Mandalorians for a few decades, he would’ve earned some better armour? They gave Grogu loads straight away! I realise beskar was thin on the ground after the Purge because the Empire had looted it all, but that happened less than a decade before the show (only five or so years if we’re to believe the timeline given in Ahsoka) when Din had already been a Mandalorian for at least twenty years. Are we meant to believe that on Concordia (the moon on which beskar was mined), they couldn’t scrounge some up, or that nobody ever died and left their beskar to be redistributed amongst the tribe??

So why didn’t Din get any decent upgrades during the two decades he spent as a Mandalorian prior to the Purge?

⛔️ No jetpack…

Most Mandalorians have jetpacks. That said, not everyone in the Children of the Watch has one, although we know they’re taught to use them as children (Din confirms he was trained “as a boy”, and we see other foundlings practising with them). However, virtually all other Mandalorians in the galaxy (through all available media) come with jetpacks, so we can assume they’re ubiquitous and that the Children of the Watch simply had a shortage. Perhaps they’re difficult to manufacture.

But why was Din never allowed to use one out of the ones they did have? Some of the covert members hanging around in the Nevarro sewers doing nothing had jetpacks, yet Din, who was seemingly the only one with a job for which a jetpack might be needed, didn’t get to use one. Why was his status so low? Was this some kind of punishment?

I suspect, in reality, the answer to these questions is “because it worked well for the progression of the story for him to earn each of these things one by one”, but I’d really like for there to be valid reasons behind it, too – something deeply meaningful in his backstory that explains all of this.

Like maybe if we discover Din did have a clan and a signet and was on his way to earning new armour and a jetpack, but then he got involved with Ran’s crew and did something idiotic (maybe the incident on Alzoc III?) that endangered the tribe, so he was ejected from his clan, stripped of his signet and had to start on the bottom rung of the ladder like a thirty-year-old foundling. (Perhaps that’s why Paz was always rude to him, called him a coward, said he’d had “disagreements” with him). And maybe they told him he could only regain his status if he worked as the tribe’s beroya to provide for them, so he joined the Bounty Guild and routinely dropped off a percentage of his credits, as we saw him do at the start, which also meant he had to live apart from the covert on his ship. Almost like a little partial exile before he was officially exiled.

Maybe this explains why he so happily lifted his helmet to drink soup in front of Grogu in season 2, even though in season 3, back in the presence of his tribe, he told Bo-Katan that you have to go off and find somewhere totally private. If he really believed that, surely he would’ve waited until the kid was asleep to have his soup. Perhaps he’s always been a bit of a rebel when he’s away from his tribe. Survivor’s guilt can manifest in many ways – perhaps Din didn’t think he deserved to be rescued, never felt like he fit in, pushed the boundaries of the faith he was inducted into due to a self-sabotaging mindset… all the while parroting the doctrine because he wanted to be worthy of it. If you think about how trauma can influence behaviour, it’s actually quite common for someone to say they want to achieve a particular goal and honestly believe it, but then subconsciously undermine their own chances of success.

And if they’ve made Din jump through hoops to redeem himself in the past, the Armorer’s directive to go and find the Living Waters doesn’t seem so outlandish anymore. How do you punish someone you’ve already dished out countless punishments to? You give them the most impossible-to-achieve task you can think of. (More fool her, he managed it!) But it also makes sense that he would jump through those hoops, even in light of his self-sabotaging actions, because it’s often the way that people only realise how desperately they need the support structure they’ve just torn down after it’s gone. That explains his seemingly incongruous doubling down on his beliefs in season 3.

I like the idea of Rebellious Din – the kid who was so profoundly scarred by losing his parents and being the sole survivor of a massacre that he embraced anger and violence and became the unruliest Mandalorian foundling they’d ever seen, never making friends or getting adopted, venturing out into the galaxy and getting himself into trouble as soon as he came of age. They hinted at it with Ran’s crew – if Mandalorians (especially Children of the Watch) are so honourable, how did Din end up with this dishonourable bunch? He definitely had a rebellious phase (‘target practice Din’), and he definitely has anger simmering below the surface (see the above GIF of him slamming his weapons cabinet closed, as well as all the times he gets snippy, which are numerous). But the show never explored it any further.

I’d love for this to be a genuine part of his past, as it would make Grogu’s influence on him even more profound if he started out so troubled. And perhaps Grogu (little troublemaker that he is) sensed Din’s unique mix of anger, heartbreak, frustration, isolation, and wilfulness, and he knew he’d found a kindred spirit.

Power born from chaos and grief. Two survivors, hidden away from the cruel world that took so much from them, angry at their losses, hiding their pain, feeling unloved.

Until they found one another, and finally, the pain and anger melted away.

Tentatively tagging a few fellow Mando enthusiasts in case of interest 🩶. Please feel free to ignore my ramblings if they’re unwelcome.

@autumnwoodsdreamer @din-cognito @dindjarindiaries @djarins-wife @djarinwidow