leesh

They take the humanoid back to home base, Kevella, towing the aruetti’s truly piece-of-shit Razor Crest behind them. The industrial might of the Kryze family’s architecture seems to adequately intimidate the aruetti— “I’m… Din. Din Djarin.”— them being visibly tense, stepping awkwardly and slow like they’re trying to look behind each and every column and banner lining the long hallway of the throne room.

“We’ll speak here,” Bo-Katan proclaims, sprawling on her throne and preening when the lump of clothes that is Djarin shifts around, a bird with ruffled feathers.

X, who stands diagonal to Koska’s position besides the throne and to-the-left and behind Djarin, hand on his blaster, taps his loud-metal foot once. Djarin looks back, and X nods. So speak.

Djarin straightens. “Ten days ago, I crashlanded on Mandalore after being hit in the crossfire of a pirate dogfight. I landed on what I believe to have been an inquisitor in possession of this… weapon. I was told it would have some significance to you.”

“You… landed on?”

Djarin nods, and then takes one hand in a fist and the other in a flat palm above it and smashes the second down into the first, flattening the fist on impact. Djarin makes a little sound effect that is presumably supposed to represent the sound the Inquisitor's guts made as they squished out of his major holes. Very well.

“It didn’t poison you? Mandalore is well known to be uninhabitable. The Empire and their bombers made sure of that.”

Djarin’s confusion is only an easy read through their cloth coverings because of Bo’s many years around armored people and their mannerisms. “It was crystallized. And cratered. But I spent over a week on the planet and have experienced no adverse effects to my knowledge. There were other creatures there as well.”

It’s almost too good to be true. The Darksaber, a crushed-to-death inquisitor, and news of a non-toxic Mandalore delivered to her feet in one red-wrapped package. Still, though: “How’d you know where to find me?”

“A… friend. Her acquaintance comes from a Mandalorian bloodline, and so she told me what she knew of you and your association with the weapon.”

A friend of Djarin’s, sure, but not many who would tell an aruetii of the Darksaber and yet not escort them to her personally could be counted as a friend of Bo-Katan’s.

Djarin seemed to read her displeasure in her face. He slouched self-protectively back at her and did not explain further. The story was not very flattering to anyone involved;

Din had been kidnapped onto the main pirate ship immediately upon leaving Mandalore’s orbit. His own had been taken to pillage for the goods he was transporting to Coruscant, where rich core-worlders were waiting to overpay for his family’s textile work. Apparently, dodging out several of a pirate king’s best flyers in such a dodgy, bulky ship as a Razor Crest made said king very determined to rob you.

He’d escaped with a strange woman named Fennec Shand, who upon seeing he’d broke out of his own cell, promised her help in navigating the hostile spacecraft in exchange for her own freedom.

They’d made a stop in the prisoner’s storage locker, as Fennec insisted. She from there grabbed a long sharp-shooting weapon, a map of the ship they were currently on, and several belts strapped full of weapons. As she was fastening these to various and sometimes unexpected parts of her body, she tilted her head and nodded towards a pile in the corner. “Is that yours?”

The pile in question contained his cloak, his blaster (which, in comparison to the sniper’s giant gun, had him feeling a little inadequate), and the weird cylinder he’d on instinct pilfered from the corpse of the Imp he’d inadvertently flattened. He shrugged.

“Huh. I’m pretty sure that makes you, like. King of Mandalore.”

No way.

“Yeah, my boss told me about it, and his father was a Mandalorian. You probably want to keep that on you.”

Again, no way.

Shand laughed, which she only seemed to do when making fun of him. “Not a king type? You could also probably leverage it for money. I know just the sucker.”

They’d gone onto stop at the treasure hold (another visit Shand had insisted upon) and rob the pirates blind before escaping into the black, Din to find this Bo-Katan person Shand was ranting about and Shand to Tatooine, of all fucking places. He thought that maybe she was on the pirate cruiser on purpose.

Choosing not to explain was, as it often was for Din, the smarter move. Not many were as comfortable in silence as he, and Bo-Katan is of the kind that will fill it if no one else steps up to do so.

“It used to belong to me,” Bo-Katan allows, dipping her un-helmeted head. “And it will again, soon.”

“You can have it, but I need a favor in return.”

Bo-Katan was honestly planning on just having it out with this poor aruetti in the middle of the throne room and taking it then, but they weren’t Mandolorian and didn’t technically win the saber in combat. Taking ownership of the saber in exchange for a favor was probably fine, should the favor itself be noble enough to tell a good story for the scattered Mandalorian people she intends to lead with said saber.

Djarin explains. Apparently they’d been taking care of a child they found in Gideon’s ship (because no way the Imp in question wasn’t that shitstain) in the week it took to scrounge around for parts and fix-up the crashed Razor Crest. Djarin’d clearly grown attached to the kid, because their spine and shoulders straightened at describing losing this child, sudden seismic activity causing the child to fall far down into a cavern Bo-Katan figures out from geographical questioning must have been the Mines of Mandalore.

“They were in a pod, so they should have landed safely on the first flat surface the pod sensed. There was no other way down?”

Djarin shakes their head.

“If the pod was paired to you, it should not have fallen,” Bo-Katan notes. To which Djarin follows with another head shake: “I don’t have any interface to pair with.”

Koska has a habit of speaking when she isn’t necessarily supposed to. This unfortunate habit, to the discredit of Kryze-taught manners, typically provides necessary information or action (see the gentling hand). This time, Koska interrupts their traditional courtly proceedings to ask: “Really? Like, anything at all? You don’t need a Coruscantian-level interface for a pod-pair, any normal com’ll work. Tell me you at least have a comm.”