#lego kit

He noticed where the bonding straps were and carefully lifted them off, one at a time. The box flaps lifted up a little, but not a lot. Grogu didn’t know if that was good or bad, but he was glad that nothing had popped up to scare him the way he had startled his dad a few minutes earlier. Grogu reached out slowly and picked up one box flap and moved it so it folded over the box’s side. He then did the same thing to the other flap. He looked in the box and groaned just a little. 

There was another box. 

This box was only a little smaller than the outer box and it had writing in Aurebesh all over it. Grogu scanned it quickly and then let out a loud, self-satisfied cackle. It was another building set! Yippee!

Grogu glanced over to see what his dad was doing and was surprised to see that Din Djarin was just watching him. The blue milk had been cleaned up from the room, although Grogu could still see it’s smudges and marks on the Mandalorian’s armor. Wow. His dad was watching him rather than rushing off to clean his armor? Had the bounty hunter hit his head on something? This was just not his normal behavior.

Grogu called over to him.

“Okay?”

By that he meant, ‘Are you okay?’, but his dad took it to mean that Grogu wanted permission to keep doing what he was doing.

“It’s fine buddy. Open the box all the way. Zac wanted you to have that and you’ve been very patient.”

“Help?”

It only seemed right to practice the lessons he had been learning. Grogu didn’t just want to spill out the boxes contents. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. But Grogu did want his dad to give him a hand, so he wouldn’t have to use the Force to change the orientation of the box. Din Djarin could just lift up with his hands, flip it over and the inner box would slide right out.

His dad walked over and understood his dilemma, sort of. He picked up the box, flipped it over and waited for the other box to slide out. And waited. And waited.

“Hey pal, why don’t you ah… do the thing… and encourage the inner box to fall out?”

At least he hadn’t asked Grogu to do ‘the magic hand thing’. 

Grogu nodded his head and closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He opened his eyes again and focused on the box within the box and pulled on it very gently with the Force. It fell right out and landed on the floor with a thud. His dad gave him a look and he returned that look to the Mandalorian. His dad laughed.

“Gravity is always working against us. Okay. Do you want to this on the table in the front room or on your desk?”

The Mandalorian picked up the building set box and set the outer box down on the floor. 

“Do everything.”

Grogu pointed at the table that had been recently showered in blue milk. He knew his dad had cleaned it well. A Mandalorian couldn’t do a poor job at something that simple. And, even if he had, which he hadn’t, that table was much larger than Grogu’s desk and the box was pretty large, so whatever he was building was going to be pretty large as well. Plus, the building kit materials were impervious to blue milk. Grogu wasn’t going to tell his dad how he knew that. He just knew that if you had cup half filled with milk and you opened a bag too quickly that contained parts from one of these kits, it was just possible that gravity would make that part fall right into that cup! It was definitely possible.

“Alright buddy.”

Grogu trotted over to the ‘do everything table’ from where he’d been standing next to the wagon and jumped right up onto the top. The Mandalorian had put the box down in the center of the table and Grogu walked over to check it out. 

While the back of the box had been covered in Aurebesh, the front had a bunch of sketches on it. Vids almost. It was very colorful. Very interesting. And only a little bit confusing. There were three vids. One of a roller coaster kind of thing. Another of a rocket launch kind of thing. Finally, a rocket spinning kind of thing.

They all looked like they were from Biggs BigsBee’s Balance Garden and Entertainments park, except that they were all space themed. Grogu had never heard of a space themed park and wondered if Zac had been there or if this was something the Brethren were going to build? After all, they all liked to play and a park where you could learn about space and play on space rides would have to be popular. How could it not be?

Grogu turned so he could go get some of the tools he liked to use when he was working on the building kits and was surprised to see that his dad was right there. Staring at the box the same way he’d been staring at it. He chirped at his dad to find out what was up.

“Which one do you plan on building? As far as I can tell this kit builds one of the three amusements, but not all three of them at the same time.”

He wasn’t embarrassed by his body. Far from it really. But, unlike Grogu’s teacher, with her variety of scars and the impossible stories of how she had acquired them, Din Djarin didn’t like to talk about how he’d managed to pick up the scars that crisscrossed his own body.

His scars weren’t just a personal reminder of surviving some sort of hostile event. They were also reminders of the people he knew who hadn’t survived those same events. People he considered friends. Fellow warriors. Innocent bystanders. There were always innocent bystanders. People paralyzed by the danger they found themselves in and not able to do anything about it. He had tried to save them when he could, but as the scars attested, sometimes he couldn’t keep either of them out of danger. 

Right now, he just didn’t want to be a Mandalorian. He wanted to be a dad. Just a dad. Like his dad was. A person who lived and loved and played and when he made a mess, always, always, always, cleaned it up. Which is what Djarin was getting ready to do. Slowly. He wanted to make sure that Grogu was really asleep because he didn’t want his son to help him set things right. He needed to do this on his own.

Grogu had been looking forward to that box from Zac so much and just when the small one thought everything was going to go his way, his own dad stuck his huge feet in Grogu’s way. It wasn’t fair; it wasn’t right; and it wasn’t going to remain that way. Din Djarin was going to make amends. 

That meant he needed to pick up all the parts and get them cleaned up, dried off, and put them back in their original containers. To do that he would also be taking all the work he’d already done and breaking it back down to the component parts. And he was going to let Grogu decide how to organize them, how much to do at a time, and when to take breaks. 

All of those actions were better done when he was in his first layer, than even when he was covered up in his second layer. He’d discovered that after he’d bumped the table and knocked everything on the floor. He’d told Grogu they would sort things out in the morning and he’d meant that at the time. But when he went to lay down, he found himself being jabbed in a dozen spots, some of them quite surprising and astonishingly painful. When he began to track down the culprits, he thought maybe some sort of biting critter had gotten under his armor, he discovered some of the smallest of the building parts had managed to find their way into cracks and gaps in his second layer. Ouch.

So he began to remove the armor and then the second layer and then he saw the small parts of the floor. After he stepped on a few of them. Ouch again. Once he had them all, he brought them out to the table and went back to his room to dress. As soon as he pulled up the bottoms for the second layer, several more parts spilled onto the floor and Djarin realized he was fighting a losing battle. He checked the top and found more parts and also found the spot where the seam had split and Grogu’s hands had been able to slip through and tickle the hell out of him. 

He was going to leave his helmet on, but that’s when he stepped on the nth tiny piece and realized that his scanners just didn’t want to pick up the tiny pieces. It didn’t make any sense until he took the helmet all the way off. One of the stickers that decorated certain pieces had gotten stuck on the exterior of the helmet, blocking that scanner. Dank Farrik. He’d certainly made a mess of things. 

Which was why he thought about his own dad. He didn’t have the luxury of hiding under a helmet or behind armor or under a bunch of layers of custom and Creed. He’d just been a man who wanted to do the right thing by his family. If Djarin was going to do right by Grogu he would clean up the mess and do it as a dad, not as a Mandalorian bounty hunter and warrior. 

He didn’t know what Grogu would think about it all, but that was okay. Amends wasn’t just about making things right for Grogu. It was also about examining why it had meant so much to him to play with the set and how he had gotten so absorbed by it until he was just being selfish. It had been a long time since he had to share what he was doing with anyone, when the thing he was doing was just for pure fun. He’d forgotten what that was like and followed such an asymmetrical path, that Grogu had no choice but to put up with it. Just like he’d had to put up with the Imps. And if there was anything Din Djarin didn’t want his son to see him as, it was some selfish jerk from the Imperium. 

Grogu’s dad already had too much stuff to carry (his words, not Grogu’s). Grogu would have happily used the Force to move the box, but his dad said no to that because Din Djarin didn’t want him tiring himself out that way. When they brought the first load to the cabin, put it away, checked on the cabin proper, used the privy, etc., etc., then they would go back with Grogu’s cart and bring the box back. At least that was what his dad said they would do. It sounded reasonable at the time and Grogu left the box on the Razor Crest.

Four hours later, when he suggested to his dad that they go back to the Razor Crest to collect the box, his dad was chatting with High Magistrate Greef Karga. Chatting. Certainly the High Magistrate was notorious for talking with people for long periods of time. He had a lot of stories that he liked to tell, a lot of information he enjoyed extracting from his victims, uh, friends, and a lot of problems that he wanted to solve, including the need to bounce the potential solutions off an appropriate audience. Din Djarin was often selected for the honor of being appropriate. 

Grogu waited as long as he could and then he remembered that he was supposed to use his wagon to do the work. He didn’t actually need his dad to help him with that. He could get R5 to help him with part of the work and R5 was already on the Razor Crest doing maintenance tasks that had to wait for them to land. By the time his dad was actually finished talking with the High Magistrate, Grogu would have the box home, the contents examined and would most likely be having a great time playing with whatever Zac had sent him. It was all good.

All good until Grogu remembered how much stuff he’d stored in the wagon. These things were surplus to requirement and didn’t need to be kept in his room, let alone in the cabin. Before they went on their most recent set of trips, Grogu was supposed to take the wagon up to the shed next to the N-1 and put the items away properly. Oh well. He had promised himself that he would follow his plan and do his chores before he opened the box and that was what he was going to do. 

He had to be very careful dragging the wagon to the N-1 location. While it was easy to traverse when Din Djarin was doing the walking, when he was carefully managing the cart to prevent all the contents from falling off of it, well, it wasn’t nearly as easy and nothing like fast. 

He remembered his teacher telling him a story about being in the  archives that the Brethren had on Tzura and how one day someone had put a bunch of artifacts in the wrong drawers. Apparently Serena was just not very open to the Force and the objects all told her conflicting stories about what they were and where they belonged. That’s when the head of the archives asked Ta’lan to go in and fix it. Being in a bit of rush, because she was always in a bit of a rush, she asked all the objects in the affected collection to tell her if they were in the correct place or not. They all claimed that they had been misfiled. A full day later the collection was all sorted out, the objects were happy, and the head of the archive was happy. Ta’lan admitted that she had not been particularly happy because she had missed several lessons, all of her meals, and hadn’t slept for two days. 

His dad asked her why she didn’t get help from someone else.

“Objects don’t call out to everyone. Kish and Sha were off planet and that meant that I was the only person who could do the work. That meant I had to be extra careful. That took time, but it was worth doing right. I did ask the archivist to stop letting Serena help them. She had no idea where any of the stuff belonged and just stuffed it in the first drawer that had room. That made everything worse. ‘If you don’t know, don’t hurry’ is a saying I had painted in each room of the archive.”

Grogu had realized when he heard that story that he could have been Serena. Just putting stuff here and there and never really caring about how much trouble that made for his dad or for him the next time they needed those items. He’d vowed to follow his teachers advice, even when he really just wanted to dump the stuff off and go and play. It just made the work harder when he returned to it later.

Eventually he and the wagon reached the shed and he opened the door wide and sighed. The shed was even less organized than he remembered it being when they left on their last trips. Dank Farrik! He pushed the wagon into the space and took a deep breath. He needed to understand what was there before he changed it all. 

First, he and his dad both used the shed, but for very different reasons. His dad managed the maintenance supplies for the ships, the supplies for his armor and weapons, the spare goods needed for the cabin, and a weird and wide variety of Mandalorian-ish things (hot sauce anyone?). Grogu kept his extra toys, plushies, education models, data packs, his shiny rock collection, interesting feathers, beads, credits, and fasteners of all varieties, and gifts that people had thoughtfully given him but that he would have to grown into, learn to use, donate, or assemble. 

Wow. It was going to be a lot of work to manage all of that, but he considered how much easier it would be in the future if he could find that two centimeter spline tape without having to open every container and dump its contents on the floor.