#teaofpeach

But in the months since he and his companions have settled here, lying awake and staring at the ceiling of his palace quarters has never invited such a sick feeling to his stomach. It’s not nausea — he’s well acquainted with that. Kamino, Geonosis, Coruscant, Tatooine. Nausea has followed him like a diseased shadow.

This is different. He calls it anticipation, for to hear a noise and feel fear is foolishness he’s long outgrown.

The noise doesn’t get louder. The snaked, coiled thing growing in the pit of his stomach gets heavier, and heavier.

Just as he feels he may be crushed into the soft sheets by whatever waking night-terror has decided to sit on his chest, Boba sits up. In fact, he gets out of bed, swings his legs over the edge to touch the chilly stone floor, and steps outside. He’s always preferred doing things, anyway.

There’s nothing out of the ordinary as Boba stares out into the empty throne room. Thin, slivered shadows and hollow caverns. There’s nothing besides that kriffing noise, he thinks sourly, tiredly, before he turns his head.

Someone is standing in the hallway.

Danger.

At first he doesn’t believe it. A simple silhouette that Boba can barely make out in the dark. Something about it doesn’t quite seem real, as if that same waking night-terror hasn’t yet been rubbed from his eyes. Boba blinks. Its outline is blurry, encircled by a slim ring of darkness and seeming to shift in and out of focus. Moonlight doesn’t touch the shape, doesn’t even creep near.

Boba doesn’t approach either. Not even when he recognises the figure. The shoulders, the stance. He can feel in his bones that in the inky blackness hides a scruffy jaw and sad, weathered eyes. “Djarin?”

Din does not respond. He continues to stand there, staring silently down at the floor, which throws the figure’s identity into question because Din is polite to a fault. Fennec had laughed about it when they’d first met the man; a bounty hunter with manners.

What’s wrong with the figure, Boba realises, is that it’s still. Too still. He squints. His eyes aren’t what they used to be, and it’s dark, but he doesn’t think ‘Din’ is… breathing.

The very wrongness of the situation has his fingers twitching for a weapon that isn’t there.

Boba is beginning to think he should have carried a blaster.

“Din,” he calls, more urgently. “What are you doing?”

Silence, again. A sudden gust of wind whistles outside the window, churning sand against rocky architecture. It scrapes.

Boba’s frown deepens. This isn’t right.

The figure then turns — though that isn’t the right word for the movement. It’s a kind of swaying, as if the body can’t quite settle its centre of gravity and settles for a light, weightless bobbing around a fixed point. Almost like dangling. There is no rustling of cloth, no scrape of foot against sandstone floor.

Against his better judgement, Boba glances down. Both of the figure’s feet are flat on the ground.

Of course, his rational mind whispers. What were you expecting?

This ‘Din’, still standing at the other end of the hallway, now faces him directly. And gripped tightly in his left hand is the source of that infernal thrumming.

The Darksaber. Ignited and ready for battle, as it always has been.

Now, technically, pointed at Boba. The figure doesn’t turn away. The light it gives off is sickly, splattering Din’s shirt with the same strange, inverse not-glow the blade itself emanates.

It reminds him of a fish, of all things. One he’d read about, so many years ago. The type that suckers in prey with a shining, blinding light.

A throb in his temple makes itself known, winding the tension in his spine even tighter. When did the thrumming get so loud? It’s everywhere; it bites up his legs and punctures the soft spots between his ribs. A clawed hand crushing a spoilt fruit in its grasp.

Boba clenches his fists to stop himself from covering his ears, nails biting into the flesh of his palms. The sound is more piercing this time, with purpose and deadly aim.

Thick, oozing cold settles in his gut. There is only one possible target in this room.

It gets louder. And louder. It ebbs and flows like the tide but so much more vicious. It doesn’t stop; the noise simmers and bubbles and rings in his ears, resounding through the hallway so strongly it shakes his teeth to the tender, aching nerves and pounds at the insides of his skull. It’s swarming out from behind his eyes and it doesn’t stop, why can’t it stop — the Darksaber swings upwards, ready to strike the final blow — why is this happening he should take it—

“Din!”

The figure flinches. Boba’s shout is as good as a bullet. His shoulders heave with staggering breaths. His heartbeat pulses jaggedly at his throat and he’s panting; a cold, thin sheen of sweat is draped over the back of his neck.

The Darksaber is held high above Boba’s head. The crest of a wave, frozen. Then the blade retreats with a quiet whoosh before the hilt clatters to the ground. That’s the only reason Boba realises the thrumming has stopped.

It still doesn’t feel fixed. Nothing does.

The figure stumbles forward and Din’s haggard face is suddenly awash in a sliver of moonlight. He’s a puppet cut down from his strings, crumpling to the ground.

Boba is there to catch him. As it will be.

“Easy. What happened?” he questions gruffly, too preoccupied with checking the other man over for injuries to hear just how hoarse his voice is.

But whatever state he’s in, Din is worse. He stares at some point on Boba’s shoulder with glazed, unfocused eyes. The man is sweating buckets. “I... I don’t know.”

Din’s voice is soft, as Boba has come to expect, though not reassuring. It crackles and bursts to suggest there’s mucus sitting in his airways, spitting and popping like rotting fat thrown out to sizzle on Tatooine street corners.

Perhaps it is reassuring, then, to be holding his friend so limp in his arms like this. Because Boba knows what blood in the lungs sounds like, and the distinct lack of it anywhere in the musty hallway finally brings his racing pulse something close to calm.

Boba makes a slow, calculated move to rise from the floor and lift the other man with him, but Din flinches when he feels Boba’s shoulders tense. A flinch that dissolves into faint tremors wracking his body, which Boba is loath to ignore, but it also clears the fog from his gaze somewhat.

“I’m—” Din clears his throat and forces out a hard, sharp breath. “I’m fine.” He looks Boba in the eye. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

“No, you’re not,” Boba returns dryly, though he can’t deny the weight that slips from his chest. Breathing, talking. Even with the tremors leaching from Din’s bones into his own, they’re good signs.

Din cracks a weak smile, which comes out more as a grimace. In any case, it doesn’t matter when it’s wiped away almost immediately as Din glances to the side.

Boba looks too. Next to the wall, the discarded hilt of the Darksaber stares back.

“Fett,” Din says gravely, keeping his eyes trained on the weapon. So gravely in fact, that Boba’s hackles rise. He’s speaking as if— as if his life depends on it.

“What?”

The fingers on Boba’s shoulder dig in tightly. “Take it,” Din whispers, hissing between his teeth. He’s pleading. “Take it, destroy it. Anything. Just don’t leave me alone with it.”

Boba is not a man easily surprised. But there is something inherently sickening in the crease of Din’s brow, anxious and abandoned. So much about all this is wrong.

He’s pallid, Boba realises. Din is shivering and sickly and sweaty like he’s in the slump of a fever. He’s still staring at that damned saber.

In the dark, they’re both kneeling on the ground. They are kneeling, technically, before the Darksaber itself.

And with a stubborn set of his jaw, Boba makes a decision.

He swings Din up from the ground, maintaining a stable hold on both arms and looping one round his own neck before either of them can topple back down.

“Right,” Boba barks, and Din’s head snaps up. “You’re going to get some sleep. And you’re leaving that blasted thing here.” His voice leaves no room for discussion.

As he marches them back to Din’s quarters, taking careful stock of any acute weaknesses in the other man’s posture and satisfied to find none for now, Din’s gaze remains forward. It latches onto the door with sharp, quiet focus, and the sight could make Boba grin.

The haunted look in his eyes is new territory. But determination; that, Boba can work with.

Walls of granite and sandstone are taller at night, it seems. Boba gets the fleeting sense that they’re boxed in on either side, in such narrow walkways, then shuns the thought. The palace is his territory. He has nothing to fear, here.

Still, he makes his way around the corners a touch quicker than before.

By the time they’ve gotten to Din’s door, neither of them have looked back once. It’s illogical, he knows. But they both look straight ahead without fail. As if that would keep the thrumming at bay. As if they feel the silence is any better.

Din takes a moment to push himself upright, testing his balance. “Thank you,” he says quietly. It’s sincere, which Boba can respect. He just doesn’t know what it’s for.

Settling on a nod, Boba suggests, “I’ll keep it in my quarters.” The empty sword still lies in the other corridor. “We’ll… figure things out in the morning.”

Din’s mouth flattens into a pained line, and a muscle jumps uncomfortably at his temple. Here, with a little more light, Boba can see the bags etched under the man’s eyes. He’s struck with the impression that this… sleepwalking, for lack of a better term, is not a recent development.

“Yeah,” Din mumbles. “In the morning.”

He eyes his cot as a starving man would a feast, but lingers at the boundary.

When Din speaks, Boba almost regrets waiting to hear it.

“I don’t know what it’s doing to me.”

The words are uttered with a familiar, resigned shame that drips to the floor. It puddles around Din in viscous trails, drooping his shoulders and shutting his eyes. Weighing him down for longer than a night, clearly.

“I don’t know anymore, Fett. Sometimes I can hear it talking to me. Talking. I think I might—” He wheezes out a sigh, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes as if to purge whatever he sees there.

A moment to collect himself, drag all the pieces together with string and a loose knot. Then, in a quiet, ragged voice, Din confesses, “I think I’m going insane.”

False platitudes have never come easily to Boba, and they don’t start now. His jaw is slack as he searches for the words, anything to fill that chasm, until he realises there aren’t any.

So he doesn’t say anything at all, save for a slow, sympathetic hand on Din’s shoulder. He stands with his friend.

And in the dark of the palace, Boba wonders if Din might be right.