Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Luke!”

It’s the first thing out of Din’s mouth as soon as the X-Wing’s canopy is thrown open.

He should be on the bridge, he knows it, but Bo-Katan waved him away with an exasperated roll of her helmet and he was gone, down the corridors at a full sprint. If anyone had been shocked to see him speed by towards the hangar, no one had said anything. He wouldn’t have stopped if they had.

He’d heard it all over the comms. Hanging back in the shadow of the second moon, Custos, they hadn’t seen much, but he’d heard it. The screams, yes, but also the chatter, the whoops of triumph, the relief-filled laughter.

Victory – their first. Unlikely to be their hardest won, but Din isn’t going to look a gift blurrg in the mouth.

Luke hoists himself out with practiced ease, leaping over the side of the cockpit and landing, catlike, on the hangar floor, wearing a grin as bright as summer. Din’s heart pounds, his breathing quickens, and he couldn’t care less about the people surrounding them, the raucous shouts of celebrating Mandalorians distant, muffled. All that matters is Luke.

He hurries forward, and Luke heads towards him, drawn into orbit around each other. Their helmets collide with a loud thunk that makes Luke laugh, his hands on Din’s neck, fingers finding the sweet little gaps where skin is bare. Din holds him, hands on his shoulders, eyes closed behind his visor.

“You came back,” he murmurs, voice catching.

“It was no Death Star trench run,” Luke says, laughter bubbling under his words, slightly cocky. And there it is, another view of the myriad facets this man can offer. Din laughs with him.

They finally part to the sound of a wolf-whistle, and Din just catches Fenn wearing a smirk that says guilty. Whatever, he’ll deal with that later.

“We’re needed on the bridge,” Din says. “We’re not done.”

Luke nods, and then turns to the side. “I’ll be right there. Wait for me?”

Din watches him go, tugging off his helmet and shaking out the thick bounce of his hair. He crosses over to one of his mismatched squadron’s starfighters, to a man that has hung back from the celebration. The pilot sits heavily on a crate, his grey-green helmet cradled in his hands, and it’s obvious who he is. They lost someone out in the black, and it must have been someone this man knew well.

Luke stops in front of him, says something Din can’t hear. The pilot looks up, nods briefly. He doesn’t shrug off the hand Luke places on his shoulder.

It’s quintessentially Luke, to forge a moment of quiet in the chaos of celebration to comfort someone.

He waits until Luke rejoins him, and there’s a cloud over his face now, something pained but resigned. Din brushes his fingers against Luke’s, and when Luke looks at him, he smiles again.

“So, this is the plan.” Ursa Wren’s voice is clear, crisp, no-nonsense. She is a woman who commands respect and attention, ideally suited to give the mission brief.

Din strips his blaster, cleans it meticulously. It’s a familiar set of movements, muscle memory, supremely calming.

“There will be five teams: the Mand’alor’s squad and four smaller squads. Each will be stationed at a random position around the dome. Each will have EMPs designed to cause blips in the energy output of the dome. These will be triggered randomly to simulate failure. Only the Mand’alor’s team will actually infiltrate the city itself in this first stage.”

He checks his vambraces, the connections, the wiring, the triggers. Grogu passes him tools when he asks. He doesn’t always get the right one first time, but he’s picking up the names for them.

“We’ll make a mechanic out of you yet, kid,” he says fondly. Grogu coos happily as Luke, cross-legged on the bed, chuckles.

“Once inside, there will be two distractions implemented: one provided by the Jedi Luke Skywalker, and another in the form of a full-frontal assault to divert all Imperial remnant forces inside the city to the spaceport.”

“What will the Jedi provide?” asks a voice.

Luke smiles slightly, playing the enigma. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

Din continues his work, checking the electronics of his cuirass. He wipes down his visor and reapplies the anti-fog spray inside and out, keeping his vision clear. He goes over his comms and his HUD, making certain everything is in order and there’s no risk of glitches.

“From there, the Mand’alor’s team will split into two: one will head for the communications hub and continue with interference. The other, headed by the Mand’alor, will make their way to the Royal Palace. At this point, the energy dome will be deactivated. The remaining diversionary teams and the main force will then enter the city and provide reinforcement.”

He counts his whistling birds and slots them back into place. He checks his whipcord and his flamethrower fuel, activates his new plasma shield to make certain it still works, though he’s never had cause to doubt the Armourer’s work before. He calibrates his thermal charges, slotting them back into his belt, and strips and cleans his second (borrowed) blaster.

“Mand’alor. Any words at this time?”

Din unclips the Darksaber slowly. He doesn’t exactly know how to clean it beyond superficial maintenance, but it doesn’t seem to require it. Lightsabers confuse him greatly, but he might as well use it – he’s meant to, after all. It seems to thrum in his hand, as if in anticipation of battle.

It doesn’t make him feel any less nervous.

Din clears his throat.

“Ner vode, we go to battle. Those who stole and ravaged our planet will not survive the retribution of its children. This will not be a pitched battle. Our enemy knows no honour, no martial pride. We will be taking our city back building by building, street by street. We might have little left beyond the victory itself, but it will be ours once again. We are strong, we are enduring, we survive. We will take back our city, and our planet, and our right by the manda!”

His vambrace strikes his cuirass, and even through the crackle of holocomm speakers, the ring of beskar is pure, strikes a resonance inside the core of every Mandalorian who hears it.

“FOR MANDALORE!”

“OYA! OYA! OYA!” comes the answer, thousands of voices united, powerful, determined, punctuated by the sound of metal on metal. Unbowed and unbroken even by years of exile, of barely surviving, the voice of the Mando’ade is strong.

A knock sounds on the door. The air seems to pulsate with the knowledge of change on the horizon.

“This is it, then,” Din says heavily. He gets to his feet – he feels like his body weighs a ton – and leans on the table.

Grogu peers up at him, making a small, worried noise. Din can’t help but smile at him.

In the end, isn’t everything he does for his son?

“Be good,” Din murmurs, and Grogu nods. He reaches out, and Din doesn’t hesitate, he could never hesitate. He takes Grogu in his arms, presses their foreheads together.

It faintly mirrors another time on this very ship, but it feels so very different: Luke is by his side now, instead of taking the child away, and saying his own farewell, and there is no sense of finality, whatever the battle might bring. They have a contingency for the worst, but although Din’s stomach roils with anxiety, he is also more certain than he has been for a long while. He has doubted at every corner – himself, the strength of his conviction, his dedication to the cause – but now he is only sure of one thing: whatever happens today will change their lives forever, and there is no turning back.

With a jolt, he realises something: he’s never said the words.

His voice cracking, eyes closed against the threat of tears, he whispers, “Ni kar'tayl gai sa'ad, Grogu.”

He doubts that Grogu understands. Or perhaps he does, because the tiny claws squeeze tighter, the little wrinkled forehead presses harder, and Grogu lets out a small noise, fond and sad at the same time.

The moment stretches, but not long enough. If Din could make it last forever, he would, but he can’t. He holds Grogu as Luke kisses his forehead, stroking a gentle hand along a large, soft ear.

“We’ll be back,” Luke says, and there’s a weight to his words that leaves Din no doubt that they will. Luke has a way of speaking certainty into the universe.

Setting Grogu down on the table, Din replaces his helmet, slips all his blasters into their holsters and clips the Darksaber back into place. He gives Luke a once-over.

“I wish you’d wear at least a little armour,” he says. “For my peace of mind.”

Luke grins, something more roguish than Din is used to seeing on him. “It gets in the way.” He presses a final kiss to Din’s helmet, the usual spot, just left of the visor, and together, they leave. Fenn, waiting patiently outside, falls into step beside them.

Din’s squad waits in the hangar by the Wayfinder: Bo-Katan, Koska, Axe, the Armourer, Paz, Srita, Cole. It surprises him how many volunteered. Perhaps it will continue to surprise him that he has somehow inspired camaraderie, perhaps even loyalty, in people. He doesn’t quite understand what he’s done to deserve it yet, but he’s not about to complain.

“K'oyacyi,” he states, as strong an order as he can give. There is a collective nod and he leads the way up the loading ramp.

Dawn breaks over the Mandalorian horizon. Light refracts off the great expanses of shimmering glass that cover much of its surface, glittering testimony to unspeakable horror.

Just below the edge of a crater not far from the shattered dome of Sundari, a mismatched cluster of Mandalorian warriors and a single Jedi crouches warily. They peer over the rim at the twisted, broken mess before them, capped by an immense, blueish energy dome. Luke shields his eyes with his gloved hand, squinting.

“Should’ve brought macrobinoculars,” he mutters.

There’s a snort. “What, your Jedi magicks don’t give you better eyesight?” Koska asks with a sneer.

“Here.” Fenn slips off his helmet and hands it to Luke, and Din can’t help but glare at him through his visor. Fenn raises an eyebrow at him.

Luke either doesn’t notice or pretends he doesn’t, because he slips on Fenn’s helmet, studying the city.

“You mentioned a diversion,” Bo-Katan says, though she sounds dubious at best. Luke slips off the helmet again (and if Din continues to glare as he hands it back with a quick ‘thanks’, well, that’s his own business), shaking out his hair.

“I did,” he says, infuriatingly enigmatic.

He tugs out a strip of black cloth and a pair of folding goggles from his belt pouch, wrapping the cloth around his head and slipping the goggles on. He then crosses his legs, hands cupped in his lap, and slips his eyes closed.

The crater goes very quiet, and it’s a bewildered quiet, at that.

“He better not be falling asleep,” Axe mutters, earning a snigger from Koska.

Luke remains in his pose, unmoving, not even a twitch to his placid expression, until a small crease appears between his brows. Around them the wind starts to pick up. Din, eye level with the ground, can see the fine grains of sand of Sundari’s desert skittering across the surface.

The wind continues to rise. The dust catches on its teeth, billowing across the landscape in small clouds, close to the ground. The light changes quality, turning dull, sepia-toned, and when Din looks into the wind, he almost falls into the crater in shock. Everyone else follows his gaze.

An immense wall of sand blocks the sky, surging forward at breakneck speed as it rolls in across the barren plains of dust and glass.

“Son of a bantha,” Axe breathes, and that’s probably what everyone is thinking.

It hits like an ion cannon, ploughing into the city, engulfing the energy dome. They huddle on the edge of the crater, and Din knows that despite them all being decked head-to-toe in armour, the fine grains will end up where everyone wants them the least. The wind catches Luke’s cloak, tosses it around but still he sits, stock still, unbothered, until he sags.

“Ok, we have… about an hour or so,” he says. “I can’t be precise.”

Din can sense from his tone that he’s trying to hide his weariness. Not for the first time, though, Din is stunned by what his family is capable of, the raw power they can summon at will. This race of sorcerers is good to have as an ally.

It’s impossible to see anything through the flurry of dust, but they know where to head.

It’s not hard to find a ledge, a jagged lip of twisted metal, to land on, blasters out and senses on high alert. They haven’t spotted anything resembling a patrol, which makes sense: not even stormtroopers are stupid enough to venture out in a sandstorm. They gather in a semicircle like a herd of bantha around their young, and Koska hauls out her EMP, setting it beside the pulsing energy of the dome.

Din presses two fingers to the side of his helmet. “Team C, activate.”

“Copy that, Mand’alor,” comes the crackly reply.

A moment later the blue field seems to ripple and flicker, shuddering like someone’s walked over its grave. It gives a split-second view of the inside – not enough to actually see anything, but enough to know it’s working.

He gives the same order to Team D. The flicker is longer this time, jittery, snapping the dome in and out of existence. Another two blips in the dome, and Din nods to Koska. She presses a button.

The wall of energy stutters, then snuffs out, leaving an opening wide enough for two.

“Quick!” she hisses, and no one needs telling twice: with Din taking point, they slink through a huge rend in the beskar plating that once made the Great Dome, and into the city.

Once through, they all stop in their tracks. All they can do is stare.

Sprawled below them is nothing but rubble, scorched and blackened. The beskar façades have all been stripped, leaving the ugly steelcrete and composisteel rebar in twisted, broken mockery of what Sundari used to be. Streets remain, but stripped to the permacrete skeletons below. By some miracle a few buildings still stand – the Royal Palace, the Academy, some other residential spacescrapers used, Din supposes, as barracks – but it makes the devastation all the uglier. What remains upright is itself a hideous testament to the devastation. Nothing remains suspended, brought down to the surface with the dome itself.

Everyone is silent for a long moment.

Din has to shake himself from his grim reverie. “No time to stare, get moving,” he orders, though his voice is unsteady.

Is this what he is to be king of? Ruins? This is what his people are fighting for? Dying for?

They quickly gather themselves at the order, and Axe takes point as the one with the city map projected onto his vambrace. He lets them to a manhole cover – durasteel, otherwise it would have been sold like the rest of the beskar cladding the city once wore proudly – and pulls it back.

It takes a while for them all to clamber down into the darkness, but with a minimum of muffled cursing, they manage it. Head glowlamps and nightvision filters are switched on.

“Sewers again,” Luke groans.

“Romantic, isn’t it?” Din says, keeping his voice low enough so only Luke can hear it, and it makes Luke snort, earning himself a couple of looks.

They’re an odd procession as they slog through the stinking tunnels – they haven’t been maintained well, Din can spot cracks in the stresscrete and the occasional side-passage blocked by rubble or a sunken main thoroughfare. He catalogues all the work to be done and sighs internally: this will take a lifetime to restore. Multiple lifetimes. It’s a daunting prospect.

They continue on, past an opening to a vast, and silent, subterranean treatment plant, until they reach a specific crossroads. Axe, the leader until now, nods.

“We split here, Mand’alor,” he says.

Left is the Royal Palace, where the Viceroy is. Right is the communications hub, necessary to keep their presence undetected for as long as possible.

Here is where they must part. Din takes a deep breath as he gazes at Luke, their eyes locked through Din’s visor.

“May the Force be with you,” Luke says with a small smile and a nod. Din swallows.

“Good luck,” he replies. In a fit of madness, he reaches quickly out and grabs Luke’s hand, squeezing it. Luke squeezes back, and it’s more reassuring than any words could ever be.

Their fingers slip away from each other until Din is touching only air, and looking away is pain. He’s surprised no one says anything, but he’s grateful they leave it. He doesn’t think he could deal with mockery just now.

The journey in the dark, rancid tunnels continues, Axe still in the lead, directing them thanks to the map projected by his vambrace. They are silent, until Bo-Katan steps up, level with Din.

“I didn’t think it was this bad,” she whispers, and even through the vocoder he can hear the cracks in her voice.

“Even if it’s ruins, they’ve been allowed to have it for too long,” Din says, voice like beskar itself.

It takes perhaps another ten minutes to reach their destination. Axe clambers up the ladder to scout the surface. The rest wait, with bated breath, in the darkness below. Din keeps his arms folded, stares at the frankly uninteresting expanse of wall in front of him, working on controlling his breathing, his heart rate, the roiling in the pit of his stomach. The Darksaber almost burns on his hip, as if it too knows what is about to happen. In the building above them is their destiny.

Funny, really, how the turning points of Din’s life like to happen in sewers.

“Coast is clear,” comes Axe’s voice through their comms, and one by one, they ascend. Din is grateful to be the first after Axe – he doesn’t want to think about how irritating it would be to come last, anticipation burning a hole in his gut.

A quick jetpack thrust onto one of the neighbouring roofs gives them a better vantage point of the Great Plaza.

“Deathtroopers,” Bo-Katan notes disdainfully, tilting her helmet at the great doors that lead into the palace. Indeed, there are four stationed there, and with an alertness that tells Din they know of the attack taking place at the spaceport.

“We could take the windows…” Fenn suggests, gesturing upwards, and Din notes the frankly impractical amount of actual glass windows present, expensive and ostentatious.

“We’re replacing those with transparisteel,” Din mutters. He looks down into the plaza, taking note of the two Occupier assault tanks sitting there, their crews milling about near them, clearly awaiting orders. They look in better shape than most of the Imperial arsenal in the sector, but in the end, it doesn’t matter.

“Paz,” Din says, pointing at them.

“Say no more,” Paz grunts, hefting up his blaster cannon.

“Get ready,” Din orders, and they obey: one foot on the edge of the roof, blasters out, jetpacks at the ready. It’s a relief to be fighting beside people who know, who understand how to fight, can almost read his mind because they think, in combat, in almost exactly the same way. It makes things easier.

Paz fires. It hits the first Occupier tank, igniting it in a burst of orange flame. The blast sends stormtroopers flying, shouts of alarm rise, and the squad takes to the air.

The children of Mandalore have lain dormant for years. In a similar way to how the Jedi were erased from memory, dismissed as myth so quickly after their destruction, so too were the Mandalorians. A purged people deserve to be forgotten, and perhaps their prowess was overblown, exaggerated. They weren’t so tough – after all, what kind of warrior people gets itself purged so easily?

The children of Mandalore have returned to show their enemies how very wrong they are.

The screeching whoosh of jetpacks heralds their arrival. Din tosses a pair of thermal detonators at the second tank: they magnetise to the main body. They explode, and the nearby gaggle of troopers screams, one collapsing, smoking, to the ground.

His boots hit the permacrete, his blasters raised. He fires. It’s easy to slip into the headspace of combat, the superior plane of consciousness that all battles exist on, where everything is slowed to a pinpoint, dilated to hyperspeed, loud and silent, calm and sheer chaos. Stormtroopers are easy prey, like taking clams from a Gungan, they’re only dangerous in large numbers, and they’ve seen to it that the main bulk of the force is far from the Palace.

He spots Bo-Katan shooting a trooper point blank in the helmet. Fenn, still airborne, swoops over the second tank, throwing his own thermal detonator into the open hatch, blowing the thing up from the inside.

Victory is starting to look easy, and that sets Din on edge. Things are rarely ever this simple.

Sure enough, the Palace doors open. Out stream more deathtroopers, and Din allows himself a small sigh before he ducks behind the smouldering remains of the left tank. The deathtroopers open fire, but most of it glances off twisted durasteel and, occasionally, beskar.

“Who has a jetpack rocket?” Din asks.

“You don’t have one?” Bo-Katan sputters, horrified. The Armourer fixes her with a steady glare through the helmet.

“I got one,” Axe says.

“Good,” Din says. “We’ll cover you: fly up, around, hit the doors.” He traces the flight plan with his finger, indicating an arc around the plaza.

Axe nods, crouches, ready to go. Din gives the order with a firm gesture towards the doors.

They burst from cover, guns blazing. Din isn’t even sure what he hits, but it doesn’t matter: he follows Axe from the corner of his eye, watching the man launch himself into the air and circle round, head lowered. The rocket flies true from his jetpack and Axe pulls up as it hits, sending deathtroopers flying and stumbling.

Then Axe plummets.

“AXE!” Bo-Katan screams.

“Sniper!” roars someone else, Din doesn’t know who, and everyone takes cover again. Din peeks out from his new hiding spot, his eyes roving the rooftops, darting from building to building. He brings up his heat-seeking filter.

“There!” he barks, pointing. Srita follows his finger and keeps close to the building façade, flying vertically up until the rooftop, aiming her blaster rifle. She shoots.

That’s the cue for Din to signal a charge.

They rise in unison, weaving around each other – which Din is pleasantly surprised goes well, considering they’ve never flown in formation before. They branch into two, classic pincer manoeuvre, splitting the firepower. They land.

Din already knows this fight will be harder. Deathtroopers are actually good, with the expensive gear and the decent training. They can take a blaster hit and bounce back.

Din holsters his blasters and unclips the Darksaber.

With a singing crackle, it flares into life, black lightning, and Din lunges for the closest deathtrooper. The man is frozen, but Din doesn’t pay attention to that: he cuts him down, the plasma sizzling through armorplast and flesh. Din only pays attention to his own adversaries. He gets some lucky blaster bolt deflections in, and he thinks, chest swelling, that Luke would be proud of him.

It’s a whirlwind of chaos, much like most battles are. A rush of adrenaline, a roar in the ears, alertness and tunnel vision. Fenn jams his blaster under a deathtrooper’s helmet, firing. Bo-Katan uses her whipcord to wrench one close enough to stab with her vibroblade. Paz downs one with a single punch, throwing his entire weight behind it. The Armourer drives the hook of her hammer in the gap between codpiece and thigh armour, tearing out the femoral artery. Din drives the Darksaber through a man’s gut, hears him let out a choked wheeze into his vocoder. Din simply uses the man’s body as leverage to plant a boot and wrench the blade out.

The steps of the Palace are a mess, scorched and bloody. But the Palace doors are open, and they can take the barest moment to breathe.

Bo-Katan is off down the steps as soon as the last trooper falls. She vaults the balustrade, slows her fall with her jetpack, and sprints over to Axe’s side, skidding to her knees.

After a moment of hesitation, Din follows.

Srita has delicately removed Axe’s helmet. Blood trickles from his mouth, and when he coughs, more bubbles forth, thick with froth.

“Stay with me, Axe!” Bo-Katan snarls, an order. A vain one, and they both know it. Axe simply chuckles weakly.

“Sorry, boss. We made it this far.” He looks past her, to Din, and gives him a nod. “Mhi yaim'ola parbanala, Mand'alor.”

Din nods back, his throat constricting. White hot and ice cold at the same time, guilt begins to claw in the pit of his stomach, dripping down his oesophagus with the taste of bile. He watches, cannot tear his eyes away, as Axe’s breath starts to rattle, blood and spit gurgling at the back of his throat, and he goes limp in Bo-Katan’s arms.

She stays there for a moment, her grip on his hand tight, before she finally lets go. She closes his eyes and gently plucks his helmet from the ground, replacing it, and presses her forehead to his.

“Rest now, vod,” she murmurs, before getting to her feet.

“I’m sorry,” Din blurts before he can stop himself, voice catching. She shakes her head.

“We are both the hunter and the hunted,” she says, though her words sound hollow, wafer-thin. She eyes him, and he sees her shoulders stiffen. “Don’t blame yourself,” she adds, sharper now. “We all knew the risks. We came here prepared to die. And we still have a job to do.”

Din nods again. Axe will not die in vain.

As they, and Srita, jetpack back to the great steps, the quality of the light changes. They look up. From above, the great energy dome covering the city begins to fall. Like a dropped curtain, it cascades down, revealing the dull colour of the Mandalorian sky beyond it, failing completely. Now, distantly, they can hear the sounds of battle, of explosions and blaster fire and shouts drawing closer.

“Follow me, Mand’alor!” Bo-Katan barks, jerking her helmet towards the doors. Din has no other choice.

In they go.

The Palace isn’t crawling with deathtroopers, which is somewhat of a relief. There are some run-of-the-mill stormtroopers, some of whom surrender, as do the handful of technicians and agents they come across. One tries a screaming last stand. It’s a waste as he falls to the floor, his head caved in by the Armourer’s hammer. They herd the Imps into a single room, locking them in, before ascending, higher and higher, until they reach a long corridor.

“The Throne Room is through there,” Bo-Katan says, gesturing towards the tall doors.

Din takes a deep breath. His destiny is on the other side of those doors. A fate he would never have chosen for himself, but fell into his hands, almost by mistake.

He would have called it a mistake, once. Called it a horrible accident. But perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps this is where he’s meant to be.

His grip tightens on the hilt of the Darksaber.

Before he can say anything, Paz strides forward, blaster cannon raised. He plants himself in front of the barred doors, feet spread, with a sturdiness, like the ancient roots of a mountain, that will not be moved. And he fires.

The doors implode, flying inwards. There’s a deafening sound of shattering glass, some yells, a shriek.

“After you, Mand’alor,” Paz says, tilting his helmet. Din invisibly rolls his eyes, shaking his head. Darksaber ignited, singing at his side, he strides in.

“SHOOT! SHOOT THEM!” a woman screams before she ducks down a corridor, white cloak billowing behind her, presumably deeper into the Palace.

Din sighs. There’s going to be a chase, then. No matter; he focuses on the opponents in front of him first. More deathtroopers, two dozen strong, clearly the last bastion of defence.

Din brings up the Darksaber, stance ready. It is now the moment to make use of everything Luke has taught him, every technique and every trick. He will need them.

He needs to also remember he is not alone. Behind him, blasters raised, are Bo-Katan Kryze, Fenn Rau, Paz Vizsla and the Armourer. They have come this far with him.

Five Mandalorians against two squads of deathtroopers?

He likes those odds.

He charges.

He summons his new energy shield in the nick of time, allowing it to absorb the blaster bolts as he continues pushing forward. He ducks and thrusts the Darksaber upwards, sinking into the first deathtrooper’s guts like sizzling butter, the armorplast offering no resistance. He wrenches the blade out and spins on one foot, still low, rising to slice through the second, nearly cleaving them in two. A couple of hits leave his helmet ringing, but that doesn’t slow him down.

It's almost over. Keep going. You’re almost done.

He lunges, bringing the Darksaber down in a wide arc – obvious enough he’s basically holocomming his moves, but that doesn’t matter. What can his opponent even do, as he slumps, boneless, to the floor? He can’t pay attention to what the others are doing, but he hears the telltale crunch of a beskar hammer on armorplast, the volley of blasterfire, so different to Imperial-made weapons to the attuned ear. But only his Darksaber makes armorplast and flesh smoulder, unleashes its crackling song as he moves.

The fourth trooper lets off a volley of fire, but they all go wide, and leave the man open for decapitation, which Din performs with ease. With his comrades keeping the others occupied, Din moves smoothly through the sea of shiny black. He jerks his vambrace, and with high-pitched shrills, the whistling birds are summoned, darting around them in the chaos of battle to find their targets.

And suddenly Din is facing a single opponent. Beyond he can see the throne of Mandalore.

This one wears the bars of a captain, and he tosses his blaster aside to pull out his own sword with a modulated laugh. Cold fury runs through Din then: from the way the blade catches the light, it is beskar. A beskad, held in the hands of the unworthy.

Din dismisses his shield, eases himself back into one of the stances Luke taught him, grounded, ready. The deathtrooper captain cracks his neck.

“I see the rabid dogs need teaching a lesson,” he says.

Din would scoff, if he were inclined to. It’s hollow bravado, after all.

The captain seems irked by his lack of reaction. He launches himself at Din, a wide arc that Din easily blocks with his own blade. He ducks under the captain’s guard, barrels into him shoulder-first, knocking the man to the floor.

The deathtrooper rolls to his feet, falls back into defence. Din circles him, studies him. The captain has a decent stance, good grip, and Din knows he’s being studied right back.

It seems what the captain has little of is patience. He lunges again, finds the Darksaber, an exchange of quick sparking blows that leaves neither of them with the upper hand. He tries low, Din blocks, skips back with lighter footwork than he would have thought himself capable of mere weeks ago. The captain tries to distract with his blade, going for a punch – Din dodges a second too late, getting a glancing blow to the side of his helmet. His head rings.

The captain takes advantage. He surges forward, beskad high, and Din raises his forearm to take the hit. Beskar finds beskar with the familiar vibrato, although this sounds… wrong, somehow. Din can’t quite pin why, until—

With a cold thrill of horror, he feels the blade bite into his vambrace, the beskar of the blade eating into its brethren. He twists his other arm up, and the Darksaber with it, slashing upwards. The captain wrenches his sword back, and the plasma just catches him in the side – not deep, but excruciating enough that he lets out a hoarse yell of pain.

He stumbles back, Din can hear him breathing harshly through the helmet. Sparks flicker from Din’s vambrace – those are his whistling birds shot, for now – and he knows that he can’t allow the deathtrooper to get any closer than he already has. Beskar protects, yes, but in the wrong hands it is so very, very dangerous.

The man lunges again with a roar. Din easily sidesteps, grabs his wrist, throws his entire weight behind his head and slams his helmet into the captain’s. Another stumble, bringing up his hand to steady his head, and Din strikes. A thrust to the gut, that wet, shocked gasp that always comes with that kind of blow, Din’s heard it enough, and the deathtrooper captain falls.

He claws at his stomach, slicing his fingers on the Darksaber blade, until Din plants a foot on his chest and withdraws it. He catches sight of the red-hot molten armorplast and the charred flesh beneath it. The deathtrooper captain slumps to the side, beskad ringing like a bell on the floor as it falls from his hand.

When Din turns, chest heaving, everyone else has been watching: his companions, the pair of deathtroopers who surrendered, and the black, unseeing eyes of the fallen helmets.

“Oya, Mand’alor!” cries Fenn, his vambrace ringing against his cuirass.

“Oya!” comes the echoing chorus.

“We’re not done yet,” Din growls.

There is a viceroy to catch.

Viceroy Channa Aderes has no idea where to run to. She never learnt that there are hidden exits in the Royal Palace – those who might have known them were either dead or long gone, scattered across the galaxy – and all she can do is run. When Agent Tae had barrelled into her office, terror in his eyes, she’d wondered who could have had the gall to attack them.

But truly, there could only have been one answer.

It was only a matter of time.

She throws herself back into her office, slamming the lock on the door and falling against it, tears streaming down her cheeks. She had, once, liked to think herself a true believer. The Empire was everything, and she was willing to die for it. But now, as she scurries beneath her desk, she realises how very wrong she was. She doesn’t want to die, especially not for a pipedream kept alive by madmen and murderers. And while she might be complicit, a New Republic prison ship is preferable to death.

She cowers in the shadows like a child for what seems like hours. Gideon was supposed to do this, Gideon was supposed to face these mindless berserkers, deal with this Mandalorian nonsense. They’d purged them, they should never have been able to come back.

She jumps out of her skin when she hears a harsh hissing sound, and the thunk of metal on metal.

“Did your Jedi teach you that?” asks a woman’s smirking voice.

“Lightsabers are versatile,” comes a man’s answer, and boots enter the room.

Viceroy Aderes is not a religious woman. She never has been, her family never was, and the Empire didn’t hold with worship that wasn’t of the Emperor. But if she was, she’d be praying now. And the word she just heard – “Jedi” – it fills her with more terror than the Mandalorians could ever instil.

She holds her breath, but not for long. The desk is wrenched away and she shrieks, scrambling away.

“Coward,” the woman sneers. The man merely strides forward, igniting a familiar weapon. Gideon used to wield it, boasting about tearing it from the hands of… well, the woman standing in this very room. Viceroy Aderes has no idea how it came to be in the hands of the man with the unpainted armour, but it is.

The man raises it, pointed squarely at her. She falls against the floor, trembling hands raised.

“Do you surrender?” he demands.

Her voice fails her. All she can do is croak as she shakily nods.

“Well, that was easy,” he says, sounding pleasantly surprised. He tugs out a pair of cuffs and tosses them to the woman.

Viceroy Channa Aderes hands Mandalore back to the Mandalorians without a fight.

They’re not done. With the dome fallen, the fighting moves within the city, pockets of conflicts in the broken streets. Din knows he could probably rest – he desperately needs it – but he can’t. Not yet.

He activates his jetpack and soars into the sky, surveying the city. It’s immense – did it really need to be this big? – and he can’t see as far as he’d like. But he can see some combat close by, and aims for it, followed by an exasperated Fenn.

He spots a tank as he flies over, the same Occupier that they found in the Plaza. It struggles to manoeuvre in the narrow, rubble-laden streets, but the turret is still dangerous.

Though not for long.

He dives, Darksaber out, pulling up at the last second to land on the rumbling vehicle. He stabs the Darksaber into the roof, cutting a jagged circle (Luke makes it look much easier), and the crew inside scream. He drops his last thermal detonator before pulling up and away, and the thing explodes satisfyingly.

He handles other pockets of fighting the same way: cornered Mandalorians saved from above by the Mand’alor. Din just does it because he feels he has to, that sitting around waiting will only cost more lives. Isn’t it his job to help his people, after all?

He’s helping to take out a squad of poorly-maintained security droids when the ground shakes. It’s familiar in a way that makes the bottom fall out of his stomach with dread. He turns.

Around the corner, looming like a krayt dragon, is an AT-ST walker. It strides forward with horrendous confidence, and Din flicks through every possibility: whipcord, Darksaber, jetpack, trying to decide–

He doesn’t need to. A dark figure appears from seemingly nowhere, and there is a brilliant flash of green. With a deafening creak and the scent of molten metal, the walker splits in two. The figure leaps from the machine, flips, and lands elegantly.

“Show-off,” Din says, knowing he sounds nothing short of besotted.

Luke twirls his lightsaber, offering a smirk that’s only for Din. “Couldn’t let you have all the fun,” he says.

The urge to drag him closer and press their foreheads together is almost too strong to resist, but they fall into stride together instead, and the last of the security droids fall with an ease Din thinks he could get used to.

He feels exhaustion dragging at his limbs, and when he looks more closely at Luke, he can see the same pinched weariness. They’re both running on fumes at this point. The fights Din has needed to intervene in have gotten fewer and fewer, and they’ve been capturing more than they’ve been killing.

“I think we can call it a day,” he says, clipping the Darksaber back to his belt.

Luke does the same. “Where to, then, Mand’alor?”

Din tilts his helmet, wearing a withering look beneath the beskar, and Luke chuckles.

“Sorry. Where to, Din?”

“The Palace is over there. I’m not walking.”

He curls an arm around Luke’s waist, pressing him closer – he’d say he feels brave in showing so much overt affection, but it’s honestly exhaustion making him forget he cares. His jetpack might be running low on fuel, but it can still make the flight with the two of them, and he takes off with Luke’s arms around him, forehead pressed to the side of his helmet.

They land in the Plaza. Smoke rises from various parts of the city, but the sounds of combat have ebbed. Koska kneels beside Axe’s body, and Din can hear her soft sobbing, far more tender than he would have expected of her.

Bo-Katan catches sight of him, and with a last squeeze to Koska’s shoulder, heads over.

“Well, it’s over,” she says. There’s a frailty to her voice, a crack in a plate: weak, but still intact. She’s barely holding it together, but holding nonetheless.

“It is,” he says with a nod.

Others begin to arrive, head over to them: Ursa, Rook, Beroya… They all look similarly weary once their helmets are off, pinched with fresh loss, but there is a glint in everyone’s eyes: victory.

It might be rubble. It might take decades to restore.

But it’s theirs. They’re home again.

“Thank you,” Bo-Katan says quietly.

Din turns back to her, frowning even though she can’t see it. “What for?”

“For doing what I could not. For leading us back.”

They gather out in the desert, before a great tibanna-fuelled pyre – no wood on Mandalore, after all. Slowly and with methodical reverence, each fallen vod is stripped of their armour by clan, wrapped in a rough shroud, and laid upon the pyre with a cry of their name.

“Werda Beviin!”

“Alix Rodarch!”

“Cam Sharrat!”

“Teyra Tenau!”

Bo-Katan stands tall after she and Koska place Axe upon his comrades, her voice clear and strong. “Axe Woves!”

The list is long. Longer than Din has the strength to deal with right now. They’ve lost so many, too many. There were so few of them to begin with...

But he is also certain that not one single Mandalorian on that pyre would have wanted to be anywhere else. Victory or death.

Once the final body, accompanied by a sobbing cry of “Zerali Jennis!”, is placed upon the pyre, it is Din’s turn to step forward. The words are simple, they all know them. He lifts his head, and his voice echoes across the dusty plain.

“Mhi su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, mhi partayli, gar darasuum.”

He aims his vambrace, and from it flame bursts, igniting the pyre in seconds. As their vode join the manda, the chant begins. Din has heard it only once before, when he was very young, and it haunts him now as it haunted him then, alone and surrounded by the intimidating helmets of those who had pulled him from the cellar and taken him far from home.

“Motir ca'tra nau tracinya.
Gra'tua cuun hett su dralshy'a. Cuun hett su.”

They have fought together this day. They mourn their dead, their far-away marchers, together. And they will feast and rebuild together.

As the plumes of smoke rise on high, up into the pallid Mandalorian sky, Din can’t help but think that they at least came home. They set foot on Mandalore’s soil, and helped to reclaim this place. Their names will be remembered, and so they are eternal.

Sundari smoulders as the sun sets.

Din sits, wearily, on the steps of the Royal Palace. From here, he has a good view of the whole ruined mess of a city. His city.

It hasn’t really sunk in yet, and Din wonders when it will. If it ever will. Will he be waking up every morning and having to relearn how to rule again?

Luke takes the steps two at a time. He’s relatively unscathed except for a couple of blaster holes in his cloak and the dust and soot of combat. He sits next to him with a small grunt, elbows resting on his knees.

“Hey.” He sounds as tired as Din feels, which makes Din’s heart ache, but he’s here. He’s exhausted, but in one piece, and where he belongs at Din’s side.

“Hey,” Din replies, his own fatigue bleeding into his tone. He feels like he’s aged ten years in one day. He feels hollow, like everything he could ever give has been poured out of him and now pools in the craters of the broken streets, seeping into the foundations of it.

He wants to take his helmet off and kiss the man next to him. He wants to run, far away from here, to the edge of the galaxy where no one can find him, only Luke and Grogu in tow. He wants to scream, he wants to laugh, he wants to cry. But most of all he just wants to sleep.

Luke’s head falls onto his shoulder, and the weight of every piece of shattered masonry in this place is suddenly lifted from him. The load is shared. He lets out a long sigh.

In the square below them, bonfires are starting to be lit with whatever can be found, mostly cloth and broken furniture. The glows mirror the stars above, visible through what remains of the once-great dome, the energy shield still lowered. Raucous laughter and cheering echoes around them, and Din starts to hear music: bes’bevs and drums and mandolins, tambours and even a mandoviol, music this shattered city hasn’t heard in years. His people will celebrate: they will drink, they will feast, they will dance. A triumphant return.

“There’s so much work to still do.”

Luke hums. “Don’t think about that right now,” he says. “That’s for tomorrow.” He reaches between them and threads their fingers together, and it draws Din out of the racing whirlpool of his mind. He takes a deep breath, holds it before letting it out again.

“Yeah, tomorrow,” he agrees.

They’re quiet for a moment, their silence companionable. If Din were a more fanciful man, he would say their hearts are beating in unison.

“Thank you,” he says, eventually.

“What for?” Luke asks, as if it’s a silly thing to say. But Din must say it, because Luke deserves to hear it.

“I’d still be running from all this if it wasn’t for you,” he says. “Thanks for holding my hand all the way here, I guess.”

Luke squeezes his hand in response. “Then I appreciate it. And I need to thank you.”

Din turns slightly, helmet tilted in puzzlement. “Now I need to ask what for.”

Luke smiles. “For guiding me.”

Din doesn’t feel like he’s done much guiding – Luke is the wise one of the two of them, after all – but he doesn’t say it. That would be dismissive of Luke’s feelings, and that’s the last thing he wants to be.

“I did what I could,” Din murmurs. He leans his head to the side, rests it on Luke’s. They can steal a moment or two.

“You should probably be down there,” Luke says. “It’s good PR.”

Din groans. “Do I have to?”

Slowly Luke gets to his feet, not letting go of Din’s hand. “I’ll be with you, don’t worry.”

“Nope. Don’t want to.” Din flops back against the steps, making Luke roll his eyes fondly. With a strength Din can only define as freakishly preternatural, he heaves Din to his feet.

“C’mon! I’m hungry, and I know they have spotchka.”

Luke was right: they do have spotchka. And papuur’gal. And kri’gee. And tihaar from fifty different fruits. They all flow with abandon, but truly, the rush of victory makes them more gleeful than any alcohol could. They dance, the heavy, concentric stomps Din remembers learning in his childhood, in time with the pulsating music and chanting. They drag him into it, laugh and cheer and chant his title. They toast to Bo-Katan, to Fenn, to the Armourer, and he loses count of the toasts they do to him. It’s surreal. He’d never really been anything, before. A blip on the Mandalorian radar, the breadwinner of a hidden cult, causing no ripples. Nothing. And now, suddenly, he’s everything. He’s someone.

Din has no idea how to deal with this except mumble his thanks and try not to embarrass himself too much. He isn’t sure he’s doing the best job of it, but he’s trying.

Eventually someone decidedly drunk gets up, clambers onto what’s informally become the Pile of Toasting Rubble, and raises his half-finished bottle of kri’gee.

“Vode, we have toasted our Mand’alor and his entourage, but we haven’t toasted his riduur yet!”

Din startles and goes still like a sneep in front of a speeder. The back of his neck burns and he daren’t look to his right, where Luke sits, bottle frozen halfway to his lips.

“He may be one of the Jetii, our enemies of old, but he has proven himself to be a worthy ally!” the man roars, to surprisingly loud cheers. “In the black, and on the battlefield! To Master Skywalker!”

More cheers, raised bottles and the clang of armour, and Luke looks to Din. All that can swirl in Din’s head right now is the word the man used: riduur, riduur, riduur. Lover, yes, Din thinks desperately, but not… not yet…

“Hey, I think they like me!” Luke says, grinning, and takes a swig from his bottle. Din, excruciatingly sober, nods weakly.

He can’t tear his eyes from Luke for the rest of the night. He watches him drink more than one Mandalorian under the table.

“Where did you learn to drink like that?” Fenn asks. His red face is clashing horribly with his hair, and he’s slurring, his words falling over each other.

Luke, only slightly pink, grins like a Tooka. “There’s not much to do for fun on Tatooine ‘cept drink and shoot womp rats.” The Tatooine drawl, lost most of the time, is coming in stronger now, coaxed out by Luke’s newfound taste for tihaar.

Koska aims a finger at him, slightly cross-eyed, but before she can say anything she topples to the side, right into Bo-Katan, who rolls her eyes but doesn’t try to move her. Luke bursts out laughing, and all Din can do is stare: he’s golden in the firelight, bright, joyful, in a way Din isn’t sure he’s seen before. It’s beautiful.

This warm, brilliant feeling settles in his chest, like a bird come home to roost, and he knows it’s there to stay. Much like Mandalore’s children have.

Dawn breaks over Mandalore, the first that sees its people come home after years of exile.

Din wakes slowly, tightens his hold on the warm body next to him, and opens his eyes. Above him is the open sky, a dreary pinkish-grey. He still feels exhausted, but also… content. It isn’t a sensation he’s used to feeling, although something is missing. He hasn’t seen Grogu in an entire day, and that’s starting to wear at him. His internal battery drains so much faster away from the kid.

He turns to the side and sees a sleeping Luke, and is surprised by how young he looks like this, how serene. The weight of the galaxy melts away and it’s just Luke, soft in the morning sun. Din almost wishes he could look like this forever.

Around them, the sleeping mess begins to stir, mostly with assorted noises of pain and discontent. Din gently attempts to extricate himself from Luke’s hold, but that earns him a soft whine, which makes him wince.

The Plaza slowly comes awake. Koska lets out a long groan like a creaking door and refuses to emerge from the safety of her arms. Fenn clutches his head as if he wants to crack it open. Bo-Katan seems surprisingly put together, except for her pinched expression. And Luke, well… he draws his cloak over his head with a pained moan.

“This is why I don’t drink,” Din says drily. That gets him some murderous looks that slide off him like water off a pelikki’s back.

It takes caf, ration bars and a round of painkillers before most people are in some sort of functional state, which means that the time to worry about the “so much work to do” has finally arrived. Din’s at a loss for what to focus on first; it’s an overwhelming amount, enough to make his head spin.

“First rule of leadership,” Bo-Katan says wryly, as if she can sense his predicament, “delegation.”

“Right. Sure.” He clears his throat. “We need surveyors for the city. It needs to be made habitable as soon as possible. We need to get the energy dome up and running again.” He sighs. “And we need to see the state of the mines.”

At the north of the city is a great pit, probably Sundari’s only real blemish before the Empire’s arrival. The scar in the landscape is immense, wide and deep, and at its centre is the reason the Empire wanted to be here in the first place. It is scattered with hastily-abandoned machinery, all bearing Imperial seals, proof that it was seeing at least some use until the very last moment. An enormous generator sits in the pit, silenced.

“The Grand Mine,” Bo-Katan says. She leads them down to it, to the huge cage lift that will take them down into the bowels of Mandalore itself. It takes a moment to get the generator working, but it groans into life.

“Is the Jedi allowed?” Paz asks, looking to the Armourer.

She gives Luke a long look, which Luke serenely returns.

“If it is the will of the Mand’alor, so be it,” she replies, neutral as ever.

The cage lift descends. It’s one of the few structures in the city that the Empire bothered to keep in any sort of decent condition, presumably to keep up the flow of beskar. The darkness engulfs them; the light of their helmet glowlamps flickers off slivers of beskar ore in the rock around them, but not enough to warrant the expense of extraction. They head deeper into the heart of Mandalore, until they finally reach the bottom of the shaft.

Before them is an immense tunnel leading further into the earth. Repulsorlift trolleys line either side, ready to be loaded onto the cargo lift next to the miners’ cage. Din has no doubt that the place is cacophonous when functioning, but for now, it is silent, and dimly lit.

“No way but forward,” Din mutters, and leads the way.

The tunnel snakes along, with many side tunnels branching off into the gloom. Here and there are abandoned tools, broken bits of droid, a burnt out speeder left to its fate. Whatever they were squeezing out of the place doesn’t seem to have been enough to keep up the pace.

They round a bend, and find themselves in an immense natural cavern, but it isn’t the beskar-laced stalactites and great conveyer belts that catch everyone’s eye. No, what draws their horrified attention is the crowd of people within, huddled in groups, staring at them with wide, terrified eyes.

Rodians, Twi’leks, Togruta, many others, and so many Wookiees. They are filthy, gaunt shadows of whoever they were before, shackled together, and they shrink away from the group, which can only stare in silence.

Luke is the first to move forward, slow, arms held up in a soothing manner.

“We’re not here to harm anyone,” he says. “They’re Mandalorians. I’m a Jedi. We’re here to help.”

A Wookiee steps forward, and she draws herself to her full height like she hasn’t been able to in years – and she probably hasn’t, Din thinks with a sickened twist to his stomach. She says something Din cannot understand, but Luke nods.

He pulls out his lightsaber, looks up at her to ask permission, and she nods back. With a hum of plasma, her shackles fall to the ground, and she bellows her gratitude.

The sound shakes Din from his horrified reverie. He moves forward.

“I… I am the Mand’alor,” he says, and though his tongue trips over the word, over having to attribute it to himself, he forces himself to say it. “We’ve liberated the planet from the Empire. You’re all free now. We’ll take care of you.” They barely have enough for themselves, but what else can he say? The idea of not offering anything at all is utterly repulsive. With a gesture, he orders the others to get to work breaking chains.

“They can’t go up to the surface yet,” Luke says, voice choked tight with held-back anger. “They’re not used to light.”

“We’ll bring them down rations,” Din says. “Have them distributed.” He put his hands on his hips, staring at the ground. This place, once sacred, now feels tainted beyond repair.

It takes the greater part of the day to sort everything out, to find a way to help the people they’ve freed: bacta patches and sprays, rations and water. They get to figuring out names, planets of origin, chain codes if they have them. It’s manic, and it distracts the Mandalorians from their main goal of quantifying the Imperial devastation. Without beskar they can’t rebuild, and they don’t even known if there’s anything worth still mining down here.

And, well, Din had a more selfish reason for heading below ground than simply figuring out what happened to his people’s birthright.

Down here, in the Grand Mine, are the Living Waters. Supposedly.

He’s sensed the Armourer’s visor-covered gaze on him all day, the bronzium of her helmet making him nervous whenever he catches sight of it. And Luke, despite being very caught up in helping the survivors – such a Jedi thing to do – can also sense Din’s nerves, but unlike the Armourer, who simply watches like a shriekhawk, he actually does something about it.

Din told him, explained in one of the brief yet agonisingly long stretches of indolence during their time waiting for the Mandalorian forces to gather, about the Waters. About what the Armourer had said.

So Luke walks up to him, concern on his features.

“Are you alright?” he asks, softer than Din thinks he deserves. With all his bluster about forging his own Way, he still wants to know. Are they truly lost?

He could try and lie, tell Luke he’s perfectly fine, but Luke can see through lies like they’re made of transparisteel, so there’s no point. He simply sighs, looks deeper into the cavern.

“Is it bad I still want to find them?” he murmurs.

“No,” Luke says with that characteristic certainty Din finds so reassuring. “It’s what you’ve known nearly all your life, Din. It’s a lot to leave behind.” He is quiet for a moment. “Perhaps we can find… closure.”

Din blinks behind the helmet. “Closure?”

Luke’s smile is perhaps a little bittersweet. “Learning to let go is very Jedi, and not very Mandalorian, but maybe it would help. Cleansing yourself for yourself, more than for the Creed.”

Din nods slowly. “That… makes sense.” He casts his gaze back towards the depths of the mines. “Would you come with me?”

“Where you go, I go.”

The warmth those words set blooming in Din’s chest – it’s almost beyond words.

The lights down here, in the deeper tunnels, are fewer and farther between, the light grimier. The glowpanels haven’t been cleaned in years. Eventually Luke pulls out his lightsaber, which casts an eerie green glow as they walk. It’s quiet, the tunnels are more roughly hewn, and as they head deeper, it begins to feel older. There are hints of carvings on the walls, and Din stops to study them.

“This is old Mando’a script,” he says. “I can’t read it.”

“Seems as good a clue as any,” Luke replies.

“Knowing us, it’s either a guide or a warning. Or both,” Din says wryly, making Luke huff in amusement.

They continue on, following the main tunnel, for what feels like hours. It might be hours, time means nothing down here in the dark, in the depths of Mandalore.

Suddenly, Luke stops. He stares at a bare expanse of the tunnel wall, frowning slightly.

“Something wrong?” Din asks.

“No…” Luke says softly. “Just…”

He heads closer, squinting at the rock, studying it, before stepping forward and disappearing into the wall.

Din lets out a startled noise and rushes forward, hands pressed to the stone, only to see Luke right there, looking back at him. He grins.

“It’s a hidden tunnel,” he says. “Just an optical illusion.”

Simple but effective, hidden by simply tucking it behind a screen of rock, perfectly invisible, and yet obvious from just the right angle. Someone took the time to make it, but also wanted people to find it.

Without another word, Luke heads off, cloak flapping behind him. Din sighs, and heads after him.

The tunnel is narrow, tight enough that Din’s pauldrons scrape the jagged walls, and occasionally they have to turn sideways and shimmy through, something that always makes Din’s heart leap into his throat. The fear of getting stuck is very real, and he doesn’t like it. But Luke seems eerily confident and singularly determined as they slink into the clinging dark. Much to Din’s relief, it pays off.

They emerge into a round chamber, not huge, but also large enough to actually move in it, right in front of a bare stone wall. It’s empty except for some stalactites and stalagmites, threaded with beskar, that have joined together over the millennia to form columns.

“Well?” Din asks, not so much annoyed as resigned. He’d very much like to return to the surface and call it a wild mynock chase, a simple failure.

“The Force called to me,” Luke says, as if it makes perfect sense. “Can you get out the Darksaber?”

Din can’t be bothered to protest. He unclips the hilt and ignites it; it floods the room with its signature brilliant white light, emanating from the peculiar black of its blade.

The walls erupt around them, thin lines in the intricate traditional geometries of Mandalorian art. They chase each other, running parallel, as if pointing to a singular place on the wall opposite them. Right there, where there was bare expanse before, are broader lines in the shape of the kar’ta beskar, glowing under the light of the Darksaber. Above that is a round, winged symbol Din’s never seen before.

“That’s the symbol of the Jedi Order from the days of the Republic,” Luke murmurs curiously. He heads closer and studies the rock, inspecting the lines, then points. “There’s an opening here!”

Masterfully hidden behind a jutting piece of rock there is, indeed, a slot of some kind.

It’s exactly the same shape as the hilt of the Darksaber.

Din weighs the thing in his hand. It’s obvious what must be done, but he doesn’t exactly want to do it. The hilt, however, is almost vibrating in his hand, as if it’s desperate for him to do just that. He doesn’t seem to have a choice.

He powers down the Darksaber – the chamber goes dark again, the lines of light dimming – slots it where it needs to go, and reignites it, the blade’s hum muffled by the rock.

The rock wall in front of them begins to shake, and they both lurch back, Din taking the Darksaber with him hastily – he’s not leaving it there, he’s fought hard enough to keep the damn thing, he’s not losing it now – and together they watch as the lines glow again. The rock parts slowly, grinding on itself, revealing an opening wide enough for two men abreast. From within comes the faintest of blue glows.

Din doesn’t know what to do. On the one hand, he feels drawn in, compelled to enter; on the other, his natural suspicion, the thing that’s kept him alive this long, doesn’t want to go in there at all. All he can do is stare, grip tightening and loosening on the hilt of the Darksaber.

“Do you want to turn back?” Luke asks.

Din swallows. “I don’t think we can,” he replies, voice low.

No way other than forward.

They cross the threshold together, Luke stepping in with far more confidence than Din. The place is instantly dimly illuminated by great crystals set into the walls, revealing a winding staircase carved into the living rock, a large chamber below them. Stalactites hang from the ceiling, veins of beskar swirling in them in intricate patterns. Against the far wall is a statue, a man who wears both armour and robes, holding aloft a sword of black crystal carved into the likeness of the one in Din’s hand.

Din knows who this man is: Tarre Vizsla, Mand’alor the Exalted, the first Mandalorian Jedi. At the feet of his statue is a spring that runs into a great pool, the waters glowing a calm, ethereal azure. Around the edges lush vegetation, plants and flowers and mosses and fungi, flourishes, more green than the surface has seen for centuries.

“The Living Waters,” Din breathes.

Despite himself, despite everything, his heart leaps. There is still a part of him, a part that was sure of himself for decades, that cries out, begs for it: redemption. To bathe in these waters would mean returning to the Tribe. A Child of the Watch once more.

Never again to reveal himself. He swallows, looks to his side, watches Luke reverently slip off his hood, and he thinks of the child so far above them, yet to set foot on his new home.

Din cannot. Not now, not now he is known and has known. Luke is right: this will be closure, not an empty redemption.

“This place… the Force is so strong here,” Luke says, slightly breathless, his voice low and awed.

The Darksaber at Din’s side almost hums, insistent for something. It draws him down the steps, to the water’s edge. The pool is utterly still, a glowing mirror for Tarre’s statue.

Din’s instincts are usually more battle-driven, and he has misgivings and suspicions about everything. He doesn’t trust what he doesn’t know, and there are so many things, he thinks drily, that he doesn’t know, especially involving the incomprehensible devilry that is the Force. But now, something compels him.

He slips off his gauntlets and gloves and sets them slowly aside as he kneels, cupping his hands in the Waters. It’s cool on his skin, soothing, and his hands, bizarrely, almost feel younger.

He lets the water slip between his fingers, unnerved, but strangely certain.

“I need to…” He gestures to the pool, and Luke nods.

“Let me,” he murmurs. And Din does.

He lets Luke remove each piece of armour, with the same devotion and care Din would show it himself. He follows the right order, working outwards in, towards the heart, until the last part left is the helmet. Luke reaches slowly for it, for Din, places his hands reverently on either side and gently takes it.

When it is off, Luke presses his forehead to it, eyes shut, and Din hearts aches at being so seen. He could never have hoped, before Luke, that someone would understand who Din is. To the Tribe he was never more than his armour. To outsiders he could never be more than whatever was beneath it. But to Luke… to Luke he is more than either of those things: he is Din, in his entirety, known and loved.

Luke sets the helmet softly down and turns to smile at him, something soft and loving and Din could drown in Luke’s eyes, in the depth of affection in them.

Din strips the rest of the way, unselfconscious in a way he’s never felt before. The idea of baring himself has always seemed horrific, an unwanted vulnerability, but now, here… it’s just the same old Din. He turns and steps, with a confidence he himself is surprised by, into the Waters.

They embrace him, as if to say “welcome home”.

Din opens his eyes. He is wearing his armour again, head to toe in beskar, and he sits cross-legged in an ocean of stars. Before him is the Darksaber, and on the other side of it sits a man in armour. The cut of his helmet is somewhat different from the statue, but Din somehow knows him.

“Master Vizsla,” he says. The helmet opposite watches him, and though Din cannot see it, he knows the man is smiling.

“Welcome, Din Djarin. You were always meant to find this place.”

Din swallows. “What does that mean?”

“The Force works in mysterious ways,” Tarre says, and Din can’t help but frown. Such a Jedi thing to say. Which makes sense: much like Grogu, Tarre Vizsla is as much Jedi as he is Mandalorian, a meeting-point of two cultures both alike and utterly alien.

“Why me?” Din asks, surprised by his own question. He could have asked where they are, or how Tarre is even talking to him considering he died nearly a thousand years ago. “Why not one of your clan, like Paz?”

Tarre shakes his head. “The manda chose you, Din Djarin. All the coincidences aligned to bring you here. They brought you to the child, Grogu. They gave you the Darksaber. They led you to Luke Skywalker, and gave you the path to the Living Waters. You are Mand’alor.”

“But why me!?” Din exclaims. “I’m not ready! I’m not worthy, I have nothing to give! I’m no leader! I’m just a–”

“Bounty hunter from Aq Vetina?” Tarre says mildly.

Din nods miserably.

“Din Djarin, Your value was always greater than you thought. I have helped you along the way since you claimed the Darksaber, but the further you stepped along your path, the less of my help you needed. You are the Mand’alor. You have brought our people home. And now they will know peace again, and so will the Jedi Order.”

Tarre is silent for a moment. Din can feel his gaze on him, even though he cannot see it.

“Who are you, Din Djarin?” he asks.

Din opens his mouth, but he has no ready answer to give. Who is he?

He is the son of Gavrel and Anira Djarin, born on Aq Vetina in 28 BBY. He is the beroya of the Tribe, a faction of the Children of the Watch. He is the father of Grogu, and the lover of Luke Skywalker, and a friend to a surprising number of people. He is the ruler of Mandalore. He is a Mandalorian. But above all, he is just… the same old Din.

“I am me,” he says. “No more, no less.”

“Then you are all you need to be. You have chosen your Way, Din Djarin. Keep following it.”

Din breaches the surface, but he doesn’t feel the need to drag air into his lungs. He blinks the water from his eyes and allows himself to float, breathing slowly. The water is cool but not cold, soothing. It seeps into his pores, down to the very marrow of his bones. He stays there for a moment longer, before he turns and heads back to the edge of the pool. His feet find solid ground again and he begins to emerge, water dripping from the contours of his body.

And if he likes the look Luke gives him, up and down and decidedly hungry, well, why shouldn’t he? He stays waist deep, gives Luke an appraising look.

This is a hallowed place, of course. A place of reverence, of deep spiritual and cultural significance.

He holds a hand out, and Luke grins. He sheds his clothes, revealing delicious skin, and takes Din’s hand.

“I had dreams,” Luke murmurs.

It’s surprisingly warm in the cavern where the Living Waters spring forth, or at least it isn’t cold. They lie, entwined, in the soft moss by the side of the pool, skin drying, and Din thinks it couldn’t be more perfect if he tried to construct the moment in his mind. He ceases drawing lazy circles on bare skin with his fingertips, but only for a moment.

“Dreams?” he asks. From the way Luke said the word, they don’t seem like the usual strange wanderings of a sleeping mind.

“Visions,” Luke clarifies. “Of the future. The Force can do that, you know.”

“Oh?”

Din feels Luke nod against his chest. To be fair, with what Din has seen today, it’s to be expected. The Force is strange.

“I saw… myself. I saw an older Ben, and I saw myself about to do something stupid, something horrible. I saw a temple burning. And I was alone, so alone, I had nothing. I felt… hollow. It was horrifying.” He raises his head, reaches up to trace Din’s jawline with aching tenderness. “I haven’t had them since we met. It’s like they never happened.”

Din’s hand settles, in the small of Luke’s back. His skin is warm, smooth beneath his fingers, becoming familiar.

“That’s good.” Din likes the confirmation that nothing is inevitable. The choices they make lead them where they need to be.

“You weren’t in those visions,” Luke goes on. He rises to lean on Din’s chest. “Not even a memory of you, or Grogu. It was like we’d never met.” He tilts his head, and Din is charmed by how very Mandalorian the movement is. They’re becoming alike, in some ways, little shared things the closer they grow. He wonders what parts of Luke he’s adopted himself. “I think meeting you both, knowing you both, changed something for the better.”

“I know it changed for the better for me,” Din replies, because it’s the truth, plain and simple. He doesn’t like to consider an existence without Luke in it, it gives only the same amount of horror as the idea of a life without Grogu does. He might have to live it, but it would be empty, meaningless, without joy. And Din knows, with unwavering certainty, that he is a better person with Luke in his life.

Luke smiles at him then, something soft that makes his eyes warm. He leans forward, Din rises slightly to meet him, and their lips brush – soft at first, then firmer.

“We should head back up,” Luke murmurs. Din sighs, and it makes Luke chuckle. “We can’t live in a cave for the rest of our lives,” he adds with a grin, pressing a last kiss to Din’s pout before he slips from Din’s embrace and gets to his feet.

The Tribe keeps itself to itself, taking one of the smaller, least ruined buildings.

“Armourer,” Din says, nodding his helmet graciously. She returns the nod. He wonders if he is still dar’manda, even now, after the Living Waters. “I come to ask a boon of you.”

She tilts her helmet quizzically. “A boon, Mand’alor?”

Din takes a deep breath. It is a gamble, this request. It could all go horribly wrong for him. But he also knows the course he wishes his life to take, a novelty in and of itself. For the first time in his life he has a path to chart, an objective, a deep desire for something of his own.

It started with a small child of an unknown species, and led to a smiling man in black, and somehow, along the way, they became intertwined, locked together in a celestial dance only they know the steps of, and could not drift apart even if they tried – not that Din cares to try.

He can only hope that this gift he asks for the Armourer to make is a welcome one, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. That seems to be the rule of his life, lately, and it will likely continue to be so.

Once it is made, he thanks the Armourer for her patience, and for this last gift.

“Will you return?” she suddenly asks, and he understands what she means without her having to explain: will you return to the fold, remember who you were before your layers were stripped from you, before you were broken and reforged anew into something different.

And Din knows he could. The Living Waters have purified him, washed away the sins of revelation, it would be easy to do so.

He only shakes his head.

He is not the man he was when he first set foot on Arvala-7. He is not the man he was when he revealed his face on Morak. He is not the man he was when he felt Grogu’s tiny claw on his cheek and watched him leave for what he thought was the last time. He is not the man he was when he first learnt Luke Skywalker’s name. He is not the man he was yesterday, even though he might look the same in the mirror. He cannot go back, the only Way is forward.

“No. There is more than one Way, and I have found my own.”

She is silent for a long moment, staring levelly at him, before nodding once.

“So be it. You are welcome within the Covert whenever you wish to visit. Ret'urcye mhi, Mand’alor.”

“Ret'urcye mhi, Goran.”

Din has been nervous before: before Gideon’s cruiser, for example, or before taking his helmet off on Morak, or before the Battle of Sundari. But this… this is completely different, alien, to every other time he’s been nervous. This dwarfs all other instances.

His stomach is churning. He’s sweating under his helmet. The boon he asked of the Armourer burns a hole under his arm.

And he’s looking for someone.

He nods in response to the greetings he gets as he moves through the city – or the small habitable slice they’re carving out, anyway. Mandalorians greet him with his title, fists over their kar’ta beskar. He crosses paths with some of those they freed from the mines, taking one of the standing buildings for themselves as they recover from their ordeal and prepare to leave again, and they wave in his direction, thanking him. He waves back.

He finally finds Luke in the Plaza at the foot of the Royal Palace – which they will be renaming. Din finds it distasteful to keep calling it that. He’s a small figure in the immensity of the place, now mostly emptied of its temporary tenants of the past couple of days.

Din stops, a few steps away, finally seeing what it is Luke is staring at.

There is a gigantic mural that takes up the whole wall in front of them, monochrome and angular like most Mandalorian art. On the right side, in familiar, stylised armour, are Mandalorians, armed to the teeth, a solid wall of military power. On the other side, in robes… the Jedi, wielding their lightsabers. Disorganised, scattered, armourless… dying.

There is a realm of difference, Din thinks, between celebrating martial prowess and survival, and glorifying war, and he knows firmly which camp this mural sits in. Strange, really, that a faction so doggedly devoted to a toothless peace would keep this around.

His feet are heavy when he moves to Luke’s side, their shoulders almost brushing. Luke has his hood drawn up, Din cannot see his face.

“Of all the things to make it through,” Din says with a sigh.

Luke hums noncommittally, hands clasped in front of him, his back straight.

Din feels the overwhelming urge to just… help. In any way he can. He’s never been good at emotions, or offering comfort, or anything to do with the social contract the rest of the galaxy seems to be born understanding, but he knows what he can offer.

He touches Luke’s elbow, his fingers skimming slightly lower, and he hopes Luke understands. Perhaps Luke does, because his hand drops to his side.

Din clasps it, laces their fingers together, and Luke’s breath catches.

Only a short while ago, Din thinks, this man was a stranger, completely unknown, nothing but the sorcerer who took his son from him, trusted only because it was what he was supposed to do. Now he is something completely different: beloved as much as Grogu, known deeply and yet still an enigma, to be parsed with joy and care for the rest of his life, piece by piece. The Jedi, yes, but also the ace pilot, the commander, the teacher, the partner… Luke.

Din’s nerves come mostly from what he’s about to ask this man. Luke loves him, of that he has no doubt, but there’s never certainty. Din’s learnt that the hard way, time and time again, and he’s afraid of the unknown that prowls around them right then.

“I need to ask you something,” Din says.

“Tell me,” Luke replies, and turns to face him.

Din isn’t really familiar with outsider customs. He knows how Mandalorians do this sort of thing, it’s tradition, culture, easy as breathing, but…

“Marry me?” he asks softly.

Luke is still for a long moment, and the nerves are replaced with cold, agonising fear. Din’s stomach twists, his veins turning to ice. He’s misjudged everything, he’s been wrong all along—

“Never mind,” he blurts. “Forget I asked—”

Luke tosses his hood back, blue eyes wide. “No! No, I mean – really?” He sounds breathless, and now Din can see his face, his eyes are glittering with… hope?

Din swallows, nods. “Yes. Say the words with me. Become Grogu’s second father. Stay here with me, on Mandalore.” He raises a hand, surprised at how much he is trembling, and touches Luke’s cheek. “When we first met, I thought I’d lost my son. But then I gained so much more, more than I ever could have dreamt of. I will know you forever, Luke Skywalker. Please.”

“Yes. Yes, yes, yes.” Luke reaches up, hands on either side of Din’s helmet, and presses their foreheads together fiercely. “I know you, I love you.”

Oh. Oh, well aren’t those words just perfect? He can barely get them out past the tightness of his throat, but he has to say them. They make sense. “I-I know you, I love you,” he replies, his voice cracking. That makes Luke chuckle, something soft and lovely, and Din loses track of how long they stand there, close like this. It could be an aeon of the galaxy or a heartbeat, but it doesn’t matter.

“You’ll have to teach me the words,” Luke says as he pulls away. “I don’t know them.”

Din lets out his own chuckle, almost surprised at himself for it, but he can’t keep it inside. It would feel wrong to.

“Don’t worry, they’re easy,” he says. “I, uh… I have something for you…”

He reaches under his arm and takes out the boon, carefully wrapped in cloth, holds it out like it’s the most precious relic there could ever be, like he’s offering Luke his very heart. In a way, he is.

Luke takes it and gently unwraps it, revealing its shine and significance.

“Beskar?” Luke breathes, running the fingertips of his left hand over its smooth, polished surface.

Din nods. “Proof you’ve joined my clan.”

The pauldron is smaller than Din’s own, the better to suit Luke’s style of combat, but the fashion of it is identical to Din’s – the Armourer knows her art well. The mudhorn signet stands out proudly under Luke’s touch, symbolic, a mark of belonging. When Luke will wear it, everyone will know which clan he is, and Din can’t pretend that doesn’t thrill him, doesn’t make him dizzy with joy.

Luke is a fast learner; it doesn’t take him long to pick up the words, and his accent isn’t half bad, either. He nods, feeling confident, and his smile would light up the darkest spaces of the galaxy. Their hands are held between them, and Din doesn’t ever want to let go for the rest of his life.

"Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar'tome, mhi me'dinui an, mhi ba'juri verde.”

The words trip off Din’s tongue, but it’s nerves, not reluctance. These words come second only to those he gave to Grogu before the battle, in the weight and scale and importance of them, in how much Din has wanted to utter them. And Luke echoes them, fierceness in his voice, his breath quick, his eyes dancing.

Their foreheads tilt at the same time, meeting again, and Din’s eyes flutter shut. They are a clan of three, and will never be parted again.

The Kuiil breaches atmosphere that afternoon, cruising into the airspace above Sundari. Both Din and Luke stand on the permacrete of the spaceport, cloaks billowing in the harsh Mandalorian wind.

“Storm’s coming,” Luke says, squinting at the horizon.

“Can you feel it in the Force?” Din asks.

Luke’s smile is wry, given with a dip of his head. “No, just old desert instinct.”

Din wonders if Luke feels as giddy as he does. He stands there as his usual calm, collected self, and Din doesn’t know how he does it, keeping up this façade without the aid of a helmet. Din feels he might be visibly vibrating out of his own skin. Excitement isn’t something he usually feels, but right now, it’s all he can manage to contain himself.

His heart leaps when the shuttle descends, gliding from the hangar and aimed in their direction. He hears Luke’s breath catch beside him, and he doesn’t even need to see Luke’s smile widen to have confirmation that yes, Luke’s as excited as he is after all.

The Lambda-class lands, tucking its elegant fins up like an Alderaanian swan settling on the water. The ramp descends, and immediately there’s a sequence of loud beeps and a coo. Din’s willpower abandons him in an instant. He rushes forward, a light jog, and Grogu leaps at him with a bright, bubbly giggle. Laughter escapes Din’s chest, let loose like a balloon, and he cradles Grogu to him.

“Hey, buddy!” he says, Grogu’s claws clicking gently on the beskar of his helmet as he gives him a Keldabe kiss.

Something wells up inside him, something incandescent and all-encompassing, and he realises that, for the first time since before he can remember, the tears threatening the corners of his eyes are tears of joy. Grogu coos gently, and Din doesn’t need the Force to know Grogu’s heart as well as his own. They’re reunited, and forever this time.

But, well, they’ve got something more now.

Din turns to see Luke hanging back, looking slightly nervous, his hand on his astromech’s dome. Grogu, babbling eagerly, reaches out, and Din’s mirrors the gesture. Oh, it makes everything more powerful to see Luke beam at that, and head over to them. He takes Grogu’s hand, presses their foreheads together.

“Hi, little one,” he murmurs, and Grogu hums contentedly into the warm silence that settles over them as they commune in their own private language.

Din settles a hand at Luke’s waist, tilts his helmet fondly, meets his gaze through the visor as he straightens up. Luke smiles back at him, affection dancing in his blue eyes.

“Welcome to Mandalore, kid,” Din says to Grogu, who cocks his head curiously, ears twitching.

There is so much still to do, to complete. The city is still in ruins, there is the rest of the system, the sector, to deal with. He has to keep his people united somehow, and he knows the rest of the galaxy won’t sit idly by and allow them to rebuild in peace.

But for now, this is enough. The three of them are enough.

It’s good to know.