Chapter Text
The heavy bridge door of the Imperial Star Destroyer opens. A man steps through the smoking remains of the dark troopers that had almost been Din’s demise.
Din stares at the hooded figure. The heads-up display in his helmet shows a normal heat signature for near humanoids, not the white hot heat of a droid’s battery. This man is just a man, yet he carved through the black monsters from Din’s nightmares like they were bantha butter. His laser sword still hums in his hand, a bright green set apart from the void-bright blackness of the darksaber Kryze is so fixated on.
“Are you a Jedi?” he asks, heart in his throat and hyper aware of Grogu behind him, finally safe.
The man reaches his hands up and drops his hood. “I am,” he says, as the dark cloak falls away from his face.
Din Died five years ago.
He’d been thirty three, and woken to find his face stripped bare and his soul gone with it, taken by a man with more kindness than sense.
When he returned, his helmet held before him and his bare neck bowed and ready to be struck, the armorer had knocked him down with a strike from her hammer, pressed his face into the dirt beside her forge, and the heat burned his skin. He hadn’t fought.
“Din Djarin is dead,” she said above the thrashing thunder of his own pulse.
Under the hood there is dark blond hair, damp with sweat, and a pair of blue eyes.
These eyes are the ones that took everything from Din. He blinks and remembers this face, lit under a waterfall, grinning. It’s been years, but he’ll never forget every square centimeter of Lars’s face; it is burned into him with the clarity of a dying man.
Din’s breath feels frail in his own chest. He wonders, in an idle and floating way, if he’s hallucinating. Maybe the dark trooper he’d fought before Gideon struck him a lethal blow that was just now taking its toll.
“Lars,” he blurts, outside of his control.
Lars’s calm facade breaks when Din says his name. His eyes flash towards Din, away from where they’d been hovering over Grogu’s small form and his mouth drops open just slightly. It makes him look even more like that young man back in the jungle.
Din’s heart is rabbiting so hard in his chest he worries it might leap out.
“No one has called me Lars in a long time,” he says.
Din hesitates. He can hear Grogu toddling towards his legs, cooing in that soft way of his, and he can sense the tension in the room behind him. But in front of him is just Lars. He’s older. It’s a strange thing to fixate on, but there are fine lines around his eyes, and a tension about his mouth that he doesn’t remember.
Lars takes a step forward and Din has to fight the urge to retreat.
“Your helmet is the same,” Lars says, coming towards him slowly like he’s trying to gentle some wild beast. Din’s heart feels a bit like a crazed thing, so maybe it’s apt. “But the rest of your armor isn’t. I didn’t recognise you.”
Lars takes another step forward. Din locks his own feet in place as if against an oncoming mudhorn.
“I tried to find you, years ago,” he says, and just like before, his face is open and kind. “I even found some of your people.”
This part Din knows. He wishes he didn’t.
“They said you were dead.”
Din was led out of the caves on Dantooine to the top of a rocky outcropping, stripped of his clothing, and blindfolded.
No one spoke to him, but he could hear the footsteps of a dozen or more of the Covert, watching the proceedings, and he shivered under their gaze and the cold rain.
“Din Djarin’s name will never be spoken by any but myself again,” the Armorer says.
He feels her gloves press against his bare shoulders and he is unresisting as she presses him to kneel on the sharp rocks.
“Din Djarin, you must choose: will you die here and let the carrion strip your bones, or will you return to us to live a half-life among us as a ghost?”
She places a hand on his head and he presses his forehead against the warm leather of her palm. His chest is tight and his throat is locked, but most of his body has been numbed by the cold rain already. Perhaps a blessing.
The hand disappears.
“I will return for your body in two days’ time.”
The footsteps retreated and Din was left to shiver and weep in silence.
Lars is right in front of him now, the rest of the Star Destroyer has faded into white noise behind him, and he can feel the slight weight of Grogu against his shin, leaning in close to him. And, Manda, he missed that weight, it’s almost enough to send him to his knees. The child is here. The child is safe.
“It was the price,” he says, finally, when he can manage around his own clumsy tongue. “I paid it willingly.”
“I was so sure I actually killed you,” Lars says. “After all that, I was so sure you’d either been murdered because of me, or--” Luke chokes on the words. “I wanted to find you again, and you were dead, because of me.”
“I’m alive.” Din’s voice cracks.
Din is largely unaware when the Armorer returns for him. Many hands bundle him back into the warmth of the caves, but he’s numb, inside and out, and hasn’t slept or eaten in days. He lets their hands take his body.
He’s washed like a corpse, dressed, and eventually he feels the Armorer’s gloved hand once again grace his forehead.
“You chose to remain in this life as a ghost, and we will honor your choice. Your sin will be burned from your history and never spoken of again. But you are dead to us and will live life as a wandering spirit. None will know your name or speak for you except for me.”
His voice is broken, his lips cracked to bleeding, but he grates out, “This is the way.”
The blindfold is lifted from him, his face is washed gently, and his helmet slides over his eyes once more.
“And... this is who called out for help,” Lars says, breaking his eyes from Din’s visor down to Grogu, still clinging to Din’s shin guard like a limpet. “Hello, little one.”
“The Empire’s remnants are hunting him. I was charged to bring him to his own kind. A Jedi.”
That Luke Lars is a Jedi is unfathomable. This is the man who doggedly kept trying to feed him when all Din wanted to do was wander in the forest until he died. This is the man who, when threatened with a vibro blade by a being he didn’t know, offered bacta and a place to sleep.
Din’s heart is thudding wildly in his chest and Lars-- Luke-- is so close he wonders if he can hear it through the beskar. But he’d seen the man cut through the dark troopers on the viewscreen, seen him raise his gloved hand and fling the droids into walls like Grogu had done to the mudhorn, and there is no other accounting for these feats except that he, too, is a Jedi sorcerer. Luke Lars is both the kind man who gently stole his soul and also the Jedi sorcerer who came across the galaxy to save Din’s child.
Grogu coos at his feet, asking for attention, and Din cannot deny him. He picks the child up and holds him to his chest, relishing the feeling of his tiny body in his hands.
Din wonders if there is something innate in him that is cursed to find his people’s ancient enemies and want to hold them to his skin.
He feels feverish with want. Grogu reaches up with a hand, and Din looks down at him, then across to Luke. It feels wrong that Luke should have seen his face and Grogu not. He had been prepared to die trying to get Grogu to safety; the possibility of success had felt remote, but now that it is at hand, he is overcome with the need to press his bare forehead to Grogu’s. The hand not holding the child reaches up to lift and unseal his helmet.
“You don’t need to--”
Din ignores Luke and lets his helmet drop to the floor. The beskar clangs like a bell against the durasteel.
Grogu is beautiful. He’s whole, he’s alive, he’s cooing his soft baby noises at Din, and reaching his claws towards his face and Din is far too weak of spirit to resist. The touch sends tears to his eyes. It’s been since his helmet went back on by the Armorer’s hand after Luke’s had removed it that he has felt another’s touch against his bare skin like this.
He closes his eyes and when he opens them he meets Luke’s blue eyes.
“You’ll take him?”
Grogu swivels his head towards Luke, who is close enough to reach a hand out to brush over Grogu’s skull and ears and does so without hesitation. “He is powerful. Training will help keep him safe, both from others and himself.”
Din breathes out and gives in. He dips his head forward until he can feel Grogu’s baby soft wrinkles against his own forehead. He’s so warm. He wants to remember this feeling on his skin forever.
He was given a gift of a second life, albeit a lonely one, after Luke Lars pulled his helmet from his face. There will be no further grace given. He knew that on Morak when he’d made the choice that Grogu’s life was more valuable than his Creed or his own life, and he willingly makes that choice now, again.
He is about to lift his head and face saying goodbye to the child, when Luke’s fingers slide into his hair and his hand comes to rest at the nape of his neck.
Din almost collapses, but Luke takes his weight. He leans forward, Grogu between them, and shakes like a dying man in Luke’s steady arms.
“I’ll take him,” Luke says, and Din presses his eyes closed until he sees spots. “And I’ll take you, too.”