Chapter Text
“Come on, don’t start complaining now,” Sari sighed heavily as her tiny ship’s engines whined in protest. She slammed her fist down on the blinking control panel and the ship quieted down again, sputtering toward the planet looming steadily closer. “That’s it, just a little further,” she coaxed it quietly before shaking her head wryly at herself. “I’m talking to a rusted pile of scrap metal.”
She jumped slightly as the radio crackled, scrambling for the old intercom and flipping on the communication channel hurriedly.
“-come in, Interstellar. This is a New Republic X-Wing patrol, do you copy? Repeat, this is a New Republic X-Wing patrol.”
“Yes, I copy, I hear you. Sorry, my comms are on the fritz,” Sari answered, pulling the intercom closer to her mouth and swearing inwardly; her ship would almost immediately be flagged as an Imperial model and gunned down.
She knew it had been a risk taking an Imperial ship, but it had been cheap and she had hoped to avoid any New Republic spacecrafts on the way to her destination like she had successfully done on every other mission she’d ever taken. It wasn’t as if she had had many options for non-Imperial ships when she had initially taken up bounty hunting for a living.
“Is there a problem?” she asked, keeping her voice as even as possible so that the radio wouldn’t pick up her rising panic as she glanced around for any sign of the ships targeting her. As she twisted in her seat, she spotted the two X-Wings flanking her ship on either side, hanging back just out of her field of view if she had been facing forward.
“Not at all, we’ll just need you to send out a ping or allow us to run your tags,” the X-Wing pilot who had initially spoken answered. “We don’t recognize your ship model and want to confirm you’re not Imperial.”
“Oh, yeah, I’ll get right on that ping for you,” Sari lied, turning off the intercom and taking a moment to pretend to flip some switches before pushing forward on the throttle to zoom forward and praying that her ship could out-speed the X-Wings.
It seemed unlikely even as she dove down towards Arvala-7, the ship heating up to uncomfortable levels as she broke through the atmospheric level. She looked up through the window to see the X-Wings descending after her, gaining on her ship with ease. The Interstellar wouldn’t be able to outfly them, she knew, but she could hopefully lose them in the rocky terrain that she saw up ahead.
Diving into a canyon, she yanked on a lever to pull the Interstellar into a barrel roll, neatly dodging underneath one of the X-Wings as it soared past her. The Interstellar stalled in mid-air before the engines promptly cut out with a loud whine.
“Not now, you pile of junk,” Sari muttered as the ship spiraled into a freefall that made her stomach flip uncomfortably, which wasn’t helped by a well-aimed blast from one of the X-Wings that took out the Interstellar's left engine. She slammed her fist into the “eject” button on the console to open the window above her and unbuckled her seat just in time to leap out of the falling spacecraft, tumbling sideways into a crevice in the rocky wall just large enough for her to squeeze into.
Mournfully, she peered over the ledge and watched as her ship landed with a loud explosion at the base of the canyon, a massive fireball consuming it and leaving behind a pile of burnt and dented metal. She doubted any of the parts would be worth salvaging as the X-Wings zoomed past her and back up towards the sky, apparently satisfied with the assumption that she had been destroyed along with the ship. Once they were fully out of view, she climbed out of the crevice she had rolled into, grimacing at the sensation of new bruises forming along her side and preparing herself for the long climb up and out of the canyon.
“‘Take the bounty without a puck,’ Karga said,” she grumbled as she fished out her hooked blades from her belt and sank them as hard as she could into the rock, using them to hoist herself up and create new footholds for herself before sinking the blades into the cliffside above her again. “‘It’ll pay big,’ he said. Who even uses tracking fobs anymore?”
Apparently, the Empire did; Sari hadn’t missed the Stormtroopers who had led her to the client hiring her to bring back the fifty-year-old target he had provided her a tracking fob for. She wondered how she would even accomplish her task without a ship to get her and the target back to Nevarro, which was half a galaxy away. Her ship, old and decrepit as it had been, had barely made the journey within two days, when she knew newer models could have gotten her there in less than a day.
Getting a distress call out to Kal was an option, of course, but that meant splitting her client’s payment with him, and while she and the other bounty hunter were dating - if she wanted to be generous and call the all-too-rare nights they got to share a few drinks and get pleasantly tipsy enough to stumble back to one of their temporary lodgings together as “dates” - she was running far too low on credits to risk splitting the admittedly-high bounty with anyone.
By the time Sari reached the top of the canyon, the sun was high in the sky and the rocky terrain had absorbed most of its heat, but she sprawled on the ground for a few moments to rest her aching arms and legs anyway, ignoring how the rock underneath her seared her skin. After catching her breath, she stowed her blades away again, climbing to her feet and grabbing her blaster gun before setting off at a pace that was slower than she would have liked it to be. She would have killed for a land-speeder or even an animal to ride, but she couldn’t see anything but sand, mud, and rock for miles around and didn’t dare deviate from the steadily-beeping tracking fob at her hip to try and search for a ride.
At last, legs aching and threatening to give out, Sari gave up and settled by an outcropping of rock to rest when the sun began to dip below the horizon and darkness began to fall. She stoked a fire to ward off the chilly night air with what few sticks of kindling she could find scattered around the sand, wishing she had some more supplies with her other than her weapons, a tiny bottle of bacta spray good for only one use, and a few pieces of dried bantha meat she had kept as a backup in the pouch on her belt. She nibbled on one of the latter just to give herself something to do as she leaned against the rock, not daring to doze off until the moon was high in the sky and had illuminated the entire terrain around her in a dim blue glow.
She was awake before the sun had even risen the next morning, but it still took her more than half a day’s worth of hiking up the mountain ridge until she reached an encampment of low buildings swarming with dozens of Nikto mercenaries, most of them huddled around a large metal shutter door that she suspected her tracking fob would lead her to.
“Dank farrik,” she swore under her breath, her throat dry and her voice hoarse from lack of use as she surveyed the town from the overlooking ridge. There was no way she could get through that many Niktos without getting riddled with holes from their blasters in the process, not to mention the mean-looking automatic blaster they were rolling out of view behind one of the buildings that she suspected they’d bring back out if they spotted any intruders. Her best bet would be to instead sneak around the back of the building and either find a door or detonate the back wall so that she could extract her target as quickly as possible.
Plan formed, Sari took a deep breath through her nose and leapt down from the ridge onto the nearest rooftop, ducking out of sight when the sound of her footsteps caught the attention of a nearby Nikto on the ground. Silently, she prayed the long braid she had pulled her black hair into had whipped out of sight in time as he stared up at the rooftop where she was hidden. He turned away after a moment and she let out a breath before hopping to the next rooftop, clutching her blaster gun tightly and keeping her thumb over the safety just in case she was taken by surprise.
Sure enough, as she reached the building just before the one the Niktos were huddled in front of, one of them climbed up onto the roof to set up a sniper rifle. He opened his mouth to call out an alert at the sight of her, but she fired a blast quickly at him and he crumpled to the rooftop, dead. She glanced up at the pale, cloudless sky above in a silent apology before hopping to the final rooftop, checking her tracking fob to make sure she was at the right building before dropping to the ground and scanning the wall for any sign of a door.
To her relief, she found a dull gray door, unsurprisingly locked, and decided to play it safe and pick the lock rather than blast the handle off and alert the Niktos on the other side of the building. With barely any effort, the lock clicked open and she slipped into the building, shutting the door behind herself before clicking the flashlight on her wrist gauntlet on and sweeping the beam of light over the room.
It was dusty, crates and barrels scattered everywhere, and Sari wondered how anyone could successfully hide out in a place that looked so abandoned. She glanced at her hip again, noticing the tracking fob beeping faster as she stepped further into the room until she reached a metal pod, at which point the fob’s light stopped blinking and remained steady, its beeps turning into a constant drone. Warily, she reached out for the pod, brushing away the cobwebs and dust surrounding it before prodding at any of the seams she could find.
Suddenly, the pod snapped open as Sari brushed her fingers over a hidden button and she jumped back, instinctively aiming her blaster at it, but then gaped at the tiny three-fingered hand grasping at the edge of one of the blankets bundled inside.
“Oh,” she said dumbly and the green alien baby - like no species she had ever seen - blinked back at her with large, dark eyes.
“Mweh?” he said and Sari stumbled back a step before sitting down unceremoniously on the floor in front of the pod as her legs gave out underneath her.
“They said you were fifty,” she bemoaned, dropping her head into her hands, and the baby cooed.
Sari didn’t know how long she’d been sitting on the floor having a miniature existential crisis by the time she registered the sound of blaster fire outside, the metal shutter rattling under the force of the battle raging in the town as she clambered to her feet. A quick glance at the watch on her wrist told her that an hour had passed.
The little green baby was still staring at her, his eyes wide and innocent.
“Don’t look at me like that, you were supposed to pay for a new ship,” she complained, rubbing at her aching eyes wearily.
“Bluh,” the baby answered solemnly.
“What does the Empire even want with a baby, anyway?” Sari added, tossing a glare at the ceiling viciously as if it could provide an answer. “Especially a fifty-year-old...what even are you? Some sort of mutant porg?”
She poked warily at the baby’s stomach and he grabbed onto her finger, promptly sticking it into his mouth to suckle on.
“Hey, no, don’t do that,” she scolded, yanking her hand away and wiping it free of baby saliva on her shirt. “You don’t even know where I’ve been.” The baby’s lip quivered and she reluctantly relented, giving him her finger again and glancing over her shoulder warily. “What do you think is going on out there?” she asked quietly and the baby gurgled in response. “Yeah, I figured that’s the case,” she agreed, deciding her mental state could do with pretending to understand the baby so that she didn’t have to think about how she was going to have to sell it out to the Empire.
The door slid open suddenly and she slammed the pod shut quickly as she scrambled for her blaster, aiming it at the two silhouettes approaching. One was clearly a droid, its long, lanky body too thin and angular to be anything else, and the other…
Sari had to squint before she recognized the glint of beskar from the stranger’s helmet and right pauldron as he lifted his own blaster to aim it at her. She’d seen the Mandalorian once or twice in passing at the cantina on Nevarro, but had hoped to never actually come face to face with him after the stories she had heard from Greef Karga and Kal.
“Don’t shoot, I’m in the Guild, too,” she said hurriedly, hoping it was enough to cover her.
“How did you get past the Niktos?” he demanded. Even filtered through the modulator in his helmet, his voice sounded rough and exhausted from the battle he had just fought outside.
“Back door.” Sari pointed over her shoulder at the door she had entered through and the Mandalorian’s gaze drifted up over her shoulder before he let out a long, heavy sigh, clearly disappointed that he hadn’t thought of a back door. “Let me guess, you were sent to collect a bounty by an Imperial client, too?”
“Get out of the way,” he answered stiffly and she noticed just how heavily armed he was aside from the simple blaster pistol he held, with a phase-pulse sniper blaster strapped to his back and flamethrower jets on each of his wrist gauntlets. “I’m not splitting the bounty a third time, I’ve already got a deal with the droid.”
“You’re gonna want to see who exactly we were sent to collect,” she warned as she glanced briefly at the droid in question, whose lenses squinted as it scanned the room.
“There is one other life form in this room,” it reported.
“How old does your tracking fob say the target is?” Sari pressed and the Mandalorian’s helmet tilted back in her direction.
“Fifty years,” he said cautiously.
“Yeah, well, apparently species age differently,” she hinted, swearing inwardly when she saw that the droid had its own blaster aimed at her; she could perhaps dodge the Mandalorian, but the droid would be a faster shot. “Just put the blasters down and I’ll show you,” she offered, taking a risk and holstering her own gun.
“I don’t think-” the Mandalorian began warily, lowering his blaster slightly in surprise, but it was just enough leeway for Sari to step aside and show him the pod.
“Lower the blaster and I’ll open it,” she said. “The target’s inside.”
“Inside that?” he repeated skeptically, but dropped his gun the rest of the way.
“Tell your droid to drop his blaster, too,” she insisted and he made an insulted noise underneath his helmet.
“He’s not my droid.” Still, he gestured briefly to the droid to lower its blaster and Sari took a deep breath before swiping her thumb over the button she had discovered earlier.
“Bwah!” the baby greeted them cheerfully as the metal panels slid open.
“Oh,” the Mandalorian said faintly.
“That was my reaction, too,” Sari reassured him.
“It’s a baby.” He glanced at the tracking fob in his other hand, clearly bewildered. “But the fob said…”
“Species age differently,” the droid quoted Sari’s own words back to them, its robotic voice toneless. “Perhaps it could live many centuries.” Its lenses shifted as it examined the baby inside the pod before it lifted its blaster again, aiming it directly at the pod. “Sadly, we will never know.”
“Hey, no!” Sari scrambled to put herself between the baby and the droid, grabbing for her own blaster again. “What are you doing?” she demanded.
“My commission was quite specific,” the droid insisted and Sari felt a cold twinge of fear as its lenses focused on her. She suspected she could reason with the Mandalorian, but droids were something else entirely. “The asset is to be terminated.”
“Well, my commission was to bring the target in alive,” she retorted, hoping her voice didn’t tremble as she aimed her blaster at the droid’s central processing unit. “What about you? What did the client tell you?” she addressed the Mandalorian and he regarded her silently for far too long.
“Alive,” he answered quietly at last, but she saw him reach for his blaster again out of the corner of her eye. With both of them against her, she knew there was no chance of protecting the infant at her back, who was clutching at the hem of her shirt with tiny fingers and gurgling obliviously.
“You cannot outshoot me,” the droid told Sari and she wondered if someone had programmed a sense of ego into it.
“I’ll take my chances,” she said, swallowing as she clicked off the safety on her blaster and placed her finger on the trigger. Before she could determine if the droid would take the shot, a shot rang out and she squeezed her eyes shut instinctively, wondering if the droid had killed her before she had even had a chance to feel any pain.
“You can open your eyes,” the Mandalorian said dryly after a moment and she tentatively opened her eyes, flushing with embarrassment when she realized she was pointing her blaster at nothing and lowering it again.
The droid lay at her feet, a smoking crater in the side of its head the only indication of what had happened. Even as Sari watched, the red lights in its eyes faded and the soft whine of the droid’s central processing unit died out.
“What, did you think I was gonna let it shoot you and the kid?” the Mandalorian asked as he stepped around the droid’s carcass to examine the baby in the pod.
“Kind of, yeah,” Sari admitted, holstering her blaster and turning to regard him curiously as he slid one gloved finger into the baby’s extended hand. “Have you ever seen anything like him before?”
“No,” the Mandalorian said, helmet tilted down towards the tiny fingers wrapped around his. “You said you’re with the Guild?” he added, not looking away from the baby.
“I have been for a while now, yeah,” she answered. “I’m Sari. My partner’s Guild, too, Kal Soren. He said he’s met you before.”
“He has.” The Mandalorian finally looked back up at her, his helmet giving away no sign of what he was thinking. “Good sniper, terrible liar. Lost two rounds of sabacc to me a few weeks ago because he couldn’t keep a straight face.”
“Yeah, that’s Kal,” Sari confirmed, unable to help but crack a smile despite herself.
Sensing her amusement, the baby let out a peal of laughter, drawing both of their attention to him again. He blew a raspberry at no one in particular as he busied himself with playing with the edge of a blanket.
“So bad news, my ship’s a pile of scrap metal at the bottom of a canyon somewhere, thanks to a couple of New Republic X-Wings,” Sari explained to the Mandalorian. “But I’ll split the bounty with you fifty-fifty if you give me a lift back to Nevarro with the kid?” As much as she didn’t want to part with the amount of credits she’d been offered, she owed him her life.
He let out a heavy sigh, muffled by the beskar helmet. “Deal. Better you than a droid, anyway.”
“No love for droids, huh?” she guessed wryly, kicking aside the body of the droid at her feet before nudging the pod free of the boxes surrounding it.
“You could say that.” The Mandalorian held his wrist to the side of the pod, pairing his gauntlet with the pod’s hover controls, before tapping a button on his wrist to get the pod to lift into the air and drift towards him. “It’ll follow me now. Let’s go.”
Sari was more than relieved to follow him out of the encampment, the baby’s pod floating slowly between them as they made their way back out into the rocky plain that lay beyond the town.
“You said you crashed somewhere around here?” the Mandalorian asked as he brought out a pair of binocs to peer ahead along the canyon floor.
“Yeah, it took about a day and a half of hiking for me to get to the encampment. At least it was faster going down than up,” Sari confirmed, wiggling her fingers into the floating pod beside her to keep the baby inside entertained. “Speaking of which, how’d you get there so fast if you’re parked even further away and only got here this morning?”
“Rode a blurrg,” the Mandalorian said succinctly and Sari stared at the back of his helmet.
“Bless you?” she tried.
“No, that’s not-” He let out a sharp, frustrated puff of air through his nose. “It’s this creature an Ugnaught I met lent me. Told me that was the only way to avoid the canyon and make it to the encampment.”
“Wish I’d had access to one of those,” Sari complained, “I had to scale the canyon myself and then walk the whole way.”
“You scaled this canyon?” The Mandalorian looked up, taking in the height of the canyon walls around them, before he dropped his gaze back to Sari. Even without being able to see his eyes, she knew he was sizing her up and shrugged, opening up one of the hooked blades hanging at her waist so that he could see it.
“Wasn’t too hard with these.” She snapped the blade shut again as he angled himself forward again, continuing down the path.
“Not bad. Takes a lot of core strength. I had to do something similar as a kid during my training.”
“What, you mean all you Mandalorians aren’t born perfect at everything?” Sari joked.
“I wasn’t born a Mandalorian,” he answered, his shoulders tensing slightly at the admission.
“Oh,” Sari said dumbly, unsure how else to respond. The baby saved the awkward moment by letting out a high-pitched squeal, waving his tiny arms in the air, and that was the only warning Sari had before four armor-clad Trandoshan mercenaries leapt out from crevices in the rock, blasters at the ready and tracking fobs identical to hers and the Mandalorian’s in their other hands.
She shoved the pod as far away from herself as she could, hearing the baby giggle madly as he zoomed across the canyon floor, before grabbing her blaster and taking out the nearest mercenary. Over his shoulder as he collapsed, she saw another Trandoshan leaping at the Mandalorian from behind as he electrocuted the one in front of him with his phase-pulse blaster.
“Your six, Mando!” she called and he spun around to slam his fist into the Trandoshan’s face. She quickly brought up her gun to take out the mercenary as he stumbled backwards from the force of the blow.
Before she could react, the Mandalorian lifted his blaster and shot over her shoulder, so closely that she could feel the heat as the laser blast soared past her ear and hit the mercenary who had snuck behind her and taken off at a run for the pod.
“Maybe a little warning for me to duck next time?” she suggested, rubbing her ear ruefully and hoping it wasn’t burned by the proximity of the laser blast, and she could sense the Mandalorian rolling his eyes under the helmet.
“Sure, I’ll make sure the enemy pauses just long enough for you to get a warning next time,” he deadpanned before tapping his gauntlet to bring the pod closer to them again, hooking his phase-pulse blaster on his back again.
The baby let out another squeal of delight as his pod was summoned back to them, his dark eyes crinkled with laughter.
“Well, at least one of us is having a good time,” Sari teased, poking the baby’s stomach gently and earning another giggle before nudging the pod along as the Mandalorian started walking again, stepping over the dead bodies they had left behind.
“Found what’s left of your ship,” he called over his shoulder and Sari picked up the pace, rounding the corner and grimacing at the sight of the Interstellar. The metal was warped from the heat of the explosion it had been through, burn marks littered across the former hull.
“Oh, yeah, there’s no saving this thing,” she said wearily as she glanced the wreckage over for any sign of salvageable parts. “Lucky I didn’t have much worth saving in there.”
“This is an Imperial ship,” the Mandalorian said suddenly, his voice hard and clipped, and Sari glanced over her shoulder at him warily.
“Yeah, I bought it a long time ago when the Empire was still in charge, what’s your point?” Realizing the cause of his abrupt change in mood, she added sharply, cheeks flushing with horrified indignation at the thought, “If you’re thinking I’m Imperial, you can knock that off right now. I’ve got no love for them, trust me.”
“I don’t,” he said shortly, storming past her as the baby drifted after him in its pod, gurgling happily to itself.
Huffing slightly to herself, Sari dug through the wreckage and found another pouch of supplies she had stored there, thankfully only singed by the explosion, before yanking it out and examining the contents briefly: another two single-use bottles of bacta spray, a few more strips of dried bantha meat, a canteen filled to the brim with potable water, and some protein blocks that likely tasted as bland and beige as they looked.
She hooked the pouch onto her belt and hurried after the Mandalorian, catching his gloved wrist to get his attention. He whirled around, his free hand already curling into a fist as it drew back before he recognized that it was just her and the tension in his shoulders eased slightly.
“I’m not an Imp,” she insisted. “Trust me or don’t, but that’s the truth. Just happened to have a ship made by them.”
“You’re collecting for an Imperial client,” he pointed out, but his tone was a little less abrasive as he lowered his fist.
“I could say the same for you,” she reminded him before noticing a gash in his upper arm, blood soaking into the fabric between the plates of armor he wore. “Are you hurt? I can take a look.”
“I’ll wrap it up later,” he dismissed, tugging his wrist out of her grasp and setting off again.
“Eh?” The baby blinked up at Sari inquisitively and she shrugged helplessly back at him.
“Kid, if men weren’t so stubborn, the universe would be a much better place.” She nudged the pod to get it moving again and began to follow the Mandalorian along the path out of the canyon.
“Would you stop so we can build a fire and camp out for the night?” Sari complained as they continued to trek along the rocky plain that lay above the canyon. The sun had set hours ago, based on what her watch told her, and yet the Mandalorian stubbornly continued on with no sign of fatigue. “You haven’t even wrapped up your arm yet and that cut’s gonna get infected if you don’t. Besides, the kid’s getting antsy,” she added with a pointed look at the squirming green child in the pod. He had been making increasingly-frustrated noises over the past couple hours as he tried to push himself out of the pod, only to have Sari nestle him back into his pile of blankets.
“Do you nag your boyfriend like this all the time, too?” the Mandalorian retorted dryly over his shoulder, but finally took a detour toward a rocky outcropping. Taking the opportunity before he could change his mind, Sari gathered a few sticks and brought them over to stack them together so that they could light a fire.
“No, because he’s not dumb enough to keep going with an injury for hours without stopping,” she answered the Mandalorian’s question cheerfully as she took a seat on the ground and he stopped in his tracks, his helmet angled down at her. “I can’t tell if you’re glaring at me or not with that helmet on,” she pointed out dryly. “Do you ever take it off, by the way?”
“No.” He sat down on the other side of the pile of kindling, finally removing the plate of armor surrounding his injury. It wasn’t made of beskar like his helmet and right pauldron, but rather a dull, plain metal like the rest of his armor, Sari noted absently as she lit the fire and stoked it with another small stick.
She glanced up at him out of the corner of her eye just in time to see him wince as he examined the wound, which was enough for her to reach for one of the bottles of bacta spray in her belt and move around the fire to settle at his side.
“Here, let me.” The Mandalorian jerked back instinctively when she reached for his arm and she rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a baby, give it here.”
Reluctantly, he stretched his arm back out and she nudged the torn fabric of his sleeve aside, examining the deep cut briefly.
“Well, as far as cuts go, it could be worse.” She spritzed the wound with the bacta spray and he let out a sharp breath at the initial sting of the medicine. “There, it should be healed in a couple hours.”
“Thank you,” he said after a moment and she couldn’t stop herself from smirking back up at him.
“How much did that hurt you to say?”
Even with his face hidden, she could tell he was rolling his eyes as he tugged his arm out of her reach, reaching for the discarded piece of his armor to slide it back into place.
“Wouldn’t hurt at all if you weren’t so smug about it.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m gonna try and feed the kid.” She climbed to her feet, then paused. “As soon as I find the kid,” she amended, staring at the previously-occupied pod that was now decidedly empty.
“What?” The Mandalorian jolted to his feet, taking in the empty pod. “He’s so tiny, how could he have gotten out of there?” he demanded.
“Bwah.” They both looked down to see the baby sitting happily on the ground beside the fire, head tilted up at them curiously.
“Okay, one of us has to keep an eye on him constantly,” Sari said, relieved as she sank back down and scooped the child onto her knee to keep him from wandering off again.
“Agreed,” the Mandalorian said as he sat down slowly again, his hand lifting as if he was about to scrub it over his face before he seemed to remember he had a helmet on. His hand hovered awkwardly in the air for a moment before he let it drop into his lap again. “He’s faster than I thought.”
“Do we even know if it’s a boy?” Sari pondered. “Should we check?”
“Considering we don’t even know his species, we’ll just have to make some assumptions unless he tells us otherwise,” the Mandalorian deadpanned. “Besides, he’s not gonna be with us that long.”
“Right,” Sari agreed, dropping her gaze down to the baby in her lap, who seemed content to fiddle with the edge of her sleeve as he leaned against her, burbling under his breath to himself.
“How long were you in that building with the kid, anyway?” the Mandalorian asked.
“An hour or so?” She shrugged. “I don’t know, I probably could’ve snuck him back out past the Niktos, but I was busy having an existential crisis before you and the droid barged in.”
“An existential crisis,” he repeated and she could hear the wry smile in his voice, vaguely wondering what it actually looked like behind the T-shaped darkened visor.
“You try reconciling the fact that we have to hand a kid over to someone who’s obviously Imperial or at least a sympathizer,” she retorted and his amusement quickly faded.
“He’s paying me in beskar,” he said quietly after a moment. “That’s the only reason I took the job. It belongs with its people.”
“I won’t deny that,” Sari agreed, but couldn’t help smoothing one finger over the baby’s tiny, wrinkled head, which was covered in fine white hair. He tilted his head up at her and let out a soft coo that shouldn’t have melted her heart, but did.
“Stop that.” She looked up, startled, to see the Mandalorian pointing a gloved finger at her in warning. “No getting attached. We hand the kid over, we pick up our payment, and we leave. That’s it.”
“Yeah, I never said I wasn’t on board with that plan,” she reminded him.
“Oh.” He visibly deflated, clearly having expected her to put up a fight. “Well. Good.”
“Great, we’re on the same page. I’ve got some dried bantha meat and protein blocks in my pack, if you’re hungry,” she offered.
“I’m fine,” he said with a shake of his head and she belatedly remembered that he most likely wouldn’t take off his helmet to eat around her.
“I can, y’know, turn around or something if you want to eat,” she suggested.
“That’s kind of you,” he said. To her surprise, he sounded sincere. “But I really am alright. Thank you.”
“Well, the offer stands,” Sari relented, fishing out a strip of meat and holding it out to the baby. “What about you, kid? Please tell me you eat this, I don’t have many options for you otherwise.” To her relief, the baby snatched the food out of her hands and scarfed it down in two bites. His little stomach was probably full with just the one piece, she reasoned as he settled back into her lap contentedly, making a soft rumbling noise to himself that sounded oddly like a loth-cat purring.
“I can’t blame you if you are getting attached,” the Mandalorian said over her shoulder and she looked up to find his gaze aimed at the child in her lap. “He’s cute for a fifty-year-old baby.”
“Sure you’re not just projecting?” she joked and he leveled his expressionless helmet back up at her, making her speculate about what kind of face he was making at her without her knowledge. “Get some sleep, then, if you’re not going to eat. I can take first watch with the little escape artist here.” She shifted her knee briefly, making the child squeal in surprised delight as he bounced slightly on her leg.
The Mandalorian let out a soft, amused exhale of air that Sari suspected was as close to a laugh as she’d heard from him so far before he nodded once, shifting to lean back against a rock. “Alright. Wake me in a few hours.”
“Yep.” Sari took out another piece of dried bantha meat to nibble on herself as she settled in for the long night ahead.