Chapter Text
It was normal for Mos Espa to be a crime-filled disaster city. No inhabited space on the sandy planet of Tatooine was entirely free from violence. Raiders pillaged settlements, Jawas nicked whatever they could get their hands on, and on that particular day, the Pykes had decided to wage war on Mos Espa’s new Daimyo.
There were many things Din Djarin was expecting to see during the engagement. Potential sights included corpses, sprays of blaster fire, plenty of enemies and allies alike dying, civilians cowering in fear, and maybe even a personal meeting between his face (hidden under his helmet) and the ground. Din already had three unexpected encounters: the citizens of Freetown, a small handful of Scorpenek droids, and now Grogu and Peli Motto riding through town on a cart. He hadn’t been expecting any more surprises.
As a Scorpenek pursued them down the street, Peli and Din exchanged fire with the droid. As he had expected, none of their shots made it past the droid’s ray shield.
“What is he doing here?!” Din questioned, only turning his head back towards Peli for a brief moment.
“The Force works in mysterious ways,” she replied without taking her eyes off the droid.
He would’ve liked to comment, but only a few seconds later, the droid pulling the cart took a hit. It tumbled and sent its cart flying, along with all its passengers. Din spun and caught Grogu before the child could hit the ground. The three pit droids collapsed into themselves. When Peli landed, she spat out a tooth.
Din was immediately back on his feet firing at the droid. It took Peli a few seconds to recover from the fall.
The Scorpenek stopped firing. It turned to look down an adjacent street. As Din tilted his head in confusion, three small cylindrical objects rolled slowly under the droid’s legs. At their low velocity, the ray shield did not mind. However, only a second later, the devices let off strong electric charges, disabling the droid. It hit the ground limply.
This would be Din’s fourth surprise of the day.
All he could do was stare in awe as three men in Mandalorian armor charged around the corner. The one taking up the rear fired a few rounds into the droid’s chassis with blasters he didn’t recognize. Once the immediate threat was gone, the three newcomers stopped and stared.
“Woah, that was unexpected,” Peli commented. “Friends of yours?”
Din handed Grogu off to Peli without turning his head. He studied their armor and quickly concluded that they were not part of Bo-Katan’s clan. Theirs were painted heavily in white, gray, and blue. There was no silver nor sigil of Clan Kryze. There were no identifiers on their armor, minus Jaig eyes painted in blue on one’s helmet and a blue handprint on another’s chest plate.
“No, they’re not,” he replied. By the way they turned their heads to look at each other, he figured it was safe to assume they were chatting with private comms.
Something roared in the distance. The three unidentified Mandalorians all turned their heads, then began running down the opposite end of the sandy street. Din snapped out of his trance-like state. He was still on a battlefield.
“You never cease to amaze me, kid,” Din spoke softly while cradling Grogu in his arms. The child babbled something he didn’t understand, but he looked up at him with a pleased expression.
The two walked down the now Pyke, Scorpenek, and rancor-free road. The citizens of Mos Espa were crowding the streets, all either rebuilding or celebrating the win. It was going to be impossible to locate the Daimyo in these conditions.
Just as he was about to give up hope, Din heard a familiar voice.
“It’s a shame the town had to get messed up over something as trivial as a territory dispute,” he said. The voice was close, likely coming from inside the nearby cantina. He peered inside the window hole, but he spotted no green armor inside.
“The Pykes were sloppy,” he continued. “Even for gangsters, involving a civilian population is generally looked down on.”
“Yeah, the Hutts are always cleaner about that sort of thing.”
Din furrowed his brow. Was he talking to himself? No, there must be someone else there that he wasn’t hearing. Grogu babbled out another strand of nonsense. He sounded confused, too.
“Fett, I’ve been looking all over for you,” Din said as the cantina door hissed open. He looked around, but to his surprise, he still spotted no green armor.
“What do you know about the Hutts being clean? It’s not like we’ve ever seen one of their hunters going after someone before,” Boba’s voice continued.
“Well, I hear about it on the holo,” he replied.
Din took a few more steps inside. Three men sat at the bar. They looked nearly identical, except one had a blonde buzz cut. They were the Mandalorians from before. His confusion grew.
“Fett?” Din asked again. This time, two of them turned around.
Just as the backs of their heads looked identical, their faces were just the same. The blonde man continued to sip his drink, but it was safe to assume he looked just like the other two. Not only did they look identical to each other, but they looked like younger versions of Boba Fett. There were only two main differences, as far as he could tell: one of the two had a goatee, and both of them had eerie, inhuman red eyes. Their stares were unsettling.
“ Buir, it’s the Mando from earlier,” the clean-shaven one with the handprint on his chest said quietly.
“I know. I could hear his armor,” the blonde one replied.
Din couldn’t help but stare in wonder. It took him much too long to realize what was going on.
“You’re clones,” he stated the obvious. “But why aren’t you…”
“Old?” the blonde one finished, finally turning around on his stool. As expected, he had the same face and the same red eyes as the other two. The man chuckled. “Long story.”
The other two turned back around to finish up their drinks. The blonde man set some credits on the counter, which were quickly scooped up by the worker.
“My name is Rex. Those two are Fives and Echo. What’s your name?”
Din sat in silence for a moment. “Usually I don’t-” he began, then shook his head and sighed. “Din. Din Djarin.” He looked down and realized the child was making a grumpy face. “And this is Grogu.”
Fives and Echo spun around again.
“Well, now I’ve seen it all,” Fives said.
“It’s a baby General Yoda,” Echo commented with a grin. Rex and Fives chuckled.
“Now, wait a minute. You mentioned the name ‘Fett’ earlier,” Rex changed the subject. “You wouldn’t happen to mean Boba Fett, would you?”
“That’s… exactly who I meant,” Din replied. He sat down at Rex’s open side. “Do you know him?”
The trio exchanged glances. Fives and Echo raised their eyebrows in an almost identical fashion. Rex looked… skeptical.
“We don’t know him personally, but we’ve heard plenty of stories,” Fives replied.
“One of our friends stuffed his head down a ‘fresher. He was a real brat when he was little,” Echo commented.
Din chuckled. “You can’t be serious.”
“When you see him later, ask him about Ordo Skirata. He’ll tell you himself.”
“If I knew where he was, I’d offer to take you to him,” Din said.
Rex shook his head. “I don’t know if he’d enjoy having us around. Boba didn’t like the clones.”
As if on queue, there were cheers outside the cantina. Familiar armor stepped inside. Din looked back at where the three clones were sitting, but they had already disappeared. He looked down at Grogu, almost as if he expected the child to give him an answer, but the little one blew a raspberry.
“You seem confused, Djarin,” Boba said as he sat down to Din’s left. Fennec entered shortly behind him, standing at Boba’s free side while leaning against the counter.
Din let out an exhausted sigh. “It’s nothing.”
“Fett got old ,” Fives commented, taking a bite out of a piece of dried roba meat with his helmet sitting halfway on his head. He handed the rest to Echo as they walked, then pulled his helmet back down.
“Not that we’re any younger, ad’ika ,” Rex commented.
As the three made their way to the spaceport, each one of them carried a different crate full of supplies. Had they known their refueling and shopping trip would have been this chaotic, they would have picked a different planet to stop at. Fighting gangsters and clankers was not on their to-do list.
“Got any more of that roba?” Rex asked.
“No, sorry, buir . That was all I had on me,” Fives replied. “I think there’s more on the ship.”
“Let’s speed up, then. I’m starving after that mess.”
Rex stepped ahead of the other two as he quickened his pace. He didn’t need to look behind him to know they were keeping up fine, even in the crowded streets. He could easily hear their footsteps on the sandy road only a pace or so behind him. Soon, they approached a street lined with vendors. It was much more crowded there than where they had come from. Many people were still working on cleaning up after the battle. Rex shoved through a group before coming to a small clearing.
In the chaos, he seemed to have lost his boys. Rex peered around the crowd, but he couldn’t spot their armor anywhere. There were too many bodies.
“Echo, Fives, I’ve lost you somewhere,” he spoke after activating his helmet comms.
“We got stuck behind a cart. We can see you up ahead,” Echo responded. Rex immediately looked for a cart, but he couldn’t spot one.
“You can go on ahead. Don’t worry about us. We’ll meet you at the ship,” Fives grumbled. It sounded like he swore under his breath. “We might be here for a minute.”
“I can wait. Can’t you just shove your way through?”
“No can do. We’re rubbing shoulders with a load of civvies right now,” Echo replied. “There’s nowhere to shove them to.”
Rex let out an exhausted sigh. “Fine. Just watch your pockets in the crowd. I’ll meet you at the ship.”
As he turned to continue down the street, the other ends of the comms system went static. He thought nothing of it, figuring they had only forgotten to respond before shutting off their lines.
Rex sat on the steps of their little cargo vessel. He recalled Parja Bralor’s eyes glittering the day he asked her to fix and mod it. He also remembered the twins enthusiastically claiming bunks as soon as she was finished. They lived out of that ship as nomads, as many Mandalorians did, especially after the Purge. He wondered where Parja and Fi were now if they were even alive.
He attempted to raise Echo and Fives on the channel again. Same as the last two times, there was no response. It wasn’t unusual for them to ignore him if they got into something they knew he wouldn’t like knowing about (which was usually just Fives finding something devious to do).
Rex leaned back and chugged down the rest of the water in his canteen. Despite the temperature control in his flight suit, Tatooine took its toll. He knew damn well he’d be flushing sand out of everything after they left.
And then the worst happened. It was a sound he hadn’t heard since Endor when Echo became lost in the forest: a specific loud beeping noise. Rex dropped his canteen and immediately slid on his helmet. His heart dropped when he noticed a flashing indicator light in the corner of his display. Fives had turned on his emergency tracker. It only took a few moments for Echo’s to activate as well.
It would have been handy to have the trackers normally, however, their locations were not transmitting. Either the trackers were broken, or they were already in hyperspace.
Jawas were crowded around the center of the street, which had long since been cleared out, and fiddled with two large metal boxes. It was obvious they were locked, or rather, as the locals called it, “Jawa-proofed.”
“Get away from there,” Rex growled with urgency in his voice. The Jawas only looked up at him for a split second before going back to work. They scattered once he drew his blasters. He could tell they were cursing at him, but Jawas were not his concern.
Rex looked around the immediate area. There were cart tracks in the sand. The two boxes the Jawas were trying to get into were the supplied Fives and Echo were carrying. There wasn’t any other visual trace of them. Rex flipped down his rangefinder and scanned through the sandy street.
The rangefinder picked up the cart tracks, footprints, and some scattered trash. He almost mistook it for a piece of scrap, but there, half-buried under the sand, was a small silver object. Rex knelt and picked it up, turning it around and inspecting it. He had only ever held one or two others of this object before. If the symbol of the Empire stamped on the casing wasn’t a dead giveaway, he recognized it as an Imperial code cylinder.
“Shab,” Rex mouthed. He let out a shaky breath and bit his lip to keep from screaming. He clenched the cylinder tightly in his fist.
During the first twelve years of his life, Rex learned to shut out his emotions in life-or-death situations. It was something every commanding officer had to learn to make the right decisions and keep their troops alive. It wasn’t something he had to do in a long time, at least since Endor.
He didn’t want to think rationally, but he knew he couldn’t break down in the middle of a street. Rex stood up and slipped the code cylinder into his pocket, then began dragging the two crates behind him back to the ship.
Boba Fett was many things. A Mandalorian, a leader, and a killer, but he never thought of himself as someone a kid would take to. However, the longer Djarin’s little green ade stared at him at the dinner table, the more he began thinking the thing thought of him as some sort of ba’vodu .
He was locked in a sort of staring trance with the kid. Boba furrowed his brow as Grogu, still locking eyes with him, refused Din’s attempt at feeding him a frog leg.
“What does he want?” Boba asked. He was now convinced this was a staring contest.
Din sighed. “Not food.”
Footsteps indicated someone was coming down the steps. Before she was even visible, Fennec’s voice echoed through the room. Boba immediately broke eye contact with Grogu.
“Fett, you have a visitor,” Fennec called.
“Yes, he’s right here. Djarin wanted the little one fed before they leave,” Boba replied.
“No, you misunderstood,” Fennec said as she stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Her helmet was over her head, and she had her dagger brought to the neck of an unidentified Mandalorian. He wore white and blue armor with no other identifying marks other than a set of blue eyes painted on his helmet.
“It’s you again,” Din said, setting the frog leg down on a plate in front of Grogu. The child ate it almost immediately.
“Caught him trying to break in,” Fennec said.
“No one answered when I knocked,” the Mandalorian replied. “I mean no harm. Ori’haat.”
There was a certain way this man spoke, a tinge of exhaustion in his tone. The use of Mando’a also left him curious. Not only that, but the voice under that helmet was one he could never forget. He wondered if the conflict in his mind was visible on his face.
“Who are you, and what do you want?” Boba asked. His voice was gruff and his tone was serious. He stood up and approached Fennec and his guest. “You can put down the blade, Shand. He isn’t going to hurt me.”
Fennec lowered her blade, but she didn’t take her eyes off the Mandalorian.
The Mandalorian removed his helmet, revealing a face Boba saw every day in the mirror… twenty years ago. Although, his hair was blonde and his eyes were red, not only in coloration, but also as if he had been shedding tears. He almost immediately recognized him from years past.
“My name is Rex,” he began. “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t so desperate, but I’m all alone.” Rex’s eyes lowered to the floor. “You’re going to think I sound crazy, but I think Imperials took my sons.”