Work Text:
It’s horrible to see Din practically wilt like days-old veggies whenever the other Mandos speak to him in their language. And there are lots of Mandos here, talking in their own language. Cara doesn’t begrudge them talking in their own language in their own land, really, especially here and now that they aren’t yet hunted down and killed and looted like trash in the hand of a scavanger, but can’t they see how it hurts Din?
Well, Cara doesn’t know why Din’s this way about his own language, but that’s beside the point, isn’t it? Besides, it’s the whole reason why she scouted out the least noisy, the least visited, the least occupied nook in this crazy farm with all these crazy little-but-not-little clones and their Mando caretakers then dragged Din here. And now, “Why you always flinch when the others talk in your language?” It’s blunt, okay, but she and Din never stand for any kind of ceremony, anyway, even when they’re talking about touchy things.
And, yep, he’s flinching again.
Cara sighs, and carefully puts her arm round his shoulders, both to comfort him and prevent him from bolting away. “Look, I’m just trying to help you, all right? You’re upset, the other Mandos are upset, and I can’t say I’m just peachy about it, too. Noticed how you strained to listen into people’s convos when it’s in your language, too, and it’s weird, I tell you.”
Din sags in her half-embrace, hearing that, and Cara’s heart sags with it.
“You… never thought you’d be in a community where people like you talk in your tongue openly?” she hazards a guess, her tone far less confident than before and rather more apologetic. Waking up on a whole-and-intact Alderaan was a horrible surprise to her, after all, if in a rather different way.
“What, then?” she wheedles when he shakes his head, his wavy brown hair flying both with the motion and in the plant-smelling, fish-smelling, water-smelling, dust-smelling breeze that’s picking up round where they are: one of the hydroponic platforms on the farther edge of the humongous pond behind the farmhouse. Then, thinking of how he is no longer armoured after he got transported and de-aged here by his own foolishness, dragging everyone with him, she adds, “Or you feel… what, unworthy speaking the language, now that your armour no longer fits you? But you said the armourer will resize it for you when there’s time and when it’s right for your kiddy body to bear it, right?”
His response this time is super weird: He shakes his head again, but he’s also blushing and scowling, like there’s something awefully embarrassing she’s dragging out of him.
Then, after a long, long, long moment, he mumbles, his voice barely audible and barely discernable amidst the quiet splash the gigantic Mando of indeterminate species and somewhat indeterminate gender who owns this farm makes as they slips naked into the water on the other side and moves about, “I can’t speak it. Not well. Very little.”
Cara has to pause to digest that jumble of words to discern the meaning, scowling to herself for the effort and to him for the bother and the other Mando for swimming up to them uninvited as they’re doing now. And then, slowly, unfortunately just as the other Mando seems to get within hearing range of whatever their species is given how they perk up, she spells out, “You… do speak the language, but very little, so you can’t understand people well, and can’t make yourself understand in that language. Am I right?”
His dispondent shrug somehow makes her want to just shove him into the water, which is inches away from their bare feet.
She settles for hissing lowly, “How can a Mando not speak the Mando language?” even as she glares at the nosy giant, warning them to stay away.
Well, she gets a grim snort from Din this time, and a just-as-grim retort of, “I was raised in the fighting corps, remember? It’s focused on fighting, so what I got were numbers, commands, reporting words, directives, weapon names, some basic words, swearwords, that kind of thing. The clanborn were rather stingy about the language too, at that time. Then many of them died in the Purge, and the covert’s more concerned with surviving and staying hidden than teaching anybody the language. It’s harder to recognise the kids when they aren’t talking in Mando’a, anyway, so they’re safe since they’re not armoured yet. Nobody would expect that they are Mandalorian foundlings if they don’t speak the language.”
Din’s positively chatty, now, if not much more comprehensible than before. But he’s also slipping out of her hug, now seated where he stood on the wooden pier with his legs dangling into the water and kicking jerkily… like he wants to kick someone, hopefully not her.
Well, to be safe, Cara doesn’t follow him and just crouches down a safeish distance away, with one eye fixed on the gigantic Mando that’s now swimming lazily underwater and hasn’t resurfaced for some time despite their generally humanlike looks, and the other fixed on Din’s hunched form.
She ends up just watching the swimming Mando swim among the few different fishes in the clear-water, rock-bottom, fairly deep pond, at length. Partly because they’re so graceful underwater despite their bulk, but mostly because she… has nothing to say – can’t say anything, because there’s too much but also too little to say. What can she say, after all? It’s mostly in the past, and weird, and previously unknown perhaps even to the Mandos, and so freakily unMando if Din’s to be the barometer of what’s a Mando like, and she isn’t a Mando though the adults seem to be eyeing her up for conversion, so is it even her place to criticise how wrong he’s brought up? He’s been teaching his kid all the words for numbers and armour and the kid can’t even talk yet! Why wouldn’t the grown-ups teach him what’s to be the tongue of his adopted culture when he joined in? He’s mentally older than Grogu when he joined up, she knows that!
She welcomes it heartily, then, when, despite her earlier warning, the gigantic Mando swims up to them again after a while. With a cry that startles Din and herself, she flings herself into the water and on top of the other Mando, landing solidly on their back that feels like a decently sized raft on its own – and just as cold! – with a rather loud splash.
The tickle attack that she is bombarded next by the giant Mando is quite unexpected, and she ends up squealing – damn her kiddy timbre! – and thrashing about.
But it helps bleed off most of her frustration, she has to admit, especially when Din joins her in trying to tackle the giant and gets the same treatment instead.
Surprisingly, it gets even better when the giant manages to pin both to their naked, clammy, ample bosom and paddles away from the platform with lazy movements of their legs.
Still, she grumbles for her pride’s sake, “You gonna drown us?” when Ruusaan Fett loosens their hold a little on both kiddified adults, letting the latters turn round or even lean over the two strong, solid, tree-trunk-like arms if they wish it, once they’re positioned in the middle of the little lakelet.
The reasonable, thickly accented, “Why bring you here if I want to drown you?” that she gets for that earns a huff of reluctant laughter from her.
Which in turn earns her a nuzzle on her splash-dampened hair, which is weird since her own parents were never this physical with their affections, but it’s also warm and, despite herself, she wants more.
So she takes it as permission and now willingly snuggles against them, shoving her face into the crook of their nearly nonexistent neck, even as she feels how Din slowly wriggles round beside her, perhaps to look at the unique, rustic swimming pool more freely and comfily.
But, just as she finds her comfiest position, and wallows a little in it as much as she can given the far-cooler body temperature of her cuddle buddy than what she is used to or even expects, Din breaks the comfy, companionable silence with a soft, timid thing that’s barely audible above the ambient noise of so many kiddified clones and adult Mandos shoved into one farm, “Will you teach me Mando’a, Ruu’bu? I know so little.”
She straightens up, twists round, and stares at the back of Din’s brown mop, so does the giant.
She, personally, cannot fathom how brave and stupid the loving idiot is, for admitting such weakness to one who is… well, his adoptive parent, really, one of two of them, but they’re new and thus still in the “stranger” category, and she will hurt them, adoptive parent and giant or not, if–.
“Why not, little one?” Ruusaan Fett says, slowly, bemusedly, as if the Mando-language teaching’s expected or even the duty of a parent in addition to clothing and food and home and such.
It’s painfully, hurtfully ironic, and Cara finds her own heart twist alongside the hitch in Din’s breathing that she can feel.
She wriggles her hand stubbornly into his own that dangles twitchily on the water surface, then, and squeezes just enough to let him know she’s here with him.
And maybe it works, because, still without facing either of his current companions, the kiddified bounty hunter mumbles even more softly but much more earnestly, “Thank you.”
She knows how precious the language is to him by just that.
And, when the giant says while nuzzling his mop of hair, “No debt,” instead of “You’re welcome” or something else that’s much more common and comprehensible, the impromptu lesson on “Mando’a” begins… for both of the said giant’s little captives.
It’s not full of new words and grammatical rules, surprisingly, but rich in concepts that Cara can use to anchor her memory of the words to as well as understand more of the culture to which almost everyone here belong. Now she knows why the “thank you” could be replied with “no debt,” and she’s much warier of thanking Mandos – and apologising to them, for that matter!
And then, out of the blue, just as the three of them are drying up on the farmhouse-side of the shore with towels that Ruusaan has apparently prepared before their dunking, again without looking at anyone, Din asks, “What’s the word for ‘hope’ in Mando’a, Ruu’bu?”
Cara’s chest cqueezes, but not because of the chill now that her wet body’s kissed by the breeze, and she automatically freezes in the act of towelling herself thoroughly after peeling off her disgustingly wet clothes.
She stares at Din again, so does Ruusaan, and it’s a stupid déjà vu she can live without, but it’s Din so she’ll bear it, and–.
“It depends on which kind of ‘hope’ you want, Din’ika,” Ruusaan says at length, as they resume towelling off their much, much, much bigger body. “’copad’ is the hope you work towards, your… ambition? While ‘vercopaani’ is something you hope for but not certain you can get, and ‘coopani’ itself is something you desire… and ‘atini’ is something you… sweat for? Fight for? Endure? It is definitely something you trust you can work towards, and we often use it, more than the others.”
Huh. Go figure. Mandos fight even for their hope.
But is it so astonishing, with all the big defeats they suffer throughout history?
And is it not so apt, even for Cara, in her rebel trooper days and even after?
Damn. She doesn’t want to relate more with these Mandos! It’s a very slippery slope!
…Which is made even more slippery when, instead of donning their clothes – a long-sleeved tunic and a pair of light trousers, all plain beige but sturdy and pliant and comfy – they bundle Din in the trousers and Cara in the tunic, made possible only because how expansive both garments are.
It’s warm, now, and the tunic smells like Ruusaan, and the giant themself now lifts her up into the circle of their arm alongside Din, and she oddly feels like she wants to cry.
Damn Mandos.