So, despite my raging fury at these last two episodes taking the main character out of The Book of Boba Fett, I gotta say the show really said "we're gonna give Din Shippers everything they want".
Din/Paz- the whole two scenes he showed up in before now involved him 1) being a dick and 2) using any excuse to get out of the house for a while on a Friday Night. So him surviving at all's a plus for this ship. Also, he bandaged Din up and then proceeded to be a dick again. Totally on point for their relationship thus far. Plus, you know, everyone being alive.
Din/Armorer- yep, someone's momma's favorite.
Din/Fennec- She knows his name! She has permission to use his name! They're happy to see each other!
Din/Luke- gotta love that co-parenting of a tiny Jedi-lorian!
Din/Ahsoka- legitimately trying to help Din and Grogu get what they need, even though it also hurts. (She also respects their bond and basically said they should stay together, so).
Din/Cobb- oh boy! Cobb's flirting immediately and hard. Din asks if he can buy him a drink.
Din/Boba- despite barely being shown together, the way Din reacts to Boba is very telling. He and Boba are square. Fennec offers him a job and good credits. Din comes to help as a *favor*. I don't know for sure, but it seems to me that every time before this when he's helping someone out it's because he's getting paid or they promised to help him if he helped them. He offers to bring in more people. He goes to Cobb Vanth and even says that he's asking for a favor. Boba isn't paying him. Din's doing this because he asked, and he's asking for a favor because Boba could use help. Just kill me.
Boba Fett: Cobb Vanth was comatose. But I got the fellow shipped to my bacta tank and the best person to repair him. Tell him the good news. He’ll live after all. I know the Mandalorian has a connection to the Marshal. He’ll be pleased.
Fennec: Sure. I’ll go find him.
--
Din Djarin sobbing at a homemade grave.
IN MEMORY OF A HOT MARSHAL
Din Djarin: Grogu, look, I made this grave for him. This man would have been your second dad. I would broken my Creed for him, I WOULD HAVE BROKEN MY CREED FOR HIM.
Fennec: You know what, I’m gonna be very demented and not tell him.
Din Djarin: My love, I should have been there for you! I SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE FOR YOU.
Day 01 Clan of Three for @dincobbweek
Summary: Cobb never expected to hear from the Mandalorian after he leaves, but then the first letter arrives...
The first letter arrives a few days after Mando and the kid leaves, and it sits unopened on Cobb’s shelf for several days before he can bring himself to open it.
The courier — a young woman named Tai with a constellation of freckles across her cheeks and forehead and close-cropped black hair — presses it into his hands with a knowing grin. Her clothes are worn from the speeder ride around Tatooine, sand clinging to them so that she appears to be part of the desert made flesh.
“If you want to send anything back,” she says, pausing in her swaying walk back to her bike, turning to look over her shoulder towards him. “Just leave it in the usual box. I’ll be back round in two weeks.”
She grins and Cobb catches sight of a new banner tied around her waist: a striped cloth in browns and golds and undeniably Tusken, but it tears the breath from his lungs before he can respond. She hops back onto her bike and is gone.
Everywhere he turns, he is reminded of Mando and the kid, and just when he had pushed the other man from his mind with practised unnerving ease, the letter arrived.
The material is well-made, smooth to the touch except for the small crumpled swell in the centre, and the seal is neat but plain. Cobb brushes his fingers over the markings — a smaller line that flares out into a small peak with a notched end next to a hooked line — and places the letter down, willing his thoughts to turn away from it.
But it remains like a stone digging into the soft skin in the arch of his foot or a shard caught in his teeth.
So Cobb opens it, after one trip too many past it, his gaze locking onto it and the burning curiosity courses through him again.
A crumpled picture on pale brown paper spills out, the edges ragged and torn, and Cobb recognises it as the unmarked side of a help wanted notice. They are common enough in Tatooine that Cobb flips it to the other side to inspect the details before allowing himself to take in the hand-drawn picture.
It was one of theirs, he realises, smoothing out the creases that distort Mos Pelgo’s desperate plea for help. Why had he chosen this? Cobb was well versed in backhanded insults and thinly veiled threats. He had learned to be. The scars that span his back and thighs still ache with the memory of the burning whip and each one is a testament to what he survived.
Mando didn’t strike him as that sort of man. Cobb had seen the way he had curved towards the kid, always half stretched out to brush fingertips across his skull as if he was caught in orbit. Cobb liked to think he was a good judge of character and even when Mando had bared his metaphorical teeth at him, Cobb knew he was a good man.
So, he reasons that the paper was likely convenient rather than a reminder of a debt owed, and flips it back over. A huge white shape dominates the right-hand side of the page broken up by the jagged edges of what Cobb realises are teeth. Next to it are two crudely drawn stick figures, one broader and grey but clearly wearing a helmet with a T shaped visor and the other taller and shakily drawn, featureless except for a red triangle at its throat. Next to the two is a smaller circle in green with two triangles for ears inside a floating grey circle.
It’s the three of them, and a Kraft dragon.
Cobb smooths it out as best he can, his heart twisting and constricting in his chest, threatening to choke him. The other item in the letter is smaller. It rolls when Cobb fumbles while drawing it from the envelope, slipping through his fingers and clattering onto the floor. He drops to his knees, cursing his own uncooperative hands and the protest of his knees, the sharp flare of pain dulling to an ache that would haunt him for a few days.
The ring is cool to the touch and is perfectly sized for his thumb. Cobb doesn’t let his thoughts linger on that, focusing on the careful engraving of segmented bone upon bone instead of the remembered press of Mando’s hand in his, surprisingly warm given the chill of the night air, the slight hesitancy as if expecting Cobb to pull away from him.
He slips it onto his thumb, tacks the picture up on the main wall in his section of the house, and returns to work. A letter detailing their efforts and professing his thanks, along with all the unmarked scrap paper he can find and pencils scavenged from the passing traders that the school doesn't need anymore finds its way into the courier dropbox and is away before Cobb can talk himself out of it.
He just hopes he has made the right choice.
The arrival of a second picture — the same lopsided circle-shaped child drawn in greens and browns and two stick figures, one grey and one brown with red at its throat beneath a sky that burst with all the colours of a fistfight — confirms he was right. The note that comes with it is brief but Cobb traces his fingers over the hesitant letters. Thank you.
⁂
The shadow at the end of Cobb’s hallway shifts as he steps closer, his blaster held ready by his side. “Wasn’t sure you’d be coming here, Mando. Glad to see I was wrong.”
Mando’s laugh sounds wrong, too sharp at the edges and echoing slightly. Cobb takes another step closer, his gaze dropping to search the lighter shadows by the other man’s feet, looking for the huddle of fabric and large eyes of the kid.
“He had to go back to his people.” Mando sounds broken, his voice flat, and Cobb knows that feeling only too well. It draws you down, down into its depths, until you can’t remember what it felt like to believe in something or to care about another person. He steps closer despite himself, one hand stretching out to try and offer what comfort he could when he stops.
Dark curls, close cropped and unevenly cut, greet Cobb’s gaze, brushing against the edge of Mando’s beskar, his helmet held loosely in one hand. His heart lodges in his throat, remembering the way Mando had recoiled when Cobb had taken off the helmet of the borrowed armour, his hope dying in an instant.
“I’m guessing a lot has happened since your last letter.” Cobb doesn’t look at Mando further, navigating with the edges of his vision, sliding his feet across the floor as he hooks his arm around Mando’s waist. The man freezes before curling into him with a wounded noise ripping from his throat. “Come on and sleep. We can talk in the morning.”
“Didn’t know where else to go.” Mando sighs, his feet leaden, but he goes where Cobb leads. His skin was as cold as his beskar, gritty with sand that rasped against Cobb’s palm. “Knew it would be safe here.”
“Ain’t that a good endorsement,” Cobb murmurs, trying to ignore the swell of emotion the words created in his chest. The gap in letters had troubled him more than he wanted to admit and Tai had taken to stopping by his house first on her rounds so he wouldn’t waste more time waiting for her, only to be disappointed once again.
“It’s true.” Mando turns to watch him, and Cobb keeps his gaze fixed forward. The other man is shorter than him, folding into the curve of his chest as if he had been made to fit there, and he catches a glimpse of dark eyes before they move into his bedroom and Mando’s gaze snaps to the wall. “Oh.”
He sways, no longer leaning on Cobb for support, but clinging to him like a lifeline, and Cobb chances smoothing a hand along the curve of his hip, leaning down to blindly knock his temple to the other man’s. “You will see your kid again, Mando. He loves you.”
“He talked about you too.” Mando’s words rumble through him, his voice cracking and breaking. “Always drawing you. We were going to come back before— before—”
“He’s a sweet kid. Takes after his daddy, I reckon.”
Mando laughs at that, a helpless exhalation, and Cobb chuckles along with him.
“Now, go to sleep. I’ll be here in the morning,” Cobb continues, nudging Mando towards the bed. It is unmade, the blankets twisted too high, exposing the pale sheet beneath, but he doesn’t have time to reconsider it as Mando falls onto it as if his strings were cut.
“Skywalker took my child,” Mando mutters into the sheets and Cobb freezes, old familiarity washing over him, his thoughts turning towards an old datapad stored in a small chest in the corner and the contact details hidden within.
“Sleep, Mando. It’ll do you some good.” Cobb waits until the man’s breath levels out, falling into the deep easy rhythm of sleep before turning to inspect the wall. The most recent picture from the child catches his eye — the figure of Cobb and Mando on either side of the kid, their hands overlapping, beneath Tatooine's twin suns — and his hands curl into fitsts. He knows what he has to do.
The datapad hums as it turns on, the screen cracked and blurred, but Cobb navigates through it easily, old memories coming back to him.
‘Skywalker? Been a while, but did you just pick up a Mandalorian’s kid and not leave any contact details?’
The reply is quick, and Cobb squints at the screen, his mouth moving soundlessly as he reads through the misspellings and laughs to himself when he finishes. Three days travel away, and Mando would see his son again. Three days of Cobb living with the man he was hopelessly in love with as he helped him restore the balance to his family. This was going to be difficult, but, hopefully, easier than killing the dragon.
