The one shot is dooooone! Let’s gooooo!
I hope you all enjoy reading how Mando finds out that Mythos is well, a Mythosaur! Thank you guys for reaching 400 and now 500 followers1 you guys rock!
Summary: a hunt gone wrong with newbie hunter Toro Calican has Din rushing back to save The Child and his traveling companion.
Warnings: Mild gore and violence, probably some errors because I only gave it one beta read
Episode Reference: S1 E5 The Gunslinger
Din grimmised down at Fennec Shand. Gut shots were certainly not a fun way to go.
The dewback gave a low groan behind him as he turned to follow the tracks left by Calican’s speeder. Part of him wanted to hope the kid had just gotten cold feet and run off.
But why shoot Shand then?
A bad feeling twisted in Din’s gut. Turning away from Shand he mounted up onto the dewback, swinging a leg over the wide shoulders of the beast and steering it to follow along the speeder tracks to Mos Eisley.
It had taken the majority of the day to reach the cliffs Shand had been hiding in, Calican had at least an hour headstart on him on a much faster mode of transportation. Din dug his heels into the dewback’s flanks and started the march back towards Mos Eisley.
The twin suns of Tatooine had long since made their way across the sky and back down when Din pulled his tired mount up next to Calican’s speeder at bay Three-Five. The three moons turned everything silver and shadows deep and dark as he dismounted.
The very air seemed to hold its breath as the Mandalorian pulled the blaster from his hip and slunk though the door into the hanger.
The hair on the back of his neck stood on end as he stepped over the threshold.
Danger lurks here, the shadows seemed to whisper as they welcomed him into their darkness.
The phantom sensation of something clung to his boots as he crept along. Tugging at the edges of his cape and guiding his steps though the short hall that led into the bay itself. Eyes open Mandalorian, your prey is close, the shadows hissed.
Peli’s pit droids startled at him, and shot noisily away, making Din press his lips into a hard line. So much for the element of surprise.
“Took you long enough, Mando,” came the voice of Toro Calican from the darkness of the Razor Crest.
The would-be bountiehunter stepped out into the moonlight, the mechanic Peli at gunpoint and The Child held in his arms. For a moment Din contemplated if he could get a shot off before Calican did. Not likely though with the gun pressed into the small of Peli’s back.
And where was Khal in all this?
His eyes searched the shadows behind the trio for his missing travel companion. The woman hadn’t been with them long but she’d already proven to be a loyal minder for The Child, she wouldn’t have run off just because some punk came in with a gun.
“Drop it Mando,” Calican hissed, drawing Din’s attention back to him.
Scowling under his helmet Din tossed the blaster down into the sand at his feet before kicking it away.
Calican shoved Peli forward, making the older woman stumble and throw a dirty look over her shoulder.
“Cuff him,” he told her, blaster still trained at her back. “Youre a guild traitor Mando. And I’m willing to bet that this here is the target you helped escape.’’ Calican used his blaster to motion at The Child, the brief moment the barrel was trained on the kid enough to set his teeth further on edge.
“It’s a shame your nanny slave wouldn’t cooperate,” there’s a mean edge to the smug grin he fixes Din with when the Mandalorian stiffens. “Real shame, she was pretty too. If she’d just given me the kid I would have freed her and made her my wife, she’d have lived comfortably.”
The past tense made him stiffen further, fist clenching around the flash pod hidden in his palm. Calican makes a gesture with his blaster to the right and Dins eyes jump to follow it even if head doesn’t. His stomach drops at the sight of a body splayed out half hidden behind one of the crates Peli had scattered about her hanger.
Oh Manda, he thought forlornly. She didn’t even have her shoes on.
All he could see of his travel companion was the waist down and a single arm bent at an uncomfortable angle. The heavy-duty boots he’d gotten her nowhere in sight. She’d hated wearing them around in the ship, insisting it tracked dirt all over the floors she’d clean daily. Khal had even bullied him into treading around his own ship in sock clad feet on longer jumps lest he face the wrath of stink eyes and his boots going missing during the night cycle.
She’d probably been putting the kid down for a nap or at least been putting around in the Razor Crest unaware of the danger he’d let slip past him.
Peli shuffled behind him and Din could at least take a breath at her being out of the line of fire hidden behind his armored frame.
“Your’e smarter then you look,” the mechanic whispered spying the flash pod the hands folded behind his head. “Sorry about the girl. She tried to run with the kid and he got a lucky shot.”
“Fennec was right,” Calican continued monologuing , unaware that he’d signed his own death warrant the moment he’d lifted a finger against the two charges in Din’s care, “bringing you in won’t just make me a member of the guild, it’ll make me legendary.”
Anger burned in Din's stomach, sharpening his senses and strengthening his resolve. He’d promised Khal they’d find someone to get that high end slave collar off. Promised himself he’d show her the wonders of the stars for as long as she wanted to travel with him and the kid.
Poised like a predator ready to strike, Din set off the flash pod in his hand.
“Was that it?” Khal called out to Peli from inside the cool shade of the Razor Crest.
The mechanic was elbow deep in the guts for the ship outside, fixing the fuel leak while Khal has scrambled around inside helping where she could with things that the droids normally would be doing, while minding the kid and insuring he didn’t put anything he shouldn’t in his mouth- already she’d taken some kind of lazor cutter he’d snagged from him and apologetically returned it to its rightful owner, Peli luckily had found it quite amusing and even offered to find a less powerful tool and some scrap metal for him to play with.
“Yeah you got it!” Came the muffled reply, indicating Khal managed to bypass the broken line as instructed.
The child cooed up at her as Khal passed and she paused to snatch him up and pepper a few kisses on his round green cheeks making him giggle. She deposited him back down on the blanket she’d spread out for him to play on as one of Peli’s pit droids came totaling up the back ramp with a bowl filled with assorted dried nuts and meat.
The droid offers it up with a string of chipping beeps that Khal didn’t understand. She thanked the little robot nun the less and offered the bowl to the kid who was more than happy to snack on the offered food.
“He’s a bottomless pit I tell you,” she snorted to the droid following it down the ramp. She paused halfway down, leaning around the edge of the ship to see what Peli wanted her to do next.
The motion pulled uncomfortably on the collar sat snuggly under her chin but she’d gotten quite used to the discomfort of the thing. It had been a bust in finding someone who could get it off on the desert planet. Peli had even taken a look at it before shaking her head and informing Mando he’d likely need to venture more into the middle ring to find anybody who was capable of taking it off without the blasted collar administering its high vault shocks.
Mando had apologized something fierce when his own attempt to take it off had left her unconscious for nearly two days. He’d not touched it since, instead hunted around for someone with the skills to do it while dodging hunters looking for the kid.
Peli was bickering with one of her droids, which was pointing and flailing its arms around while it beeped at her about the inner workings of the Razor Crests guts.
Before she could call out to the other woman the sound of the hanger door banging open made Khal jump. Swinging around to face the door she watched as the young bounty hunter her Mandalorian had left the day prior strolled casually out into the hanger. Khal looked hopefully behind him for her shinny friend, frowning as the door swung shut and nobody else followed the hunter in.
Her magic twisted like live worms in her belly. Straining against the confines of her body the collar kept it trapped in.
“Where’s the Mando?” Peli called, coming around the corner of the ship with grease stained hands on her hips, voicing the question on the tip of her own tongue.
“He sent me ahead,” the man said with a bland smile, “where’s the kid?”
Khal’s stomach twisted further and her golden eyes narrowed at him but before she could deflect and slide away to hide the kid she felt a small three fingered hand curl around her bare ankle.
“Ah, there it is,” the smile on the man’s face took a sharper shape and that’s all Khal needs to snatch him up and bolt.
The Child pressed his face into her chest as she hit the hot sand running. Peli shouts and Khal ducks under the first burning red bolt. The sand exploded next to her as she dodged another.
Peli is shouting, her droids screaming, Khal’s magic presses tight up against her skin trying to burst out from her pores, to do anything but stay trapped in the small frame it was not meant to be contained in.
The third shot catches her in the neck.
The collar explodes in a shower of shrapnel and sparks. And just for a moment the suffocating silence the collar brought is broken in a symphony as the stars themselves sing their welcome back to her. The wicked pleasure of the shot landing from the hunter is acidic on her tongue, the horror from Peli turning the steadfastness of her song into dissonance. And the beloved little star, warm at her chest, wails as her shoulder collides with the hot sand and darkness drags her under.
Khal drifts. Her mind and magic spilt from her body like a gutted animal.
It hurts, she thinks absently.
Not physically, no. Her body feels too far away, like she’s caught in the currents of the desert sands and can’t get her footing to claw her way back. The tendrils of her magic that had been cramped and trapped in her body respond sluggishly, tender and painful when she tries to draw them back in.
Something malicious steals the star crying at her breast. Corals the steadfast horrified mechanic away. Disappearing into the shell of metal she can feel against the whiskers of magic and knows it’s the Razor Quest by the echoes of her own song that have started to make their home amongst the layers of its history.
She drifts again. Aware of the fear lapping against her mind but unable to do anything with her uncompliant body.
She feels something slowly drift into her awareness. Like drum beats on the wind. Steady and constant till the heat of the suns gives way to the cooler light of multiple moons. Then all at once boots drop down onto the sands outside the hanger and she knows.
Her magic curled sluggishly around his boots, catching oddly on his armor and tugging at the steady beat of war drums in Mando’s chest.
Desperately she tried to offer to the beat of those drums that danger lurked. Hidden in his own den. The drums beat ready and resolved, a hunter set on finding its prey.
Eyes open Mandalorian, she whispered, your prey is close.
She finds more perch for the whiskers of magic on his armor. A cool balm against the bruised edges of her mind. A stark reminder of her own heart, lost and stolen when Imps poached her from the planet she grew up on.
There’s talking. Garbled and far away to her ears. She feels the meaning more than she hears the word. Feels Peli’s fear, the quiet contained resolve and fear of The Child, the pleased pomp of the hunter, and the wrathful burn of Mando’s own anger.
Mando searches for her, Khal can hear the echo of her song in the beat of drums in his chest as he scans for her amongst the hostages, but can't do anything to draw his attention to her form sprawled out and forgotten in the sand.
The forlorn cords that twangs though him followed by the heady burn of anger.
It rallies Khal’s magic where it’s twisting its way up the lattice work of armor covering Mando. Finally, finally, grounded and not drifting she can feel her body again. The sting of skin where the collar was blasted away, the soreness of joints that have layed twisted the wrong way for too long. She draws a deep breath that tastes of sand, blood, and the wrath Mando wishes to bring down on the foolish hunter who thought he could come and take what wasn’t his.
Mando readies the charge in his hand and just as light blinds the area Khal explodes outward.
As soon as the flash pod goes off Din has his blaster drawn.
There’s a shout from Calican, and the moment the light clears Din’s got his blaster trained on the hunter.
Or well, where the hunter should be.
Din freezes. Peli makes a startled sound at his back. The mechanic’s fingers curled and tugged in the fabric of his cape, the only proof he’s not seeing things.
Where Toro Calican had been standing moments prior now hung the twitching legs of the hunter. His upper body hidden behind gleaming, clamped teeth.
Din’s eyes jumped up and seemed to meet the ire reflective gaze of the hulking beast crouched on top of the Razor Crest, freezing the breath in his chest.
“What is what?” Peli gasped.
Din couldn’t seem to unglue his tongue from the roof of his mouth to respond.
And yet, gleaming tusks arched forewarn from dark scaled cheek, silver and reminiscent of his own gleaming armor. Familier, their shape etched into his mind from a lifetime of seeing depictions of them printed on secret halls. Each panted exhale from its barrel chest, sent thrums through his armor that made it ring with just the barest hint of its true ringing song.
But Din could feel it deep in his gut that what he wanted to deny on the absurdity of it alone.
Crouch atop his ship, Calican hanging limply from its mouth was a Mythosaur.
“The kid!” Peli cried, bringing him from his spiraling thoughts.
The great eyes that had been locked on him jumped down and away and Din followed it, sighing in relief when he spotted his little green charge peaking out from behind the equipment scattered around the ramp.
“He’s ok,” Dis says softly. Eyes jumping back to the mythosaur atop his ship.
“How can you possibly know tha-” she cut off as those eerie eyes jumped back to the pair.
Din couldn’t stop the way the blaster twitched in his hand, ready to defend himself even if he knew it would be a useless endeavor to use such a small weapon against it. Something shifts across the mythosaurs snarling face, something close to devastation of all things seems to flash through its eyes twisting Din’s insides oddly.
There’s a wet thump as Calican’s corpse drops onto the ramp below it. The upper part of his body sliding a notable few more feet then his lower. All at once the mythosaur becomes hard to look at. Like his eyes can’t focus on it, it’s frame distorted and unreal and between one blink and the next it’s gone. Din and Peli swing around looking for it.
It’s Din that spots her first.
Crouched behind the landing gear of his ship is Khal. Eye’s reflecting as they always do in the low light back at him though his visor.
What are the chances, he thinks to himself as he steps away from Peli who’s still searching her hanger for the vanished predator. What are the chances that the small spitfire woman running from Imperial Storm Troopers, that quite literally plowed into him would be the beast of Mandalorian legends.
By the Manda,what are the chances??
The kid beats him over to Khal. Shooting under the Crest and tumbling into arms that snatch him up and craddling him to her chest as loud sobs break loose from him.
“I’ve got you baby, I’ve got you. I’m ok, I’m right here,” she whispers into the downy hairs on the crown of his head, all the while those sharp golden eyes stay fixed in his approaching form.
When Din kneels down next to her, Khal hunches her shoulders and twists away from him, like he might try to take the sobbing child away from her and it makes something twist in his chest. Something shifts in the eyes she still has trained on him and she relaxes. The Kid peaks out from the mess he’s making of her shirt to sniffle at him before hiding his face again.
Khal continues to stare wordless at him but doesn’t shy away when Din dares to reach a hand out and angle her chin up. The skin along her jaw and throat is burnt but not badly, the skin unbroken for the most part.
“Your’e lucky he only got the collar,” Din said after a moment. Starting to feel a little wrong footed with the big owl eyes she was giving him.
“Shit kid, I thought for certain he killed you,” Peli came bustling up on them, breaking the spell bound feeling of holding Khal’s gaze Din had been under.
“You, uh-” Peli cleared her throat and shuffled in place, eyes bouncing between Din and her, “you always been able to turn into a giant lizard or is that a new thing?”
The smile Khal gives her is small and a little strained. She ducks her head and fixes her gaze on the sand by Din’s boots.
“I’ve always been able to,” she said softly, voice horse and throat sore. “Just haven’t in a while."
The last part comes out a whisper and her gaze jumps back up to Din’s before skirting away. She soothes a hand over the kids back where he’s quieted into soft hiccups in her lap.
“Guess this means you didn’t get paid,” Peli tries to jest in an effort to break the tension that’s building up again.
Din stared at Khal for a moment longer before rising up and making his way back around to the ramp of his ship. He steps over the upper part of Calican, pointedly ignoring the way the arm that had held his blaster was mangled and bent wrong from getting trapped between Khal’s teeth, to dig around in the would-be hunter's belt pouches.
The amount of credits he pores into Peli’s hands is enough to cover the hanger, repairs, and the emotional damage he’s caused and then some. The older woman stutters though a response before ordering her pit droids to clean up the mangled mess of Calican’s body.
“I don't know!” She hissed at her still shaken up droids, “take it to beggars cannon or something!”
Din makes his way back over to Khal, who now stood at the base of the ramp staring into space and swaying like a blade of grass in a light breeze. Her unfocused gaze turns to him before he gets to her and he thinks of all the times he’d accidentally startled the woman because she’d seemed so unaware of her surroundings all the time.
“It was because of the collar,” Khal said softly into the quiet between them.
Din stilled. Head tilting slightly.
“Sorry,” she murmured, turning her nose down into the kids head again, “that was an inside thought and it’s rude to pry. Everything’s just so loud right now.’
“You’re not wearing any shoes,” Din said instead of trying to understand what she meant by that. The air is still and the night quiet save for the distant sounds of city life, but even then that late into the night that wasn’t much.
Khal glanced down at her bare feet as if she hadn’t realized the lack of shoes until he pointed it out. She swayed dangerously, brows furled and gaze going distant again. Din gets a hand on her arm and the other on her lower back as one sway threatens to send her to the ground.
“I was inside when he came for the kid,” she said, eyes clearing somewhat.
“Let’s get you back inside then,” he replies, just as soft. Like she might spook and disappear into the night.
She nods absently, humming softly under her breath and Din starts steering her up the ramp. He puts himself between Khal and the kid and the splatter of blood and viscera Peli’s droids are working to clean up. Khal makes a disgruntled sound when he flicks on the interior lights of the Crest, squinting at the sudden brightness.
He leaves her sets at the table and returns to help Peli.
“She gonna be ok?” Peli asks him in a whisper as the last of viscera is wiped off the ramp.
“I believe so,” he tells her head turning to glance where Khal is still sat staring into the middle distance. “I am sorry we dragged you into that.”
Peli waves a dismissive hand and pads down and off the Crest. “Next time you're in the neighborhood you use my hanger, I’ll be checking in to make sure you’re treating that girl and kid right.” The grin she shoots him is cheeky.
Din gives her a nod and closes the Razor Crest up.
He’d get them off planet and moving then it was probably time for Khal and him to sit down and have a proper talk. It felt long overdue.
Some extra shots of the art:
You tag people for these things right? Mutuals assemble!
@roughdaysandart @creature-beast @cozy-fish-crow @thelemonador5000
Idk who else wants to be tagged lmao
