Work Text:
Something I've found
Yeah that want to turn around
You got to walk, to walk, to walk, to walk
To make any ground
Foo Fighters, The Last Song
He can’t look at anything in his home without Karga invading his thoughts.
Not surprising, seeing as how his home had been a gift from Karga, himself.
He and Grogu had been at the bazaar earlier that evening when they’d heard the news. Din had recognized the odd mix of high energy, shock, and morbid gloom among the marketgoers as the mark of a sudden local tragedy. He’d seen it often enough before, given the harsh reality of the Outer Rim. Bad things happened all the time. Horrifying accidents happened all the time. Good people were gunned down all the time. This time, like every other time, he’d turned to the nearest stall keeper and asked, “What happened?” He hadn’t necessarily cared in the past, beyond strategic reasons for keeping informed on local current events. Asking is an old habit.
“High Magistrate Karga is dead.”
“What?!”
Grogu, sitting in his pod, had let out a surprised squawk, eyes round, ears stiff.
This time, Din Djarin had cared.
The merchant had nodded, sorrow dragging at the wrinkles of his face, having repeated the same news several times over the course of the day. “He passed away peacefully in his sleep last night.”
Din had frozen for a full five seconds before turning and striding for the city center as quickly as he could without alarming the civilians, Grogu gliding along right behind him.
Another Mandalorian had been at the foot of the steps at City Hall by the time he got there. Din had recognized her as one of the Tribe members who stayed behind on Nevarro with most of the children and a few others until conditions on Mandalore proved more sustainable, taking command of the Tribe in the Armorer’s absence. “Din Djarin, Din Grogu,” she’d bowed to each in turn. “I gather you have heard the news.”
“I don’t understand,” Din had said, his disbelief turning his tone to cold steel. “I spoke with him a few days ago. He was just fine.”
The other Mando, her name unknown to him… he’d never talked to any of them long enough to get to know any of their names… had nodded in gentle understanding. “An investigation has already been conducted. Nevarro City Council recognized our interests in this matter and invited our medic to participate. High Magistrate Karga’s toxicity screen was negative. No physical trauma. No indication of foul play. He appears to have had a previously undiagnosed congenital defect in the electrical system of his heart. It simply stopped beating last night.”
Grogu had let out a low, plaintive whine, ears flattening against his shoulders, the corners of his mouth drawn down into a frown, forehead pinching into even more wrinkles.
Din had let out a short sigh. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Yes,” she had said, handing him a memory cylinder. “Council members provided a copy of Karga’s foreign policy draft. It is not yet complete, but he stated his preference for you to represent Mandalore’s interests as an emissary to Nevarro. His margin notes indicate that he had not yet had a chance to ask if you are interested, but he made it clear that he thought you are the best person for the job. I have not spoken with the Armorer on the matter yet, but I think she would agree to recommend you to Lady Kryze. The details are all here.”
Din had let out another sigh as he accepted the cylinder. Politics are the last thing he wants to get involved with, but he couldn’t find fault in the reasoning. “I’ll consider it,” he’d said.
“Regardless of your decision, please notify Lady Kryze of the High Magistrate’s passing at once. The news will be easiest coming from you.”
“I understand,” he’d said, ending their conversation with a slight bow. He’d turned, gathered some fortitude from Grogu’s steady gaze, and walked home, his grocery mission at the bazaar forgotten.
Local time at the Great Forge is in the middle of the night, but Din makes the call anyway. He puts it through the official channel, not Bo-Katan’s personal comm. Convincing the low-ranking soldier who answers to rouse Lady Kryze takes some doing, but he manages it, and she appears in the holo-projection a few minutes later a little bleary-eyed, but attentive enough. “Din, what’s going on?”
“Greef Karga passed away last night. Natural causes. Our medic confirmed it. We thought it was best you heard it from me immediately.”
Her face walks through the phases of shock, suspicion, and sorrow in an orderly fashion. “Din, I’m sorry. How are you doing?”
He stops short, freezing up again, and realizes he’s not really sure. He’d spent the whole walk home wondering about Nevarro’s next steps, how the next High Magistrate would be determined, if they would hold elections or if someone would just fight their way to the top, wondering what kind of person would be likely in each scenario, and how he would have to deal with them with regard to Mandalorian land holdings on the planet.
But he hadn’t thought about how Karga’s permanent absence would impact him, personally. He answers in the only way he knows how. “Karga was in the process of writing a foreign policy document. It stated that he wished for me to represent Mandalorian interests on Nevarro. I looked over the terms and they seemed clear enough, so I’ll send them along. If the details are acceptable and you approve, I’ll agree to it.”
Bo-Katan tilts her head to the side, eyebrow raised just a bit. “I appreciate the situation report, but I asked how you are. He was your friend, wasn’t he?”
Din hesitates. Karga had greeted him with the phrase “my friend” several times in recent months. Karga’s recent generosity is difficult to ignore, even beyond the home Din currently sits in, following through on the Magistrate’s offer of sanctuary to a Mandalorian considered an apostate to his own people. Karga’s fondness for IG-11 had driven him to incorporate the droid’s remains into its own memorial in the city square. Karga’s fondness for Grogu seemed to exceed even that, hiring the Anzellans to refurbish and convert his beloved droid’s remains into a mechsuit and gifting it to the little green toddler.
But Din cannot ignore the earlier days.
When Karga’s treatment of him depended solely on how quickly he’d brought the bounties in. When Karga grumbled about the price Din charged for his abilities despite his skill and efficiency. When Karga sided with the Imps and did everything short of killing him to prevent his escape from Nevarro with Grogu. When Karga laid the trap for him in a false offer of truce to lure him back.
Din knows the exact moment when Karga’s loyalties had changed.
The moment Grogu had saved Karga’s life, neutralizing the venom and healing the deadly wound from the reptavian attack.
Only then had Karga changed his tune, switching his loyalties out of the life-debt he owed to the child. Everything that followed can easily be chalked up to opportunistic strategy. Welcoming offers that had paid off. When Gorian Shard and his pirates had come calling, the Mandalorians had come to Nevarro’s aid.
Din’s relationship with Karga had started as a transactional one. He’s not sure that had ever really changed.
“I’ll approve Karga’s request through official channels in the morning,” Bo-Katan says.
Din realizes she’s taken his silence as a refusal to answer the question. He’s used the tactic often enough that the mistake is understandable. He tilts his head in acknowledgment, seeing little reason to say any more than he has to.
“Give my best to Grogu,” she adds, a touch of a smile warming her image in the holo.
“I will,” Din says, deeming well-wishes to his son worthy of a direct reply.
Night falls. He puts Grogu to bed. The little boy had been fussy and unsettled since returning from town, but goes down easily enough now, sensing his father’s weariness, knowing tonight is a bad night for the usual token struggle to stay up later.
Din opens a cabinet, reaches way in the back, and pulls out the tall, thin glass bottle.
The Coruscanti whiskey Greef had given him upon the Nite Owls’ arrival on Nevarro.
Din hasn’t opened it yet, the “smaller gathering” Greef had recommended for its consumption never having come to pass. Din had simply left Mandalore, come back here, and set up residence as soon as Greef had offered him the cabin. He’d craved a return to solitude after sharing close quarters with so many others, even if they had been Mandalorian. He misses the Razor Crest, had missed having a place of his very own, where he could let his guard down, if even only just a little.
Greef had given him that space for himself. This place of his own.
Din places the bottle on the table, the thump of glass-on-wood warm in the cozy room. He pulls his gloves off, tugging one fingertip at a time before sliding them off entirely and placing them next to the bottle. He opens another cabinet, pulls a glass out, and places it on the table before sitting down. He reaches for the catch on his helmet, disengages the seal, and lifts it off his head.
Din doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he won’t tempt fate. Greef would haunt him to the very end if he drinks this stuff through a straw.
He breaks the seal on the bottle, pulls the cork free, and pours a finger of whiskey into the glass. Din is no expert on the finer points of appreciating hard liquor, but he’s seen it done enough times in enough cantinas that he has a decent idea of what to do. It’s all worked well enough for him in the past, albeit with lesser-quality spirits, to be sure. He’d generally chosen the cheap stuff for himself, tithing as much of his credits as he possibly could to the Tribe, back in the day. Now, he finds himself surprised that the fumes don’t make his eyes water as he swirls the glass. He takes a tentative sip, finds that he can hold it in his mouth without it burning quite as much, and it goes down relatively smooth as he swallows. He sits for a moment, looking at the glass in his hand, left eyebrow arched, noting the pleasant aftertaste. Oak, maybe?
It doesn’t burn like high-ABV, but it warms his hands and face like high-ABV. His thoughts gain an immediate fuzz.
So. This is what the good stuff is like.
His eyes trace the walls of his home, a gift from Greef Karga, on a plot of land gifted from Greef Karga, drinking fine whiskey gifted from Greef Karga.
A man who had once pulled a gun on him. A man he’d once shot in the chest. A man who had once conspired to capture and send him to certain death.
All that had changed when Grogu saved Karga’s life.
But if anyone knows how a life-debt owed to a tiny green alien baby can change a person, it’s Din Djarin.
The home he sits in may have been motivated by life-debt obligation, but the armor he wears was paid for in blood. When he himself had sold the child who had saved his life against a mudhorn to the Imps.
Din takes another pull from the glass, wishing it was more punishing to drink.
He will never forgive himself for his crime against Grogu. For trafficking a child to people he’d known damn well meant to harm him.
But maybe he can forgive Karga for his past slights. Once free of Imperial presence, Karga had devoted himself to revitalizing Nevarro City, and now the place thrives. Karga had stood up to the pirates who had threatened to drag it all back through the dust, had gunned the first threats down, had buried his pride and reached out for help when things had gotten too big to handle himself. Karga could’ve waited it all out in the abandoned Mandalorian hideaways Din himself had revealed, but had chosen to lead his people and share their fate instead.
Din takes another swallow, closing his eyes against the opening of his sinuses, draining the glass.
The galaxy is a hard place. The Outer Rim especially so, still stooping over to sift through the dirt and pick up the pieces shattered by an empire that continues to linger in the shadows. An empire that smashed beings between a rock and a hard place time and again, bringing out the worst in everyone.
Din included.
Karga’s token of redemption floods his veins, softens the hard lines of the glass bottle before him, lightens the weight of what he thinks might be grief in his soul.
Grief. Greef.
Din’s life had never allowed much time or space for grieving. Grudges, sure. Vengeance, absolutely. The sudden vacuum that his parents’ subtraction pulled on his life had inspired decades of both, decades of violence that had never filled the void, but had usually kept him well enough occupied to disallow the time and stillness to examine how he’d ever felt about the whole thing.
He knows the flashbacks aren’t grief. His occasional, sudden visions of the mad dash through his childhood village as battle droids bombed it to oblivion. His parents’ last-ditch dying effort to keep him safe. They just are. A short-circuit in his brain when the present gets too close to the past and reality arks between them.
Din pours one more finger of whiskey and knocks the whole thing back this time, bringing what’s left of his focus to bear on the burn in his sinuses and the sting behind his eyes.
Not smoke. Not fire. No bombs. Pull yourself together. What are you going to do about it?
He opens his eyes, confirms that he is, indeed, still in his own kitchen – wow I have a kitchen – and wonders what he’s going to do about Greef Karga’s death.
Karga had spent his final year rebuilding Nevarro. Bringing peace, prosperity, and freedom to its people. Bucking the imperial remnants and pirates who threatened them. Forging an alliance with the Mandalorians who he’d known could help protect this world. When given the room to choose, he’d chosen to build. To provide. To protect.
To heal.
Din caps the whiskey. With a deep sigh, he hauls himself up out of his seat and returns the bottle to its place in the cabinet. He washes the glass – I have a kitchen – and sets it in the rack to dry.
He checks the proximity sensor array panel and confirms that nothing larger than a womprat is within a kilometer of the cabin. Though not large enough to trip the sensors, he figures the Anzellens are unlikely to come unannounced, and deems it safe.
He leaves his helmet on the table as he steps outside into the night.
He faces first toward Nevarro City, hidden from direct view by virtue of its sunken elevation, nestled down into a valley between the old lava flows. Even so, the city lights spill up into the sky, casting a warm glow on the near horizon, still peaceful and welcoming even without its beloved High Magistrate.
He turns and faces towards the lava flats, out beyond the crisscrossing hills that meet the stars off in the distance. He closes his eyes and allows himself the rare luxury of concentrating on the breeze against his skin. Warm, dry, burnt, metallic.
Volcanic.
He’d buried Kuiil out there, not so long ago. Din’s past had left even fewer occasions to bury fallen allies than it did to grieve them. The allies themselves had been few and far between, with cases when there had been both actual remains and the time to return to them in even shorter supply. He’d done the best he could for Kuiil out on the flats, with loose rocks of appropriate size difficult to find. But Kuiil was small and it hadn’t taken much, and the task had tallied up to nowhere near the amount Din owed the Ugnaught for his loyalty and sacrifice.
Kuiil had helped him get Grogu this far, and thus had a hand in Karga’s redemption and Nevarro’s renaissance along with it. If Din has any reservations about what he owes Karga, he has absolutely none about what he owes Kuiil.
I will keep watch over this place for you, old friend. I dragged you from the peace of your valley to die here. I’ll do what I can to keep the peace here so you can rest.
He opens his eyes just in time to catch a meteor as it streaks across the sky, a long trail of sparkling green and silver burning through the atmosphere before it evaporates, no doubt kicked out of place from the orbital mines above. He can’t help but take it as a response.
You have spoken.