Witchmoat was a cheap prefab colony-drop town, with extra storage 'huts' made out of old fuel tanks, and a shower of ever-present rust replacing the concept of paint. It was clean and well-kept, however, with tamped down, well-lit paths trailing between the small homes. Someone in the colony had taken to dyeing scraps of cloth and brightening the structures with braided ropes and fluttering ribbons, probably enlisting the settlement's few children at the job to keep them happy and motivated.
Din Djarin didn't know at first if the slightly larger structure Jerrit was leading him and the kid to could even be classified as an inn. Then he saw the way the home had been divided up, and realized what the man had sacrificed for this chance at some personal dream. Jerrit had given himself only a tight slice of privacy up near the front of the home, enough space for him and, to the Mandalorian's surprise, Jerrit's young son, who waited for them on a rusting porch. The bulk of the place was a cozy common room latched onto a surprisingly solid-looking kitchen area, and over a half dozen comfortably-sized rooms upstairs, each with a clean window overlooking the town.
"Good looking place," allowed the Mandalorian, genuinely impressed.
"Clean up's been a breeze for a while," said Jerrit with the sardonic good humor of a man used to looking on the bright side. "I'd offer you the far corner room for extra privacy and quiet, but my friend, you could sleep in the commons and be just as well off."
"You could have just thrown me a couple of blankets and told me which storage tank was mine and I would have shrugged and taken it," said the Mandalorian, enjoying the banter.
"What kind of hospitality would that be? You'll get the room on the far right, top of the stairs, it's the biggest and gets some extra warm off my heat unit, your kid'll appreciate it at night. Chill comes sharp, then. Everyone keeps close and quiet after dark." Jerrit waved at his son, who dropped off the porch and jogged up to them, his wide eyes fixing on the foundling at Din's ankles. "Dyrric, want to give them the tour?"
"What's his name?" said Dyrric, not looking at anything but the child at Din's side.
"Doesn't have one," said the Mandalorian, uncomfortable with the direct question. Next it would be about his.
The boy peered up at him, his face reflecting off the silvery beskar, but he didn't. "What do you call him?"
"Kid."
Dyrric rolled his eyes, heavy and full with that sometimes wise exhaustion children had with adults. "That sucks."
"Dyrric!" The name bolted out of Jerrit, aghast.
"It's all right," said the Mandalorian, amused. The child cooed and patted a hand out towards the human boy, curious about him. "The kid's still very young, and he's under my care. He'll have a name someday, but right now it's… complicated." He looked down into the foundling's wide-eyed stare and gave up a known truth. "But he loves attention, especially from nice people."
"Can I play with him?" The eagerness in the boy's voice told Din a lot - a young boy with responsibilities beyond his age, only one parent to support him and barely holding on himself, and feeling alienated from the few other kids in town.
Din knew how to spot a losing battle, and more importantly, ones that shouldn't even be fought. "Sure," he said, amiably enough. Eh, it would give the bean some extra socialization. Bounty hunters and droids were dull company for foundlings, and the kid had dealt with both too much lately.
"Don't take the child too far into the jungle, and stay away from the old hut," said Jerrit, putting his hands on his hips for emphasis. More clues. These were things that happened, and happened a lot. Faint worry hit Din's gut, and he recognized it, annoyed with himself, as growing parental concern. The kid would be fine. The kid could somehow toss a critter across a canyon if he felt he had to.
The kid would absolutely get into trouble out here.
Ehhh, I'll deal with it when I have to.
Dyrric hid a fast pout, but not all that well. "Sure thing, Dad." He looked up into the Mandalorian's helmet. "Come on, I'll show you around the place."
. . .
There was also a private bath off of the top floor, one that had no windows, locked, and was also installed with a strangely top-tier sonic-wash stall that could hose a kid off in five fussing seconds. Din eyed the door to the bath through his helmet with the sort of yearning some people spared for luxury dining, or the poetry of lost loves. There was a wash system on his ship, of course, and he kept himself as regularly clean as a bounty hunter who got shot at nearly daily could hope to be. But a whole-ass bath like this in a town the size of a mouse droid?
Suddenly he was kind of in love with Witchmoat, and at first barely noticed the other bizarrely good amenities Dyrric showed off, like the public kitchen the inn operated with the help of a town gardener's fresh supply and a good mech-kit system, the stupidly soft bed in a room with a door that locked and a window with - Din almost groaned in delight, betraying himself - full tint controls programmed into the crystal-glass for even more privacy. And an auto-wash laundry bin. He was going to have to run back to the Crest and get five months of backed up gun-cleaning rags and under-armor thins while he could.
"Where'd you guys come from before joining a settlement ship?" Din asked the boy.
Dyrric shrugged, toeing his shoe at the top step. "Dad ran a place. On Corellia."
"Yeah?"
"I don't know much. He was pretty popular."
And ended up running a tightrope gig in a backwater, still with the heart of a luxury proprietor. Weird, but all right. Din let it go for now. The Empire had shuffled a lot of people's priorities over the years, possible Jerrit had wanted the simplest answer, and the one Din had the most obvious sympathy for: get himself and his kid out of the firing line and into a nice, quiet place for a while.
He realized the top floor of the inn had gone silent again, the foundling already conked out on the bed in their temporary new room, and Dyrric, still at the top of the steps, looking at him. "Question, kid?"
Silent tap-taps of the shoe as the boy looked away. "Is it neat?"
"Is what neat?"
"Being a bounty hunter? Being a Mandalorian?" Hidden but savage eagerness, the quiet desires of a bored child in a tiny town. Uh-oh.
Din studied the boy, picking over his words carefully. "I lost my family. All of it. Was younger than you. My clan is my family now."
They still were, weren't they? The few of them left out there, the clan armorer surely holding fast on Nevarro until her duty was complete, the cheerfully antagonistic artillery expert, Paz, not one to go down until he took a full Destroyer of Imps out with him, the boys he once trained with, now possibly lone Mandalorians adrift like him. He pushed the thought away, the worry, the grief still lingering. These were not the Way - although the Way couldn't always change what the heart felt in private.
"My clan lives in danger, now. Because of what happened with the Empire." That was true, in more than one way. He could say that much without betrayals. The kid's eyes were still on him, and they were huge. "I live in danger. Almost every day."
A thought struck him. He hunched down, turned his neck hard so that the boy could see the scorch mark still on the back of his helmet. He hadn't managed to scrub it away yet. "That shot almost killed me, Dyrric, the way it made my skull smash into my own armor. Almost bled out. I've had others like it. In the arms. In the chest. I've got scars all over me from years of hard work. It's just that my armor hides them. That mark on my helmet is just the most recent chance I had to be passed by my own death."
He turned back to look at the boy, now at eye level. Still wide-eyed, absorbing what he said. "This place is going to be the first safe rest I've had in a while." He let the last word drawl a little, giving it a grander sense of time before continuing. "You can't know how grateful I'm going to be for that."
Dyrric blinked, his eyes damp as he thought things over. They were true, and they were hard. "My dad wants me to be like him someday."
"Yeah?"
Dyrric looked down. "I don't know about running an inn. My mom taught me to cook before… she was a really great cook. I loved helping her."
Din allowed himself to sound a little softer than usual. "I bet you'd be a great cook someday, too. You know, that's the heart of a lot of places I've been, makes you remember them, makes you come back."
The boy found a new smile, plucking its way in from the corners, twisting a little as he started the process of thinking over a new dream to replace an old one. "Maybe I'll do that. Anyone can help me run a place, but not everyone can cook."
Din snorted through his helmet, knowingly. "Yeah, that's a fact."
Dyrric blinked away all of that, looked into the blackened visor that hid Din's face. "I should leave you alone for a while, so you can get your boots off or whatever. But dinner will be in an hour! We always make enough for a bunch of the village, so lots of people don't have to do it themselves."
"You gonna help with that, kid?" He made it sound as encouraging as he could. Meant it, even.
"Yeah, I already made the dough this morning!" And with that, the kid bounded down the steps two at the time, already tearing off on another tangent of whatever internal life he kept to himself.
Din Djarin hung his head, still hunkered at the top of the steps, and allowed himself one good, heavy, chest-stretching, and deeply world-weary sigh, having, he hoped, saved another kid from ending up like him. You're welcome, Jerrit. Hopefully you'll never have to find out why.
. . .
All that said, the flaky, pastry-wrapped meat and veggie pie the Mandalorian took upstairs to eat in unhelmeted privacy was absolutely delicious. If that kid went bounty, the culinary galaxy was going to miss out.
. . .
Din kept the window's tint just dark enough that even a good scan wouldn't pick up his bare, tingling face behind it. The foundling was out cold, stunned into deep restfulness by a double whammy of some hearty, rich-smelling broth, and happily chasing Dyrric around the common area in exchange for Din's wonderful hour and more of solitude spent upstairs in the bath and the private room. He sipped at a cup of clean, brisk water and watched the town's nighttime patterns begin.
Wasn't much to see, to be honest. There were a couple of shopfronts meant to facilitate trade between the residents, and they closed up well before the sun dipped past the leafy horizon. He watched frost patterns trail up from the bottom of the window, adding a pretty, glazing layer to the tint protecting his identity from the world, and here and there he saw bundled up figures emerging to visit a neighbor or put a protective tarp over some outside plant.
The cup of water drained, he picked up his helmet and was just about to put it back on when he noticed a knot of more furtive figures. Two from the central homestead that doubled as Mo Deera's town hall, a couple thicker figures that weren't Corellian, and a slender figure with what he unmistakably identified as a blast rifle slung over her shoulder. Fala Deera, the no-nonsense sister. He recognized how she moved, all business, and no trouble under her eye.
They slipped quietly through a town with windows now shut and tinted like his own, up and up to its dimly lit boundary, and then disappeared onto a faint jungle path that he'd first assumed was just a waste trail.
Hunters? No, he decided. Too many, too bulky a crew, just one rifle. The meat was coming from a rancher family on the eastern side of the town, and she had a pretty stable-looking herd.
Night scouts checking the boundaries? Again, too many, one rifle, tight cluster. He would have focused more on the route to and from the landing field, not up into tight, patchy jungle with no sign of other sentient life.
He frowned, unkempt hair managing to tickle at the back of his bare neck in a warning he didn't like. The slip of paranoia on Mo Deera's face - he'd been unexpected, but they weren't shocked by visitors, either.
The helmet rolled around his hands until the faceplate came back up to look at him. He glanced at the blackened glass that hid his eyes during most hours, then glanced at the foundling. Still knocked out. Good.
Because only one of them should be this stupid at any given time.
Din Djarin locked the helmet back over his face and quietly re-armed himself, slipping soundlessly out the door and sealing it behind him. The innkeeper's boy had done him another valuable service, jolting up and down the stairs the way he had. He knew every squeaky step already, every place the rust of the steely town could scrape a beskar boot, and he passed out of the inn and into the shadows between the buildings like a ghost.
Maybe the nighttime crew weren't professional trackers… but the Mandalorian was, and now he had fresh questions about this sleepy little town. Maybe the answers were a lot of nothing, and he'd be able to go back to that lovely, private room and nap with his bare face on a real pillow.
And maybe they weren't.
The Mandalorian didn't like surprises. Better to make sure. For his tiny clan's sake.