Din slipped back into the village with his usual trained silence. Once he felt certain that he was well out of sight of any of Voontu's spies, he caught himself doing the thing where he was absolutely not running in a worried frenzy towards Mo Deera's home and town hall, but was instead tromping with a controlled, militant steadiness. Quickly, to be sure. His shoulders were squared back and his helmet was held high in what Greef Karga had once merrily described to him as 'the murder strut.'

It was, yes. Sure as hell the Mandalorian was gonna kill someone before all this was over. But first, Fala Deera had proven to him that she had a right to know what was about to go down. Further, an idea was starting to come together, and it required the help she'd offered. It was a hurried plan, not as clean as he would like, and it had variables he couldn't completely account for, but now he was on a fixed schedule.

Din didn't like to work in a crunch, but he had to admit it had a way of bringing his mind into crystalline focus. He nodded to Dyrric, standing on the porch of the inn with the strange foundling holding his hand, his own thoughts still full of fragments of possible plans. He didn't have time to catch the look of worry on the young boy's face, nor the way their heads turned to watch him go by.

There was a man doing his best to not look like a guard not far from the Deera home. He straightened up in a hurry as the Mandalorian approached, his mouth opening to ask the obvious, but the way Din was marching spoke for him. The mouth snapped shut again and the human went to get the door ahead of the Mandalorian's arrival. "Fala!"

He saw the shadowed outline of her rising from a chair inside the home, making it inside before Mo came all the way down the staircase. He kept his focus on Fala. "It's a hit. Voontu wants to corrupt and consolidate power within his family."

"When?"

"Tomorrow."

Fala swore, her hands balling onto her hips. She looked at her sister, their faces paling at the implications an empowered, bloodied Hutt would have for their village.

"He's decided to trust me. I know the layout now, I've got all the choke points and guard patrols mapped." He waited for Fala's attention to come back to him and began to speak quickly. "Voontu is completely focused on the the idea of building a new legacy for himself. You were right, he escalated his plans the moment I came on board. But it's also narrowed his view, and the guards are thrown off by their boss's obsession. If we want to dig him out, this is the time to do it."

Doubt darkened Fala's face despite his efforts to keep her focus on him.

"I'm not going to take the hit, obviously. But if we don't clear the Hutt out while we've got the opportunity, sooner or later, and probably sooner, someone else will take my place."

Mo seemed to feed on her sister's worry. "If whatever you have in mind doesn't work-"

"Then Witchmoat is doomed." The Mandalorian said it in as cold and flat a voice as he could manage, keeping their eyes on him, forcing them to stay centered. "But it was heading for doomed anyway. Right now, we can still fight."

Fala jutted her chin at him, convinced. "What's your plan? Finally got one?"

"I'm supposed to be on site early, finalizing where I'm going to take my shot. Voontu's brother is arriving in the later morning. If this were a real job for me, I wouldn't move until sometime afternoon at the earliest. I'd want him feeling safe. The longer he, and whatever guards or staff he has, gets to relax and look at Voontu's pretty dancer, the cleaner my shot would be. That's exactly how I'm going to play the set-up. Now. That's when I need a distraction. Mid to late afternoon. Fala, you, your crew. You attack the fortress."

Mo jerked forward, horrified. "What?"

Din lifted an armored hand, keeping it close to him so it didn't seem like he was trying to condescend to her. It seemed to work. Fala laid a hand on her sister's forearm, still listening to him talk. "It's a risky play, but it'll set off a reaction inside the fortress. Chaos can be useful. Your strike doesn't have to succeed, keep yourselves alive. All I need is a lot of loud noise, enough to pull focus to the front gates. That'll give me room to move. While everyone's busy, I'll grab Fadilan and get to the comms room."

"That's still a firefight." Fala didn't sound frightened. Tactically calm. Thinking through the angles. That was good. He could work with that. "Even if the goal isn't to take over the fortress, that's a lot of blaster fire in the air."

He couldn't help sounding grimly pleased at the mental picture. "Lady, at this point, I'm hoping for it. I assure you, I'll be adding plenty of my own inside. Not every guard's going to make it to defense positions, and since what I actually did, instead of pick out a snipe nest, is found where I can block off multiple control points, you're going to get the fun of personally taking out at least some of the guys shaking down your town."

"That's fun?" asked Mo, still looking a little horrified.

Fala's expression suggested that yes, yes it could be. "Fadilan's non-combat. He's no coward, but he knows when he's underfoot. He'll probably take cover."

"Yeah. He's got a room not too far from the comm. Saw it on my tour today." He grinned inside his helmet. "And his door's not blast-reinforced."

Hope began to creep onto Fala Deera's face. "Once you're in the comms, what's your play?"

"The Republic's got an emergency channel operating throughout a lot of territory. Supposed to be for internal comms only." He didn't explain that he knew this for deeply illegal reasons, the most recent one involving a prison break. "And they re-established Echo Base as a major checkpoint a couple years back. It's manned at all times. They'll have an emergency X-Wing squad on deck. It'll get here fast."

Fala grimaced. "All this would have been a lot easier if they'd spread out patrols from there. Seen us flailing out here on our own."

Din didn't say anything to that. Wasn't anything to say. Sometimes people needed to get some rightful bitterness out of their system. That the Republic was still half a mess, in his opinion, wasn't a useful defense. That thousands of pilots had been lost fighting Imps, that the next era of cadets were being scraped from still-exhausted worlds, that a lot of bases were operating with skeleton crews just so that the Republic could say they were there. That there were so many places where people like him were slipping through the net, and probably would for the next couple of decades. The times after a war were always tough. He understood. It didn't make it easier on the people. Had to let off steam however you could.

Fala shook off her own irritation. "They're going to pitch a fit if you cut into their line."

"That's what I'm going for. Then all you have to do is hold on until they get here."

She thought his plan through for a while. No doubt she saw the same flaws he knew about. The same variables. If the fortress simply went into lockdown instead of reacting to the strike, if Fadilan wasn't accessible, if Voontu changed any part of the schedule beforehand. If the Republic peacekeepers didn't come. If, if, if.

The wrong 'if' could kill a guy. Din didn't focus on it too much. You did what you could with what you had. The rest, well. Improvisation was a core skill.

Mo spoke up, almost startling him. She'd been eerily silent since her sister had decided she was all the way in. "We've got fuel for you. Pulled it out of a few volunteered vap-haulers, and if this works, we'll get plenty to replace our stores once we start reclaiming the fortress. Can get you and your child off world before the Republic notices you're involved."

Din went quiet again, wondering how to take that, wondering why it felt acutely aware.

She smiled, softening the incisive effect. "Look. You're riding a pre-Imperial gunship. I saw a few on Corellia when I was a kid. Very few. They were all kitted with what I'd politely call aftermarket parts. And you're a Mandalorian who picked our village to land in. You're not looking for attention."

"It's not what you think."

She shook her head. "Doesn't matter what I think, doesn't matter what it actually is. For what it's worth, I believe you. My point is, Fala told me you went out of your way to help us. We didn't ask you to. You found out on your own. Tomorrow we find out if it all works out. If it does, the least we can do is what you came for, and see you off as the private traveler you showed up as. We owe our visitors that much hospitality."

He let that sit for a moment, debating with himself on if he should say anything. "Not quite accurate."

She arched an eyebrow at him.

"Dyrric asked me to help. I did find out about Voontu on my own, but when Dyrric found out that I had, well. Couldn't turn the kid down."

A smile crept onto Mo Deera's face, a small and sad one. He hated the sight of it, hated the way it tugged and hurt.

He didn't need to know. It didn't matter. There was no useful reason to ask the question. It came out of his mouth anyway. "What happened to his mother?"

"Same thing that happened to a lot of people during the war."

"She was a chef, wasn't she? On Corellia."

Reluctance crept into her voice, tuning it low. Mo looked away as she answered. "Amari and Jerrit were operating a place in Coronet City, not far from the shipyards. Had for years, since before they were married. They took care of a lot of people coming to tour the latest Star Destroyer or whatever major project was going on."

"Big names."

"Yeah. And staff are invisible to the elite. I'm sure you know how it is. Amari passed on some things she overheard to an old friend. She got away with it for a while, too. ISB finally got wind of where the leak was, came in for a private dinner one night. They wouldn't buy the cover story, that it was just talk between friends. She knew her friend was a Rebel. They had proof. And his corpse." Mo still didn't look at the Mandalorian. "Jerrit was passed over, along with Dyrric. She'd kept them out of the loop on purpose, and that gambit held. At least that much. He signed on to our colony project the week he found her name on a list the Rebels uncovered when they retook our planet."

He guessed. It wasn't a difficult one. "Prison deaths."

His answer was a slow nod. She still didn't look at him. Din let the silence linger, a way of honoring the past. The ones that had gone before. Deep respect overtook him. When faced with a choice, Jerrit's wife had done what she knew was the right thing, and kept her family, her child safe doing it.

Mandalorians, the clan that raised him, scattered throughout the galaxy all over again. Having done the right thing, knowing full well what it could cost. It was the Way.

He buried the growl, the emotions it was trying to reveal. "This is going to work," he said instead. "I promise."

Mo Deera lifted her head at last, looking at him for a while in that same contemplative silence. Finally she spoke, loaded with the weight of some personal verdict. "I believe you."

. . .

Dyrric waited until the Mandalorian had gone upstairs to rest before he really got to thinking. The child was still patting around the common room, filled to the brim with noisy toddler energy because he'd finally gotten a couple of hours of attention from the armored man. Dyrric supposed 'father and son' was actually the right term for their relationship, but the awkward standoffishness the Mandalorian kept trying to show was confusing the issue.

Not for the kid, at least. He was blatting in delight, but at least he was also messily doing what the older boy had asked and was pulling the (unbreakable, thankfully) wooden trays from some of the tables over to the cleaning racks. Dyrric wished the kid could actually speak. He wanted someone to talk to right now, but nobody else, and especially not an adult, was going to listen to him. Or understand.

Mostly they'd just be mad that he had been eavesdropping on the big discussion at the Deera home. He couldn't believe it! The Mandalorian was really going to do it, get rid of the bad guys!

"I just want to help," Dyrric said to the child, grimacing at how limp it sounded aloud. "I know I'm just a kid, but…" Oh, that was worse. "I sort of helped start this, you know? I feel like I have some responsibility here."

There. That was a big kid word. Responsibility. It was close to how he felt, too, excited and scared and as if part of this was on him, somehow. A little better. The green kid blinked up at him with those huge, limpid eyes, his ears wiggling. He'd stopped running around the room when Dyrric talked. Maybe he couldn't talk back, but at least he seemed like a good listener. Dyrric smiled down into those eyes, feeling self-conscious.

Dyrric then frowned a moment later, still thinking. "They need to set up a distraction to help your… the Mandalorian. Just a lot of noise, he said. Nobody's supposed to get hurt except the bad guys, right?"

One broad ear lifted higher than the other, a sort of curious shrug.

"And what's noisier than a screaming kid? Plus it'll pull attention off Fala Deera. Just maybe add a few more minutes for them to hold off the Hutt's goons." Dyrric perked up, thinking about what it would look like, a hero doing his part to help the resistance.

And not at all about his odds of getting shot up instantly.

The broad ear lowered, and then they both went back. A look of worry creased the soft green features. The child didn't think in full words, but he did think in concepts, and while violence wasn't a huge part of these thoughts, his expression suggested he was more than a little concerned about Dyrric's add-on plan.

Dyrric, staring off into space, didn't catch the child's look of worry and warning at all. "Yeah… All I gotta do is be careful. I don't want anyone to get hurt."

The child pawed at his leg, trying to get his attention. Dyrric, still lost in his showdown fantasy, reached down and took his little hand in his. "It'll be fine. You just stay here and we'll bring your dad back safe and the Hutt'll be gone, and it'll be the best day ever."