Mand'oa translations at the end of the chapter.
Moff Gideon watched his grysk hunter stalk towards the lone Mandalorian.
She was certainly a fighter, he observed, leaning heavier against the railing that ringed the sandy pit below. The arena was dusty and lit only by the dull glow of some luminescent stones set into the shallow domed ceiling. There was only one entrance or exit, and, as she had no doubt ascertained already, it was the one currently sealed beneath the sand she stood on.
Gideon inhaled deeply and leaned deeper into the prop of his arms, carefully avoiding the invisible shock-barrier that separated the elevated platform he stood on from the arena. He looked closer at the Mandalorian.
Despite the injuries she had sustained during the raid on Nevarro's Mandalorian covert and the poor treatment she had no doubt received during the time in between now and then, she had her feet squared confidently, her blaster gripped tight in one hand, her helmet trained directly on her attacker. No doubt her mind was spinning with ways to escape her unfortunate predicament.
Gideon let a wan smile steal across his face. She would find no options that he did not intend for her to find in this little controlled experiment of his.
"Make the first move, Mandalorian," Gideon murmured after watching the grysk continue to creep forward, slowly—so very slowly. He forced himself to ignore the rising impatience in his chest. This grysk, Kuban-lan-dul, was a fool. He was no grysk of legend—he was an orphaned beast with no knowledge of his true potential or of the deadly and infamous race of which he was inescapably a part of. A failure. A shadow of what was once great, that pulsing lifeblood of legends.
The smile slipped from Gideon's face and morphed into a snarl of disgust.
It seemed there was a rising amount of ignorance tramping throughout the galaxy these days, perpetuated by arrogant, oblivious rogues like Din Djarin or "the Client," as the former Imperial official had so liked to be known as. No one, Gideon thought as his hands tightened painfully on the railing, understood how dangerous this chaos they craved really was.
Gideon was spared further anger by the sharp retort of blaster-fire. He refocused his eyes to the arena and was immediately pleased to see that the Mandalorian, apparently just as nauseated by the dramatic approach of her attacker as Gideon was, had let off a shot—and hit the grysk directly over the heart.
Apparently, she had not known that his reptile-like skin was virtually impervious to the standard blaster-shot, however, and with a guttural roar, Kuban-lan-dul shot forward, barreling toward her on all four legs.
Ignorance was, indeed, a grave mistake.
Gideon watched as the young Mandalorian dropped to one knee at the last possible second and procured a shiv, seemingly from thin air. She held it at a firm angle as the grysk collided with her, neatly dislodging her from her kneeled position and launching them both to the ground in a spray of sand. Gideon heard the grysk emit something between a growl and a yelp, and his frown deepened.
Weak.
Both of them were weak.
The grysk, of course, recovered faster than the Mandalorian did, and he swung his left arm towards his rising opponent's face with bone-crushing force. He made contact, and the Mandalorian's head snapped back and to the right. Gideon could not hear her cry out in pain, but he was certain she did—if she was still conscious enough to do so.
She wasn't unconscious—though likely severely concussed—and before the grysk could overcome his arrogant bloodlust to begin his traditional volley of final blows, she had lifted the upper half of her body enough to fire her blaster again, once, twice, directly at the grysk's face.
Gideon pulled his hands away from the rail and clasped them behind his back.
This was better, if more desperate.
Kuban-lan-dul roared in fury more than pain at the shots and, with his eyes presumably screwed shut, blindly launched himself at the Mandalorian again. She was more than prepared this time, however, and as he came within range she ducked under his massive arm—easily as large as her entire torso—and jabbed her shiv savagely into his chest, to the right of his armpit. She must have penetrated his hide, too, because the grysk recoiled immediately, and his roar rose in pitch.
Gideon scoffed at the display.
The beast was blinded before the blaster bolts to his eyes—blinded by a thirst for violence that left no room for logic or the necessary calculation of close combat. If he had been the one deigning to sully his hands with this Mandalorian's blood, she would be dead several times over by now.
But the grysk—even if the Moff hardly considered Kuban-lan-dul a proper member of species—were physically superior if not mentally. The grysk's minor injury only goaded him forward, an angry bull with a single victim.
Kuban-lan-dul had latched both fists around the Mandalorian's wrists, where the vambrace Gideon himself had removed before placing her in the arena should have been, and wrenched her forward, toward him. Her blaster fell uselessly from her hand, and the shiv she had been wielding in the other one was little more than a toothpick in the face of the new attack.
Though he could have easily pulverized the bones in her arms with the secure grip he had, the grysk quickly decided to forego such a swift ending to his duel, and he wrenched the Mandalorian to the side viciously, tossing her form to the sand as if she weighed little more than a sack of grain.
As he began his slow advance toward her, pulling his own sleek blade from its sheath, Gideon watched as the Mandalorian put barely any effort into trying to push herself into even a sitting position.
She was through before she had ever begun this fight, Gideon thought with disgust. Apparently, the grysk and his weak Mandalorian "opponent" were equally matched in their status as failures in their membership of supposed warrior races.
Gideon raised an outstretched hand.
"Stop!"
He could tell Kuban-lan-dul had heard him by the briefest of hitches in his stride, but the crazed beast did not stop moving toward his fallen prey.
Gideon scowled and shouted louder, though he laced steel through his tone as well as volume.
"Stop, Kuban-lan-dul, or your life is as good as hers."
This time, the grysk did stop, and if the Moff had been anything close to a timid man, he would have immediately dropped his gaze as Kuban-lan-dul locked his beady, deep-set eyes upon his employer. There was nothing but hatred and rage there, dark and boiling and unrestrained.
After a short showdown of gazes, the grysk finally sheathed his weapon and stepped away. Gideon turned and left the room, headed to the tunnels that would take him to the arena.
He was not finished with the Mandalorian so quickly.
This was only the beginning.
"I assume," Gideon said icily. "That you know what this is?"
The female Mandalorian sat on her knees in front of him, hands and feet bound, shiv and blaster removed and in the possession of Kuban-lan-dul. Her helmet was angled toward the sand, but he knew she could tell by the cold illumination of the darksaber on the dusky sand in front of her what he held.
Gideon swung it experimentally in the air directly before her helmet, let it drag through the sand and fuse the grains of rock and dust into a perversion of glass. When he was certain she had seen it, he disengaged the blade and tucked it back onto his belt. The quick tilt of her helmet that indicated she had seen where he had stored the saber did not escape the Moff's notice.
Gideon straightened and clasped his hands once more behind him. He looked at the dented Beskar helmet—grimed and obviously quite old. He noted the streaks of blood in the sand beneath her knees, the way she trembled as she unwillingly kneeled before the one who had spared her life—from the dishonor of a death at the hands of a mere brute, at least.
"Tell me, Mandalorian…what do your people call you?"
The Mandalorian did not answer him right away, but Gideon saw how her fist curled tightly into itself. After a pause that had begun to sour on the Moff already, she looked up sharply, T-visor impenetrable as she spoke.
"Mando'ad."
Gideon raised his eyebrows in mock surprise and peered directly into the place he inferred her eyes might be.
"Come now. Surely you are more than the sum of your creed. What is your name?"
Her response came much quicker this time.
"Ni vaabir not dinuir o'r at aruetiise guuror gar. Slanar at dar'yaim," she hissed.
Gideon scoffed and leaned down so that he was at eye-level with her. He kept his voice even and low as he responded.
"Vaabir not mirdir gar joha arane gar oyay. Ni cuy' nayc besom."
He was pleased to see her react to his words, recoiling as if on instinct, the rage that bubbled up inside her practically visible despite the Beskar.
"Now," Gideon said after straightening up again. "I want to know—why did you stay behind when your Covert was raided?"
The Mandalorian stared down at the ground, silent once more. Gideon felt his impatience uncoil like a whip in his chest, sharp and fast.
"Very well," he said, snapping around to look at Kuban-lan-dul, who was lounging some feet away, no doubt sulking. Gideon jerked his head towards the Mandalorian.
"The helmet. Remove it."
The grysk, with raw anger simmering in his eyes, stepped forward obediently, and Gideon turned to the Mandalorian, the ghost of a smile on his lips.
"I have heard, of course, that your particular breed of Mandalorians is quite…dedicated to your peculiar sense of honor."
He noted with satisfaction that, as Kuban-lan-dul approached, the Mandalorian's chest began to rise and fall more rapidly, and she worked her hands futilely against the chains that bound them up until the very moment Kuban-lan-dul's grasp wrapped around her head, obscuring her view of all but his skin.
Gideon held up a hand to pause Kuban-lan-dul, and then he stepped around so the Mandalorian could see him in her peripheral vision.
"You will not be the first nor the last Mandalorian whose helmet I remove, my dear. And if you wish for a warrior's death following our interrogation, I would advise you to answer me honestly. It would be unpleasant to continue your miserable life with no past, no creed, and no future, would it not?"
With those words and the final flash of a smile her way, Gideon nodded, and the grysk lifted the helmet off the Mandalorian's head.
To his surprise—the first of this particular evening—he found that the girl underneath was just that. A girl. She couldn't have that far out of adolescence, and while she appeared to be human at first glance, her dark hair and skin were in sharp contrast to the unnatural golden hue of her eyes. She was no warrior, though the pure hatred radiating from her gaze was, perhaps, more befitting of a warrior than anything she had displayed yet.
Gideon sighed and gestured for the grysk to retreat. Kuban-lan-dul did so, but not before letting out a low hiss in her direction and casting the prized helmet at her feet—the addition of insult to injury.
"I trust I have your attention now," Gideon asked, ignoring the grysk's temper tantrum.
The girl dropped her gaze to the sand and swayed slightly. The Moff could now see the patchwork of dark bruises blooming across her face, the creeping despondency in her posture, and he was reminded once more of just how effective this method was to break a Mandalorian's spirit—to strip away all that they were and they strove to live by. She was nothing but a shell now. But perhaps he could garner what he needed from her yet.
"What do you want to know?"
Gideon smiled again, though he was not so foolish as to assume she would offer up anything she deemed important even now.
"Excellent. I will repeat my earlier question: why did you stay behind?"
She did not look up, merely spoke again in an accent that was strange and exotic to his ears, clear without the interference of her helmet's modulator.
"For the Foundlings."
"And how long has it been since you yourself were a Foundling?"
She did look up at that, and the Moff was pleased to see that her spirit was not completely shattered yet.
"Long enough."
Gideon regarded her, holding her gaze steadily.
"And what do you know of the bounty hunter Din Djarin?"
The girl's eyes dropped too quickly for Gideon to believe she knew nothing of him. He reached forward despite his repulsion at such contact and forcibly lifted her face toward him.
"What do you know," he repeated slowly. "Of the Mandalorian Din Djarin?"
She let the silence continue for another few seconds—seconds in which the Moff seriously debated snapping her thin neck then and there—before spitting out her reply.
"He is a coward. Reckless. He is a danger to our people and a disgrace to our Creed—he has soiled our name by working with men such as you."
Gideon dropped her chin and laughed.
"Such a strong reaction from one so young and inexperienced. And such an ignorant one."
Gideon smirked, stepping away from her and once more gesturing for Kuban-lan-dul to approach them.
"And such harsh words for one who was a member of the people you once knew as your own."
He saw her flinch at that, and he decided this discussion was over for tonight. He would have plenty of time to study how she reacted to the loss of her creed in captivity—despite how new it was to her, she obviously held it in high regard. She would be a fascinating case study, a glimpse into the minds of the Mandalorians—particularly, it seemed, of those who knew nothing else in life. What he gleaned from her would be valuable in moving forward with his plans.
As he walked away from Kuban-lan-dul, whom he had instructed to imprison the girl, he heard her call out, her voice trembling, weak, broken.
"You will never be the Manda'lor," she shouted. "The darksaber alone does not make you ruler, and even if it did, we—the Mandalorians would never follow a coward like you!"
Gideon stopped, turned around, let a smile spread across his face. She spoke like the immature child she was—perhaps it was beneficial that he had stripped her of the right to wear the armor and helmet she so obviously was not qualified to own.
"You mistake my intentions, young one. I do not intend to rule your pathetic remnant of short-sighted warriors. It would be a waste of time and energy. I intend to remake them."
With those final words, he turned on his heel and strode away.
He could feel the dar'manda watching him as he left, and he hoped she would remember his words during her long stay in this planet's dungeons—that she would consider their meaning until he returned to tie up the loose ends of which she was a part. It would make things…more interesting.
Gideon glanced at the sky as he exited the Imperial amphitheater, noting the position of the triad of moons.
He could not waste anymore time thinking of her at the moment, he surmised.
He had a meeting to attend.
Mando'a Translations (mostly from a website called lingojam, so please be forgiving XD)
Ni vaabir not dinuir o'r at aruetiise guuror gar. Slanar at dar'yaim: I do not surrender to outsiders like you. Go to ****.
Vaabir not mirdir gar joha arane gar oyay. Ni cuy' nayc besom: Do not think your language guards your life. I am no uncultured fool (rough translations).
Dar'manda: one who was but no longer is a Mandalorian and who has lost his creed, honor, and identity.
A/N: Hello again! Long time, no see. I'll admit that this chapter is a bit rough (it's been a while, OK? ;) and, quite possibly, makes little sense given what's been happening in the last few chapters. However, I promise you that some things you've seen here-regarding Gideon and his plans and mental state and such-SHOULD make much more sense moving forward. Not to mention, there will be a chapter coming up at some point that details this little "meeting" he's having. Juicy plot stuff, right there...I hope. XD
Anyway, please tell me what you thought, thank you for reading, I'll try to be more timely with chapters in the future, and please stay safe and healthy out there!
-Roanoke
(Ephesians 6:12)