Oh look! New chapter on the same day! This one is very mando'a heavy, so I'll put the translations in the bottom for anyone. As usual, hit that kudos, bookmark, subscribe button! Leave a review if all possible, it's literally the only thing that helps keep me focused and writing the next chapter for you guys. This one has to be my all time favorite, though!
Din and Paz
The first time Leia meets Din Djarin, the two burst into the market place hollering and kicking. Fists and feet are kicking up dirt and being thrown at each other, while the Boy and the girl grunt with effort as they try to wrestle the other. Leia may have been the smaller of the two, but she feared backwards, and sank her teeth equally hard into Din's upper arm. Din howled, face turning an interesting shade of angry red as he punched her in the eye soundly. That was of course when they ended up knocking into a taller, sturdy built boy who turned his eyes downwards.
"You losing fights to aruetii, now too, Din?"
The boy in question, Din, had his arm wrestled up behind his shoulder blades with Leia perched on top of him. He's just about to reply back to the other, when Leia is the one to intervene. Leia is stubborn and hardheaded the same way a Ronto behaves in a Lishen shop.
Rough and straight forward to the point of being dangerously uncouth. And absolutely devoid of any grace and poise.
"Hey! When I'm done with this di'kut, I'll come over there and answer your jaro!" Leia shouted loudly, finger pointed at the other, eyes blazing and knuckles bloody. She is a sight to behold, sitting on the skinny prone boy and staring down the taller, broader, older boy without fear and full of righteous justified anger.
Her words only seem to make the other look at her in confusion, while he stared at the two still wrestling children. Din had managed to free his trapped arm, and was trying to wiggle out from underneath, but Leia clung on the same way recklessness clung to a proper Skywalker. From there the two combatants evolved to throwing elbows and pulling hair, kicking up dust and rolling beneath shoppers' feet as they wrestled.
By the time the older boy managed to wrestle in between the two, and having to resort to picking Leia up by her waist to hold her back, the locals were beginning to stop and stare. Several largely called for parents to be tracked down, while others paused with their goods in hand, watching.
The older boy turned warm amber colored eyes towards the younger. "Din, gar shuk meh kyrayc."
"I'm not dead, Paz. She has a really mean staab gaanynir." Din's hand swept across his mouth, smearing the blood from his lip as he sat up. His brown curls sat equally disheveled like his clothes.
Leia smiled proudly, her grin just shy of being that of a rancor's as she stared downwards. "Of course I do. K'atini!" She wiggles trying to wedge a sharp pointy elbow into a equally soft rib cage, trying to free herself. Paz only responded with a soft oof, arms tightening themselves around her.
"You speak mando'a." Din spat into the dirt, looking up at the two, before hosting himself upwards.
"Of course I do." The word di'kut not being said vocally, but was just as implied. Leia's brown hair had come out from it's pigtails and now fell freely in front of her face. "My bavodu'e taught me."
"If I let you go, are you going to pick anymore akaanir with Din or me?" Paz questioned, jostling the girl once to gain her attention. It was starting to look like the girl was done fighting, but he had to be sure before he released the tiny hellion.
"Yeah yeah yeah. I'm done. And it wasn't fighting," Leia shrugged helplessly. "It was bonding."
"Of course it was. You enjoy fighting entirely too much, dala'ika" Din sighed, flopping backwards bonelessly as Paz released Leia.
"Oh I know." Leia settled her hands on her hips, eyes studying the boy in the dirt before her. Without a word, she grabbed his hand and tugged him upwards, eyes smiling in a way that spoke of great happiness and punched him once more in the shoulder. Din sighed, letting himself get tugged along seemed the route with the lesser injuries. Paz followed along behind the two.
She led them away from the center of the village, towards the old ship ruins on the edge of town. All the while leading them along a well hidden path, Leia excitedly talked about her bavodu'e and all the things she had learned. Like how they wore armour and taught her to fight, and how they had taught her mando'a and her missing jetii ba'vodu, who they would one day find.
~*THE LITTLEST GENERAL*~
The day Leia comes home from school, sporting bloody knuckles and blossoming black eye, is also the day she makes her first real best friend. A friend she won't have to leave in a few weeks when they decide to travel once more. Who doesn't see Leia as a strange forcefully strong girl who hits people entirely too much as a way to show her affection. The young girl has a large gap toothed smile, proudly dragging a skinny boy with curly brown hair roughly her age along beside her. Behind the two of them, trailed a slightly bigger and older boy.
She stormed up through the vast hallways of their ship, missing the awed hush that befalls her two 'friends'. Paz and Din had heard stories about Kelabe warships, but had never thought they might one day see one for themselves. The smaller one, Din is nursed equally red knuckles and a swelling bloody lip. While the older doesn't have any visible injuries, just a laughing smile on his lips and dust on his clothes.
"Jesse! Kix! Rex!" The young girl hollered loudly, her words having a strange familiar lilt to her basic the other two slightly recognized.
Who was this strange forceful female who showed her affection the same way their older aliit did?
Her bavodu'e were eventually found in what was now the mess hall. They all shared the same ruddy skin coloring that Din's and Paz's aliit had. The three move with a steadiness that the two boys have only seen in people who have worn armour all their lives and are uncomfortable without it.
One of them is nursing a cup of caf. Another is strip cleaning a rifle with precise and quick movements that filled Paz with envy. The third one looked up from a stack of flimsies, a look Din was all but familiar with. It was the look of an exasperated parent, knowing what had happened earlier but waiting to hear their Foundling's side of things.
The one who was cleaning the rifle, set the disassembled weapon down, and introduced himself as Jesse. He quickly took in the state of Leia's unruly hair, the bruised knuckles, the torn clothing, and the dust covered face of his young charge. Jesse is prouder then puffed up mamma Numa, cowing proudly at the state of her bruised knuckles.
Kix is the next one to approach, settling his cup down and beginning to take stock of the numerous cuts decorating the young girl. He hissed sympathetically about the black eye that is framing her lovely brown eye, as he grabs a bag of frozen veg from the freezer unit. The two are all but familiar with Leia coming home after her particular 'bonding' experiences. She tended to be more dejected and mopey, this proud little girl dragging friends home is certainly new for them.
Rex is neither proud nor sympathetic in the very least. He has the look of a man who had been in charge of General Skywalker and both Shenanigans with Fives and Echo. It is a very similar look to that General Kenobi wore, more often than naught when asking if Skywalker had really gone and done that thing he told him not to do. Rex feels many things, looking across the room at a youngling who brought two others home after soundly brawling with at least one of them. One of those feelings is the very strong urge to apologize to Cody about General Kenobi looking like a man who never got any sleep. If raising Leia was any thing like how General Skywalker was at this age, Rex can fully sympathize with the man.
"Leia, who are your friends?" The former captain asked.
Leia; who looks more like a proud Lothcat that had caught a tooka successfully for the first time, grinned even wider. Which also managed to show off the gap toothed smile and blood coating some of her teeth. "These are my friends, ba'vodu. Din and Paz. We met in the marketplace."
Din smiled more shyly, hand reaching up to wave at the Clones. Leia still had one hand captured in her's. "Hi."
"You didn't fight them did you?" Rex resisted the urge to wrangle his slightly feral child out of sight and ground her. For all the good it would do them.
"Be glad, she's making friends, vod." Kix's voice chided him, hands tilted leia's head this way and that as he examined the blackening bruise under the light.
"A little more roughly then a normal kid might've but ya know; it's progress." There was Jesse, agreeing with Kix.
Sometimes, Rex wondered if he was the rational one out of the four. "You two are di'kuts. How we haven't managed to screw her up worse, I will never know."
"Hey! Did you know; Paz and Din speak Mando'a too! Maybe they know more of your vod!"
"Oh, I'm sure that Paz and Din speak it because of other reasons, Leia'ika." Kix attempted to derail Leia before she began to ask questions that would quickly turn things uncomfortable.
"Kix is right, ad. Not everyone who speaks mando'a is like us." Jesse chimed in, having settled back to replacing his rifle back together.
"We're Mando'ade. Our aliit live nearby." Din piped up, these strange people becoming all the more stranger. "Our buir likes us to be home soon, Leia. We gotta go."
Leia's face fell, before she pulled Din closer. She wrangled the skinnier boy into a hug, before reaching out and pulling Paz into one as well. "I'll see you two again, right?"
"Maybe. We have to talk to our buir about letting you come visit, on account of you being an aruetii but meet us next to the school building around noon, yeah?"
~*THE LITTLEST GENERAL*~
Din looked at his older brother before glancing backwards at his new friend. He never met a girl quite like Leia. The other Foundlings tended to play tag or hide and hunt. Leia went after him the way a rancor goes after lunch. Fully focused and with a lot of muscle.
It wasn't exactly bad, Din thought on his way home to the Covert that night. Leia was a force to be reckoned with, certainly. But the punching and the kicking that was their initial meeting felt almost right. She hadn't held back, he grinned, gingerly touching his blackened eye. Underneath all of that rash brilliant head of hers, was something that Din felt connected to. She breathed that fight like she had simply been greeting him and it felt….comfortable. Leia had fought him without a grudge and didn't hold back and Din he gave that back in spades. And afterwards, the aruetii girl grinned and called him her friend. She told them all sorts of things from her travels. Her words easily switched between basic and mando'a with a swiftness that the two brothers hadn't heard in a while.
But the stories! Leia told good stories. She told them about her blood father, who had been a General and her aunt who had fought at the Siege with her Uncles. How they had taken her in and raised her while planet hopping. Din listened with a wide-eyed eagerness he hadn't felt in years. Paz was his equally silent shadow like always, but even the older boy was enticed by the wild girl's tales.
The small boy paused outside their doorway, looking up at the stars one final time before following his brother inside and to face their parents. The stars silently shone miles and miles above his head, telling the boy all the things they held in the galaxy. They whispered secrets that Leia had decided they were trust-worthy to know off. And Din paused, thinking off the day and how wildly different it could have gone, if only he hadn't gotten into a fight with a small brown haired girl who had decided that punching him was as good as saying 'hello'.
Translations:
Aruetii- outsider
Di'kut- idiot
Jaro- death wish
Gar shuk meh kyrayc- literally; you're no use dead.
Staab gaanymir- right punch, to- basically right hook.
K'atini- suck it up OR it's only pain
Mando'a- Mandalorian language
Bavodu'e- plural for aunt/uncle.
Dala-woman. 'Ika- little. Basically little girl or woman.
Jetii-Jedi
Aliit-family
Vod-brother
Mando'ade-children of Mandalore
Buir- father/mother. Basically parent.