Something has been brewing in Cobb Vanth's mind for a long time. Splitting, more like. He knows that it's better for him to remain at the palace throughout the entirety of his treatment, but, at the same time, he would much rather pack his things and hit the road back to Freetown. No man is fond of being trapped, but especially not one of his background.
There are two types of slaves on Tatooine: the ones that are timid and quiet, and the ones that are strong and angry. Cobb had always thought himself a mix between the two, but now- now, he's just angry.
No one asked him if he felt up to going to this week's therapy meeting. No one warned him of what they'd ask of him.
Dr. Vesset, who's been monitoring his recovery, notes that the most recent scan has hardly changed from the last. The scar tissue marring the inside of his head has slowed its healing, stopped, almost. Dr. Bross suggests that it won't ever heal- that it's permanent brain damage. The idea of it makes his teeth grind together; everything he's survived, and it's come down to this?
"Is there nothin' else they can do?" He very nearly snarls, frustrated and impatient and all kinds of tired.
There's a flicker of emotion- of doubt, of uncertainty- in Bross's face before she glances at Vesset. A new wave of rage crashes over him at the realization that they haven't ever really known what they were doing.
"If you've got somethin' to say, it'd be mighty kind of you to say it to my face." Cobb says lowly.
He sees Vesset nod out of the corner of his eye.
Bross clears her throat to compose herself. "There is one last thing we would like to try." She motions to Dr. Vesset. "Please administer your medicine to the Marshal."
Not a question.
An order.
And when the man steps forward to comply with it, he procures a kriffing hypo.
Now, Cobb's no fool. He's heard of the fancy elixirs that the galaxy's wealthier cities use to put down their sick. Mercy poison, so to speak. Puts the slow-dying out of their misery. He hadn't thought there'd be any on this sand-hole, but Tatooine's Daimyos have always had an immense money cache hidden away somewhere. Cobb had just thought that he'd known Boba Fett better than this. Who spends thousands of credits building someone a new arm and then turns around and euthanizes them?
And here Cobb had thought they'd become something like friends.
The doctors don't notice his reaction, not fast enough. Vesset comes forth, preparing the syringe for injection, and Cobb side-eyes him as the world closes in around them. No way he lets them do this to him. This isn't how he goes out.
He sees red as he rises up and backhands Dr. Vesset across his face with metal knuckles.
The PT flies across the room.
Behind him, Drash- still bruised and scabbed from his last outburst- leaps onto his back and latches onto his shoulders. Nails dig deep into his flesh when he tries to shake her off, and he snarls as he reaches over his shoulder to grab the back of her shirt. His modified arm tears her off with less resistance than his body had braced for.
She hits the ground hard at his feet, her small frame jolting at the impact. Fear flashes across her face, but Cobb's too far gone to see it.
He's upon her in no time at all, pinning her down with his left arm, throwing punches into her face with his right. He doesn't really know how to stop; he can't, not with Bross screaming across the table, with Vesset shaking himself as he staggers back to his feet.
Cobb thinks he might be screaming, too.
Blood splatters across his arms, neck, and face. Drash stops struggling, head misshapen almost beyond recognition. His hands are too red for him to know which is flesh and which isn't.
Words rip from his throat, but he can't hear them over the sound of Bross's distressed shrieks. He throws himself at her because she just won't. shut. up. He needs her to stop, he needs a moment of silence to think, to-
Her neck is frail beneath his hands, and her voice cuts out as soon as he's laid them upon her.
Something stabs into his arm before he can turn away from the broken body slumped in Bross's chair, and he whips around with a howl. He jams the backs of Reeve Vesset's knees into the table and knocks his lights out with a single swing.
His vision spins, and Cobb collapses backward into the corner of the room behind Bross. Function begins to return to him as he slides down the wall. His hands slip off of everything they catch on, painting red trails across pristine sandstone. Something wet drips into one of his eyes, and trying to wipe it away smears it down his cheek.
Cobb holds his hand out so he can get a good look at it.
Blood.
Everywhere.
The hypo's sticking out of his arm. And he's…not dead.
.
When Boba Fett grows concerned and finally comes to see the hold-up himself, he finds Cobb sitting in a pool of blood, bodies strewn across the room.
The Lars homestead had always been a family farm, passed down generation to generation. Until the Empire burned it and killed the last of the bloodline, that is.
Cobb Vanth had only met the final man of the lineage, and only once. It hadn't been quite the friendly encounter. Owen had stood in his doorway and fingered a hidden rifle during the entire conversation, stubbornly overprotective- aggressively so- of the blond-haired boy at his wife's hip. Cobb had left half-expecting to get shot down from behind.
Needless to say, he isn't really sure how to feel about being the first man to live in the home since its recent restoration.
Even after he's got himself settled in, Cobb thinks he can smell the ashes mixed into the sandy pourstone walls. Hell, maybe he can.
It's then that he knows his exile will be long.
Contrary to when he first woke up after the accident, Cobb doesn't sleep much. The crime scene is practically tattooed to the inside of his eyelids. The bodies, the blood. The expression on Fett's face as he stepped into the room and took it all in- the shock, the grief, the accusation.
Cobb doesn't try to understand the point of his punishment being relegated.
A life for a life?
He'd taken three.
And he walks still, only his arm taken for compensation. They should've taken more from him. He should have made them take more from him. But every man is a little bit selfish, he thinks, when Din Djarin's voice bounces around his head.
Should've taken more, should've taken more, should have taken-
"No," says the Mandalorian. "They took your town, too."
Cobb tries to keep an open mind.
But the days blur together, and, before he knows it, two whole weeks have gone by.
His hallucinations, his episodes, are mild again. He talks to the strangers who roam the sands some days, watches them pick their way through the desert.
He tries to give a little girl one of his water rations once, and never again after. A sand bat landing on the house's dome startles him one night, and it takes him a few minutes to settle even after the roof doesn't cave in beneath the creature's weight.
He has to keep reminding himself.
That the things he sees, the things he hears, most things he perceives- they aren't real. Nothing is real, not anymore.
"Not real, not real, not real-"
Those are the words that help him sleep at night.
.
All that's real is the way he shambles around the homestead and wishes he had some real company.
Sandstorm season is in full-blast. Cobb doesn't have a town to protect anymore, so he hunkers down inside the homestead and listens to the way the sand beats against the walls.
For a little while, at least, the sound is like white noise. Soothing in the way that lapping waves would be to anyone living on a planet with actual bodies of water. In the calm and quiet, he thinks about his people. Hopes they're safely indoors as well. Jo's a good woman, she'll know how to reason with them. She oughta be in charge now, with him gone.
The thought almost makes him smile.
All the hounding he's given her about joining up as his deputy, only for her to be forced into the position after he's wiped himself from some sort of plane of reality.
Do they think about him often? He wonders what Fett's told them. The truth?
That their marshal's a murderer?
That he's been exiled?
"We've sent him to a more advanced facility off-world. There is more that they can do for him than we ever could," he can almost hear the daimyo say.
And he thinks that, for once, a pretty little lie would be kinder to them.
.
The storm gets worse after that. His mind takes him back to the collapsing mines, and he comes to in the middle of the desert, half-buried in sand beneath the twin suns. He follows the strange whining that wakes him to a half-dead massiff pup.
Cobb isn't really sure how they find their way home after that, but the only thing he can think about is how he finally has a purpose again.
By the time of the second supply drop, the pup is back on its feet, limping and running and scratching- it's all Cobb can do to get the thing to hold still when he checks the progress of its healing leg. It reminds him of twitchy old Scott, and after he calls it deputy once, the name sticks. He's always chasing after the damn thing.
It's a fond thought, in hindsight, if a little bittersweet.
One moment the little beast is curled at his feet, the next it's bolting out the door at the sound of the supply speeder. Cobb leaps after him, and that turns out to be a good thing when Skad raises his blaster at the sight of its charge.
"Whoa, easy there!" He calls over, raising his hand to steady the man. He whistles. "Dep, get back here!"
Admittedly, he is a bit surprised the pup dips back around. Despite the few weeks they've been each other's company, the young massiff has shown quite the rebellious streak. But a wild thing is mighty hard to tame, he thinks, because he's one himself.
There are many words in the eyebrow Skad raises at them, his speeder stopping just a few yards off. He doesn't say anything as he hops to the ground.
Cobb shrugs the best he can. "Sorry 'bout that. Think you're the first man he's ever seen, myself not included."
"Where'd you get him?"
He'd been expecting the silent treatment. "Couple klicks north, after a bad storm."
The kid huffs a bit, still unforgiving of Drash's murder, and turns his attention to Dep. His lips twitch, and Cobb thinks Skad almost smiles when he kneels down to pet the thing. "He bite much?"
"Sometimes," Cobb says.
"Train him young and well, and he'll be loyal." A final pat atop the beast's head.
He watches Skad rise. "That's the plan."
They turn to business quickly after that. The careful friendliness between them takes a turn toward a neutral I-really-don't-wanna-be-here, and conversations all but falls away. Skad leads him over to the duet of crates attached to his speeder, pops the lid on one, and begins explaining what's in each.
Cobb doesn't know why he bothers. The last supply person did the same, and he's willing to bet the contents of this drop are the same.
He quickly discovers that they are not, in fact, exactly the same. Fett's thrown in hypos supposedly meant to reduce his symptoms. Hypos like the one that Dr. Vesset had jammed into his arm just before Cobb killed him.
Poison, his mind screams at him. The words slip past his lips before he can stop them.
Skad opens his mouth to ground him. "It's not-"
Cobb just shakes his head, his body almost painfully rigid. It's all he can do to keep the rest of him from shaking. "I ain't takin' that."
"Suit yourself." The Mod sighs, turning to disable the coupling that holds the crates to the speeder. Cobb stares at him the whole while. Dep whines and paws at his feet.
It's not long before they've got the crates stored away below ground, the empty ones from the month prior brought back up and strung together. Cobb watches as Skad finishes tethering them to his speeder, and it's only as the kid's climbing atop of it that he finds his voice again.
"Skad." He waits for him to turn. "For what little it may be worth, I am sorry about what I did to Drash."
"Yeah, I got that. But sorry doesn't bring my best friend back."
He feels a mighty bit more lonely in the weeks that follow. The nights are the worst. In the darkness beyond his walls, the deep and piercing howls of wolves that Tatooine doesn't have rip through the quiet. A rapid knocking reluctantly draws him to the door one particularly chilly eve, but there's not a soul in sight by the time he's got it open.
"Who's there?" He calls, with just enough bite to sound a fraction of his former self.
Behind him, Dep whines at the sound of his voice.
Cobb raises his volume a bit and repeats himself. Frowns. Grabs his blaster pistol from the table. Drops a threat. "Come on out. I ain't afraid to shoot."
.
In the end, he rushes the door, prowls the perimeter of the property. There's nothing to be seen, nothing to be heard;
The desert is silent.
He does try the medicine, once. Then he decides that the hallucinations make the time go faster.
Before he knows it, Dep's fully grown and has been trained down to sniffing danger based on how recently a blaster's been fired. Nothing can sneak up on him. But somehow, the return of Din Djarin for the first time in two years does.