Hi folks!

It's so fun to have my next chapter ready just in time for May the Fourth. Happy Star Wars Day to you all and May the Force be With You.

This one was a bit of a challenge for me, but I think I wrangled it into shape. I want to give credit for the title of "Imagine Din"(for the Din that Bo talks to in her mind) to the amazing She-Elf23. She's a great writer and you should definitely check out her stories. I also want to thank her for all her help with this story and for encouraging me to dip my toe into Mandalorian fanfiction. I'm having so much fun writing Din and the rest of these characters.

Enjoy!
-Moki

0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0

Din Djarin was in a life-or-death battle that now filled nearly every moment of his life. He discovered exactly what Gideon meant by a new "phase" not long after the Moff mentioned it. "Phase Two" as Gideon affectionally called it, challenged Din more than ever before.

Any semblance of a schedule had been dropped. Din never had any idea when they were going to pull him out of his cell. Sometimes it felt like only minutes went by after being thrown inside before the guards were back and dragging him to the debriefing room again. Other times, it felt like days would go by where he would just sit there staring at the walls with nothing to keep him occupied but the pain of his wounds.

At first, the visits to the debriefing room didn't change. He was walked in, forced onto the table, strapped down and had to endure whatever form of torture the Moff had in mind for that day. Usually. it was just electricity coursing through his system, perhaps varying in intensity or frequency. But though it didn't change, it still became harder to endure as it happened more frequently and without the customary rest he had gotten used to before.

But soon, the actual visits to the debriefing room changed as well, as Din found out one day not long after the new phase had started. He was brought in and expected them to shove him onto the table as usual, but the room was empty. The sight of the missing table made him stumble as it caught him off guard for a second, until the trooper behind him pushed him farther into the room. Once he was inside, they turned and left him there alone. The door closed and he waited.

Less than a minute later, the door opened again, and a large droid rolled inside.

What new hell is this?

Before Din could think anything else, the droid began shooting at him with a small blaster attached to one of its spindly arms. Din ducked instinctively, using his beskar to fend off the blasts, surprised that it wasn't a particularly hard challenge.

Is this really it? I did harder training when I was a boy.

Five hours later, Din's legs shook as he dove away from another blast. Sweat dripped into his eyes as every duck and dive got harder. About every ten shots, the droid would get one to a place on Din's body not covered in beskar. His clothes were shredded, his skin burned in multiple places.

From an outside point of view, Din almost appreciated the brilliance of the plan. The droid never made more challenging shots than it did when it first arrived in the room. It was shooting lazily, as if not actually trying to kill. Which of course it wasn't. Gideon wouldn't want Din to die that quickly and easily.

The point of all this was the amount of time Din had to stay ahead of each blast. He was never allowed to rest, the droid continuing to fire with the relentlessness that a human wouldn't be able to achieve. The longer it went on, the more exhausted the Mandalorian became and the harder it was to dodge each blast.

As the hours dragged on, Din's eyes became heavy, and he felt the pull of sleep even as he kept fighting the droid. He had to shake his head and force himself awake more than once, thankful the thing wasn't programmed to kill him. It was designed to annoy, to cause pain and to wear him out and Din was sad to admit it was going a pretty damn good job of it.

Just when Din thought he couldn't dive away one more time without staying on the floor and letting the thing blast him full of holes, it stopped.

Din stood panting, waiting for a blast that never came. Just as quickly as it started, it was over. The door opened, the droid rolled back out, and a guard came in, motioning him to follow. Straightening his back, and pulling up his shoulders, Din walked out. As he entered the hallway, his usual escort of a dozen stormtroopers fell into line behind him. As tired as he was, it still amused Din that Gideon always sent that many to walk him to and from his cell. Then again, he had taken out at least that many before they captured him initially. The Moff wasn't taking any chances.

From the control room, Gideon smiled as he watched the Mandalorian. How the man hid any sign of fatigue was truly a wonder to behold.

This is even better than I thought it would be.

He turned off the video feed and left the room.

Back in his cell, Din took up his usual position, feet on the floor and back resting against the wall. He closed his eyes briefly but fought against the sleep that wanted to take him. He still refused to give them the pleasure of seeing him immediately collapse after their treatments. Not yet.

But Dank Farrik did he want to. Instead, he took stock of his body, examining the burn marks. None were too bad. The droid's blaster had been set to a lower power than typically used. The blasts had burned but hadn't ripped open his flesh like an actual blaster could. They still hurt like hell though and even when Din allowed himself to sleep, he figured it might not be easy with the pain.

Then again, he was so exhausted it probably wouldn't matter how much his skin burned. He'd just pass out anyway. It was a small consolation for what he'd had to endure for the last several hours.

As he rested, Din's mind wandered to the homeworld of his childhood. The heat generating from the burns on his skin reminded him of the heat of the hot desert there. He could almost feel the heavy robes he and his people wore to protect their skin from the blazing sun. He had always loved the dark maroon color.

Until he had seen those robes stained with blood that turned them almost black.

Pushing that thought from his mind, Din pondered happier times. When the long summer months dragged on and he and the other children would go swimming. There was a small, ice-blue lake not far from town that was fed by an underground stream. No matter how hot the days were, the water there was always cool and refreshing.

Din licked his cracked lips, swallowing to try and ease his dry throat. He leaned his head back against the wall with a light clang as the beskar hit the metal behind him.

What I wouldn't give to be in that lake now.

0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0

Bo paced across the bridge of the cruiser. The crew watched her out of the corners of their eyes, but no one said anything to her. She'd been at it for hours, waiting for any sort of signal.

"Anything?" She asked for what felt like the millionth time. Probably because it very well could have been the millionth time.

"Nothing, Lady Kryze."

It hadn't been long enough, Bo knew that. It had taken them awhile to come up with a plan and Axe had only been sent back to Mandalore barely a day ago. He would need more time to get in and gather some intel.

After a few hours, the night crew came to the bridge and Bo decided to head back to her room.

It was still fairly early in the evening, but she found Grogu in a fitful sleep. Once again, his body twitched as he slumbered.

"You know something's wrong with him." Imagine Din (as she'd started to call him in her mind) said suddenly, appearing on the other side of the cot as she watched the child.

"It's just nightmares," she whispered.

"No, it's not, Bo. You spent enough time around us. You've seen him sleep. He's usually out like a light. Even with all this," he waved one arm to indicate the new, strange place for the child. "He shouldn't be reacting as he has been. You know something's wrong."

"I don't know what you mean," she whispered desperately. What was this vision trying to tell her? She didn't have a lot of experience with kids. Wouldn't a child have nightmares if they had seen their father taken violently by an evil man who had once kidnapped them as well? Wouldn't that be enough to make the poor kid twitch and moan in his sleep?

Suddenly Imagine Din appeared next to her, his voice a desperate rasp in her ear. "Help him... please."

Din would never beg for himself, but for the child he would do anything. Hearing that request, no matter where it came from, was enough to get her to look more closely at the little one on the cot.

His movements were unusual. So precise. It was almost if he was being…

Tortured.

Oh, no.

Bo bent down by the bed and carefully put a hand on Grogu's back, not wanting to scare him.

"Grogu, please wake up. Wake up for me, little one."

Grogu woke suddenly, his eyes snapping open and looking around confused.

"It's okay, you're here in my room. I'm here," she said reassuringly, rubbing his back.

"Grogu," he looked at her with intense eyes when she said his name.

"You can see your father sometimes, can't you?"

The little one nodded solemnly. She tried not to react to that startling revelation, again not wanting to scare the child.

"Are you… in pain when you do that?"

He shook his head and Bo felt some semblance of relief. Din would never forgive himself if his son was suffering his fate.

She hesitated before asking the next question. She felt that she didn't want to know the answer, but also had to know for sure.

"Are they hurting him?"

Grogu nodded, and tears brimmed his eyes as he whimpered.

She took a shaky breath to steel herself for the next question. But once again, she had to know.

"Is he in pain right now?"

Grogu flew into her arms, his body shaking with sobs. That was all the answer she needed. When the child cried on her shoulder, the warrior princess dropped the armor that no one could see. The armor she kept up around herself at all times. The armor she hadn't allowed to crack in a long time.

That hidden armor crashed down as she hugged the child. Her tears fell on his robe as his tears fell onto her neck. They comforted each other as well as they could, knowing how Din was suffering.

0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0

With everything else that had changed and the new challenges he'd had to endure in the debriefing room, it had taken Din a while to figure out what else was different. At first, he just thought the new schedule (or more accurately, the lack thereof) had confused him. But after a while, he was sure.

They had stopped feeding him.

Never once had Din considered refusing food, knowing how foolish that would be. A warrior couldn't afford a hunger strike when planning an escape from enemy territory. So, though the meals had barely been more than grey tasteless protein sludge with a few pieces of some sort of dried meat, he'd always eaten every bite. He also drank every ounce of water they'd given him. He would sit on the edge of the bench closest to the corner, face the wall and carefully raise his helmet quickly before each bite and each drink,

Before things changed, Din assumed he'd been on the same schedule as all the soldiers on the base. Meals in the morning, midday, and evening. It had helped him to know when a new day began to have food and water delivered at those times.

The first time he got only water, Din wondered if they were giving him extra water in between meals. He had no access to water other than what they brought him. There was no sink in his cell, just a privy. He had no way to bathe his own wounds or slake his own thirst. But then he realized that the water had been given instead of a meal.

Soon, meals became few and far between. Water came at odd times, but more often than food. Sometimes a new container of water would be delivered not long after a previous bottle had been given. Sometimes a day would go by with nothing.

He knew why they weren't withholding water as much as food; after all, a person would die much faster without water, and they wanted him alive. Gideon wouldn't want to lose his favorite toy.

But hunger was a different story. A man could go a long while without actually starving to death. Keep a man hungry and you could make him weaker, but it would take a long time to kill him.

After several days (or was it weeks?), Din got used to the raw knot of hunger in his stomach.

As the new phase wore on, Din soon gave up on the idea of not sleeping when he was shoved back into his cell. It wasn't just the overall bone-tiredness that plagued him, it was the lack of schedule. Not knowing if he'd be pulled out minutes, hours, or days later, Din got sleep whenever he could.

As soon as the cell door closed behind him, Din would walk to his bench, lay down and go to sleep (or simply pass out if his wounds were bad enough) without any other preamble. He decided to let his captors think what they wanted now, rest was more important than whatever impression the Moff was getting by his behavior.

Din's visits to the debriefing room also became harder and harder. Gideon seemed to be constantly thinking of new ways to wear him out and cause him pain. The blaster droid was now part of the rotation, as were other surprises. Once, Din had entered the room to find a group of stormtroopers waiting for him, all clad in beskar. Apparently, Gideon had decided to use him as a training device for his troops. Din had to fight them all off, weaponless. And if he managed to get a weapon from one of the troopers, other guards would take him to his knees with a shock rod and take it back.

Tiredness became a constant companion, as did hunger and thirst. But Din had gone without sleep before. There had been times in his hunting career when a quarry had eluded him to the point where he'd needed to stay awake to track them and keep them from getting away. Or other times where he'd found himself in situations that required him to stay awake and stay vigilant, sometimes days at a time. It wasn't anything he hadn't experienced before.

He also hadn't gone without food and water for days before. Once when tracking a quarry to a remote planet, Din had been trapped by the man's guards and unable to get to his ship for supplies for several days. But he had just held his ground, waiting patiently until the perfect moment had presented itself to take out the guards and the quarry.

These challenges were why Mandalorians constantly trained. It was a reason that Din always drilled and trained, whether it was in the hull of the Razor Crest (ah, how he still missed that ship) while flying through hyperspace between jobs, or taking a day to park on a planet he trusted and run for miles on end, fully armored.

Eventually Grogu joined him during those times, watching from the bunk as Din drilled and practiced, or following in his pod as Din ran through the rocky terrain of a new planet. Din grew to love the way the kid would make encouraging noises and look at him with proud eyes when he finished and would collapse panting on the ground.

Din's strength wasn't a vanity. He didn't keep it up just for show. Though that did sometimes help in his job, the ability to make a quarry quake in their boots when they spotted him. But his strength was his protection. It kept him alive; it kept the Foundling in his care alive. It was as much a part of his armor as his beskar was.

Strength was an absolute necessity and it required constant upkeep. It hadn't been handed to him naturally. In his younger years, rising in the Fighting Corps Din had had to learn the basics of fighting just like all the others. He had gotten his fair share of bumps and bruises as a boy and more serious injuries as a young man. All of it built up his strength to turn him into what basically amounted to a weapon.

Din's entire body was his weapon, even more so than the armor, than the guns, and other armaments. As he'd seen with the stormtroopers, simply slapping on beskar didn't turn you into the fighting machine that made one a Mandalorian.

But now he could feel that hard-won strength ebbing from him with each passing day. His body was tearing itself apart from the inside out, breaking down muscles to make up for the lack of food and rest, and the constant battering. A body's job was to sustain life, it didn't care about muscles and bones as much as vital organs. As long as the lungs still breathed, the heart still beat, the body was proudly doing its job.

But Din wished he had a say in the matter. He'd tell his body to stop doing things like growing a beard and hair that made his helmet more uncomfortable by the day. Or stop growing nails that constantly tore and broke during the fights - and leave his muscles alone. But he didn't have a say. He could only rest whenever possible and eat and drink whatever little was put in front of him. And he could fight as hard as he could each time he was taken from his cell.

All he could do was live another day.

But at some point, Din started to wonder why. It wasn't often, but little thoughts would flit through his mind during the especially hard times. Why fight so hard? No one was probably coming to get him. He had to face that now. Even if he'd had some hope in the beginning, it was waning by the day. He still worked on his own plans but acknowledged that his increasingly weakened condition was going to make escape close to impossible.

Still, it wasn't in Din to give up easily. So, he kept fighting.