"That's the last of them?"
The Gran dockworker only grunts as he puts the sixth and final supply crate down in the cargo hold of the Razor Crest, a loud metallic clang echoing through the hull of the ship.
"Yes. Meds, healin' supplies, bacta. Last part of the bounty package, as agreed." He wipes his six-fingered, grimy hands on his equally stained work pants, smearing the dirt back and forth.
Din nods and opens the lid to have a look at the contents, like he had with each of the previous crates. He has been in this business long enough to know better than to trust anyone's word, but the shipment appears to be in order, the crate filled to the bottom with Republic-stamped goods.
The Gran waits impatiently, taping one booted foot on the floor. The phlegmy noise at the back of his throat suggests he would like to do nothing more than spit out. Fortunately for him, he has enough brains not to and resorts to fixating all three eyes on Din instead. Any meaning the gesture might have carried is lost because his middle and left eye cross and the Mandalorian, although sure the glare is intended as a sign of contempt, thinks it looks more like a bad case of indigestion.
"That bacta better be med-grade," Din says and slams the lid closed, receiving another one of those wet harks in return. He stares the Gran down until he swallows it back down.
"I ain't the one supplyin' it."
"I'll work my way bottom to top, then," Din tells him coldly and finalizes the bounty contract, putting the two frozen bail jumpers into the dubiously qualified care of the worker. He cannot wait to leave this shoddy excuse of a New Republic outpost – or what passes as one in this part of deep space.
"You're cleared for takeoff," the Gran tosses over his shoulder as he activates the two slabs of carbonite and begins to push them ahead of him.
Looks like they can all agree that neither of them is happy with him being here. The pay is good at least; wares instead of traceable transactions and the contract had come in through a middle man of the Guild who has proven himself reliable more often than not. Din secures the crates and closes the loading ramp before he takes to the cockpit.
A moment later the Razor Crest comes to life and rises out of the hangar, breaking the atmosphere and the blue of the horizon peels back as Din dives his ship into an eternal night nose-first. The view that greets him is one he hasn't tired of in all his years of traveling the galaxy. Space. Empty except for millions of planets, vast beyond comprehension and yet reduced to the cramped quarters of his spaceship. It's everywhere and nowhere, a place between places that is home to no one.
Din cannot put his finger on what draws him here, time and time again. Perhaps it's the illusion of having the freedom of being able to go anywhere the fancy strikes him. Din is not a man given to whims and fancies. It is always the black-baked volcanic soil of Nevarro he returns to. Nevarro and the Guild and the next job, his rushed visits to the hidden covert scattered in between bounty hunts.
With the planet dwindling in size behind him and the Crest empty save for its pilot, Din makes a conscious effort to unclench his jaw. Always the damned bail jumpers. He shouldn't complain considering it's what earned him a hold full of valuable goods this time. Healing supplies are never easy to come by; the Armourer will be pleased.
He… he could let them know.
His Tribe.
Din doesn't call in often. The communication is encrypted, the channel's frequency one only a few members of the Tribe know by heart, but there is always a chance, no matter how slim, that the communication will be noticed by someone who will take undue interest. It is a risk, and one Din does not take lightly. He hesitates and with every minute that passes the decision weights heavier on him.
Din has never minded the solitude that inevitably comes with a beroya's life. Quite to the contrary, he is uniquely suited to this line of work, but he doesn't tolerate the hardships it comes with as well as he used to in his younger years and the silence around him is both a blessing and a burden.
Space travel is not, actually, a silent affair at all. There is the roar of the engines and the hum of electric appliances, the buzz of the freezing unit, the bleeping of various sensors and the creak of the pilot's chair, but those have become the background noises of Din's life. He is so used to them that he has to consciously focus to hear any of it and notices them respectfully only in case of their absence.
But the ship is in good working order, even if it groans like a beast of burden straining under too heavy a load as Din accelerates. The Crest surges forward with a shudder before she settles into the new travel speed and the silence descends once more, dense like a black hole.
Two bodies frozen in carbonite and one disgruntled dock worker do not make for company. Bribing barkeeps and informants and enquiring after his target's whereabouts is not conversation.
The silence grows louder.
It seeps into the cracks between his beskar, a knife wielded by a skilled assassin's hand. What it strikes, he cannot tell, but it hollows him out piece by piece with every cycle that passes. There is no pain, just the spreading numbness of a deep cut that Din bears with the same indifference he has developed towards wounds of the flesh.
The change doesn't sit right with him whenever he can muster the energy to actually care. Today, it seems, is one of those rare instances.
Din dials in the code of the covert's secure comm before he can reason away his desire to speak to someone who is not an official granting him landing permission or an informant and waits. He has almost given up hope on the call being picked up when,
"Tion?"
He would recognize that voice like a boulder thundering into an empty well anywhere. And it's just like the man to greet him with a brusque what?
Din has half a mind to say 'nothing' and hang up.
"It's Din."
Paz Vizsla grunts. There is a clamour in the background that Din recognizes as a clash of metal. Din's brow furrows. It doesn't sound like fighting though even if he can hear Paz grunt in annoyance. If he is the one manning the comm, Din wouldn't put it past him to pick up in the middle of a spar.
"What are you doing?"
"What do you care?" Vizsla grunts, following the statement by another clang that fizzles into a crackling bout of noise. He still answers when Din doesn't. "I'm fixing the damned circuits in this skug-hole. An eruption caused the generators to go haywire; one of them fried several outlets and appliances."
From the sound if it, he's beating them into submission. Din wholeheartedly sympathizes with the circuits.
"Why do you call?" Paz wants to know.
Because I miss my Tribe.
Because I feel like I'm slowly going mad from all the emptiness without and within.
Because I wanted to talk to you, di'kut.
"I bring supplies," Din replies.
"Good," Vizsla rumbles. "When will you be here?"
"A couple of days," Din answers, checking his position on the holomap. "Paz – "
"Don't die, Djarin," Paz interrupts. "I don't want to hunt down your beskar'gam."
The call cuts off, leaving Din blinking at the white noise of a dead line. He sighs and ends the transmission on his end.
Paz has a chip on his shoulder proportionate to the size of said shoulder – the word massive does come to mind – and this is as close as he has ever come to saying that he cares about whether Din lives or not, even if the only reason that he does is because of the inconvenience the beroya's demise would pose. Somebody else would have to pick up the trade; Vizsla would make for a terrible bounty hunter. He is an excellent killer, though.
At least Paz still chooses to remember Din's name when he has been beroya for so long that there are few besides the Armorer who might recall that he hasn't always been a human-shaped task. One day when Din does fail to return, maybe Paz, despite their many differences, will care enough to speak his name to the stars.
It hasn't always been like this.
It is one thing not to have a home. It is another thing for Din have a place to call home, but to know with the same certainty one knows a broken bone by the grind of wrongness, that he does not belong.
Even amongst his own people.
With a hiss, Din's helmet unlatches and he carefully sets it on the passenger seat, within easy reach.
The next hyperspace lane is a few hours away and it will take even longer to reach Nevarro. Din has plenty of time to take stock of the goods and decide on what to keep and what to sell off for credits. His armour may be in good condition, but there are small repairworks that have piled up over the past cycle because he never found the time with much bigger issues always pushing to the front.
Then… he ought to rest.
There is no relevant time in space, no day or night circle to live by. Din looks at the small digital chronometer to his right, programmed to the surface-time of some unknown planet. It reads five fourty in the morning. The Marshal will be on soon.
Din spins his chair to face the compact radio setup underneath the chrono and reaches for the on switch, his finger hovering just shy of pressing it.
He endures the silence until his bones ache with it and then he gives in and turns on the radio.
four months earlier
Din curses and hammers his fist against the frame of the piece of garbage that calls itself a radio. It's stamped right across the front of the device, mocking him in bold, garishly yellow letters. The script hangs in a crooked line above a multitude of knobs, dials and an array of lights, all of which are dark and indicate that the unit is either shut off or not working.
Din knows it is not shut off.
He has gone through the ABC of repair work; turned the radio off and on again, unplugged it and plugged it back into the circuit and given the casing a few good slaps with the flat of his palm. By the book, the next step is to issue a last warning and when the metal box does not begin to cooperate after he has threatened to chuck it out into space, Din sighs, admits defeat and fetches his tools.
In the end, he has to disassemble what feels like half his cockpit. Sure, having things set into the paneling saves space, but it makes for a pain in the shebs if one needs to get to the back wiring of one particular device. He has to unscrew the radio's interior from its case but that ain't happening unless he manages to get the outer case away from top panel that it has been bolted to and that one in turn connects to the back for stability, which he isn't able to access unless he takes out the front first.
Whoever thought of this design, Din wishes a slow and painful demise upon them. Being nibbled to death by a pack of starving, frenzied womp rats sounds unpleasant enough that it will do until he can think of something better. Like being torn limb from limb by a rabid rancor. It always pays off to have a backup plan.
None of his grisly fantasies come to fruition, but they do their job of keeping his mind occupied as he uncomfortably sits wedged in between his passenger seat and the right-hand console, surrounded by bolts and screws and pieces of his ship that litter the floor like fallen soldiers.
This is already more work than it is worth, but it's a matter of pride now. Din never knew when to give up; not when he'd been a scrawny novice pinned to the ground by one of his larger opponents, arm twisted at an unnatural angle and his joints screaming in protest, not when he'd been in the fighting corps making his way back to the Tribe in a ship that was more holes than hull, shaking and half-delirious with blood loss.
Giving up is not something the Way teaches to those who choose to walk it.
Success is a state of mind, mastery a matter of perseverance.
Din disassembles the console and the radio, exchanges a capacitor that looks half-disintegrated by corrosion and replaces the broken, crumbling wiring. When he hooks the thing up to an auxiliary power source, the main lamp gives a hopeful flicker.
It feels like victory. A small, meaningless victory bought by too much time and effort for what it's worth, but Din allows himself a moment to enjoy it anyway.
For everything he fixes in the spaceship, two other appliances fall apart, but Din refuses to give up on the Crest. The gunship is his home, more so than any house on a planet could ever be. The Crest may be banged up, held together by a prayer and flying only out of sheer habit, but she is unequivocally his, like few other things.
His training, his Creed, his weapons and armour, his ship.
Pre-Empire is a nicer term than old-fashioned, but perhaps less accurate than 'antique'.
Din wonders what that makes him.
About to reassemble the entire console, that's what. He does so without much fanfare, the plates at least sliding and staying in their respective slots with an absolute minimum of resistance. Maybe he'll get around to fixing the temp control in his shower next.
Din turns the radio on again and scans for transmissions. He waits impatiently, tapping the folded multitool against the plate on the back of his hand to the musical ring of beskar.
The radio spits static at him.
On second thought, Din is just fine with the sonic.
He fiddles with various dials for wavelength and frequency to much the same result and finally stops an hour later.
Din still tries on the next day.
And the day after.
He did, after all, never learn to give up and there is little else to occupy oneself with up here, between worlds and stars that Din can claim familiarity with by now. With the route mapped and set, the ship's automatic flight controls hold them on course. He still chooses to fly without said controls more often than not, because it gives him something to do other than stare out of the diamondglass window and count the hours until touchdown. There is only so much maintenance his armour and equipment needs and there is a limit to the amount of time he is willing to spend repairing the Crest.
Din does what needs to be done, but to step outside of necessity does not sit right with him, as if some part of him were unwilling to make even the smallest concession to comfort. He burns the shred of introspection away by training until his muscles give out on the exercises he has been taught to maintain strength and stretches the soreness out of his limbs afterwards so as not to lose any more mobility than is unavoidable in his age.
When exercising has exhausted his body but not his mind and sleep won't come, he occasionally turns to the pad. Those times are few and far in between, because the holonet tends to give him splitting headaches but now and again he does get hooked on a documentary on foreign planets and star systems, despite being picky about quality.
Din also has the one or other language course that he could work his way through, but even those hold little interest as of late. These days, all his effort goes into repetition and maintaining so as not to forget what he already knows.
On most days, it's enough to kill time.
Sometimes, it leaves him pacing with what his trainers had used to call the indoor-crazies.
Din tries the radio again and rocks back on his heels when it blasts noise at him, a wild, jarring cacophony of sounds. It's a radio station, but the music is too shrill, the hosts sound like they have just snorted an entire camtono of spice and he has zero patience for advertisements. He turns it off with a huff of annoyance and then it's just him and the thoughts bouncing around in his head. Manda knows he doesn't always want to listen to those so Din worries at the radio's dials some more like someone might at a scab over a wound.
It frustrates him that he cannot seem to let it go, but,
There has to be something in this galaxy that is not complete, utter garbage.
The galaxy, it seems, is dead set on proving him wrong.
Din braces himself for disappointment and finds exactly what he is looking for.
In the weeks after, the radio is unused and forgotten, the experiment deemed a failure. Din doesn't know what rides him into trying it again, all the way out in the Navalah system and fresh off a successful hunt. The Rodian arms dealer is well contained in carbonite and Din has had a sonic and a change of his flight suit to get the last traces of the planet's cyan-coloured dust off of him.
It has turned out to be mildly caustic to human skin and experiencing the alien beauty of Navalah has come at the price of a rash on his neck and in a few other places. Din's skin feels hot and tight and he is in need of a distraction rather than medical treatment.
There is a Mandalorian saying for situations such as this.
K'atini.
Suck it up.
So Din does.
Plays with the wavelength buttons until he catches words between the fuzzy cracking of white noise. The frequency isn't quite right and Din fine tunes it until like a puzzle solved, the garbled noise merges into words. Basic. A man speaking.
Out of habit, Din raises his hand to flick the off switch.
Pauses.
Listens in.
It's the first voice he has heard in days and it's… a pleasant one.
Din's hand falls away, fingertips slipping past the ribbed dials, wrist going lax.
The host sounds a little hoarse, like he has a sore throat or maybe that's just what his voice is like. He has a drawl in the vowels and somehow despite the distance between them, a genuine cordiality bleeds through and,
"… put your feet up for a moment and enjoy a cup of your favourite brew with me on this fine mornin'."
It's not morning for Din in space and he misses out on making himself something to drink that first time, transfixed by the small box that talks to him like it has known him since childhood. There is no screaming, no maniac laughter, no jarring jumble of noise, just the slight crackle of a threadbare reception and the sanded down rasp of the charismatic host who later introduces himself as Cobb Vanth.
o
The Marshal comes on at 05:45, mystery time, on the dot. Punctual, Din would think except the radio doesn't have a predictable schedule although the Marshal seldom fails to greet his listeners in the morn. From what Din has garnered, Cobb is just a one-man operation, running a radio station in his free time whenever duty does not call him away. He is an actual marshal, not just one in name and not Republic-appointed either. Vanth has earned that station by picking up a badge and a blaster like some heroic lawman fighting crime in one of those holomags that fuel stops sell a credit a dozen and that Din has never bothered with.
It might, however, endear Vanth to a man with a weak spot for romantic idealism.
It has charmed Din and he thinks it's all a steaming pile of bantha shit.
Still paints a good picture though and Din enjoys the station's music; smooth in the morning, livelier in the afternoons and soothing during long sleepless flights as much as he does listening to its host.
"And that was the Blue Moon band with their single, Waves," Cobb says. "This is Radio Freetown. To our new listeners, welcome! To our old listeners, welcome back! This is Marshal Cobb Vanth wishing y'all a good morning."
It is now, Din thinks as he allows the sun-basked warmth of Cobb's voice to fill the Crest. Cobb never fails to sound as if he actually were glad that somewhere out in the galaxy someone might listen to him.
"It's quite early over here so I got myself a cup of nice, hot caf," the Marshal says, his voice only slightly distorted by light years of distance between them. "So pick your beverage of choice, lean back and crank up the dial, we're starting the day slow and relaxed."
Actually, caf doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. It's either that or a short rest, but a check shows Din that he has been up for eleven hours and is good for a couple more. He has to rely on other ways than a day and night cycle to know when to rest and his own body has proven to be unreliable in that regard. Between hyperspace, hopping from planet to planet and pursuing his bounties, Din's feeling for the passing of time is nonexistent.
He knows from experience that exhaustion will make him prone to irritation and sloppiness, more likely to make mistakes that he cannot afford when on a job, but it's hard to tell when the ever present weariness blurs into fatigue. So Din keeps tabs on his waking and sleeping hours, orienting himself by the numbers displayed on his HUD.
Din toggles the speakers to switch to the cargo bay outputs and heads down the ladder towards the nook that serves as his cooking area. It contains a sink, a cooking plate with enough space for two pots as well as portable nanowave oven and cupboards for storage. Din fixes himself a deluxe meal of not one but two ration bars and once the instant caf machine is done vomiting brown sludge into a discoloured mug, he drops down on one of the supply crates to eat.
Listens to the melody while he nibbles on a ration bar and washes the grainy, indefinable taste that all space food seems to have in common down with bitter black caf. Waits for the next interlude.
Indulgence is a dangerous thing.
The instrumental music fades out.
A moment later, Din's ship is filled with the presence of the Marshal who, over the course of only a few months, has become more of a real person than most people Din meets planetside.