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autumnwoodsdreamer · 2 months ago

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Chapter 48: The Moment to Live and the Moment to Die

Characters: Din Djarin, Bo-Katan Kryze, The Armorer, Koska Reeves, Axe Woves, Sabine Wren, Paz Vizsla, Ezra Bridger, Omega, Grogu

Words: 4458

Summary: Mandalore the people VS Mandalore the planet

Read on Ao3 or below the cut

Author's Note: Hey, so, remember that major character death warning I put on this? And how I said at the beginning that Gideon was only half of it?

Well…

Here comes the second half

. . . . .

“Get to the ships!” Bo-Katan called for all to hear. “We leave immediately!”

“Do not follow her!” Din shouted with all the desperation of a man trying to belay a mass execution order. “The moment you set foot on the planet’s surface, you will die! It is not something you can just filter out: the radiation levels on Mandalore are fatal!”

Emotions and voices ran high.

His crew spread out, each one giving their voice and their conviction to the warnings, imploring the hundreds present to stop and save their souls.

Some reacted.

Some shouted curses.

As many as he had on his side spreading the warning, Kryze had her ones attempting to douse the truth with rage, belligerence, and blind devotion.

But the vast majority of the crowd remained silent—silent and rooted in place.

Their uncertainty was palpable, like the strained beats of their hearts had coagulated into one great pulse reverberating through the air and unsettling the very earth. Eyes shifted and brows twisted, looks of puzzlement and a sensation of unease washing through the audience.

Axe, who had marched through the crowd to confront Koska and back Bo-Katan, suddenly quit his stance. In the blink of an eye, he became a different person, his countenance totally shifting: where he had been stubborn and hostile just moments ago, he now projected sensibility.

With haste, he moved to physically intercept Bo-Katan, halting her march towards her ship.

“Perhaps we should do another scan, as they suggest,” he said, his calm, reasonable tone so unlike the fire of before that he sounded like someone else entirely.

Nevertheless, neither his words nor his tone had any effect on his superior.

Sharply, jarringly, Bo-Katan shook her head. “No! No more delay! We’ve waited too long for this!”

Axe didn’t budge or blink. He didn’t look uncertain at all as he lifted his head and set his shoulders, cold steel pouring through his gaze. “Then we’re not going.”

“Fine!” Bo-Katan bodily shoved him out of her path, the move so sudden and charged that he stumbled and nearly fell. “Mandalore doesn’t need cowards like you polluting her!”

With that, she continued on her way, marching towards one of the unpainted Kom’rks standing in the lot nearby, collecting a skeletal line of adamant followers as she went.

Out of a camp three hundred strong, Din counted barely more than a dozen falling in line behind her—all up, they were just fifteen.

Just fifteen chose to follow her.

It was a small fraction of the tribe. At the galactic scale, they amounted to little more than a drop of water in a planet-wide ocean.

But they were not nothing.

Din did not watch them form a line and march towards the fighter with indifference or some kind of relief that they were all who chose to go.

He saw each as a life about to be cut short.

And for what?

“Kryze! Stop!” he shouted, futilely.

She didn’t turn around.

She didn’t pause.

She kept going.

Din felt his heart kick and thrash in his chest. He stood, fixed to the earth, sight locked on Bo-Katan and her company as they boarded the Kom’rk, pack animals herding towards their inevitable slaughter.

He had warned her.

He had begged her to turn around.

And she wasn’t listening. She had even accused him of subterfuge, of intentionally misleading their people.

In the back of his mind, a small seed of doubt cropped up.

Could they be wrong?

Purportedly, Rau’s ship was the only one to find Mandalore toxic and uninhabitable while multiple others provided a miraculously favourable scan. Could the former result be the inaccurate one while the latter ones were true? Could they be hindering rather than saving?

But, no: Din had done the scans himself and he detected no anomalies indicative of interference. Besides that, he had seen how meticulous Rau was when it came to keeping his ship in good repair, and for the results to be so drastically dissimilar, one or the other had to be intentionally tampered with—what reason would Rau or Koska have for manipulating things to produce such a result?

No.

Din had come to know and trust Rau and Koska.

What he saw on those scans, he could believe. He saw the evidence and he came to the conclusion himself that Mandalore was cursed.

But he was struggling to believe Bo-Katan had had anything to do with the false scans.

Her lust for power had ignited and fuelled a frightening paranoia, but for her to have falsified the scans so thoroughly would have meant she had to know beforehand that the planet was radioactive. When could she have discovered that without others in her entourage learning it too?

And if she did know, why go to all the trouble of bringing the camp here? Why set up base on Concordia at all? And, most telling: Why continue to send bounty hunters after Din if she had already chosen a suicide run?

Perhaps her delusion had pulled her down to a level he simply could not fathom, but he just had a feeling, some inkling that there was something more at play…

A hand grabbed his arm. He knew before he even turned his head that it was Sabine.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, worry thick and sharp in her voice.

It was only when he registered her words that he realized he had taken a step without thinking.

He glanced to Sabine then back to the fighter just as Bo-Katan disappeared within.

He closed his eyes.

He had warned and even pleaded and she had brushed everything he said aside like it was all just some bothersome insect not worthy of her time and attention. Physically, he knew he could overpower her, hold her back and force her not to go, but she wouldn’t see it as him saving her life.

He could just leave her to dive headfirst into her ruin; he would incur no guilt and he doubted he would lose any sleep over it either.

But if he could just get her to scan the planet and see for herself…

“Rau, Reeves,” he called and the two Protectors snapped to attention. “We have to follow them.”

“No!” Sabine grabbed his other arm and moved in front of him to block his path. “What are you doing? You can’t go down there! You’ll die!”

Gently, he took her hands off his arms and held them. He wished he didn’t have the helmet on right then, so desperate to feel her hands cradle his face, to press a kiss to her fingers, give her a reassuring smile. But all he could do was hold her hands in his.

His sail.

His anchor.

His lighthouse.

His safe harbour.

“I won’t go down, I promise,” he said to her, hauling all the sincerity welling up in his heart out and pouring it into his voice, saturating every word with intention and faith. “But I have to try to stop her.”

Sabine had her helmet on, too—he couldn’t see her face. But he knew her so well, all her shades indelibly inked in his memory, in his heart, that he could without thought, without much effort at all pierce the beskar and tinted transperisteel and see everything hidden within.

He could see her knitted brows and the not-quite symmetrical furrow fear carved along her forehead. He could see her amber-brown eyes shift side to side as they searched his face, could see the pinpoints of reflected light. He could see the twitch in the corners of her mouth as she fought with words and wants, dying to speak yet unable to find her voice.

He bowed his head to touch their helmets together, the little ting of their beskar kiss sounding so forlorn.

“I promise I’ll return,” he whispered as he pried himself away, feeling so rusted and rooted in place.

“I’ll hold you to that,” was all Sabine could manage to reply, her voice choked. Her hands squeezed his, her grip so tight, he could feel her nails dig through his gloves. But then she released and he drifted away like a ship severed from its moorings.

There wasn’t time to say goodbye to everyone, but he made sure to seek out Grogu’s gaze and sign the same promise to him.

He firmly believed there was no need for these farewells: he had no intention of setting foot on Mandalore, he was just going to try one last time to reach out to Bo-Katan.

“I’ll come, too,” Ursa pledged and he nodded his assent.

In a blur, the four of them boarded the Kom’rk. Fenn and Koska took their stations at the helm and had the fighter in the air within moments of Bo-Katan and her party taking off.

“Follow close; keep the forward shields up,” Din ordered as he planted himself between the pilot seats, a hand clamped on the back of each chair for stability.

“Copy,” Koska clipped out, reaching up to key in a sequence on the overhead controls.

There was a sharp pull as they shot into the sky, Kryze’s ship shrinking rapidly in the viewport. The engine droned and the wings angled into flight position with a smooth, sliding sound.

. . . . .

Numbly, Sabine watched them leave—Bo-Katan and her party, and then Din, her mother, Fenn and Koska.

Her heart thudded and white noise screamed all around her, piercing her head with so many spikes.

It had all just… happened.

The moment they arrived, a spectacle, a parade, a court-case began and now, suddenly, they had stalled and juddered to an abrupt intermission.

Well, for the ones left on the ground it was an intermission; to the ones in the departing ships, the proceedings continued.

Sabine was struggling to catch her breath—figuratively and maybe just a little literally.

Bo-Katan’s aggression and spite, she had anticipated. In the years since their last meeting on Krownest, the woman’s malice hadn’t dulled—if anything, paranoia and desperation had only sharpened it.

Hearing her fume dragged Sabine straight back to that awful day, to smoke and carnage, to remains and ruins, to a stinging cheek and a shattered heart. As she stood there, she relived that moment again, finding a kind of clarity and catharsis in this twisted encore.

Back then, surrounded by loss, overwhelmed by grief, alone and untethered, she couldn’t withstand the onslaught of accusations and condemnation. Taking blow after blow with no time to recover in between had left her weak and vulnerable, exposed and frayed thin. Unaware of her attacker’s true character, she accepted every wound she inflicted as just and warranted.

She let her label her dar’manda and she took herself off into exile.

And it nearly killed her.

Now she was free but it had taken everything to climb out of that dark pit, to rebuild her strength and regain her stance.

And in the back of her mind she had to wonder: How would the story have gone if she had stood her ground and lashed back? If she had known then that Bo-Katan was a liar and a fraud, would she have found her way home to the Mandalorians sooner? Would she have found her mother years ago? Would she have been able to help the tribes reassemble and march out into the sun earlier?

Hindsight and what-ifs helped no one, she knew, and what she had now she might not have so much as glimpsed had the story followed a different path—the very child she now carried might never have come to be. But she could adore and appreciate the family she had made out of the broken pieces while still mourning and regretting all that she had lost because of Bo-Katan.

Kanan would implore her to forgive, and she would because she had herself come to believe in letting go of resentment and grudges, but she didn’t believe she deserved her gratitude.

And now…

Now she felt like she was taking everything away again.

She must’ve swayed or something because the next thing she knew, Paz was beside her, an arm around her back for support.

“You should rest,” he said to her, gently. Then, turning his head, he addressed the crowd, all of whom looked rattled and lost, abandoned and betrayed by their leader. “Are you just going to stand around and force the Mand’alor’s pregnant riduur to stay up on her feet? Where’s your sense?” he snapped. “Get her a seat!”

“I’m fine,” she protested.

Whatever embarrassment she was primed to feel was instantly eclipsed by amusement as she watched the camp bolt into action. At the sound of Paz’s booming, authoritative voice, they began scrambling to fetch something, anything for her to sit on. This one grabbed a crate, that one grabbed a barrel, someone yelled at someone else that, no, a weapon kit would not make for an appropriate seat.

At last, a stocky, balding Mandalorian came scurrying over, carrying a small bench like one from a dining set. It even had a threadbare cushion (which, to Sabine, may as well have been plush velvet—she was beginning to feel like she could indeed use a rest…)

“Apologies, M’lady,” he gushed as he set it down, bowing his head and wringing his hands as he backed away, looking every bit like a pet whipped into submission.

“Thank you,” she said. And, because it was the kind of thing Din would say, she added: “This is very kind of you.”

The man looked confused by her words. His eyes shifted and he didn’t seem to know how to respond so he bowed his head again.

She accepted the seat and the moment she was off her feet, the lightheadedness abated. Unnecessarily, Paz helped her to sit. He was hovering, she realized, the exact same way Din did.

“Everything okay?” Omega asked as she came over, brow furrowed.

Sabine took her helmet off, sighed, and then nodded. “I’m fine, just… got a bit dizzy there.”

Omega’s eyes shifted as she examined her expression, mouth pressed tightly closed. “He’s going to be alright,” she said, earnestly.

Sabine felt her throat close up and the edges of her eyes prickle. “I know. He promised. And he doesn’t break his promises.”

She turned her eyes to the sky. Somewhere amidst her episode, the two ships had disappeared, absorbed by the sky just beginning to blush with morning colour. Her heart sank as she realized she had missed him; she hadn’t watched until the very last glimpse of him…

But he had promised.

She held onto that.

“It’s… something more than that,” Omega said, her voice shedding some of its certainty—not in that she didn’t believe what she said but more like she didn’t know how to explain why she believed what she said.

“Another one of your Force things?” Paz ventured, sounding a tad derisive and yet curious at the same time.

“A crude description, but applicable,” Ezra said as he rejoined their group, Grogu hovering alongside him. He glanced to Omega, the most subtle of knots tying his brows together in the middle.

Had she not known him so well, Sabine could have written it off as nothing significant. But she had grown up with him and in those years that they forged their bond, she learned the different shades of his expressions like a secret code.

More than just what she saw on his face, it was what he said—and what he didn’t say—that stoked her anxiety.

“What are you sensing?” she asked him, point blank.

He didn’t look at her right away. He looked to the sky first, eyes catching, no doubt, on the now invisible ships.

He seemed to turn to stone for a moment: so unnervingly still was he, like he focussing, listening, cracking a puzzle they couldn’t even fathom. Then he exhaled, his breath emptying in a quiet rush, his shoulders losing their hard lines and Sabine supposed he had found all the answers he could reach.

When he turned to her, she felt a wave of peace. As it first washed over her, she felt the tension unspool and some voice in the back of her mind questioned why they were so worked up to begin with, but as the second wave reared up, she realized he was projecting it on purpose and she barricaded against it.

She was Mandalorian.

If she was going to feel something, she was going to feel it all: pure, raw, and complete.

Ezra pulled out a small, apologetic smile.

“Prepare yourself,” he said. “This next part isn’t going to be easy.”

. . . . .

“Chopper, open the comms, broadcast channel,” Din instructed the droid, who had dutifully remained at his station all this time, ready to signal for help or provide a quick get-away.

Chopper offered one curt noise to confirm the order and Din took the following whir of his scomp as assurance he was doing as requested.

The comm beeped just as they lost sight of the other Kom’rk in the clouds.

“Kryze. Bo-Katan,” Din implored, softening and sobering his tone. “This is not worth dying over.”

He expected his words to hit the proverbial wall.

In the beat of silence that followed, he believed they had. She could have ignored him, or she could’ve jammed her own comms so even a broadcast message wouldn’t reach her.

But then a small chime came from the console, indicating a response.

Promptly, Chopper opened the other end of the channel.

“You’re just afraid to see our world is perfectly safe because it will expose your lies,” Bo-Katan spat, none of her vinegar diluted.

“I’m afraid I’m going to watch as you and your followers die horribly yet needlessly,” Din countered.

“If we do die, we die as warriors, taking back what’s ours.”

“This is not a fight you can win!”

“And what would you know? You never fought for our world.”

He blew out a gruff sigh and shook his head, despair and defeat washing over him.

Outside, the clouds ebbed away, the shy glow of sunrise fading and muting as they climbed into the black. As they breached the outer layers of atmosphere, they again caught sight of the other ship, hurtling towards the main planet.

They didn’t really see the stars; all they saw was the noxious, verdant expanse that Mandalore had become.

This was closer than Din had ever been to the planet before.

Up this close, he wondered why they had ever even needed the scans to tell them anything: one glimpse of the thick, swirling clouds and all the disturbing colours therein were enough to convince him the world was drowning in poison.

He expected Kryze to just dive right in.

But the fighter hung there a moment, looking like a toy that had reached the end of the string which held it off the floor.

What reason was there to pause but to conduct another scan?

It was enough to raise his hopes and he held his breath, waiting for reason to breakthrough, bowl the determined disbelief over like the flimsy wall it was.

But then, too soon to have completed a fresh scan and comprehended the results, she forged ahead.

Din couldn’t think of anything more to say.

He was out of ideas, out of rope to throw to someone so resolved to lose themselves to the darkness.

Either Ursa detected that or she simply determined now was her turn to speak, because she opened the comm at her station and reached out.

“Bo-Katan Kryze,” she addressed her, formally and yet with a faintly warm tone somewhere in the neighbourhood of the voice Din knew to be reserved for only friends and family—the voice he realized she had used with him even before he met Sabine. “I used to serve alongside you in the days of the Death Watch,” she said. “We were both there in the throne-room the day Pre Vizsla fell. I remember how you cried, I remember what you said when Maul claimed the throne: ‘No outsider shall rule Mandalore.’

“Din Djarin is no outsider. He is as Mandalorian as you or I. Being of House Vizsla and winning the saber in combat, he has twice the claim to the throne than anyone else. Why can you not accept his rule?”

“He’s a foundling,” was Bo-Katan’s reply.

So simple, so straightforward, so contemptuous, like his broken and reconstructed lineage—a thing she was directly responsible for—was a mark against him, something to be ashamed of, something that made him less than all other beings. It spilled acid through his veins, fuelling a corrosive indignation that ate at his innards, but he kept his mouth clamped shut, a part of him curious to hear whether Ursa would defend him or express agreement with Kryze.

“Tarre Vizsla was a foundling. We all descend from foundlings from one place or another,” Ursa recounted, her tone as level and instructive as ever he associated with her, a teacher as much as she was a leader. “Had our ancestors not integrated adoption into their ways, none of us would be here today; all our ways would have faded into history. The foundlings are the future and the future has arrived. Why can you not step into the light of this new day? Must you sleep on forever?”

“Why must I take anything from you?” Bo-Katan snapped, venom dripping off her words. “You’ve abandoned our ways and thrown your lot in with his cult. There’s a reason we shed the ancient way. We’ve outgrown it. We’ve transcended.”

“Have we? All I see is back-sliding. How is holding onto a decayed world transcendence?”

It was a valid question, the kind that forced one to confront reality. Though Din was firmly on this side of the debate, it made even him stop and think.

But for the one it was intended it may as well have been a gust of formless, meaningless wind.

“Save your preaching; I don’t need your approval. Mandalore is mine.”

And with that, the comm cut out.

Din watched as Kryze’s ship dove into the inky atmosphere, the swirls of black and green swallowing it instantly.

“Is she still showing up on the radar?” he asked.

“Yes,” Koska answered.

Din shared his gaze between the planet outside and the screen embedded in the dash.

A single blue triangle symbolized Bo-Katan’s ship. It flashed as it crossed lines marking intervals of distance, keeping the rhythm of an unaffected heart.

As it breached the atmosphere, it began slowing, meeting the kind of resistance she could not pierce by being obstinate and determined.

His throat ran dry, his heart constricting.

Starships were equipped with radiation shielding—they had to be to traverse space and especially hyperspace. If it were only a toxic, radioactive atmosphere they had to account for, the fighters would handle it adequately.

But Mandalore was not quiet in her sickness.

The movement of the viscous, nauseating colours covering the planet indicated massive storms, and the fact they could see it all from such a distance spoke of just how violent, how enraged those storms were.

A world-engulfing tempest.

A reinforced bulk-freighter could not last long in the midst of such fury; Din was not a gambler, but he would bet good credits a Star Destroyer would even think twice before dipping their nose in there.

What chance did one little Kom’rk stand?

The blue triangle continued to flash, its progress slowing drastically. Suddenly, it began to judder, as if the screen were glitching. Its progress stalled.

Without ceremony, without a sound or a show, the little blue triangle blinked out.

Din shut his eyes, his head turning away.

“Report,” he clipped out.

“No life-signs,” Koska answered, her helmet’s modulator doing its best to keep her voice neutral.

He breathed out, soundlessly.

That was the only way he could describe all of this.

Silent.

It seemed so wrong, so unfitting that a life which had left such dark stains on the lives of myriads throughout the galaxy should end so quietly, like a raging wildfire suddenly meeting an ocean.

Perhaps she had screamed and cursed in her final moments but what did it matter? No one living had heard a single gasp out of her. Her distress, her defiance belonged only to Mandalore.

Mandalore is mine.

And so it was.

It was her goal, her mission, her throne.

And now it was her grave.

There was no way to retrieve the bodies or any part of the wreckage, Din knew. To even attempt so would expose them to the radiation and the will of the storms, and he had witnessed enough suicide this day.

The storm would have claimed her, there was no chance she had even glimpsed the surface.

But he imagined she did.

In his mind’s eye, he pictured her landing on a plain of murky glass, the colours of the poisoned atmosphere reflected by the treacherous ground. He saw jagged rocks jutting out of the earth, forming a kind of archway for her to stride under. He didn’t know what the throne-room on Mandalore ever looked like, pre- or post-Purge, but he pictured some hazy equivalent just sitting there, unattended, unclaimed. But he could not see her reaching it. The radiation would’ve sunk its teeth into her the instant she opened the ship’s hatch; it would be generous to let her go so far as to even glimpse her prize.

Some part of him wondered if he should say something over this.

But there was no true desire.

Everything she ever did, she chose to do.

She chose to join Death Watch.

She chose to hunt and kill innocents.

She chose to lie, to cheat, to take and take and take.

And she chose to die for a decrepit throne she had no right to.

Perhaps there was poetry in that, but there was no sense and Din couldn’t see any redemption in such self-destruction. And besides her own soul, she had strung fifteen along with her and now they all together were lost.

He could find it in him to feel some sympathy for them but for Bo-Katan? He would not mourn her.

She was no friend, no ally, she wasn’t even a worthy opponent, exposing her guile, her underhandedness in refusing to face him in a fair fight, opting to let others handle her dirty work for her instead. If she had ever had an ounce of honour, he had not witnessed it in action.

There was nothing more to say.

There was nothing more to do.

It was over.

“Take us home,” he instructed.

Before you come at me: I know Din should NOT have followed Bo-Katan AT ALL. But! I really needed him to see the end of it (and I really needed to show that, yes, the planet’s absolutely a no-go; I can’t just keep *telling* you all it’s poisoned, I have to *show* you)

So, yes, logically, he should have stayed put and left her to her bad choices, but I had to~for reasons~have him follow her

But I was never gonna let him get hurt. That’s important to note.

(And you can all chill about that major character death warning now 😮‍💨)

🎶chapter playlist🎶

Kids in the Dark — All Time Low

Old Scars/Future Hearts — All Time Low

Unbroken — Adelitas Way

The Resistance — Skillet

Bleeding Out — Imagine Dragons

Nothing Left to Say — Imagine Dragons

Without You — Ashes Remain

At the End of Everything — Everlife