Chapter Text
Grogu lay face down with his cheeks squashed against the crystal tray that Master Luke, former authority figure, had forbade our princeling from so much as breathing on, such was the young Djarin’s hunger for vengeance.
Grogu starfished, stewing on a long, floating table of finger foods where he lay amongst the shot glasses and tiny umbrellas. A chandelier swung slightly above his head, a kyber import on Lucas the Swine’s part. Its facets glittered off the already decadent outfits of guests crowding Grogu's banquet hall, but schmoozing with the elite was the farthest thing from his mind.
How could citizens of Mandalore be gorging themselves on the public dime when such a tragedy had befallen their long-suffering leader? In their own house of government!
He didn't know how this place was running itself.
Ingrates.
Grogu continued muttering when the ji*zz record skipped. He wouldn't have paid it any mind, but something landed on the back of his ear, triggering, to his great chagrin, an involuntary twitch. They really had a mind of their own.
Grogu looked up, before plunking his face down again and clattering the silverware, of course, to see plaster flaking from the Simbari/Buir duel painted across the ornate ceiling.
Odd.
With another skip of the record, and perhaps a loud clang, it was almost as if a commotion were happening upstairs.
He shrugged it off.
Grogu quickly considered other things, like his room, and the glowing stars on the wall that Skywalker had insisted be charted perfectly so Grogu could find his way around the galaxy when he grew up.
“Neither Buir nor I are always going to be here. We push you because you need to learn. You need to survive. I won't be the last Jedi," Master Luke had said, wiping glue from Grogu's cheek with a damp cloth. "Just like you won't be the last Mandalorian.”
Duh, obviously.
Grogu remembered rolling his eyes.
Silly Lucas. If anything happened to Buir, (unlikely) Grogu fully intended to ascend the throne and take over at least a dozen planets. Why, the vast majority of the systems would be Mandalorian before Grogu was finished with it.
But, looking back, what had Lucas meant?
The Force, the Manda, it made no difference to him.
Of course Lucas would always be around, like Buir and Erdo would always be around. For a monk, Master Luke sure didn’t have any faith.
Had Lucas meant that he, and he alone, was leaving them? That it wasn’t death taking him away, but Lucas’s own choice?
The Jedi that'd left him before hadn't had a choice.
Grogu worried his ears.
“I… love you guys, too,” Lucas's voice echoed in memory.
Love. Jedi weren't supposed to love. Grogu was almost certain that they didn't have the ability, that Lucas wasn't fully old Order. Yet...
This felt achingly familiar.
Grogu couldn't believe he'd kissed the forehead of such an idiot. Of a liar.
How could Luke Skywalker, a supposed celebrity, supposed family, be such a liar?
Jedi left. Why did it surprise him?
The Jedi always left.
The table rattled. It startled the party guests, many of whom had chalked up the Prince-in-Name's undignified position to a tantrum, but all of whom knew the Force when they saw it.
After all, they could never forget Grogu’s fifth name-day party.
The only national incident that came close was Tollomy Winslow’s fifth name-day party.
A collective shudder chilled the room.
“Do you suppose we ought to…?” a guard began.
“Nah,” waved another. “Koska gets paid, what? Eight times more than us and ten times more than the average citizen? It’s out of our pay grade, brother.”
“True,” an Anomid Mandolorian convert nodded, rasping through a vocoder but slipping on his helmet anyway, eyes narrowed as if he didn’t fully believe himself. “Hella true. Hey,” he backhanded a friend. “Quick question, the boss’s new insurance policy—”
“It has fifty OSHA violations. Accept it and move on already, Howard.”
Howard, though, tilted his visor toward a ruckus on the grand staircase. Several humanoids, and one human, came toppling down the steps, and someone with a camera rolled over the railing into the demonsquid tank, an exotic gift from the delegation of Aquaris.
It was the only party Howard had ever been to where the calamari ranked higher on the food chain.
“I… think I’ll go to the bathroom,” he said.
While Howard relieved himself, the rest of the Mandalorian Guard went back to watching Grogu, but mainly out of morbid curiosity.
The duty of babysitting, in their opinion, rested solely on the shoulders of the powerhouse that was Koska Reeves. They didn't know how she did it.
Ever energetic, there were few occasions where the prince-in-name moved like a slug. Only the twitch of his small, beskar-booted toes betrayed a sign of life.
I’ll get even with that Jedi if it’s the last thing I do, Grogu thought.
Or, perhaps more cruelly, he could flex his royal status and get Luke banned from Gucci Amidala.Grogu had already loosed Miliscent in the limited edition section of Lucas's eleventh closet, so he admitted that he may have jumped the ladder a touch too quickly.
Was he being too mean?
Grogu shook his head
“Dammit, of course not! I've got civil liberties!”
Grogu slammed his fists on either side of his head. He sat up, seething, and a deviled egg rolled off the table, veering at an unnatural angle onto the domed head of Erdo’s annoying pet droid.
It was a sassy, squeaky antique that needed some WD-40 in its wheels. Master Luke had gifted it to Erdo after he and the droid had “come to an impasse” in the wake of the holovid scandal.
R2-D2 rolled into chair legs, then a slew of Hutts, squealing
Grogu rolled his eyes.
Really, if there was one thing he couldn't stomach, it was unnecessary dramatics.
“Excuse me." A shadow fell over Grogu, and the sing-song voice of a Togruta rang off the fine china. She bowed her head, dipping slightly with her hand over her heart. "Your Royal Highnesses.”
Grogu saw her reflection in a shot glass and considered her.
Gray montrals, unusual white zigzags down the lekku, and her skin was the most vibrant starfighter-toned yellow. It matched the N-1. Certainly not that stupid jacket of Master Luke’s.
Grogu flopped over, ear splashing into, what he believed (and what Erdo had led him to believe) was an alcoholic beverage called an Angry Bloody Rancor.
“Are you—?” Grogu hiccuped. He pancaked back on his face. “Are you single?” he asked, voice muffled.
The Togruta shook her head.
“I apologize, my young prince, but I have already had the unique pleasure—” Her lips twisted, as there must have been something wrong with the food. A bad aftertaste, perhaps. “—of dating your father.”
Blast! Of course she had!
Buir, that hound still (which also happened to be the song playing over the sound system, so the Manda must've agreed).
Buir got around too much, that was his trouble. Master Luke held him in a choke collar and ruined his game! That Jedi scumbag. Stalling Buir's finesse with charming ladies just because the Jedi wanted Buir all to himself. But what was he doing about it?
“Why,” Grogu pinned his ears flat, mumbling in drunken speech patterns at rising and falling volumes. “I oughta—! The Taung had it right! That mud-scuffing little frack—!”
Grogu hiccuped into the egg salad. It shut him up for a moment, so his sister was thankful.
“Don't mind him,” Erdo interrupted, especially respectful of Togruta. However, she didn't look away from the cupcake icing she smeared across the Keldab walls with her fingers. Ratios, she'd told Grogu. She picked up the tray, offering root beers, tiny umbrellas, Grogu, and all, to her guest, who paid her the honor of, “So this is the bright mind of Mandalore,” and then, with a cut of the eyes to Grogu, “What a well-mannered,” she enunciated the word, “princess.”
Erdo curtsied before placing her brother back on the table. The Togruta mingled back into the phantoms of the crowd.
Grogu was sure Erdo would be busted for it. The wallpaper, a Mandalorian hunting scene featuring his beloved mythosaurs, was ruined. Irreparably ruined.
But desperate times did call for desperate measures.
Edro did calculations in her tiny, horned head, tongue poking from one corner of her fanged mouth as she rubbed her chin thoughtfully.
“Honestly,” Erdo said between curtsying at dignitaries too stupid to tell she was busy. “Buir said you couldn't be mad! You're trash-talking our Jedi to anyone who comes within two feet of you. The media isn't exactly on our side, you know. Wasn't pelting Master Luke’s portrait with houre d’oeuvres enough to calm you down? You even smeared a mustache across his forehead.”
“No!” Grogu shot up but swayed on his feet before falling back on his tush. “And it’s called a unibrow, Miss ‘I know everything about everything.’”
Grogu crossed his arms.
He wasn’t old enough to drink, but Erdo, forever the scientist, theorized the week before that due to the amphibious membranes of his skin, Grogu could absorb gases like a frog.
Which, for the most part, was true.
However, the fumes of a Bloody Rancor are far too dangerous to experiment with on someone of Grogu’s size, so she decided to test out what she told him was “a placebo effect.”
So far the results were spectacular.
“You’re recording this, right?” Erdo snapped her fingers at the antique droid, which chirped (as Grogu was quite a pain) that it wouldn't miss this for the galaxy.
“Great,” Erdo said, then, in an uncharacteristically ambitious move, giggled menacingly while folding hand over hand. “I'm for sure going to win the science fair this year.”
Grogu tripped over the hem of his robe, floundering over a soup bowl.
“Please elaborate,” Erdo encouraged, “on the effects of inebriation on your perceived hand-eye coordination.”
“Father says you're not allowed to curse at me in Zabraki, Erdo! That isn't what he pays your tutors for!”
Erdo patted Grogu on the head, patient. She slipped a macaroon in his mouth, but he spat it into Master Luke’s favorite vase.
But he wouldn’t get in trouble for it. Marshal Vanth also mistook it for a spitoon.
“If Master Luke—” Erdo began.
“That bantha’s butt is no master of mine!”
“If Master Luke sneak attacked you right now,” she said, voice delighted, “what would you do?”
Grogu thrashed his foot into a pork slider that he kicked across the room into a paparazzo's face. It must've had a bone or the Force on it as it knocked the man out cold.
“LUKE! LUCAS?! HE'S SOME NERVE DRAGGING HIS FILTHY CARCASS BACK IN THIS KELDAB—!”
Erdo took Grogu under one arm and planted her hand over his mouth, much as if he were a designer clutch from one of Master Luke's walk-in closets.
“Come now, Gu,” she said, rocking and feeding him green cookies when he tried to bite her. He had to swallow or die since she held his mouth and his nose closed.
Erdo htheorized long ago, in the name of science, that a pretend drunk Grogu would make much the same decisions as a regular sober Grogu, and so far her hypothesis was coming along swimmingly.
“Master Luke still lives here,” she insisted. “Even if he is out with Mara Hot Pants. He'll have to come home. His clothes are here!”
“Temptress,” Grogu muttered, spitting crumbs.
Erdo wasn’t sure if he was referring to Hot Pants or Master Luke.
“We’re not totally defeated yet!” Erdo pressed. While hurt, she held on to her hunch that the entire affair was an adult misunderstanding. “Looking at the ratios, Buir has messed up far worse than this. Don’t you remember when he tried to do Master Luke’s laundry?”
Madalore’s princess did, and in vivid detail.
Erdo had an anxious stomach the entire week after that terrible incident with Dolce and Gabbana.
“When I get married,” she’d told her father, “I’m never going to buy a pair of pants over fifty credits! It’s all fun and games until you have to pay for a divorce.”
Din hadn’t said much after that, but Grogu remembered him laying in the floor.
Grogu wriggled free. He toppled to the floor.
He blinked several times, flinching like the sound of his chainmail shirt striking the marble startled him. Grogu continued hiccuping, rising then staggering until his feet tangled and he had to balance himself on a fallen oyster fork like an old man. He'd never looked so supremely out of sorts.
Pale. Lime, really.
He clutched at his chest.
“In what delusion,” he said, quiet yet strained, “have you found this new hope? Did we even watch the same melody?”
He hiccuped and Erdo’s droid caught him when the fork went out from under him.
“Melodrama, Grogu.” Erdo took a break from her calculations and massaged her tattooed forehead. “You mean ‘melodrama.’”
“BUIR BANNED you from WATCHING those!” Grogu bellowed, scandalized, nevermind he broke more rules than Buir could make. Laws, even. He slid until his feet starfished out, the droid’s metal arms digging into his pits.
Erdo elected to ignore his hypocrisy.
She went back to her configurations.
“Eri, it pains me to say this. It truly does,” Grogu said, ears low and his upper lip stiff. “But Buir’s porg is cooked! Roasted! Singed! And thank goodness it is!” he pointed. “You have been won over by a…”
He scrambled for the vocabulary from Law and Order: Bounty Hunters, just another good thing Lucas had ruined.
How dare he block it on GalaxyFlix? Even Buir didn’t have access, though Erdo had hacked it, the criminal.
“You've been won over by a long con of a sleeper cell!”
Grogu’s head slipped below his collar until only his ears were visible, but this didn’t stop him from tirading. “You saw the brand on Hot Pants’s boots! It’s over! I tell you the Manda's truth: I won’t suffer that Jedi scumbag back in my house! That charlatan! That d—!”
Grogu recovered the full facilities of his speech.
At least he wasn’t hiccuping anymore.
A placebo could only go so far, it seemed.
He fell out of his chainmail and went pacing shirtless while Millicent the Strill tracked him step for step, licking food off of him with her prehensile tongue.
He either didn't feel or didn't care about the slime dripping from his ears.
Grogu glared into the distance, dauntless with his small fists behind his back.
Eri didn't understand, he thought. They'd been wronged! Why, on the one hand, Master Luke had been like a second father to him, but on the whole, how dare he?
Steam practically rolled off him like a swamp fog.
It was a fine thing, the princess concluded, that her brother had chosen to forgo the path of a Jedi. He would have gone full Sith for sure, and then where would they be?
Erdo finally let up on her notes.
Math would never persuade Grogu. He was a man of emotion.
The Jedi knew what was up. Anger did nothing but cloud the mind from truth and pure, cold reason.
“You're making no karking sense,” Erod said, hands on her hips but as calm as if she weren't cursing. “MasterLuke… Well, he must have some reason for what he said! He is kind. He is honest. HE WENT TO MY BES'BEV CONCERT!
For the first time, Grogu stopped fighting her.
“...with no ear protection.”
“What?” Erdo asked.
Grogu cleared the air furiously with his hand.
“Nevermind,” he said. “Alright! Let's just assume,” he drawled, narrowing his eyes with his hands on his hips.
Just like Erdo.
Just like Buir.
“That the fool actually deserves my—! I mean, Buir’s mercy.”
A cold look on his face caused guests more familiar with Grogu to turn on their heels.
Root beer really wasn't that great anyway. It certainly wasn't worth an altercation with the prince-in-name.
Grogu struggled to resign himself to peace when Mandalore itself, the land of his people, was always to be a planet of war!
For the first time, the prince wasn’t wholly devastated by the theory Father couldn’t live forever. Why, if such a thing ever happened, Grogu fully intended to make good on his promise to raze the Skywalker lineage to the ground.
Womp rat bastard.
Just who did he think he was hurting Buir’s feelings like that?
Grogu opened his mouth to ask Erdo how long it would take to program a weapon capable of exploding Master Luke’s lightsaber at a distance so his other arm could be blown off too when, mid-rebuttal, Erdo screamed.
It was a sound as piercing as a bes’bev.
Shrill.
For a Jedi padawan, Erdo had no aim to speak of, and she hurled a cupcake right in Grogu’s open eyes.
He went yowling into a footstool.
“Who in the name of Yoda let you in here!” he heard his sister demand. She shouted for the guards, who, of course, were eating peanuts in the far corner.
Grogu felt around with the Force and catapulted himself into a punch bowl. He popped out of it, eyes burning.
“Good night, Eri, would it kill you to use the Force?” he said, but hated himself for the second he half hoped, for no reason whatsoever, that Erdo had seen reason and been shouting at Lucas, but when he looked, he saw someone else.
And lo, it was none other than the wimp who'd gotten them both into this mess in the first place:
Stout Skirata.
“You!” Grogu whipped out a butter knife.
It’d been sticking in the cream cheese and was a poor weapon, but it would have to do.
If Stout weren't so stupid, Grogu would swear he was in league with someone. The human stood cowering in a very small, admittedly well-tailored butler suit, offering Erdo a stack of grilled cheeses.
Oh.
Oh, he was good. Buir should take notes from him.
But Grogu couldn't be bought! His love for Erdo was second only to his love for his Buir.
Stout smoothly rotated his other arm from behind his back, tilting towards Grogu a bowl of caviar frog eggs. These were no ordinary eggs. These were Trask eggs.
Dank farrik, was Buir lying to him too? He'd said they were illegal! Yet, there they were, delicious.
Drool gathered at Grogu’s bottom lip.
It was Erdo’s batttle, come to think of it. And aren’t Mando’s about fighting their own—and sometimes other people’s—battles? Really, it'd be rude of Miss Perfect Princess to except Grogu to interfere.
He accepted the caviar, ever the gentleman. Grogu nodded, “Thank you, my good sir,” then cleared his throat. "Do carry on."
“Grogu!”
The Princess's eyebrow tattoos knitted together until it looked like two mythosaurs dueling.
Betrayed, Erdo hissed, her eyes a burning amber and the horns in her forehead glistened like diamonds in a demonic tiara, but her imposing presence had the opposite effect on the heir of Clan Skirata.
Stout looked bashed over the head.
“Gee, Jango,” he flushed, whistling. He leaned closer to inspect Erdo's teeth, startling her into a tablecloth whichshe pulled to the floor when she tripped over her own too feet.
Grogu shook his head.
Embarrassing. His sister had always been clumsy.
And, Grogu noted and hoped Erdo, know-it-all, noted too, her little admirer was THE definition of a unibrow.
Grogu trilled at his butler in Shyriiwook.
"You caterwauled, Your Highness?"
Grogu waved his hand.
"Eh, that wasn't a waterfall, Lumpy. Hey, if you have time, could you bring me a—"
Lumpy produced a straw from thin air.
"Damn, you're good."
"Only the best for you, sir."
Grogu sat back, sucking his eggs down, glad that, for once, hewasn't the one making the spectacle.
Where the devil were all of the adults?
On cue, Cobb Vanth bowlegged over.
The blood-red color returned to Erdo's cheeks.
“Marshal Vanth!”
“Little Missy,” Cobb quirked his toothpick at her. It was made of beskar, a gift from Buir, and the sight of it alone could clear Lucas from a room.
Grogu’s ears perked. Why had he been so quick to dismiss it before?
There was a greater revenge than banning Lucas from Gucci Amidala. Of course! Cobb Vanth! The Silver Sand Weasel!
Grogu spat out his eggs.
“Now listen here, youngin’s,” Cobb said, slow. Oh, so very slow. “What's all this here co-motion? Y'all know your daddy,” he said, hazel eyes watering for some reason, “is going through a right rough patch of cacti. Yuns got to show him a heap more consideration.”
Cobb blinked when he looked at Stout, for the first time realizing that the meeting wasn't strictly family, but he smiled.
“Well, now,” Cobb said, sobering between looking at the rattled Mandalorian princess and the peewee heir of Skirata House. “Who've we got here? A friend of yours, Princess?”
“No!” Erdo’s heels clicked. “Vehemently no!”
Cobb knelt beside a hurt-looking Stout and put his callused hand on the boy's shoulder, winking. His eyes no longer watered but instead twinkled with conspiracy.
“Keep the heart, son,” he fake whispered. “Dadgum, if my mama didn't say the exact same phrase to my daddy.”
“Excuse you?” Erdo screeched despite her jaw never closing.
Her hand dangled dangerously close to the pouch storing her bes'bev.
Well, Grogu thought in Cobb's voice. Shoot fire, if the cowboy didn't have him a ship.
Yee doggies.
“It isn't like that, Marshal Vanth!” Erdo protested, then turned on Stout, who looked like he might faint from Erdo speaking to him alone. "And shouldn't you be in a hospital? I could have sworn I creamed your clock!"
"My... family needed me working more."
Stout cut his eyes from Erdo. He ducked behind his pile of grilled cheese, but Grogu held his entire ear open, like a large green satellite, and strained to catch what Stout was saying.
"Her Highness doesn't have to like me back, but..." Stout leaned toward Cobb. “Did your mama really, Mr. Cowboy, sir?”
Cobb blew a raspberry and slapped him on the back.
“If I’m lying, I’m crying, son.”
“Then start weeping!” Erdo bared her fangs to ensure her traitor of an Uncle did just that, but then something peculiar happened.
"Did you hear that?" Erdo asked.
"Yeah," Grogu began. "He said—"
"No, not that. It's..."
Erdo clasped her hand on her bes'bev pouch.
The record skipped worse than ever in the background.
Like a heartbeat.
"Princess Erdo?" Stout started.
"Wind." Erdo’s face turned a sickly pink. "R2, go find Buir immediat—"
The softest tremor dimmed the lights. It tapped, growing louder and shaking vases ever closer to the edge of tables until one smashed, and with it, the sense of safety.
Water puddles rippled.
"R2, get Buirnow!"
There was a collective scream. Fingers pointed to the ceiling, and when Grogu looked up, he saw the chandelier, not swaying, but falling when the largest quake yet hammered the Keldab.
That's no quake,Grogu thought."That's a bomb."
“Clear it, son!” Cobb said, ripping Grogu out of his shock before grabbing Erdo by the dress robes and Stout by the suit. Alarms blared, damped by bodies slamming together in a bid to escape the Great Hall.
Grogu tried bounding with the Force, but when he jumped, it was a pathetic hop. He scrambled, far too slow to survive.
You have to survive,Master Luke’s voice echoed in his head.
What the kriff?
“Your Highness!”
A silver blur barrelled through a crowd running for the door.
Howard the Guard ran over people like he was fighting his way upstream, and he leapt, skidding on his chest armor before barely pushing Grogu out of the way.
His lips parted to say something, but Grogu never heard what it was.
The chandelier fell in a hail of dust and plaster. It blinded Grogu to what became of the Anomid who’d saved his life.
Had he survived because someone else hadn't again?
“Vanth!” Grogu called, coughing. He hadn’t been scratched but his body hurt. “Vanth, what’s happening?”
The room fell dark, lights flashing on and off as a brown smoke laced with the foul atmosphere. Shattering glass matched the sound of coordinated footsteps marching from within the Keldab itself.
Thank the Manda, the army!
But Grogu froze in his tracks when they zeroed in on Erdo, tall and bright enough to stand out.
To be problematic. To be a target.
Grogu weaved, scrambling from left to right to avoid being trampled by stilettos and boots as his heart hammered in his ears. The Mandalorian guests were up and fighting, but they were confused.
What the hell was going on?
“Eri!”
“Seize the Zabrak,” a general ordered in a low voice. Blaster fire pewed off of the man’s armor, but he glanced at it as if it were nothing more than an annoyance. "For the moment, I want her alive."
A coup d’etat, Grogu thought, and the cruel words whispered behind hands came barreling at him like he was hearing them for the first time.
On the tube. In school. From passerbyers in the street.
Jedi should not be in the Keldab.
Cobb Vanth drew his pistols and fired. All the small slugthrowers did was spray off the beskar in shrapnel.
“Princess," Cobb rushed without sparing a glance. "Run!”
Fleeing dignitaries trampled over the table. There was another explosion, and water pulsed from a crack in the squid tank. It swept Erdo off her feet, and someone trying to escape tripped over her and kneed her in the face.
“Buir!” she cried. “Buir, help me!”
Erdo thrust her hand toward the Mandalorian soldiers running at Vanth, but nothing happened.
The soldiers busted him in the nose, but Cobb thrashed until he couldn’t anymore.
“Detain the Marshal,” one officer said, and hooked Erdo under the arm.
“Let go of me!” She whipped her bes’bev from her robes and stabbed the man in the artery exposed at the bend of his knee. “My father is Mand’alor—Oh!”
The soldier backhanded Erdo across her cheek. She further cut her lip on glass when she smacked the floor.
“Get away from her!”
Grogu had been about to say the words himself, but was beaten to it—finally—by Koska Reeves, trailed closely by Bo Katan.
The two barreled in on jet packs, Bo swooping up the soldier hurting the princess before punching the man down, fatally, into the marble.
Grogu heard his neck snap even with the helmet to muffle the sound.
Koska gathered Princess Erdo’s swollen face in her hands, the welted skin swelling from more than just injuries.
“Her throat!” Koska, shouted as loud as her vocoder would allow. “Grogu! Where’s Grogu? Lady Kryze!”
Grogu waddled forward, reacting to the gas more severely. He couldn’t even speak.
“Don’t!” A hand hauled him up, and Grogu was so dizzy he didn’t think he would stay conscious, but the harder his kidnapper ran, the farther they went from the smoke, the better he felt.
Brown bled into gray that bled into blue that bled into green as they bolted through people and rooms and doors.
Grogu's vision cleared, but when he looked up, he realized he’d been rescued by his sister’s suitor.
“Skirata?” Grogu hacked. Nausea racked his frame. "What are you doing? We have to go back for Eri!"
Grogu flexed his hand, the Force siphoning back into his fingertips. The connection was weak.
That gas…
It was the same as the alleyway!
“I wasn’t close enough!" said Stout. "Don’t you think I want to go back for Her Highness?” Stout, huffed, tripping behind a shrub outside of the Keldab’s servant’s quarters but angling his torso so that Grogu wouldn’t be hurt.
The seam of his suit shoulder tore, but Stout was too preoccupied with desperately digging in his pockets to care.
He took out a strange L-shaped tube and pumped it into his mouth, gasping.
The sound of marching intensified.
“Heatseekers! Maybe if I run, we can get to the—”
Grogu slapped one hand over Stout’s mouth and held the other up, concentrating with all his might on Hoth, Spiders, and Ice Planets, until goosebumps riddled his body.
The soldiers marched by, too close and with strill baying at their heels.
War dogs.
Grogu thought only calming thoughts, difficult as it was, and prayed to the Manda.
He could charm animals, but strill were always a hit or a miss.
He exhaled when they raced past their hiding spot.
“Sweep the area,” a woman’s cloaked voice approached on crunching gravel. “The Jedi Princeling couldn’t have gotten far.”
Stout, in a turn of events, held his hand over Grogu’s mouth, faithful to do so even when Grogu forgot his situation and bit the boy.
“You cannot,” the woman continued, “count out his magic tricks. They are not our most ancient enemies without reason.
“Affirmative, ma’am.”
The woman gazed across the lawnscape, the reflection of the fountains shimmering in her visor along with the biodome’s reflection of the night sky.
“There is a third. Do not return to base until it is caught.”
“Skywalker, ma’am?” a ranking officer asked, looking to his unit and back at the commander. “We’ll need reinforcements. You briefed that the plan hinges on disabling the Master, but we’ve yet to get close enough to him to test…"
“Not Skywalker,” she interrupted, then turned, flaring her cape as Grogu’s ears pricked. Screams of “Princess! Princess!” echoed from within the Keldab, but they were older. They weren’t Eri’s guards.
“Solo,” the commander said. “Bring me the Zab, the menace, and,” she sounded like she was gritting her teeth. Her leather glove strained when she closed her fist. “Bring me Skywalker’s nephew. It is a new Mandalore for us,” she said, lifting her head to the simulated stars. “Let us no longer linger in the shadows of our enemies. Kill the boys,” she said. “But bring me the Zabrak’s body.”
Grogu’s blood turned to carbonite in his veins.
Eri.
The gas, was she already …?
The moment the soldiers left, he bolted out of Stout Skirata’s arms.
“Your Highness!” Stout oofed, bounding forward on his belly and whacking his chin on the ground as he nabbed Grogu’s heels. “You’ll die if you go back in there! Didn’t you notice? Your body went anaphylactic almost immediately! It… It must be your skin!”
“I don’t care!” Grogu said.
He couldn’t believe this, but he deeply wanted to see an adult, one that wasn’t gunning for him.
The Zabrak’s body.
Buir. He absolutely had to find Buir.
There had been so many soldiers. Soldiers that Buir, he, and Erdo should have been able to trust.
Lightsabers. Confusion and fear.
Execute Order: 666
No. No, no, no! This wasn’t supposed to happen to him anymore!
Stout was right. It wasn’t lizards, or binders, or anything Grogu even knew.
Whatever was in that gas, it was a bioweapon, designed to kill him, his sister, his annoying cousin, and even…
Lucas.
They wanted to kill Lucas, too.
All the oxygen caught in Grogu’s throat, but it had nothing to do with poison.
He felt like he couldn’t breathe because he did love Lucas. He loved him like he had once loved the few Jedi who would visit and talk to him, and he’d been let down again.
His entire family had been let down.
“I don’t care,” Grogu repeated. “I’m not a Jedi. I don’t back down from a fight when my aliit need me.”
“My aliit is in there too!” Stout shouted, then remembering himself, he hushed. “Strategy wins battles, not impulse.”
“Oh, like when you got your ass kicked by my sister who you definitely don’t deserve?” Grogu countered, glaring at the goose egg Erdo had left on Stout's forehead. "You're a liar, too! You won't go back for her."
Stout stilled, red-faced and frustrated.
“I can’t," he answered, words like scraping rock, "let you go back inside, Your Highness. You can't make me.”
“Oh, yeah?” Grogu held up his hand. “I can make you do anything that I want. You will let me go back inside.”
“No, I will not!”
Hold the comm.
Grogu cleared his throat, raspy though it was.
He tried again, forehead damp from the effort. What? So this stupid kid wasn’t as dense as he acted?
“You, Stout Skirata, will let me, His Highness, Prince-in-Name Grogu Djarin, go back into the Keldab where you will help me save my family.”
“But you won’t save your family!" Stout said. :The entire army is after you.”
Son of a bitch.
"I'm going back," Grogu said. "And you can't stop me."
But there was a bang.
Grogu jumped, bunching the hair from Stout’s eyebrows in his hands when he landed on the boy's head.
A voom. A clash like sparks from an arc welder colliding with gunfire. It was an unpleasant sound unless…
Buir?
But Grogu saw, yet he couldn't be sure.
“Is that...Do you see green?” Grogu asked Stout.
The back door blew off the servant’s quarters, and a violent hum followed the mechanical steps of a boy peppered in red welts as he redirected blaster bolts. He was doing it without the Force and nearly missed a shot aimed at his head when a grappling hook sprang out of the smoke, lassoing around the soldier’s throat and cutting into the soldier’s neck.
A green and red helmet stormed out of the wavering fog, and it ended the last man with a Keldabe Kiss.
The two helmets clanged, but the vibro blade in the soldier’s exposed abdomen finished him off.
Boba Fett ripped it out with the blade slinging blood before replacing it in a holster.
"Ba'vodu?"
“Mr. Fett?” another voice overlapped Grogu’s.
Grogu’s posture straightened.
That voice…
He gave Stout the slip and launched out of the boy's arms.
“Your Highness!” Stout called.
But Grogu skidded the corner, sliding over the gravel until he was certain.
Looking up, uglier than he had ever been before, was his annoying cousin, unrecognizable and barely able to breathe.
How in the Manda was Ben Solo still alive?
“Ben?” Grogu said, incredulously, then turning. “Ba’vodu Boba?”
Fear shot through Grogu’s body.
“Buir. Fennec!”
“We must go,” Boba said, digging his grappling hook from the soldier’s neck and reeling it in. “We do not believe it is the whole governing body, but a large enough faction has the military in shambles. We can’t trust our officers, and they are receiving conflicting reports in your father’s name until even the loyal are unsure who to obey.”
That didn’t answer Grogu’s question.
“Where are my Buir and sister?”
Stout and Ben exchanged a look Grogu didn’t like, and to his great irritation, Boba nodded.
“Hate to do this, kid,” Ben panted, and something sharp dug into the back of Grogu’s neck.
"Ouch! What the kriff do you think you're—?"
A wave of numbness cascaded down Grogu's limbs
The world bled together, in blotches of painful color before fading into dark.
“Take him and go,” Boba ordered. “You know the Way.”
All other sound climaxed at a deafening pitch, until even the ringing became white noise in a blackened galaxy.
Lucas, Grogu thought, and then thought nothing at all.
