#idk should paz really mount din in front of a live audience?

[bellsyafterdark]

I don't remember hearing about a pyramid head Paz au, would you like to talk about that one a bit? I only really know the basics about silent hill but I am 👀 about that concept anyway

You're on Twitter? Who are you? Drop me your name so I can find you 👀

I am so stupidly thirsty for contemporary renditions of pyramid head-- not the stickly original, but the dead by daylight murder muscle with a helmet version just--

Behold 🤤

He's the physical manifestation of a specific character's desire for punishment over his guilt for something terrible he did, I won't spoil for those who want to play the game though it's been out for decades.

My interpretation was much simpler (maybe to his discredit). A canonical divergence from the end of Mando s2 and before tbobf was released, I started this for a friend who shared both my Pyramid Head and Paz appreciation, but then I did the typical thing of overstuffing it with potential plot and got stuck. I mean... theoretically I could post this as-is but I didn't even get up to the post-battle (potentially public battle?) horny, which was the whole point.

You can read the set-up under the cut.

///

“You said you were going to look for your people.”

Mando shifts uncomfortably. “I said… I might.”

“What if I told you we found one… but there’s a fee to pay?"

cw for religious desecration and distress

///

The pit is busier than usual, by Fett’s measure.

The crowd writhes and bays for satisfaction. Under the setting suns of Tatooine, this evening’s contesters are a Trandoshan and Falleen pair. Vast and towering, their rippling muscles sweat and strain under the rose-gold of dusk. Armour broken, jaws twisted and snarling, they exchange a frustrated glare. Vibro-bladed axe and double swords are hoisted in slippery grips.

With a roar, they charge Tatooine’s champion again. The crowd echoes the ravenous cry.

“Ugh….” Fennec groans, exasperated.

From his high seat of privilege above the surging mass, Fett smiles at Fennec’s bored eyeroll. In his periphery, her gloved fingers glide restlessly on the barrel of her rifle. Fett represses a sympathetic shiver and throws his attention out to the same spectacle they’ve endured for the last week.

He understands why she sighs. It’s a good night for sporting but, from what he’s witnessed, he doesn’t expect a new victor from the contest. Every challenger has brought more showmanship than strategy. It sells.

Every crawler and their mutt in Mos Eisley has apparently spilled into the pit for the evening’s entertainment. By the dress and number in the stone seats that ring the pit of the old palace’s mountainside, the festivities are attracting a larger off-world crowd every night.

And why not? This far out on the Rim, how many places could offer order, bloodsport and a fair bet? How many like Boba Fett could assure it?

Fett’s sentries patrol the highest points of vantage encircling the pit, insinuated in every rung of the mountainside and, at their head by Fett’s side, their captain strokes her rifle, coal dark eyes narrowed at the crowds.

The hint of a storm lingers with the faintest kiss of an electric charge in the air. If Fett squinted hard enough, he would find the ridge of stormclouds on the horizon. Time enough for a few rounds more.

The blended scent of pressed flowers and leather catches his breath, and suddenly Fennec is on her feet. He almost leans away on his throne’s arm, only saving himself by a lifetime of learning to be deathly still and patient. Somehow, Fennec circumvents all those instincts. He looks up and up at the imperious stature of his captain, body tensed on alert, elegant chin angled away.

The butt of her rifle tucks against her shoulder, aimed low. She looks down at Fett and he stares back.

“He’s here.”

A ravenous scream of victory surges through the crowd. The Trandoshan and Falleen slump to the dusty ground, unconscious. The vibro-axe shimmers by the Trandoshan’s twitching hand. Over their unmoving bodies, the huge figure of the champion staggers, unsteady.

They advance one heavy-booted step.

“Hold!” The pitmaster barks and, immediately, every sentry’s rifle is pointed at those broad, hunched shoulders.

Fingers curling round the stone arm of his throne, Fett’s eyes narrow at the spectacle. He forbids loss of life in the pit. Some people need reminding. And others, he suspects, are not in their right mind to observe the rules at all.

“Hold, you big oaf!” The pitmaster shouts as the champion closes the distance to the defeated challengers, another lumbering step.

The crowd’s excitement rises, thrumming in encouragement. They miss the blood of Jabba’s rule. It’s too bad. With a glance from Fett, the sentry by his throne kicks the waiting disruptor cannon online with a whirr and points it down into the pit.

“Boba,” Fennec says.

The cloaked figure at her side has made a considerable effort to soak in every shadow, wrapped in the manner of Fett’s own days of wandering the sands. But the setting sun strikes those few slivers where black robes didn’t cover the brilliance of flawless beskar armour, and Boba Fett has made a career of spotting his quarry undercover.

Fett stands, offering his arm. “Mand’alor.”

The other Mandalorian flinches at the title, black visor glancing at the offered hand like it may strike him. “Don’t call me that.”

Fett smirks beneath his buy’ce. “You earned the saber. You won the mantle.”

It makes him all tingly inside thinking of that proud little princess and her hound losing a coveted relic to a man too humble to care for it. Kryze belongs to an age of Mandalore long gone, whether she accepts it or not.

Mando reluctantly takes his arm, clasping firmly in greeting. He sighs. “What am I doing here, Fett?”

“Champion, hold!”

One of the sentries opens fire and stone chips fly at the booted feet of the last one standing in the pit. Fett glances to another high balcony where a squat Chagrian shoots to his feet, four horns bouncing, furious red eyes finding him across the chasm. A private frequency crackles to life in his buy’ce.

“Fett! You so much as singe my champion and you’ll pay for the damages!”

“You’re in my games, Sir Lori,” Fett growls and closes the channel. He glances to the sentry manning the disruptor, a wiry youth with the best aim among them; their shoulders tense, ready.

Mando cocks a hip, gesturing to the hungry crowd with weary bemusement. “Not my kind of sport. You have a bounty for me?”

They haven’t seen the man since the pursuit of that Imp who took the child; since Fett rounded back to pick up Fennec and learned, after all that effort, Mando gave the child away-- to a Jedi, of all things. No accounting for good judgment. There aren’t many Mandalorians left in the galaxy and even fewer people of true honour worth mention.

Maybe Boba is sentimental sometimes.

“Actually, we have one for you,” Fennec says. “You said you were going to look for your people.”

Mando shifts uncomfortably. “I said… I might.”

“What if I told you we found one… but there’s a fee to pay?" Fett asks.

Mando’s visor turns on him with a stone-cold threat of imminent violence, it’s almost nostalgic.

Fett raises a hand in placation. “Not to me.” He turns and nods to the angry merchant still fuming in his pompous seat across the pit. “Him.”

Mando joins his side, gazing out across the crowd, to the merchant and, finally, down into the pit itself. He considers the hulking figure who looks on the verge of falling to their knees. “That one?”

“He’s won nine nights in a row,” Fennec says from Mando’s other shoulder.

“So what?”

“Nobody does that,” she says.

“I’m flattered you think only Mandalorians could,” Mando sounds unconvinced. “He looks half-dead.”

“The merchant pumps him full of juice every night, keeps sending him back for the winnings,” Fennec says. “People bet high stakes. No one can beat him. But everyone has a breaking point.”

Fett smacks Mando’s chest with the back of a gloved hand. Mando looks at him. Curling his hand into a claw, Fett mimics raking fingers down his pauldron. He points to the champion in the ring. Mando stares. He looks back at Fett. Fett sees the moment he understands, straightening tall and alert.

“Are you sure?”

“Plain as the armour they stripped him of.”

Mando’s tone drips with venom. “You saw them take his armour?”

“I saw what was left of what they didn't sell. They let him keep his buy'ce. Or something like it.” They all glance at the angular helmet donning the champion’s head like a macabre spike of metal; hints of blue among the rust.

“That’s not his buy’ce,” Mando says, voice rough.

"There’s good reward for beskar these days. Mandalorians themselves... also fetch a good price,” Fett says. “In my games, if they pay, they can play."

"He's sponsored the last eight challengers to win him back since he realised he was one of you," Fennec interrupts, treating Fett with one of her droll, fond looks that made warm embarrassment crawl up his neck. "The famed Boba Fett could find a Tusken in a sandstorm but not a worthy challenger. Want to give it a shot?"

Mando studies the champion as he sways, finally dropping to one knee, large hands clutched to the sides of that monstrous buy'ce, as though in pain. Mando's hands clench by his thighs.

"Nine rounds, huh?" He asks quietly.

"They're not allowed to kill each other, but he'll die of exhaustion before the merchant lets him stop," Fennec says. "Unless you get him out first."

Mando looks between them accusingly. "They're your games. Pull him out."

"There are rules. I made them. If I break them… well. I won’t." Fett leans into his shoulder, voice low and conspiratorial. "If someone else won, against the size of the current pot? That man could demand any prize he wanted.”

Mando stares down into the pit. “And if I lose?”

“You won’t lose,” Fennec doesn’t hesitate.

///

Once upon a time, Mando’ade were the galaxy’s fiercest warriors. The stories say their likeness inspired fear and awe. They were revered; respected. And now Din goes to release one from the bonds of bloodsport, like cattle.

How did it come to this?

“A ne-ee-ew challenger!”

Stone scrapes like the growl of a beast as the barrier rolls away. Emerging onto the pit, Din winces with the adjustment of his visor to the piercing rays of the sun setting behind the mountains. He’ll need to avoid that vantage. The roar of the crowd is… intimidating, now encircling him and sweeping up the mountain's height in their number. All those credits, all those eyes, all that manic fervour funnelled toward him.

Him and his opponent.

The reigning champion is back on his feet, towering opposite the chamber where Din emerged. Hunched with his immense shoulders wrapped in rays of twilight, his skin gleams with the sweat of strain and exhaustion. He does not react to Din's appearance.

Din shakes his head in pity and disgust for how the merchant and these games have reduced him: stripped to little more than a flimsy sack draped from torso to heels, fastened with rope. No defensive value. It is stained with more than Din cares to imagine, and he can imagine quite a lot. Had they even let him wash? The indignity.

His poor treatment doesn’t appear to have diminished his stature. He stands just as tall and broad with generous muscle as when he last brandished a knife at Din’s throat.

He can see it now: the signet Boba indicated scarred into the man’s deltoid. A passer-by could dismiss it as no more than three angry slashes, but the ones who wore that saved Din from certain death as a child and he will never forget it, however he may try.

Din finally looks to the giant vibro-cleaver embedded in the ground before him. At rest, it looks like it may have been fashioned from the tooth of a creature whose scale is horrific to consider. A brief image of the krayt dragon flashes through Din’s mind. The blade is jagged and as wide as the man’s thigh, but as tall as his waist. That is a weapon built to saw and separate; when the vibrations come alive it will do its job well and its scale is absurd-- better suited to giants twice their size.

But then, Paz Vizsla always punched above his weight. Commander. Heavy infantryman. Guardian. Now, slave.

Sighing, Din shakes his head, heart tugging at the unfairness of it all.

How did they get you?

Not the reunion he had hoped for, but he'd hardly dared hope for one with any of his people. The thought of confronting them after everything that happened, all he had learned and lost. Would they still take him back? Did he want to go back?

The answer to that changed from day to day.

"Are you still in there?" He calls across the pit.

Paz's huge chest rises and falls with his deep breaths. That vicious helmet is too large to be pragmatic, like the sword, it is designed to intimidate. Din's stomach drops with pity. For that one to go on, the former had to come off; and if it came off….

Somewhere in the crowd, the pitmaster counts them down.

"We're leaving here together," Din shouts across the pit.

I'm not leaving you behind again.

Din lowers his hood and an excited murmur ripples through the spectators.

“What is this? A Mandalorian?” The pitmaster crows, exhilarated. “At last, do we have a worthy opponent? Or will he meet the same fate as the rest? Get ready to line your purses and count it down in five--!”

A klaxon sounds and the crowd screams, counting down. The signal startles Paz into action. Straightening with alarming calm, his meaty hand closes over the cleaver’s handle and yanks it from the ground with a clean shank of sound. Din stares at the power in that movement, conservatively intimidated.

“-- Three--!”

What did they do to you?

Din glares up at the merchant’s balcony and finds the Chagrian glancing between them, face pinched, calculating. He did this. Scowling, Din whips the beskar spear off his back and levels its point at the merchant, tasting dark satisfaction when that blue skin blanches.

You’re next.

“One!”