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i-was-bored-so-this-happened · 4 months

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Second Star Chapter Fifteen: The Fireflies

Fandom: The Mandalorian Wordcount: 4.6k Warnings: Description of injury

Okan, Mando and the child land on a forest planet. Okan and the child struggle with the effects of planet-hopping, and to distract herself Okan returns to gardening. After a close call with a bounty hunter, Mando takes care of Okan for a change

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Okan is pursuing a ridiculously frivolous endeavour. Alright, that’s not the phrasing Mando’s going to use when he sees it, but they’re the longest words she can think of to describe the thoughts that will roll around his helmet when he sees it. He’s been gone for almost two weeks now, but he’d sent a message through the commlink he’d given her four planets ago to tell her that he should be back before dark today. He’d been reluctant to give her the comm, it ties him to Okan and the kid, but a couple of months ago he’d come back from a job early in the morning and she’d attacked him out of surprise. She’d landed some good hits, but he thought it best to prevent it from becoming a repeat event.

At least she’s kept the floor of the hull clean, covered in the biggest tarpaulin she could find, he can’t yell at her for that. On the tarp, she’s amassed an impressive collection of paint cans, buckets and empty ration tins. As per Mando’s stipulations, she had waited a week before going to the town market and had only paid with Mon Calamari credits. She’d used her cranky old hoverboard to transport all her purchases herself because Mando had lectured her about trackers on commercial hoverboards. It had taken a while to go back and forth from the market to the ship to the market, meandering aimlessly through the forest for the first three-quarters of an hour to throw off any potential followers, but she’d done it. Four sacks of compost - two dry and crumbly and two moist and dark - packs of draining rocks and drip waterers and plant food, and a crub. The portable kind can rarely be relied on, all spindly metal and plastic, so she’d shored it up with rust-resistant scrap metal and set it up in the kitchen. She’d sacrificed one of Mando’s screwdrivers to punch drainage holes into her chosen containers and spent the last few days potting. Some vegetables she’d found in that same market, some self-seeds she’d pulled out of fruit before giving them to the baby and some flowers she’d uprooted from the woods just outside of the ship. Forest planets are her favourite for the sheer density of life held on the surface.

They’ve been planet-hopping for months. The longest they’ve stayed anywhere is sixteen days, on a ring planet so full of droids and cameras they’d hardly left the ship. Sleep schedules are nonexistent with so many different time zones to keep up with and Okan’s been nursing a headache for the past three days but for now, elbow-deep in dirt, she doesn’t feel too bad. The baby is in the cubby with his wooden snake, still awake. Still. Awake. He’s getting better at sleeping when Mando’s not around, but the constant travel has him all turned around too. Okan’s managed to keep up a steady stream of stories and she’s only hoping he doesn’t notice she’s repeating rhymes. She has no energy for games. At least when she’s doing this she can sit on the floor. Pull one can towards her, fill it with the layers of rock and soil and food and eventually the plant and then shove the can aside to prepare the next one. It’s repetitive work, but it’s nice, using her arms and skills she hasn’t employed for close on nine months.

The hull door creaks and cranks down into position. Okan pulls her hands from the current pot and claps the soil off them, rubbing the back of her hand on her cheek for good measure before she stands and ties her cloak into a sling for the baby.

“What fresh hell is this?” Mando, at the bottom of the ramp. A body is slung over his shoulder like a bag of rice. Okan tries to keep the baby facing in towards her stomach as she settles him in the sling.

“Mando, we talked about this.”

“We did not.”

“About you bringing dead bodies back while the baby’s awake.”

“He’s not dead,” Mando tells her, doing a little jump on the spot to jostle the body. It groans and a leg kicks out, but Mando catches it, “Yet.”

“He doesn’t know that!”

“Would you rather I leave our fuel money in the forest?” Mando counters in that dry, unimpressed way. Okan sighs, blowing air up past her nose and into stray hairs that are propelled upwards for a moment. The baby, fascinated, tries to grab the tendrils of hair. “There’s a clearing about five minutes back. Take him there while I deal with this. Why is he still awake, anyway?”

“It’s the planet-hopping,” Okan answers, pulling off one glove to wrap tendrils of warmth from one of the lights around her fingers. She’s brought this up before and ended up in a bad spat with the Mandalorian. The subject, paired with their tiredness, has made their silences spiky “His little body doesn’t know what time it is anymore, he’s getting overtired and then oversleeping-”

“Now is not the time-”

“-We need to stay somewhere, Mando, actually stay. Just as we adjust we move again, I...we can’t keep up with this.”

“I told you to leave.”

There’s a moment. That swift, silent battle between Mando and Okan that always takes place when he gives her some kind of order. It’s always silent, but it’s always fierce. It always looks so one-sided, too, the tin can not giving any indication of what Mando’s thinking while Okan is utterly unable to hide any emotion she experiences. The being over Mando’s shoulder groans again, and Okan surrenders. Still, she stalks rather irritably past Mando,

“Barshtok.”

“Hu’tuun.”

Insults are traded, and the baby whines in confusion, not understanding why the adults aren’t happy to see each other. Behind her, there’s a scream. Okan flinches, her shoulders hunching over as she holds her hands over the baby’s ears and starts mumbling an old prayer. Her eyes sting. The sound of fists hitting metal fades as the trees do. The clearing’s an illusion of peace, but it’s at least a prettier illusion than the salt flats on the last planet. There’s no peace anymore, not really. Planet-hopping’s no good for anyone. Okan sits down when she reaches the middle of the clearing. She only lets go of the child when he starts writhing and complaining about being held. The little ball of light she’d collected bobs above his head as he explores this new terrain. He might be full of energy, but Okan feels as if her bones are full of freshly-churned cement. There’s a shrill noise, perhaps a bird.

“Bara. Drop it.” The distress call stops, and a sound that’s halfway between guilty and apologetic replaces it before a bird takes off from the ground, squawking. “Thank you,” The orb of light bobs along as the baby flees the scene of his own crime. Okan picks a strand of grass that had been tickling her elbow and tears it into strips as long as her hand. She picks the widest of these, holds it tight between her thumbs, lifts it to her lips and blows hard. The effort brings an edge to the dull pain in her head but she’s rewarded when a high, sharp, almost deafening sound comes from it, like a bird call but less scared than the one she’d just heard. The baby stops in his tracks, makes one of his curious little noises, and starts trundling back towards her, babbling away. As the grass quacks again, he pops up at Okan’s feet. He’s smiling, and there’s no way Okan can’t smile back. She reaches out to rub his head with her gloved hand, but pauses when she notices the little insect trekking its way along the join between his ear and his head. Okan holds a single finger out to it, and the insect crawls onto the glove where her fingernail would be, “See this? It’s a Tuli-bug. Rest of the galaxy calls ‘em fireflies,” Okan tells him, watching as it makes its way up her finger. She waits until the child’s fully focusing on it and then blows gently on the bug. Startled, it takes off, and as it takes flight its rear end glows yellow. The light reflects in the child’s wide eyes, and he watches it like a cat waiting to pounce on a mouse until the insect dives back down into the grass. The child runs after it, wanting to find it, and disturbs other fireflies as he squeals through the grass, leaving a glowing trail behind him. Okan laughs as he runs, but stops when she realises what he’s really running to. Then she turns back around and pulls her knees to her chest, looping her arms around them.

“Hey, kid. Are you, uh, having fun?” The child gabbles on and on, giving Mando an answer he can never understand, “That sounds. Great.” The child, thrilled by the offering of conversation, goes on even louder and more enthusiastically. He’s winding up again and the idea of staying awake for another night cycle has Okan pushing the heels of her hands into her eyes. The child scuttles past her when he’s done talking to Mando and back into the grass

“Shik’da, ha’be.” Okan passes her covered hand over his head when he passes and flicks her ungloved fingers to send the ball of warmth after him. Mando shuffles through the grass, hardly lifting his feet. She watches another firefly wander up her arm, battling the headache that’s trying to split her skull in two. Eventually, Mando decides to sit down, and lands maybe two feet away from Okan. The firefly takes off. Fresh silence punctures the faux peace of the clearing while they watch the child trundle about.

“You’re right.” He says. Quietly. Like very distant thunder that may or may not be real.

“I’m right about a lot of things, but you don’t tend to say it.”

“I’m not saying it again.”

“What was I right about?”

“Planet-hopping,” Mando admits. The baby squeals as he races after more fireflies, rustling through the grass and flushing even more of the bugs out, “It’s not good. For the kid,” Okan waits for him to continue in the short, simple sentences she’s used to, “I’ll take the trafficker into the town tomorrow and we can stay here for a while.”

“Stay?” Okan echoes, trying to coax more out of him and letting herself look at him now. He stares resolutely ahead.

“In the woods. Until the money runs out. Or the Guild finds us,” he explains, “Maybe a few months. It’s quiet here. Relatively safe. Out of the way.” Okan lets the following silence hang to show that she recognises this decision and is grateful for it before she speaks,

“Thank you, Mando. For listening.” She doesn’t need to say any more. The best way to respond to Mando is in the way he speaks to her: short statement to short statement, long explanation to long explanation. Silence softens.

A giggling, squirming, weight slams into her. The child, trying to hop up and onto her legs or into her arms and instead knocking her over. There are twin shrieks as she tips, both from Okan and from the surprised baby. The shrieks turn to laughter, loud, genuine, joyful laughter as Okan catches hold of the baby and falls back into the grass. As they disappear into the green, a cloud of glowing yellow fireflies billows up around them. Okan stays where she falls, laughing hysterically. The child, figuring out that this is a happy reaction, squeals with her. Okan misses trees. She misses rolling around in the long grass and flattening it, unable to shake of the giggles. She misses making Tuli-bugs light up and making grass whistles. So that’s what she does.

***

The moons have risen fully now. Okan knows she’ll be in almost complete darkness, but Mandalorian armour isn’t so easily disguised under moonlight. There are four or five black dots on his helmet. Okan adjusts her bag and moves closer to him, “Can I touch your helmet? Not to remove it. Don’t nod or shake, just...yes or no.”

“Yes.” He sounds confused, but he agrees, so Okan shuffles closer and slowly reaches towards the tin can. She rests the back of her hand against the helmet until the little family of fireflies crawls onto her knuckles.

“Tiene-tuli,” Okan taps the left side of her chest, where a human heart would be, and holds the insects up for Mando to see as they travel up to her thumbnail, “Tuli-bugs.” She does the same thing for him as she’d done for the baby, blowing air towards the insects until they glow yellow and take off, looking for a more sheltered place to land. Another firefly drifts lazily between Okan and Mando, their heads turning to follow its path. Mando’s head turns. Okan watches the side of the helmet and wonders what his face is doing. Not what it looks like, but what emotion it’s conveying. When he’s annoyed his knee pops out and his head tilts to the right and when she confuses him the helmet twitches left. When he’s angry he looks down at her with his hands on his hips like an elder giving her a good scolding. When she’s done something right he gives one of his tiny nods and sometimes when she makes him laugh she hears cracks of it through the modulator. She still doesn’t know his tell for when he’s smiling.

“What exactly were you doing in the hull?” he asks a short while later. It’s too dark for them to remain outdoors and they’re almost back to the ship.

“They won’t stay in the hull. There’s a space marked out in the galley for them. It’s food, mostly…” Okan stoops to allow her fingers to follow the curl of a fern, “I wanted something to do with my hands, and I missed using them with the earth. They’ll freshen the air on the ship, and they’ll look nice,” she can’t quite come up with a reason for the plants that she thinks Mando will agree with, but she looks at him all the same with her plea. Her eyes are dark and deep and hold the image of more fireflies that are crawling over Mando’s helmet, “Can I keep them?”

“You used your wages on the plants?”

“Well, on the soil and the-” she stops herself and backtracks, “Yes. Yes, I did. But I followed all the rules. Calamari credits, misdirection in the woods.”

“Then it would be a waste of money to get rid of them. And a waste of your time potting them.” There’s the nod. Agreement. Okan smiles and the firefly reflections in her eyes squish into stars. Her hand finds his elbow, the fabric between plates of armour, and she squeezes it tight for a split second before letting go to tap the column of her neck twice with two fingers. The latter gesture is Nokanish and shows gratitude, conveying deeper thanks than the words themselves. The other gesture, the hand on his elbow, carries no cultural message that he’s aware of. It’s something she likes to do on rare occasions: a squeeze of the elbow, nudge of a foot, flicking her fingers against his beskar to hear the ting sound and smile at it. In the cockpit, when she wants to look at what he’s doing, she sets her forearms on the back of his chair and leans over him, and once or twice her fingers have trailed over his shoulder and onto the fabric of the cowl that sits about his neck. He hasn’t been able to find the reason behind it yet, hasn’t asked. She’s learned how to read the movement of his shoulders for the most part and always withdraws the moment he tenses, taking the baby with her if he’s sitting on Mando. At this moment, as the Razor Crest comes into view and Okan sends her light back to its source, the baby flops over Mando’s arm and waves his hands in the air. Still awake, damn him.

“I’m not lifting all those pots for you.” Mando tells Okan as they step back into the hull. He throws the switch to close the door and lights flicker on.

“I’ll manage,” Okan assures him, adjusting her cloak. When she turns her back on Mando he sees she’s modified it into yet another iteration of a sling, one he’s seen before that holds the baby close to her back, “Pop him in so he won’t bother you.”

“I can take him while you do this.”

“It’s alright, he might fall asleep if I keep him still and warm,” Mando slots the baby into place, then holds him there while Okan tightens the straps to secure him, “Might. Besides, you’ve been gone for almost two weeks, you need rest too.” Well, the child does seem content. He’s not complaining about his new perch at least, making small ooh sounds when Okan squats to pick up a bucket. She doesn’t show any struggle with the weight, and by the looks of the containers none of them should be too heavy for her by Mando’s estimations. She’s strong, but she knows her limits. She turns back to Mando with a pleased expression and the large bucket held in front of her, “Goodnight, Mandalorian.”

Mando tracks through the ship to resume routine, checking on every crate and door and tool. He doesn’t move them from wherever Okan has put them, he’s just making sure they’re still there. There’s a screwdriver he’d left on the workbench he can’t see anymore, but that’s a problem for tomorrow. She doesn’t touch the cockpit when he’s gone, so his tour through it before he retires to his room is brief. During his scans of the ship he does pass Okan several times, but she doesn’t try to engage him in conversation. She has said goodnight and marked the end of their time together - they exist in their own individual space until the morning. Her exchanges with the child are low and lilting, trying to lull him into sleep. Mando can hear them pass his door when he’s in his room. Okan goes back and forth and back and forth from hull to galley and back again with each plant while Mando strips himself of armour and settles to studying his datapad. He can tell when the baby finally falls asleep, because Okan finally stops talking. She shuffles up and down for a few hours yet before the door to her own room slides open and closed, and then Mando can’t hear anything.

***

The plants are restricted to the galley for about a month to adjust to their new homes and surroundings before Okan starts to move them around. The first is a plant in the refresher, a tiny thing in a ration tin she suspends from a hook in the ceiling that releases a pleasing smell when the water showers run. Then a second ration tin set between the two sinks in the same room that’s only allowed to stay because Okan has promised it won’t climb up the wall as it grows. Several have been relocated to Okan’s own room, the ones that will produce colourful buds, lined up along the blank wall opposite the door. A couple of pots, heavier ones that can be attached to the walls via hooks or ropes and trusted not to slide around during jumps, have made it into the corridors. Between them, the child’s toys and Okan’s blankets, it’s now fairly obvious that other people live on the Razor Crest. Mando’s been avoiding thinking about how he feels about that in case it’s angry. He doesn’t have reason to be angry at them.

He’d listened to Okan and they’d stayed on the forest planet for several weeks more. For the most part, they stay on the ship in the woods. After completing each job he manages to root out Mando moves the ship to a new region of the planet so they don’t risk becoming fixtures as they had in Sorgan. Unfortunately, there aren’t many jobs to be had but he and Okan are experts at the art of laying low and finding menial tasks to fill their days. She doesn’t object to moving over the planet’s surface as much as he’d worried she would, rather she relishes having new spaces to explore. She always does, no matter what sort of planet they land on, but he can see forest planets are something special to her. He’d have to be blind not to see that.

Once she has their routine down, she sticks to it like glue. Every morning, the first Mando hears of her is when a door creaks open and he leaves what he’s doing to find her sitting on the hull door or directly on the grass in her nightclothes, her eyes closed and her face upturned to the sun to absorb the light and warmth. If uninterrupted, she’ll sit like that until the child wakes up. Mando never interrupts her. Through the rest of the day he can mostly track her by sound as she talks to the baby, and if she goes out of earshot she tends to leave her commlink open so Mando can hear if there’s any trouble. So far, there hasn’t been. Mando himself does as he always does: tidies the ship, cleans his armour, maintains the repairs, works out their next three or four bolt holes for whenever they have to leave this place.

Today he’s woken from a few hours of stolen sleep in the cockpit by Okan’s voice, as he so often is. The difference this time is that it’s coming through the commlink. She’d left with the child in the morning, but now the sun hangs low and blood-red in the sky.

Mando. Mando, she stretches out the first syllable in the sing-song voice she uses when she doesn’t want to alarm the baby, wake up and let us in…I really hope you’re asleep and not just ignoring us, the comm is in her chair so he pushes himself upright to twist around for it, but spies movement out of the windows ahead of him, Aha! You moved. You see us? She’s waving from where she stands at the treeline, big arcs of her arm over her head. It’s a good thing her cloak is red, it’s what distinguishes her from the woods. Mando scoops up the comm her voice is still filtering through,

“I see you. Disengaging ground safety protocols.” he tells her. Confusion sprouts when he sees Okan check her surroundings before she moves, and when she does she darts from tree to tree. It’s odd.

Got a blaster on you? Just in case? She asks, as though there’s any world in which Mando isn’t armed at all times. The question is more than enough to alarm him. He doesn’t ask why, just drops down the ladder and triggers the door. He slinks down the ramp, pulse rifle ready. Okan moves quickly, zig-zagging through the trees.

“What am I looking for?” he asks when she steps onto the ramp. He chances a single glance at his companion - the child is held tight to her side and seems fine, but Okan’s hair is falling messily out of her hood and past the shadow of the fabric he can see bruises. “Who?”

“A hunter,” her voice still warbles up and down and he understands now, if she sounds panicked the baby will panic. She moves swiftly past Mando to put the child in the cubby, up in his hammock, and closes the door on him before taking up position behind Mando and peering over his shoulder. With the close of the cubby door her voice straightens out again, “Guild. She’s dead, but I don’t know if there’s anyone else. I’m not sure we weren’t followed, so I thought I should get you out here-”

“You thought right.” Mando tells her. He steps backwards, and she moves with him. She closes the door when she’s told to do so and Mando climbs up into the cockpit. They’re off the ground within three minutes, and sub-light within seven. Okan opens the door to the cubby but the baby’s comfortable in his hammock so she leaves him in favour of sinking down onto the bench by the hole in the wall herself. Steadying her breathing, she pulls her bag onto her lap. When she hears the rattle that signals Mando dropping back down into the hull she lifts her head and lets her hood fall. Blood leaks from a cut through her eyebrow like oil.

“I’m sorry. Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“What happened?” Mando asks.

“We went back to the pond. I shouldn’t have, I shouldn’t have gone back and we stayed too long-”

“Okan.” He doesn’t sound upset or angry, just trying to keep her on track.

“It wasn’t that we’d been seen and reported, she had a fob,” Okan finds the thing in her bag and tosses it to Mando. She’d crushed it under the heel of her boot but he can still see what it was. Her medical pack follows the fob’s path out of her bag and she starts probing uncertainly at her face with one hand to find where the most pain is. There’s a bad scratch on her leg just above her knee, her trousers ripped, “Sprout didn’t get hurt, just scared,” The third item to be pulled from the bag is undoubtedly the weapon that had inflicted the wounds, complete with Okan’s black blood drying on the blade. The handle is slightly curved for ease of grip and the blade is roughly the length of Okan’s arm. It holds three waves in the metal. Mando’s heard various names for these types of swords of course, but the simplest that Okan will understand is a flame-blade, the metal imitating the wiggling of a lively candle. She hands the sword over to Mando, who puts it in the weaponry case on the wall. Out of the baby’s reach. “Oh damn.” Okan has found the cut on her face and seems surprised by the blood. She pokes around it to try and figure out how big and how deep it is, but she’ll struggle without a mirror. Mando steps from being in front of the weapons cabinet to standing in front of Okan and holds out his hand. Her eyes flick up to the helmet, a little confused, but then she tilts her head further up and lets Mando prop the orange ends of his gloved fingers under her chin.

Her medpack is open and well organised, it’s not difficult to find what he’s looking for: clean cloth, damp wipes, something in a dropper that prevents infection that he can’t remember the name of at this precise moment. With one hand he holds her chin and with the other he cleans her face. Wipes away the dirt of the day to better see the evolving colours of the bruises, harder to make out through brown skin. She lets him. She doesn’t even say anything, just looks up at him and stares at the helmet in that way that almost tricks him into thinking she can see his eyes. She does her best not to frown when he reaches the cut through her eyebrow and instead clenches her jaw, purses her lips. He’s gentle, pausing between wipes and drops to let her breathe the pain out. He has to clean that side of her face again once he’s smoothed a sticking plaster over the scratch because of how much it had bled.

“I’m sorry you got hurt.” Okan can count on one hand the amount of times Mando has outright apologised, said the words I’m sorry in the time she’s known him. His voice is as soft as the movements of his hands. He’s got that caring tone about him again. She lifts two fingers and taps her neck. Thanks.

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