Restraint, Kids, Hunt, Reflect, Comfort, Language, Together: Mandalorian: Fic: Reflections on Armor

[jordannamorgan]

Title: Reflections on Armor
Author: jordannamorgan
Fandom: The Mandalorian (+ The Book of Boba Fett)
Characters: Din Djarin, Grogu (“the kid”), Greef Karga, Winta and playmates, Cara Dune, Peli Motto.
Setting: Various. Spoilers through the end of "The Book of Boba Fett".
Rating: G.
Length: 3,655 words.
Summary: Seven vignettes on the theme of Din’s armor, and the rules and complications thereof.
Notes: Each segment of this story fills a different FFW challenge prompt. Respectively, these are: Restraint, Kids, Hunt, Reflect, Comfort, Language, and Together.



From an early age, Mandalorians were trained in the art of stillness. Unlike the constant restless chaos of young from other cultures, a Mandalorian child was not unaccustomed to sitting perfectly motionless for hours. In adulthood, this came to play nicely into their tribe’s intimidating image; but the truth of the matter was that there were some very practical considerations behind the conditioning.

“…So what happens if your nose starts to itch under there?” Greef Karga asked out of the blue one day, studying Din Djarin’s perpetually-helmeted visage in a fit of bored curiosity, as they waited for a client who wished to discuss the details of a job in person.

“I wait for it to stop,” Din answered tonelessly. (He did not sigh in annoyance under his breath. Really.)

Greef raised his eyebrows. “That must take some kind of willpower.” A slight dip of his head, an unrewarded effort to meet a hidden gaze, and he lamely attempted some idea of a joke. “Isn’t that your cue to say ‘This is the way’?”

This time, Din did turn his head to stare at the man. A near-lifetime of experience—including being on the receiving end from his elders far too often—had taught him that even with their eyes unseen, a Mandalorian’s stare was one thing that had a phenomenal power to penetrate the helmet.

It only took a moment of that invisible yet still unnerving challenge to shut Greef up.

Until, three minutes later…

“What do you do if you have to sneeze?”

And yes, Din just might have let himself sigh then.



You must never remove your helmet. That was the hard-and-fast rule burned into the very fabric of Din’s being; yet as an adult, moving among other life forms in the wide galaxy, he had started to realize just how many gray areas and unspoken rules there were about other parts of the Mandalorian image. All he could really do then was follow the example he had witnessed in his elders… and hope nobody ever asked.

Until one day when someone did.

“The grownups say you’re not allowed to take your helmet off in front of other people,” nattered a curious blond-haired boy on Sorgan, nearly a week after the defeat of the bandits and their salvaged Imperial walker. “But what about the rest of the stuff you’re wearing? Do you get to take off anything else?”

“Yeah, like your gloves. Can you take your gloves off?” joined in Omera’s daughter Winta—now a far cry from the spooked little girl he had first met.

Din paused in the act of repairing an old piece of krill-farming equipment. The locals remained more than happy to dote on the visiting heroes who enabled the bandits’ defeat, but still, enough days had passed that Din was starting to feel he should do something to earn the ongoing room and board for himself and his little ex-bounty. The only problem was that casually moving around the village like this made him seem more… accessible than he liked. So when the kid had spotted him all shiny in the late morning sun, and ambled over to his familiar protector… well, naturally the walking squeak toy had lured a whole horde of other inquisitive youngsters along with him.

“There’s… not technically a rule about that,” Din conceded reluctantly. “But the rest of my armor and clothing is meant to provide protection.”

A bright-eyed little girl blinked at him. “But what do you need protection from now? It’s safe here since you and Miss Cara chased the bandits away.”

“It’s… not just that.” Din struggled not to squirm under the weight of nearly a dozen laser-focused young gazes. “Remaining covered is part of the Mandalorian image—the way others expect us to look,” he simplified grudgingly, as a younger boy started to open his mouth. “Not knowing anything about what we look like makes us more…” Perhaps intimidating was too big of a word. “More scary to bad people, so the ones that are smart enough won’t try to fight with us in the first place.”

Busy playing with a spare screw down by his knee, his green companion made a raspberry noise that sounded unnervingly derisive.

Comprehension was dawning on some of the youngsters’ faces, but not all of them. With a sudden inspiration, Din turned and pointed to a bright red-and-orange caterpillar crawling along a fencepost, which his acute perception of movement had automatically catalogued and dismissed a while earlier.

“Listen. It’s like the way a poisonous animal will wear bright colors to show that it’s dangerous, so predators won’t come near it to begin with. Mandalorian armor and gear says the same thing to anyone who might want to cause us trouble.” Of course, that didn’t address the fact that he shouldn’t need to look threatening in this village of people he had befriended, but he could only hope that particular point would elude the children’s minds.

His heart sank as Winta released a very entertained giggle. “But those caterpillars aren’t poison! They’re just colored that way to look like they are, but they’re really harmless.”

“I guess that’s what he means then,” the blond boy said, nodding sagely. “The Mandalorian looks mean on the outside too, but on the inside, he’s nice.”

More accurately, on the inside, Din was mentally banging his forehead against the inside of his helmet.



Armor was not an uncommon concept in nature. For a Mandalorian with a foundling, encountering it could be a teachable moment…

Except Din wasn’t sure just who ended up being taught, or even exactly what the lesson was.

The occurrence also came during their stay on Sorgan. On an idle afternoon, following the kid watchfully as he chased butterflies had led to a walk in the woods together. Din had to admit that their leisurely stroll beneath the trees was kind of nice… or at least it would have been, if everything that moved wasn’t ending up in the kid’s mouth.

Frogs. Worms. Grasshoppers. Grubs. If it hopped or squirmed, the voracious little beast would pounce on it, and have it sliding down his gullet before his hapless guardian could intervene. It was disgusting, but after the embarrassing simile of the caterpillar, Omera had assured Din that there were in fact no poisonous creatures in the region. So Din shrugged his shoulders and left the child to enjoy his snacks. He was getting some decent early practice in hunting, at least.

The Mandalorian had to pause and chide himself for thinking of the kid, even briefly, as if he was a legitimate foundling to be raised in The Way: taught the path of hunting and killing, of honor and tradition. Surely he was much too fragile a creature for that. Rather, he was only an unjustly-targeted mark that needed to be delivered into safe hands. Their association—and Din’s responsibilities regarding him—would go no further than that.

At his side, the kid appeared to have sighted some tantalizing new quarry. Din stopped to watch as little hands clapped down over something on a tree trunk, only to come away clutching a beetle. It was about the size of the kid’s own fist, and its carapace was colored a striking metallic green-gold. That hard shell glittered bright as beskar in the rays of sunlight slanting through the trees.

“I guess you caught something crunchy this time?” Din queried facetiously—and then fell silent in curiosity as the kid made no move to eat his catch. He only turned it over in his hands and studied it with intense fascination. After a long and ruminative moment, he actually petted its shiny back, and held it out toward the tree again with astonishing gentleness.

The moment its waving spiky legs made contact with the tree bark, the beetle grabbed on and skittered up the trunk; and Din stared in bemusement at the little carnivore he had never seen refuse any prey smaller than himself. He bent down as the kid toddled toward him, and when arms were raised in the universal gesture of pick me up, he obliged.

“Didn’t want that one, huh?” he asked.

He wasn’t really expecting any sort of intelligible answer—but he seemed to get one. The kid blinked at him solemnly, and then patted the silvery gleam of his cuirass in a manner that was all too deliberate.

“…I am not a beetle,” Din muttered offendedly.

Still, that moment stayed on his mind for days afterward.



Of course, the shininess of Din’s armor was an entire subject unto itself. Many Mandalorians painted theirs, but he’d found that he just couldn’t bring himself to conceal the magnificence of the beskar he had earned. (Well, and then technically sort of un-earned when he shot up the client’s safe house and stole back the mark he’d just delivered… but hey, doublecrossing Imps was definitely the last thing in the galaxy he would ever feel guilty about.) In any case, rather than alter the perfect gleaming silver of his armor, he was willing to work around the minor complications of essentially wearing a mirror.

Inevitably, it drew attention when he walked in the open. The Armorer had warned him of that when she forged it, but he’d already anticipated and accepted the problem. It usually just meant that a few more people with ill intent were coming at him to be shot or punched now and then, and this he chalked up to target practice. Besides, any beskar-hungry mercenaries he weeded out were thereby eliminated as a threat to other Mandalorians.

Reflections on the polished metal could hinder stealth in some circumstances. However, this had an even simpler fix. It was for good reason that he wore a cloak: he could easily pull the fabric over his armor, stifling any gleams of light that might give away his location.

Those were the only issues of any importance. The other drawbacks Din had encountered were nothing to speak of.

…Quite literally.

Such as the time after a firefight when Cara Dune had leaned a bit closer for a second, checking her admittedly-fabulous hair in the reflection on his pauldron when she thought he wasn’t looking.

He really did choose not to say anything about that. Not only because Cara was his friend, but because that whole little moment was just… too ridiculous to want to think about again.



Din was so accustomed to sleeping in armor that he rarely took any of it off when he bedded down, even in the past when he was alone on the Razor Crest. After the kid came into his life, he still slept in it for some time. Removing even one piece created a vulnerability, and while he knew in his mind that the kid posed no physical threat to him—well, other than magic mind powers that beskar would be no defense against anyway—he still had a deeply ingrained instinct to maintain his guard in the presence of any other living thing.

But then he kept waking to find the kid snuggled against his chest, forsaking pram or hammock or any other sleeping arrangement Din tried to provide him.

The kid didn’t seem to be uncomfortable pressing his soft little body against Din’s hard cuirass. He certainly slept soundly enough, not twitching an ear even when Din picked him up and moved him. Maybe he was just that good at sleeping anytime and anywhere, as children often were.

Even so…

It wasn’t easy, the first time Din removed cuirass and padding to let the kid cuddle up to his undershirt instead. He was tense, and his heart hammered in his chest at the feeling of another living creature moving so close to it. He knew by now that the kid would never think of hurting him, so why—?

Then tiny fingers curled into fabric, and the kid was warm, and the movement of his breaths was a steady soothing rhythm, and it was… nice.

After that, as long as Din was assured they were in a safe and private place, the kid always slept against his unguarded heart.

When the kid… when Grogu was stolen from him, then—except for that brief soul-killing hour when he wore the disguise of a storm trooper’s armor instead—he couldn’t bear to take off a single piece of beskar until after he’d rescued his foundling. It was all he had left of himself, its solidness his last remaining strength, standing between him and everything so no one could see him coming apart.

Yet even with armor firmly in place over it, his heart still felt just as exposed as his face had been inside that Imperial compound, and he couldn’t make it stop.



“You know, I feel like you’ve opened up a lot since we first met,” Peli Motto rambled to Din, as they were in the process of turning a dubious pile of scrap into what was just starting to look like a rather intriguing starfighter.

“Oh?” Din murmured as he focused on stripping a wire. His voice was toneless, but inwardly, he felt more curious about her line of thought than he wanted to admit.

He didn’t know what he was now: only something hollow beneath his armor, severed from everything that had meant anything to him. Bereft of the child he’d loved enough to make himself apostate to his tribe for, uninterested in the work that was all he had known before that, he was just moving numbly from one step to another. He couldn’t help but wonder what Peli saw in whatever was left of him.

“Yeah,” the mechanic nodded with conviction. Clearly oblivious to the empty hole he was carrying around in his soul, she grinned at him. “For one thing, you talk a bit more these days. And you’re a lot more lively when you do talk.” Her hands, one of them gripping a wrench, moved in a vague gesture that reminded him by odd coincidence of the Tusken sign for wandering.

That gave Din pause to consider. Silence and intimidating stoicism was part of the Mandalorian image, but… he was different with outsiders he had truly come to know and trust. He was already aware that he spoke to people like Peli and Cara and Greef much more casually than his taut and formal demeanor among his former covert. It hadn’t really occurred to him that he was also more open with them, somehow warmer in a way than he could ever be with his own kind—but it was true.

Loyalty and solidarity are The Way, he had said… only hours before the Armorer’s crushing judgment of the sin he had committed to save his foundling.

You are a Mandalorian no more.

Of course he had known all along that his confession would lead to such a result. Even so, expecting it was very different from actually hearing the words, and facing the bitter reality of that moment. The things it made him feel… and strangely also not feel, when such a large part of his mind and heart was still occupied by someone more precious to him than any fellow Mandalorian.

He was going to need to think long and hard about what all of this meant for him.

In the meantime, as for the rest of what Peli was getting at…

Come to think of it, he wasn’t just talking more to his closer acquaintances in the verbal sense. He’d actually been doing quite a bit more talking with his hands as well.

Between the concealing armor and the lifelong conditioning to be impassive and imposing, Mandalorian body language was extremely difficult for outsiders to read. Only one who had grown up in a covert could immediately detect its subtleties: the question in the slightest helmet tilt, the exclamation of warning in the tensing of muscles under beskar. With strangers who were unversed in that nuance, their communication was limited to speech, and Mandalorians were sparse by design even in that. It made them seem that much more mysterious and impenetrable…

But it was no good for connecting with a child.

“I… suppose I’d fallen into a habit of gesturing to the kid,” Din admitted somberly. “A lot of the time, I wasn’t sure he completely understood what I said to him in words, so I had to express things more clearly. …I hadn’t noticed that I’ve been doing it with others who are familiar to me as well.”

So it seemed he’d been acting on an unconscious impulse to deepen his connection with the non-Mandalorians he was fond of, the way he had deliberately done with Grogu. That was a hefty realization to unpack—and yet another bemusing piece of the puzzle of what was left of him. He wondered what he would look like if he ever managed to put it all together.

Peli merely beamed at him. “Hey, I’ll take that as a compliment. It’s actually kinda cute.—So have you been throwing any Sand People talk in there too?”

“Maybe. I learned their language early in my travels as a hunter.”

“Huh… Well, if you’ve been visiting Tatooine for so long, you should’ve come around my hangar a lot sooner.” The mechanic’s smile became softer and warmer. It made something ache just a tiny bit in Din’s chest.

Even now, he wasn’t really without people. They just weren’t the ones who had raised him to be a cold and silent killer.

Part of him was not entirely sure that was a bad thing.



It had been an eventful day for Din.

He’d taken part on the defending side of a siege, vowing to stand by Boba Fett to the death… which, truth be told, was just what he’d expected to happen. Alongside some friends and Fett’s pet rancor, they had ended up obliterating the foot soldiers of a criminal syndicate, plus a pair of droids from the darkest pits of his childhood nightmares. And then the aforementioned rancor had tried to use him as a chew toy—incidentally causing him far more damage than he’d taken at the hands of the Pykes. (Because seriously? From blurrgs to mudhorns to Krayt Dragons, animals had always been a lot more dangerous to him than people. …There were probably inferences to be made in this fact that would not endure close examination.)

Yet the chaos of the day was only a blur of noise and light in Din’s memory, as he wearily shut himself in a guest room of the former Hutt palace now occupied by Fett. It was all burned away by the one bright, blazing presence that had come leaping back into his arms in the midst of it all, saving him again twice over—and now lay sleeping peacefully on the room’s enormous bed.

His kid was reunited with him.

He was still unclear on the exact details of how and why. He wasn’t even sure those weren’t questions best left alone. All he understood was that Grogu had chosen to return to him.

There was much Din wanted to say, and more that he wanted to hear—for even without proper speech, he knew he could understand the heart of whatever his foundling might wish to express about their reunion. However, that conversation would wait just a little while longer. In pacifying the rancor, Grogu had exerted himself heavily. He needed the deep, restorative sleep he was currently lost in… and after being fool enough to try to grapple with the rancor himself, Din knew very well that sleeping would do him just as much good.

In Fett’s palace, they were among friends. They could rest here without concern.

Not that familiar paranoid habits didn’t rear their cautious heads first.

Din may perhaps have gone over every inch of the room to check for hidden lenses. He might just possibly have pried off the door control’s access panel and physically disconnected the wiring, ensuring that the door could not open until he reattached it. …He certainly did not shove the bureau in front of the doorway for good measure. Really.

When he was satisfied that their refuge was secure, and they would be safe and unobserved… he slowly, meticulously began to remove every weapon and piece of armor from his person. Beskar gleamed in soft light as it was laid out in perfect order atop a spare blanket on the end of the bed.

His helmet followed last of all, set judiciously in close reach beside the pillow; and then he crawled up on top of the covers to spoon protectively around his child, one bare hand clasping gently over a tiny shoulder.

Big brown eyes drifted open. Seeing the exposed face of his chosen parent, Grogu only smiled and trilled softly, a little hand reaching up to brush against the stubble on Din’s cheek.

…That wasn’t a tear he was brushing away. A bit of Tatooine’s sand had simply gotten into Din’s eyes in the midst of all the action earlier. He must have forgotten to pressurize his helmet, was all.

Then Grogu snuggled sleepily into Din’s unprotected chest, and the warmth and fullness flooding through his heart provided a deeper security than armor ever could.

Beskar could only shield his life from outward harm. It couldn’t give him a reason to care about that life in the first place.

Drowsiness beckoned the exhausted warrior. After lightly pressing a kiss to the corner of a big green ear, Din let his head sink down onto the pillow; and for one rare moment in his life, everything around him and inside him was warm and soft and peaceful.

He didn’t know whether he was still truly a Mandalorian, or whether Grogu would ever be a Jedi… but he knew that right now, they were both exactly what they needed to be.

Father and son.

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2022 Jordanna Morgan