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It’s been full dark for hours now, and the Mandalorian’s ship is about two-thirds repaired. After a minute or two of searching, Kuiil finds the Mando in question sitting crookedly against a crate, one side pressed temple to hip against it. Kuiil has to watch for a long moment before he realizes the bounty hunter is asleep, or at least dozing; his head is bowed, but the fingers of one hand are still wrapped loosely around a component of the main control panel, the parts of which are arranged carefully in the dirt before him.
Drawing back a foot to nudge the crate, the ugnaught pauses. The Mandalorian’s breathing is shallow and a little labored, with an alarming wheeze at the end of each exhale. Now that Kuiil thinks about it, there was no way a person could take a charging mudhorn to the chest and not get injured in some way, no matter how good their armor was. The stiff, pained way the Mando holds himself corroborates this.
Kuiil is still debating whether to unobtrusively wake the Mando or let him sleep when he makes a small, surprised sound and twitches awake. He winces, one hand drifting up to his head before he notices he’s being watched. The helmet tilts sheepishly in the ugnaught’s direction; there’s a pause, and Kuiil gets a distinct impression of owlish blinking.
“...sorry.”
Kuiil pretends not to hear the grogginess in the Mando’s modulated voice.
“There is yet work to be done,” he says instead, not unkindly, and leaves the man to his task.
***
The rest of the night passes without incident, and just as the sun breaks over the horizon, they finish. Dyn offers his genuine gratitude, and accepts Kuiil’s thanks as gracefully as he can. They exchange nods, and soon the Razer is pulling out of the atmosphere and into space. It’s not often a bounty hunter has positive interactions with the locals near a bounty, and Dyn is a little disappointed Kuiil turned his offer down, but he understands. They each have their paths to travel, and his is not one most would walk willingly.
And in any case, the Mandalorian’s path has just become intimately entwined with something far beyond what he’d thought possible.
Dyn forces himself to wait until he’s input the coordinates for a waystation halfway between here and the client and made the jump to hyperspace before swiveling the pilot’s seat to look at the cradle. He can see the tip of one fuzzy green ear peeking out from the blankets. The baby makes a little whining sound and shifts enough to make the capsule wobble, but otherwise stays quiet. Dyn exhales.
Stretching his legs out and slouching down in the seat is painful, and his entire lower back cracks as his hips slide forward. Even without the dim reflection in the windscreen, the Mandalorian looks like shit, and he knows it. His chest plate is mangled, probably beyond repair, his bracers are scuffed and bent, and his rifle has mud in the firing mechanism. Dyn had managed to scour a good portion of the mud off his armor with sand while traveling with Kuiil back to his ship, enough that he no longer looks like a swamp monster, but it still sits stubbornly in the crevices. He’ll have to thoroughly scrub and buff each piece to get it off entirely, so he’ll just have to deal with looking battered and wrecked for a while. More annoyingly, the cloth and leather parts of his gear, especially his cloak, are still absolutely caked in mud. Flakes and scuffs of mud in various states of drying coat the pilot’s chair, and the joints of his armor are stiff and pinched. He also still smells like an unpleasant mix of mud, blurrg, and hot metal. The Mando has rudimentary cleaning supplies in a compartment somewhere, enough to mop up whatever detritus he tracks in during hunts. There’s got to be some kind of brush or soap for removing mud from cloth back there, right? He definitely has armor and weapon cleaning solvents, maybe he can polish at least his new beskar pauldron before meeting with the client...
Dyn jumps when the chin of his bucket clacks off his chest plate. Once again, he had been well on his way to nodding off while still mostly vertical.
Trying to ignore the head rush upon standing, the Mandalorian slowly rises and limps his way out of the cockpit, fumbling for the button on his bracer to activate the asset’s capsule. He eventually finds it and gestures vaguely for the thing to follow. Thankfully, whatever programming or sensors the repulser pods have, they lift the cradle out of the passenger chair and float it toward him without a hitch. Dyn had heard the kid shuffling around and making small, drowsy sounds before, but now it seems to be asleep again.
He makes it most of the way down the hallway before the head rush turns to full-on dizziness; the Mando’s knees half buckle and he staggers sideways into a bulkhead, sending lances of pain through his several broken ribs. Shit. Too many hits to the head, not enough sleep. Nausea curls through his guts, the sheet of overlapping bruises on his back spasming. And beneath it all, the cut on his arm that the kid had been so fascinated by, the one he had most definitely gotten mud into, throbs hot and vicious.
There is a weak, agitated squeak, somewhere outside the fog in his helmet. Dyn lifts his head and cracks his eyes open; the asset is hovering in its capsule, a good two feet above him. He realizes he’s slid halfway down the wall, somewhere between kneeling and sitting. The kid is fearfully peering down at him with its big, dark eyes, awake but weak. Tiny, three-fingered hands grasp feebly at the edge of the cradle. Dyn waves a shaky placating hand.
“Hey, hey, none ‘a that. M’okay, just...”
Even to his own ears, he’s slurring. Fuck. If he wants to be even moderately healed by the time he gets to the client, he’s going to have to treat his probable concussion. And to do that, the helmet has to come off. Dyn looks up again; the baby looks back down at him. It’s no longer squeaking, but its ears are still drooping in anxious misery. He sighs. He’ll only keep the helmet off as long as he needs to. It’s not breaking the Code if the person he takes his helmet off in front of is an infant, right?
If there’s one thing the people of Mandalore know how to do besides fight, it’s get back up after being knocked down. Dyn drags himself to his feet for what feels like the millionth time that day and slides gingerly down the ladder into the living and cargo area. The cradle pod floats silently down after him. Pausing to catch his breath at the bottom, he and the child stare at each other for a long moment. The Mando reaches out a finger like he had in the raider camp, and an impossibly small hand immediately wraps around it.
***
Dyn grasps his helmet in both hands, only hesitating a moment before twisting it off. As always, he’s a little startled by how bright the world is without a tinted visor over his eyes. Studiously ignoring the lift of curious ears from the capsule across the room, he sets his bucket aside and releases the clasps on his bracers to remove them as well. His ribs really don’t appreciate sitting on his bunk and bending at the waist to take off his boots and greaves, but he gets them off eventually. Piece by piece, the Mando strips down to his, thankfully clean, bodysuit and drapes his filthy armor over a crate to be dealt with later.
Medkit open and ready, Dyn shrugs painfully out of his undershirt and surveys the damage. Bruises in fun, new colors cover the majority of his torso, he has at least two broken ribs, though miraculously no obvious internal bleeding, and mild electrical burns arc across the spots where the Jawas shot him. Fishing bandages and bacta out of the medkit, he gets to work.
The bacta he smears across his ribs is cold in a numbing, chemical way; it almost seems like the hot, irritated cuts and bruises flare up in response. The cold will eventually fade to something more soothing, but for now Dyn sucks it up and tries not to shiver. He takes extra care to clean out the now mildly inflamed cut on his upper arm, swiping mud out of it with a disinfectant wipe and liberally applying bacta before bandaging it. He was stupid to let it go untreated for so long, but in his defense, a lot had happened between when he’d gotten it and now.
The Mandalorian wraps his cracked and broken ribs as tightly as he can stand with bandages soaked in bacta, and gives the tender lump on the side of his head the same treatment. He knows from experience that it will take about five days for the bruises to fade and a week and a half for his broken bones to stop paining him. Both would take mere hours in an actual bacta tank, but Dyn has a reputation built on seeming inscrutable and unkillable; a reputation that would be ruined if he showed that the high-paying, nearly impossible bounties were actually difficult, or that he could indeed be badly injured. He had learned very early on in his career how to patch himself, his gear, his weapons, and his ship up with minimal resources.
The child watches him work with sleepy curiosity, peeking out over its mound of blankets, it’s eyes big and innocent. Maybe it’s the broken ribs, but Dyn feels something hot and sharp in his chest when he looks at it for too long. It’s not guilt, exactly, but it sticks uncomfortably in his throat every time the infant is startled or uneasy and looks to him for reassurance. It sticks even more when he finds himself giving that reassurance as though he’s not going to turn the kid in for a profit at the end of the week.
Finally, the Mandalorian is bandaged and patched up to the best of his ability. The painkillers he had begrudgingly taken are doing their job wonderfully, and Dyn barely manages to nudge the bassinet next to his bunk and flick off the lights before flopping onto his bunk and shuffling under his blankets. The child coos softly and his chest floods with warmth, followed as always by spines of uncomfortable emotion. A single, bleary thought threads its way through his head just as he drops off to sleep: he had forgotten to put his helmet back on.