Chapter Text
Aay'han cursed as her ship was unceremoniously yanked from hyperspace. Purrgil. Great. The massive beasts meant no harm, but they could seriously kark up a ship if the pilot wasn’t careful and skilled.
Aay’han was skilled, but the careful bit would have benefitted from some warning.
Some fancy flying meant her beloved Bes’bev Laar wasn’t flattened on the side of a majestic, flying space creature. Purrgil vaguely resembled something you’d see on Mon Cala or Trask, some water world with unholy underwater behemoths. Beautiful, but only if you weren’t in imminent danger of crashing into one of their pod. She narrowly dodged one of the young, and a light came on in the section of the console that meant trouble. She didn’t have time to look closer, spinning deftly away from another young. They must be fresh out of whatever spawning ground they used.
Well kriff. At least they pulled her out near a planet. A blue and green mid-size planet, mostly ocean but with sizable landmasses and not a single resolvable com signal. She spun through all the presets, trying to get so much as a flicker before giving up and making for an area that seemed populated by the number of lights.
The strange city didn’t have a visible space port, but they did have a large area with trees and grass and such, and the Bes’bev Laar was equipped to land on just about any surface that could be landed on, so lacking better options, Aay’han set down in one of the smaller clearings in the green space. Nowhere else would have fit the ship, and she did have an emergency stash of credits to pay a parking fine if necessary.
Once landed, she turned her attention to the notice light. Oh.
Regular maintenance, required every 3,000 parsecs in hyperspace. She didn’t have to do that now, really. But the purrgil would make taking off into hyperspace harder than it needed to be, and she might as well run a reboot cycle on the navcomp and check her exhaust ports where they tended to collect grime that stole fuel efficiency. Setting the internal systems to reboot and defragment the drives, she put her buy’ce on and fiddled with the HUD’s display. When she got it set where she liked it for external systems checks, she stepped outside to scan the hull of her ship quickly before working her way to the back to clear the exhaust port.
Sure enough, it needed cleaning, but not a terrible amount. Her last stop overnight had left her ship in a hanger with a fine mechanic who took care of what had built up. Granted, that had been a few missions back, but the current situation was fine. Even her buir couldn’t complain about waiting until she got back to Manda’yaim for a proper tune up, but she brushed out the port anyways.
“WOAH,” came the sound of an excited ad. She turned and looked down to see the beaming face of a small human, definitely too young for their verd’goten. Considering it was well past nightfall in this section of the planet, Aay’han scanned the surroundings for signs of the ad’s buir.
“Is this a spaceship?” the child asked excitedly, looking at the ship in undisguised wonder. “Are you a KNIGHT? A space knight? ”
“No,” Aay’han answered, a bit taken aback. “Where is your buir… your parent?”
“Miami.”
<^>
Kevin wasn’t sure what to do. He hadn’t thought it was all that wrong to use his dad’s card to get a hotel room. Sure, it wasn’t his money, but it was his dad’s job to make sure Kevin wasn’t homeless, right? And if they were going to go to sad Christmas-less Florida and leave him in New York, wasn’t it right his dad’s money go to keeping Kevin off the streets? But it probably wasn’t, since the hotel man had been really upset, and Dad would probably point out that Kevin shouldn’t have had the card to start with, and he should have just gotten on the right plane in the first place, and it was likely his fault anyways.
He tried going by Uncle Rob’s townhouse, which probably should have been his first stop, not the hotel, but the place was a wreck! It was getting fixed up or something, and Uncle Rob and Aunt Georgette hadn’t been there. He didn’t want to just break in and get in more trouble, so he went to the park instead, to walk around. Clear his head.
In the park, he saw a spaceship.
That was when he knew what to do. Obviously, if you see a spaceship, you’ve gotta go get a closer look at it. You never know when you’ll get to see another one. The ship was pretty, all swoopy silvery metal and laid out like a large bird of some kind, a swan or something. Maybe a goose, but he didn’t want to call something so pretty ‘gooselike’ because geese were awful. He’d been bitten by a bunch of geese after he wandered away from Buzz’s hockey game one time. Mom had been really upset at all the holes in his sweater.
As he rounded the back of the ship, he spotted the only thing that could have made a spaceship even cooler.
“Woah! Is this a real space ship?” he asked, then realized that was a dumb question. “Are you a KNIGHT? A space knight,” he clarified.
“No…” the knight said. Well, maybe not a knight, but they had shiny armor like a knight and this was clearly their ship. “Where is your boo-er, your parent?”
Oh, right. That. He winced.
“Miami,” he admitted. “They got on the right plane, I got on the wrong one.” Oh, wait, alien knight. They probably didn’t know where that was. “That’s South, at the end of the coastline.”
He held up a hand in the general shape of America, with his thumb as Florida. He pointed to the base of his palm opposite the thumb. “We’re here, they’re down here,” he said, sliding his finger to the tip of his thumb. “It was an accident! I didn’t mean to,” he hastened to assure the knight, he didn’t want them thinking he ran away on purpose, afterall. Everyone knew him to be a trouble-maker enough as it was.
“And when did this happen?”
“Yesterday morning. We were supposed to go to Florida for Christmas Eve and Christmas, which is dumb, Florida doesn’t even have Christmas trees. But then everyone overslept again, and we had to rush, and at least I got to the airport this time, but it was really crowded and I got kinda lost. So when I got off the plane, it was in New York, not Florida, and I may have used Dad’s credit card to get a room, but now the card doesn’t work and the hotel man was angry.”
The not-knight went very still and Kevin shifted guiltily. He was about to confirm again that it was all an accident, when the knight knelt down and reached a cautious hand out.
“You may spend the night on my ship. It’s not safe to be without shelter at night.”
<^>
Aay’han had been stabbed before. It wasn’t pleasant, there was a reason Mando’ad wore beskar’gam after all. It felt remarkably similar to the sensation of hearing the cheerful ad defend himself for his buir’s neglect. Especially with the soft shadows that chased across the ad’ika’s face as memories that obviously pained him got tangled up in the current situation. The telling use of the words ‘again’ and ‘this time’ made her hearts clench painfully.
On discovering the ad’ika didn’t have a place to sleep, Aay’han had to count to ten in Mando’a and then back down in Basic just to avoid finding this hotel man to demand why he would turn away an ad in need just because the kid ran out of credits.
She knelt carefully, trying to avoid spooking the child. Mandalorians had a certain reputation, and while no Mando’ad would ever dare harm a child, she knew she cut an imposing figure. “You may spend the night on my ship,” she offered. Not wanting to risk the ad running off, she added “it’s not safe to be without shelter at night.”
“Thanks!” the ad said, sticking his arm out. She took it carefully, her fingers able to fully encircle his forearm by the elbow, but she released quickly when his eyes widened. “I’m Kevin, what’s your name.”
“I’m Aay’han, Clan Cadera, House Mereel, she and her pronouns,” she said, guiding them into the ship. She would have to pull the spare hammock out of storage. “Have you eaten recently?”
“No, I was going to have dinner in the hotel but the hotel man said I stole the card and then the cops came… I didn’t think it was stealing! But maybe I was wrong, I’m just a kid, I don’t know.”
Law enforcement? To take in a child? For seeking food and shelter? For using their parent's money to do so? Aay’han pushed down the rage. She didn’t want to scare the child. Instead she grabbed ration packs from her supply. Not the most appealing food, but human safe.
“Cool, space food!” the ad’ika crowed as he happily ripped into the foil around the meal kit.
“The bar is supposed to be savory,” she advised as he unpacked the three items within. “The ball of liquid is just water. The packet is sweet. Kind of pudding, sort of.”
She dosed her own bar with ge’tal’cha, which she offered to Kevin, who sniffed it and passed politely. Fair enough. She’d rather the ad’ika set his own limits than try something too hot for his young mouth.
They ate in companionable silence until the kid’s curiosity got the better of him.
“I’ve never seen an alien before,” he said shyly. “Is that rude to say? I don’t mean to be rude!”
“It’s not rude,” Aay’han laughed. “I imagine your planet doesn’t see many off-worlders, you don’t have a functional spaceport, that’s why I had to land here. But I’m glad I did, because I met you.”
“You’re the first,” Kevin grumbled. Aay’han stilled. He seemed to understand that as an invitation to say more. What spilled out was a life no ad’ika should endure. Constantly picked on and berated by his entire aliit, frequently forgotten or neglected, rejected by his buir’e multiple times over totally reasonable questions.
“I hate to ask,” Aay’han said softly when he wound down, “but you said something earlier about making it to the port ‘this time’ and I….”
“Oh yeah, the year before last everyone was gonna go to Paris for Christmas, but I overslept and they left without me. Then there were these two bad guys, they’d been stealing from houses while people were on vacation, and they wanted to steal from our house, but I was still there. So I had to chase them off.”
Mandokarla ad. Aay’han sighed, reaching out to lay a comforting hand on Kevin’s neck. He startled at first, then leaned into the touch.
“It’s my fault. I keep wishing that my family will leave me alone, and then they do. I should learn my lesson.”
“Nu draar!” Aay’han insisted. “You are not to blame for the actions of your dar’buir. On Manda’yaim such acts would have them stripped of their armor and declared dar’manda. With no possibility to re-earn their armor.”
“You have to earn it?” Kevin asked, and Aay’han let the deflection work.
“Yes, every Mandalorian earns their armor. It’s what makes us Mandalorian. We come from a hundred different worlds, a thousand different species, but our heart is what calls us to the Way, and to devote ourselves to it, we earn our armor. When we fail, when we dishonor our armor and our people, it is taken back. For small mistakes, working for the wrong person, for example, we may re-earn our armor by proving ourselves. For endangering a child in our care? Nayc, we would not be worthy to wear it ever again. Demagolkase like that are dar’manda, no longer Mandalorians.”
“So dar means not,” Kevin said, catching on quickly. Aay’han had to quash the urge to say the gai bal manda right then. Ambush adoptions were tacky, only to be done in emergencies and easily revoked. “And buir means parent. So… you called Mom and Dad not-parents?”
“No longer parents, by means of no longer deserving their child. No child should be neglected as they neglected you. You deserve a better parent.”
Kevin finished his pudding quietly. He was obviously thinking things over.
“I’ll fix up the hammock. We’ll talk more in the morning.”