found. | Din Djarin

Twenty Four

Time itself comes to a standstill as we look upon one another but despite the years, despite going to Tatooine to hunt him down... nothing could have prepared me for this.

"You know why I have come," he tells me, his voice the only thing about him I recognise.

"You should be dead," I say, hand wrapped around the hilt of my saber.

"I should be after you left me for dead," he replies and I feel it, the anger, the betrayal that he should have seen coming. "But you never could do it could you?"

"Neither could you," I remind him, and despite every piece of reason in my head screaming otherwise, I feel safe in that security that he could never bring himself to ever truly hurt me, he just stood by as others did. "You don't scare me Boba."

Something in him almost softens, but only for a moment. "It is not fear I want to provoke, not anymore."

His words catch me off guard and leave me almost confused by the change of heart I feel in him, but I ignore it for the sake of self preservation.

"You look older," he says, as if we were meeting under normal circumstances.

"You look like shit," I tell him, trying to bite back the true horror at what I did to him.

"Getting struck down and devoured by a sarlaac does that," he says and gets to business as if we're negotiating in a messy divorce but there is little else that could be used to describe Boba and I. "I want my armour back."

"I want lots of things back, things you took from me," I tell him, Din emerging from cover with his blaster drawn since negotiations have been established. "But life isn't fair, is it?"

I eye the carved wooden weapons he has at his back, weapons I recognise as belonging to the sand people of Tatooine but it is surprisingly not violence he negotiates with.

"I have brought you a peace offering."

"A peace offering?" I repeat and actually laugh, feeling Din's alarm at the sound. "The only peace offering I would accept is Vader's head and unfortunately that is ashes on Endor."

Looking at him now I wonder what he knows if he's lived in isolation on Tatooine because he looks surprised by my revelation. "So you killed the bastard then?"

Now I'm the one in surprise as I scoff "Don't act like you wanted him dead."

"Of course I wanted him dead," he says and takes a step closer, a step that makes Din raise his blaster. "I'm not after you Mandalorian."

"You left me for dead," Din says and I see a look of satisfaction in Boba's eyes that stirs a new type of rage in me.

"Fair is fair," Boba says, ignoring him to speak to me. "I'd call it justice."

"Revenge you mean?"

"One and the same," he says, determined to hit every nerve he knows how. "That's what you said, isn't it princess?"

If this is how he wants to play, I'll play along perfectly.

"Yes." I take a step closer now, looking him dead in the eyes as I tell him. "It was both when I left you for dead."

"I could take revenge," he tells me, but fails to intimidate. "I certainly have enough reason to, but fortunately for you I am a changed man."

I laugh again, the type of unhinged only Boba Fett can make me after he put that madness in my brain and twisted it into what it is now. "Boba Fett? A changed man?"

He isn't amused and looks back towards his ship "I thought you may say that, so here is my peace offering. My armour for yours."

My face falls and I blink at him "What?"