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Mandalore knows of Cassus Fett—it would be impossible not to, given that the man is a rising star among the mando’ade and has been since his impromptu command on Cathar—but it is one thing to have heard of him, to have commanded him through comms and indirect orders directed at a faceless mask, and another to find him at the heart of the war camp thoroughly sweeping the floor with warriors who had bloodied their first beskad before Fett could even walk. The verde dotting the edge of the makeshift sparring ring that’s sprung up between war tents and crates of ordnance are all either thoroughly trounced or clearly enjoying themselves watching it happen to everyone else (and in many cases, Mandalore suspects, it’s a vindictive mixture of both).
The ring of beskar heralds another hit as Fett sweeps his spear at his opponent’s ankles faster than they can drop their beskad into a block. Their armor might protect them, but the blow sends them staggering back; Fett’s spear twirls in a flash of silver and he grins, utterly feral, as its point comes to rest at his opponent’s throat.
“Anyone else?” he calls, spear hanging lightly from his hands as he turns in a circle. “Come on, I’m finally warmed up! Is this the courage of the mando’ade?” Every line of him drips with arrogance, with confidence, with the sort of surety Mandalore has only rarely seen even among his command. Fett knows exactly how good he is—and exactly how he compares to every mando’ad watching him with disquieted eyes.
It must be some little insanity that makes Mandalore shoulder through the crowd and step forward. He hasn’t properly dueled in months (not that that has dulled its skill, not when the Dar'arasuumla’s computers are more than adequate practice targets), and to set himself against Cassus Fett is far more of a statement than he’d like. Fett bloodied himself on Cathar—he hasn’t seen half the battles most of high command has, and they all know it. This is a statement, for Mandalore to deign to duel (and it is a duel, despite the lazy grin scrawled across Fett’s face and the languid flow of his muscles; no one would offer a spar to Te Ani’la Mand’alor in the center of camp with the spurned losers of his past fights standing scattered around the ring’s edge. It must be a duel—and yet that doesn’t quite explain the look in Fett’s eyes when he sees Mandalore before him).
“What say you?” Mandalore asks, and he can’t help the smile tugging at the corners of his mouth beneath the heavy sunburst mask.
And Fett—he smiles, all white teeth against dark skin. “A worthy fight,” he says, words chased with a tone akin to reverence. “It would be my honor, Mand’alor.”
“What are your terms?” It has not been so long that Mandalore has forgotten how challenges go among his people or the expectations placed upon them, and he will accept whatever terms are set; he is Te Ani’la Mand’alor, and his fear does not dwell here in the heart of his camp in the eyes of Clan Fett’s burning star. Nor, he surmises, does any threat against him. Fett is the sort of prodigy born once in a generation if that, but gods, he’s still young, half his fights won his fellow mando’ade, and Mandalore—Mandalore might have lost two decades earlier, before he took his title from the planet-grave of Te Kandosii Mand’alor, but the battles dwelling behind his eyes are ones Fett hasn’t yet dreamed of. This is not a fight that Mandalore will lose, and watching the way Fett’s eyes flicker over his mythosaur axe, the mirrored tightening grip of Fett’s slim fingers, Fett knows it too.
But when he lifts his chin to look Mandalore’s mask head on, no fear glimmers in the dark depths of his eyes, only a spark—the sort of heat that lights a wildfire, that so rarely shows in any of Mandalore’s advisors. (Such, he thinks, is the disadvantage to being sacred. Defiance is permitted only when accompanied by strength, and half his commanders would see a challenge to his battle plans as kin to a challenge for his mask—and that he would not abide, not on the eve of open war beneath the largest banner the mando’ade have held aloft in decades if not centuries.) He is just as eager for his loss as he had been for all his previous victories; a curious thing, in a man whose name is written in the challenges to his clan and his honor that he has refuted with blood and fists and beskar.
“Your terms, Mand’alor?” Fett asks almost quietly. His gaze never breaks, never falters as his spear shifts between his fingers. “You accepted a challenge; it is your right to set them.”
“What did the battle circle decree?” Mandalore asks. He will not set his own terms—changing them would diminish this victory, would say he was incapable of winning under the same circumstances as the murmuring soldiers scattered around the ring.
A flash of teeth, and Fett brushes dark curls from his face. “No shields, no stims, no kolto,” he says. “But any weapons and armor you wear can serve. Will you fight under those conditions?”
Mandalore tilts his head to study Fett. Even relaxed, his stance is set for battle, grip nearly perfect; he was born for a fight, that much is obvious. Clan Fett was nothing before Cathar, its best son little more than a footnote until he knelt at Mandalore’s feet, golden beskar stained with ash, and held out his spear as an offering and an oath. My life is yours, he had said—gods, he’d been so young there kneeling in the rain of a dying planet, and yet he’d been the only commander to make it through the battle, the only one with the strength to give the orders that needed giving.
My life is yours.
“I accept your terms,” Mandalore says, locking eyes with Fett through the blackened visor of his mask, and the fight begins.
Fett is better than the rumors say—and almost exactly where Mandalore estimated him to be, blindingly skilled but without the experience to make him truly the apotheosis of the greatest generation the mando’ade have ever produced. He will be, given ten years (and Mandalore revises his opinion to five when Fett’s spear lances straight towards his side and only his mythosaur axe prevents the other man from drawing first blood), but now—now, Mandalore disengages and circles, and Fett becomes prey instead of predator. Some long-buried genetic instinct murmurs that his throat is the easiest target, soft flesh bared as Fett tips his head backwards to look his leader in the not-eyes of the mask, that his flesh would rend so easily beneath teeth and sharp claws; a quieter voice in the back of Mandalore’s skull threads hunger through his veins as Fett grins and launches into another perfect attack. He is—unfairly beautiful in a way very few humans have been to Mandalore, made so much more so by the liquid lines of his movements and the surety with which he fights.
But it won’t save him from this fight. The fan of Mandalore’s axe cuts across his shoulder, and before he can recover his stance, Mandalore steps across the space between them—left, right, and then he slams the axe’s shaft across Fett’s torso hard enough to send him stumbling. He doesn’t even need to use the axe to send him to the ground, just sweeps a leg between Fett’s feet and watches him sprawl across the packed earth of the battle circle with no small amount of satisfaction. And Fett grins up at him, mythosaur axe to his throat, looking for all the world like this is the greatest joy he’s ever experienced.
“Yield,” he rasps, sweeping a hand across his face. “Well met, Mand’alor .”
“Well met.” Mandalore offers him a forearm and pulls him to his feet, and Fett takes it gratefully. His grip is firm and steady even with the teasing comments his defeated opponents are beginning to throw at him, as balanced as his movements while he fought. But none of the words seem to break the bubble of almost-silence that hangs between them, Fett’s bare hand pressed to the beskar of Mandalore’s forearm, burning like a brand through solid Mandalorian steel. He looks at Mandalore like he’s the only true opponent Fett has ever fought, the only other sentient alive in the galaxy, and something in those molten eyes rings true.
“It was an honor,” Fett murmurs, and the smile on his face is a fraction of his earlier grin, though just as bright.
And then he’s gone, the moment snapped as quickly as it came together, a bright comet as he steps back across the ring and gestures to someone waiting on the edges. Low waves of conversation lap across the crowd, and Mandalore steps back, lets the bustle of the camp hide him from the battle circle before Fett turns back in time to see him standing there as if struck dumb.
Gods, a man like that—Mandalore will have his eye on Fett for a long, long time (and somehow, recalling the other man’s look in the ring, he gets the feeling that Fett wouldn’t entirely mind that).
There are times when Mandalore is immensely grateful for the anonymity of his mask—and the longer his war council keeps speaking, the more that becomes his dominant thought.
“You’re not listening, ” whines one of the Vizsla commanders, and his opponent, a Kryze who clearly thinks she has better things to be doing, scoffs behind her helmet.
“All due respect, you’re the one not listening. Mand’alor—”
“Both of you, shut up!” A different Vizsla this time, arms crossed as he glares around the council as though he’s any better than they are. “This is a karking war meeting, not a clan dispute!”
“Oh, don’t you get all high and mighty with me, you—”
But before the meeting can truly explode into chaos, the flaps of the war tent blow open with a snap, and in the flash of lightning that splits the night apart, Mandalore catches a flash of mud-streaked gold. Thunder cracks as boots hit the ground; a single gesture has the guards closing the tent, and Fett barely stops to toss his rain-slick helmet to the side as he strides across the tent and drops a stack of datasticks at Mandalore’s clenched hands.
“Recon,” he says flatly, sparing a derisive glance for the mess that is the rest of high command. “If the rest of you could pull your heads out of your shebse, Mandalore will want to see this. You were right—” and now he’s back to addressing Mandalore himself— “Send our forces the way they suggested, and half of them will end up dead before they’re halfway through the jungle.”
“And I suppose you have a better idea?” asks an Ordo commander, crossing her arms. Fett just grins, that same flash of white that has half the camp hanging off his every word, and brushes damp curls from his face. He’s been gone nearly three days on what was supposed to be a routine scouting mission; his hair is a knotted tangle, armor covered in whatever the jungle spat out at him, and Mandalore can smell exhaustion hanging from his bones, but to see him now, it’d be almost impossible to pick out.
“ Mand’alor, may I?” Fett asks with a gesture to the holoprojector; Mandalore steps back with a nod, and Fett slides neatly into his place and flicks on the map of this side of Alarcanta (insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but a jumping-off point for the next three sectors Mandalore intends to take, and a miserable hellhole of a moon that he’d prefer to see the back side of sooner rather than later). The moment his datasticks enter the equation, it’s over for the other commanders. They know they’ve lost their bids for command as one by one, Fett points out the flaws in each of their plans, dismantles every theory they presented, and trounces them as thoroughly here as he would in a sparring ring. Twenty-four and smarter than all of them, an eye for tactics that even Mandalore can’t keep up with sometimes—it’s no wonder some of the older commanders don’t entirely like him, but the ones who discount him based on their own injured pride are bigger fools than they realize.
Kryze is the first one to fold, scoffing behind her helmet as she finally takes her seat again. The Vizslas follow one after the other, and in a slow wave the rest of the table—Ordo last, still glaring daggers at Fett—resume their various seats. Despite themselves, their eyes are glued to the display flashing blue and red across Fett’s face; he’s reeled them in sure as any hunter, and the smile pulling at the corner of his mouth says he knows it. If he was half as clever, he wouldn’t be alive, let alone standing here, and if he were half as alluring, no one would be listening—but here, now, he stretches out a hand and people watch, as much as they may not want to.
“Now,” Fett says lightly, “I have a proposal.”
Two hours later, a bottle of tihaar dangling between his fingers, Fett is the only one left in the tent, exhaustion clawing at the lean lines of his body as he stretches back in his stolen chair. It’s the first time he’s seemed truly relaxed since he appeared out of the storm, and Mandalore can hardly blame him for that when he’s managed to attract the ire of so many of his compatriots. But still, to see his guard drop around his Mand’alor when it never does around those he should be calling peers—it strikes a strange chord in Mandalore’s chest, one he has no particular desire to dwell on in any great depth. The time for those thoughts passed the moment he lifted this mask from the Dxun jungle and made it his second, truest face; he has no time to consider what it means that this man, bright as a star among their people, places all his unshakeable faith in a leader whose face he’s never seen (and sometimes, it feels, Fett’s words almost seem directed at the man behind the mask, for all that Mandalore’s title slips off his tongue like water).
Fett tips his head back to take a swig of his tihaar, and Mandalore attempts to tear his gaze away from the single liquid drop trailing down his throat. He isn’t some adolescent lusting after every warrior he sees, especially not his own commander—a human commander, rising quickly, but young and softer than any taung, blunted teeth and nails instead of true claws. Humans are fierce verde in their suits of armor and with weapons in their hands, but with only fists and bodies as weapons, they seem almost defenseless. With Fett’s throat bared to him, a surrender and a trophy, it is far too easy to remind himself how easily that blood would spill the moment even a single wrong step was taken. Easier, then, to push down the urge to set teeth against that skin, to find out if Fett’s loyalty truly stretches beyond the armor and the mask. None of this will matter in a year or five or ten, and he needs a commander, not a lover. There is no time for anything but war when the horizon is red with the blood of the mando’ade.
“Fett,” he says instead of any of the words attempting to crowd out of his throat. The man nearly chokes on his drink in his haste to set it aside, but Mandalore waves him off before he arranges himself into some semblance of propriety and not post-mission laxness. “How did you come by that strategy?”
Fett seems to have been prepared for a much graver question; faint lines of tension in his shoulders ease into nothingness and a smile flickers across his face. “It wasn’t particularly difficult, Mand’alor; all I had to do was find out what we were up against, where they’d be used to fighting. And from there,” he says, sketching out invisible lines on the table, “it wasn’t much of a leap to figure out what we needed to not lose half our verde to the jungle. Separating the forces created a net here and here—” condensation trails mark crosses where Fett has indicated— “and any vulnerable spots across the front could be reinforced more quickly than anyone could break through. We’re Mandalorians; we’ve never needed the sorts of weaponry the others are suggesting, and we shouldn’t rely on it if we want to win—removing it lets us move faster than anyone we face. Break through here, and that’s the battle for the planet.”
Few among the clans can boast about creating a plan such as this, especially during a three-day scouting mission jumping in and out of combat. Even Mandalore would have had some difficulty with the jumps Fett has made, and yet he presents this plan as if it’s the simplest thing in the world. He knew Fett was clever—this is more than bare intelligence, this is seamless strategy, and judging by the look on Fett’s face as the silence stretches out, Mandalore doesn’t know if he even recognizes what he’s done.
“Fett,” he murmurs, low and conversational, “I’m in need of a second-in-command.”
Mandalore is frankly impressed at the sheer variety of language Cassus manages to employ as he ducks back into their makeshift tent. He was exposed to the elements for a bare minute, but his visor is already streaked so heavily with rain and dirt that he tosses his helmet clear the moment he’s out of the storm. His expression is sheer petulence as he tosses himself across a stool and kicks his feet up onto the mostly-empty supply crate stuffed in the corner of the tent. He only seems to remember that Mandalore is still here when he’s halfway through tossing his armor into a pile near his bedroll.
“Useless,” he says tersely. His blacks join the armor pile and he tugs the closest thing to a dry shirt and pair of pants they have on before he settles down on his cot and flicks open a datapad. “Fairly sure it’d kill a jetpack in about ten seconds, and this rock is the only thing not underwater for a few dozen kilometers in any given direction, so we’re karked. Sitting vonnuvi until these tides go down, and that won’t be for another—” he cuts off to type something into the datapad, murmuring under his breath as he does. “Fuck. Three days, and this mess has killed our comms. All the fleet has to go on is our last known position and the hope that that hunk of metal out there sent out an actual signal before it drifted off to the bottom of the ocean.”
Mandalore’s mouth twitches into a smile behind his mask. Cassus isn’t one for mincing words, especially now that he’s settled into his command and gotten used to the fact that his word is as good as law among the clans now, second only to Mandalore himself—and every time they win a battle with his strategies and his command, his reputation increases just a fraction more. Still young—but nothing that could be called untested, not with planetary conquests beneath his feet and command of his own flagship and portion of the Mandalorian fleet, and not with his leader’s hand on his shoulder (metaphorically and sometimes literally; Mandalore finds something grounding in the easy solidity of his second, and the other man has never been anything but receptive. He fits, Cassus Fett, like the last piece of a weapon in a forge, the places he fits already welded seamless into the same smooth, shining beskar as the pieces around him.
He is also halfway through his twenties and an absolute bastard when he wants to be; given that they’re trapped on an island in the middle of an ocean held at high tide by a moon nearly close enough to touch, Mandalore will forgive him the complete and total impropriety. He feels like doing the same right now, when they’ve been landlocked since their shuttle went down two days ago and the storm has only worsened in all the time they’ve been here. They were lucky to drag themselves and enough supplies to survive out of the wreck before it went completely under, luckier still to have found a rocky outcrop large enough to prevent them being washed away by tides as tall as a starship, but listening to rain and thunder for two days straight hasn’t made Mandalore’s mood particularly pleasant, and Cassus is nearly burning up with the need to do something. Even watching him pace around their tent causes an itch that Mandalore can’t shake.
“I don’t suppose you have any cards,” Cassus groans, datapad tossed aside and pillow held over his face. “Or a game or something? I’m going mad in here.”
“Not unless you’d like to test how closely we could duel,” Mandalore says absently as he reaches for a ration bar. These must be inedible for humans; they’re downright foul for taung, but they’re the only nutrients in the tent unless Mandalore resorts to cannibalism (and not the sort of eating others that Cassus has a little too much familiarity with, all things considered).
Cassus huffs out a bitter laugh and throws his pillow away as well. “ Mand’alor, right now I’d wrestle you barehanded if the defeat wouldn’t crush my ego. I need to do something and it’s too karking wet outside for—anything. Gods, I miss starships.” He heaves a sigh and tips his head back, eyes fixed despairingly somewhere on the roof of the tent. “Ever been in something like this before?”
The honest answer, the one he offers to Cassus, is that he hasn’t. Oh, he’s been in a hundred different kinds of misery on various campaigns, even before he took on the mask, but this is its own special kind of hell. Not worse than the others, just a tedium clawing along the inside of his armor that has him nearly as restless as Cassus—the man laughs faintly at that, lighter than he’s looked in months, and his sideways grin doesn’t fade even as his face grows pensive.
“When I was fifteen, we got stuck on this tiny little hell of a planet—gravity you wouldn’t believe, and even the herbivores kept trying to eat us, my cousins and I. We were supposed to be figuring out how to handle ourselves before we became adults. One of my older cousins lost his leg, naturally, but I did manage to kill something with the few weapons we were given. Set its tooth into my spear, actually. That was a lovely three-month string of unfortunate events which is almost as bad as this. Better scenery there, at least.”
“And here you are, Fett, still stranded in the middle of nowhere with inadequate company,” Mandalore says, unable to help the answering laugh. Fett’s face shifts strangely to see it; viewing Mandalore without his mask seems to still surprise him even after two days and more than one glimpse since he became Mandalore’s second. His eyes are almost painfully sincere, dark and bitter and swirling with an emotion Mandalore can’t name but which has proved enough to still his fevered energy.
“I could hardly call you inadequate company,” Cassus murmurs, that same raw sincerity coating his every word. “You—you are our people, Mand’alor. The culmination of everything we are.”
“I’m not infallible,” Mandalore says quietly. It feels like a confession to lay this before his second, perhaps the only other person he wholly trusts, especially after all the years they’ve known each other, fought side by side. “This will be our final true war; you can feel it, can’t you?” Cassus nods, though for a moment his eyes flicker closed against the weight of it. “Then you understand what it means to carry the mask.”
“If I didn’t trust you with the lives of the mando’ade, I wouldn’t be here,” Cassus says, shrugs one shoulder as his gaze drops towards the ground. He’s levered himself upright again to hang his legs over the edge of the cot, and every line of him is a whisper of truth. “But I trust the man and the mask both. You have to know that after all this time.”
“I am not entirely sure,” Mandalore replies softly, “that there is a man behind the mask anymore, Cassus.”
Something flashes across Cassus’ face and he stands in a fluid motion, crosses the space between them with narrow steps and drops to a knee inches from Mandalore’s leg and the short supply crate he’s appropriated for his own seat. “If there wasn’t,” he rasps, and gods, he’s so painfully sincere it’s sharp as a beskar knife, “then I wouldn’t have sworn half the oaths I did. I meant every word of those, ner Mand’alor, and I’d make them all again today if you asked it of me.”
His eyes are fixed on Mandalore’s face when Mandalore brushes a hand along his jaw and tilts his head up. He feels the motion of Cassus’ throat all too keenly, can sense every path those eyes trace across his skin—and when he tips his own head down, the only movement Cassus makes is to let his eyes close for a brief second before Mandalore presses his mouth to Cassus’. There isn’t a rational thought behind it, no driving motivator besides the fact that he’s wanted to do this since he saw Cassus, that he owns this man’s loyalty more fully than he could ever have imagined, that for once—for one tiny moment, there can be an echo of the man who became Te Ani’la Mand’alor, and Cassus can be something other than a legend.
And Cassus—when Mandalore releases his grip, the other man is grinning and softer than Mandalore has ever seen him. He reaches up a hand to brush faintly across the planes of a face that must be as unfamiliar in its species as it is in individuality.
“I meant it,” Cassus murmurs. “My life is yours, for as long as you’ll have me.”
“Then let me offer you the same. An oath,” Mandalore says, low and soft. “Not from the mask. You—you mean more than you can imagine,” and the truth of it rings down to his bones. “Fight at my side. Let me forge you armor. And I will grant you everything it is within my power to give, as long as you stay alive.”
“I’ve heard worse,” Fett says, though the hoarseness in his voice betrays how serious he is. “I don’t want everything—our religion is battle, that’s all I’ve ever needed. But to fight at your side would be the greatest honor of my life.”
“Then this should prove an adequate distraction before we wait for rescue to arrive.”
For a moment, it’s clear Cassus doesn’t know what to do, and then he’s laughing, doubled over and clutching at Mandalore’s outstretched leg.
“Gods,” he chokes out, “certainly a better distraction than I’ve ever had before.” He pauses—his brows furrow in confusion as the silence stretches long enough that Mandalore grows concerned, and then— “Hells, none of my cousins could ever hope to have this. Always told them I’d outrank them someday.”
Mandalore questions his own judgement.
But not for long.