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It was so stupid.
The thought had been echoing around the Beskar helmet for the last two days as Din made his way to that planet. The planet he swore he would never return to. That cursed planet.
He'd dropped the Child off on Nevarro with Greef and Cara for his excursion. Their brows pinched together in confusion when he arrived and explained, but they, thankfully, said nothing. He knew they would be confused — it was well known around the galaxy that the Mandalorian rarely, if ever, let the Child leave his side. There would be hell to pay for those who tried to take him away, and yet, he willingly passed the Child along to be babysat for three days. The baby whined as the Mandalorian grew smaller and smaller in the distance, and as much as his heart was screaming at him to return, Din continued on until he was aboard the Razor Crest. He plotted the course for that planet, and the pit in his stomach grew larger as they drew nearer.
There was a whisper of a rumor that had caught his ear a few months ago while he was on Cantonica. Ever the pessimist, Din was extremely hesitant to believe it. He was reluctant to get his hopes up, guarding his tender and still mending heart from being crushed once more. But the rumor wasn't entirely unbelievable — he'd seen far stranger and much more far-fetched things in his journeys around the galaxy. And so, with a little more research, Din deemed the rumor to have some merit, and that merit warranted a venture to that damned planet.
The whisper of the rumor came from an uncharted galaxy called the Milky Way. It was home to many uninhabited planets, but the one that was populated, could be described as nothing short of a backwater shithole. The inhabitants were blissfuly unaware of the other life teeming around them, and from the truly horrific stories about Earth that circulated the galaxy, many were glad to keep it that way. But, as the universe would have it, that same shithole is where the rumor originated from.
The rumor says that one night a year, the night they call Halloween, the dead could return to the land of the living. They could walk, talk, run, jump, scream, eat, cry, laugh . . . touch. It was as if they were alive once more for one blissful night. It was a night of happiness and reunions and glee and . . . love. She could return to him.
At first Din dismissed it without second thought. They were speaking of witchcraft, something far beyond the capabilities of his little one. He'd reached far enough with the Child — for the sake of his sanity, he would reach no farther. But that night, when the helmet came off and he retired to his measly lone cot, the rumor bounced around in his head. Sure, the couple he'd overheard it from had been drunk off their asses and spewing nonsense all night. But some small part of him wished for it to be true. He begged for even the slightest chance to see her again.
So at the next planet they stopped at, he walked into a library — he'd heard that joke before (admittedly not as good as the bar jokes). He settled the energetic child with some mindless activity as he did research on Earth. Most of the results he found were sickening and enough to make a man want to burn anything that contained the word Earth in it (some of them were funny, though he would never admit that).
