Captive | The Mandalorian

CHAPTER 3: My Sweet Surrender

Pacing back and forth, Aspen tried her best to stay focused on the dilemma at hand, but the little green infant babbling at her was making it increasingly difficult to concentrate. In all fairness, the little green infant was the dilemma at hand, but she was currently struggling between a moral decision and felt like her attention was being pulled at from every angle possible.

"I don't know what you want from me." Aspen turned to the little guy, not even sure if it was able to understand what she was saying or not. 

Staring up at her with its huge pools of blackness for eyes, the child cooed softly while grabbing for her with its chubby fingers. The innocence of it was nearly enough to make Aspen's heart melt; how could it trust her this much after just meeting her? Didn't it know that she was a stranger? That exact nature of blind trust was probably the very reason why the Mandalorian had been looking after it. 

And just like that, Aspen started spiralling again. Not only was she a wanted criminal, but now she was also a kidnapper. She had stolen an actual child. 

How had things gotten this messed up?

Sitting down on a nearby crate, Aspen ran her fingers through her hair and exhaled slowly. This was a critical moment in her life and she needed to make this decision carefully. As much as she knew that she needed to return to her anonymous life of lying low as soon as possible, she was also pretty sure that she would be unable to live with herself if she actually went through with knowingly kidnapping an adorable alien child.

She contemplated dropping the child off somewhere on the way back to Tatooine, but what if she left it on the wrong doorstep? How was she supposed to know who was capable of taking care of a child and who wasn't? Where did one even take a homeless, parentless kid in the galaxy? That type of knowledge wasn't exactly Aspen's forte. 

The only person Aspen knew for sure that would be capable of taking care of the little guy was back on Alderaan. The Mandalorian had managed to keep it alive thus far, so he must have been doing somewhat of a decent job; even if a Mandalorian and an alien infant were an odd duo that made one wonder about the circumstances that needed to take place for a partnership like that to form. 

There was only one problem with that course of action. In the past 48 hours, Aspen had tried to unmask said Mandalorian, stabbed him, stolen his ship, and kidnapped his child. If she returned to the planet, even under the good-intentioned pretenses of returning the child, he was sure to murder her on the spot. If someone did all that to her, she would have no problem blasting a hole between their eyes and calling it a day.

Lifting her head to look at the child, Aspen sighed. "Do you think your dad would be understanding about all this?" she asked, knowing she wouldn't get any sort of helpful answer—or any answer at all, more accurately. Either way, having someone to talk to about her current predicament was kind of nice, even if they just gazed back at her with a blank expression as she did so.

Her mind racing a million miles a minute, unanswered questions bouncing back and forth and possible outcomes playing out in flashes before her, Aspen finally shook her head free of the all-consuming thoughts and made her decision. 

This needed to end. Everything needed to end.

Marching back toward the ladder, Aspen climbed up into the cockpit, turned the ship around, and reprogrammed the coordinates of Alderaan into the control board. 

Even if Aspen could find somewhere safe to drop the child off, she realized in that moment that she didn't want to return to the life she had been living; always on the run, her head on a swivel, always looking over her shoulder. She couldn't do it anymore. It was physically and mentally exhausting and Aspen knew the Bounty Hunter's Guild and Greef Karga too well to actually expect them to ever give up; and if she was being honest with herself, she didn't know how much fight she had left in her.