A Life Without Meaning

𝕋𝕙𝕖 ℙ𝕒𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕘𝕖𝕣 (𝕀𝕍)

For the second time that day, Ellia was jolted awake by a loud voice.

"Wake up, Mandalorian!"

Din was startled awake just as harshly as she. So much so that the side of his helmet slammed into her forward. Ellia hissed in pain, but if Din even realized that he hit her, he didn't show it. Instead he had drawn his blaster out of his thigh holster with one hand, aiming it straight forward.

"This cannot wait until morning." a robotic voice continued.

With a hand still pressed to her forehead, Ellia looked up with furrowed eyebrows. It took a few seconds, and several frantic blinks for her to figure out what she was seeing. The head of the disassembled droid, Zero, that Din had taken apart after their adventure with the New Republic jail ship, was somehow talking to them.

"Do not be alarmed." it said, and that's when Ellia glanced to the right, finding the Frog Lady standing there, a string of wires leading towards where she held a small mic-bit to her mouth. "I bypassed the droid's security protocols and accessed its vocabulator." she explained.

Now fully awake, Ellia's eyes widened- impressed.

"What the hell are you doing?" Din asked, holstering his blaster. "That droid is a killer!"

Ellia made a move to sit up straighter, but a tough squeeze from the hand that had yet to remove itself from her hip caused her to still.

"These eggs are the last brood of my life cycle. My husband has risked his life to carve out an existence for us on the only planet that is hospitable to our species. We fought too hard and suffered too much to resign ourselves to the extinction of our family line. I must demand that you hold true to the deal that you agreed to." the Frog Lady explained through Zero's voice.

Din shook his head,

"Look, lady, the deal is off." he said as the female amphibian looked down at the ground dejectedly. "We're lucky if we get off this frozen tomb with our lives."

In a flash, she had brought the commlink back up to her mouth once more,

"I thought honoring one's word was a part of the Mandalorian code." she scolded, the words somehow came out bitterly, despite being filtered through an unfeeling machine. "I guess those are just stories for children."

As if on cue, the child looked up from where it had apparently crawled over to cuddle against Ellia's thigh sometime while they were asleep. Din briefly turned to look down at him.

Then, not without a heavy sigh, Din finally pushed himself up from the ground, his arm slipping out from around Ellia's waist.

Stomping across the hull, he forcefully grabbed a tool box, before turning around and pushing aside the singular drape that shielded them from the outside.

"This was not a part of the deal." he muttered like a child before finally disappearing out into the snow.

It didn't take long for Ellia to jog out after him. Shedding her blanket and stepping out of the hole and into the icy conditions outside the Crest.

They were in some sort of cave, by the looks of it. Ellia could see beams of light streaking in from the hole that they had fallen through, but the caverns beyond seemed to stretch on for ages.

Looking back at the ship, she saw huge chunks of the protective paneling missing in some spots, and there was a plethora of exposed wires on the outside too, sparking just as much as the ones she had tried amending earlier in the day.

"Get back inside. You're not dressed warmly enough." Din barked without even sparing her a glance as he began to survey the ship, walking around towards the front.