Archive of Our Own ^beta

Tooth daggers are traditional for marriage proposals. Like most Tatooine customs, the idea probably comes across as a rather blunt statement to outsiders. There’s real thought and care and artistry put into them, though, for those who want to know.

For those with a desire for romance, they’re usually partly-made well in advance of when they’re needed. Before people have even chanced to meet their future partners, sometimes. Those folks are the real romantic type, and they get all their sandhawks in a row so they’re ready should they find any matches. Then all that’s left are the finishing touches, and a hopeful suitor presents their offering and hopes, as they all do, for the best.

Cobb’s never made one. He’d imagined doing so, as a child, when his mother and his grandmother had first explained the pretty knife hung on the bedroom wall to him. He’d thought sometimes as a teenager of how he’d make his, what it would look like, who he might eventually feel certain enough with to offer it to, to ask for a lifetime with. One day you just know, so the older folks said.

But then, for a long time, all he thought about was survival.

So his past didn’t afford him much opportunity to think as far as marriage, and his present is fulfilled and busy. Solitary. And he imagines, sometimes – just idly – what his dagger would have looked like.

One day, a Mandalorian walks into Mos Pelgo.

Cobb doesn’t know if he’ll ever see the Mandalorian again. He’s damned sure he won’t see another man like him, though.

He feels a certainty somewhere deep in his bones, and regardless of how it ultimately ends up shaking out, you have to be prepared for these things.

Just in case he comes back.

Plenty of things with big teeth on Tatooine. Sandtuskers are a popular choice. Dune worms if you want something really fancy, kind of crystal looking. Cobb Vanth sets his sights higher.

The winding, splayed-rib spine of the dead krayt still lays, of course, where it fell. The Tuskens have taken everything they needed, the bones left gargantuan to bleach in the sun and sink into the sand. Many of its teeth were blown loose by the Mandalorian’s decisive final strike. These sink faster, breathed over with sand by every breeze and soon disappearing. Cobb digs.

It’s a project; the whole thing will be. Cobb makes trips up to the great skeleton and shovels and sifts in the cool of evening, mapping out squares he’s covered and ones left still to search. Starts a pile of fangs too big or too broken to be of use. What he needs is here. He just has to be patient.

A few weeks of odd evenings, and he finds what he’s looking for. One of the smallest teeth, which is still the length of his forearm, whole and unspoiled. It’s hot from the suns even this far into dusk, like it would have been in the beast’s still-living mouth, like the strange wet gust of its heated breath as they flew through its jaws together. Cobb had laughed as they did it. He wonders if the Mandalorian heard. He wonders if maybe, quietly, he’d laughed too.

The tooth is cream coloured, surprisingly clean in appearance, and unbelievably tough – acid resistant, obviously, and spewing noxious bile probably did a lot to prevent other kinds of decay. It’s constructed in sleek enamel layers, though, and it cuts nice and smooth under the right tools, like fine chalk or strange solid butter. He plans and sketches and finds a shape he likes, one with an elegant sweeping curve that reminds him of beskar cheekbones, before hooking out into a good sharp tip.

The handle, that’s easy. Japor ivory wood, traditional for Tatooine lovers, a little lighter and whiter than the deep cream of the tooth. Hard and dense, polishes up to a gorgeous smooth sleek finish – after gruelling hours of elbow grease.

Then, scrimshaw in the wood – there are standard patterns, learned by osmosis when watching his mother’s careworn hands as a child during long sandstorms. These Cobb has always thought of as the formalities of the thing. This knife is my proposal to you.

The rest of the space is for the who and why of it. Cobb, feeling clumsy all of a sudden, starts with presenting himself. A dune jackal, angular and bony. Marks on its flank for his mother, and his grandmother before her. A hashed star shape beneath the animal, which he strikes through deep enough that the wood bruises blue. Burning suns. A camtono. A helmet with a viewfinder sticking up. A tiny town and a set of spurs, sharp and gleaming and new.

Ok.

...He doesn’t know much about the Mandalorian. Makes this part difficult. The helmet is obvious, so he starts with that; the child also, nestled underneath. After some thought, he tentatively adds the symbol off the Mandalorian’s pauldron, some kind of horned creature. He hopes that’ll be enough. If it’s in earnest, it should be enough, that’s how it’s supposed to work. He leaves space in case he thinks of anything else.

So that’s who dealt with.

The next part is easy, the why, the here’s when I fell for you, the do you remember when?

Twin suns. Crossed blasters. The dragon. Clasped hands. A trail like ants, like a bantha train through the desert. A great mouth, all teeth. The dragon enraged, marks for the valiant dead, wings – such wings, to fly in tandem like that, do you remember? Fire, then lightning. The dragon’s skull, eyeless and blasted. His armour in a bundle. Clasped hands again.

Cobb regrets he has no beskar to clamp the hilt and the blade together. There’s no way he could have, but he’s wistful about it as he makes a ring out of humble pourstone, the very substance of Mos Pelgo, and fits it in place.

There is one more step, but that part is supposed to wait. Cobb, impatient, carves a little divot in the handle anyway, and sits back to look at his work.

There. There, he’s prepared, should he ever be lucky enough to see the man in armour again.

He carefully wraps it in soft jerba leather, and hides it away at the back of his cupboard.

Despite the odds, he feels pretty lucky.

Din comes back. A different man in some ways, the same man in all the ways that Cobb hoped for. He shows Cobb his face. Eventually, the town comes to know it too. Visits turn into stays turn into daily routine. Cobb learns about him, his past, his heart. Din still leaves, sometimes, because the stars are in his wandering blood, but it’s ok. He comes back. While he’s away, Cobb’s mind starts to fill in the gaps in the scrimshaw. And after a long, comfortable time, his hands want to do the same.

The next time Din is away, star-called again, Cobb takes the dagger out. Unwraps it gently, admires his handiwork. Where did he leave off? Din’s helmet, a little carving of Grogu’s face underneath, the mudhorn above. Now then. He brackets Din’s helmet with two figures in robes. Then, a circle of many Mando helmets around the whole arrangement, and little pinprick stars to soothe Din’s nomad heart. Cobb thinks for a while, and adds some lines by Din’s helm, indicating the potential for movement. It’s simple, a concise story. If Din wants something added, he need only ask it.

Right.

The proposal, who, and why. All taken care of.

Finally, at last, the question. Cobb thoughtfully runs his finger over the divot he left in the wood. Something precious must be set in the hilt, freely given, no expectations. A gift to be accepted or rejected, and not returned in either case. A crystal, a wad of metal, a coin, a tooth, a sandglass marble. The most precious little thing you can get your hands on or have to give away.

It’s hard to find young krayts. Their life cycles are strange. There are stages of their life that haven’t even been witnessed.

By folks in the settlements, anyway.

The Tuskens are surprised to see him, riding up alone on his speeder, a bantha in tow. They’re more surprised when he asks them his questions. They become guarded, wary, and it isn’t until he produces the dagger-in-progress, brokenly trying to say in Tusken what Basic fails him to find words for, that they agree to even discuss it.

He barters handsomely for the information, and not just to compensate the Tuskens for their knowledge and trust – not having slain the bearer of the tooth himself, he has to give up good things, wanted things, for this to mean something. His heart breaks when he motions to the speeder, that beloved well he’d poured hours of troubled thoughts and careful ministrations into, that first thing he’d made big and loud and bold and brash and gaudy, and as he rides out on banthaback for a spot far into the wastes he was sworn to keep secret on pain of death, he weeps a little. It feels right. It hurts terribly. He can start again.

The young krayts aren’t powerful enough to burrow through rock, not yet. They can chew into it, slowly, digesting minerals over years and excreting them to armour their skins, becoming formidable with age. Young krayts are armoured with the sands first, and when Cobb, heart in his mouth and bantha a good half-mile away, caws with all his desperate scrappy might at the dunes, he expects something crusted with grit to appear. He is not expecting the long, glinting glassy quills, needle-bright in the suns, bristling as the thing arcs past him and so sharp they open his leg in fifteen places.

So sharp, he barely feels it happen.

He yells, horrified, and fires at the sand where its glittering tail is vanishing into the dune. A crack of glass and green blood, and a pulse of rumbling bass from – directly underneath him—

Cobb jumps aside, the dragon bursting with mouth wide from the place his left foot had just been, jaws snapping shut in a blink. Cobb backs up as he fires two shots, neatly, to the neck, his hands steadier than his head ever was; there’s green and something else, this time, a yellow bile that gouts from the wounds and makes the sand hiss.

Wet heat seeps down Cobb’s back and only then does he feel the fierce sting, turning with shock to watch the ruined tail rearing back to whip at him again. It pauses there and quivers, a horrifyingly delicate tinkling rattle— Behind you, idiot!

Cobb dead-drops to the sand, the dragon sailing over him in a lunge, its jaws clamping hard on its own tail with a teeth-aching squeal of cracking glass. The bass burst slams painfully in Cobb’s ears, his skull, his eyes his bones his blood, reverberating. The dragon writhes in a twisting ring of grit and glitter, impaled on itself, roiling on the surface of the dune, sand hovering strange in the air as the bass keeps pulsing, and it’s agonising. With blurring vision Cobb flees as its thrashes carry it down towards him, wishing for a jetpack, wishing for wings again. It thunders past, too close, wetness down his hip, heat and pain following – the sound is numbing him now, too loud, too close, his knees hit the sand, he can’t feel his legs or his lips—

But his fingers are true.

Already they find the trigger again, already his arm raises, steady as his speeder over the sands. And as he squints one blurry vibrating eyeball open and sees the dragon in triple vision, rolling and rolling and rolling, he picks the spot where the back of one of the heads is about to be, and fires.

The dragon falls limp at the foot of the dune.

It’s a hellish thing, wrapping a young krayt in bantha wool. The Tuskens had given him mitts of the same stuff, thick matts felted into dense stiff protection, but it still takes him two hours to wrangle the thing and hoist it up behind his bantha’s saddle. Shaky with fatigue, he clambers aboard, heaves a sigh, and takes a moment to look at the far dune spattered with green, and yellow, and red.

He gives the bantha the gurgle for home, and falls dead asleep, a small pearl clutched in his fist.

It takes longer for the stars to charm Din again after that.

Eventually, though, he will need to wander a little, and when he does Cobb will lie in bed and set his eyes on the dagger, hung on their bedroom wall. Their bedroom wall.

It looks good there.