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He dreams of a man with his father’s face and his father’s voice, his father’s way of walking and speaking, even his father’s armor — his father in every way, except when this man looks at Boba he doesn’t love him. This man looks at him like he doesn’t know who he is, and like if he did know he wouldn’t care.
The dream shifts. His dad’s helmet lying abandoned on the empty rain-slicked landing platform, his father’s second face without him behind it. Boba picks up the helmet and clutches it against his chest. Dad wouldn’t leave it behind if he’d had a choice. He would never go anywhere without telling Boba first.
Everything is wrong. He can’t find his dad anywhere, and the tall thin silhouettes of the Kaminoans serenely tell him to wait quietly until he comes back, like a good boy. Their wide eyes follow him with a vast clinical hunger barely concealed, as if they want to take him apart to see how he works inside. Well, he won’t give them the chance; he runs. He can’t find his dad anywhere, and no one will tell Boba where he’s gone — if he’s on a job or if it’s a game or if something bad has happened and he needs Boba’s help, and the panic climbs up his throat like it means to choke him as he runs through the long pearlescent-white hallways with the helmet clasped to his chest and finds nothing but strangers who look like family, or family who looks at him like he’s a stranger, he doesn’t know which one is right, and he just wants his dad, why isn’t his dad here, he said he’d come right home after —
His foot slips and then he’s falling, hurtling towards the choppy lead grey waves and boundless indifference of the ocean, his fingers still grasping at the helmet even as it starts to slip away.
Boba jerks awake before he hits the water, though his heart is hammering in his chest until it almost makes him feel seasick.
In his bedroom there’s only oppressive darkness and the ever-present sound of rain against the window; the scrape of his own breathing in his throat won’t ease.
The remnants of the dream rest uneasily in the pit of his stomach, like when you’re falling or when you’re about to throw up. He wants to cry, a little bit, but he doesn’t think that would do much good.
After a moment’s agonizing hesitation he listens to his instinct, like his dad tells him he always should, and nearly topples the precarious stack of holobooks on the nightstand as he darts out of bed and across the hall towards his father’s room.
There’s a hall light still on, and Boba’s not scared of the dark but he’s a bit grateful anyway. He waves at the door sensor and the door slides open to reveal the room beyond it, its familiar tidy surfaces made somehow eerie and foreign where they’re drenched in shadow.
Boba wavers on the threshold. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if his dad isn’t there after all.
“Daddy?” he calls from the doorway, his voice too high and shaky. The hall light falls in a clean stripe across the floor, almost but not quite reaching the bed and his father. No answer. “Dad?”
“Hm?”
Boba wants to cry again hearing his dad’s sleep-raspy voice. He shuffles his feet, his new pyjama bottoms too long in the legs still and hems trailing over the floor — it’s been a long time since he last did this, he realizes belatedly. Maybe he’s too big now. Six is pretty big, right? Almost seven, in five months or so. Most of the other children he’s ever met grow so much faster than he does, he’s not quite sure where that leaves him. “Can — can I sleep here tonight?”
The sheets rustle and in the dimness he can barely make out the darker shape of his father pushing himself up on an elbow. There’s a pause, then his dad says: “Of course. Come here.”
With a breath of relief Boba scurries over the floor until he can dive under the covers where his dad holds one corner lifted for him. He presses himself against his father’s side, making a small sound when his dad lies back down and wraps one arm around him, hand smoothing soothingly up and down his shoulder.
Boba feels better already, the weird dizzy feeling from the dream becoming smaller, like it’s just an ember in his gut now instead of a bonfire. He’s seen a big bonfire before, last year, on a small plain farming planet they’d gone to; it’d smelled terrible because a lot of the things the people there were burning had been trash and also some bones, but it looked really cool.
The darkness is suddenly simply the darkness of their apartment again, homey and normal and safe. The calm, steady beat of his father’s heart under his ear calls out to his own in a familiar way — slow down, don’t just race ahead. Think.
Boba closes his eyes and burrows under the covers. The fabric of his father’s sleeping shirt is soft against his cheek.
“Bad dream?”
Boba nods. He doesn’t want to talk about it — doesn’t want to ask the stupid questions he’d had in the dream, like ‘how will I always know that it’s you’. It’s easy to tell the difference; he has never once mistaken his dad for any of the others, even the oldest ones who are almost men now. No one would ever look at how his dad carries himself and think he was one of them, or that they were even remotely the same thing. Boba understands this on a level he can’t quite explain in words, and he feels silly for even dreaming otherwise, so he’s not going to talk about it. But he still wants his dad to take away the bad feelings and make everything okay again, like normal. “...I don’t remember all of it.” It’s not a lie, not really, it all blurs together now in impassive faces and white hallways and cold dizzying panic. “But it was scary.”
“I see. Want to learn a trick?” Jango Fett says, with the conspiratorial lilt to his voice that always makes Boba feel happy and special and proud, like they’re a team. Normally that tone means he’s about to learn something cool with a blaster or how to slice a new security system, but even if it’s only a smaller trick because it’s the middle of the night it’ll probably be fun.
“Yeah!”
His dad takes Boba’s hand and guides it down to rest against his belly. “Feel the way your stomach rises and falls under your hand.”
Boba does, noting the quick, tense movements of his own muscles as he breathes.
“Now breathe out all the air in your lungs. Even more, every last bit.” A hint of amusement enters his dad’s voice as Boba dutifully wheezes out the last traces of air from his body. “That’s good. Breathe in. See how much it lifts your hand? Pay attention to that and how it goes down again.”
The inhale comes in almost by itself when his lungs are so empty, easy and smooth and deep. His dad talks him through doing it again a couple of times before he says: “Good. This time just relax and match your breathing to mine, through your nose. Ready?”
Boba nods, listening to his dad’s measured breathing and doing his best to follow along. At one point his father gives a sudden sharper inhale through his nose and Boba blinks in surprise before mimicking him, I’m paying attention! — there’s a small smile playing at the corner of his father’s mouth and Boba grins back; it’s easier when it’s a game, when it’s not so serious.
There’s a rhythm to it, almost like the lullabies in Mando’a his dad used to sing to him when he was little. Breathe in, and then pause. Breathe out for a bit longer, shorter pause. Breathe in again. Like a chorus that’s always the same even when all the other words change around it.
It only takes a little while of breathing together like that until the fear goes away completely and is replaced by warm sleepiness spreading from his toes and all the way up to his ears. He can’t help but yawn on the next inhale, leaning his temple against his dad’s shoulder.
“Better?” his father asks, carefully tousling Boba’s hair.
“Uh-huh,” Boba says, managing to nod lazily.
“If you’re ever scared and I’m not there, you can slowly count to eight every time you breathe out,” his dad says. “I can teach you another time. Fear happens to everyone. The difference is that strong people understand it needs to be controlled, and you have to know how.”
Boba wrinkles his nose, confused. “Not to everyone. You’re not scared of anything.”
His father is quiet for a long time. In the darkness Boba can’t make out his face anymore. “I’m afraid everyone’s scared of something, ad’ika,” his father says finally, his fingers still stroking Boba’s hair, gently smoothing it away from his forehead. “But we have no place for fear here tonight. Try to sleep again.”
“’Kay,” Boba agrees amicably. It’s an easy promise to make: his eyes are already slipping closed on their own, there probably won’t be too much need for trying. He curls up against his father’s side and closes his eyes, lulled by the warmth and fingers combing slowly through his hair and the new breathing that still feels like a familiar song in his lungs.