Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Scars
“How does it feel?” Fennec Shand stood on the access ramp of Slave I, the Mandalorian Din Djarin several steps ahead, his boots meeting Nevarroan soil.
Fett, opting to remain aboard his ship, cocked an eyebrow in her direction. He remembered she could not see his features behind his impenetrably dark t-shaped visor.
“How does what feel?” He grunted, nonchalant.
“Having your armor. By the way you were taking out those Imps back there, it’s as if you could’ve been wearing it yesterday – if I didn’t know any better,” A smirk played on her lips, eyes locked on his t-visor.
She was right. The armor felt as natural as his own two hands and feet.
“There aren’t words,” He shrugged. Not that I’ve ever been good with words…
“It shows,” Fennec nodded. “Going to stretch my legs… clear my head for a bit,” she gestured briefly to the desolate surface before making her descent, trailing the Mandalorian.
While Fett truly felt it was no one’s business but his own how anything made him feel, he also recognized his response was earnest. There were no known words that captured how it felt to have the armor returned to him, at least in Basic. But there were emotions… feelings he had not felt since he was a young boy on Kamino. When dad came home from a hunt after weeks of absence. That was how it felt having the armor once more in his possession. Worth more to him than any number of credits. Priceless.
As Din bartered with a marshal for aid in the form of ex-Imperial sharpshooter turned New Republic chattel and Fennec wandered planet side, Fett descended to the lower levels of Slave I.
Shutting a portal behind him, he removed the helmet – his father’s helmet, his helmet. Holding it with both hands, he felt the dense weight of the Beskar sinking into his palms as he held the heirloom in front of his chest. With his left hand, he gripped his fingers around the bottom edge of the helmet, taking his right thumb to gently brush away a thin layer of sand and grime from a cheek mottled with scars and a chipped coating of green paint.
With the damage from the Sarlacc and, to a much lesser extent, the marshal Cobb Vanth, there was more silver than green, revealing the dun gleam of the Mandalorian alloy beneath.
Dad would polish the Beskar, Fett recalled fondly. Like Din, his father Jango had chosen to let his Beskar breathe, its luster a menacing promise.
“It doesn’t matter if they can see me. I’m coming for them,” his father had told him.
Every scratch, nick, dent, and deformity in the armor had origins – Fett mused he had once been able to recollect the various encounters, scraps, and struggles that had conceived the markings on his kit.
For each blemish was a story, the armor a saga of survival.
Dragging a finger lazily across the dome, he saw where old imperfections, the ones he knew, joined with the markings he did not, forming larger regions of whittled paint on the sea-green canvas. The orange kill stripes on the dome were as faded as the memory of the lives they once symbolized.
Glancing down towards his chest, he observed how most of the blotches on the damaged green coating were sizeable, consuming the smaller, older ones like weeds in an untilled garden, leaving no traces of most of Fett’s former battle scars.
Even as he wore his inheritance, the armor that for years had been his second skin, he knew its speckled tale was no longer his. The Sarlacc, the Great Dune Sea, the exploits of Cobb Vanth – these had re-written the stories told by the Mandalorian armor.
He placed the helmet gingerly on a nearby workbench and began removing the armor piece by piece.
***
Fett stood over his armor, sprawled out like various pieces of a child’s puzzle across the workbench, feeling unexpectedly light. The rough-hewn, loose-fitting robes were all he had adorned the last several years during his hermitage on Tatooine. In truth, he had forgotten how the armor had weighed upon him, pressing into his shoulders, chest, and forearms – a solidity that loitered on the skin, not unlike the heavy heat generated by the twin suns of Tatooine that penetrated one’s core long after those formidable stars were consumed by the dark horizon.
I’m getting old… and my time out of it has made me weaker, Fett mused coldly.
He knelt to rummage through a utility crate, until his search yielded a canister of spray pigment. He shook the container vigorously, hearing the contents sloshing within. The paint, too, was past its prime but remained functional. Setting the canister aside, he gripped a small cloth and wiped a chest piece, freeing it from its thin coasting of loose grime and sand. The piece freed of dirt and debris, he set aside the cloth and retrieved the pigment, applying pressure to a trigger to release a sputtering green spray. It was darker than Fett remembered, as he absent-mindedly recalled that different planetary conditions at the time of application could impact the tint. It made little difference to him how the color appeared – all that mattered was that it was his.
The emerald tint was not, by any means, a universally suitable color from a tactical perspective. There were more times than not when his armor clashed with the environment, as apparent as a Twi’lek dancer on the bridge of an Imperial Star Destroyer. But that was hardly a concern when your name alone sent the most ruthless louts into a cowardly frenzy.
His opting for pigment was not for tactics, style, or tradition, but something personal. It was necessary.
Coating the armor had lessened the grief that had come when his face and frame matured into that of Jango’s. At the onset of adulthood, his gangly youthful stature broadened, and the armor fit his frame just as it had upon his father. When on the rare occasions he was confronted with the armor’s scintillating reflection in a Slave I viewport or upon a reflective decoration in a gaudy cantina, wearing his father’s silver Beskar had become less a way of honoring him and more a grim rite for conjuring a ghost, supplying a swift and raw feeling of loss and cold resentment. In his prime, the choice to adorn the armor in green with maroon and auburn accents had made him Boba. It was a small act of delineating himself from the man who raised him. The man stolen from him by a Jedi when he was a mere child. The man who had chosen an heir engineered from his own genetic code.
For as long as Boba could remember, he had known he was a clone.
***
~29 BBY, Kamino
“Dad.” Boba’s hand tugged at his father’s shirt. Even seated, Jango towered above him. “Do I ‘ave bruh-ders?”
“Hm?” Jango’s large hand ruffled Boba’s hair askew, but his eyes remained locked on the data pad in the other.
“Do I ‘ave bruh-ders?” Boba repeated, his small brow furrowed.
Jango slowly lowered the data pad on the adjacent table, turning to his blood. His other hand continued to slowly tousle Boba’s hair. The young boy before him was getting bigger each day, his physical growth perhaps only eclipsed by the development of the personality taking shape.
“The uh-thur boys who live here, the ones who follow the tall people ‘round an’ stuff… They look like me.”
Jango scooped up the young Boba, placing him onto his lap. He had mistakenly thought Boba was too young to recognize the others as potential kin. Afterall, they were growing at a match faster rate than Boba. Still, perhaps he had been a fool to think the similarity would go unrecognized this long.
“No, son,” Jango signed. “They might look like you, but they’re not your brothers. Taun We and the others look after them.”
“Oh,” Boba’s shoulders slumped, his eyes absorbing the white flooring. “Buh – But why do they look like me?”
“Hmmm,” Jango hummed, his arms embracing is son, pulling him closer to his chest.
“You’ve heard Taun We talking about the clones, right? You look the same as the other boys because you’re all clones. But that’s the only thing you have in common.”
Boba’s gaze shifted upward, meeting Jango’s chest, chin, nose, then his face. Jango peered back, identical pairs of dark brown eyes locked on the other. “Whatsa clone?” Boba asked.
“A clone is a copy. You’re all copies of me.” Jango paused, allowing a moment for Boba’s young mind to comprehend.
Boba’s brow crinkled in confusion. “But why?”
“You and them have been copied for different reasons. You, Boba… you’re my son. You’re my legacy. You give me purpose.” Jango squeezed his small son, his fingers slowly – then suddenly – playfully kneading into Boba’s shirt and skin.
“Daaaad, tha’ tickles!” Boba snickered, swatting at his father’s hands.
“My little warrior,” Jango chuckled, his eyes crinkling warmly. He cleared his throat, easing his grip on his son. “The others, they’ll have purpose, too. And they’ll be warriors. But they’re not mine, the way you are. You are special, son.”
Scooping up Boba, Jango stood and tossed Boba gently into the air. Boba shrieked with laughter as he soared towards the ceiling above.
Jango caught him, spun him around a few times, and placed a teetering Boba feet-first on the floor. Boba chuckled as he wobbled around the room, struggling to keep upright, making his way back over to Jango’s side.
“One more time, dad!”
“Later – you don’t want to spit up your midday meal now, do you?” He chuckled, smoothing Boba’s head gently. He lowered himself to sit on his heels, meeting Boba eye to eye once more. “One day, when you’re old enough, do you know you’ll have Mandalorian armor – just like your dad?”
Boba steadied himself, no longer teetering, mouth agape. “Really?” He breathed, eyes widening as a smile grew into his ruddy cheeks.
“It’ll be forged just for you – one of a kind. I’ll see to it.”
“I’ll be a Mamda-lor-eean, too?” Boba asked.
“You already are. And a proper Mandalorian warrior needs armor.”
“When? When?” Boba tugged anxiously at the fabric of Jango’s pants, beaming with excitement.
“Oh, when you’re a bit older,” Jango chortled. “You’re growing a lot at this age, and we’ll want it to last once it’s forged.”
“Oh…” Boba sulked, his small lips forming into a pout.
“Don’t worry, another year or two, and you’ll be ready to come with me on some of my hunts. I’ll start teaching everything you need to know to be a warrior. How does that sound?” Jango said, grabbing Boba’s tiny hand into his fist.
“Swear?” Boba asked.
“It’s a promise.”