Chapter Text
Kebiin.
Blue.
The sky was so, so damn blue.
On... Tatooine?
Right?
Of course it was Tatooine.
Boba wasn't really sure why the Mando'a word had drifted to the forefront of his mind before basic, but it seemed to fit the color more vibrantly in that moment than any other dialect could.
He realized he hadn't actually seen the color in so long. Aside from the colors shifting in his hallucinations within the Sarlacc, fusing and mingling into shapes both familiar and not. People long gone, places long past seen. Sometimes even voices, carrying a cadence to them that clawed at his throat to just respond, please.
Boba found that he didn't want to pry too hard into figuring out exactly how long he’d been down there.
He had wrenched the helmet off moments after succeeding in his frenzied escape, seeking fresh air and thinking of little else at the time. Such as the unforgiving, eternal glare of the twin suns sitting high in the sky, and the agony their light would cast on eyes hidden for far too long from their untempered radiance.
He'd only gotten a glimpse skyward before having to scrunch his eyes shut, throwing an arm over them, but it still didn't feel like enough. Boba slumped back into the sand, and his armor made a soft thud with the impact. The leftover acid on his skin felt like a brand, rippling across his nerves.
His vision danced between oranges and greens and purples and, eventually, black spots that flared blearily along the edges of his perception before overtaking him, pulling him down.
A small part of him flinched internally, fighting viciously at the simple idea of downward, of sinking, too much time spent downward. Even in just a metaphysical sense. It didn’t matter, the sinking feeling of losing consciousness still felt like a physical trap pulling him down into a pit.
But nothing could stop the exhaustion in his unused muscles from sealing the deal as he blacked out.
He shocked awake later on, to cool night air, and feeling much, much lighter. He scrambled to sit up, get up, anything to do with going up. His body didn’t fully cooperate, but the attempt at least woke him the rest of the way up, shaking the vestiges of panic from his mind.
The brisk evening air of the desert bit into his flightsuit much more freely than it had any right to.
He shifted, and paused. He didn't feel the bite of a pauldron that he should have, or the stiffness of a vambrace, the hug of an unforgiving cuirass cupping his form snugly.
Ah.
That’s why.
Well. He'd have to go find that now too, apparently.
Ship first, though.
Actually getting to his ship, much less putting distance between himself and the Sarlacc, proved to be more difficult than he'd realized.
His muscles were weak from disuse, and the sudden activity was exhausting him. He could do nothing to prevent his body from shutting down occasionally, slumping down into the sand tiredly, trying to conserve what limited stores of energy he held onto. Whatever was in the Sarlacc's acid had likely also been sustaining him as well, keeping him alive, and the irony felt tangible.
There was also the matter of his leg. He hadn't given it much of a look, hadn't given any part of him a look yet, really. He didn't want to know. He was too set on pushing forward to concern himself with what he might find. There was nothing to be done for it. Still though, he knew something was wrong with his leg. It didn't react to his movements properly, the muscles unreactive and sluggish, or at least more so than the rest of him. He remembered hurting it, in the early days of his imprisonment, something tearing as he fell downward. After that he'd gotten used to the pain, felt numb to it, the Sarlacc's acid likely had some antibiotic component in it to prevent its victims from perishing too early. But the entire leg felt numb now, coalescing into a staggering pain higher up past his knee.
His head spun with a bone-weary delirium.
Boba continued onward.
The air was still brisk in the early hours of the night. It was cold, enough to chill him, but he preferred it to the stale, unmoving air inside the Sarlacc. The remaining acid that had soaked his flightsuit, now mostly dry to the air, bit out a painful reminder wherever it rubbed against his skin.
He wasn't sure how far he'd made it from the Sarlacc's crater, a dust-ridden hole in the ground now left blissfully empty.
He had tried to piece together the events of his escape, but his memories felt guarded, fuzzy in the center but too sharp to touch around the edges. Too dangerous to handle except to make out the vague shape of what happened.
He couldn't help the pained breath that tore out of his throat from even thinking back on the whole experience. A shudder rippled through him.
The clearest, most recent memory he had as of yet was the horrible, piercing cry the Sarlacc had released before his entire world shifted violently. He'd long ago forgotten the directions of up or down, simply floating within his own existence, ungrounded. Pain from the acid dulled his senses into a mindless, agonizing hum. Until something had pulled his world, yanking it off its axis and throwing it to the side with gut-wrenching inertia.
As his thoughts continued, his memories grew clearer. The edges grew sharper. The memory continued, unbidden.
The Sarlacc had moved. Of its own accord or from outside interference, he had no idea. It stayed stationary for a moment again, but his universe still felt unsteady. A horrific reminder that his prison was alive.
The combination of the Sarlacc's deafening cry and his gravity shifting had nearly caused him to black out, but the sudden introduction of sunlight felt like a step above. He looked up, feeling his neck muscles twinge with their lack of use, and gasped.
He could see absolutely nothing, but it was blinding. The contrast of utter darkness and binary sunlight was too great even through his visor. His helmet whirred to life shortly after, waking from the sleep mode it had frequently fallen into when Boba's lack of motion tricked it into believing it had no host. He didn't blame it, he hadn't felt like he existed either, in those moments.
The contrast in his hud adjusted after a moment, clarifying the picture and removing the blinding glare. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, Boba felt panic ripple through his body, a searing, white hot fear.
In front of him, shifting violently mere feet from where he was suspended by the tendrils of the Sarlacc, was a tooth. It was almost as large as him. Spots of sunlight filtered in through the space between the Sarlacc and the gaps in the other creature's massive teeth.
It pierced the Sarlacc's body in a jagged wound and was shifting down, rending the injury open further. Boba felt inertia kick in again, and realized that whatever creature this belonged to was dragging the Sarlacc, tugging it from its pit in the sand.
He heard another shriek from the Sarlacc, and a responding growl from the other creature that shook him down to his very soul.
Boba inhaled sharply and staggered for a moment, remembering his current location, remembering he was safe. It did nothing to quell the panic. He felt the tug of exhaustion darkening his vision again, yet he continued his relentless steps forward.
The vague tug of unconsciousness was worrying sign, as was whatever untold injuries plagued his body, but all he could do was press onward. It's all he'd ever done, he might as well continue.
Boba snapped awake suddenly, gasping. Again not aware that he'd even passed out, and again face down in the sand. He rolled over onto his back to gaze up at the early morning sky. The movement jostled his torn leg, and he hissed at the pain that jolted up his spine from it.
He mentally took stock of himself for a moment. He was tired, that much he knew, but he was also getting weaker. Without food and water, he had nothing to refill his dwindling energy. Nothing to stave off the dehydration that would surely set in further soon, with the inevitable rising of the suns any moment now. He felt loopy, unmoored, only half present and only vaguely aware of the passing of time.
He had no idea where he was going. He'd picked North, and simply kept going. He couldn't remember where anything was in relation to the Great Pit of Carkoon, and the lack of foresight was something he'd be kicking himself for for the rest of his life.
Possibly a short life, all things considered.
The sudden realization that he could meet his end here of all places, wandering the desert aimlessly, struck him with a force that practically winded him. How cruel could the universe really be, to grant him this reprieve from his prison, only to kill him with the very act of escaping it?
Could he not have met a merciful end early on, if the universe craved his death so greatly? Could it have spared him the confusion and anguish of accepting a drawn out, painful, mindless death? Of an indefinite, undefinable amount of time spent languishing in his own thoughts as the acid ate away at him?
The Sarlacc, for all the damage it had done to him both physically and mentally, had successfully kept him alive. For its own merits, of course, but nonetheless. It shielded him from the ruthless climate, and sustained him just enough to stay conscious. Conscious enough to count the minutes, hours, days, and weeks until they blended together in the cacophony of his hallucinations.
The very act of leaving that torturous existence may very well have been the thing to seal his fate.
The soft hiss of sand moving nearby thankfully woke him from his reverie, however, and he turned to see the source of the noise.
The glint of a gaderffii mere inches from his face was not what he expected.
The Tusken holding it was as still as the dunes that surrounded them.
He blinked. Boba hadn't even heard the Tusken nearby, much less heard them get close enough for this. The wind kicked around their robes -- a soft, muddy brown color, accented with tan edges -- as they stood over him.
Boba's understanding of the Tusken language wasn't what it could have been, for all the time he spent on Tatooine, but it was enough to get by in minor instances.
This was not a minor instance.
He leaned up from his prone posture in the sand, and felt the gaffi stick shift down slightly to meet him, pushing into his unarmored chest with a force that said to stay put. He hesitantly raised his hands in surrender, before bringing them together in one of the few signs he knew.
He added on a questioning sign after, changing the meaning.
Friend?
The Tusken was unmoving above him. Mentally, he calculated the ways out of this situation, down to a number that was distressingly small. In his state of weakness and injury, compounding the lack of energy and muscle mass, fighting was simply not an option.
Finally the Tusken retracted their gaderffii, shifting and leaning down. Inspecting him. Not even a moment later, the Tusken jolted backwards as if burned, flinching at some unknown influence.
Boba was immediately on high alert before realizing that the reaction was at him.
The Tusken began frantically signing, throwing their hands around in a frenzied manor that Boba felt like he could not have kept up with even if he was fluent in the language. Guttural sounds of excitement accompanied the signs. Many of the signs were followed by a point in his direction, some of them with a point back towards the Tusken themselves.
Boba slowly shook his head, unsure how to proceed. Was this excitement aggressive or friendly? Would his denial of it lead to a threat of some sort?
Catching on to his confusion, the Tusken slowed, crouching down in the sand next to him as they seemingly considered their next attempts at communication.
The Tusken slowly, deliberately, choose a few signs, common ones to hopefully convey their intentions. Boba picked up on one out of the three.
Friend was one of them, surprisingly.
Boba tilted his head. The Tusken slumped their shoulders, clearly frustrated in some manor, and tried again. They pointed at his chest, a very clear indication to Boba himself. Boba nodded.
It was followed by the Tusken waving their hand in front of their face, indicating to their... mask? Boba knew the word for mask, so he signed it. Were they asking about his helmet? Maybe they knew who took his armor, or where it was.
The Tusken signed back a quick no, shifting to get more comfortable in their crouched position. Their hand pointed to his face this time, making the same vague waving motion. He started to get the meaning, and his stomach sank at the realization.
You.
Your face.
He tensed, ready for a fight of some sort, even in his state. References to his face rarely led anywhere good. He'd fight for his life regardless, even for a misunderstanding such as this. However, the Tusken continued, signing something familiar, something that immediately threw Boba off.
Friend.
Before he could react, the Tusken continued with another sign.
Kin.
It was a vague sign for family, not too far from aliit. It could reference any particular family member in general, from father, to parent, to son. Or a sibling.
Or a brother.
Boba swallowed thickly.
The Tusken combined it with another sign to change the meaning, wrapping up the past few terms into some semblance of a sentence that Boba's extremely limited sign language could pick up on.
You. Face of Kin. Face of friend.
Boba was stunned, speechless. A... clone had made it out here, to Tatooine, at some point, and befriended Tuskens? Or at least this particular Tusken, or his tribe. Was this clone still with them? No, no clone could have survived for this long. The accelerated aging would not have permitted any remaining clones to live to an age such as this.
This bond, between the clone and this Tusken, it had to have been generational. The clone would have arrived here either during the Clone Wars or during the mass exodus of the remaining clones following their replacement with the new era of indoctrinated stormtroopers.
But no, that couldn't be right either. The Tusken had recognized his face, after all. That immediate, jarring recognition wasn't something you could pass down through the generations. This Tusken, whoever they were, would have known this clone directly, had been around them during their time here.
He realized suddenly that he hadn't responded yet, but the Tusken's content patience left him feeling no urgency. Everything in him wanted to correct the Tusken, even with his limited vocabulary, but what would he even say? Even with full fluency, he could never explain the simple nuance of clinging to the notion that he was unique, separate, from whatever man had resided here with his face.
But going with this half life, this half truth, felt like a dishonesty in its own right. Would this Tusken help him? Would their tribe? He would surely die out here, alone, if he continued to push on in this state.
With his armor stripped, he was no longer Boba Fett, at least for the moment. He was simply the kin of a clone, sharing the face of one who had earned a place among the Tuskens.
Maybe that's all Boba needed, for right now.
He desperately wanted to know what this clone had done to earn their trust.
The Tusken, clearly past expecting a response at this point, straightened up and offered Boba an outstretched hand.
He took it.