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Boba reclined on Jabba’s former throne, satisfied with the day’s work. Fennec took another swig of spotchka, a smirk growing on her face.
Boba surveyed the corpses of Bib Fortuna and the other unfortunate remnants of the Hutts’ slow-dying empire. The carbon burns stood out, black and charred, on their limp forms. Someone would have to deal with that sometime soon, but it wouldn’t be Boba or Fennec.
They had other plans.
“So,” Boba said, “sauna.”
“Sauna,” Fennec agreed.
“Think the old slug ever managed to figure out what that room was for, or just kept assuming it was just poorly ventilated?”
“Should we be so lucky,” Fennec muttered. “It’s probably covered in slime. And who knows what karking Bib did to it.”
As they spoke, Boba noted the twisted stone rancor faces that flanked the throne. Awful. Those would have to go.
But again, another time.
Right now, Boba and Fennec had a sauna to evaluate.
“Kark,” Boba said.
“Hm,” Fennec said. “Worse than I was expecting.”
Fennec surveyed the sauna with a blatant moue of distaste. The actual bones weren’t bad—the native Tatooine dark, almost red cedru wood would probably smell a little spicy after a good sanding, and a combustion stack would heat hot stones and put off a soothing steam. The wide and spacious benches looked perfect for spreading out to sweat and relax.
If it were shipshape, it would be beautiful.
It was definitively not shipshape.
At some point, someone had laid down a wood frame on the floor, presumably so that moisture could drip into a floor tray and evaporate.
Whatever was in there had not evaporated.
The mess was, really, indescribable, but if Boba had to recount it, he’d probably have wanted to say something like, “Green ejaculate of mysterious origin, horrendous splatters—blood pattern, but not blood color from any species I’ve shot, not even a Rodian, and not interested in finding out what they actually were—” and then just settled on, “It’s a biohazard.”
He wasn’t going to say any of that to Fennec; it was right there in front of them, and he could see her making the exact same observations, then quietly folding them up and shoving them into the sealed-off corner of her mind where she liked to keep the worst of things. The less they discussed it, the better.
Boba looked at Fennec, ready to say, ‘Let’s get to it.’
“You’re gonna need gloves,” Fennec said, first.
When Fennec said you are going to need gloves, she meant it. No amount of cajoling could get her to help.
“I have too many ideas about where… all that… came from,” she said, something dark in her expression. “I’ll handle the acquisitions. Besides, someone needs to direct the cartel while you indulge.”
“You’re going to benefit from this too,” Boba pointed out, in a last-ditch effort to not end up alone in that dark little room trying very hard not to imagine the origins of the hardened fluids he was scraping up with a shovel. The shovel was gold in color, but he was fairly certain it wasn’t actually gold in composition. Surely Jabba didn’t keep a pure gold shit shoveler lying around.
Neither of them would consider sending one of Bib’s lackeys to clean the sauna. The majority of them had been laboring at near-poverty wages, even for Tatooine—abysmal, considering that the Hutt clan was one of the largest employers on the planet. And no amount of credits would constitute “fair pay” for asking some poor scrub to take a brush to that hellhole.
“I’m not doing your datawork, otherwise,” Fennec said.
“Fine,” conceded Boba, who hated few things more than datawork. He’d allowed Fennec to take over all his ledgers, just to give her something to do while she was healing. And… he’d allowed her to keep managing the books after.
He certainly didn’t enjoy it.
Contracts were one thing, easy enough, more often signed and enforced with a blaster than a signature. Ledgers, he could work with. A little bit of smudging in the ledgers was just to be expected, if you outsourced something like that to someone like Fennec. Boba wrote off the minor embezzling as her cut.
Forms, though. Hideous.
The point was—she had the leverage.
Also, he was never exactly quite sure where or how to file things, because he’d been in prison and then running for his life during the formative years that most people learned things about participation in legal society. Half the reason Boba valued his imperial contracts so highly is that name-checking Vader always saved him the hassle of having to keep up with imperial regulatory changes. The imps changed their code frequencies faster than Boba changed his socks, sometimes. Anyway, it didn’t cause too many problems—most people interpreted his continuous failure to properly register Slave I as an aggressively anti-government choice—and contributed to his overall reputation of general lawlessness.
So, the point was, Fennec Shand could make Boba Fett do almost anything she wanted, as long as she made sure he never had to look at a single kriffing form ever again.
And that included mucking out decades of Hutt grime.
Boba sighed, rolled up the rubber gloves to his elbows, and got to work.
“I have bad news,” Fennec said.
“What now?” said Boba, expecting something like, ‘The Second Sun Tuskens are encroaching on cartel territory.’
“This sauna is expensive,” she said. “We’re already in the red.”
“Just to fix the heater?” Someone, shortly before the sauna’s broader demise, had attempted to heat the stones by burning organic matter of, again, origins that Boba was determinedly not thinking about. The heater had not taken it well.
“Do you know how much all this water costs, on Tatooine? The taxes alone—criminals couldn’t come up with a better scam. Plus, the industrial-grade chemical scouring agents for the…” Fennec made a gesture indicating ‘floor gunk,’ not trying to hide her disgust. “The sandpaper. Replacement cedru wood for rotted boards.”
“Alright, alright,” Boba said, holding up a hand.
“And it’s not just the sauna,” Fennec said.
Here we go. This is what Boba had expected.
“This entire enterprise—I have no idea how the Hutts were keeping it running. Maybe Bib ran it into the ground—”
“Probably,” interrupted Boba, unable to resist expressing a bit of ire towards the Twi’lek who’d tormented him when he was a child desperate for bounty work. The bastard deserved nothing, even if he was already dead.
“—but as far as I can see, this clan of Hutts hasn’t made an actual credit since well before Jabba’s death. They were coasting on interest, at best.”
“Shand, I don’t see how this is our problem.” It wasn’t their responsibility to lift this hulking carcass of a cartel off the ground. They were here for the joy of vengeance and the heat of a good steam room—nothing more complicated than that. “Dealing with this sounds like too much hassle. Why don’t we just dip out, call it a day?”
“You want to stick around long enough to enjoy the sauna, don’t you?”
Boba crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow at her. Fennec knew the answer, and had one of her own to match: They’d talked at length about their mutual aches and pains. The sarlacc scars hurt, and nothing felt better on them than a long soak and a nice steam. As for Fennec, leading an active lifestyle without an abdomen, even after a quality cybernetic update? Very hard on the spine.
“Look,” Fennec continued. “Why don’t we just open a spa?”
“A… spa,” Boba repeated. He wouldn’t have thought of it. He wouldn’t have expected Fennec to suggest it, either.
“It’s another source of income. It looks good, won’t draw too many eyes. Keeps Bib’s staff fed, too. The infrastructure for it is already here.” She activated a holo, which threw up a glowing blueprint of Jabba’s palace. “Did you know there used to be a public bath house on the second floor?” she asked nonchalantly, eyes bright.
“I had no idea,” Boba answered, truthfully.
“Hmm,” she said. “It might’ve been before your time.”
Boba forgot, sometimes, that she’d been working for the Hutts for a good decade before he bluffed his way into their service as a recently orphaned ten-year-old. He had no idea how old she was, and it didn’t seem prudent to ask.
“It’s enough to at least start a plausible spa,” Fennec said.
It didn’t sound like an entirely unreasonable suggestion. This sort of business wasn’t exactly in Boba’s wheelhouse, but it couldn’t be too much of a change to go from charging an entirely reasonable fee as an honest murderer-for-hire to charging admittedly too much money to moisturize people who live on a giant desert.
It wasn’t what he and Fennec had planned at the start of this venture, no. Or what Boba had envisioned for himself—what Boba’s father had envisioned for him, more accurately—years ago.
But his time in the sarlacc’s belly had taken him back to those memories of his father, and as an adult, he’d looked at them with fresh eyes. In those hard days after, healing from the acid, he’d spent a lot of time thinking hard about what he wanted.
And come to the conclusion that what he really, truly wanted was a nice long fucking bath every night for the rest of his life.
“Alright,” Boba said. “Let’s do it.”
The Mandalorian showed up two days later.
By that time, the sauna was properly scrubbed, with only the faintest tinge of green outlines hinting at what might have once transpired in its dim depths. The public baths would take a lot more effort, and probably even more astringent chemical washes. Boba had fought to the death in cleaner coliseums.
“The… Spa,” Din read from the Aurebesh that had been hastily scrawled atop the stone palace entrance.
“He’s still workshopping the name,” Fennec said, with a truly uncalled-for amount of dismissiveness.
Boba wasn’t entirely sure why he had to come up with the name when the idea belonged to Fennec, but.
“I don’t see what’s wrong with it,” Boba said. “Short. To the point. You know what you’re gonna get.”
“Huh,” said the Mandalorian. “Except it’s a front, right?”
“Yes,” Fennec said, at the same time that Boba blurted, “No.”
Maybe they would have to talk about that one. Boba had no plans to bail out a failing, indebted criminal enterprise—that was for sure. He was here for the sauna, and maybe a nice bath, and that was it.
Fennec could do what she wanted, though.
The sands shifted behind them, and the Mandalorian’s head gave a tiny twitch—not noticeable to the casual observer, but just enough to betray alarm, if you were watching.
“Jumpy?” Fennec asked, eyebrow raised.
“Last time I was here, I got eaten by a krayt dragon,” the Mandalorian grumbled. “You’d be jumpy, too.”
Boba had heard about that and put it off to rumor. The idea that this small-fish Mandalorian bounty hunter might have climbed directly into a krayt dragon and blown it up from the inside? Ridiculous. Though now that he’d worked with the man a bit more, he was starting to believe it. What Mando lacked in resources, he made up for in sheer stubbornness and a lack of self-preservation.
And, of course, every time Boba thought of someone skewering a krayt dragon, it took him back decades, to those days with Bossk and Sing and Razzi, that strange band of criminals who thought it’d be a fun time to let a rageful thirteen-year-old run them ragged on bounties around the galaxy.
The Mandalorian would probably find it funny, from what Boba knew of him.
“You know, back in the day, I ran this little band of bounty hunters—”
Boba stopped.
The Krayt’s Claw, he had called it. A good name, he thought. A little ominous. Not too full of itself.
“The Krayt’s Spa,” he said, slowly, testing the words on his tongue.
The Mandalorian looked at him. Fennec looked at him.
“That’s the name,” Boba said.
Fennec groaned.
The Mandalorian said nothing, but he tilted his helmet to look back at the sign. Boba thought the angle of his head seemed thoughtful and, just maybe, approving.
A few weeks later, the spa opened for business.
They advertised quietly, at Fennec’s request—she turned out to be a dab hand at marketing and knew a suspicious amount about HoloNet ad contracts. They had local clients rolling in, slowly but surely, if just to see what had become of the great Hutt palace, converted into a place of leisure.
And in the meantime, the word spread parsec after parsec.
Far away on Bespin, Lando Calrissian watched the words scroll across his HoloPad: “The Krayt’s Spa. Open for public bathing. Sauna recently de-slimed. Find us at the old Hutt Palace on Tatooine. If you don’t already know it, don’t bother visiting.”
And in fine print at the end, “No imps. No rebels. No New Republic. No Jedi. No Sith. No Death Watch. No Bo-Katan Kryze. Tuskens get half-off on all spa packages.”
Hm, he thought with a grin. So who’s left?
Lando turned off the HoloPad and thought of it no more.
Unread by Lando, and indeed most individuals who saw the ad, in even finer print: “The Krayt's Spa is not responsible for any allergic reaction to bathing conditions, or for death or dismemberment associated with facility staff or proximity to the premises.”
Lando would come to wish he’d paid a little closer attention.