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“It’s hideous, isn’t it?” the Mandalorian asks.
The man’s voice is rich and self-assured but not haughty, and somehow not at all what Boba expected to hear from under the audacious cowboy hat and full-faced tassel mask.
“It is,” Boba agrees. “A clear ripoff of your work.”
The man just tilts his head, silently assessing. Not what Boba expected at all.
What Boba did expect from the designer who’d uncovered Jango Fett’s long-lost suit sketches at an obscure estate sale, coaxed them from sparse lines to brilliant life and detail? Well, he isn’t entirely sure. Someone younger, maybe, a brash hotshot with something to prove.
Someone whose work deserved to be mangled by fast fashion, ripped off and slapped onto a too-thin Eternally 21 mannequin. Someone who had stolen his father’s work, surfed his way to middling fame on its back. Just another one of the dozens of hacks Boba helped E21 exploit and copy, to no consequence.
Not… this. Polite. Considerate. Wearing a clearly hand-made suit at once so outlandish and so well-made that the man must have crafted it himself. Standing quietly in the middle of the biggest fashion show in the galaxy, looking at his life’s work turned to cheap trash by the hulking remnants of Palpatine’s fashion empire.
“What would you say,” Boba starts, “if I told you that something could be done about that.”
The Mandalorian steps closer, and though he’s slender, probably weighs thirty pounds less than Boba, there’s still something of a threat in the way he moves.
“I’d say, I worked for them, and I got my just desserts,” he returns, his voice still mild, deceptively cool. “How many designs have you helped them steal, as they built their empire? You know. There’s nothing to do about it.”
“You have something I want, though,” Boba continues, “and you’re going to give it to me.”
“Oh?” the Mandalorian returns mildly. “And why is that?”
“Because I’m going to help you stop them from using it,” Boba says.
“Seems like a lot of trouble just to get something of mine,” the Mandalorian says.
Boba has no bargaining power, here. Normally he holds every card, every advantage. But the facts are pure and simple: The Mandalorian owns something that is priceless to him. Irreplaceable, irrecoverable. Something he’s spent his whole life looking for.
So all he can do is offer a deal the Mandalorian can’t refuse.
“The Jango Fett sketches,” he says. “They’re mine by rights. Willed to me. You return them, and I’ll do whatever it takes.”
The Mandalorian folds his arms and tilts his head in a cascade of beads. His eyes gleam through the mask, just barely, and Boba can see in them just enough: exhausted crow’s feet around dark irises, skin bruised from lack of sleep.
“Come with me, then,” says the Mandalorian.
The Mandalorian doesn’t even know for sure that Boba can help.
The thing is, Boba can, and he will. He’s been working on a back door, tracing down obscurities in intellectual patent law, working with a killer lawyer with a sniper’s eye.
But the Mandalorian doesn’t know that. The Mandalorian is just placing his father’s suits into his hands, no questions asked. Boba’s fingers close over the sketches, so delicately, careful not to blur the charcoal lines or bend the ancient paper.
His father’s legacy, in his hands at last.
“I had planned to return them anyway,” the Mandalorian says. “They’re yours. But I won’t turn down the help.”
Boba Fett wants to say thank you, to breathe it out into the air between them. But he squashes the urge.
“You’ll get it,” he promises, instead.
Corporate espionage in the fashion world seems like it would be thrilling.
The fact of the matter is, it’s just not. It’s long nights of digging up old prototypes, looking for times and dates in old hard drives, pulling up glimpses of sketches in the corners of photos of sewing spaces. Finding the irrefutable proof -- the trail of paper and cloth that proves ownership and theft.
Boba Fett has always been very, very good at making sure that this proof disappears.
But he hasn’t worked for the Empire in years, now, and his replacements aren’t half so good at his job.
But at the heart of things, it’s just work. It’s way, way too much caf, and watching the line of the Mandalorian’s throat as he drinks, and not watching the sure movement of the man’s hands cutting and pinning and styling as he feverishly brings designs into dimension for next month’s show, as if nothing is wrong, as if there isn’t someone waiting on the other side to take it all from him all over again. It’s falling asleep at a work table but waking up to find himself on the nearby couch, a garish blanket settled over him.
The Mandalorian is too kind by half, for this cut-throat world.
“This is pointless,” Boba growls. “They’ve made so many mistakes, but it doesn’t matter -- the Eternally 21 contracts are airtight.”
“Can I borrow you, for a moment?” the Mandalorian asks, ignoring the outburst.
“I’m already here,” Boba asks, inanely. “What for?”
“I need a few measurements,” the Mandalorian says, and gestures at the well-lit pedestal in the corner of his workshop, which normally just houses a mannequin -- obviously missing, today.
Bemused, Boba drops from his counter-height stool and makes his way to the pedestal.
The Mandalorian’s strong hands nudge him into place, making gentle gestures that let Boba infer and complete the movements he’s supposed to make. Boba’s throat goes tight, and he suddenly feels too large for his skin.
“This will be quick,” the Mandalorian says, inscrutable behind today’s fringed mask.
“Alright,” Boba manages to croak out. When is the last time someone handled him this gently? He doesn’t remember. He almost doesn’t care what it’s for, anymore.
“It’s a thank-you,” the Mandalorian says, answering Boba’s earlier question in an uncharacteristic moment of unprompted chatter. Boba hopes that’s a sign that he’s not the only one unsettled by this. “I thought I’d make you one of your father’s suits.”
“You don’t need to thank me.” The Mandalorian unrolls a soft tape measure and starts to measure Boba’s arms. “I extorted you.”
The Mandalorian’s hands are brisk, clearly used to professionally, dispassionately taking measurements for fittings. The thing is, Boba’s heartbeat doesn’t know that. It just knows the feel of a kind touch and races beyond his control. He tries to calm it without obviously deepening his breaths.
“You don’t know how to sew, do you?” the Mandalorian asks, clearly headed somewhere. He takes one measurement after another, noting the specs on a sheet of paper.
“Only some,” Boba admits. “He never taught me much, before he died.” It’s how he ended up where he did, contracted as a thief, not a designer proper. He could deconstruct something already made, trace the pieces, deliver the idea -- but he couldn’t turn a flat sketch into something real.
The Mandalorian hums. “So if you did want to bring his designs back to life -- you’d have to hire someone. You couldn’t do it yourself.”
“Yes,” Boba says, slowly.
The Mandalorian is kneeling, now, to measure his inseam, fingertips brushing like irons against the insides of his legs. It’s a thankfully brief moment, and then the tape is around Boba’s neck, and he’s looking directly into the Mandalorian’s eyes.
There’s something amused in them, behind the tassels.
“What are you fitting me for? A garrotte?” He always has defaulted to gallows humor to hide his nerves.
The Mandalorian doesn’t say anything, but the humor in his eyes grows.
“We could fight this futile battle against the empire,” the Mandalorian says slowly, “or we could do something else altogether.”
He’s done with the measurements, but the measuring tape still circles Boba’s neck. The Mandalorian’s hands are on his lapels, warm and strong. Boba can feel his breath.
“What do you say we go solo together, Boba Fett?”
Boba thinks of his father’s sketchbooks, the hundreds of designs in grayscale and color, the incomprehensible notations, the language he never learned to speak. The breathtaking ways the Mandalorian has interpreted the handful he had time to recreate himself, before Boba reclaimed Jango Fett’s visions.
It’s a good idea.
But none of that matters. Right now, the Mandalorian’s eyes are welcoming, and his hands haven’t moved from Boba’s shoulders. Boba would say yes to anything the man asked of him.
So he does.