Chapter Text
The fire does not take long to destroy the entire life that Omera has built for Winta.
It’s a stupid, sad accident that lights the sparks. No one’s fault, really. Just a combination of old brewing equipment and faulty wires and haphazard communal maintenance. The sort of thing that could happen anytime at the village.
It wouldn’t be a problem in the wet season. But it’s the dry season.
So the consequences are devastating and deadly.
Flames sweep through the village, starting on the edge, near the spotchka refineries, and swirling inward in a burst of ash and heat. As soon as Omera realizes what’s happening, she ushers all the krill farmers into the ponds and wets rags to cover their faces and protect their lungs from the smoke. And then she is running.
These are things she learned to do in her past life. She has not forgotten their many uses.
Her heart does not beat quick. She is calm. She is cool. She will save her daughter and anyone else who happens to be close enough.
She grips Winta so tight her knuckles turn white on her shoulder. But Winta is brave, and Winta is strong — like both her parents. She knows when to hide or when to run; she knows when to stand her ground, even at her young age.
Legs churn and villagers scream, but nearly all of them make it to the few wagons. The lumbering things lurch away, retreating from the roaring flames and flying ash. They roll so slowly. But it’s fast enough. Others keep running, outpacing the wagons. They will tire soon.
Omera tries to count the survivors. But these are not soldiers or bounty hunters; they don’t have an evacuation plan, stations to line up at and formations to keep. There’s no way to find every face in the chaos.
Still, enough of them will live. It is not far to the city, where there’s a single functioning commlink.
She has a comm code, given to her by the unpainted Mandalorian. She has carefully recorded messages, left weeks apart, whenever either of them can get to a communications hub. She has his endless promises that he will do anything he can to support her, should she choose to leave Sorgan.
She has her daughter. She has her village.
And she has a place to take them both.
This is, perhaps, not quite what the Mandalorian meant. But she plans to hold him to it.
It’s a shock to see the ashen, soot-covered faces of Sorgan krill farmers file into Jabba’s palace.
They look haggard and underfed, more like the people Din met who were desperate and afraid, harried by bandits — so unlike the determined militia who defended their homes. They huddle just inside the palace entrance, eyes skittering and afraid.
He wonders if this is how his own people looked beneath their helmets, when the imperials drove them from their homes. If they looked hollowed-out like these villagers, stripped of their iron skins. If they felt like he did on the imperial cruiser, naked and afraid and blinking under harsh lights. Or if they stood proud like warriors, even forced to scatter further, to shed the familial inheritance of their armor, to lose every bit of comfort they had hoarded for themselves on Nevarro.
They were probably stronger than him, Din thinks.
Like Omera, who steps forward from the crowd, spine straight, arm protectively wrapped around Winta.
Her holocall merely said, I need help. See you soon. It only arrived two days before. The connection between Sorgan and Tatooine is bad at the best of times, and it’s clear from the villagers’ charred clothing and patchy bandages that Sorgan is not in the best of shape.
She gave no warning of this.
“This was the only place I could think of,” she says. There is no apology in her voice. She does not look guilty for bringing three dozen mouths to feed.
She is a survivor who has chosen to survive, and had the strength to bring others with her.
Din nods at her. “I will see to it that you are fed and housed. I don’t know how long we can support you. But we have the resources to help some relocate, and others may find work here.”
At once, her spine relaxes. Omera gives him a playful smile, something bright peeking through the exhaustion. “Who are you, the King of Tatooine?”
“No,” Din says, and doesn’t say, but I have his ear. “I’ll introduce you.”
Omera does not know what to expect of the man who gutted the last dying remnants of the Hutt cartel.
She has a vague sketch of the man, assembled from bits and pieces Din has mentioned in their sparse holocalls. First foe, then friend; elegant in battle, as much a krayt dragon breathing fire as a man; strong, gentle hands; a steady presence, in Din’s loneliness and loss since giving away Grogu and breaking his Creed.
A good man. A man she would like to meet, if just to gauge whether she has read the wistfulness in Din’s voice correctly, and to determine whether or not the man is worthy of it.
She would have expected literally anyone other than the husband who died years ago.
“You,” she whispers, as he turns to regard her from his easy perch on his throne. It is as if every muscle in his body becomes stone at the sound of her voice.
The uneasy pause in the room speaks of untold violence — of a man known to make quick and brutal decisions when it suits him. Of a court held together equally by fear and respect, by the knowledge that each visitor will receive exactly what they deserve.
“Everyone out,” he rasps.
When she hears that voice, she thinks for a moment she is mistaken. It is quiet, hoarse, where the voice she remembers was smooth.
But that careful way of speaking is still there; she’s never heard that accent anywhere else. And she can’t imagine that anyone else could wear that armor for long, without coming to some unfortunate end.
Caben and Stoke give her quick, worried glances, but Omera waves them all out.
It’s unmistakable.
Boba Fett is alive.
They say a lot of things about the King of Tatooine.
That he crawled out of hell. That he made the charred, smoking hole in the desert that used to be the Great Pit of Carkoon. That he is the sarlacc, or at least its spirit, tangled into a piece of hapless prey and ascended to the hot sands above.
That he has no emotions, no soul, no family, nothing in him to tether him to this world.
That he cares only for money, and power, and the contract.
Some of it is even true.
But no one, not even Din, knows what Boba did those first cruel months after waking from his coma. How he scoured the galaxy, looking for his wife and his daughter. Even before he sought his father’s armor.
They had been separated for nearly a decade, by then, after she refused to raise a child with a man who took contracts for Vader. But that hadn’t stopped him from making sure they had everything they needed, even should he die. He had no one else to leave it to, after all.
He had left instructions, like his father before him: should he fail to send a message one day, open a book. It contained the passwords to his bank accounts, the encryptions to his files, the chaincodes to his armor and Slave I, maps to his safe houses — everything a bounty hunter and her daughter needed to erase their names and disappear.
She executed his last will well.
Too well. So well that he could not find her again. It filled him with a grim satisfaction: if he couldn’t find her, then no one else would, either.
They were safe.
He has always hoped — known — that she lives, that she was too smart, too quick, too mercenary and far, far too protective of their daughter to waste any time searching for him. That she would move on without him, and probably be happier for it, finding some measure of peace in this wasteland of a galaxy.
Even as the cybernetics ports healed on his leg and the scars turned from angry red to dull white, none of that could outstrip the pain of knowing that he lost them in a way far more permanent than mere separation.
Except Din’s pretty widow is Boba’s wife. And now she’s in this room. No longer safe.
He feels frozen to the throne. He wants to stand, to take her in his arms and kiss her again. He wants to lift his daughter, to see how she has grown.
The girl won’t remember him, though. She is already hidden behind her mother, peering out from behind. He probably scares her. She is so old now, and she looks nothing like him. She might have, once, but he is glad that she, at least, will not be cursed to look in the mirror and see her father.
The woman who was his wife says nothing, mercifully.
He wants to yell, tell them to go back to Sorgan and forget everything here. He wants to fall to his knees and kiss the dirty hems of their dresses.
Din’s presence hangs heavy in his peripheral, hand so close his blaster. What must he think of this strange, silent stand-off? Does he plan to shoot Boba? It wouldn’t be the first time he’s deserved it.
One of them will need to explain. Or maybe no one will — maybe this will just be a strange, forgotten history between the people they used to be.
He doesn’t want that, though. Not unless it’s what she wants, too.
So he takes the helmet off.
She’ll see the gesture for what it is.
As soon as Boba reaches for his helmet, Din tries to leave, but Boba raises a hand: Stop. So Din stays, feeling increasingly bewildered and uncomfortable.
Boba is calling Omera something, a name Din doesn’t recognize.
She flinches at the sound of it.
“It’s Omera, now,” she says.
“And she —” Boba doesn’t finish the thought. He grips his helmet so hard that his fingers go pale.
“Winta.”
“Winta,” Boba repeats. He reaches towards her, but pulls his hand back — not quickly enough to keep Din from seeing that Boba is trembling. There’s something watery and disbelieving in his dark eyes.
“Honey,” Omera says, putting a hand on Winta’s shoulder, “I want you to meet an old friend of mine. Boba.”
There’s a steel in her voice that Din’s only ever heard when she’s preparing for a confrontation. Din does not know what’s happening here, but they sure don’t seem particularly friendly. Din has never seen either of them quite like this. Neither of them spare a glance at Din; he’s just a shiny, well-armed fly on the wall.
“I know that we did not part on good terms,” Boba says, “but if you would allowing me to know her — or you — in any capacity —”
Oh, Din thinks. He thinks he’s beginning to see. Omera’s quiet familiarity with Mandalorians, but not his type of Mandalorian — her sharpshooter’s eyes and steady hands. Her quick thinking, in the face of fear.
He looks from Boba to Winta, and he’s not sure whether it’s just his imagination that he can see them in each other’s eyes.
“That depends,” Omera says.
“On?”
“Whether you’ve learned to want something more than what your father made you for.”
Boba’s eyes cloud over. Din has not heard Boba speak of his father, often. But a small black book lies in Boba’s nightstand, and Din has glimpsed in it the holorecording of a serious-eyed, scarred man, a few times when he’s entered Boba’s quarters without warning.
A cherished memory, Din suspects. He wonders what Omera knows of Boba’s father that Din doesn’t.
“You have no reason to believe any promises that I make. But I think my actions will show that my priorities have changed,” Boba says.
There’s a strange amusement, now, in Omera’s face. “Well, I’d certainly believe that you’ve changed. A throne, Boba? Really?”
Din looks away. If it wouldn’t be conspicuous, he’d shut off the audio inputs to his helmet, too. This conversation is not for him. He doesn’t understand why Boba hasn’t sent him away.
He does his best not to listen to any of the rest, but he can read the signs clear enough. He’s seen families reunited after the Great Purge. Mandalorians who did terrible things to survive, alone, had to find new ways to sew their patchwork lives back together with the families they’d loved and lost.
That’s not what this is, exactly, but it’s something close enough. He tries not to think of his fruitless dreams that he might find his own parents, again, and that they would struggle to take each other back like so many of the others.
The conversation does not last much longer. Boba leaves to escort Omera to new rooms. If either of them look to Din, he doesn’t notice; he’s too busy trying not to invade their privacy.
After they’ve left, he stands in the empty throne room, adrift. Normally at this time he would head to his own quarters, shed his beskar, and slip quietly into Boba’s room for an evening meal and a game of sabacc.
He won’t do that tonight.
He might not ever again, and he feels a pang of loss at the thought — selfish, he knows. But he has found a sort of peace and solace here, between Boba’s service and Omera’s long-distance companionship.
But he respects both of them too much to stand in the way of whatever they might want to build without him.