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0.
The end comes on a nondescript day after a series of unmemorable, unremarkable events.
“I need you to go into hiding.”
Boba sits up. The blanket, a thin but warm thing, pools in his lap, a bit caught by static electricity on the right side of his shirt. Cotton, real cotton. It was a gift, set out with matching shorts and stockings the night before. Boba had marvelled at the luxury and then cut and filed his nails in the fresher to avoid snagging the fabric.
Vader is sitting in his pod, rotated and open to face Boba. The helmet is on, but Boba has grown to recognise that this is as physically vulnerable as he can be. Vader, beneath the suit, is still human. He can’t risk any exposure of viruses or bacteria that Boba may unknowingly carry, and Boba doesn’t want him to take the risk for a selfish flesh to flesh interaction.
“Why?”
A long moment of silence, the even, forced breathing filling the room. Boba shifts, pushing the blanket off. He leans down and feels around for his boots, fresh cotton stockings laid neatly over their tops.
“I will die soon.”
Boba, half the stocking over his left foot, feels like he’s turned to ice. He stares at Vader, and, if he was anyone else, Boba would call him a liar. Darth Vader is many things, but he has never, ever lied to Boba.
It’s why they are who they are to each other.
“There are provisions for you,” Vader says, and Boba finishes pulling on the stocking, his heart pounding against his thread. “Calamari flan, too.”
Vader expects the Empire to fall.
Boba puts on his boots. He swallows, mouth immediately filling back up with saliva. He swallows again.
He wants to protest.
“I have sent the coordinates to your ship,” Vader says as Boba reaches for his undersuit.
Boba swallows. He pulls on his undersuit. Interior gloves. Straps on his greaves. Pauldrons. Vambraces.
His blood is rushing in his ears.
“You are upset,” Vader says, low and in the soft tone that Boba has only ever heard when it is just them, safe and alone.
“You are going to die,” Boba says, and his chest plates are floating before him, level for him to step into, “and you’re telling me to run away and hide.”
He buckles the straps of his armour. Hooks up the connections between his flamethrower and jet pack. Checks the responsiveness of his controls, helmet, and rocket launcher.
Vader breathes. Steady. Unrelenting.
“You cannot help me,” he says, very soft.
“Don’t try to soothe me,” Boba says, connecting his belt and checking that everything is secure; his hands have a faint tremor. “Will you at least tell me why?”
Vader breathes. Boba’s helmet floats beside him. He doesn’t reach for it.
“Luke Skywalker,” he says, the name of the rebel hero that Boba had brought him a handful of months ago and then thought very little about; “He is my son.”
Boba opens his mouth. Closes it. He swallows. Clenches his shaking hands into fists.
“Boba,” Vader says, and it’s sad, infinitely so, in a way that punches through Boba’s gut like an ion cannon. “I will not be made to choose between the two of you.”
Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star and has marked himself with a bounty greater than even Boba would dare hunt. He’s not suicidal nor fool enough to chase a price set by the Emperor. That is Vader’s job. He must hunt his own son.
There are things that even Darth Vader will not do.
Boba breathes in. Out.
“Does that really mean you will die?” he asks because he can feel the galaxy crumpling around him.
“Yes,” Vader says, absolutely certain. “Maybe not immediately. But soon.”
Boba sucks in air. Vader looks at him, framed by the meditation pod. For a mad, desperate moment, Boba thinks about crossing the room. Climbing in. Contaminating the pod, driving one of his knives into the respirator, setting them both on fire with his flamethrower. He even thinks Vader would let him. If only for a moment.
But then Vader says, “Please,” and Boba feels the galaxy collapse.
He takes his helmet. Puts it on. He attaches the seals one by one with his fingers. They aren’t shaking anymore.
“Fine,” he says, and it is wretched, and it hurts, but he’ll do it because he won’t make Vader choose either. “Fine.”
1.
“Fett,” Bossk says, heavily distorted by the poor reception, “you need to go into hiding.”
Outside, the latest storm lashes the ruins of Kamino. Boba frowns, not at Bossk. Not at anything in particular, really.
“I am in hiding,” he says, fingers resting on the comm controls.
“Real hiding, not just bouncing around Wild Space,” Bossk says, and he scratches at the right side of his face, his primary nervous tell. “I know you’ve seen the New Republic bounty out on you.”
Of course he has. Boba checks the bounty networks like clockwork, a habit he would have to be dead to stop. He even got a ping when the bounty was posted because it fit his notification parameters: skyhigh payout, armed and dangerous target, Mandalorian. Seeing the holo of himself, standing on an Imperial gun deck next to Darth Vader, had been less of a shock than it should have been, but Boba has a hard time giving a fuck about anything nowadays.
“I’m surprised they want me alive,” he says because he should say something in response to Bossk.
“This isn’t the time for your stupid death wish,” Bossk scolds, like Boba is fourteen again and throwing a hissy fit; Bossk catches himself and grits his teeth, sucking in air through them and blowing it out audibly. “Darth Vader named you a partial inheritor of his will –”
The galaxy inside of Boba is falling into a black hole.
“So it’s not just the New Republic that’s chomping at the bit,” Bossk is saying, barreling forward because he obviously thinks Boba needs to hear this, “someone is going to figure out you’re on your accursed ocean planet –”
“There are many ocean planets,” Boba says, leaning back in the chair and crossing his arms. “Unless they know what I am and find a surviving and cognisant clone to get here, no one is getting through the atmosphere. The Kaminoans are effectively extinct.”
Bossk rubs the side of his face, more frustrated. He doesn’t speak immediately, staring at Boba as if he has a million things to say and doesn’t know what to start with. Boba waits. All he has is time now.
“Do you know what Vader left you?”
“No,” Boba says because the information is not readily available, but Bossk has always been better at hacking than him because he actually tries. “I’m not going to pay you for the information.”
“It’s not my right to sell it,” Bossk says, and waits.
Boba presses his arms into this chest, a poor shield. He looks to the window, smeared and stained by the years. His armour rests neatly beneath it, freshly cleaned from the morning.
The red streak around the visor stares back.
You changed your visor colour.
“Fett,” Bossk starts.
“Tell me,” Boba says because he isn’t a coward.
“He left you beskar,” Bossk says, and Boba feels the way his flesh turns to ice, and he knows that Bossk will be able to read his expression; Bossk knows him better than anyone else left in the galaxy; “A lot of it. And a lightsaber.”
Beskar to be forged as the recipient sees fit and a weapon to defeat enemies. Two gifts to prove love and respect. Something that would mean something to Boba. Something that meant something to Vader.
Do you like it?
“Fett,” Bossk says, and Boba has put his face into his hands, elbows sinking into his thighs, his skin peeling off in the frigid cold. “Fuck.”
Boba breathes in. Shudders. Breathes out.
The colour suits you.
“Bossk,” he says, and it hurts to speak but he lifts his head anyways and finds Bossk watching him with something that could almost be sympathy, “I made a mistake.”
Bossk is quiet. He watches Boba stand up. The way he goes straight and rigid.
“Fett,” Bossk says, low and unhappy, “please don’t do something stupid.”
“You know me,” Boba says, and terminates the transmission.
The love they had grew like flowers in a desert.
It was fragile and shadowed. Boba doesn’t quite know when the bud formed, but he remembers lying awake some restless nights and refreshing his messages, trying to convince himself that Vader just might have contacted him with a job. Gradually, between hunting and Vader himself, those nights turned into text messages and then voice and holocalls. Like the slow movement of water over rocks, turning all edges smooth, their professional conversations meandered, forming new streams that became rivers that eventually became deep, deep pools.
It made Boba’s life better. He had more time between jobs because Vader paid well, and his credits were more often than not unmarked. Boba bought better armour, better weapons, better repairs for Slave 1. He drank and smoked less, realising belatedly he’d been doing both too much, and he felt calmer, knowing that he could tell Vader things that he would otherwise have to keep bottled up and within himself.
And Vader told him things, so much that Boba didn’t need nor deserve to know. He told Boba secrets about the Hutts, and he told Boba of monsters in hyperspace, and he told Boba about Mandalore and Coruscant and Naboo and all the worlds that someone like Boba could never know because of how he was born. He told Boba about the wars and far more than he should have about the Empire and Republic both. Boba lay awake, often in the bunk of Slave 1 and sometimes, preciously beside Vader on land or in his ship or even a few times on boats over water.
“We shouldn’t continue,” he said once, close to his twenty-sixth birthday, and he’d realised that most of the clones were old men and he was just entering his prime. “We’re going to get each other into trouble.”
“I know,” Vader said after his breathing choked the quiet.
“Or maybe the trouble is worth it,” Boba said, and Vader looked at him so hard that he could feel it in his bones. “Otherwise, we have to be alone.”
These are Boba’s thoughts as he hurdles through hyperspace towards the Core. Towards Naboo where Luke Skywalker has been living, hiding from the holonews in plain sight. Bossk didn’t charge him for the information, and Boba didn’t say thank you because he didn’t want to hear his old mentor’s lecture or worry. All of Slave 1’s cloaking shields and scramblers are active but if Skywalker is even half of what his father was, he will know when Boba arrives.
And if he is not, then Boba will do what he does best:
He will hunt Luke Skywalker and take what he is owed.
Luke Skywalker –
“You’re Boba Fett.”
They are standing on a balcony in a lovely country house on Naboo. Luke is dressed in robes that Boba once would have murdered on sight. His face looks like the Jedi that Boba cut his teeth hunting: sunken and sallow and haunted. His hair is mussed from sleep, or at least lying in bed and tossing and turning.
“I had a feeling you were coming,” Luke says in the dark lit only but the faint lights in the garden beneath them. “I should have realised you are a Mandalorian.”
Boba opens his mouth. Closes it. Vader left him beskar. The part of him that is listed in his vambrace as his father’s son aches.
“Do you want to come in?” Luke asks as if he hadn’t grown up on Tatooine where he would have heard Boba’s name whispered and cursed.
They end up in a sitting room. Luke sits in one of the armchairs. Boba stands next to the floor to ceiling window. There is a chest of beskar in slabs open on the floor. There is more in the basement beneath the house. More beskar than Boba has ever seen in his life, if the note on flimsi pinned inside the chest lid is real.
The lightsaber is in his hands. He’d picked it up from where it lay across the top of the beskar. Vader had claimed he’d lost this one three years ago. He knows this lightsaber as well as he knows the contours of Vader’s mask. Hands. Chest, shoulders, hips, mechanical legs and feet.
It feels warm.
“You grieve.”
Once upon a time, Boba would have been angry. He would have whirled and drawn his rifle and blasted Luke in the face. The calm absoluteness is so Jedi that it conjures ghosts.
Outside, a light rain shower has started.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Luke says because Boba is just standing there, Vader’s lightsaber in his hands and all their love laid out before them. “I…” and finally there’s the crack, the humanity in the smooth Jedi veneer. “I grieve him, too.”
The black hole in Boba’s chest is roaring.
“Is it supposed to be warm.”
That isn’t what he meant to say. Luke blinks at him. His eyes flicker faintly. Over Boba. The lightsaber. The chest. Back to Boba.
“The lightsaber is warm?” he asks, low and hushed.
Boba feels his head tip forward. Right itself. Luke’s eyes flicker. Widen. He looks at the lightsaber and then at Boba, more intense than before.
“Am I going crazy,” Boba asks, or says; he really isn’t sure.
“No,” Luke says, lower and more hushed. “I think –”
“Don’t say it,” Boba says, a flood of dread coursing through him even as he curls his hands around the hilt of the lightsaber.
Luke closes his mouth. He looks torn between hopeful and stricken. Boba clutches the lightsaber that Vader had thrown to him to use in their most difficult situations. In those moments, Boba had fought with all of his martial skills, and Vader had pulled on the Force with all his strength and will. All else but battle was blotted out. Boba never trusted anything or anyone as much as Vader then.
I will not be made to choose between the two of you.
“That selfish bastard,” Boba hears himself say.
Luke barks out a laugh that sounds like it tore its way from his belly to his throat to his tongue through his lips. He slumps in his chair. His grief spills out of the proverbial gut wound.
“What are you going to do?” he asks, and he sounds as young and lost as he looks.
Boba turns the lightsaber on. The red glow throws the pale ivory and light blues and greens of the room into sickly relief.
The aching supernova in his chest expands.
“Selfish bastard,” he says again.
Luke closes his eyes. He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t cry.
They stay like that for a long time.
2.
Boba stays on Naboo.
He stays in the country house with its soft, loamy fields and pretty, clear lake. He stays in a room across the hall from Luke Skywalker, the son of the man that Boba loved and who loved him back. He stays in a house filled with droids and that has food and drink readily at hand in the kitchen and the same cloaking shield that he nearly died to install in Slave 1.
“I haven’t told anyone you’re here,” Luke says when he comes to find Boba standing at the shore of the lake watching the fish.
“My bounty has gone up on the networks,” Boba says, which is how he knew before Luke said it aloud.
“Leia is working to get it taken down,” Luke sighs, running his hands through his hair.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Boba says because the public knowledge that Darth Vader left him something is enough to make an enemy out of everyone.
For the first three days and nights, they mostly avoid each other. Luke meditates in the morning and trains in the bottom level of the house in the afternoon, and the sight of his green lightsaber makes Boba’s skin crawl. Boba works on minor repairs to Slave 1 where it’s docked next to Luke’s T-65 X-wing, which is still striped in Rebel red. In the humid heat of the afternoon, Boba swims in the lake, the only time he removes all of his armour outside of showering in the pristine, well-stocked private bathroom attached to his bedroom. Bobbing up and down in the water, Boba looks at the pleasant blue sky with its wispy, fluffy cloud and wonders what he’s going to do. He doesn’t know. He feels lost and strangely, achingly small.
“I can’t get used to it,” Luke says when he comes into the kitchen and finds Boba cutting up vegetables for his dinner.
Boba doesn’t ask. He puts the slightly hairy end of an orange root vegetable he looked up and found to be both nutritious and edible into his mouth. It crunches pleasantly as he bites down, and it tastes good. Oddly sweet.
“The greenery,” Luke says, and he isn’t like his father at all, if he always talks this much about nothing. “The breeze. The light rain.” He sighs gustily. “What are you making?”
“Salad,” Boba says because he doesn’t know where the meat in the kitchen came from and his experience tells him it is much easier to hide poison in flesh than vegetables.
“I really should eat healthier,” Luke says, moving to the refrigerator and pulling out a piece of salted meat in a reheatable container. “Leia sees what I put on the list for grocery delivery.”
Boba eats another piece of the orange vegetable. It’s native to Naboo, and he has never seen it outside of the planet. When he leaves, he’ll miss it.
“It’s tomorrow, by the way,” Luke continues, like they are actually having a conversation. “Is there anything you want?”
Boba forces his face to remain neutral. If this had been even a few years ago, he would never have dreamed of eating in the presence of someone he barely knows. He didn’t take his helmet off around anyone who didn’t know him for himself for years.
“No,” he says as Luke puts the container into the reheating box.
“What about spices?” Luke asks, looking at him with an expression that is the opposite of threatening.
Boba opens his mouth. Closes it.
Everything aches.
“Sorry,” Luke says, his face falling; the reheating box pings; he ignores it; “I make you uncomfortable.”
“You don’t,” Boba says, using the knife to scrape his vegetable medley into the well-made, pretty blue bowl. “Do you really not know what I am?”
Luke blinks, which is answer enough. “You are a Mandalorian.”
“I’m a clone,” Boba says, even though all he wants to do is take his vegetables and leave.
Luke’s lips part. Close. He stands there with his surprise, and Boba is forced to think about how all of his brothers-but-not-really are dead or likely look like ancient elders. He doesn’t grieve them. Nor does he pity them. Thinking about them still hurts.
And maybe it’s because all Boba does these days is hurt that he feels his mouth opening again, his tongue and throat moving as he says:
“I thought that was why Vader was interested in me,” and he has never told anyone this, but he never told anyone about their relationship; “After the first few jobs I took from him, it was obvious he knew what I was. Vader never commissioned any other bounty hunter more than once a year. I was young and stupid and curious. I did some digging that I shouldn’t have and figured out he was once Anakin Skywalker. A Jedi and a General who commanded clones. I age normally. I got the wrong impression about why he was interested in me.”
Clones are the property of the Empire. Those that were still useful were the original frontline Imperial stormtroopers. Boba doesn’t know if Luke knows that, but Luke is from Tatooine. He would know what happened to those who were no longer useful.
The way Luke looks at him is both horrified and gut-wrenching. Boba regrets speaking. He regrets getting food from the kitchen around the time he knows Luke usually gets a snack after lightsaber training. He regrets a lot of unnameable things.
“That isn’t why he wanted me,” Boba says, his tongue once again moving without his permission; a small, childish part of him is suddenly afraid that Luke is a jedi and jedi make people say and do things against their will; Vader taught Boba how to stop that from happening; he taught Boba how to protect himself; Luke cannot be stronger than Vader in that. “He had honour.”
Luke’s expression crumples with grief and no little amount of relief. For a moment, Boba thinks he’s going to say something that Boba will regret hearing for the rest of his life. But then Luke pulls himself together, not completely but enough to straighten and take a deep breath.
“Thank you for telling me,” he says.
Boba inclines his head. He turns and takes his salad up to the bedroom he’s claimed. He sits on the balcony. Looks at the multicoloured, beautiful sunset. All of the vegetables taste wonderful.
He doesn’t know what Vader’s favourite foods were when he was Anakin Skywalker. Never wondered.
He doesn’t care.
Luke orders more vegetables. He also orders spices, peppers, and concentrates. Boba watches the delivery of supplies at the gate from the shadows, rifle in hand. Luke’s eyes flicker to him a few times, clearly sensing Boba’s suspicion of the two Gungans doing the delivery, but he doesn’t mention it until it is late afternoon. The weather is fair. Boba is smoking a thin roll of ryll by the lake. Luke’s nose wrinkles, so Boba does not offer him a hit.
“I don’t know anything about you,” he says after a long moment.
“I could say the same about you,” Boba says, watching the fish flitting about just beneath the surface of the water in the afternoon light.
“I’d heard of the bounty hunter Boba Fett while I was growing up,” Luke says, and he lowers himself to sit a couple of arm lengths away. “I didn’t know he was a clone, or a Mandalorian, or that he likes carrots, or that he can swim for hours. I just knew you worked for Jabba, and some people said you worked for the Empire, too. I didn’t know you worked for my father. I didn’t even know who my father was.”
Boba inhales. Ryll does not do anything for his mind, but it’s the only thing that really helps when the nerve damage in his lower back and hips from the prison prods act up.
“You want me to talk about him.”
Luke’s expression is ashamed. He seems to shrink into himself. But he isn’t a coward.
“I didn’t really know him,” he says, soft and a little wavering and greatly wanting. “And you don’t think he’s a monster.”
“He was a monster,” Boba says, watching the full body flinch move through Luke. “I helped him be a monster. Why do you think he left me his lightsaber?”
Luke’s eyes flicker. Boba had stopped him from saying it back in the dark of his arrival. Now:
“You can use it,” he says, and his eyes are very blue.
“I have used it,” Boba says, and he can almost hear the bright, blossoming song that seems to echo in his ears whenever he wields the blade. “I have also used many other lightsabers. I started hunting Jedi when I was ten. The easiest way to prove the target was dead was to present their lightsaber.”
Luke doesn’t look at him. He stares at the fish. The sun reflected on the water.
“Most of the early jobs,” Boba says, letting the words come and roll off his tongue, “Vader and I hunted Jedi together. He was brutal, intelligent, and crafty. I copied some of his fighting style, and we learned how to fight back to back. I hated him because I needed his money even though he was once a Jedi, and I think he wanted to hate me because I reminded him of the past. We were both very angry back then.”
Slowly, like moving through tar, Luke’s gaze slides to him. Boba flicks the remaining ashes of his ryll into the dirt. Away from the clear, lively pool.
“Anger is part of the Dark Side of the Force,” Luke says, not accusatory.
“Your father was a Sith,” Boba says, and he’s mostly dry from his afternoon swim except for his hair and underwear. “He told me his anger was his power, and I wouldn’t have survived to adulthood if it wasn’t for mine. Vader was a monster. I was already a monster when we met. We didn’t change each other.”
Luke breathes out. In.
“I think you did change each other,” he says, low and with a diction that is like his father in his better moments. “Maybe not your anger. Maybe my father would have still done all the horrible things he did. Maybe you would have made similar choices. But you didn’t hurt each other –”
“We did,” Boba says, and it’s his turn to look away; he stares at the dirt and doesn’t know why he is still here on Naboo or why he continues with: “When he was angry with me, he would call me a painted, moralless whore, willing to work for anything that paid. I called him the worst names I could, but it hurt him the most when I called him the Emperor’s favourite slave. Don’t fool yourself.”
“I’m not,” Luke says, and there’s heat to his tone; “I know what he left you. Maybe you were horrible to each other, but you also loved and respected each other. You wouldn’t have come for the beskar and his lightsaber otherwise. You wouldn’t grieve him like you do.”
The universe is tearing itself apart in his chest.
“I didn’t know him,” Luke says, his own hurt and sadness bleeding out with his words, “and you did. I don’t care if you tell me he and you are the worst people imaginable—I already know that. I don’t want what everyone knows. I want to know my father and the person he loved at least as much as me.”
I will not be made to choose between the two of you.
Boba blinks. His eyes burn. He presses the heel of his palms against his eyes. Luke could stab him in the back. He isn’t carrying his lightsaber.
“Fuck him,” he says, bitter and watery and all the storms of Kamino rolling through his flesh.
Luke sits, quiet and understanding, as Boba cries.
The thing is:
Vader made Boba a better person because he always, always treated Boba like a person. He never made Boba feel like he was less than his skills, not even when they teased each other, and he never reduced Boba to just a clone. He never disrespected Boba’s armour, and he made such a massive effort to make sure Boba never had to choose between his goals and what made him his own brand of Mandalorian.
They were never disposable to each other. It made them feel safe in a very basic, instinctive way. It is why, as Vader’s health began to more rapidly deteriorate over the past eight years, Boba knew. He learned how to jumpstart Vader’s heart, how to hotwire his respirator, exactly how much painkiller to feed into his bloodstream to keep him functioning and marginally coherent until they could get real help. And he learned that Vader had to come back to life on his own volition or he would come back worse under the Emperor’s hand.
“Do you want me to kill you?” Boba asked after a particularly close call. “If I can’t bring you back?”
Vader was just back in his suit from the bacta tank. Boba wasn’t supposed to be here. The entire medbay were Vader’s droids. The humans on the ship had been Force-influenced to ignore them both temporarily.
“I will not ask it of you,” Vader said, stilted and slow.
“Then I will do it,” Boba said, hands on Vader’s elbows to guide him to the meditation pod.
“You have a death wish,” Vader bit out as they began the laborious process of getting into the pod.
“That is different,” Boba said because he was Mandalorian enough to dream of an honourable death in battle. “Killing you like that—I would know you did not have to suffer.”
Vader’s hand shot up. He gripped Boba’s bicep so hard through the thin, very clean shirt he wore that the fabric began to tear. His respirator made a horrible grinding noise.
“I want you to live,” Vader said, loud in the silence.
He eased his hold on Boba’s arm. They finished getting Vader situated and hooked up in the pod. Boba checked the internals of the respirator. Vader watched his face as he worked.
“Did I hurt you?” Vader asked after Boba replaced the fried wire.
“No,” Boba said because he would have a bruise, but that doesn’t count.
Vader reached up. He placed his hand over where he’d torn Boba’s shirt. Boba leaned forward.
Their foreheads brushed, light and painful and perfect.
They had been peaceful, in that moment.
Boba watches the clear evening sky with his bowl of cut vegetables when Luke sits down next to him with a cup of blue milk. He goes through a bottle a day of the stuff. Boba isn’t sure if he had blue milk as a child. He never developed a taste for it or any other viscously textured drink as an adult.
“Did you see the news?”
The clean up in Theed has revealed a cache of dangerous experimental weapons beneath the royal palace’s ion pulse system.
“I’ve asked Leia if I should go to Theed,” Luke says, sipping his milk before continuing; “This was Palpatine’s homeworld. It could be Force-related.”
Boba sets his bowl down. He rests his elbows on his knees. His stomach is concave, reminding him how much weight he’s lost in the past couple of years. The night air is pleasant and sweet.
“I asked if you could come, too,” Luke says, and it’s cautious and undemanding. “Leia hasn’t responded yet.”
“I have many more years of experience than you, dealing with Force bullshit,” Boba says, words of a ghost.
Luke smiles. In the dim lighting filtering from the kitchen behind them, he looks young. He is young. Boba feels old, like cracked leather.
“I know you have a bounty on your head –”
“So do you,” Boba says, picking up the water cup by his right knee and swirling the dregs. “If someone managed to capture both of us alive, they could buy a Core moon that can sustain life with the payout.”
“No one will catch us,” Luke says, unkindly. “Not if we work together.”
The last of the water is tepid. Boba sets the cup down. Luke is of a naturally smaller build than him. He does not use the aggressive, overpowering style that Vader favoured. He fights like a Jedi, and he relies on speed and subterfuge.
“I don’t work for free,” Boba says, even though he has effectively been squatting in this perfect country estate for well over a week.
“I told Leia that, too,” Luke says, smiling again. “I don’t have any money to my name.”
Moisture farmer from Tatooine. Boba makes himself eat a vegetable piece. It annoyingly doesn’t taste like anything.
“A word of advice.”
Luke blinks. Boba shifts so that they face each other. He wonders if Luke looks more like Vader or his mother.
“Don’t try to hire a bounty hunter before you know their going rate.”
Luke laughs, bright and amused. His expression quickly sobers.
“I think there might be more related to my father beneath the palace,” he says, more like he was the night Boba arrived.
Boba wishes he was surprised, but he long ago accepted that anything related to the Force is bound to be bizarre, unpleasant, and heart-wrenching. Luke sighs. He leans forward, mirroring Boba’s hunched posture.
“My mother was from Naboo,” he says, and Boba finds himself reaching up and scratching the side of his neck; he isn’t itchy; he doesn’t repress the motion. “It could be related to her, too.”
“Padmé Amidala wasn’t Force-sensitive,” Boba says because Vader kept three versions of her bounty pucks in his meditation pod. “But she was Queen of Naboo and then its Senator. If it’s related to her, it’ll be a lot of trouble for your sister.”
“Leia can handle it,” Luke says, his eyes very, very blue. “How did you know she wasn’t Force-sensitive?”
Boba looks at him. Really looks. Luke has pale skin that likely burnt so many times in his youth beneath the twin suns of Tatooine. It’s given him freckles and premature wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and mouth. He’s younger than Boba by at least thirteen years, but there’s white hairs speckled at his temples while Boba’s head hasn’t yet given him even a pale hair. He has a prosthetic right hand that apparently came from an ill-fated encounter with Vader.
“Your mother had bounty pucks,” Boba says, and he doesn’t know what they teach moisture farmers on Tatooine, but it isn’t history. “When I started my career, they always mentioned if the target might be Force-sensitive.”
“Oh,” Luke says, and he looks down, not quite crestfallen. “I thought maybe you’d met her.”
For a moment, Boba is back on Geonosis. He remembers the small, feminine figure in the sand arena with the Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker. He remembers the feeling of stretching in his chest as his father’s head departed his shoulders. The collapse of his universe as it hit the sand.
A rustling. Luke has straightened. Legs shifted beneath himself to move closer. Reach out.
“Fett?”
Boba stands up.
“What –”
“I didn’t meet her,” he says, and Luke stills, half-risen. “I saw her. I should have killed her. I should have killed everyone. Maybe then the war wouldn’t have happened. But I was ten, and I was not enhanced, so my father died, and they lived, and I accomplished nothing.”
Luke stares at him. Bright, bright eyes. Rosy, parted lips.
The whole universe coalesces around them.
“You are strong in the Force,” he says, somewhere between terror and awe.
Boba breathes in. Out.
Vader’s lightsaber, resting against his hip, is warm.
Even now, it is difficult for Boba to put a finger on when exactly his and Vader’s relationship shifted from something still vaguely polite and professional to intimate. They came to trust each other through battle and combat first, strangely Mandalorian despite everything. Bossk and Dengar started pointing out that Boba was taking too many jobs for the Empire near to his twenty-second birthday, and they’d argued.
“No matter who it is,” Dengar had pressed, trying not to raise his voice, “it’s dangerous to take so many contracts from the same person.”
“So, what, am I supposed to tell Darth Vader ‘no’?” Boba snapped, feeling boxed in even though they were sitting out in a completely abandoned field around a campfire.
“Yes!” Bossk exploded, slamming his fist into the dirt. “It would be less dangerous to work for the Hutts at this point. You of all people know what fucking sorcerers are capable of!”
And they had been right, although not for the reasons they thought. At twenty-two, Boba and Vader were firmly locked in each other’s orbit, neither of them fully understanding what was happening until it happened. Until Boba had blood in his mouth and hands full of Vader’s wires, and Vader was in the process of dying from the electrical pulses that had blown them out and forced them to retreat. Boba was scared, and Vader was desperate, and Boba remembers he told Vader that dying in hiding was a coward’s death, and Vader had managed to laugh, two wet, horrific coughs, and Boba had simply just not wanted them to die. Not like that.
“Fett,” Vader managed because they weren’t Boba and Vader yet, “we aren’t dead yet.”
It was the first but not nearly the last time that Vader reached out and connected to him with the Force. The pulse of power, the flow of energy that surged between them, the sense of the fabric of the universe around them:
I want you to live.
Now:
Leia Organa stares at Boba, blue-tinged from the hologram. Her expression is hard, lips thin and pursed. Luke looks between them, soft and young and uncertain in a way that Boba was never allowed to be. Maybe Leia wasn’t either.
“My brother tells me you have been a good house guest,” she says after a long, heavy moment.
Boba doesn’t have anything to say to that. He showed up, chasing Vader’s last gift to him like he would a bounty, had a breakdown, and Luke just never got around to throwing him out.
“I don’t know if he’s a guest, technically,” Luke says, slow and more than a little uncertain. “He has as much of a right to be here as I do.”
Moisture farmer hero of the Republic from Tatooine and perhaps the most notorious bounty hunter currently alive and free. If Boba was someone who found humour in such ironies, he would be doubled over laughing.
Leia frowns. It’s a look that sits well on her face.
“We need to know what is under the royal palace,” she says, and Boba senses that she resents him. “Luke, are you sure that Fett is the best person to take with you?”
“He knows more about Dark artefacts than I do,” Luke says, lower like they’ve discussed this before. “And he knew our mother back when she was Senator.”
The boy is a good liar, building little exaggerations off truth. Boba watches the way Leia’s face gives nothing away. She seems angry in a very specific, targeted way.
“Fett is expensive,” she says, blunt and harsh.
“Leia,” Luke starts before he stops himself, gaze flickering between his sister and Boba, half-desperate, half-apologetic. “I know he is the right person for this.”
“Because of the faith our father placed in him,” Leia bites out, a curse.
Despite himself, Boba feels like he shouldn’t be present for this conversation. There’s a lot between Luke and Leia, and the intricacies of interpersonal relationships has never been his strong point. He thinks about Bossk. He wonders if he should call him.
“Honour means a lot to Mandalorians,” Luke says, and Boba definitely regrets being here. “You said yourself we need to get along better with them.”
“Don’t bring Mandalorians into this,” Boba says, completely exhausted.
Luke winces. “Sorry,” he says, contrite.
But it has had the desired effect. Leia’s air has marginally improved. She rubs her hand over her face.
“We’re in a bad position,” she says, and Boba wishes that he wasn’t involved, but it’s a pointless sentiment. “We can’t have another public scandal of hidden legal documents or illegally held Imperial property.”
It’s not Boba’s fault that Vader stored his last will and testament in an obscure location that was found during a public broadcast. He hadn’t even been aware Sidious allowed Vader to have such paperwork. He probably didn’t. Vader likely stored it as he did deliberately. If Vader was alive, Boba would have left him a large number of angry voice messages.
“Leia, trust me,” Luke says.
She sighs, a deep, long gust. “Fett,” she says, and Boba gets the strange, overlapping impression he sometimes does of a much older version of her; the hologram flickers, and the vision is gone. “I asked around. Your last going rates for search and retrieval were in the mid-five figure range, Imperial credits, but it looks like the last time you worked on the books for the Bounty Hunter Guild was five years ago. Is that rate correct?”
“No,” Boba says; the texture of the air feels palpable. “This isn’t Guild business. Force bullshit requires a highly unique skill set because any object involved is effectively semi-sentient. Low six-figures. Right now, payment in calamari flan. I charge extra if sentient beings end up being involved.”
Luke breathes out. Leia sucks on her teeth.
“How much upfront?”
“One-third,” Boba says, and he feels his face stretching into a smile that he doesn’t feel. “I will draw up a contract. Expect it tomorrow morning.”
It’s evening when Luke comes to find him. He stands at the bottom of the ramp to Slave 1 for a very long moment before he climbs up. Boba is reviewing the finished contract on his datapad as he eats cut vegetables with spicy dipping sauce. Luke stands in the small, unforgiving hold of Slave 1, arms akimbo.
“Are you a vegetarian?”
Boba vaguely remembers Jedi tend to have a preference to lead into conversations. He didn’t put up with that when he was hunting them regularly, and the ones he hunted in later years with Vader had been worn down by life enough to cut to the chase. Those Jedi were nearly worthless, but Vader had pursued them anyway, trying to kill Anakin Skywalker all over again.
“No,” Boba says, somewhat belatedly.
Luke seems to process this, whatever it means. He looks around the hold, eyes lingering on the empty carbonite cases and the two locked weapons cases. When his gaze returns, it passes over Boba’s helmet, which he’s resting the datapad atop on his lap. He focuses on it.
“Is it true that Mandalorians think of their helmets as their true face?”
“Sometimes,” Boba says, dipping a vegetable piece in sauce; he eats it before continuing, Luke’s gaze moving up to his flesh face. “My face is one of two million. Both of these are my face.”
It’s obvious that Luke wants to ask him something more but is holding back. Boba sets the datapad aside. Licks the last of the sauce from his fingers.
“Ask your fucking question.”
Luke bites out a laugh. He shakes his head, face twisting. Bitter and pained and openly jealous.
“Why did he have to die?”
Against his will, Boba feels the vegetables attempting to come back up. He doesn’t let them. Luke breathes in. Shudders.
“I know it’s a relief to Leia. To the whole galaxy. But he did have people who love him. Why couldn’t he have tried to live? If not for me –” and Luke’s voice cracks, but he forges on, blue eyes burning as they stare Boba down, “then why not you?”
That hurts. More than Boba wants to admit. He won’t lie: he’s asked himself variations of that question more than once in the past two years. He has replayed their last meeting over and over, wondering if there was a way to change their fates. To convince Vader to choose him. Find a way that Vader could have both his son and Boba both. He’d considered killing Luke himself or at least hunting the man in front of him so that Vader wouldn’t do whatever suicidal bullshit he’d foreseen in the Force. He’d mulled over and discarded infinite scenarios until he couldn’t take it anymore and started taking kill-on-sight bounties in Wild Space to stop himself from spiralling.
“Sorry,” Luke chokes, swiping at his eyes, nose, cheeks; he looks young and small, hunched forward in his black Jedi garb. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
Boba’s hands are wrapped around the contours of his helmet. Against his will, he shuts his eyes. He hears the way his breath comes. In. Out. He remembers his father’s head was loose when he retrieved his helmet in the arena. It was warm as he pressed his head to the metal. The helmet is the only part of the armour that is pure beskar and not alloy.
It was warm.
Despite his love, Jango did not choose Boba.
When he opens his eyes, Luke is staring at him. Lost and scared and so very bright and alive. And despite everything Boba has had to be, has had to choose, has embraced and cut and grafted into himself:
“He believed he didn’t have a choice,” he says, and his voice is steady, rising from the depths of himself through his chest and throat and tongue; “He begged me to go into hiding, and he told me you were his son. He told me: ‘I will not be made to choose between the two of you.’ I couldn’t make him choose between us. We were horrible, but –”
His voice breaks. He swallows. Luke reaches out. Places his flesh hand over Boba’s right. Against the helmet.
“He treated me like I was someone worth living for. He made life worth living. Even…” and it hurts; it fucking hurts; but Boba is a warrior and pain is something he can deal with: “His health was declining. It was getting worse. I used to… I wasn’t helping him. I was just putting him back together. I think he was holding it together for me because I… I made him feel like there was something worth living for. And then, when I told him your name, the moisture farmer from Tatooine who blew up the Death Star, he knew he had to hold it together for you, too. But he was dying. He couldn’t hold onto both of us. So, he asked me to hide. He asked me to live. So, I did.
“And that is why I’m here,” he says, and Luke is sobbing, head tipped forward to kiss the helmet’s forehead, skin to beskar, and Boba has to admit to himself that he doesn’t hate Luke; he understands him too well; “I can’t let him go. I’m not ready.”
“Yeah,” Luke sobs. “Yeah.”
3.
Theed is beautiful.
Naboo’s capital city rises up like it was always meant to be there. So much of the planet’s natural beauty is preserved, trees and plants and vines climbing up the outer buildings, which are shaped like flora and mushrooms. There is minimal pollution. Ships and cruisers zip about in organised traffic lines, horns blaring only as needed. Children run about on the streets, which have been cleared of evidence of Operation Cinder.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Luke says, not bothering to hide his awe. “Did you know Theed has not just one but four universities?”
He walks beside Boba, who has his armour packed on his back and his face and head covered with a full black veil. For the first time in their acquaintance, Luke wears something other than black, the white hooded cloak perfectly blending into the general populace. Together, they look like a local human, showing a humanoid off-worlder around.
“I didn’t go through formal education,” Boba says, rather dryly.
“I wasn’t good at school,” Luke laughs, eyes roving around the shop windows and tracking the people around them with easy, wide-eyed joy. “Me and my friends were always trying to skip off and fly something. I drove my uncle and aunt spare.”
Jango took Boba on his first hunt as soon as he could run and shoot a half-blaster. He doesn’t even remember that hunt or his first bounty or his first kill. They might have been important, but all of those firsts have faded out like a flimsi photo that’s been handled too many times. For Boba, he splits his life into sections: Kamino and his father, Geonosis and jail, Bossk and aching joints, and then Vader.
“Are you hungry?” Luke asks as they pass through a crush of small restaurants and fruit and vegetable stalls. “We aren’t going to get to eat for a bit.”
Boba usually doesn’t eat on a job, not unless it’s going to last for multiple days. Rations and hydration packets are safer, easy to consume quickly and filling. Luke is already gravitating to a fruit stand that has a juicer and what looks like some sticky sweets on sticks. He smiles at Boba, warm and guileless. He looks like his mother.
They get sweets. Boba gets water and Luke juice. They sit down on a bench in the park a couple streets away. Boba pulls up the deep hood of his cloak so that he can move the veil enough to eat. Luke sits next to him, eyes flickering back and forth as he watches anyone and anything that moves by them.
“You’re suggesting they ignore us.”
Luke’s lips twitch higher. “Do you like it?” he asks, nodding to the half-eaten sweet stick.
Boba doesn’t know how to describe the taste. It’s herbal, but it isn’t unpleasant due to the sugar. Boba likes sugar in the same way that he likes spice and hates salt: it preserves food, and it tells him it’s full of energy. Salt preserves better than both, but it gives him headaches and makes him absurdly thirsty.
“Not really,” he says, placing the stick in Luke’s outstretched hand. “I prefer floral sweets.”
Luke blinks, clearly thrown. Boba sticks a straw into his water. Overhead, the calm Naboo sun is beginning to set.
“There are no flowers where I was born,” he says, and he can almost feel the old smooth nothingness of Kamino, so different from the constant violent storms raging outside. “There are no plants. There is no natural sunlight. As a child, it was the most dangerous place in the universe. Now, it’s a water-logged graveyard and the safest place I know.”
Luke leans to the side and puts their finished sticks in the politely placed public bin. He sips his juice, licking away the residue from his lips.
“I spent all of my life desperate to get off my home planet,” he says, and Boba doesn’t blame him; he spent enough of his youth in and adjacent to Jabba’s court to know the cesspool. “But I wasn’t smart, and my uncle and aunt didn’t want me joining the military, so the only chance for me to get off was to earn enough pod racing or something like that and buy passage. I just wanted to go somewhere, anywhere else. And now that I am: I would do nearly anything to never go back.”
“I chose to go back,” Boba says, and he thinks about how the storms buffet Slave 1 every time he enters and exits Kamino’s atmosphere. “My lover –” and isn’t it wild that he can say something like that aloud – “taught me that if I hated any one place or person too strongly, I ran the risk of it consuming me.”
Next to him, Luke breathes out. He shifts, legs slightly wider. His knee knocks against Boba’s thigh.
He doesn’t say anything.
Boba finishes his water. He looks around the park. The people lounging, much like them. The people, rushing by.
He closes his eyes.
In private, closely guarded moments, Boba wonders if Jango knew that the blood price for his DNA had ended up Force-sensitive.
Boba is comfortable with the fact that he exists because Jango bought him. He doesn’t mind that he came into existence because his father wanted to have one unaltered copy to call his son. Jango could not trust anyone except for himself, but he was Mandalorian at the end of the day, and he needed a foundling. A child. Boba was the culmination of his father’s most intense, basest desires.
He was not a bad father. Boba doesn’t try to pretend he was a good one either. He was unkind to Boba, but it was in the same way he was unkind and even cruel to everyone. There is a reason that the Kaminoans bred out the worst of Jango’s aggression from the rest of the clones, and even more reason that they bred out his contrariness from them as much as possible. Boba inherited it all, and Jango raised him to be his legacy, and legacies are always meant to be better than the template.
If Boba shot better than Jango had at his age, if he was better at dodging an incoming attack, if he flew ships and cruisers better:
It made sense. He was Jango’s blood price, and Jango’s blood was worth more than anything else, even in the end.
“What is it?”
Luke is looking at him in the pitch darkness in the shadow of the royal palace hanger. Boba is back in his armour, his helmet his face again. The air is cool and humid, heavy and coiling around them.
Boba traces his fingers over the ground beneath their boots.
“It’s warm,” he says, and he can feel something he thinks of as the ebb and flow of ocean waves, breaking against the slowly rotting foundations of Kamino’s great cities; he only ever let himself do this with Vader in their precious, fleeting moment of downtime; next to him, Luke presses his flesh palm to the ground, eyes strangely bright in the dark. “You were right.”
“So were you,” Luke says, and he smiles in a boyish, very alive way. “Come on.”
There is a lot of Dark here. Boba is not classically trained in any meaningful way, and he has learned to identify what is Light and what is Dark by how it feels to him. The Dark is familiar and comforting, warm and like the tides of any large body of water affected by a moon. The Light feels like a fire fight, power that sets Boba’s blood aflame and carries him through the fray like he is a great monster of old, invincible in his element.
The power plant beneath the hanger and royal palace is seeped in the Force. Luke breathes in deep as they shut the trap door from the hanger behind them. The eerie ion glow makes his pale skin and too bright eyes ghostly.
“This whole place is a conduit for the Force.”
Boba draws Vader’s lightsaber. It roars as he activates it, flickering and pulsing in a way that Boba has only seen it do when it’s in his possession. Vader had loved how it looked in Boba’s hands. He loved Boba so much.
Luke activates his lightsaber. It doesn’t look or act unusually, but he doesn’t seem disappointed.
“Come on,” he says, and they go
Down, down,
Down.
The air isn’t stale, even after a twenty story descent. The whole power plant feels like it’s full of activity and people, even though it’s empty as a corpse. Boba deactivates Vader’s lightsaber and looks around. The ground floor is massive.
“Fett,” Luke says, and he points towards a far off door; he’s returned his lightsaber to his belt as well. “Let’s go that way.”
“There should be alarms,” Boba says as they move together, the air flowing around them. “I’ve heard of this place, a long time ago. It was in some records about battles between the Sith and Jedi.”
“Which ones?” Luke asks as they approach the door in the eerie quiet.
“Darth Maul killed Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn and was cut in half by then Jedi Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Boba says, and Luke kneels down to inspect the door panel. “Vader always told me that such events leave marks.”
“Ben, well, Obi-Wan, never told me about that,” Luke says, and Boba remembers how Vader cut down Obi-Wan Kenobi as he always told Boba he would and then mourned the old Jedi so violently that Boba feared he would have a heart attack. “But I didn’t really get to know him. He spent all of his time teaching me before he died.”
Boba really should have messaged Bossk before coming down here. He’s never been good at communicating, at using his words instead of using fire power. Yet, for the past couple of weeks, all he has done is talk. Luke is easy to talk to.
They decrypt the door with Luke’s expertise. Beyond it is a dim hallway, lit by only minimal strip lighting. Boba activates his thermal sensors and there’s nothing. It’s colder than the generator room. Next to him, Luke sucks in his breath, jaw clenching.
“Kriff, it’s cold.”
“Desert boy,” Boba says, and Luke huffs out a laugh, breath rising up in a white cloud. “Take my cloak.”
Luke wraps himself tightly as they walk. It’s another descent, winding around through the narrow halls. There’s a few rooms, none of which have doors. They’re empty, presumably for storage or maintenance. The atmosphere is weird. Unsettling.
“I think we’re close,” Luke murmurs as the hallway begins to widen and darken.
Boba turns on his night vision. Raises his arm and stops Luke bodily. Luke’s eyes flick to him. Glowing in the near dark.
There is a mechanical groaning.
“Fett,” Luke hisses. “It’s not alive.”
It’s not. Boba is momentarily speechless. The massive droid unfolds itself, a great spider with a heavy belly and massive, coal black eyes. It rises and rises, gradually spreading to fill the space, metal clicking and groaning. Luke stares at the way the shadows shift, his hand drifting to his belt. His lightsaber.
“Wait.”
The head begins to twitch. The eyes crackle, the first light to come from the spider-droid. Boba twists his fingers in the fabric of Luke’s clothes.
“Mandalorian,” the spider-droid states, clicking beneath the grating screech of a voice. “Human. Not Master Anakin.”
Luke goes utterly still. Boba breathes in so hard he hears the memory of Vader’s respirator in his ear.
“Master Anakin did say a Mandalorian would visit,” the spider-droid says, and Boba’s breath is frozen in his lungs. “Very strange. A Mandalorian and a Jedi.”
“That’s us,” Luke says, glancing at Boba with a short, reckless flick of his eyes. “Do you have a name?”
The spider-droid clicks. The crackling runs over its eyes. Boba forces himself to let go of Luke’s clothes. Lowers his arm. He runs through a thousand plans in an instant before discarding them all.
“Master Anakin only made one,” it says, and it sways dangerously forward and then back, great belly a looming boulder. “Master hid it away. Where it would be safe.”
“I don’t think we can fight this,” Luke whispers.
Boba concentrates on breathing. The spider-droid looms above them. If it tries to chase them, if it moves too violently, the whole room and everything above it could come down.
“You are safe,” he says, and Luke’s eyes flick upwards once before he seems to get it, too. “We came here because Anakin Skywalker is dead.”
The spider-droid goes still. Boba draws Vader’s lightsaber from his belt. Activates it. It glows, red and somehow peaceful. The spider-droid eyes crackle, blue and intense, its head twisting, contorting. Panels move, rearranging themselves until they are staring at Vader’s mask.
“Anakin Skywalker has been dead for a long time,” the warped, rotten variation of Vader’s voice says.
“Yes,” Boba says, and he is a warrior, and he knows what he promised Vader all those times he held his life in his hands; he still holds it now; “You got what you wanted. You died with honour. You do not march faraway in despair.”
The spider-droid lurches. Forwards. Backwards. Luke draws his lightsaber as the legs skitter on the floor, unstable.
“March,” it says, a calliope of voices, broken and stretched and dead. “Faraway.”
It heaves. Crashes against the walls. Boba backs up, his shoulder knocking with Luke.
“Free.”
“Let’s go,” Boba says, and Luke doesn’t need telling twice.
They turn in an attempt to run, but the spider-droid skitters, a foot slamming down and blocking the exit. Boba swears, stumbling as the floor buckles, and Luke whirls about –
“Ah –”
There is a flash of light.
Boba moves on instinct. Jams Vader’s lightsaber upward.
The whole world seems to heave.
Luke’s voice is high and strained and Boba doesn’t even know why they’ve trying to use their lightsabers against the crumbling, stumbling, gigantic spider-droid, but –
I want you to live.
Boba thrusts upwards, upwards, upwards and there is a feeling of pushing, of giving, of –
Luke yells, the spider-droid convulsing, and his lightsaber—green, arching, flashing –
And Boba sees it. Their lightsabers have made a crack in the connection between the heavy abdomen and the head. Boba deactivates Vader’s lightsaber, activates his rocket launcher, takes aim, and Luke is in front of him, covering him, and Boba locks on and leans forward –
The world explodes in metal and fire and Boba is tackling Luke because his helmet is beskar and his armour is beskar alloy and this is it, this is all there is:
I will not be made to choose between the two of you.
Boba closes his eyes.
4.
Leia Organa, sitting on the plush cream-coloured chair in the kitchen nook of the quiet, sprawling Naboo country estate, is clearly annoyed.
“I don’t know why I feel responsible for your idiocy,” she says to Luke, who is sitting across the table; he has a couple of healing cuts on his face and is waiting for a fresh mechanical hand. “At least Fett has the excuse of being a businessman with a skillset that makes sense to hire him to investigate and infiltrate a power generator with possible connections to Darth Vader. But do you know what hoops I have to jump through to explain my brother’s wackadoodle Jedi Force-hunches?”
Boba continues his meal prep, peeling the pale tubers to add to the curry he’s making, pretending to give them some privacy. He’s opted to wear his helmet while Leia is around, uncomfortable with the thought of her knowing his face because she certainly has encountered and recognised clones before. His helmet and armour’s paints are horrifically scratched, and he isn’t wearing his jetpack and rocket launcher because they need to be completely replaced, but other than a very sore left foot, he got out of the whole power generator spider-droid clusterfuck relatively physically unscatched. If only his luck was as good with sabacc.
“I really appreciate it,” Luke says, smiling and sheepish. “I also appreciate you sorting out the whole… mess. Under the generator.”
“I think we all agree that Imperial remnants getting wind that there was a gigantic spider-droid powered by a kyber crystal and designed by Darth Vader under there is something we should avoid,” Leia says, full of acid.
“Ah, yeah,” Luke says, even more sheepish; Boba wipes the peeling knife on one of the nice cotton kitchen towels and picks up the chef knife he’s considering stealing when he leaves. “My hunch was right.”
“Fuck your hunches,” Leia snaps before blowing out her breath and crossing her arms.
They sit quietly for long enough that Boba finishes his vegetable and tuber prep and fillets the two fat fish he’d taken from the lake. He’s tying the carcasses and heads in cheesecloth along with the aromatic herbs when Luke stirs himself, turning in his seat to watch Boba. Leia has been watching him the whole time.
“So you really aren’t a vegetarian?”
“No,” Boba says, placing the pouch in the pot he has in the sink and turning on the faucet to fill it with water.
“Is it going to be spicy?” Luke asks, quite worried.
“Is there a charge for this?” Leia asks, half-irritated, half-resigned.
“Yes, and no,” Boba says, thinking very disconcertingly of Bossk and Cad Bane, the latter of whom would be laughing uproariously right now; he needs to call Bossk, if only to assure him that he is alive. “Think of it as a goodwill gesture for completing the contract payment.”
“You are not what I expected,” Leia says, matter of fact rather than scathing.
“I am a businessman,” Boba says, and she barks out a surprised but not displeased laugh.
They eat outside. The weather is lovely, and Leia is more than happy to eat seated on the ground, making the meal easier to share. Fett eats with the veil obscuring his face, and she sincerely doesn’t seem put off. For a politician, she is unusually tolerable. Luke scarfs food between them, seemingly oblivious to how strange a scene like this would be to the vast majority of the galaxy.
Boba considers if this is what it’s like to be self-aware. He doesn’t like it.
“What are you going to do with the kyber crystal?” he asks because he needs to avoid his own discomfort.
Leia sighs. She stirs her remaining curry and rice rhythmically. Boba wonders how much of the personality that he is experiencing here ceases to exist as soon as there are other eyes.
“I don’t know yet,” she admits as Luke adds more rice to his curry, expression smooth and eerily Jedi. “I’m sure you are aware that there are talks about how to revitalise the Jedi, but enough people remember the Clone Wars, and kyber crystals are disastrous in the wrong hands.”
Boba licks his fingers, grateful for the safety of his veil. The crystal is nearly the size of his helmet. When he had briefly handled it in the wreckage, he had felt its power, an intoxicating, coiling call that was so familiar that letting it go made him ache. Luke had barely touched it before he jerked his hand back, shuddering with revulsion.
“It’s connected to the Dark,” Luke says, not looking at Boba. “I think it might contain some of our father’s memories –”
“Luke,” Leia starts, very tired.
“I’m not going to use it,” Luke says, even though the tension in his body screams how much he wants to. “I don’t think I can.”
“But Fett can,” Leia says, exhausted.
“You don’t use a kyber crystal like that,” Boba says because Vader’s meditation pod had one powering it, and it kept him alive and allowed him to sleep, but Boba knows it also made Vader ten paces north of insane. “My best advice is to destroy it.”
Luke and Leia sigh. Boba shifts, threading his fingers through the end of his veil. He loops the corners around his thumb and middle fingers. He thinks about when he bought it, one of his more inspired ideas about five years ago when he was last on Nar Shadaa. Dengar had pointed out, not unkindly, that he was becoming too recognisable; he was finally old enough to look exactly like most people remembered the clones without their armour. Boba had bought several of the black mirror veils lower caste, unattached Hutt women preferred. The colour and effect reminded him of Vader’s mask, especially the eyes.
“Fett,” Luke says, drawing him out of his thoughts. “What are you going to do?”
Boba resists the urge to suck his teeth. He deliberately does not look at Leia. Princess and newly elected Senator of the New Republic. He has two decades of experience on Luke, but the boy is a natural fighter, and he doesn’t doubt Leia's own, unknown abilities.
“I’m a bounty hunter,” he says, pushing down all the uncertainty and distemper he feels. “My skills are well-known, and, despite the bounty on my own head, they are a specific set. I’ll find work.”
“You could stay,” Luke says, doe-eyed.
“Luke,” Leia warns.
“We could work together,” Luke argues, and there’s a fire to him that isn’t unlike his father but also utterly unlike Vader. “You know how to use the Force. I need help –”
“No,” Boba says, and he’s surprised he feels tired rather than annoyed. “I don’t work for free.”
“The New Republic’s pockets aren’t deep,” Leia sighs, worn in a strangely ancient way; “The Empire was a lot of things, but it was good at accounting.”
Boba hears himself laugh, a rough, unpleasant bark of a thing, before he can stop it. He shakes his head, thinking of Vader arguing back and forth with the finance and administrative departments about everything from major repairs to the Executor to hex washers for his kingdom of assistant droids.
“If you need accountants, try the old guilds,” he says, shifting and standing up; his back snarls at him, the pain grounding and familiar; Leia looks up at him with the sharp astuteness that he has learned to expect from politicians who are actually good at their jobs. “The defunct Commerce Guild might be a good place to start. They did not love the Empire.”
Leia inclines her head. “Good advice,” she says, and there’s a thread of wariness about her as she asks: “Where are you going?”
“For a walk,” Boba says, and he passes Luke on his way back into the house. “I don’t take kindly to being followed in the dark.”
They leave him be. Once he’s safely out of their sight, Boba unwinds the veil and puts his helmet back on. He folds the veil as he returns to his room, stuffing the fabric and its hidden clasps into his pack. He picks up his rifle, checks the fuel cells, and slings it over his shoulder. Vader’s lightsaber rests at his hip in the old vibroblade clip.
For a long moment, Boba stands in front of the dressing mirror, a wide floor to ceiling thing obviously meant for capturing Nabooian finery. His armour’s paints are still badly scuffed, greens and reds cut through and showing the beskar alloy beneath. If he choses, he could have the armour completely remade with only a miniscule portion of the pure beskar that Vader left him. He could refit Slave 1 in beskar. He could upgrade all of his weapons and install a new hyperdrive. He could pay a certified repro surgeon to repair the damaged nerves in his back. He could help Luke do whatever insane thing the Force wants him to do. He would still have an astronomical fortune leftover.
Boba doesn’t know how he feels about that. About all of this.
Vader died and left him what he never had.
For the first time in his life, Boba has options.
I want you to live.
Boba breathes in. Out.
“I would have killed you,” he says aloud. “I would have helped you, if you asked.”
He curls his fingers around Vader’s lightsaber. It’s warm. In the mirror, he looks tall and battered and strong, and he knows:
“But this is what you wanted,” and he finds himself smiling beneath his helmet, like he did so many times knowing Vader would smile back, if only he could. “You wanted me to live and be free because you wanted that for yourself.
“You were a selfish bastard until the very end.”
Boba turns and goes for his walk.
Against his hip:
The lightsaber radiates warmth.