Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The suns haven’t fully set but the bonfire is already burning when Din’s ship appears through the atmospheric distortion.

Fennec spots the glint of it first. She signals to Boba from the sentry tower and points until he can see it too, watching it grow over the dunes, silver turning red in the light of the suns-set. He can just make out the lines of the engines before it dips behind the palace toward the hangar and out of sight.

Parnel knuckles up beside him, lifting her goggles and following his gaze down over the side of the mesa. “You want to go down, Boss? I’ll watch the fire.”

“He’ll come up.”

“Ah. Because you haven’t been waiting all day on him.” The rasping voice sounds entirely too knowing.

He gives the Dug a glare. “I don’t pay you to psychoanalyze.”

She chortles. “I’m already going above and beyond the job description, Boss. Demolitions work on top of gunnery?” Her first knees draw in and her second set spreads, the soles of her feet turning upward in a cheeky Dug-shrug. “Might as well take on morale too.”

“Don’t call me ‘Boss,’” he grunts, and walks away from her chortle to the edge of the outcropping to look over the wastes, at the shadows and dips of the dunes where the warm red stone of the mesa bleeds out into the pale Tatooine sands. He ignores Parnel where the gunner has settled in to watch his back, and pulls his mind away from calculations of how long it might take for the Mandalorian to walk from the vehicle hangar to the lifts, and make it to the far side of the palace and out to the western courtyard.

Din will find him when he can, Boba reminds himself. He’s as reliable as any of his people could ever hope to be. He adds an extra few minutes to account for the shorter steps Djarin might take, to balance his load.

Fennec whistles to him again, a sharper signal. This time she points out toward the plains to the northeast, where the dark shape of an ore crawler now crouches just at the border of the B’omarr Flats.

He watches it, daring it to move, until the shadow of the mesa falls over it. Puts on his helmet and keeps staring into the dark until the chorus of rising voices draws his attention back.

He just catches the gleam of beskar on the other side of the fire before the on-duty guards close in-- the cries are of greeting, not warning.

It’s understandable. They want to see the Mandalorian, maybe even see his child, and welcome them home. Din had trained them, after all.

After Boba had killed Fortuna. After employment at the palace became something anyone was willing to consider again. After that year of just the three of them digging in and pushing back against every strike team sent by every criminal organization, crime syndicate and Mining Guild member with operations in the system, until the simple fact that they were still standing made the idea of working for him seem like it might be something other than a direct path to an early grave. More of a direct path than any other on Tatooine, at least.

It still rankles when the guards close in, blocking Din from his view. Even to his low-light and thermal input feed they’re just an indistinct swarm of heat and overlapping outlines.

He’d never grown accustomed to sharing, despite a lifetime of circumstance.

Someone approaches from the side; he knows Fennec’s careful step without having to hear her order the gunner to relieve her.

“It’s favoritism, this is,” Parnel gripes cheerfully. “He’s my friend too, and I’ve never seen the baby.”

“I met him first.”

“I’ve never shot him,” Parnel points out.

Fennec tuts. “He likes it. Ask all his friends. Get in the guardpost.”

“Thankless. Thankless job,” the Dug mutters, still good-naturedly, and cheerfully trots off toward the sentry tower.

Boba clears his throat, disgruntled. “You’re in for a wait. You’d get a better view from up there.”

“You could go over,” Fennec says, bobbing her brow when he turns to glare at her with his helmet. She smiles back, lopsided and too fond to be a smirk, even if she’s teasing.

“Why don’t you?”

“I’m a sniper. I know how to wait.”

“I’m a bounty hunter. So do I.”

“You could have fooled me. You’re acting as patient as a massiff at dinner time.”

He jerks his chin at the ore crawler. “If only we had some massiffs-- I’d tell them it was dinnertime.”

Fennec raises her rifle, peering through the scope. “Still there. Think they’re watching?”

“They should be. This show is for them.”

The bonfire is still roaring, bright now against the night sky and shedding thick black smoke into the atmosphere. There’s material enough to feed it for a standard week, even without the backlog that Parnel still has to analyze to see if it’s safe to burn-- even with the crawler-loads that had to be traded or sealed because they hadn’t been.

The fire brands the sky with their defiance. They live. The last of old Marlo’s mercenaries have crawled away, relinquishing their claim on the palace. They live, and they live here.

They live, and everything foul that Jabba hoarded and Fortuna left to rot is being scoured clean. They live, and this palace is a fortress strong enough to house the beginnings of a new kingdom. Safe enough for a Mandalorian to bring his child.

The child Fett has yet to meet in person. He’s seen the small green shape at a distance, on Tython. Spoken to him over holo several times after that. But he hasn’t yet met Djarin’s child face to face. And at this rate, he won’t before morning.

He looks over to the swarm of thermal impressions and lifesigns that make up at least half of his crew of guards, staff and day-labourers-- wild and cheerful, just a blur of body heat against the greater heat of the bonfire, because the night is a show for anyone who might be looking to fill the place Marlo’s mercenaries left, but it’s a celebration for the survivors, too. They’ve earned it.

“You’ll have to tell me if the kid’s grown. You got a better look at him than I did.”

“As slow as Din says he’s growing, I’d need fine-tuned measuring equipment to tell.”

“We should take him to the kitchen, make a mark for his height.”

“Next to Ygabba’s?”

“Ygabba’s are in her father’s old quarters.” There’s a gap in them, where she was taken as a slave-- not as big a gap as there should be. Those years of malnourishment stole inches off the cook’s natural height that she never quite got back. She’s made it out fine, though. Certainly hasn’t needed the extra reach to make herself heard.

It feels odd that Shand doesn’t know this. He’s known her a damned long time, as she wandered in and out of the Hutts’ orbit while he was mostly swinging within it. She knows him entirely too well herself. But she doesn’t know this, and she’s waiting with her eyebrow raised for an explanation.

“...the ones in the kitchen are mine.”

Her smile spreads as slowly and subtly as a good poison. “Boba Fett.”

“Shand,” he says gruffly.

“We’ve been clearing this dump out for almost three years, and you didn’t tell me that the height notches in the kitchen are yours?”

“Figured you’d guessed, an observant woman like yourself. You saw the size of me when I started here.”

“I thought you’d given it up. I did see the ones inside the Slave One, observant woman that I am,” she teases, her voice soft because she knows how bare a target she’s aiming at.

He’d wondered if she’d seen them, the steady climb of notches not quite half-way up the bulkhead near the main bunk. He’d painted over them a long time past-- couldn’t bear to file them clean, though. Still couldn’t.

“Ygabba’s father was an old soft-heart,” he says gruffly. “It was important to him for some reason.”

“Does Djarin know?”

“Doubt it.”

“He’ll like it, once he does. He’ll be happy that you want his kid there too.”

Oh, no. He will like it, Boba realizes it, with something like trepidation. He’ll be touched.

“You said it, can’t take it back,” Fennec says cheerfully, her expression bland but her eyes sparkling when he turns his head to stare her down through his visor.

The firelight reflects off her hair, gleaming on the black and blending with the red cording. She winks. “You know that doesn’t work on me.”

He turns back to the ore crawler and stares it down instead.

Hurried footsteps come towards them-- Boba squares himself, blaster drawn, but keeps his gaze in front in case the new arrival is a diversion; Fennec shifts to stand with her back to his.

“Jora,” she says, and they both relax.

“Ma’am,” the quartermaster says, a bit too eagerly to hide her shyness. “Fett,” with a nod, when Boba turns to face her and the fire.

“What’s the rush?” Fennec asks, and Boba’s HUD shows the tips of Jora’s lekku flush before they flip behind her shoulders with casual nonchalance.

“Just saw Parnel headed up the tower-- what are you looking at?”

She peers out over the wastes, her dark eyes searching the shadows. Her night vision is as good as most Twi’leks’, but she doesn’t have the benefit of Fennec’s scope or his rangefinder, and the ore crawler is still. He sees when she finds it; how she stiffens, then relaxes to squint and lean forward. Good.

“Do you think they’ll be trouble?”

“Not tonight,” Fennec says. “They won’t make a frontal push, not after what we did to Marlo’s mercenaries and that gang from the Black Sun.”

“What if they don’t come in the front?” Jora glances down uneasily at the rock beneath their feet.

“They’ll make a racket if they do,” Boba says. “Mezza’s got her engineers putting in vibration sensors.”

Jora knows the palace even better than he does, though; got sent on more and nastier errands into the bowels and extents of it. It’s why he’s paying her a small ransom to keep working here, in the halls where she was once a slave, assigning living and working space to the slowly growing crew.

“If there’s anywhere you’re worried about as an access point, write it up for Mezza and send me a copy,” he says. She nods, looking uneasy.

“I can do a walkabout with you, day after tomorrow,” Fennec offers, sweetening the pot. “We’ll take a look at all the back doors.”

The flush goes further up Jora’s lekku this time.

Boba doesn’t know all the details of what happened between them-- Jora had fled the palace after Fennec shot her free, and days later Fennec had happened across her out in the desert while she was hunting for one of Fortuna’s lieutenants who’d stolen a sand schooner.

She’d just dropped the woman off in Mos Espa, she says, paid a medic to get fluids into her and the chain off her, left her with a pocketful of credits. It wasn’t anything, she says. A chance meeting a few years back. It’s nothing, Fennec says.

“Of course, Miss Shand,” Jora says, with that soft sparkle in her eyes that makes Boba doubt Fennec’s report all over again.

Fennec is loyal. But that doesn’t mean she always tells him the truth. They’ve both been in the game too long for that.

There’s a cheer from behind them, then a louder one, followed by a whoosh of flame that looks like it’s trying to touch the atmosphere. When he clicks the input for his HUD over to the unaugmented feed, the bonfire is alive with all the colours of a rhydonium explosion in hyperspace.

“There go those old portraits,” Fennec says. “Still can’t believe Parnel approved burning those.”

Jora gives an exaggerated shudder. “Maybe she thought it was worth the risk.”

“I’d burn them from my memory if I could,” Boba says.

Fennec eyes the fire. “At least they turned out to be good for something.”

There’s a second whoosh, and more cheering. The fire flares, the flames dancing with colours again, before it fades back to oranges and reds. The muffled thump of contained explosions sound off from the distance, and red and gold and green fireworks light up the sky over the palace.

“I think Parnel was saving them until the baby could see the fireworks.” Jora’s eyes light up, reflecting back the glimmers of gold and green in the sky. “Did you see him? He’s so small!”

“Not yet,” Fennec says.

“If you want to tonight, you might want to get down there. Mezza was moving in when I left.”

“Go on,” Boba says. He flicks his feed back to the low light-input and the range over to his 360; the ore crawler hasn’t moved. “Grab a drink before Zhosef’s rabble finishes it all. I’ll watch our friends a while longer.”

Fennec shoots him a smirk, knowingly, but one of her teasing ones, and she’s not so cruel as to make it soft. “You do that-- and if I see our friend, I’ll make sure to send him your way. After I meet the baby,” she adds with a wink.

The fireworks catch her when she tips her head at Jora, warming her with shimmering red and gold. “Let’s go get that drink.”

The flush makes it up to Jora’s headpiece this time, but she can probably blame the fireworks for her red cheeks.
Boba waits. Watches the ore crawler as the moons rise high and slow over the northeast plains. Behind him, the noise of the party rises and peaks and begins to fall as the celebrations slowly give way to the stillness and chill of the desert night.

It’s cold enough that the insulation layer in his kute has engaged when he sees a flicker of thermal movement, a glimpse of a head and torso on the exposed outer platform of the core crawler.

He powers up a wrist rocket, the red activation-light bright in the dark, and aims-- lowers his arm and disengages when the figure yanks themself back into the cover of the upper deck. They know he sees them. That’s all he wanted.

“How long has that been there?” Din asks from behind him, and Boba goes still with surprise.

He switches over to his unaugmented feed and turns to catch the last of Din’s approach: his familiar, quiet steps with that hip roll that means he’s feeling confident, the tip of his helmet hello-- the quick bob like a wink that says he saw Boba startle-- and the glow of the still-burning bonfire behind him, rolling liquid light down the edges of his armor.

For a moment, Boba’s chest empties. He forgets how to speak.

Din stops beside him, and now Boba can tell he’s holding something in the crook of his arm-- his child, tucked against his chest and looking out. It’s dark, but Boba can see the clever light in those eyes, and the way his big ears perk up.

“Beroya,” he says, a little more crisply than he means.

“Fett.” It’s gentle and happy and pads the edge of his impatience. The easy tilt of Din’s helmet isn’t offended.

“Showed up about the same time you did.”

Behind them, the gathered crowd shouts and laughs. Distantly, Boba can hear something that sounds suspiciously like one of the palace staff running through a scale, before stopping abruptly to the sound of more laughter.

“Eh?” the child looks up at him from his father’s arms, his dark eyes shrewd and seeking, even more so in person than across holo. The heavy green head nods once in judgement. “Pofa. Boosee.”

“Yeah. He wears a buy’ce too sometimes,” Din says.

Boba realizes the child has never seen him with it on; he always took it off for their private holo-conferences, because Din was similarly bare-faced for those calls and it felt strange to be more armored than the Mandalorian. He lifts his helmet now, hooking it to the groove set in on his belt.

“Recognized me anyway, didn’t you? You're a good little hunter.” He smiles wryly, and the child chortles with delight.

Then his heart stops in his chest, because the little creature reaches up from his father’s arms. To him.

“Would you?” Din asks hopefully.

“You sure?” He hears it come out almost uncertain, but he’d die on the hill of that ‘almost’.

Din tips his head, once, firelight tracing the motion up and down the curves of his helmet. It’s so reminiscent of the child’s decisive nod-- because the child learned it from him, Boba realizes. Because this is Din’s child, even if the kid’s got a decade or more on either of them.

He reaches out without thinking, and then the little weight-- such a small thing-- is in his arms. The child shifts to sit on Boba’s forearm, taking surprising care to make sure he’s not sitting on the vambrace controls. Maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising; he’s a Mandalorian’s child, and a clever one at that.

He’s clumsy and a little top-heavy in the way of small children, but aware in a way Boba associates with the squad of young clone troopers he once infiltrated-- thinking faster than his body can keep up with. There’s more going on behind those big eyes than instinct. The smoke from the fire is making those same big eyes water a little, but he keeps them trained on Boba’s face, assessing.

He reaches out to touch Boba’s face, and Boba feels a brush of--

“No. None of that.” His heart kicks up in his chest again, doubletime, adrenaline pulsing, but he keeps his voice, and his arms, steady.

The brush against his mind fades away as fast as it came, and the little one’s ears go back and down like a wary tooka. Din takes a step forward, one arm halfway up to snag the child back.

“...it’s all right. Just startled me. I don’t-- I don’t like Jedi stuff. I’m not mad at you,” Boba says gruffly.

“Eh.” The kid looks down at his robes thoughtfully.

“I like you fine. You’re not ‘Jedi stuff’. You’re a little Mando’ad’ika, aren’t you.”

Din makes a slightly pained noise, but the child’s ears straighten up and his eyes widen with delight. “Pofa. Ba, bato.”

“Certainly,” he says solemnly, with no idea what he’s agreeing to.

The child coos happily, and pats his face curiously again, this time without the Force tagging along on the exploration. He’s fascinated by the scars; his clawed hands trace them carefully while he watches Boba’s face until he’s sure there’s no pain, and then he starts poking and exploring in earnest.

His grip is stronger and surer than Boba would ever have expected from his tiny holo-presence. He looks fragile, with those proportions like a human infant, but in the flesh he’s more obviously sturdy. He gives an inquisitive prod to Boba’s browbone.

“Hey, kid!” Din objects.

“It’s fine, I don’t mind.”

“Someone else might. You ask first,” he adds, wagging a finger at the child in such a fussy nurse-droidish way that it startles a chuckle out of Boba.

The child whines at his father in protest, tipping his head beseechingly.

“And you wait for them to answer,” Din adds. “That part is important.”

“Eh?” The child turns back to Boba, training that big dark gaze directly on him.

“Poke all you want. Just don’t go for the eyes. That’s only for enemies.”

The child coos, putting on an innocent air, patting his finger.

“Ah, I see. Sweet as tiuja,” he teases. “Wouldn’t harm a fly. Perhaps a mudhorn or a stormtrooper, but not a fly.”

“Fett…” it’s a sigh. “Come on, I’m trying to keep him honest. He’s got to know his manners.”

He reaches out to trace a wrinkle and-- with a glance at Din-- pauses.

“May I?” he asks deliberately.

The child makes a roughly affirmative sound, and doesn’t move away from his hand. He strokes one of the lines across the child’s brow, surprised by the thickness of the skin.

“Psht, your father thinks you’re trouble,” he murmurs conspiratorially, smoothing down the wrinkle again. “Not you, Tiuja. You and I know better.”

The child pokes his nose consideringly, just to prove him wrong, and he laughs outright. It surprises him, and Din’s helmet takes on a new angle that means both ‘thoughtful’ and ‘fond’.

“‘Sugarfruit?’ A spoiled-rotten sugarfruit, maybe,” Din says. “Come on, Grogu. I can see ba’vodu Boba is going to be a bad influence.” He holds out his arms again.

“Weeeh,” the child protests, clinging dramatically to Boba’s neck.

“There’s roast jerba.”

“Oooh?”

Boba feels the grasp around his neck loosen a little and chuckles again. “No, not spoiled at all.” He touches the child’s tiny nose in payback, startling him and making him sneeze.

“He ate a few hours before we got in,” Din says. “A full soup ration. Nutrients and calories for two days. I don’t know where he puts it.”

“Stores it in the Force, maybe. For later.” He’s mostly joking.

“Maybe.” Din sounds thoughtful. “His powers do take a lot of his strength.”

“Ah?” The child turns in Boba’s hold to look at his father, and then down at his own three-fingered hand.

“Or maybe he’s saving up for a growth spurt,” Boba suggests.

“That would be some growth spurt.”

The child looks between them, one green ear perked, considering.

“That’s right, Tiuja,” Boba says, and steps away from his lookout spot, Din falling in beside him as he takes them toward the spit of turning jerba. “Keep storing energy like that, you could grow a whole two centimeters.”

“Grogu the giant,” Din says seriously, reaching out to his child’s reaching arms and settling him back into the crook of his elbow, against his chest. “Maybe even three feet tall someday.”

The child peers up at them both. “Wha. Batu?”

“Could be,” Boba agrees as they approach the far side of the fire, where Ygabba’s holding court over the cooking jerba. “That’s almost as tall as Shand.”

Ygabba looks up, her familiar searching squint breaking into a smile so wide it almost reaches her ears when they come close enough for her to make out.

“Notice how ba’vodu Boba doesn’t say that when ba’vodu Fennec can hear him?” Din asks his child, who either knows what his father is saying, or at least knows his father’s tone, because he burbles with delight.

“Mandalorian!” Ygabba crashes down upon them like the waves of the planet where Boba was born. Her grin pulls at Boba’s lungs in the same way it always does, when he’s reminded again of everything he didn’t lose to the sarlacc.

She thrusts a plate of food at him, the glow of the fire painting warmth into the white streaks in her frizzy hair and her toxin-burnt and sun-scarred eyes. “Yggy,” he says.

“About time you showed your face, Fett. You think I don’t keep track? Eat.” And almost before he has it in his hands, she’s swept over to the baby.

“Oh look at you,” she breathes out, leaning in close to the child, almost head to head with him where he sits in his Din’s arms. She glances up at Din, still beaming, and then winks at the child. “Now, is your daddy as cute as you under that helmet of his?”

The child coos and giggles, but his eyes follow the second plate of food Ygabba is holding when she shifts it.

“Ah, that’s what I like to see in a growing boy,” she says. “A nice big appetite. Your daddy here said you were a bit of a carnivore. I don’t suppose you’re hungry after your big trip?”

Din sighs, fondly. “He’s always hungry.”

“A boy after my own heart. May I?”

The last is to Din, and he nods, surrendering his child to her strong, skinny arms with a firm: “Manners.”

Boba swallows his laugh at that, but from the way Din’s helmet tilts at him, he heard him anyway.

“And I don’t suppose you’re any more likely to have remembered to eat than the boss here,” Ygabba says, squinting knowingly at Din over child’s large ears and the happy sounds of him devouring the plate of meat with almost alarming speed.

“Kid,” Din says firmly. “Chew.”

“Let me know when you’re ready, and your plate will be in your room,” Ygabba adds, without waiting for Din to completely avoid answering her.

“Thank you,” Din says, in that way that sounds like it’s coming from somewhere deep in his soul. Somewhere in the beskar. “I brought you the supplies you requested.”

Ygabba nods, pleased. She can make months of meals with the carbonite-stored blocks of produce Yavin offers in plenty, the load Din can fit in the hold of his ship more than Tatooine grows on its own in a season. “Your daddy’s a man of his word,” she tells the child. “Oh! All done? Well come with me, little mister. We’ll get you another plate!”

She peers back to Din, and he nods-- watches them go. It’s only a few feet, but Boba feels like he needs to fill the space it leaves.

“Wasn’t sure any of the rest of us were going to get to meet the little one. Heard Mezza had him.”

“She did,” Din agrees dryly, still watching as Ygabba balances Grogu on one hip while holding out the child’s plate for one of her staff to pile it with another absurdly large serving of roast jerba. “Wasn’t sure I was going to get him back before next week.”

“She’s been waiting for someone to give her a great-grandchild.”

Din grunts, then raises his hand to sign ‘I see’ to his son, who’s peeking over at them and holding up a fist-full of fresh-carved jerba excitedly. “The way they’re all acting, you’d think I’d was holding interviews for ba’buire. Dorai met us in the hangar holding a tuft-rabbit kit.”

“Smart lady,” Boba says, nodding. She may have been missing the bonfire and celebration to keep charge of her various flocks, but Dorai knew when to press her advantage. “I think I’ve heard Oro practicing a lullabye. Prepare yourself.”

“I’m more worried about Shroud deciding he’ll run off with Grogu to found a new tribe. I don’t know if Oro’s ready for kids.”

“Good news for the kids,” Boba says. Shroud was the best purser he could have hoped for-- which was why he’d been able to insist on his partner’s room and board, despite the man himself.

And as if summoned by speaking the little bastard’s name, he can hear the warning sounds of a guitar being tuned.

Beside him, Din stills, then tilts his helmet in the way that Boba knows means he’s engaged his proximity scanners.

He replaces his own helmet, flips over to his 360 and searches by audial input. “Other side of the bonfire, thirty degrees northwest. About 60 feet. Guitar is armed and ready.”

“Mm,” Din says. “Affirmative. Looks like he’s playing for the guards. That should keep him busy-- all done?” He shifts forward, arms out to take his child back from Ygabba. “Did you leave any for everyone else?” he asks the child, who coos innocently back.

“Not a bit. Ate it all, down to the bone,” Ygabba says with a cheerfully exaggerated wink. “Like an anooba-pup.”

The child looks confused, but giggles when she bares her teeth at him, and bares his own stubby fangs back.

“I’ll make sure to save you the bones of my enemies, Tiuja,” Boba says gravely.

“And spare your own old teeth,” Ygabba says, because she knows she can get away with it. He turns the full force of his helmet on her anyway.

“My crew is packing up what your growing lad left behind, Mando,” she says, ignoring Boba’s glower. “And I am off to my kitchens to find out all that you brought me. Plates will be waiting for you in your rooms-- for both of you, Fett, if you don’t finish that. And there might just be a bowl of sweets with someone’s name on it too,” she adds in something that’s nothing like a whisper.

“I’m touched,” Boba says, ignoring the pointed way her head bobbed at the plate of jerba he’s still holding, and feels more pride in Din’s quiet chuckling exhale and his child’s squawk than Yggy’s glare.

“Glad to have you back, Mando,” Ygabba says. “Someone needs to keep the boss in line.”

“I know better than to take that job,” says Fennec as she approaches, the steady fall of her boots on the sandy rock not quite masked by the distant guitar.

“You just encourage him,” Ygabba agrees, but she smiles, and Boba can see Fennec twitch a smile back as Ygabba nods and turns to join her kitchen crew’s procession back to the palace.

“Feh!” the child says from Din’s arms, and Fennec stops beside them.

It’s more than a twitch of a smile this time. “Well if it isn’t the monkey-lizard himself.”

The child gives her what looks very much like an affronted look, and blows a raspberry at her.

She winks at him and he goes still, his little expression made of equal parts joy and confusion.

“You going to eat that, or just hold it?” Fennec nods her chin over at the plate in his hand.

He doesn’t look down to select a smaller piece of roast jerba and hold it out to Din’s child-- but if he uses his 360, who’s to know.

Din sighs, but the child reaches over to snatch it with a happy burble, and disappears it in one bite. Those little green jaws can open surprisingly wide.

Boba hands the child another sliver of meat, and Fennec rolls her eyes. The orange and red of the fire dances in them and then throws them in shadow moment after moment, the light flickering over the reddening tip of her nose and cheeks and showing the chill Boba can’t yet feel through his armor as the cold Tatooine night settles in.

The child pauses, peering down at his food thoughtfully, then offers it up to his father.

“Thank you,” Din says seriously. “But I already ate. You go ahead.”

Boba tips up his helmet to eat a piece of jerba himself, instead of focusing on the pang in his heart and the tightness in his throat at the picture the Mandalorian and his child make.

It’s good; of course it is. Ygabba would call him a sand-louse at the implication that he ever thought otherwise.

He eats another piece, then two, then three before he’s full. Despite Ygabba’s tendency to believe everyone she didn’t personally see eating was starving on her watch, he’d had his meals for the day. The extra protein was nice, not necessary-- and he didn’t have the extra spiritual capacity Djarin’s child seemed to have to keep the leftovers in.

“Here,” he says, and hands the plate to Fennec.

Fennec glances down at it. “Mm. It’s a little too much solid protein for the machinery to handle. I ate this morning; you know what my calorie intake is these days.”

He does, to the fraction of a kilocalorie. Her guts are highly efficient but in danger of overloading under strain.

“But I’ll keep it around as a decoy if you’re not eating,” she adds, setting it down on a higher outcropping of pitted plateau rock. “So people stop trying to give me more.”

“Ygabba knows better.”

“Ygabba isn’t the one trying to suck up to me.”

“Jora?”

“No, Jora remembers I don’t eat meat. It was one of the workers. A Gamorean; I think he wants back on guard duty.”

“I think he wants a matriarch that can break his back,” Din says.

“He’s not getting either. If we change the policy on letting Hutt’s old guards hold weapons again, it’s not going to be for him.”

“You think he’s a threat?”

“No, I think he’s an idiot. We don’t let Oro have a weapon, either.”

The guitar in the distance gets a little louder, to put the lie to her words.

“Star Waver again?” Shand shakes her head helplessly. “He must know at least one other band.”

“The guards seem to like it,” Din says. “The ones who’ve stayed.”

“You’ll have better taste,” Boba promises the child, who angles an ear in question. It’s so similar to the way his father cocks his helmet when he’s curious that it pulls a laugh out of him, dry and surprised.

The child doesn’t know what’s so funny-- probably, although he’s a shrewd little thing and he has the Force to guide him along-- but he wrinkles his already wrinkled little face up and giggles back anyway.

Din looks back and forth between them, his easy posture showing his happy amusement as much as Fennec’s pursed lips and sparkling eyes show hers, and Boba can’t understand how anyone could see Din and his child and not know they were family. They look more alike in this moment than his father and any of the clone troopers ever had, more than he has for years. He hasn’t caught a glimpse of his reflection and felt it catch in his heart in a decade.

The child reaches out with one hand, and Din steps over to shift him into Boba’s arms before Boba realizes-- he hears Fennec’s quiet snort and shoots her a glare over Din’s shoulder, but it slides off her and evaporates into the air.

“Aah?” the child asks, and taps gently at the bottom of his helmet.

“Of course,” Boba says, and tugs his helmet off, hooking it back to his belt. “Here I am.”

Fennec laughs at something Din says in a murmur, and then Din turns to him, chin tipped forward, brow back, and Boba knows he’s smiling, looking at Boba, looking at his child in Boba’s arms. The firelight makes Fennec’s eyes sparkle, makes her smile glow, and makes Din’s armor seem soft and warm. He could reach out and touch it and he thinks he might feel his beating heart under the kar’ta beskar. His fingers twitch with the absence of Fennec’s tight braid against them. They are two gravity wells tugging at him.

“Pofa.”

“...yes, little one?”

The child is like a third point of gravity in his arms. He strokes one of the little ears carefully and the child fusses until lifted to touch his own round ear.

Then he grins, mouth full of rounded fangs, and throws his arms around Boba’s head, leaning his heavy little brow against Boba’s. “Ba-bah,” he says firmly, patting Boba’s temple with a little claw. “Ba-bah.”

He can hear Fennec’s little chuckle and Din’s soft glad exhale.

“You’re in a good mood. Was it the food?”

The child blows a raspberry of exasperation at him and snuggles back down, resting his head into the crook of Boba’s neck.

“Well you’re trapped now. The infection’s set in,” Fennec says cheerfully, grinning at him. He glares back, and she ignores it completely, coming to tuck up against his arm.

“Ba-bah,” the child says, muffled by his shoulder, and reaches out to touch her cheek. He gets to see her smirk falter into alarm, as disarmed as he is by this determined acceptance.

“You’ll never prove it,” she says, but her bravado is firmly cracked. He feels a strange kind of delight bubbling up-- a joy with no edges or acid.

Din cups their shoulders, pulling them together. “And when there’s two of them, we say bavodu’e,” he says matter-of-factly.

“Bababay,” the child agrees.

“Is that what he’s saying?” Boba realizes, horrified, and Din’s laughter spills out of him as rare and precious as water from a spring. “I’ll take that nonsense from you, Mandalorian, but don’t fill the kid’s head with it.”

“You’re really going to let him saddle you with us?” Fennec asks, eyebrow raised.

“I made that decision a long time ago, Shand,” Din says, his voice soft. “He’s just giving his seal of approval.”

The sniper rocks back on her heels, but can’t go far, between Din’s hand and Boba’s bulk. “Shut up.”

“Too late,” Boba parrots back. “The infection’s set in.”

She does almost look like she might sacrifice a limb to stop it at that. She looks terrified at what this means. Unworthy and uneasy in the face of Din’s adoration and the approval of his child.

...or, no. That second part is him. It’s him.

For a heartbeat, he’s too much for his armour, for his skin. Too large and the boundaries of himself are shaking, breaking apart in the same way the dark of the desert night is fractured by every spark and flicker of the bonfire that they seem to be the only people standing around anymore, but these must be the only three other parts of the galaxy left standing, the wells that pull at him until--

He thinks it’s another firework and glances up, but the only lights in the sky are the stars and the moons and the rising red glow of the fire.

The child makes a low, confused sound. When Boba looks down, his ears are pulled flat, then twist up tall. They wobble when he gives a little headshake.

He reaches up, and pauses. “Ba?”

“As you wish,” Boba says, without thinking. Grogu may have been with the Jedi for the past few years, but he’d wager that Din had taught him whatever that Djarin secret was that lets them steal away all of Boba’s better sense long before he’d ever entered the Jedi’s care, because he's as good at it as his father.

The little hands reach up to press lightly on his chin, and there’s a flicker of the child’s mind brushing against his-- then a ringing in his ears, like metal rattling on a ship far overhead, or a storm sweeping through a canyon in the distance.

The child makes an unhappy sound, his arms drooping. Boba’s ears pop.

“Grogu?” Din says, stepping closer. “Are you alright?”

The child looks back and forth between them, his little face scrunched up and puzzled, before he leans towards his father. Din scoops him easily from Boba’s arms and Boba smiles after him as gently as he’s able, hoping it’s enough to reassure the child that he’s not upset.

Grogu tucks his head into the crook of his father’s elbow while Din traces careful fingers down his ears and arms, resting them on the boy’s little stomach. “You tired, kid? Or is your belly sore?”

He grumbles back, and Boba can hear the smile when Din’s helmet tips to the side. “I think that’s a ‘yes’,” he says. “All that jerba must be catching up to you.”

“Or the days in hyperspace,” Fennec says. “Are you taking your room or Fett’s tonight?”

“Generous,” Boba says, and the warmth of it settles in his chest. It’s a joke, and Fennec knows it’s a joke and so does Din. And unlike Fennec’s rooms, it’s something shared.

“Mine. It’s been some time, but he used to want to sleep close when we first stayed somewhere new.”

Fennec crouches down enough to meet the child’s gaze. “See you at breakfast, then, mischief-maker.” She straightens, adding: “I’m going to go find the unlucky scuffers who pulled watch shifts tonight, and get Parnel off that tower. She needs to watch this fire tonight.”

“I’ll see you inside,” Boba says, and she winks before spinning away on a heel.

“Boba Fett, observant woman that I am-- you know I always see you first.”

Din laughs, gentle and pleased, and a moment later Grogu muzzily echoes his father.

Boba glances to the fire. It’s burning low now, barely taller than he is, bright and red against the increasing cold of the Tatooine night. It’s served its purpose. “I’m with you then, Beroya,” he says, and falls in step beside Din for the walk back to the Palace.

Chapter Text

The wind blows in with the morning, sharp-edged. It wakes him a little before his chrono is set to go off; he blinks awake with only the memory of a whistling sound in his ears.

The patch of bed beside him is empty, but as his gaze sweeps the room he finds Fennec sitting in the window well, looking out through a slit in the metal shutter. First-sunrise must only just be starting; it throws a soft strip of reflected light over her face, slanting across her right eye and down to her jaw.

Her gaze is focused; targeted. It’s at odds with her naked legs, his own oversized robe spilling over her shoulders and piling in her lap.

“What’s got you worried?” he rasps, rolling to his side. It can’t be too bad, or she’d have woken him herself. He can appreciate the sight of her, that sliver of collarbone just visible between the folds of fabric, the curve of her legs folded under her, a hint of her ass where the robe is bunched up around her upper thigh. Deadly. Compact. Lovely.

“Nothing,” she says softly. “Had a weird dream. Couldn’t get back down.”

“Got another half hour before either of us has obligations. Come back here.”

She hums an affirmative and shifts half off the ledge, one foot brushing the floor, the other still under her.

“Shand. What is it?”

“Something’s blowing up to the east. Maybe a sandstorm.”

“Plan on shooting it or something? C’mere.”

Her eyes are oddly distant when she looks at him-- still focused a thousand klicks away-- but then her gaze sharpens up, and her face relaxes a little into a tired sigh. “You’re going to tempt me to sleep in.”

“Worried your employer will be angry?” he teases. “I could make excuses for you.”

“Mmm, I have to do a weapons check of the armory with Parnel-- make sure everything’s still in order and nothing’s wandered off after that last big skirmish.” She sighs. “And go through Parnel’s inventory requisition, then price it with Shroud. It has to be today; that patrol with Jora is going to take all day tomorrow.” She slides all the way off the window anyway, tossing his robe over the bedpost on the way, leaving her in just the soft nightshirt she prefers.

She sighs and rolls back into bed gracefully, head thumping against his chest. “Regular hours are softening me up.”

“I’m sure something’ll come along to make life interesting before long. Marlo the Hutt isn’t the last crime boss in the galaxy.” He curls his arm around her, stroking her back sleepily.

He lets his heavy eyelids shut again, content in the security systems that surround them, knowing Din is only a few rooms away with his child.

He’s just at the edge of sleep, where thought breaks down into stray whisps and incomplete ideas, when there’s a high whistle-- another gust of the wind plowing through the rock spires and hitting the shutter hard enough to make it thud in its seat.

His adrenaline spikes, and Fennec tenses similarly in his arms.

“Fuck.” She breathes out through her nose, deliberate like she’s settling her heart rate before she trips a biometric sensor. “Do you think Din’s awake?”

“Noise probably woke up the kid.” Probably woke up the whole Palace, and all of Mos Espa. “Want to go get caff?”

“Caff,” she sighs wistfully. “Damn, I’m tired.”

Din answers his door right away, helmet on over sleep pants and a pilfered robe of his own. He waves them inside; his room is full-dark, the shutters closed tight. Without the dawn-light, the only illumination comes from the glowing panels that line the walls at floor level, warm gold cut with shadows The whistle of the wind is distant, but not gone.

“Don’t I pay you enough to buy your own clothes?” Boba asks. He runs his fingers down the closed front and sleeve of his robe as he passes, the fabric smooth over Din’s strong chest and arm.

“Yours smell better,” Din says matter of factly, taking off his helmet and setting it on the stone-carved bench by the head of his bed.

Boba’s eyes flick around the darkened room. It’s warm and cozy enough with the dark and Din’s presence that he almost-- almost-- thinks he might be able to fall back asleep here, if his heart wasn’t now awake and pumping like he’d had a few cups of caff already.

Din’s bedding is in a tangle; he’s not a fretful sleeper, normally, long used to tiny bunks and shared spaces. An unmoving shore for Boba’s own tossing sleep to crash against when they share a bed. It’s out of place enough that he moves closer to examine it.

It’s more nest than tangle, he realizes; sheets, pillows, and clothing arranged with purpose into a protective bulwark.

“He didn’t want to sleep in the hammock I brought.” He nods his head to a little hanging basket tucked next to the far side of the bed. “We compromised.”

Boba can see the dense lump in the center of the heavy night-blankets now, hear the tiny snores. The nest is flattened out on one side where Din must have curled against it, close enough for his son to feel his warmth.

“Lucky this wind didn’t wake him,” Boba says.

“I wish I were as lucky,” Din sighs heavily, sitting down on the bare mattress. “I’ve been up a while.”

“We’re going down for caff. Come with us,” Fennec urges.

Din nods slowly, and reaches to rest his hand on the child. “Ad’ika-- do you want breakfast?”

There’s a sleepy coo, a stir in the blanket nest. Grogu’s head emerges. His eyes are barely open and that big green head seems too heavy for him to raise; he rests his cheek against the nest wall, one ear folded up.

“...is it too early, little one?” Din reaches out and strokes his son’s shoulder with his thumb, hand curled over his back.

Grogu yawns deeply and makes another half-hearted attempt to get upright, reaching out for his father. Din leans toward him and scoops him up, settling him against his chest, Grogu turning into his warmth with a fretful little noise.

“You’ll feel better after breakfast,” Din promises. “We have all that frog spawn Luke gave us-- the kitchen’s keeping it safe for you.” Grogu makes a sleepy sound and rubs his head against Din’s stolen robe. “You can sleep again after. Mezza’s got a nap spot for you in the main power control hub. Remember Mezza?”

“Muh.”

Din is willing to go helmetless around Boba and Fennec these days, but he hasn’t had so much face-to-face socialization in the last few years that he’s developed a sabacc face. His worry creases up his brow and draws his mouth down, even his neat mustache seeming to slump. He forces a smile that cannot touch the worry in his eyes. “She liked you, kiddo. You liked her too. She’s probably made you a nice little crib already. She’s good at building things.”

The child musters a faint noise of agreement, and then goes limp in Din’s arm.

“...Time difference must be hitting him hard. It didn’t used to bother him, but he didn’t used to get much of a consistent day-night cycle, either. He must be used to the Jedi’s moon now.”

“He’ll bounce back. I always did,” Boba promises. “The schedule on Kamino was even tighter than planetary dawn, and I took a few days to get back on shiptime, but never too long.”

“You’ll feel better after some caff, too,” Fennec says, the hint not well disguised. Din isn’t properly addicted to the stuff, but he makes it damn well.

“You mean I’ll feel better after you’ve had some.” That makes him smile, though, in the way that does touch the worry in his eyes. “Let me get dressed. Boba, here.”

His arms go out before his brain catches on, and Din presses his son into his arms.

Fennec snorts at the expression on his face.

Grogu stirs, blinking up at him, and curls into his chest. Boba feels something move over him. Not in him, not prodding this time, but there is a presence around his shoulders that feels almost tangible, like he’s holding the child there instead of in his arms.

“What’re you up to, little one?”

The child doesn’t answer, fast asleep once more.

He glances up and Din’s dressed in more solid pants and an overtunic, boots and helmet on, his cape knotted expertly into a birikad. He missed that. Fennec didn’t, not by the slight smirk on her tired face.

“Thank you.” Din’s voice is warm through his helmet’s vocoder as he retrieves his child, tucking him into the makeshift carrier over his chest.

“He’s not so heavy, don’t sound so serious.”

Boba feels the presence around him ease with the distance between him and the child, but it’s still there. Not quite a weight, not quite a restraint. A heavy nuisance, like a thermal layer over his armor.

He knows it’s the child, but he’d have to wake him to make him stop, and Din’s rattled enough already. He’ll hold off, mention it later if it becomes important.

The wind isn’t as bad in the main galley, down at ground level, insulated by the layers of stone walls.

They aren’t the only stragglers there. Boba’s not surprised to see Zhosef and Parnel holding down a table together; both of them have rooms in the tower. But there’s an unusual amount of general crew about, paid laborers and Fennec and Din's off-duty guards scattered around the ancient wood tables, some heads down on their arms, others staring miserably into the middle distance or clutching a cup of their stimulant-of-choice to their chests. He didn’t think he’d supplied that much free drink.

A streak of red and black catches his eye. Dorai’s tattoos are unmistakable, and that’s all he can see of her with her head down on the table and her lekku limply tucked under her neck. Wind must have disturbed the animals.

Zhosef is more covered even than usual-- when they look up at him it’s like being eyeballed by a pile of blankets. They’re wearing a hooded coverall on some middle layer under a heap of shawls, and it leaves just a strip of skin visible over their normal dustmask. Just a pair of lined, bloodshot eyes to show there’s something alive inside the layers.

“Djarin making caff for us all?”

“For us,” Fennec corrects. “Not for ‘us all’.”

“Fucking wind, isn’t it?”

“I’m tired, Zhosef,” Boba says. “Smalltalk about the weather is a firing offense, you understand?”

“Employment or blaster-? Nevermind.” They shift over on the bench, scooching a bit toward Parnel as if she’s awake enough to protect them.

Din shepherds him and Fennec over to another booth, the comfortable one in the corner with a good eyeline of the room. Two of Zhosef’s laborers are already there, but they vacate it instantly with apologetic phrases in Rodian that Boba’s brain can’t catch hold of.

“Never saw anyone steal Jabba’s seat,” Fennec says, though there’s a jaw-cracking yawn in the middle of it. She wilts into the booth, hunching forward over the table.

“Never saw him leave the thing, maybe that’s why,” he mutters back. It’s not funny, but it’s a coherent response, and that’s as much as he can promise at the moment.

He feels like he could sleep for a week. Where was this helpful exhaustion when they were up in bed? He tries to catch hold of the threads of the day, look for the hours he can sleep. There’s usually time, in the hottest hours. What the hell does he have to do today? Doesn’t remember.

His joints are aching as if he’s stuck in low grav with no pressurization.

“What’m I doing today, Shand. Can I go the hell back to bed.”

“I’m not your keeper,” she says. Then: “I think so.”

The smell of fresh caff reaches him, then-- rich and spiced. The world settles back into order, the atmosphere comfortable over his body again, as Din draws near with two mugs in each fist.

Boba grabs for one of them, takes a sip, and blinks at the taste of savory broth. “What?”

“That’s for the kid, Boba.” Din rearranges the mugs on the table, pressing a different one into his hand. “Shand, that’s mine. Get your face out of it.”

“I changed my mind. I want hot chocolate. It’s mine now.”

Din gives her a flat look. “Sure,” he says, and whisks the cup out of her hand. Her reaction time is shot; her fingers graze the handle and she looks at them betrayed until Din holds her own caff under her nose.

“Nobody’s sleeping in this morning, whether they're on morning rotation or not,” he says, unnecessarily. “We should give everyone but essential crew day-rest when it gets hot.”

“There’s fewer than two hundred of us. Who isn’t essential?” Fennec argues back.

“Everyone but the guards and engineers can have two hours.”

“What about the cooks?”

“None of these people would trade a fresh lunch and a long watch for the chance of rations and a nap,” Din says shortly.

Boba glares at them both. “Didn’t realize you’d taken over leadership, you pair.”

Din’s body language shifts, shoulders up straighter. “It’s my advice only, Fett. I mean no--”

Oh in all the Sith hells, Din’s tired and it means he’s lapsing back into his monastic little habits from his traditionalist covert like he always does when he’s being powered by muscle memory and will and not rest, and if Fett had more energy he’d find it charming.

“...calm down, Djarin, I’m just tired. It’s a good thought. Both of you. Think Djarin’s right on this one.”

Fennec mutters something about favoritism into her mug.

Din unwraps the bundle slung against his chest, carefully tugging out the sleepy child. Grogu is curled in on himself in a tight little ball.

“Breakfast, ad. Then you can go right back to sleep.”

“Nn.”

Din settles Grogu in his lap, placing the mug of broth before the child. The baby is as deeply tired still as the rest of them, but his ears twitch and his eyes flutter open and brighten when the scent of it reaches him.

He rubs at one of his eyes with a sloppy fist then holds out his hands, eager if uncoordinated. Din pushes the mug into them, and Boba can read his relief in the gentle curve of his body, how he leans inward to the child, the small star at the center of his orbit.

Boba’s starting to think he should have Mezza check the air intake, even though he knows the envo-sensors would alarm long before any airborne-contaminant reached concentrations that would affect anyone. He yawns so wide it hurts, his jaw popping and creaking, and then drinks deep from his caff while Fennec glares at him through her own yawn.

Din helps the child lift the mug to his mouth, and then tips his own helmet up to take a drink of cocoa. The child watches the shadow of his jaw intently, cooing with delight. It has the feeling of a game-- something shared and secret.

They trade sip for sip, until the broth is gone, and the baby’s color looks better-- as far as Boba can tell. The ears are pinker, at least. They twitch with interest and the big dark eyes brighten when they focus on his caff mug.

“Ah?” 'Good. Me?' he signs, clumsily but eager, in the simplified Mando'a combat hand signals his father has adapted for him.

“Have this instead,” Din says, and hands his child his mug. There must not be much left, because the baby has to tip his head back to get it, mug in the air, and for a moment he’s just a pair of eagerly gulping ears.

“Not drinking caff yet, Tiuja?” Boba aims for teasing, but it comes out slow and heavy, weighed down by the pressure of the wind behind his eyes.

“Not after the first time,” Din says darkly.

“How about a second cup for me, then,” Fennec says, and reaches across the table to tap Din’s vambrace with her mug. “You were gone for weeks--”

“A week and a half.”

“-- that’s a lot to make up for.”

“I wasn’t aware I had a quota.”

“Careful not to let it slip.”

Din helps Grogu set the empty hot chocolate mug on the table. “What do you think, kid? Should we get some more?”

“Whe,” the child says with notable enthusiasm, although he rubs at his eyes muzzily.

“Fett?”

It takes him too long to respond. The answer is there, waiting, but somehow out of reach behind a well of silence deeper than the Great Pit of Carkoon and full of a poor night’s sleep and the disordered mess of what he might and might not have to do today.

“Boba?”

He sees Din stand, Grogu tucked in the crook of his arm, and rises to his feet.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes. Very much. I’ll come with you, then go find Mezza. I need her to tell me we aren’t all breathing in fumes.” There’s another flicker of movement, in his peripheral; he tenses before he registers that it’s Parnel, and relaxes into a nod as the Dug ambles up.

“Boss,” she says, stopping beside Fennec’s seat, and rubs the heel of a foot into her squinted eyes. She blinks them widely when she’s done, then breaks into the sappiest smile he’s ever seen on her-- sappier even than the time they’d found that storeroom of safety-packed ordinance for the old mobile grenade mortars in the hangar. “Well isn’t that the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.”

He follows the line of her gaze to Din tying off the ends of his cape-adapted birikad, tucking his child into it.

“Ssu.” Grogu wriggles a hand free, holding it up in a wave.

“This is Parnel,” Din says. “She made the fireworks for you last night. Remember those?”

“Ooh.” The ears flick up with interest.

“Glad to leave a good impression,” Parnel says, a chuckle bubbling in her throat and making her barbels quiver. “Mando said you were fond of explosions.”

“A true little Mandalorian,” Boba says. “You here for Shand?”

“Yessir,” she flicks her ankle in a sloppy salute. “Armory day.”

“Not until I’ve had more caff it isn’t,” Fennec grunts.

“I’ll make yours first,” Din promises. “Parnel?”

She sighs. “Already had a cup of the kitchen’s brew, or I would. Too much caff gives me the shakes;”

“My condolences,” Fennec says, and sounds like she means it. “Hurry back.”

The galley’s filled a little since they’ve been sitting, a few more day labourers and what looks like the guards who pulled night shift huddled up at the tables, along with Zhosef and Dorai.

“Fett.” It’s a bare croak as he passes a table. Dorai pushes herself up into a mostly respectable posture. “There is something wrong with the blurrgs.” Her Ryl accent is never absent, but now it’s thick as the walls around them, running her syllables together melodically and incomprehensibly. “I need to brief you.”

“Now?”

“Soon.”

“Can it wait a day?”

“Only a day.”

“Tomorrow,” he nods.

She nods back at him, at Din, and manages a smile for the baby before she curls up around what must be a long-cold mug of tea.

It’s busy in the kitchens, busier than usual for this time of day, between the hustle of firstmeal prep and second, the kitchen staff and a few of the laborers shuffling about with crates and bins. They all look as half-dead as everyone else has, as he’s felt-- eyes dull and movement slow. One of the junior apprentices yawns over her kettle, and it spreads around the room at once, catching him sharp and wide.

Din steers them towards the calm of the old stone oven carved into the side of the wall in the far front corner. He crouches down to slide out the assembly stovetop from underneath it, setting it up quickly on the little hollow of a countertop next to the oven while Boba leans back into the familiar groove beside him and lets the wall take his weight.

The old oven had been the only reliable one in the beginning, before he’d wooed Ygabba back to work in the kitchens of her youth. Best they could tell, most of the power-fueled equipment had been decoupled and left to the dune mites and dry rot under Fortuna, without the full complement of Jabba’s staff and his ever-revolving army of guests to feed. There had been a few ranges that Fortuna’s cook must have risked using-- and they’d isolated those from their power cells the minute they’d opened up the vents to a shower of sand and little bones. It was a wonder Fortuna’s kitchen staff hadn’t accidentally gassed him and his entire retinue making Rylian fungus loaf.

But this little one had gotten them through the first year and more, until there’d been more than a few dozen mouths to feed, at most. The kitchens are never silent these days like they were in the beginning, or the Palace as empty as those long nights when it had seemed like the only point of light and warmth in the whole desert was that old oven, but it’s still just as necessary a thing. Ygabba’s never mentioned it, but he knows she’s left it like it was, ordered the kitchen staff not to use it unless necessary. They’re not the only ones that oven has been there for.

The wind gusts outside and wails down the long vent shafts, and Boba resists an angry shudder. Maybe there was something to be said for letting the damn things clog with debris, to hell with the suffocation hazard. He clenches his jaw until his teeth ache.

“Careful!” Ygabba snaps, loud and clear from across the busy kitchen, and startles a laborer to an awkward stop in time to stop a collision with one of her staff, both of their arms piled too full of crates to see the other.

“Give me that,” Ygabba says, tugging her crewmember back and rising to her toes to snatch the top crate from his pile. “We don’t have time to sweep this all up-- you should know better, Ymicc. And you--” to the laborer, “--announce yourself when you pass, and mind where you’re going. Now go, both of you.”

The little stove-top caff maker comes to life with a hiss and a groan-- Boba sees Ygabba’s head turn at the sound of it, and she’s smiling wide when she reaches them despite the bruises he can see under her eyes.

“Back again, eh. Who got you this time, Mando?”

“Same as last time,” Din says, and Boba can hear the smile in it.

The air around them grows sweet with the scent of melted chocolate and warm with spices; Grogu turns his head between Ygabba and the little saucepan his father has in front of them. One of Din’s gloves is tucked into his belt, and he sprinkles something fine-milled and red into the chocolate.

“There’s nothing wrong with my caff,” Ygabba tells Boba sternly, even as she holds out a mug to Din without shame. Din takes it from her, setting it beside Fennec’s and Boba’s own on the little counter-top.

“There isn’t,” Boba agrees, holding Ygabba’s gaze while Din pours and stirs beside him.

Ygabba nods decisively-- until it breaks partway through into a yawn that Boba can’t help but echo. His ears are ringing like his audial-input’s jumping frequencies by the time he’s done but he left his helmet up in his rooms, along with everything but his chest plate and vambraces.

“Kark this,” Ygabba groans, shaking her head. “My whole crew is dead on their feet-- what was in that spotchka, Mando?” She’s teasing; Boba can see the smile and the tired sparkle in her eyes, knows that tone of her voice, but Din’s back goes rigid and he turns stiffly-- kark that.

“A joke,” Boba says, before Din can apologize. Hopefully before he internalizes the idea, and the blame.

Damn the native Mandalorian need to base his whole value on what he can give to others. “The wholesale market you opened for us with the Sorgan distillers gives us a far better product than anything else we would get otherwise-- and what we don’t overindulge in turns a good profit,” he adds dryly. “If anyone overdrank last night, they’re paying their own debts today.”

Ygabba nods, her face pinched in apology. “No slight meant. It’s just the wind-- it kept the whole Palace up. And Mos Espa and Mos Eisley, too, from what I’ve heard. We’re staring down one krayt of a storm.”

Din nods-- the movement tight, his back straight as he hands Ygabba her mug back. His shoulders stay rigid, as if he’s been genuinely chastised.

“Fett,” he says, and passes Boba a mug too. He drinks from it-- pulls back in surprise at how sweet it is, the spiced caff is mixed with the melted chocolate, and Din covers it with a hand before he can go in again. “That’s Fennec’s. Yours is coming.”

“I’ll take it to her,” he says, because it’s starting to feel less like he’s leaning against the wall and more like it’s holding him up, and he needs to move before he petrifies.

“Don’t drink it all before you get there,” Ygabba teases, which is bold considering he can see she’s well on her way to draining her own mug. Maybe it’s bold of her to tease him at all; no one ever dared speak to Jabba that way. But he isn’t Jabba, and he’s known her since childhood-- whatever that meant, growing up in the ways they did-- and he’d rather know his people will speak their minds than be silenced by fear.

He fixes her with a flat glare anyway, and carries the expression with him through the galley in case anyone’s feeling chatty.

Din has his mug full and waiting for him when he returns-- and a third serving waiting in the carafe, because he is a generous soul who knows the amount of stimulants Boba needs to function when he’s been denied sleep.

Boba takes it and drinks it dry. Din refills it and hands it back.

“How many pallets have been thawed?”

“Not many,” Ygabba says, worried. “Just the ones for today, and the young ones on the short timers. But we’re running the clock on the rest-- a few hours would be better, but we could push it the rest of the day, and most would survive. But the warning beacons haven’t even triggered yet-- this storm won’t blow over in a few hours.”

“And the walkway won’t be clear in a day,” Din says with a sigh.

“What’s this?” Boba says, savoring the last drinks of Din’s caff. “Surviving what?”

“The live plants need to get up to the hydroponics section, Boba.”

His brow furrows; his mouth opens to ask what the problem is. Shuts his mouth as his tired brain catches up. Live plants-- that Din brought back from the Skywalker’s hideaway, like he always did when he visited his son, stored in carbonite pallets for transport.

He frowns, setting his mug down with the empty saucepan and Ygabba’s. “The dome’s too dangerous with the wind like this, and the path up the dome’s going to be thick with sand. Can’t they stay in carbonite?”

“Plants don’t get carbonite sickness,” she frets at him. “They just die. We have to thaw them in the next twenty-four hours if we’re going to save anything, but they can’t stay down here. They’ll die down here just the same, in the dry.”

“Is anyone on their feet? Not just of your crew, you could borrow from Zhosef or Mezza–”

“Not enough. I’d do it myself, but those catwalks--”

He wouldn’t let her if she tried. They’re precarious for people with perfect vision in a wind like this; they’ll sway without warning if the wind stirs things into the right frequency. He’s seen the aftermath of falls. Can picture too well the blank, empty eyes of Jabba’s slaves as they cleared away the crushed remains of one of their own.

“I’ll do it,” Din says quietly. “I’ll get my jetpack; it’ll be faster if I don’t have to take the lifts or the catwalks.” He lifts the knotted cape off his shoulders, offering it to Boba solemnly. The child inside doesn’t even stir, fast asleep again. “Boba– will you watch him?”

He’s punchy enough that the solemnity is amusing; something to enjoy and smooth over old memories. He smiles as he takes the birikad and loops it over his shoulder. “I will bear this burden.”

“You’re not funny,” Din says, his voice soft with relief.

“I’m the king. I’m hilarious.”

Din pulls him by the shoulders into arm’s reach, the child nestled between them for a second, and then turns away toward the stacked palettes. Boba watches him appreciatively; he cuts a pretty figure when not obscured by his cape. If he was fully rested he might want to do something about that later.

“Come on, little one.”

The child mumbles in his sleep and squirms to face his chest. Boba lays a hand on the little back, stabilizing him.

Off to see Mezza and make sure there’s not a slow leak poisoning them all.
There isn’t, at least according to Mezza, and he trusts the Ugnaught’s judgement above and beyond her sensing equipment.

Just a bad wind. Just a really shitty storm.

The trip up to the tower quarters is a climb through an angry hive of Irlings. Hard to say if the turbulent wind or the sand it’s strumming across the ditanium shielding is more responsible for the noise. Boba’s head is pounding by the first landing. Din’s room is a shield of relative quiet when he dips in to take the child’s unused hammock; it makes the short walk to his own rooms even harder to bear for the respite.

He only relaxes when the door to his own quarters is shut behind him, the high edge of the noise suddenly distant. The insulation is doing its work. The shutters still thump, irregularly, but it’s the drum of one immovable thing inside another. The wind isn’t prying them open.

He kicks the floor rug up against the door, toeing it up against the slide housing as a reinforcement against the noise, and has just enough energy to set up the child’s hammock beside the bed and place him in it.

His little eyes flicker; he looks as miserable as Boba feels.

“Rest for us both, little one,” he rasps, and the dark eyes fall shut again. He sags into bed, disengaging his chestplate closures but leaving it on, Din’s knotted cape still wrapped around his shoulders.

He’s parched. Should take a hydro-pack before he sleeps; hasn’t got the strength of will to clamber back up from the mattress for it. Staying limp and horizontal is too great a temptation; he shuts his eyes and feels himself drifting almost immediately, the immediacy of gravity lessening on him. His stomach swoops, not pleasantly, but he sleeps.

When he wakes it’s from a dream of water. It sucks at his thoughts and tries to pull him back like it pulled him down while he slept— deep, cruel red water, somewhere underground, rushing with battering force and dragging him further and further from the Palace, from Din and Fennec and any help. There is an infinite darkness above him, split only with a crack of light, too bright to look at and too far to reach even though he tries, and it’s shrinking and shrinking until there is only the roar of the water and darkness and the sea of red is pulling him deeper and deeper away–

Awareness is no relief; the feeling of loss haunts him as he surfaces from nightmare into a dehydration headache that feels like it’s anchored itself to him with spikes through the skull above his left eye. His stomach complains, unhappily empty except for the caff, eating itself up with acid.

He lies for a long time, trapped between nightmare and pain, his skin aching and burning with familiar acid, the sheets tangled around him like digestive membranes--

The child whimpers, reaching out of the hammock toward him. “Pofa,” he cries. “Pofa.”

“I’m up.” He sits, reaches out and cradles the little creature against his chest. “I’m here.”

Grogu clings to his cowl and pulls himself close, making sleepy sounds of distress.

“I know. Me too,” Boba tells him, shuddering with renewed exhaustion. “I know. I know.”

His closeness soothes the child; the cries slow and taper off to little sighs. He holds him to his chest and is soothed a little too.

At least he isn’t the only one miserable.

“All right,” he tells Grogu. “Back to work.”

No answer: the child is half asleep again, maybe fully asleep, but the weight and warmth of the little body is one real thing in an otherwise foggy, distant world.

He forces himself to his feet, braces against the shower of stars behind his left eye when his headache realizes he’s moved, and murmurs nonsense to the child until it passes. The birikad Din had knotted out of his cape seems secure-- he tugs a few times to check, then carefully slides Grogu inside to make his way to the refresher.

He doesn’t vomit when he gets there, despite the churn of stomach acid in his gut. Grabs a ration bar and a hydro-pack from the refresher storage cupboard and waits out the minutes after consuming them when it gets worse before it gets better. Eventually he relaxes out of the rigid position his body locked into, and feels alive enough to lean forward and let the refresher counter take some of his weight.

He strokes at Grogu’s back, checking; Din had said he was an empathetic little thing, but the child is still sleeping soundly. He nestled a little closer at the touch.

Boba’s skin feels tight, pulling down his back where he leans forward, around his eyes and down the lines of his face when he blinks, tugging at the scars. He knows better than to let himself dehydrate on Tatooine when he has the option otherwise, to go to sleep thirsty and reject the means to drink when it’s available. The wind has blown the sense out of him, as well as the moisture.

He looks up enough to meet his own gaze in the mirror. It’s easier, still, to go piece by piece when he looks at himself.

Circles under the eyes, dark and lined with a bruised, sallow green. Dry-looking skin, tight and tense around the mouth, flaky along the scars. Exhaustion puffiness to the cheeks, under the jaw. Dark eyes that look darker still against the bloodshot whites.

When he puts the pieces together, he knows the reflection he’s seeing isn’t a memory, isn’t his father, isn’t one of the other millions of pretenders with a version of his father’s face but not his soul. He sees himself. He is Boba Fett.

He is Boba Fett, and he has a headache.

Grogu stirs under his hand— more awake now, Boba can marvel at the way the child’s back tucks entirely into his palm, he’s such a small thing— and one of his big ears pokes out of Din’s cape where it’s hung over Boba’s shoulder.

He peers up, squinting blearily. “Pofa.”

“Here I am, little one. Are you hungry?”

The child blinks, considers– and his eyes start to droop closed again even as he mumbles agreement, until the wind slams the shutters with extra force. He flinches, then whimpers softly.

Boba’s headache throbs red behind his eyes.

He does up his chestplate closures. “I wouldn’t have picked a sandstorm to welcome you home with if I’d had the choice, Tiuja.” He rubs gently along one of the big ears. “Let’s get down to a lower level. Find your buir.”

There’s a wave of cries from outside– faint, muted by the distance and the walls and the wind, but he picks up the repeating pattern, confirmed a moment later by a series of vibration signals from his comm-link.

He covers Grogu’s ears before there’s the muffled thump of a land-based detonation outside, and keeps them covered until he counts out the second and third explosions. His headache echoes them angrily.

“Weapons test,” he tells Grogu, pulling his hands back. “That’s probably where we need to go.”

It is. They find Din under the arches of the western courtyard, his head bowed in quiet conversation with Mezza. The suns hang in the western sky and catch on the clouds of fine dust and sand in the air, making it look like the gusts of wind are painting the air with wild brushstrokes of colour and flame.

It’s later than Boba realized. He checks his chrono to make sure, and somehow he slept half the day away. No wonder the child is hungry.

“Boo!” Grogu says, and wiggles in the birikad when his father turns.

Din is covered in ruddy brown dust, just slivers and hints of the polished gleam of his armor peeking out to find the light, and there are three distinct furrows in the courtyard that look to account for most of it.

“Are you blowing up my palace, Mandalorian?” Boba asks, glad he put on his helmet before leaving his rooms this time, so the HUD can adjust for the spears of red-gold light that the glimpses of Din’s armor throw out as he approaches, and Boba can enjoy the view.

“Only a little,” Din says, stepping close to slide the cape and his son off Boba’s shoulder, tapping their helmets together lightly as he does. He settles the makeshift birikad back into position over his own shoulders, giving Grogu a dusty finger to grab. “For Mezza.”

“Eh? Szaa?” Grogu says, his curiosity clear even through the sleepy croak of his little voice.

“It is necessary,” Mezza says solemnly, holding up a holopad. “To test the seismometers. Hello, little one.”

“Szaa!”

“You can visit Mezza after you’ve had some soup,” Din says. “If she isn’t busy. You know about work.”

“Are they working?” Boba asks Mezza, who considers his question gravely.

“They will be soon,” she says. “I will make refinements, as will my workers. They are released now from the kitchens, and ready for this task. Thank you for your help, Mandalorian.”

“The hydroponics are finished,” Din explains, nodding politely to Mezza.

Din had found her originally, on the recommendation of his mechanic in Mos Eisley, when they’d needed someone able to sift through the Tatoo-rat’s nest of the sensor arrays and security systems and holo-infrastructure of the communications dome and surveillance equipment, and trustworthy enough to permit to do it. And he’d been the one to recruit her to stay on as their security technician after.

Mezza was a vital piece of their operation, and her knowledge and long lifetime of experience had proven invaluable more than once. She had given Boba her services and her discretion, in exchange for room and board and pay, and Boba had no doubt of the old Ugnaught’s word or her honour, and no doubt too of whom among their little crew had her love.

“I will have a pram fabricated for you by tomorrow, little one,” Mezza promises the child seriously. “And if your parent will permit it, I will provide to you a place to sleep and play for many hours.”

“That would be very kind,” Din says, just as seriously. “Thank you.” Boba can hear the strain of weariness rasping against his usual husky voice.

“But first,” Boba tells Grogu, “you were promised soup.” And together they steal Din back for the rest of day.

Grogu stays awake long enough to finish a bowl and a half of roasted jerba broth and meat; Boba watches while Din eats two servings himself, sliding over most of his own side plate of the herb salad Ygabba had put together, a rare indulgence even in Jabba’s day. It must have been the wind making it more bitter than usual, though, and he doesn’t mind watching his disappear into Din, bit by bit.

By the time the suns set, Grogu is fighting to stay awake again, and the storm still hasn’t landed. Boba watches it, a darker, screaming blur against the dark night sky, while Din tucks Grogu into his little hammock, arranging the scraps of blanket inside around his child in the way he says Grogu would normally do himself, until it met whatever metric of satisfaction the mite knew in his heart.

They listen to the faint snuffles of the child’s snores, barely there under the wail of the wind, and slowly strip off their armor and clothing until Din hands him back his own robe from Din’s armor locker and promptly takes a new one from the refresher for himself.

“I saw that,” Boba says dryly, and Din tips his head in the quick bob that would be a helmed wink.

“You were meant to.”

Boba lets Din pull him into bed after, dragging the heavy nightsheets up around them until they’re almost over their heads, and then lets himself be soothed by the sweetness of Din’s mouth and gentle hands until Din slips sideways into sleep.

He must follow, at least part way, because he surfaces blinking at the soft fall of Fennec’s footsteps when she slides into the bedroom a few hours later, the blinking red dot of the door lock disengaging enough light to show how her shoulders are slumped with heavy fatigue. He watches her stand where he had in the window, staring down the storm, until she feels his gaze and he holds open the covers.

She undresses to her undershirt and crawls in with worrying unsteadiness. She’s as bad as a tooka about hiding her pain and the shiver she can’t quite suppress when she slips into his arms is testament to how much the day has wrung out of her.

He curls his arms around her and settles her against his chest, running a hand down her strong back.

“Next time let’s take out a criminal syndicate on Naboo,” she says. It’s a new version of an old joke, something she used to hiss over whiskey when Jabba was on the throne and he hadn’t grown fully into his father’s armor. Next time I’m contracting out to criminals on Cerea.

“Not as nice as it looks. Neighbors would be intolerable,” he murmurs back, and strokes her spine slowly until she relaxes in his arms. Din stirs beside them, leaning over with a bleary, owlish look to tuck the covers around them both and kiss Fennec sleepily on her temple.

He wakes in the small hours with his joints aching. Fennec mutters to him as he slips out from between her and Din. He smooths a hand down her arm, tucking the blankets over them both before he goes. They’re not unused to his restless nights.

The child protests, sleepy– Boba hushes him, putting a hand on the hammock to rock it. A little clawed hand closes tight around his finger, but the grip slackens soon enough as the exhausted child gives in to sleep again.

His stomach feels sour and his muscles feel as if they’re too loose. His eyes burn. He wanders the Palace, looking for a quiet place and not finding it. It’s a little better down out of the tower, but there’s only so deep he can get before he starts delving into the old B’omarr dormitories and mine pits.

He finds himself in the throne room, torn between trying the kitchens– food might put him back down, though he hates how sluggish it’ll make him in the morning– or giving up and going back up to sit in his quarters. He’s spent the darkest hours of many nights on the couches in the front room, or on the bench of the bedroom window well.

He sags into the throne while he debates with himself, resting his eyes and trying to sit still enough that the renewed headache can’t find him.

He must fall asleep where he’s sat, because his thoughts unspiral into dreams that he has wandered out into the storm. The buffet of wind-blown sand feels soft and irrelevant, but the sound is still too much. He crouches low in the sand, digs in with his hands and feels it soften and give way. He sinks into it, slow, and it folds over him like a blanket that finally, finally stifles the wind.

He does not need to breathe here, and he can swim through the dark weight as easily as any Kaminoan training pool.

In the deep dark under the sand only footsteps and heartbeats are audible. He hears many bodies in the darkness, wandering and jostling aimless. He hears animals milling, the night shift dragging slow and wounded about their work.

The weight of the sand embraces him, and he stretches out, and out, and out….

Chapter Text

He wakes to an awkward cough and a concerned face.

“Sir?” one of his guards says, and he must be in the throne room, because the guard is standing hesitantly on the first step of the dias, peering up at him. Why is he in the throne room. “Sir?”

“Yes.” He coughs into a fist; his mouth tastes like dust and old metal, and his back aches as he straightens. “What is it?”

“Sorry to wake you, sir,” the guard says. The haze in Boba’s mind clears enough to remind him that this was Lliewel, and then of the guard shifts, and wasn’t Lliewel’s squad on the morning rotation this month? What time was it? “But the day shifts are starting, and we weren’t sure–”

Lliewel shoots a look to his shift partner. She stares back at him silently, but the pause is long enough for Boba to realizes that if Lliewel and Bhurra are on duty, that means dawn is approaching and the rest of the morning shifts will be reporting in soon too, if they haven’t started already, and he’s sitting in the throne room in nothing but his robe.

“I see,” he says, and draws his robe closed. His throat is so dry when he swallows that it threatens to crack open and pour out sand like a punctured sandbag. He coughs again. “Thank you.”

He pushes himself to his feet and his joints crackle. Did he sleep here overnight? He’s lucky he didn’t freeze in place. He nods as disinterestedly as he can manage. “Carry on with your duties.”

They stomp a pair of relieved salutes. His eyelid twitches as the reverberations run up through the stone dias and into his skull, but he strides down the steps and through the back corridor with all the confidence thirty years of bounty hunting and three years of rule have given him, and keeps his gaze from landing on the few figures in the hallways who might be wondering where his armor and clothes and boots are.

The wind still screams outside, and when the lift doors open to the tower it’s so loud he wonders for a moment if he’s hearing the sandstorm warning alarm instead because the damned thing has finally arrived.

He’s not so lucky.

The shutters are open when he steps into his bedroom. The line of Fennec’s back is long and straight and beautiful where she stands in the window well, dark against the dim glow of the early morning light. The second sun isn’t above the horizon yet, and the usual bright dawn greens of the sky are a faded brown, almost choked out with the sand in the air.

She’s focused on the storm, the lines of her face soft but her eyes hard when he stands beside her. Her gaze flicks to him; he recognizes the set of her mouth before it softens in surprise, the same tight line that he’s seen on the job since the first time they teamed up together.

“Boba–” he watches her eyes as her gaze tracks down his robe, his bare legs and feet. “Anything I should know about.”

He considers. “Lliewel and Bhurra may put in for hazard pay.”

She snorts. “This is Tatooine. It’s all hazard pay.”

She shoots him another look before turning back to the storm. Tatoo II is creeping up over the eastern ridge of the plateau between them and the Flats, bringing the day to Tatooine. The new light finds the darkness under her eyes, making it hard and sharp. She’s as tired as he is.

“Was it a bad one?” she asks the suns.

“I’ve had worse. You still thinking you can shoot that storm?”

“I can try.” Her smirk is playful, familiar and biting, but it doesn’t quite make it to her eyes.

“Where’s Djarin?”

“Caff.”

“A light in a dark galaxy.”

“Go put some clothes on.” The sly, teasing angle of her mouth warms him more than the rising suns. “It’s not fair. I don’t want to think of you lounging around while I’m hard at work peering into every corner of the sublevels.”

His feet are cold, but he waits an extra minute on principle. “I won’t be lounging.” He can’t afford to; not after sleeping through most of yesterday, for all the good that seems to have done. His headache lurks just beyond the tideline of his awareness. “Just comfortable.”

“Sounds like you already have been. In the throne room, no less.” Fennec softens the edge of it with a smirking– “I might put up with that thought. Still think you’d look cute lying up on the dias.”

He tsks at her, nose wrinkling to hide his fondness. “I’d never get the slime off.”

He’s pulling on his boots when Din returns, Grogu strapped to his chest and a tray of drinks and food in his hands. Today they match; fully armored, although Boba’s chosen his kama rather than his flightsuit. He tucks pleats of his kama behind his leather greaves and rises, going to the beroya.

“Boba,” Din says, setting the tray down on the room’s table and passing over first Boba’s mug then Fennec’s.

It had worried Boba, at first. In the beginning, everything Din hadn’t said was louder than what he did, until it had seemed like there might be nothing under the armor at all, except for the idea of a Mandalorian, some faded, passed-down story. Din’s quiet solicitude had aggravated him in its apparent excess, and the deference in the way he spoke had landed heavy with his grief. The formality in his words read like a judgement, like Boba was incapable in comparison, every exchange labeling him dar’manda until he felt it like tangible ailment.

He knows better now. It’s never been Boba that Din was leveling judgement against. And that formality, oddly enough, is Din feeling at home.

Din unwraps his son from his chest and props him gently in his normal seat at the table, pulling over the footrest to sit down beside him. “I found Lliewel hiding in the seating booths.” For as mildly as he says it, Din’s voice has a teasing edge as sharp as a nexu’s claws.

“Would have thought he was made of stronger stuff.”

“He received quite a shock. Bhurra’s drinking it off.”

“Thadda girl,” Fennec says, raising her caff mug.

Din takes off his helmet, and as playful as his voice was, his dark eyes are not.

“Easy, Beroya,” Boba says, reaching over to brush the underside of Din’s chin because he can’t brush away his worry. “It was just a bad night. I can’t send you to hunt down the wind.”

“I would,” Din swears.

He would. Between him and Fennec, it sounds like a story Boba should have heard around the heartfire with the Carkoon’s Skirt, old Tusken words casting long shadows in the flicking light, or like an ancient Mandalorian myth long-since repurposed into a drinking song. The lovers who killed the wind.

“I’ll settle for caff.” Boba folds into his own usual seat, holding up his mug with a nod. It smells as delicious as usual, dark and rich and sweet in the way Din knows he likes when he can get it. “And maybe running some extra drills for the new recruits. They’re too green. I don’t want their nerves making things worse when this damn storm finally lands and we have to hunker down.”

Din nods, sipping from his own mug. It’s caff this time; the nights have been too long for all of them. “I’ll wear them out.”

“Just leave me some alive enough to double up the watch rotations,” Fennec says, taking her seat and reaching over to spear a piece of liwi fruit from Boba’s plate. “I want the extra eyes on our weak spots. I don’t like not standing shift two days in a row.”

“That’s up to them,” Din says, rolling a kuvara lightly between his palms to loosen its skin.

He passes it to her and she cracks the bright red peel as easily as a Qiiluran local, quickly segmenting out the little pods of fruit inside. She pops one in her mouth, then another, and the juice stains her teeth and lips red until she takes another drink of caff.

Boba didn’t keep a warm place in his heart for Skywalker, but he’s grateful that the Jedi’s apparently let half the land around that school of his be taken over by native and imported edible flora, and willing to let Din haul away as much as he can fit in his ship each time he visits his son. Fruits aren’t unknown on Tatooine, but they can be hard to come by, depending on season and access, and the variety is limited.

He finds it repetitive, and the weeks without long– and his brush with death in the desert hadn’t left him with the dietary options of fruit, well-cooked vegetables and soft grains, or nutripacks taken through the input port.

Din holds a slice of meiloorun under his child’s tiny nose, his worry and love showing in equal measure when the little one slowly blinks awake, sniffing, before his small hands shoot up almost faster than Boba can see to snatch the fruit from his father’s fingers and shove it in his mouth.

“I thought that might do the trick.” Din’s tone is teasing, but he keeps one hand behind his child’s head, gently stroking. “We almost didn’t get any meilooruns back here– they kept going missing from the storage locker at the school. Even with the door locked.”

“But how could that have happened,” Boba says, eating his zucca bacon. “What an unsolvable mystery.”

“Pofa! Ba-bah, Noo-ah!” Grogu says with a croaky chortle

“Yes, ba’vodu Boba is very funny,” Din agrees. “Ori’nuhla.”

“But I’m the favorite, right?” Fennec says, reaching over to hand the child a slice of meiloorun almost as large as one of his ears.

“Ah!”

“Don’t eat that all at once,” Din says, while Grogu tries to do just that. “N’iviinyc, ad’ika. Go slow.”

Grogu burbles, reaching over to pat his father’s face with a sticky hand, leaving a smear of meiloorun juice on Din’s cheek. Din sighs.

The wind gusts, shrieking through the ruts and hollows of the plateau to rattle their breakfast dishes.

Boba’s headache awakens with a roar, throwing stars across his vision, as red as Fennec’s mouth. His stomach roils on the sweet caff and bacon fat.

Grogu moans, tucking in on himself on his seat until he seems half his size. He lets the meiloorun rind fall from his little fingers. Din puts it on the tray quietly and pulls his son onto his lap, rubbing gently behind his ears.

'Big,' the child signs, little hand held tight. 'Heavy.'

“I won’t miss that today,” Fennec says dourly. She presses her fingers below her ears and drops her jaw wide, giving her head a shake. She tips her head back to drain the rest of her caff, and Din slides over two insulmugs.

He taps the lid of one. “This is Jora’s.”

“Thanks, Djarin. I’ll be sure to tell her I made it.”

“She won’t believe you,” Din says.

“I can always try.” She grabs two more kuvaras and slides them into a carrypack, hooks her helmet to it, and raises the insulmugs in a farewell salute. “Comm me if the warning beacons go off. We might be too far down to hear them.”

She pauses at the door. “Or if that ore crawler comes back to cave us in. I could do with shooting something.”

“You’d hear that no matter where you are,” Boba promises grimly.

The smirk she gives him is straight out of his childhood. “I’ll hold you to that, Boba Fett.”

Dorai is waiting for him when he arrives at his workroom, hands behind her back and shoulders and lekku relaxed, her head angled down in a way that says she could stand there forever.

He doesn’t make her. “Dorai.”

“Fett.” She straightens. Fatigue is clear on her face but her lekku draw up, alert. “Do you have time.”

“The blurrgs.”

“‘Ta-- yes. The blurrgs.”

He gestures to his workroom door, tapping open the locking system to let them in. It’s genetic, in part, linked to him-- and isn’t that a joke, to himself and four million others-- and Djarin and Shand, and sequenced to a revolving code in their respective armor or kit, but Dorai shakes her head, lekku signing the negative before the locks have fully disengaged.

“You wanted to brief me,” he reminds her.

She frowns. “Yesterday, yes. It is more, today. Will you come to the pens?”

There is little he wants to do less than to go to the pens. He nods, and follows her out.

The big circulation fans keep the beast pens from being an oven, but only just. It keeps the smell tolerable, but not good; the banthas have to be closest to the outlet and the smell permeates the stone. Even with the last of the night’s chill still clinging to the foundation the rising heat is rich with the presence of livestock.

Dorai leads him downwind in the tunnel of kennels and pens to the big carved out enclosure where the blurrgs are milling about, occasionally sniffing the air and nosing in the big food trough for any missed scraps. She frowns in at them, lekku twining behind her neck in a half-conscious fidget.

“They’re getting restless. I noticed yesterday. This morning it is worse.” She points with her hand, a slow tipping motion that won’t agitate the beasts, and Boba follows the line of it to where the enclosure fence meets the carved stone wall. There are scuffs along the wall and a few bits of splintered wood ground into the dirt. He switches on the targeting focus in his HUD, and, up close, can see the signs of a fresh repair job on the fence. “It is months early, but sometimes a new environment will drive the mating urge. If one of the new girls thinks it is the mating season, the others will follow.”

“Could it be something else? How sensitive are they to vibration? The detonations yesterday might have set them off… or if the Mining Collective’s trying to extend tunnels onto our land….”

“It could be many things, but I need to separate them to be sure. The males from the females. I need a construction delegation to put in the partition. It must be strong, or they will break it down.”

So that’s what this is about. “Does it have to be now? We don’t have enough hands for cleaning duty as it is.”

The Twi’lek shrugs philosophically. “We could slaughter the males, or try to sell them.”

“And if we don’t? How many babies are we looking at?”

“Perhaps half a dozen for every mated female, if all the eggs are intact.” She looks through the bars, eyes tracing the dimensions of the pen. “Even with the males all eaten, there would not possibly be food for so many growing foals.”

As if aware it’s being talked about, one of the beasts cranes up and sniffs the air, grunting urgently. The others stir uneasily, crowding against one another. A big one-- female, he thinks-- pushes at another one for space by the food trough. The resulting squabble happens like an RPC crash; big weights at low speed, more funny than frightening.

He can feel the headache stirring up behind his left eye again. Of course it couldn’t be easy. Of course nothing was going to go smoothly. Of course they’d only traded external attacks for internal crises.

“...I’ll ask Zhosef who they can spare from the laborers. Next convoy, Oro can go into town to see if anyone’s looking for draft animals, in case the females decide to push the schedule.”

“I hope Zhosef has someone,” Dorai says, nose wrinkling delicately, more offended at Oro’s involvement than the consuming reek of the animals.

“Don’t count the boy out. He’s an idiot, but that silver tongue does its job.”

“Remind him he’s selling animals, not music discs,” she scoffs. “Can’t you send Shroud?”

“Shroud’s too useful here. I’m not losing him to some trigger-happy homesteader in Mos Espa.” Or some trigger-happy rival at that. Shroud gives nothing of his history, not even his name. Boba doesn’t know if he has bad blood with any of the tribes in the area.

No, Oro’s a safer salesman. As long as he remembers what he’s selling.

The walk from the beast pens to the main engineering power hub, up two elevators and across most of the length of the palace, feels like a forced march in a low-ox environment. He collects himself outside, letting the weight of his armor settle his bones back together.

The door hisses open, and he steps into the dimmed room.

Mezza is ensconced in the middle of the control panels, but she’s shifted her big console chair to one side to make space for a little pod floating on anti-grav.

“Is the child--”

Mezza raises a hand, one finger up to silence him, without looking up. “He is sleeping. Lower your voice,” she says in a low rasp.

He reminds himself that it’s better to have extreme competence than extreme deference in a crew. The two prior masters of the palace are proof of it. Still, he clears his throat and waits until the Ugnaught lifts her head and acknowledges him with a shade of apology.

“What do you have for me?”

Mezza’s porcine face wrinkles. “As you know, we installed the seismometers yesterday. It took the work of many hands, but they are now functional.”

“Good.”

“It is not,” she proclaims, presenting the information like a religious scripture. “They have found something.”

“Mining Guild?”

“Too small. Too quiet.” She snorts to herself and starts to shuffle readings up onto the screen, window on window opening with color-mapped grids that mean nothing, as yet, to him. “See.”

“What am I looking at?”

“Disturbances.” She fiddles with the display, turning it into a slightly more readable radar display. “Small. But fast. Here, very close to the old mines. Here, near the living quarters. In the walls near the beast pens.”

“Is that all?” He scoffs. “There’ve been sandworms here forever.”

Her beady eyes always look judgmental, but he thinks this time that they’re moreso than usual. “This is bigger than a sandworm. Not longer, but more massive. It’s big enough to be a threat even to fast, healthy people.”

“Not to us. These rock walls are solid. Worms only hunt in sand; it couldn’t break through rock if they tried.”

“You are sure that the integrity is so good? You think there aren’t any holes it could slide through? You are sure there is only one?”

“If there are holes, we’ll seal them. Fortuna had half the palace locked down anyway; we’ll shut a few more blast doors and make sure anyone moving outside the common areas goes armed. If we see signs of an infestation, we’ll take care of it.”

“If you think so,” Mezza says, skepticism thick in her voice. “You are warned.”

“Yes, thank you.”

He holds the images of the seismometer logs in his mind and their holo-record in his helmet’s datastorage as he makes the walk from the power hub to his workroom. Gravity pulls at him, at his aching head and tired thoughts, making him drag them like an anchor, scraping up a trail of chipped stone and dust behind him.

He sits down heavily in his seat when he gets there. After a moment, he signals Fennec’s comm-frequency.

“Shand,” she says.

“Shand,” he echoes, and smiles at her muted, familiar snort. In the background, he can hear another voice, indistinct, higher than Fennec’s. Jora. “I spoke with Mezza– she has the seismometers running. They tracked something in the place last night.”

“What kind of something?”

“Not clear. Smaller than an ore crawler. Fast. Maybe a bulkier species of sandworm. Nothing we can’t handle. But it was over by the old mines for a while. Look for any soft patches where something could burrow through. And keep an eye out down there.”

“Copy that.”

“Anything worth reporting so far?”

“Two access tunnels I didn’t know about. One’s caved in, one’s blocked off at this end– with a door. Nasty piece of work. Not sure about the other end, but there were some dead Jawas inside. Mostly bone. And a couple rooms to move to the top of Parnel’s list. We might like what we find, but I’m not going in there until it’s cleared. I’ll send you the locations.”

“Mostly bone like they were picked clean, or mostly bone like they died years ago?”

“Died years ago. There was still some skin. I’ll get Zhosef to send some of their crew to extract them and take them to H2 to verify. Parnel can collapse the tunnel after.” Jora says something Fennec’s comm doesn’t pick up, but he can hear her low laughter, and Fennec murmur something in response, muffled but pleased and happy sounding.

‘It’s nothing,’ he thinks. ‘A chance meeting a few years back,’ he thinks. And after secondmeal, he’ll go chop wood on Bespin. He’ll get the story out of Fennec one day.

“Taking charge again, I see,” he says. He hopes she can hear the tease in his voice; he can’t, behind the stress headache that's starting to unspool at her report. If Fennec hadn’t known about those tunnels, there’s a good chance he hadn’t either. How many secrets is he unknowingly on top of? “Good work, you two.”

“Locations incoming; I’ll comm back in three hours with anything new.”

“Keep your eyes open,” he says, and disconnects.

He loses the rest of the morning to work, and then most of the day following, marked by successive three hour check-ins from Fennec. Payday is in two cycles, and the shift logs trickle in to be reviewed and signed off. He leaves the verified stack for Shroud’s final check, and when the Tusken arrives, sends him off with both the logs and instructions to tell Oro to report to Dorai for instructions for a possible job the next morning.

The head of the Mos Espa spaceport authority sends a communication request late into the afternoon. They’re clothed in more layers of drab-colored cloth than usual, only their eyes, the tops of their ears and their headgear peeking out of their wrappings. It’s difficult to tell in the hologram blues, but Boba thinks they look pale. Sullustan hearing being what it is, he doesn’t want to imagine what the wind sounds like to them.

“Portmaster Miunb,” he says.

“Honorable Boba Fett.” They nod. A little too deep. A little too long.

He keeps his body relaxed, but his gaze sharpens behind his helmet. He waits.

They clear their throat and raise their hands under their wrappings into a beseeching press. “I have had news from the Mos Eisley spaceport. I understand from Portmaster Dumana that she has sent a similar missive to your honorable estate. However the communications relay is quite strained, and the missive I received is of very poor quality. I cannot say whether yours will have survived transmission.”

They look up hopefully. Boba waits.

“In her message, Portmaster Dumana informed me that the Mos Eisley spaceport has been forced to close for the time being. The storm.”

The storm. It says it all.

“I see,” Boba says.

“It is worse there, now heading up to us both, but slow moving. Much larger than our normal storms. Portmaster Dumana was unsure of when it would be safe to reopen.”

“And you’re passing along her message?”

Miunb clears their throat again, dips their chin over their hands, still pressed together under their wrappings. “Indeed, sir. I wished to ensure you were aware of the circumstances, Lord Fett. The port authorities value the great contribution you make to the economic and spaceway traffic.”

Boba waits. He has sat through far more posturing than this, but his patience for it today is as thin and strained and as his temper– worn away by the wind.

Portmaster Miunb’s holo-image flickers, wavers and breaks. They break off– and start again, speaking quickly. “I see our connection is becoming unstable. The storm. I shall be expedient–”

“Please do.”

“--I wished to personally assure you that the Mos Espa spaceport will do its utmost to ensure your space traffic is unaffected by the temporary closure of the Mos Eisley port, and that it remains prioritized for hangar, departure and arrival allocation. We are, of course, only one spaceport and do not have the facilities of two– but anticipating that your Mos Eisley traffic may be rerouted to our port, I simply confirm our commitment to facilitating the best available solution to your needs.”

There it was. Miunb was pleading for leniency, terrified that their port would be inundated with every incoming and outgoing spacecraft on Boba’s docket.

“I apologize sincerely for any delays to your scheduled shipments on account of the storm– given your long history with our shared planet, I am sure you understand the particular challenges. In the event that we too are forced to close, should communication relays fail or the atmosphere become unsafe for traffic, we shall inform you at once, if we are able, and make every effort to recover any accumulated– ah,” they clear their throat again, forcing a poor chuckle out of it. “Any dune delays, as we say here–”

“Thank you for your assurances, Portmaster,” Boba says. Miunb’s mouth closes sharply. The degrading frequency replays the motion in a wavering loop. “My agents will coordinate with yours. Now I’m sure your time is in high demand. Good day.”

He cuts the frequency, unless the storm’s atmospheric interference beats him to it, and the barely-there flicker of Miunb’s holo-image vanishes.

He leans back in his seat, pulling off his gloves and helmet to press against the hard knot of pressure forming between his eyes, rolling it like a stone in a gizzard until his vision is streaked with red light.

He sighs and taps Mezza’s voice-comm frequency on his vambrace. As obscured as Miunb’s appeal for clemency was, the Portmaster’s information is valuable, and the sooner it’s in Mezza’s, Zhosef’s and Shroud’s hands, the sooner the logistics will be put in play.

Mezza takes the news solemnly, her tone steady as she warns that the day is getting long and any shipments delayed today may not be rerouted to Mos Espa before tomorrow, but he can hear her tapping furiously at her keypads when they disconnect.

The somber old Ugnaught is right about one thing– although, he admits to himself wryly, she’s most likely right about it all. The day is getting long. And he has spent too much of it sitting; there’s an absent hunger growing under the discontent in his belly, and his hips feel achy and loose, like they’ve slid too far forward.

He goes to put his gloves back on, and stares, confused, at the red on his fingertips.

It’s blood. Wet. Fresh.

He looks around, stupidly. Like he might have missed a pool of blood somewhere, or something injured and bleeding out. Then he registers the sting in his leg, and the muted sensation of something damp, and looks down at the furrow he’s scratched up the length of his thigh.

It’s hard to make out under the smeared blood at first. But there are angry red lines in the meat, not just the wound he’s worried until the skin is tattered but stinging scratches around it, welts risen enough to show through the seeping blood.

Kriff. He hasn’t done something like this– because his skin hasn’t bothered him like this– in years. Not since the sarlacc wounds and acid burns had finally, finally healed over. The scars haven’t even itched that badly after he was able to spend some time in bacta. It must be the wind, blowing away every whisper of moisture in the already parched air and cracked ground, taking from the living what it can’t get from the land.

He wipes his hand clean on his kama and readjusts the folds to cover his leg, grimacing when the cloth catches and tugs on the shredded bits of skin. He revises his half-formed plans. A late secondmeal can wait; he isn’t hungry anymore. This karking storm.

He finds H2 where he expected; bustling around her clinic in the way that instantly confirms for anyone watching that her med-programming was built on a protocol-droid base. Whether any of her former pediatric patients took the intended comfort from the mannerisms they may or may not have recognized from their tutor or minder-droids wasn’t something Boba could confirm, but from the lecture he bears while she prepares the wound cream, he finds the idea hard to believe.

He leaves H2 with the tub of wound cream, a second, large tub of thick, antioxidant cream for the rest of his dry skin, and a roll of soft bandages tucked into his belt-pouches, all handed over with firm instruction to avoid sonics, fine grained particles, and unsanitary conditions. He hadn’t pointed out the futility of that advice on Tatooine. Whoever programmed the old med-droid hadn’t bothered with irony.

The med-clinic is close to the training arena, and he finds himself there without thought, following the rhythmic thumps and impacts of in-time drills until he’s standing on the sidelines inside the entrance. The squads of guards slumped on the side benches and ground nearest him stumble to their feet when they realize he’s arrived, first the closest, then the group beside them in an uneven wave. Across the training grounds, a few guards on that side notice and scramble up as well, pulling their squadmates up with them, and the wave repeats.

He nods, watching them all behind his helmet. They’re a mix of the newest recruits and the more seasoned, and they all look gratifyingly worn out. After a moment, he waves them down, and they fidget back into slightly-less slumped posture than before, gathering and straightening out their kits and trying to look attentive.

On the grounds themselves, the training mats have been stacked at one end, and Din is running two squads through close-range club exercises, Grogu strapped to his chest behind a thick layer of quilted fabric and leather.

“At’tsi!” Din says, and the guards step forward as one, their heavy boots hitting the dirt-packed ground in unison. The reverberations of it ring in Boba’s bones.

“Ruu’staab, yust’payt!” The guards stomp their right feet in place, then stride forward onto their left. Boba can feel each step in his chest, echoing around in his ribcage.

“Laam’nyn, ar’udul!” The guards swing their clubs up sharply from their right sides, using the same movement to raise their left arms to guard their necks and faces.

“At’nor!” The guards step back. “Ke tug’yc.”

Boba breathes into the feeling of it, his bones humming; he closes his eyes and tracks the squads as they repeat the exercise through the impact of their feet on the ground.

Then, footfalls that aren’t part of the drill; off-time, softer, approaching. He opens his eyes and nods to Din. “Beroya. How are my guards?”

“Exhausted,” Din says. “As requested.”

“Not too rusty after weeks without their captain?”

“I’m not their captain,” Din says, as calmly as he’s said it everytime. “That’s Shand.” Who denies it just as firmly.

“As you wish, buir’jurur,” he teases. Din goes still in startlement, and a husky laugh escapes through his vocoder. Boba’s as proud as he was when he put that together in the first place, leaning into his Mandalorian heritage to slap together ‘parent’ and ba’jurur, instructor.

“Mn?” Grogu mumbles, twisting in his carrier until he can blink out at Boba. “Pofa!”

“Here I am, Tiuja.”

“Here he is,” Din agrees dryly, reaching into the carrier to pull Grogu out and hand him to Boba. “I think your ba’vodu just called me a mother hen.”

“If the buy'ce fits,” Boba says, making no effort to hide how pleased he is with himself.

“Ba-bah,” Grogu says, and trills sleepily in his arms.

The layer of warmth settles over Boba’s shoulders like a borrowed sweater; he hadn’t realized it was gone until it was back. He looks down at the child questioningly, but the little mite just snuggles in. Maybe that was just the way the child felt, a sign of his young age and incomplete training in the Force.

“Have you been helping your buir whip my guards into shape?”

“Yaa,” Grogu nods, yawning wide– and then startles, sitting upright when his stomach growls.

“Getting hungry? Me too,” Boba tells him. “In fact, I’m here to steal you and your buir away for eveningmeal.”

“Yes,” Din says, and walks away. “Gev!”

The guards on the floor stop as one, the last hard stomp of their feet spilling red dots across Boba’s vision. He blinks to clear them, and bounces Grogu when he coos. “Did you sleep all day, little one?”

“Weh,” Grogu says, signs 'Yes. Big,' and yawns again, resting heavy against him.

He can hear Din speaking softly to the guards, praising efforts and improvement and dismissing all the squads to cool down and clean up before the evening rotations begin.

As the group from the floor approaches the sidelines, a hushed conversation grows loud enough that Boba can’t ignore it, and he turns his helmet to stare impassively at the cluster of guards coming towards him. Lliewel sees him looking and flushes redder than Din’s drill had already left him, ducking his head to hurriedly side-step over to the far end of his squad.

“He’ll get over it,” Boba says at Din’s pointedly tipped helmet. “Bhurra has.”

Bhurra’s wiping the sweat out of her helmet with a set face, determinedly talking to another member of their squad instead of risking eye contact.

“You certainly made an impression,” Din says, falling in step beside Boba to walk to the galley. “Gossip says now they all know why Shand calls them the Krayt’s Claw.”

Fennec only calls the guards that to torment him, frankly. But the idea that it’s because of a draconian endowment instead of because he was an idiot when he was thirteen is a delightful surprise, and Boba laughs out loud.

“Well that’s going to make it awkward when the Tuskens call you Dragon-killer.”

“Not in front of the kid,” Din says, with a catch in his voice that Boba can translate into a handsome flush under the helmet.

“At least this dragon doesn’t eat you. In fact, it’s the other way--”

“Boba!” Din shoulders him, but there’s a grin in his voice and a shy tip to his helmet.

It buoys him up all the way to the galley.

Grogu stays awake through eveningmeal, sipping two bowls of broth to his father’s visible relief, but dozes while they walk the route in the deeper sublevels that the seismometers logged the night before. He stirs awake when they cross paths with Fennec and Jora near the old B’omarr mines, but curls up and sleeps so deeply after that he doesn’t stir for hours, not even when the wind gusts so hard one of the speeders in the docking bay comes loose of its mooring and slams into the neighbouring stall.

He finally blinks awake when Boba and Din begin to wind down for the night, perking up through Boba’s dutiful read and re-read of what is apparently one of the child’s favorite books, but afterwards falls back asleep in his father’s arms mid-clothbath.

Din sighs as he tucks his son into his hammock, fussing with his little blankets. “I’m going to comm Luke,” he says, the words heavy with worry. “This isn’t just travel-lag. He should be over it by now, not worse.”

“What can the Jedi tell you that H2 can’t?” Boba says, hanging his chestplate in his armor locker. He can hear the dourness in his own tone and grimaces. His stomach acid churns on the last of his supper.

Din sighs again; Boba unclasps his vambraces, and resolutely doesn’t look over, not even when he can feel the weight of Din’s worried gaze on his back. A moment later, a warm chest presses up behind him, then a mouth and a tickling moustache brush against the back of his head, and Din’s quick fingers unlatch his backplate.

“The only other times I’ve seen Grogu sleep this much was after he overused his powers.” He hangs Boba’s backplate from its hooks, then steps into Boba’s arms. “He hasn’t done anything like that here– I haven’t seen him do anything,” he corrects. “But I can’t ignore the possibility that this is Jedi.”

It’s hard to be cross holding Din Djarin. Even about the Jedi.

“Jedi osik,” Boba grumbles, half by rote, and then presses his forehead to Din’s. “From what you’ve said, Skywalker won’t have a clue anyway,” he adds, and can’t suppress the little crack of fear the off-hand slight opens in his heart. Trust Skywalker to actually be so useless.

“Luke is doing his best,” Din says. “The Empire left very little of the Jedi to help teach him.” He pauses, tightening his grip on Boba’s hips before letting go. “But I hope they left something about this. I’ll message him from my room.”

“Use the front room,” Boba says, pulling back. “I need to wash up before bed anyway.”

His kama’s stuck to the blood on his thigh, and he reopens the wound when he undresses in the fresher. He dabs the mess with antiseptic wash and a dry-clean packcloth, then presses a thick layer of wound cream to the tattered skin and still-red welts, and takes the time to rub the dry skin cream into all of the rest of himself that he can reach.

Fennec comms when he’s struggling to get the center of his back. The sublevel recon is finished, she says, but they’re short hands for watch if she wants to keep the guards on doubles with enough hours of rest in between shifts to also keep them functional, which she does.

She’ll stand one of the shifts herself, taking the night in a sentry tower. “Someone has to keep you boys safe,” she says, teasing in the way that means she’s being dangerously sincere. The exhaustion’s clear in her voice.

He says, “Watch yourself up there, Shand. No point in doing the Mining Guild’s job for them,” instead of anything unforgivable like: ‘I need to keep you safe too,’ or ‘Please come back,’ or ‘I don’t want to be alone.’

“Ha-– not at the rates they pay. See you in the morning, Boba Fett,” she says, and disconnects.

He rubs the cream into his arms harder than he should and pays for it, hissing at the thin layer of skin it peels from his scars. Then he puts it on his face, and around his neck, and down his chest until he’s breathing hard and rubbed raw.

The smell of the cream is familiar, as is the greasy texture. He’s spent more of the past decade with something like it on him than not. He sits on the side of the tub to let it dry, eyes shut while his headache throbs, as distant and ever-present as his heartbeat.

The wind screams in the desert wastes. He doesn’t give in to the urge to scream back, but bites his lower lip bloody fighting it.

He puts some wound cream on that too.

Din is still in the front room when he goes to bed. He leaves the dry skin cream on the bedside table and falls asleep to the sound of the wind and the murmuring conversation through the closed door, Skywalker’s high, irritating chatter and Din’s low, husky voice a counter-beat of irritation and succor.

His dreams are full of the ever-shifting dark, the rasp of sand scraping against stone, against skin and bone, and a red ache in his belly that drives him deeper and farther until he’s roaming the memory of the palace and the day like his own ghost.

Something like the rhythm of the guards’ drills catches the edge of his hearing. Repeating, pacing, heavy steps, and they pull him towards the surface of his thoughts, the sand shifting around him, parting like mist while he goes up and up until he breaks–

-–there’s moonlight and the wind, screaming—

He fills himself with it, drowns it in the sand, and lets it drag him back down into the quiet deep to rest.

Chapter Text

His mouth is dry when he wakes, the bed too wide and empty around him but too confining. He grabs for the pot of skin cream H2 gave him and slaps it on his face, his chest, hissing in pain as the ointment seeps through cracked skin. His scars are dry and angry, the skin around them tight.

His comm chimes and he swears viciously at it, activating it with one hand as he uselessly rubs salve with the other as if a little grease and active antioxidant will undo the pressure and ease the crushing headache.

“Fett,” he snaps.

“Sir,” Dorai says, voice somber. “You are needed at the beast pens.”

The beast pens are in chaos when he arrives-- he can hear the noise along the stone tunnel, but when the door slides open that noise becomes a wave that breaks over him, pounds at him even through his helmet’s filters.

He can make out the low of upset banthas, and the bugling and the smell of uneasy eopie. The crowing is probably the keedees, but he doesn’t know what’s making that irregular scream.

“They been like this all morning?” he demands.

“What?!” Dorai yells back, raising a hand to lift one of the protective mufflers away from her ears and then thinking better of it.

Kriff this. He jerks his head toward the door he came in through; they won’t be able to have a conversation here.

Dorai nods grimly; he waits at the door for her, but just as she draws near, the animals go quiet, all at once. A lone keedee cackles to itself and then stops, shamed into silence.

He cautiously adjusts his audial filters. Dorai shifts her mufflers down to her neck.

“...this usual?” His voice rasps from his earlier shout.

She shakes her head. “No. This has been all morning. Not before. I don’t know what will set them off again, enjoy this while it lasts.”

“That what you wanted to see me about?”

“No.” She tips her head toward one of the big cages-- the blurrgs’ stall.

There’s two fewer than there were yesterday, and lest anyone wonder how that happened, the floor is stained with rusty-red stripes dried to a powder.

“Fuck me,” he sighs. “I thought we had more time.”

“And I,” Dorai mutters. “The girls must have been angry. They do not usually share a meal but none of them are glutted.”

“What does it mean?”

“Good news, no eggs. Bad news… the rest of the males must go, now. We will not be that lucky again.”

The sandstorm is more visible this morning; what was a blotch on the horizon is now a looming mass, crawling westward over the Dune Sea.

Boba watches it from one of the observation ports with an insulmug of Din’s caff, and almost feels a hint of guilt at approaching the least useful member of his staff to go out in it. Almost.

But Oro’s hardy as a dune mite, and just as much of a pest. Easy to forget with his manicured nails and soft-rumble musical tastes, but he’s lived off the back of a speeder bike with his partner for years, years that should have sandblasted the youthful softness off him and haven’t.

Which is to say that when he responds to Boba’s summons, he comes dressed so sensibly that Boba almost doesn’t recognize him. Only his face is still bare, and there are goggles pushed up over his forehead and a layered gaiter scrunched around his neck that will see to that when he gets outside.

“Hi, Mister Fett! You wanted to see me?”

‘Mister Fett.’ It’s a joke only Fennec should be able to get away with; it’s worse that Oro apparently means it. Boba doesn’t have the energy to growl at him about it. He waves vaguely at his unusually layered appearance. “Dorai’s told you what’s up?”

“I’m taking the blurggs to Mos Espa,” he agrees. “To sell the males. And no music discs.”

“Dorai said?”

“Yeah… but if it’s not officially in the orders--”

“It is,” Boba says shortly before hope can take hold in the musician. “No discs. Chase your career when you’re not on the clock.”

“Yessir.” Oro throws off a salute with his eyes twinkling.

“Get back if you can. If you have to shelter in town, comm back.” He tosses the boy one of the more powerful comm relays. “Lose that and it’s coming out of your skin.”

Oro doesn’t seem appropriately cowed. Probably lacks the self-awareness to be. “Okay! Shroud says the weather should hold through tomorrow. I’ll be fine.”

He probably will, the Force favoring the foolish as it seems to do.

“Get, then, before it’s already tomorrow. Don’t take any stupid risks.”

Oro tosses off another bright, sparkling salute like he’s posing for a publicity holo and then swirls out as soon as Boba flicks his finger at him.

He resolves not to worry about the little idiot– or even the effect that little idiot’s death would have on a damn good purser, but he does return to the observation port when Dorai reports his departure.

One of the big blurgg females pushes out into the storm undaunted, the males clustered up behind her. On her back, hunched almost flat, is a slim, covered figure, riding well despite the gusts that throw up the sand at them. They’re out of sight in almost no time.

He waits for the storm to plunge onto them or break up, but it would seem that Shroud is right, as he usually is about the desert. It just looms on the horizon, not moving but growing, like a carpet of algae picking its way up a damp surface. Not that many on Tatooine would understand the comparison.

Mezza starts running a tracker feed in her office by mid-morning, pieced together out of what imagery can be gleaned from various planetside sensors and the spaceports’ satellites and the ever-degrading frequencies of all the communication-relays, and it seems like everyone with half an excuse to be in the engineering office gravitates up to the main power hub. It’s something to gossip about, apparently.

Making the best out of the misery really is the Tatooine pastime.

Have you ever seen one this big?

Fennec smirked the first couple times she heard it, the expression young on a face that’s flat and tired. But the novelty wore off quickly under the constant awareness that the smudge on the horizon is spreading toward them. He finds himself in Mezza’s office like the rest of them, watching the large red blur on the display window, spreading infinitesimally slowly, like a bloodstain.

The third time Zhosef appears– quickly launching into a discussion of the delayed cargo receipt due to the over-logged spaceport capacity when they see Boba’s glare– Boba takes the seismometer logs from the night before and stalks away, scattering lurking dayworkers and guards and even a few kitchen apprentices with no excuse to be in the power hub corridor at all in his wake.

He’s not surprised at the readout of captured movement; whatever this thing is, worm or other burrowing Tatoo-vermin, it’s active at night, roaming the perimeter of the Palace, the faintest captures during the hours it went deep below the farthest sublayer Parnel’s cleared for safe entrance.

He’s half expecting the concentration of movement under the animal pens, the bright, close-to-surface sprays of cresting red and orange vibration that stains the log in the early morning hours. No wonder the beasts were screaming. The threat alone was probably enough to set off the female blurrgs’ season early.

He sends a short text-comm to Mezza reminding her to confirm what out of Jora’s report can be acted upon, and when.

The storm still hasn’t reached them come midmeal, but it throws off border gusts that rattle through the rocky canyons and catch vehicles and people off-guard. There’s an ever-growing dent in the docking bay wall from too-slow tie-downs, and even the keedees have given in to the inevitable and stopped crowing.

There’s bets on how long it will last– it should blow apart at this size, it’s too big to hold– but if it doesn’t– if, if, when–

He catches one old cook telling tales of the million-year storms on Wynkahthu, and orders him back to the kitchens with enough venom that Ygabba leaves her post during eveningmeal prep to bring him a carafe of caff and a small jerba-pie, still warm. He drinks the caff and gives the pie to Grogu; he’s too nauseous to eat, feeling bloated and his head pounding.

In Mos Espa they’ve already had to cancel two circuit podraces, which is a thing that Din knows because he enjoys them for reasons Boba cannot fathom, and Boonta Eve is less than two months away. If the sand shifts enough, the course might be unrecognizable. Boba keeps his comm on just to hear him and Fennec bicker over their private relay while they split watch rotations with the stretched roster of guards– she seems to think it might make the race interesting for the first time in history, and Din disagrees, arguing the finer points of skill and tradition.

They’re soothing; the rest of the chatter around him is less so.

Noise. It’s all just noise. The only one who seems as unamused by it as Boba is Shroud himself. The Tusken spends the evening with the wind for company, watching the storm and the western passes in turn as if he can judge before Mezza’s equipment how much time his partner has to return.

Oro’s not back by evening, nor when the suns set, the usual pinks and oranges of the vanishing day red and sickly brown instead in the sky too choked with sand. Boba watches Din go to Shroud, still dusty with the remains of his last shift up in the sentry tower–- dangerous in the wind, but it hasn’t stopped Din or Fennec from standing watch in the tallest one.

His hands and gestures are gentle in the glow of Shroud’s small covered fire, movements soft and close to his body to keep the conversation private as he speaks simple reassurance and reminders. That Oro knows what’s doing and better than to risk the desert at night, that the blurgg he’s riding will know its way home no matter what the sands do, that watching the night won’t make it pass faster.

Shroud shakes his head, goggles fixed on the horizon. They shine red with the reflected glow of his fire.

“The sand is hungry,” he says. “I’ll wait until he’s home.”

Boba retires to his rooms to treat his leg scratch, burning and slow to scab over, and applies another layer of dry skin cream to the rest of him. Every movement he makes feels so tight he’s surprised his flesh hasn’t simply pulled open to leave his bones out for the wind to scour clean.

When he leaves the fresher, Din has the small storage trunk from his own bedroom set up along the back wall of Boba’s, a cloth bag on top. The trunk Boba knows; it doesn’t hold much but almost everything Din owns: spare kutes and unarmed clothing, a few extra vibroblades and steel knives, the small odds and ends he’s collected in the years since Moff Gideon had his Razor Crest destroyed.

The bag is unfamiliar, but Boba can guess what it holds.

Din murmurs to his son as he dresses him for bed, trading the child’s robe for a similar one he pulls from the bag. Monastic little habits, Boba thinks, and the chance to sleep is close enough that he does find it charming, even if the thought does its best to stir some up some tired worry in him.

It’s not the first time Din’s given into that Mandalorian urge to gather his Covert together– that ingrained need to keep his tribe safe, like denning down together and having everyone in arm’s reach would make a difference for survival when it came to it. But it’s the first time in a while. The void-damned storm.

Grogu’s barely awake, leaning heavily into his father’s chest and lifting his arms clumsily as the robe is pulled over his head. “Ba-bah,” he says croakily, reaching out when Boba sits down on the bed beside them. 'Heavy,' he manages with one little hand, and then, maybe, Help?, before Din catches his hand to kiss it gently.

“You are," Din reassures him. Then, "Almost done,” guiding the child’s little wrist through his sleeve, smoothing down his fuzzy cowl. He hands his son to Boba.

Boba cradles Grogu in one arm– he’s so light, he’s such a tiny thing, but he feels so much heavier in Boba’s heart– and pulls his father into a chaste kiss. Din melts into him, like his tension was the only thing holding him together.

Something in Boba’s chest stirs and swells; he wants to howl out in triumph across the Dune Sea, proud in the knowledge that he can bring the Mandalorian so much comfort just with his body. If he wasn’t busy tracing the shape of Din’s lips with his own he’d roll his eyes at his absurd, posturing response. He can almost hear Fennec’s smirking ‘you boys’-- except she’s put herself up in that damned tower again, until the mid-night shift change.

“Skywalker message back yet?” he asks instead, when he pulls back. Grogu makes an incoherent baby noise, some slur of sound Boba doesn’t think even Din could pull any words from, and burrows his face into Boba’s sides.

The Siths-damned Jedi had been as little help last night as Boba had thought he might be, leaving Din with nothing more than assurances that he’d review the texts and seek guidance.

“No,” Din says, and rubs his hands together. “I trust Luke. He’ll search until he finds something. …I just hope the comm systems are still up when he does.”

Boba stands to place Grogu in his hammock, tucked up on the side of the bed nearest Din’s pillow, and pulls the child’s blankets into his best approximation of the jumbled mess he’s seen Din make.

He turns out the lights after, mindful of Din still sitting on his side of the bed, and climbs under the heavy night-sheets.

“Come to bed, Djarin,” he orders instead of pleads, and hums, pleased, when Din does, folding in beside him with a weary sigh. “Good.”

Din grumbles something loving into the dark, and Boba turns into him, the occasional sound of Grogu’s little snores and Din’s steady breathing through the wailing wind enough to lull him to sleep.

He stumbles out of bed in the early hours of the morning, or dreams that he does-- the walls of the palace seem too close, but insubstantial, something he can shoulder through like insul-foam. Everything is brittle and breakable; he sways clumsily through the halls and things crash and shatter and yield around his body as he pushes through.

He is tired and cannot sleep; he is hungry and directionless.

He is standing at the big external doors of the beast pens; there is a cacophony of shrieks, but nothing compared to the wind as he opens them and steps out into the night.

It screams at him.

Acid is boiling up in his gut, acid and hate. He screams back at the wind, his voice echoing across the tossing dunes until the wind warps it into something animal and strange.

Chapter Text

Boba wakes, in pain, curled up against the basin in the fresher, with no memory of getting there. That’s twice now that he’s woken somewhere other than his bed, in almost as many days. He must have gotten up to vomit, his dreams of acid in his throat all too real– he can still feel it burning, and his lips are wet with mucus and gastric juices.

The frailty of his own guts a parting indignity from the sarlac, which fucked his digestion even as it worked to digest him. His innards have become sensitized to stress and certain foods still take him off guard. He’s better off than Shand… but more fragile than he likes to be. Hasn’t had to spend a morning with his back against a wall in months, but here he is.

He fumbles down a palmful of antacid tabs and flushes his mouth out with the last of a hydropack.

The wind is louder this morning, even if he hadn’t thought that was possible. A high shriek that sounds like it’s ripping the canyons apart.

It isn’t yet sunsrise, but there’s no lying down again. The only comfortable position is bolt upright– hardly conducive to sleep– so he sags into the window nook, watching his lovers in the dim light. They’re still fast asleep, even Fennec so exhausted that he hasn’t woken her with his retching and fumbling.

The child is tucked in his bedside hammock, snoring inaudible now over the constant wind noise. Boba can see it, though, the way the eartips visible over the mass of blankets quiver regularly. His father has shifted from his usual plank-like posture– has thrown his arm out to pin down the pillow left in the spot Boba vacated. Fennec has claimed another pillow, holding it close to her chest, face buried in it so that the loose strands of hair spill over its side.

He watches them until his back twinges, the jolt of stiff muscles setting off a fresh burning cramp below his sternum. The first sun is rising anyway, thin, murky light turning the haze into a lighter shade of haze. It’s time he faced the day, for better or worse.

He pulls on his helmet, immediately thankful for the audial dampeners when the sound of the storm cuts out enough that he can hear the ringing in his own ear, and then goes still when its proximity sensor bursts to life, flashing red in the corner of his vision.

There’s something alive behind him, silently, suddenly–

He spins, one arm raised to catch anything incoming, one driving forward, held steady and primed for a last-minute switch to his flamethrower if needed.

It’s not; he pulls his punch short so quickly he stumbles. His glove still thumps lightly into Din’s palm.

“Gev! Udesii, udesii, Boba,” Din says, both hands raised and open in front of him. He smiles crookedly– a little concerned, mostly bemused, the glow of the haze through the window leaving him washed out but still beautiful. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You need heavier feet in this wind, Beroya,” Boba says, and breathes deeply like the morning-chill in the air might be enough to calm the spitting stomach acid in his gut. And he needs to see to some armor maintenance.

Maybe sand got into the sensors. There’s been enough of it flying around, and there’s nothing technological that doesnt get kriffed with a little sand in the works. …He should make sure Fennec’s had a chance to flush her cybernetics. The thought of her abdomen seizing up on her, alone at the top of that tower, lodges in his mind like a loose bit of gravel.

He looks over to his bed– she’s still there, face pressed in her pillow, her legs poking out from under the sheets at the knees.

“She got in late,” Din whispers. “You were already gone.”

“Let her sleep,” he says, instead of asking what time that was– how long he’d been working through his discontent guts without realizing it– and tugs Din toward the front room. Din grabs one of his robes from the wall and follows after him, chuckling softly at Boba’s exasperated sigh.

Oro comms– a crackling report to let them know he’s on his way– and hearing his voice is the only way Boba can finally pry Shroud from his windy vigil and shove him into his room with a mug of caff and a large bowl of broth.

The Tusken says he heard a krayt in the night. It’s the last thing they need– and it accounts for some of the seismometer readings, out toward the Flats. Maybe the damn storm chased it west. It’s a small beast though, a canyon krayt or a very young greater. Nothing that can’t be driven off, still. Boba has to swear to send out a squad to watch the approach from Mos Eisley and escort Oro back before Shroud will finally promise to actually rest.

Oro does make it in from Mos Espa a few hours past sunrise, escorted by the squad Boba sent out and blurgg-less except for the female he rode out on. Dorai goes out on another of the females to split him off and bring him in, a slugthrower strapped to her back and a few grenades in a pouch, but neither she nor Oro report Krayt-sign in the rock.

Oro also proudly places a bag of credits on his desk that has surprising heft; his eyebrows raise when he looks inside to see the denomination of the chips.

“Everyone knows the storm is coming in; a speeder got flipped out near Mos Eisley and port traffic is practically backed up to Mos Entha. Everyone needed draft animals,” he says, with barely restrained pride. “I got choice prices.”

The profit is impressive enough that he’s actually willing to admit it.

“If you could pull sales like this more often, we might have a use for you.”

“Thank you, sir.” Oro practically sparkles at him. He already regrets his beneficence.

“Now get out. Shroud’s been worried. You make sure he’s sleeping. I actually need his brain working.”

The musician giggles and brushes the insult off like glitter in his wake. “I will. Poor baby, he’s such a sweetheart.” He vanishes in a dramatic swirl of poncho to find his mate. But the sparkle and good news he leaves behind hovers in the air, infecting the dayworkers who catch wind of it despite the storm spreading ever closer.

Boba can’t quite internalize their cheer. His stomach churns on his third mug of caff– more milk than actual caff, from what he can tell, Din taking it upon himself to parent Boba’s guts as attentively as he does everything else, but Din refuses to acknowledge his biting comments about it with anything more than a tip of his helmet over his child’s sleep-heavy head. The Mandalorian waits behind his shoulder patiently, as if he’s a fixture.

Boba tries to get on with business for a while– trying to figure out who of his deeply reluctant criminal contacts in Mos Eisley can send support to Mos Espa before the port is hit with a displaced wave of scum and villainy on top of the slightly more reputable Tatooine-traffic, but after a single sharp message to the very aspirationally named Troska Syndicate he finds himself out of options and focus.

He goes to watch the storm from an observation port, grateful when Din follows silently after him. The red light of his proximity sensor flashes reassuringly at the edge of his vision.

Have you ever seen one this big?

Mezza keeps the tracker feed up in her office, watching the core of it, watching it sit and gather strength in defiance of all prediction.

The storm looks like a mistake, a slow file corruption or damaged output creeping up the display.

Have you ever seen one this big?

He retrieves the datalog of last night’s seismometer readings and walks their path through the sublevels with Parnel and Din, the mid-day and afternoon disappearing into the deep until Din fades away with murmur that he’s going to— something.

It slips out of Boba’s grasp, the memory insubstantial and he’d almost think he dreamed it, except the thought of it doesn’t bring the taste of stomach acid to his mouth.

Parnel bobs alongside him, muttering to herself and occasionally to him, adjusting her goggles and headlamp to peer down the corridors and past the doors they can wedge open.

Boba has no idea what’s stored away down here; no one does. Half the locks are seized, the fine, settled sand and dust is inches thick; Fennec and Jora’s footsteps trace a perimeter check through it, a jarring hint of life in the dark. These corridors were forgotten decades ago, levels below where they’ve been inventorying, but he needs to know if this void-damned worm is likely to immolate them all burrowing under some storehouse of ancient explosives and rotting, unstable relics.

Parnel marks a few doors as they go, sweeping large no-entry slashs across them with a pot of phosphorescent stain– then more and more as they descend deeper. The last hallway she marks up entirely.

The glow of the slashes plays havoc with his vision, blurs the edges against the void-dark of the corridor. “Hope this worm knows what those mean,” Boba says. It doesn’t earn the chuckle Parnel huffs out, but they’re all strained for humour. “Must be a big bastard,” he adds. “That krayt Shroud’s been hearing might have chased it in.”

No chance it’s the krayt itself: not unless it can key open doors. They can’t flatten themselves to get through vents and the damn worms can, even apparently this one that’s too big to be the normal variety of subterrestrial pest that lurks in the walls of the lower levels. He itches to burn every last one of them out of the burrows.

“I hope it doesn’t collapse the whole place,” Parnel says. She’s tired, Boba can tell, her purple splotches unevenly pale and tinged with green, when there’s enough light to actually see them, and her barbels hanging limp. But she’s as determinedly good natured as she ever is, even when she’s slamming a foot into his chest to keep him from crossing into whatever newly discovered blast radius they’ve opened up.

“There are more degrading chemicals down here than in a Correllian garage,” she says, knuckling them back up the hallway. “That room,” she jerks a foot at a slash-marked door halfway down the hallway, “books. Shelves of actual books. Those things must be ancient– I could feel the ink fumes and the paper rot in the air.” She shudders.

“Flupp, and that last storeroom we checked had a pallet that said it was cortosis ingots holding up crates of High Republic-stamped blast power, all stacked next to Vratixian cartel barrels, and it’s anyone’s guess what’s in those. Who needs rhydonium when you have a recipe like that?”

He grunts and follows her, but she starts going back up a level. “The worm– the thing– goes deeper than this at night.”

“It does,” she agrees. “But we don’t. Did you see how collapsed in that next stairwell is?”

He hadn’t. But he doesn’t have a Dug’s night vision, even with his HUD. “How collapsed?”

She taps her toes against the side of her long snout, thinking. “Not safely passable, not with all the volatile material around. We’d need to blast our way through.”

His irritation rumbles up in his chest.

“Sorry, Boss,” she says. “I doubt anyone’s been down this far in half a century, or more. Except for us.” She sweeps with her knee, indicating the tracks in the dust. Theirs, Fennec’s and Jora’s.

“Except for us,” Boba repeats grimly. “All right. Write it up, prioritize the best and worst of those rooms and integrate them with the rest. Send me an update, copy it to Shand, Mando and Mezza.”

“You want some estimates on clearing out that stairwell too?”

“Yes– but if you need to come back down here, you bring at least two guards with you, and test the comm signal first.”

“Boss, I didn’t know you cared.”

“You get eaten by a giant sandworm, where am I supposed to find anyone else crazy enough to do your job?”

“Eh,” she says. “Think I still have a cousin on Rugosa. You’d have to convince him to move to Tatooine though.” She chortles. “Might have your work cut out for you there.”

She’s not wrong. No one wants to come to Tatooine. It’s not a choice; it’s something that happens to you. To the unluckiest, at birth. The rest of the galaxys’ wretched wash up here, dragged along by the currents of fate, dumped like so much space trash.

“Don’t get eaten then.”

She taps her ankle to her brow. “Yessir.”

He has to wait for the lift to the power hub. When it arrives, three daylaborers and one of the junior kitchen apprentices come spilling out, whispering to each other and one of Dorai’s beasthands who follows after them. They’re trailed by one of Mezza’s mechanics and one of her service droids, carrying a load of reinforcement plating between them.

The laborers, apprentice and beasthand freeze when they see him, conversation stuttering to silence, then scurry past. The mechanic strides past him as well as a Pacithhip can manage, her wide mouth set in a defiant line, powered by purpose. The droid wheels after her.

When the lift reaches the power hub level, the floor itself feels like it’s whispering, full of the voices and gossip of everyone that shouldn’t be lurking in the corridor, shouldn’t be huddled around the door of the engineering office. It echoes in the skin, amplifies in the bones until his headache threatens to crush his mind like a trash compactor.

The crowd in the corridor scatters around him, like the near-surface fish he used to watch as a child, when something from the deeper reaches of Kamino’s oceans passed underneath.

It’s payday, he remembers. That’s why so many of the dayworkers are on the grounds, the regular and rotating crews from the closer settlements. It does not explain why they are here.

“If you have nothing to do,” he growls, “report to Zhosef. I assure you there is no shortage of work.”

He has no time for the idle or their whispers; not when the wind thumps the walls and howls through the closed catwalks and desert beyond. He has no time, either, for the Tatooine superstitions he can hear the echoes of, track the fluttering ends of them back to the guilty. The old cook; the weathered day laborers; the apprentice transport mechanic.

Tatooine breeds dune tales like it breeds dune mites, with as little purpose. Swirl them with the whispers of krayt from those who heard its cries in the night– or heard from someone who heard from someone– and the rumours that the Mining Guild or something worse has been burrowing around under the grounds, the air is as thick with lurid speculation as it is sand.

Mezza’s office is quieter than it was in the corridor. Only a few of her droids are there, with a handful of her mechanics and Zhosef’s laborers; Shroud stands on the far side of Mezza’s station, peering out the little observation port there with his back to the rest of the room, rigid. They’re all quiet, not speaking at all or only with low voices, heads close together.

A glance explains it: Grogu’s floating pod is beside the old Ugnaught. Din stands on his child’s other side, head bowed in quiet conversation with Fennec. Her braid is dull with a layer of sand, the bright red of her cording barely poking through. She still has her helmet on, and there is dust and sand caked to the front of it, in the creases of her clothes.

Din sees Boba enter– nods, taps Fennec’s elbow. She turns and takes her helmet off to smile tiredly at him.

He feels like he’s interrupted somehow. He bristles with it as he goes to them, two of Mezza’s mechanics and a mouse droid quick to get out of his way.

“Fett,” Fennec says. Her voice cracks with the dry, but it’s warm. Glad that he’s there.

“Boba,” Din echoes; just as warm, just as pleased to see him.

It unbalances him. It shouldn’t. But the anger he was carrying unravels, spools uselessly and flutters without a target. It leaves him raw. It’s too much, to have them looking at him like this; it feels like being ripped from his armor. Like crawling, exposed and burning on the sands.

He pulls his helmet off before the memories suffocate him. Nods stiffly. “Bring half the desert in with you, Shand?”

She laughs, but he can see worry in her eyes when they search his face. “Feels like it.” She jerks her chin to Mezza’s display. “Look at this.”

He steps closer, glances first to the sleeping child in his pod, one more lump of blanket in a nest of them, except for the tip of a green ear, then to the screens. The same churning, spreading mess of storm, taking up more and more of the display; the same data input sources, although he sees the Mos Eisley spaceport feed is completely down.

And then he sees it, a new window down low, an intercepted communication relay. The play loop is paused, but the transcription underneath is simple: Crawler 873-016, return to your post.

Fennec ducks her head down beside his, speaking low. “The crawler moved– not far, pulled out and made it maybe 400 meters north before it reversed and parked again.” She points to Mezza’s displays, to where the ore crawler has been since the night of the bonfire, then marks its short path and return.

“Came in to see if we got something.” She moves her hand down to the communication relay. “We did.”

“There were more communications,” Mezza says. “Outgoing only. On the encrypted frequency that we cannot intercept. I have logged them.”

“The encrypted relays could be weaker,” Din says.

Fennec nods. “Small, short range. Reliant on repeaters. Easy for the storm to take a few of those down or degrade the signal before it can get out… their bosses must want them in position pretty badly if they were willing to risk the open frequencies.”

“Think they were trying to leave before the storm trapped them here?” Boba says, glaring at the storm on the display.

“They should.” Shroud steps over, the edges of his sign pulling Boba’s attention. His dustmask turns up to look at the display as well. “The sand is hungry. They should go while they can.”

“Guess their bosses disagree,” Fennec says a moment later, Din’s voice soft while he translates the Tusken sign for her. The words sound wrong that way, the Mandalorian’s husky bedroom voice whispering nightmares in her ear.

“The sand is hungry,” Shroud says again, and turns sharply away from the display.

The way he says it sticks in Boba’s craw. It’s hard not to think about something else hungry in the sands, and he feels the memories snagging his hands like a restrictive membrane.

He thinks it’s the memories of that dark, acidic pit making his scars feel like they’re splitting-- until Din says his name, dismayed, reaching to touch his cheek. The rough leather stings against raw flesh and he inhales sharply, reaching up to touch it himself, feel how the old healed lines are oozing and inflamed.

That ends his meeting with Mezza, over his protests. Fennec and Din all but strongarm him into H2’s clinic-- the overwrought med-droid immediately demands his blood, scans him up and down with worried noises, and jabs him with vitamins.

“You are displaying early scorbutic tendencies. There is no reason for that,” she says, as if it’s something he’s chosen to do. “This has something to do with your tendency to live with caff as a sole dietary supplement, I am sure of it. You have somehow impeded your ability to uptake vital nutrients. It will get worse if I cannot understand what is happening. I do not have the facilities–”

Every diagnosis H2 has given since Boba removed her restraining bolt has included ‘I don’t have the facilities’-- he pushes past her.

“Master Fett-? Master Fett, please--”

The sand is hungry.

He isn’t. He feels burned out and tired. He lets his feet carry him to one of the cleared out storerooms and presses his aching skull against the cool stone until he feels human again.

At eveningmeal, the mood is somber again, the afternoon’s burst of speculative energy worn thin by a long day. Oro’s success warranted extra water rations all around, but the shrieking wind stifles what would otherwise be a celebratory mood. Everyone is tired, strained and fraying.

Boba has their usual booth alone. It isn’t the first time their meal shifts haven’t intersected by far, but usually he has at least one of them nearby. Technically, Din is: he’s holed up in the corner with his child and H2, talking urgently to the droid as he tries to feed the child. The usually voracious little mite is still exhausted, falling asleep almost between bites.

They’re not ten meters away, but the gloom makes the distance between him and the Mandalorian seem longer, the air between them darker.

Fennec is absent altogether; up the watchtower on one of the shifts she insists on taking.

They have not chosen to leave him alone, isolated at the small booth, but it feels that way. He’d be more isolated if he retreated to eat in his chambers like a good little warlord, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels worse to have this radius of respectful space around him.

Everyone is quiet; even the Gamorreans in Zhosef’s workforce subdued and refraining from picking fights with one another.

There’s a twang out of nowhere, loud, followed by a slightly flat chord. It breaks the stranglehold of the wind for a moment. Oro is tuning his karking guitar-- but it’s better than hearing the galley so quiet.

The wind slams a shutter somewhere up in the ventilation system, and while Boba restrains himself from jumping, those around him do not-- a cacophony of jarred benches and dropped silverware, the clatter-splash of a spilled mug, and above it all a wordless bi-harmonic howl of surprise.

All eyes turn to Shroud as his gloved hands hit the table.

“Fuck this wind,” he bellows to the ceiling, the high shriek of Tusken profanity going down Boba’s nerves like a file. The purser lapses into even more profane sign marred by the tension in his fingers.

A flash of silver-- Djarin covering his sleepy child’s eyes with a hand.

Oro lays his guitar across the table and shifts to straddle the bench facing his partner, slipping his hands under the outer robe to bite down through armor and wrapping and rub the tight shoulders beneath. Boba can read his lips more than hear him ask ‘What’s wrong, baby?’

Shroud’s hands are pulled into claws; they almost shake as he signs into the space between them-- “This wind is wrong. This storm is wrong.”

Oro answers in kind, lips moving along with his slightly rougher sign: “We’ve been through worse, honey, remember when we were stuck out in that tent--”

“No,” Shroud croaks out loud, along with the sharp slash of his hands. “This storm is wrong.” The terminating sign is emphatic and violent, carved out of the air next to his chest.

The human touches his hands, lays his forehead against the cheek of Shroud’s dustmask, humming softly. “It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.”

Shroud shoves him back gently, makes him watch his hands: “We shouldn’t be here.”

“This is the safest place we could be.”

“Nothing is safe. Not with the weather like this. Not when the sands want blood.”

Boba can hear the uneasy shifting around them, everyone who can read Tusken sign glancing at each other. He could strangle the superstitious little shit. He doesn’t need this.

He doesn’t need any of these idiots, huddled at the edge of his sight, unwilling to approach. Cowards.

Din is bent over his child, a limp and motionless mass, not even looking. Fennec is far away. Chose her shift so she wouldn’t be here…

His head pounds and he sets it in the palm of his hand, digging his fingers into the bridge of his nose as if he could reshape the bone or crush the pain out of his skull.

The workers murmur and fret and clean up spilled food and wasted drink.

After a little bit, Oro starts to pluck a song, bright brassy notes hitting limply against the wall of distant wind sounds. It’s louder than he’d usually dare, knowing Boba’s temper.

(Knowing that Boba was caught tapping his foot along once and has never forgiven him for it--)

The music brings a little rhythm to the noise. Oro can play that thing, he grudgingly admits it, and his voice is smooth and confident.

The galley starts to relax, the sounds of tableware and conversation slipping into the wake of yet another void-blasted Star Waver cover song. The musician segues neatly into a less familiar song.

Boba looks up to see Shroud’s shoulders relaxing, head bobbing along with the melody.

He recognizes it now; one of the ones they’ve been writing together. How theoretically precious. Oro’s been ambushing people as test audiences, and he’s got a large captive one now. It’s not a bad song, though, he’ll grudgingly admit. It’s a retelling of the Tusken sun fable and it’s accurate enough that it won’t get Oro shot most places on the planet. He’ll give Shroud the credit for that.
.
“Run, brother run, across the empty sky,” Oro croons, defiant in the face of the low constant gale, and Shroud’s fingers murmur along. “Run, brother, run--”

The sound of the guitar string snapping is much quieter than the shutter banging, and the distant wind entirely steals whatever sound of pain the musician makes. The smell of copper fills the room; Oro stares down at the deep slice across his hand as if he doesn’t understand it.

“Are you okay?” One of Zhosef’s stockmen gasps.

“It-- it, uh, it’s fine,” Oro says, his voice distant. His eyes flick to the guitar, bright with betrayal and fear. “It’s… I should go to medical.

Shroud has his back to Boba and whatever he says is hidden by his body. It makes the human look up with lost porg eyes, soulful and stupid. “Okay.”

“You should go to medical indeed,” H2 says firmly, shifting out of the booth and strutting over to waylay him. She scoops her metal arm into Oro’s elbow, half-dragging him out. If Boba didn’t know better he’d say she was relieved to have a malady she could treat.

Shroud stays, leaning over the table, eyeing the guitar like unexploded ordnance for a long time.

When he moves, it’s to walk towards Boba.

Boba glares him down, outraged by this familiarity now, now after everything’s gone to shit. Only when he wants something, then he’ll acknowledge his employer in the room.

“What?” he demands, before Shroud is quite in front of him.

“I am leaving tonight. I take my partner. We will return when the storm is over,” Shroud signs.

Boba answers in kind, standing up and shoving the table away to emphasize his gestures: “You will beg my forgiveness before you cross this threshold again.”

“I will dig for water when we return, to earn our places again.”

And he’s serious, Boba knows damn well how serious that debt is. He still can’t believe it.

Shroud must see it in his wide-staring eyes: he signs on. “We are leaving tonight. The storm is unnatural. You should leave too, sir.” Or: not entirely ‘sir’, but the whole conversation couched in full-gestured formality that only irritates him more.

“Like hell.”

“Please. For your hunter’s sake. For his child--”

“Get out,” Boba snaps aloud, in Basic.

Shroud dips his head and turns.

“Coward,” Boba spits at his back and watches his shoulders stiffen, the hand that shoots to the gaffi stick that hangs at Shroud’s side, but the Tusken doesn’t turn back to face him. The hand slips away from the weapon. That’s…almost alarming.

Shroud takes Oro’s guitar as he leaves, tucked protectively inside his robes.

When he’s gone, the eyes that watched him go all turn to Boba.

He sits, leaning forward with an elbow on his leg, his eyes sweeping the room.

“If anyone else doesn’t have the constitution for a little wind, you should leave now too,” he says coldly, and a part of him is bitterly satisfied as first one worker stands, and then one of the guards, and then another.

In the end a half-dozen of them shuffle away, casting wary looks over their shoulders. Boba memorizes their faces, pins them with his cold disgust.

“Don’t bother coming back, any of you.”

“Boba--”

He hadn’t even heard Din approaching.

“Djarin? You too?” he’s grinning. The air stinks of blood. His teeth feel too large in his mouth. He should have seen it coming, he thinks.

“Boba, no,” Din murmurs, and sinks down next to him.

His child is curled in the crook of one arm-- he reaches out with the other. Boba smacks it aside and Din turns his body, meets his parry with a grip, and pulls determinedly closer.

“Boba.”

The sick feeling in him ebs, the nausea, the headache, the feeling of distance and hate. He stares into the dark visor before him and feels his lungs struggle for air.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“I know.”

“The others. Tell Zhosef-- if they hear about this, tell them there’s no blacklist.”

“I will.” Djarin lets go of his wrist and his hand falls to his lap. His arm feels too weak for the effort of raising it, as if he’s been climbing a high wall for hours. He lets Djarin touch him now, glove on his shoulder, knuckles worriedly rasping against his neck. “Does it hurt?”

“A headache. It’s nothing new.”

“I’ll get something from H2, and give you a neckrub tonight,” Djarin says decisively. “You have to take care of yourself.”

“I’m just--”

“Whatever excuse you’re about to give me, is it one you’d accept from Fennec? From me?” Din says softly, with his helmet tipped just so that it seems as if the beskar has raised a brow.

“...I’d like it. You. Tonight.”

“You’ll have me.”

There’s a soft whine, and the limp bundle snugged up to Din’s chest shifts.

The child’s eyelids seem too heavy to raise all the way, but he makes a worried little warble and reaches weakly out. Boba offers him a finger to clutch; the little claws grip loosely before sliding away as his eyes close.

“Did he eat?”

“Not enough. Not for him. Hope he really does have all those leftovers stored in the Force somewhere,” Din sighs. “If he doesn’t get better….”

“You want to take him back to Skywalker.”

A nod. “And send a comm to Tano, if she’s in comm-able space again. See if she knows anything. But it’ll be a short hop. If I have to go, I won’t be gone long. And it won’t be tonight.”

Don’t go at all.

He can’t ask it. It’s unreasonable. But part of him is so tired. Part of him is… frayed. It feels like old cloth in the wind. If he clings too hard to it, the worn parts will tatter.

“I’ll be with you tonight,” Din repeats quietly, cupping his neck. “It’ll be all right.”

“If I have to threaten the weather at blasterpoint, it’ll be fine,” Boba agrees.

Din leans in, sets his helmeted brow against Boba’s bare skin. It’s cool and firm, eases the ache and the pressure just a little. “It’s probably going to be a bad storm. But we’ll get through it.”

“Take more than a little sand in the air to kill me,” Boba says, not without irony. It’s not as if it isn’t dangerous.

But they’ve all survived sandstorms before. It’ll be fine.

The headache doesn’t eb as the evening falls. It’s starting to affect his eyesight; everything’s fuzzy, spots and flickers of light and darkness in his eyes when he turns his head too fast. Everything is loud, too, the vibrations in the rock walls feel like they’re buzzing in his jaw and skull.

He hangs close to the walls and sticks to shadows left when the lighting switches to night-shift. He drifts through the palace not sure what he’s doing; makes for Mezza’s control room before he remembers he’s already checked in. There was something with Dorai– he doesn’t recall.

He’s about to head up to his chambers to gather his useless brain and go through his appointments when he hears voices near the vehicle hangar entrance.

Din. He hears Din, and he moves closer, leaning in a doorway to watch mostly unseen.

Shroud and Oro are packed for a long haul; both weighed down with bags and wrapped bundles.

Despite the distance and the constant whine of the storm, he can hear it as if the wall brings it to him. He can hear more clearly than he can read the sign; Din’s back is half to him and it’s all just shadows.

Din’s speaking Tusken; trying to convince Shroud to take a bantha instead of a speeder. It’s going as well as could be expected, by his resigned tone. As long as Boba’s known him, Shroud has refused to ride bantha-back, some piece of his past making it too painful or too dishonorable.

Din’s voice murmurs, worried, about the wind, the comparative instability of a speeder in storm weather.

Shroud insists. Oro backs him up.

They’ll be fine. If nothing else, the two of them are as much survivors as the rest of this motley bunch. Shroud is damn good at navigating the desert and Oro is smart enough to listen to him.

Those two will be fine.

His accounting might not be. His accounting may in fact be kriffed after this.

Acid wells up in his throat. Stress.

He reminds himself that they aren’t fucked. Shroud doesn’t record-keep like a standard accountant but he very reasonably shares his accounting with one of Mezza’s droids to create a backup of the numbers that live in his head. They have a record of funds, they won’t miss anyone come next payday.

But he remembers how miserable it was at the beginning with three bounty hunters, a dozen cutthroat captains of their own crews, and a high-churn skeleton crew trying to keep the numbers straight. It feels a little like they’re fucked.

“Where are you going?” Din asks.

Shroud’s sign for the place is one Boba doesn’t know, a downward motion into an open hand. Pebble in a bowl-? He can’t see details; the distance smears into indistinguishable shades of brown and red. He shuts his eyes, waiting for them to regain function.

“I think the name is Mos Pelgo,” Oro says. “It’s a tiny little place out in the Northern Dune Sea.”

“I know Mos Pelgo. That should be safe. Are you-- good? You’re good with the Dragon Walkers?” Din asks Shroud, concern clear in his voice.

Shroud must answer in the positive, because Din sounds a little mollified, if not completely at ease with the idea.

“Tell the Marshal I sent you, if there’s any trouble at the settlement, okay? He’s a friend.”

“Thanks, Mando,” Oro says, smiling weakly. “We’ll be okay. You want to come with us? Just until the storm’s over?”

“My place is here.”

The words hit like a shock. Boba realizes only then that he’d been expecting Din to agree, to leave with the boys and take his kid back to the Jedi that night. He opens his eyes, squinting to make them out, looking for reluctance in Din’s body language that he cannot possibly see in detail.

The young men share a look. Oro seems to read something through his partner’s dustmask and goggles. “...just… take care of yourself, okay? And your kid?”

“I will. Please be careful out there.” Din lays a hand on both their shoulders paternally.

Whatever Shroud’s reply is, it's formal to the point of sarcasm, throwing in broad flourishes that even Boba can make out. ‘Yes, grandfather’, or something to that effect.

Din clicks disapprovingly at them both, but lets them leave. He watches them go into the dark of the vehicle hangar; when the door hisses closed behind them he leans beside it, waiting, until there’s the distant grind of the external door. His shoulders slump as he turns away, and the hand laid over the sleeping child slung against him is visibly tense.

Boba approaches slowly, and it’s like his eyes are clearing off Din’s armor, the blurred haze sharpening back into details. He finds enough words to string together a sentence instead of staring, gets his face under control as Din looks up at him. He’s got a duty these days; can’t go falling apart on his people, especially not the loyal beroya and his kid.

“Boba,” Din sighs. “How are you?”

“Lousy. But I’ll live.”

Din huffs in fond amusement. He has a taste for bluntness and understatement.

“They’ll be all right,” he promises. “Mezza’s got a track on all the vehicles. She knows they’re leaving. Probably as worried as you are. We’ll know if anything goes wrong.”

“Will we know in time?”

“Yeah. The blurrgs can still handle this weather; we can reach them if we need. …Wish I’d thought to give’m one. They wouldn’t take a bantha.”

“I gather Dorai already offered and they turned it down. Shroud thinks it’s worth the risk to clear the storm faster. He thinks the worst hasn’t hit yet.”

“Oh, that’s reassuring,” Boba says flatly.

Din’s helmet dips to the angle that means he is resigned to the awareness of the universe’s ability to make a bad day worse.

“Come to bed,” Boba murmurs, and Din’s helmet lifts up, sweet and obedient, to meet his eyes.

There’s an unfamiliar tub of ointment waiting next to the bed when they reach his rooms. Din’s offer in the galley wasn’t just a nicety. Not that he’d thought it was, but it’s a soothing reminder of how damn good the Mandalorian is.

They work together, fingers brushing, to remove his helmet. They move the hammock from its place by the big bed to the smaller second room, motion and audial sensors set so that Din will know if his son stirs.

Halfway back to the bed Din turns away, looking for something, dark eyes darting thoughtfully back and forth for a second before he sees one of Boba’s robes.

“You have to leave me one,” Boba sighs, exasperated, when he grabs it.

“I’m not stealing this one,” Din promises earnestly, and starts draping it off the posts of Boba’s bed to make a hasty screen between them and the doorway to the other room. “Just. Kid’s good with doors. We might not have enough warning.”

“...Oh. Carry on.”

They strip each other of their armor and then Din guides him into bed, to lie on his front. The makeshift screen dims the low light further, makes the space around him and Din feel small and safe. Din’s weight against his back is another wall of security, of comfort; it reminds him of the sensation of taking off with the grav dampers at half strength.

Din crouches over him, warming the cream from medical in his hands; it has a distinctive medicinal smell, and despite knowing what he’s in for he hisses when it hits his skin and feels almost ice cold. He exhales as it starts to warm up to burning, and Din rubs it mercilessly into his shoulders, his hands digging in until it feels like Din’s put his whole weight on them. It aches in a way that distracts from the headache, and as Din crushes and releases him he feels like the tension he’s been carrying all day is being wrung out.

The ache eases. It feels like even his skin is less tense. Din stays astride him, unseen but known by the strength of the legs caging Boba’s ribs, the warm pressure where he sits on the small of his back, the hands working diligently until Boba’s finally loosened up, floating in endorphins and the absence of pain.

He realizes he’s making noise, so deep it’s barely audible, a low groan of relief.

They pause, listening carefully. Only soft breathing over the audio monitor.

Din listens a second longer and then shifts off him. Moving almost silently, he rolls Boba onto his back, cleaning his hands thoroughly and reaching for a different tube of ointment.

He straddles Boba’s hips again, unscrewing the cap and reaching behind him. “I’ll take care of you,” he says.

“I know,” Boba whispers.

And Din does.

They move the child back into the main room late in the night; Din’s not comfortable to leave him out of arm’s reach when he sleeps. Boba’s worried too, perhaps, a bit. The kid hadn’t stirred, didn’t make a sound even when Din tucked a shawl over him to stave off the night-time temperature drop.

He pulls the beroya into his arms when he returns, snuffles into his neck, across his chest, half-kissing, half-mouthing until he can feel Din’s muscles firing around sleepy, swallowed laughter. He leaves his head on Din’s chest, listening for the beat of his heart through the constant wail of the storm, until Din falls asleep.

He follows, slipping from wakefulness to sleep between thoughts so he dreams of Din’s body. Tasting down it, hovering above until Din seems so small below him, small and sweet. He can taste himself on Din’s skin, and does, until his dream dissolves with the sound of Fennec’s footsteps as she approaches down the hallway.

He blinks, rolls over, and his thoughts dissolve too, until he’s back in the sands, hungry and angry like the sands. He finds the barest trace of the tracks left behind by Shroud and Oro’s speeder, what the wind’s left in place, and screams and snaps at the sky and anything foolish enough to be alive in the face of his fury.

Chapter Text

In the morning, the child won’t wake up. Not even for breakfast.

The worry churns in him, sticks to the bloated feeling that weighs him down. He forgoes breakfast himself, nauseous with the blinking lights in his vision, the half-seen glimpses that feel like they’re filtering in through his sinuses, warped and changed by the force of his migraine.

He holds the baby while Din dresses, the little body so light he feels like air. The fear it calls up inside him is cold and miserable, and isn’t chased away when he nurses his caff and spends too long watching Din rock his child instead of getting dressed himself, trying to taste the sweetness that seems parsecs away on the other side of the armor locker.

Boba accompanies Din to the medical and watches him watch his son under H2’s careful manipulators. She takes scan after scan, optics flickering as she accesses the trove of records in her memory-- flickering too long. Longer and longer after each scan.

Din looks wan, somehow. The tip of his helmet is weary; his shoulders are set but not with resolve, more as if he’s rusted into this position and jammed there.

In the strain, Boba sees his decision. “You’re leaving.”

“I have to. I have to hope the Jedi knows something.” Something he doesn’t know already. Something he hasn’t bothered to comm about. Something far away from here.

“...good journey.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Of course,” he says, numb.

“I’ll leave tonight. Make sure everything’s in order before I go.”

“Don’t let me keep you.”

“Boba. I will be back.”

He looks at Din’s helmet, can read it like his open, dark-eyed face. He believes what he says.

But don’t they all.

The day passes with the screams of the storm; Fennec locked away in her chosen tower; Din like a ghost, everywhere Boba looks except for with him.

In the fresher, he peels sheet after sheet of dry, dead skin off his arms, his legs. The scratch he’d left on his thigh is an angry red scab that threatens to break with every dab of wound cream. The scars on his back split when he bends. He feels like a rotten fruit, one of Fennec’s kuvara maybe, the insides fermenting until the pressure of it splits the skin.

He finds an insulmug of caff Din’s left for him on the table in his rooms after, and drinks it defiantly, crunching the jogan fruit left with it in sullen rage.

When the evening comes, it’s too soon. He aches with it, but it’s a distant thing. Numb like an old scar– but not his old scars, which throb despite the wound cream and bacta gel he smeared on them.

Din finds him in the throne room when the first sun sets, Grogu strapped to him with the quilted leather birikad. The child is still sleeping. He considers ignoring him, leaving him to stand at the foot of the dais like one of Jabba’s old supplicants. He can’t.

“Beroya,” he says.

“Boba.” Din steps up beside the throne, takes one of Boba’s hands gently between his. “I would like it if you would see us go.”

Somehow, he had forgotten how incredibly cruel Djarin could be. “As you wish.”

“I’ll be back,” Din says, fiercely. “Boba, listen to me. I’ll be back, I promise. Haat, ijaa, haa'it.”

His father used to say the same thing to him, when he left on a hunt. Boba can’t remember if he ever told Din that. It didn’t matter if he had. His father may have had little positive to say about what was left of his people by the time he had Boba, but he couldn’t have scrubbed the beskar from his soul anymore then than Djarin can now.

“I’ll hold you to that, Mandalorian,” he says, and walks with him to the hangar.

Din’s ship lifts off as the last sliver of the second sun slips below the horizon, a drowner’s fingertips sliding under the water.

He watches the streak cut a path up through the stars; the observation deck is dark and empty, and it’s easy to follow its engine trail high into the atmosphere.

He thinks: do we ever know when the last goodbye will be?

He stands until his suit’s climate control switches to heat and the moonlight is strong enough to splinter his shadow into three long shards before him, and then turns to go in.

He stops.

He’s never seen all three moons full, before.

The distant storm must be throwing particulate into the air, must be choking the atmosphere, because the light is red and the moons look bloodstained in the sky.

He sees the moons all night, even when he sleeps. Sees them in his dreams until he sinks into the sand, down deeper and deeper than his dreams have taken him before, until the only thing around him is the peace of the dark and his own heartbeat and hunger for company. He stays there.

Chapter Text

Din has been gone for two days and Boba’s head feels empty. Gravity feels unbalanced around him, one of his orbiting bodies gone and destroying him with his absence. He limps through the daylight hours, listening more than talking as people lay out their woes.

Mezza needs to start shutting down the more vulnerable subsystems; the air vents will have to go back on hydraulic release. Zhosef has new timetables, delayed timetables; their workers are hemorrhaging away, fleeing to seek shelter with families elsewhere or even get offworld– with limited success. Traffic through the eastern spaceports is slowing to a crawl; there’s catastrophic mumbling that even Mos Espa might shutter its hangars if things get worse.

The only mercy of the dwindling workforce is that there’s fewer of them to gossip and trade rumours and pointless speculation. Their voices of those who remain are thick with the perverse glee of shared misery, saturated with their own dread while they mutter knowingly about the three red moons, about the failing communication relays and the settlements going quiet, and about the storm. Always about the storm, how it’s hanging in the eastern sky like the universe ends there.

He dreams about it, at night, the void-damned storm, how it wails like a living thing.

Dreams about the bowels of the Palace, finding the worms he can only track the vibration-trails of in the day, tearing them to shreds.

Dreams about screaming for Djarin to the sky that screams back, until he’s swollen with it, bloated and massive, stretched out like he might be able to tear the Mandalorian back out of the black with his bare hands.

When he wakes, he’s alone. Nothing but his aching bones and peeling scars to keep him company, and he takes them with him through the days. Fennec seems to have stopped sleeping, or at least sleeping with him– she’s always up the tower or roaming the perimeter or cataloging damages with her precious quartermaster.

His vambrace comm spits static at him, and he starts. As if thinking about her summoned her, Fennec’s voice comes through–

“Fett. Problem.”

“What is it?”

”It’s that Guild crawler. It moved about half a klick in and then stopped. There’s gunfire.”

Adrenaline sharpens the blurred lines around him. “At us? They’re insane. What have they got?”

“It’s small arms, by the flashes. Not at us. It’s crossfire over the deck. What’s our move?”

“Keep an eye on it. I’ll be up.”

Having an objective gets his feet under him, finally, and he feels almost like himself– simmering anger and thrilling to the hunt– when he surges out of the lift to her viewing station.

She’s got her binoculars to her eye, a sardonic twist on her perfect lips. It reminds him of when she was younger, the edge of it, an almost casual enjoyment of other people’s failure. It’s like the storm has carved away any bit of softness she gained since.

Or he’s imagining things. He rips his eyes from her mouth and looks out– the air between them and the crawler is hazy with particles of sand, but there’s foul black smoke rising from its main combustion reactor so thick that it pools a little faster than the wind gusts can blow it away.

“Well, isn’t that a picture.”

“I think there’s been a change of management,” Fennec says. “Or an attempt at one. …someone’s leaving. No, two–”

“Give me the binocs.”

She gives him a sidelong look but obeys.

He sees nothing that she already didn’t tell him: there are four ant-like dots on the sand now, scuttling away in disoriented patterns, a few potshots from a blaster scorching the sand at their heels.

Maybe it’s staring into the low-hanging suns that’s throwing off the shooters. A shot goes so wide it clips the edge of the plateau and sends down a slide of red mesa stone. Maybe he’s being too generous.

“Can’t tell if they’re trying to scare this lot off or just bad shots.”

Fennec sighs, an edge of irritation. “I could, if you’d let me.” Her voice is cloyingly patient.

“Fine.” He rolls his eyes and returns the binoculars, catching the sour twist to her sweet smirk. It makes him feel–-

It makes him feel about fourteen, actually, watching the older and better regarded hunter drink Jabba’s booze and watch her competition with that same cold eye. He hadn’t counted as competition, back then. She feels tighter wound. Even her face looks… younger. Somehow. She’s aged much more gracefully than him– even without the dip in digestive acid, he thinks she would have– but he’s been around for enough of it to know it’s happened. He can’t tell now though.

“Bad shots,” she says decisively, almost proud. “I’ve seen better aim in the back alley of an Imperial bar.”

It’s there in the tension of her mouth, the anger that keeps her lips tight. That slides it into place for him: the anger. It’s what she used to carry with her, back before he could identify it, the brittleness that made her sharp. It’s like looking at a thirty-year old holorecord, but solid and full of the rage born of pain that’s still too raw to make a shield. When Din left, he didn’t just leave Boba, he realizes. Or maybe he’s just projecting.

“What,” Fennec says, not bothering to hide the glare she’s giving him behind a smirk or practiced disinterest.

He’s staring at her, and it really is like he’s fourteen again and she’s caught him at it. His ears heat up, and he half expects her to offer to flash him her underweave if he’ll run some life-threatening and inconvenient errand for her. He’s grateful he’s wearing his helmet.

“What’s happening down there,” he says flatly, because at least he hasn’t lost the tricks thirty years of bounty hunting have taught him.

She looks again, binoculars moving minutely as she tracks the movement on the ground. “Two more have left the crawler– someone got a lucky shot, took one down. Has to have been an accident.”

She goes quiet, leaning forward in her focus. He glares out at the sands, rangefinder down, looking for anything she might see.

“They’ve figured out directions, at least– or they’re coming to us by accident.”

He can see it too, the five dots clinging to the high slopes of the plateau, slowly, slowly scrambling higher. A few more blaster shots hit the rocks around them, but when the crawler shudders forward then rolls back with a belch of that black smoke and a few flickers of flame, the shots stop.

“Prioritizing that breach,” he says.

“What’s a few runners to a possible reactor meltdown,” she says wryly. “Well look at that.”

One of the figures has made it up the first crest of the plateau, waving wildy at the Palace. They pause to crouch and pull someone else up with them. They strip their shirt and wave it like a flag between their hands, almost losing it in a gust of wind. It might generously be called ‘white’.

“What’s the call?” Fennec asks. “Could be the Guild management. Could be the laborers choosing new employment.”

He breathes deep. Watches the fluttering shirt, the first figure lying down on it’s belly to reach over the edge of the plateau until they come back with a third figure. The last two yet out of reach, picking their way up the rocks. The crawler’s still smoking.

“Send a squad to pick them up. And get Parnel up in the second tower with an RPC-2.”

It takes the better part of the next few hours to round up the deserters– the squad approaching slowly across the mesa, keeping low in case the repairs on the crawler itself stabilize enough that whoever’s still on there with the bad aim turns their attention back on the ones who fled, or decides they can’t let the chance to pick off a few of Boba’s guards pass them by.

The squad captain confirms when they’ve isolated the deserters, moved them closer to the Palace and out of range of the small arms they’ve seen from the crawler, surrounded them. “Unarmed,” she says. “Say they’re mine workers.”

The state of the five supports their claim. Wages were low, but all Mining Guild laborers were paid for their work, officially. The Mining Guild didn’t run slaves on Tatooine anymore. The Mining Guild didn’t rely on slave labor at all, according to the formal statements, which were as believable as a Black Sun tax ledger. But on Tatooine, at least, the Guild knew the ban had teeth behind it.

If they were found out, Boba thinks grimly, watching the feed from the squad’s holo-relay.

The miners are malnourished; that much is clear, even without diagnostics to confirm, dehydrated in a truly unhealthy way, and not just the normal state on Tatooine. Their clothes are worn, ragged and stained, and there’s an edge to the fear and desperation hiding just behind the blank exhaustion in their bruise-rimmed eyes.

They seek assistance and sanctuary, they say. They will pay what they can, when they can access their accounts. The Pantoran who’s doing the most talking for the group shoots a nervous glance over her shoulder to where the ore crawler sits, still smoking.

“We are willing to share more of our time here on Tatooine,” she says, speaking carefully. It’s well done; she has Boba’s attention, through the one-way relay, her words chosen to as easily offer labor as information. “In return for your assistance.”

Boba nods.

“Bring them in,” Fennec comms to the squad leader. “Space them out, stacked escort. Bioscans before they get through the gates.”

Boba can just hear the staticy “Copy” her comm spits back out. The holo-relay disconnects.

Boba keeps Parnel ready with the missile launcher in her tower, comms Mezza to run extra proximity sensors to their other sides in case of distraction, and watches with Fennec as the little convoy makes its way to the Palace, slowly crossing the kilometers between them while the suns sink lower and lower towards the western horizon.

They only have another kilometer to go, Tatoo I just disappearing from view, when the human miner in the middle of the queue stops, clutching at his arm. He pulls his hand back, shouts something Boba can’t hear over the wind, even with his audial input targeted on the group. He can see the panic in the others though, and the little red light just visible through the man’s arm.

The squad and other mine workers scatter. The Ongidae that had been behind the man in the queue pauses. Boba can see the human say something, sees his fear. Watches him curl in on himself around his arm, cutting off the increasing speed of the flashing light.

The Ongidae runs, flings himself forward and is grabbed by one of the squad. He’s yanked behind the ring of blast-shields the guards have up, crouched low, reversing carefully and quickly together.

The explosion is bright against the darkening sky, deep yellows and oranges tinged with pink in a parody of the sunset. Boba sees red.

“Guess somebody forgot to turn off that transmitter chip when they started paying him,” Fennec says, then, into the communications unit: “Sung. Report.”

There’s a burst of static, and the squad leader’s crackly voice. “One of the workers had a transmitter chip in his arm. He’s dead. Remaining workers are alive, and all of Squad 011. Few scrapes and singes, no serious injuries.”

“Anyone else chipped?”

There’s a pause. “Confirming now. Two of the workers say they were told theirs were turned off. One says it was removed. Fourth didn’t have one.” Voices, in the background– fast words carried on quiet grief. “The mine workers say the human– the one who’s chip detonated– was told his was turned off too.”

He takes the comm-set from Fennec. “Sung. Stay there,” he growls, barely waiting for the squad leader’s “Yes, Sir!” before pushing it back to Fennec.

There’s something growing inside him, in his gut, behind his lungs, up into his chest. It’s not indigestion; that he already can feel, churning and spitting. “Relay H2 and another squad. Tell them to take speeders and meet me with Squad 011 in ten. I want Ygabba ready with a hot meal when we return. You and Parnel keep your eyes on– then switch out when we’re back. I’m not wasting the two of you out here all night.” The thing inside him screams.

“Yes sir,” Fennec says, and he’s turned and stepped into the lift before he can see what expression she’s wearing, if her anger now matches his own.

It screams in time with his heartbeat. Howls as he breathes. How dare they.

He thought he knew every flavor of anger, was an old friend of most. But this is something new, an incandescence so bright he can’t even see it. It sinks so deep into him it’s like a type of peace. How dare they.

He grabs a speeder from the vehicle bay, nods to the mechanical worker on duty and requests she be ready with six more, three-seaters or more, for a squad of guards that will be following him.

His vision is ringed with red; it echoes in his ears, rolls under his skin. He follows the sound to the explosion site, and almost hopes the crawler crew feels like challenging him. They don’t. How dare they.

It takes another two hours before the remaining miners are cleared to enter the Palace, the moons high and the night air cold. Boba can feel the blood from the splitting scars under his helmet cooling on his skin despite his armor’s temperature control.

H2 scans every inch of the remaining four miners until she can confirm the state of their transmitter chips, present or not. She extracts the two offline chips while he watches, a field medic station assembled on the back of the largest speeder, pop-up durafab tent walls that stretch taut in the wind and are quickly stained red and brown from the dust and sand in the air.

He gives the chips to the former slaves to stomp to powder, blasting the remains when they’re done.

The Pantoran holds her hand over the incision in her stomach, pressing the small bacta patch tight against the wound. The clan tattoos on her cheekbones are wet in the moonlight; the blowing rock dust sticks to them, brownish red obscuring the delicate gold ink. “I have much I wish to tell you,” she says.

“After you eat and sleep,” he says. “You can speak with my security technician in the morning. I will be very interested in hearing what you have to say. Then we’ll see about getting you four on your way before the storm lands.”

“You should know,” she says, looking out across the sand, eyes jerking side to side. “There is something targeting the crawler. We heard a krayt screaming, and something big rocked us and damaged the treads. It was safer to run than stay.”

“We know. We’ve got eyes out.” He nods solemnly. “You’ll be safe.”

She nods, and gets on a speeder with Sung and H2. Boba waits until the last of the squads and the mine workers are on their way to the Palace before he follows. How dare they. How dare they run slaves on his world. How dare they murder them on his doorstep. How dare they.

He finishes a pot of wound cream before bed and opens another. It burns, then cools, numbing the surface layer of his dry, tight skin. It doesn’t reach the diamond-hard point of fury deep inside him.

He goes to bed alone, and dreams that his teeth fall from his mouth, one by one, and his scars reopen and gape until his skin is tattered.

He wakes with the phantom sensation of spitting out a tooth, lies in bed shivering as he runs his tongue carefully over his teeth, confirming them each in place. They feel sharp.

His empty rooms feel frigid and confining. He shoulders out the door, takes the stairs rather than wait on the lift, pressing out again into the wind and the looming shadow of the storm. He can barely feel the sharp grains, the tugging gusts. They feel as insubstantial as a dream. He circles past the bare trace of ash where Shroud sat vigil a few nights ago, striking out into the bare rocks.

He realizes that he’s dreaming again only when he finds himself in the middle of stone crags, too sharp and cruel to be climbable. They feel soft and brittle under his hands, painless in the way dreams can sometimes be.

Below him, the Flats. The crawler, still reeking, though the bleed of smoke has stopped.

It is still and quiet, but he can hear the little crawling things inside it, desperately working to fix what is broken.

The ground yields beneath him like a liquid.

He wakes in bed, with all his teeth, to the sound of the alarm he set, and feels as if he’s barely rested.

Chapter Text

There is a hand on his shoulder.

He takes a wide swing on instinct before his eyes are even open; it hits air and leaves his shoulder feeling sprained.

Fennec is watching him with her mouth tight when he opens his eyes, still leaning slightly to the side as if she froze there after dodging his clumsy swing.

His mouth and sinuses feel vacuum-dried; his skin taut and painful as the first few days out of the pit. His hip and side ache, a deep, throbbing feeling he can’t account for.

“What’s wrong,” he demands. The angle of the dingy light is wrong. The temperature is wrong. “What time is it?”

“1000. ...and you should get up and look.”

“Why the hell’d you let me sleep so long?” He’d woken to the alarm on his chrono, exhausted, hadn't he? Was that today? When had he fallen back asleep?

“I had other shit to deal with. I’m not your alarm.” Her voice is rough silk, catching and tearing against his calloused skin.

He meets her gaze and holds it; she turns, crosses over to the window well, bows her head. When she looks back up, she turns to face him again, and it’s like looking at another person. Or, at the same person, but another version of her, another Fennec. She looks older, tired. Worn. The strain of the past days is more visible in the lines around her mouth, the weary slope to her shoulders that says they have held up systems.

He rubs the migraine lights from his eyes and crawls out of bed, swallowing the grunt as his lower back flexes uncertainly, wobbles like the bones of it are in the wrong place, loose and overstretched. His guts protest, a surge of acid as his stomach lurches to life with him, the bits of latemeal he ate with the guards and miners the night before sitting heavy in his middle.

He steps down on something hard and small enough to hurt; hisses and kicks, and it skids across the hard floor and disappears under the bed. The whole damn Palace feels like it must be falling apart around him, blown to pieces by the storm if it isn’t shaken down by whatever void-damned pest the desert’s sent to them.

He grabs his kute and stalks to the refresher. “Give me a hint,” he says.

“Dorai,” Fennec says, with none of the bitter bite of before. She just sounds sad and alone.

“Kark. Shand– wait for me?”

“Sure, Fett. Someone’s got to keep you boys safe.”

He only realises she said ‘boys’ when he’s scrubbing his teeth, his grip slippery from applying the cream to his skin. He doesn’t ask her about it when he steps back out, armored for the day. She nods quietly to him and falls in at his right side, each movement slowed and heavy like she’s dragging more than her own weight.

She leaves him at the bottom of the lift, to get logs from Mezza she says, and stand a shift in the tower. He can’t ask her to stay, but the words are hooked like a barb and lodge in his throat while he watches her back until the shadows swallow her whole.

He goes to the animal pens.

They’re in pieces. The doors have been smashed in, fencing torn down, divider bars wedged apart and gaping. The keedee coop and tuft-rabbit hutch are shredded, broken up into nothing. There’s evidence of what was once inside; bloody bits of fur and feathers stuck to the sharp edges of wood and ripped wire.

Dorai looks numb, standing in the charnel-house of the beast pens. The place stinks of blood and frightened animals.

It’s quiet, except for the wind and a few broken calls from the survivors. There are smears of blood and thick digestive fluid on the floor– only the largest animals left a corpse, and of that only bones. They’re almost picked clean, but enough muscle and skin remains to make it horrible.

“Dorai,” he says, as kindly as he can manage. She turns as he approaches, but too slowly, too little to see him when he steps in beside her.

“It was last night. I was sleeping.” She takes a few shuffling steps forward, one of her hands turning over, palm up and limply cupped. “This morning– this.”

She stops– inevitably– at the blurgg pen. The fence is in splinters, and there are scuff marks on the tunnel wall and an ugly crack at its base.

There’s no point to it, but she goes to where the gate hangs from one hinge to enter the enclosure. Boba follows, although it would have been easier to walk through one of the wider bends in the bars.

“Two female blurrgs are left,” she says, numbly reciting off a list. “One bantha. There were three keedee, but one would not have survived. Two of the rabbit kits were hidden well enough. The jerbas are gone. The eopies are gone. The cu-pas are gone.”

“Dorai--”

She kneels down by one of the broken piles of bones. A piece of a thick femur, the end splintered into shards. A chord of vertebrae, each bigger than his fist. An unhinged jaw and a massive skull. “It was something big. Very big. The banthas and the blurggs put up a fight. Drove it off before everything was dead.”

Dorai touches the heavy skull, her thickly-gloved hands laying over a patch of fractures in the brow. “This was the oldest female.” Her fingers tremble over the dented skull. “She fought so hard.”

He doesn’t know what to say. He stands beside her, too quietly; carefully puts a hand on her shoulder.

She traces the crack again and again. “I do not know how it got in.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he says, too awkwardly. She nods, maybe, or just bows her head. He takes his hand back.

She murmurs something in Ryl that he isn’t meant to catch– he only makes out I’m sorry. One of the surviving females ventures close enough to sniff her roughly and when she twists to touch its wide nose he sees the flash of wetness in her eyes.

For a moment he is standing in the throne room looking down through a thick grating, watching old drunk Malakili sob himself sick over a dead rancor and feeling a stir of foreboding that he shuts down quickly.

Because he’s always been too smart for omens, hasn’t he.

“Put in the labor requests you need,” he says, too late. “We’ll get it cleaned up, and we’ll find the big bastard that did this and burn it out of its nest.”

She nods, but it’s not to him. Her gaze does not focus on him when she stands up and turns toward him.

“Yes, Fett,” she says a moment later, to the wall meters behind him.

The smell of blood and the animals’ fear clings to him. It trails him through the Palace like a pack of strill or a bonegnawer out in the Wastes, sticking close to his heels after he’s left Dorai to her grief.

He flags down Zhosef on his way to the power hub. They’re as exhausted as the everyone else is, a pile of layered, wrinkled cloth, their eyes peering out in the strip they’ve left for them, red-rimmed and bloodshot. They’re hunched in an outcropping in one of the corridor hubs, half-leaning, half-sitting on the jut of tunnel wall.

“What’s the word, Fett,” they say, shuffling up into a straighter slouch. Their voice crackles with fatigue and the dry.

They’re clutching a datapad. Boba can just see hints of the display through smudged dust– a list, most of the entries crossed out. He’s grimly certain it’s the current reality of Zhosef’s labor force. There are so few beings in the corridors, in the galley, in the barracks. Even with the guards doubled on every rotation Fennec can manage, there’s nowhere near enough life in the place. It’s like time’s rewound in on itself, like it’s a year ago and they’ve just started to feel like their hold on the Palace and the territory is real.

“The beast pens.”

Zhosef winces. It’s a full body movement, not just their eyes, but their shoulders, their arms, their back. “Karking hell,” they sigh. “What a mess. The fucking storm.”

“Do you have anyone working on them?”

Zhosef puffs out their cheeks; the wraps of dustcloth around their face crinkle, expand, sag. “Two. Took ‘em from Parnel’s lot. Do we need more?”

They look down to their datapad, flicking the list up until it hits the end, sliding through a few windows of tightly-packed text. “The rota’s stretched. Don’t have a lot of hands these days.”

“Let’s get the surviving beasts rounded up, and something put together that can hold them until we can do more. Dorai should be putting in a request.” Should be. “She’s taking it hard.”

“Ugly thing,” Zhosef says grimly. “Don’t blame her. We’ll get it done, Boss.”

Boba nods. “I know.” He feels too large for his words, somehow. Out of scale. Anchored and weighted down with something. It’s not hope. Maybe a warning. It rings dully in the empty hallways, either way.

Mezza gives him a long, solemn look when he walks into the engineering office. There’s only one kitchen apprentice lurking near the doorway, her hand tight around the wrist of one junior mechanic. He’s not surprised; the corridor was almost deserted as well, only two of Mezza’s mousedroids rolling off to some little maintenance task. There aren’t that many left to gossip with, after all.

He tries not to feel judged by Mezza’s serious tone when she holds out a stack of reports. “The seismometer logs for the night are first. The disturbance was very active.”

“Let me guess. Around the beast pens.”

“Yes.” She nods seriously. “I have not seen the damage, but I have heard. It is a grave loss. The pack animals were needed.”

He knows he’s imagining it. Must be. But the ‘you are not’ rolls through his head as clearly as if the old Ugnaught had truly said it.

He clenches his jaw and takes the reports. When he opens his mouth again, his teeth ache; his throat burns like he’s swallowed acid. He pulls his thoughts back before he can remember exactly how that feels.

He looks up at the display instead. The storm looks bigger, swirling out and bloating like a scalt drawing in air. “That wasn’t so far south before.”

“No,” Mezza agrees.

Her dark eyes close, and he can see for a moment how tired she is. That there might still be room for something like fear in her, despite centuries of life spent being traded from one cruel hand of fate to the next. Boba’s sorry– suddenly, deeply– for how unkind he has let his thoughts about her become. He can feel the heavy weight of Djarin’s stare, if he knew.

He reminds himself how very skilled Mezza is at her job. His operation would have crumbled without her, like the sand castle he’s heard the Palace mockingly called for as long as he’s spent time on Tatooine– and, he’d wager, like it’s probably been called ever since the B’omarr Order built the damned thing.

“What can you tell me.”

“It has spread south, like you say,” she says, turning her seat to face the display. “It’s expanse is greater to the north and east, as well. It spreads to the west– see, there.” She aims a red indicator beam at the spotchy western reach of the storm, it bounds flickering and spittering as the input from the many intercepted sensors and holo-relays feed in and out. “It was not so far before. This pass, north of the High Range, is almost overtaken. Soon there will be no way to reach the Northern Dune Sea than through Beggar’s Canyon.

He does not say that it’s surrounding them, no matter what it looks like. The void-damned storm is not sentient, and he’ll be a paranoid old fool before he gives it that much respect.

“Nothing toward us?”

“A little,” she says. “Here, the ore crawler.” The indicator light moves, lighting up the tiny dot at the edge of B’omarr Flats, roughly where the crawler’s squatted for more than a week. “It is not yet within the storm, but should it continue to grow, tomorrow it will be.”

“Finally coming home to roost then,” he says.

She turns back to him, fixing him with her tired gaze. “Yes. You should consider leaving, Fett. Although there may not be far to go, by land. But you could fill your ships with all who remain, before flight is impossible.”

Leave. The hell he will.

He snaps his mouth closed so violently he bites his tongue and has to swallow the blood.

“No.” His stomach rolls; it feels too tight, too full, like a forgotten geyser that’s started to steam. “No. I will not leave. If the staff want to take their chances, they are welcome to. The workers and guards– those who’ve bothered to stay this long.” He forces a breath. Forces himself to calm.

His head pounds in time with his racing heart.

“Take a ship– two if you need them. But you will be tracked. And my ships will be returned. Take the miners with you. Go to a New Republic system and drop them off, make them the local magistrate’s probem. Void, take them to Nevarro. Let Karga return some slaves to their homes. He likes to be a hero.”

He laughs. It’s an ugly thing, starts too deep, ends too high. “He should be grateful for the clout. Let him owe us a favor.”

Mezza considers him solemnly. “I will not go today. But it will not be safe to remain for much longer. If you mean what you have said, I shall alert Zhosef and Shand, and advise all that, should they wish to take this opportunity you have given them, a ship will depart at sunsdown.”

There’s something unsettling in her old eyes. Resignation; judgment; a burden of disappointment.

His mouth waters with the churning acid trying to crawl it’s way up his gut. How dare she–

–he will not lower himself to her expectations. He closes his eyes behind his visor; keeps his posture stiff. The light is too much to see through.

“Fine. Whoever goes, they are to take the miners. Tell Ksziro and H’huun they’re off the guard rotation after midday. Give them my congratulations on their promotion to pilot and copilot. The course is for Nevarro. Message Greef Karga and tell him to expect some visitors. You heard me–” he adds, turning to the kitchen apprentice and the mechanic. The two girls are pale; the Ovissian looks like she wants to faint. “There’s your chance to go see some lava fields.”

“It will be done.” Mezza nods, then gestures to the stack of reports he’s still holding. “The report from the mine workers is there. They had much to share on the Mining Guild’s activities.”

Void, he’d forgotten. “Thank you.” He looks again to the display wall. “Update me at eveningmeal– I want to know everything that damned thing does.”

He takes the stairs down from Mezza’s office, like the effort will burn off some of whatever’s churning under his skin, the headache fog in his brain. He’s cursing the decision before he’s a quarter of the way down; whatever he did to his hip and side is throbbing. He doesn’t know if the bit of wetness he can feel there is blood, sweat or his skin weeping. His helmet communicator buzzes.

He knows it will be Fennec when he answers; the private frequency isn’t strong enough for Din to reach, if he’s even out of hyperspace yet. (He’s out of hyperspace. Unless he hit trouble on the way, he’s been out of hyperspace since just after the suns rose.) He doesn’t let himself hope.

“Boba,” Fennec says. “Something’s happened to the crawler.”

“On my way.”

The storm may not have reached the crawler yet, but the B’omarr Flats are almost out of sight behind the wall of dark sand.

“Switch to thermal,” Fennec says when he comes striding out of the lift, his rangefinder already lowering into place. She turns to face the storm, raising the binoculars. “Just wish I’d done it earlier.”

He sees it at once. A smear of heat, so red it’s almost black on his HUD. The cooler outline of the ore crawler is barely discernable beside it.

“I think it’s been like that since the night. No sign of movement.” She swears, mutters something to herself. “I can’t believe I missed it. The storm must be fucking with my eyes.”

He hasn’t heard her this angry with herself since he was twenty. He had no idea what to say then, and no idea how to comfort her now.

“If you didn’t see it, no one could have,” he says instead. “I’m going down there.” He needs Fennec up here, and Din at his side. He’s clicked over to his helmet comm-controls and selected Djarin’s frequency before he remembers.

He stares past the indicator of the waiting connection until the characters blur at the edge of his vision. He needs his best. He tries to think of any other name, the guards he’s watched train, helped train on too-rare occasions, but all that he can think of is Din. Might as well try to substitute his cuirass for a stranger’s armor as try to replace the Mandalorian.

He stops, paralyzed by the gap in his thoughts, a void too wide to get over.

“Boba,” Shand says, low and private, jerking him back from the abyss.

“I’ll need a squad. Do you know who’s left? Who’s the best we have?”

“I’ll get Terza and Nir’g.”

He knows them both. Terza is a Tatooine native, new to the guards but familiar with the landscape, and she’d taken to Din’s training like a natural. Nir’g wasn’t born here, but he was almost as close as it got, dumped into Mos Espa as a child when the podracer who owned him and his father crashed and burned in the Jundland Wastes. He was a few squads more experienced than Terza, not much, but his Reesarian eyesight would be a boon out on the sands.

Boba nods, once, sharp. He can place them. They are good. Good.

“Have them meet me in the vehicle bay. We’ll take speeders. Watch my back out there, Shand.”

She nods and winks as the lift door closes on him, already speaking into her communicator handset.

The orecrawler is fully on its side, the house-sized machine smashed off its treads. This isn’t an accidental roll off a dune because the drivers were fighting over the controls– it was thrown from its place so hard he’d think it hit a buried explosive, if there were any sign of heat-scoring on its dented side.

The hatch to the processing chamber is torn open; its cargo of purified minerals was probably solid before the reactor breach. It’s a half-melted-out cast now, a spill frozen in time. The surface is pitted black, glistening with glass where the blowing sand met liquid metal. He can almost feel the heat trapped inside; the outer shell cooled too fast, insulated the still-molten innards. It glows a wicked red on his HUD.

His proximity sensors start to flash, a scrolling alert so understated it takes him a second to process it.

“Stay away from the spill. It’s hot enough to ignite anything left in that wreck,” he yells across comms, signaling the guards back. And if the surface yields under the growing internal pressure, what comes spurting out will be hot enough to vaporize. He doesn’t mention that part.

He scans the external temperature, the internal. Logs the readings. He’ll give them to Mezza and Parnel. Have them run the calculations and tell him how likely it is to go brittle and shatter, and how likely it is to explode under the increasing pressure. What chance they have of containing the slag; what chance it has of killing them all.

Might be nothing to do but warn the local tribes to give it a wide berth and leave it to simmer, or detonate at a distance later.

“Run the perimeter. Look for the crew.”

He doesn’t expect anything within the perimeter to be alive. The crew made it to the shelter of the mesa or they didn’t make it at all. Still he adjusts his heat overlay back into the range of common sentient body temperatures, down out of the inferno range it read from the crawler, and searches out his quadrant diligently.

He sees as little as he’s expecting, until Nir’g gives a startled report-in over comms– something dark and moving to the north. He moves in that direction, stalking slow, and they pop into view in the overlay all at once.

They shift orientation to follow him when he circles to the side. They’re aware he’s there, but they don’t approach, or retreat. When he gets closer he can make out the blurred outlines of something about the size of a womp-rat, with the cool gradient of a reptilian– some of the heat signatures squared, some long and low to the ground. One metamorphs into the other and gives him enough context to make out a quadrupedal shape with a hunched back.

“Pack of dragonets.”

“Figures,” Terza says. “They follow big predators around.”

Nir’g swears. “You mean they follow krayt dragons around.”

“Oh, there’s plenty of nasty things they could be following. Why limit your options,” Boba says, and Terza restrains a shocked guffaw. Ah, she was one of the newer recruits. Hadn’t met the dour legend’s sense of gallows humour yet. “Hold position and let me get close enough to see if they’ve found anything interesting. Then we’ll leave them be.”

“Do you think we could chase them off? A couple blaster shots?” Nir’g says optimistically.

Terza scoffs. “Not before they coated you in acid as a startle response.”

Boba clears his throat across the comm and smirks to himself as they fall silent, remembering who they’re babbling to. The reaction does go away eventually, but it’s gratifying while he has it.

He approaches with caution– Terza’s not wrong about that startle response, and he’s not too big for them to consider as a potential meal, if they’re desperate. Although he suspects they’ve recently eaten well.

They finally move when he’s fewer than ten meters away, close enough to see them through the haze. One of the ones standing starts to shuffle away from him, and then they all seem to, standing up one by one and sauntering back maybe five meters before settling down again. He stops in place and arms his flamethrower, waiting, looking for a sign that they’re readying to make a run, at him or away from him. Might be the cool of the wind making them calm, or they don’t want to move far from each other in the storm.

Either way it lets him get close enough to see what they were crouched over.

Digestive acid has left the logo of the mining guild almost burnt out of the duracloth coverall– almost. Not a whole uniform. Most of the torso, maybe, the rest torn or melted off. There’s the glitter of wires from a torn headset, half stripped out to chew on. They aren’t as bad about wiring as a rill, but seems they won’t turn it down either.

“Found the captain.” The tattered coverall was too small for one of the euphemistically-titled foremen, unless the mining guild had started to diversify their slave drivers.

“There’s bits of something over here, but… I don’t know what it is. Sir,” Nir’g says.

“We’ve all got a good enough guess. Does it look like a bottom half-?”

“No, it’s. Just. Smears and pieces. Against a rock.” He sounds sick to his stomach.

So there was something bigger out here the scavengers were following. Not usual krayt behavior to smack their prey around; usually they aimed to kill immediately and eat with minimal fuss. Couldn’t rule it out, though, if someone took a shot with a blaster and managed to hit a sensitive bit, they might have succeeded in making it angry. Hell, if it brushed that spill, they might have succeeded in making it furious.

He presses a hand to his aching hip and lets himself hope that smear is the foreman. The deserters only reported one, and there wouldn’t be more than one on a little crawler like this, not for the handful of laborers needed to keep the processing equipment going.

“It’s high time we got out of here. We’ve got as much of an answer as we’re going to get without meeting its teeth.”

“If we got a couple long-distance slugthrowers we could come back and take those dragonets out,” Terza suggests.

“For what? We don’t need the meat and they didn’t flip that crawler, or get into the pens.” The dragonets couldn’t have caused that carnage. They were too small, too timid when it came to sentient spaces and living, fighting prey. The tuff-rabbits and the keedee, those they could have managed. And the cu-pas, maybe, the poor docile things. But they wouldn’t attack most beasts larger than themselves like that– and couldn’t do that kind of damage to a bantha or blurgg, nevermind a herd of each. “Leave’m. You’ll see more wildlife before long if this storm keeps up. Things come to the rocks when the Dune Sea is shifting.”

They push the speeders as fast as they dare back up the rise; he feels his stomach lurch as the wind gets under the grav drive, making him horribly weightless.

“Slower up the ridge. It’s not going to surprise us on the rock,” he comms, seeing as Nir’g’s speeder leans too wide ahead of him. He pulls it back, stabilizers juddering under him, and Boba falls back to let him slow.

Terza shoots an arm out to the right, and he sees what she saw a moment later– a dark mass he can just make out as a bunch of rill lying nose to tail in the lee of one of the rock crags.

“Well spotted,” he calls into comms over the wind and engine whine. “There’s your wildlife, Nir’g.”

Less than he expects, as they approach the palace, though. And that worries him. These solid walls should be sheltering a whole new menagerie. Something big must be scaring them away.

They make it to the vehicle bay without any more surprises. He orders the guards to an impromptu meal and an extra water ration: they’ve suddenly got more supply than staff, and he needs morale as high as it can get.

Dorai is in the galley when he gets there, nursing a bottle of spotchka that looks like it might have come from Fennec’s personal store. She looks up at the three of them, and as Terza and Nir’g move off toward the smell of one of Ygabba’s spicy root-stews, he splits off to approach her, slowly, waiting for a sign– or a flung object– to show him he’s not welcome.

She's pulled her headpiece off in the heat-- or to sweat off the drunk, or both, but it's a sign she's in the mood for a fight. 

Not that she's in the right place to get one. Boba didn't have the patience or room for anyone who would get high-minded about modesty, or ask intrusive questions about the lobed ears a lady may or may not carry around with her.  

“Did you find something to shoot out there?” she asks, voice husky and tired. She pushes at her headpiece, a sad shed hide on the table, but doesn't make a move to put it on.

“No. Something big tossed that crawler. …Probably the damn krayt everyone’s been hearing. Bigger than I thought, big enough to chase anything inwards. But there’s nothing out there now but some dragonets.”

“They are scavengers?”

“Yeah. Harmless.”

“You left them alive?”

“Yes…” He tries to read the blank mask of her face. Even her lekku are still. “They follow trouble. They don’t make it.”

She cares about animals. She cares about animals more than she cares about any sentient left breathing. He's fairly sure she didn't want him to take out their misery on a handful of bone-hoarding scavengers. But he's not sure which way her anger is turning. 

“...good.” She sags, some of the banked rage in her seeming to die out and leave her on half-power. “Enough things are dying.”

Rylothian melodrama, he doesn’t say. This is a mood a joke won’t bring her back from, even one that had more legs than Boba’s brand of dark humor.

“Get second rations of dinner tonight,” he tells her instead, sharp and commanding. “And don’t drink more of that than you drink water, all right? We’re not adding you to the list of casualties.”

“...yes, Fett,” she sighs, and puts her head down.

The galley half-fills– and then empties, and does not refill. Even Dorai finally leaves, waking as if from a dream, replacing her headpiece, and slipping out with the grace of a less hungover woman.

Mezza buzzes his communicator after she’s gone. “The ship will depart shortly,” she tells him, instead of giving him another update on the storm. He taps up the chrono in his HUD display. Sunsdown already.

“Many have chosen to leave,” Mezza says. “Though they have promised to return.”

“I didn’t require that.”

“No. The first offered. Many others followed. I have made note of it.”

“I won’t hold them to it. …How many are we losing.” He bites back his curse when she tells him. “Didn’t think we even had that many left.”

“The storm is growing,” she says somberly. “There will not be another opportunity to leave by ship tomorrow night. Have you reconsidered?”

“My place is here,” he says gruffly. He pushes himself to his feet, striding from the galley in the direction of the observation ports opposite the hangar. “Is the ship stocked?”

“They have been provided rations for two weeks. Fuel for Nevarro, and to return, with small delays. I have recorded this.”

“Karga say anything.”

“Magistrate Karga has returned my missive. He awaits the arrival of your staff with optimism.”

“Sounds like that old schemer.”

“I will send you my reports,” Mezza says, and disconnects.

He stares out the observation port as the ship’s hatch seals shut. It’s the biggest of the transports. He tries to feel something about that, other than the grim knot of stress and fury that’s scratching around his chest like a piece of sand.

He can just make out Ksziro and H’huun on the bridge in the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, still in their guard uniforms. They see him looking and salute as the engines engage.

Boba nods back, and watches the transport until its spot of light vanishes in the darkening sky.

He finds himself in the dim kitchens after, instead of chasing the half-formed plan to go to his workroom and shuffle cargo logs until he gives up and sleeps. The oven in the front corner is still running, though the others have been shut down and sealed, vent hoods disconnected from the air shafts. He can see where one ruptured, rust giving way under a badly-aimed gust or pressure build.

Not the sturdy old corner oven though. It’d always been the reliable one, as far back as he’d been at the Palace. It’d been a warm place at night when nightmares chased him out of solitude, somewhere to grab an extra bite of nightstew or a tooka-doze. Sometimes Ygabba would already be there drowsing up against it, the soft crackle of its fuel chamber a reminder that she was home and not in the camp he’d pulled her out of.

She joins him there now, sunworn and smiling through her own fatigue. Her eyes aren’t focusing; he knows they give up, after enough sleepless nights, and she just moves through a world made of blurs and sparkles, relying on her memory and sense of touch to appear as if nothing’s wrong.

“A bad evening?” She doesn’t have to see his expression to know it. He’s here, and she’s here. A bad evening.

“We worked so damn hard,” he sighs. “To find a crew on this dustball we could trust. Who’d be willing to work here. We didn’t even have a full staff. They’re going now.”

She tuts. “I know. I know, bunch of womp rats getting skittish over a little wind…”

“It’s not a little wind.”

“Well, it’s littler than it would have to be to chase me out.” She leans against the warm stone and for a moment the vulnerability shows as she presses her hand hard over her eyes. “I’m too old to run to the Sand Shore and back on a whim anymore.”

“You’re a year younger than me.”

“And here you are, instead of out by the dunes”

He snorts, and she snorts, and the oven crackles.

“I’ve lost most of the good cooks. They think they’re all going to find work with Porcellus until this tides over or something. I doubt it,” she says after a minute. “Most of the apprentices left tonight. The ones who don’t have any family nearby. I’ll have to change meal allotments. We have plenty to eat. Just a matter of getting it cooked.”

“We’ll all pitch in. Everyone who wants to eat, anyway.”

“Might be worse than no help at all,” she tuts without any real condemnation.

“Well, then give them raw tubers to chew,” he says. “Worked with me, didn’t it.”

She laughs out loud, head tipped back. “Sands and stars, Boba, I’d forgotten about that. My father’s face– your face!”

“Thought I was going break my teeth,” he says. “I’d only just finished growing in the back ones.”

“Kept your mouth busy though,” she says. “And filled your belly.”

“I didn’t want to eat for days after that. Felt like carrying around rocks.”

She chuckles until she sighs. “You were so young– we were so young. Didn’t feel like it then.”

“Just imagine what you’ll be saying in another thirty years about this.”

“I’ll be telling my strapping young Twi’lek manservant all about it. I intend to retire.”

“Liar. Not as long as the Palace stands.” They grin at each other– or he grins at her and she knows he’s doing it despite being unable to see it, so she grins back.

She closes her eyes, breathing out slowly and steadily until he wonders if she’ll be dozing here tonight like the old days, what old nightmares the wind is stirring up. But she groans, giving herself a shake. “Morning comes early in the kitchen. I’ll have caff in the morning, Boba. Until then.”

“Good night, Yggy.”

He watches her go, then watches nothing until his gaze finds the shadow where he knows his height is marked up the wall. He hadn’t even had a chance to get Grogu there before the karking storm blew in.

Maybe that was for the best.

He hears hurried footsteps; the door separating galley from kitchen bounces open hard enough to hit the wall as pressure equalizes. “Mistress Ygabba? Have you seen– Sir?”

“You need Ygabba? Better be an emergency.”

“No, it’s you. Sir, it’s a report for you.” The guard collects himself. “It’s Dorai.”

“Something wrong?”

The guard shuffles nervously. “She’s gone. She’s taken the last of your animals, sir. Last reports have her heading west on Banthaback--”

“Let her go. I’ll call my contacts in Mos Espa. If she makes it that far, I’ll have eyes on her.”

And he’ll have to make some show of punishment, only backhandedly merciful, even though he can’t find it in him to blame her for this. The last of ‘his’ animals, it sounds wrong. She raised them, nursed them through all but the direst illness, contracted the vets for what she couldn’t fix herself. He’s seen her carve rot out of a bantha’s foot, chattering to it in Ryl, with the flimsiest restraints to protect her. She chose the meat animals for slaughter without flinching and birthed their foals.

They were only ever very nominally his animals.

But he’ll handle that all when the storm’s over. He can’t do anything about it now except make sure it doesn’t swallow her.

There’s a message waiting for him on his communicator relay when he gets to his workroom. All thoughts of sending a ‘gram to his contacts in Mos Espa evaporate as he stares at the blinking message light, at the readout beside it. He knows it by heart. Din’s ship.

He tries to remember if he had saved any messages of Din’s before, something the relay might have mislabeled as a new communication with the holo-comm network degrading in the storm. Maybe that one from– Void, was it really only two weeks ago?– confirming that he and Grogu were on their way to Tatooine, sent right before they entered hyperspace.

Boba had watched that message so many times when it had come in, he can almost see the child’s big curious eyes now, can almost replay the whole thing in his head. Can hear Din’s excitement and nervousness, there if you knew to look for it. Can see his flexing fingers and Grogu strapped into the copilot’s seat, watching Din speak into the recorder and holding something tightly in one of his little hands. Soft tufts of fabric peeking out through the spaces between his fingers– a stuffed toy of some sort. A tooka.

He jerks his head, shakes it clear. No. No he hadn’t saved that.

He stabs the message indicator, activating it.

It takes a moment to start. His heart drops at the long, blue-lit nothingness.

“Fett,” Din’s voice says and Boba jerks his head up. “Fett, I don’t know– you– get any— but— interference– bad.”

The Mandalorian flickers into view. His holo-image is wrong. Boba startles back, sits upright in surprise when the ‘gram of Din’s helmet stretches, lengthening and splitting before his head vanishes entirely, just to reappear three centimeters to the right of his torso.

It’s the interference. Din’s holo-image warps and fades, uneven and disorienting while his recorded voice keeps talking. “It’s 0900 on Tatooine. I’m– jump– hyperspace. I– back soon. The child is–

“–the child is–

“–the child is–

“–the child–”

Din’s voice drops and warbles into a long, fading drone until there’s nothing but crackling static. His holo-image disappears. The message light blinks out.

“No!” Boba snarls, swipes at the relay– pulls his clawed hand back in surprise when the message light blinks back on, Din’s holo-image suddenly there again, edges crisp and clean until Boba drags his hand through them.

“--with the Jedi. He’s still sleeping. He hasn’t woken up since we left. But he’s safe here.”

Din says it calmly, like he’s reciting a sitrep for a senior warrior. But Boba can hear the faint catch in his voice, the pause and off-beat syllable that says his heart’s breaking.

“He will wake. The Jedi says he is trying, but he’s drained of energy. He needs time to recover. Mos Eisley’s already closed. All inter-system sensors show the storm getting worse. I’m leaving now before it’s impossible to get back. Boba, ni--”

He flickers in and out, the holo-image shifting and fading, loading sideways like something rescued from an antique datastick. The image jumps and reloads, displaying Din’s chest and helmet, then his full body, then nothing.

““--darasuum.”

The message light blinks out.

He sits heavily. Reaches out and selects Vhawn Jurr’s frequency from the list in his relay.

He knows the ‘gram he leaves is coherent; he hears himself record it, distantly. Feels his back, locked rigid and upright. Lady Jurr will know to have her people keep eyes on Dorai, if she makes it to Mos Espa. To board the animals at the Jurr stables if needed. That he will compensate her for it.

Something in his chest screams and tries to tear itself apart. He disconnects the comm relay, and closes his eyes.

When he opens them again, he’s in the throne room, lungs heaving like he swam the length of Tipoca City to get there. His ears ring, his bones shake– he knows, knows they’re going to split him apart.

He watches as his ribs stretch, pop up one by one to splay open, welcoming. He lifts a hand. He lifts another hand. He lifts another hand. He lifts another hand and reaches inside to pull out a fistfull of sand.

Somewhere, the krayt screams. Or maybe it’s the wind.

Void, but he wishes he could strangle that fucking wind.

He struggles upright– the throne room spins, when did he lay down? The throne room spins, and it’s too small, the lights are before his eyes but he can feel them in the tatters of his skin. He can’t go out into the wind like this; it would steal him like a kite.

He vomits.

He struggles upright, gets to his feet.

No. No those are his feet. He can see them, but they’re so far away. He steps and they move.

But what is he walking on. And why are his feet going the wrong way. Doesn’t he know he has to be careful. It’s fucking dark in here, except for the lights in his eyes, but when he closes them he can’t tell where he left that damn pit at all.

He laughs, stretches over. Over. Over. Over to the pit. Malakili couldn’t bring himself to clear out Pateesa’s body himself; he remembers how old Porcellus had half the kitchen down there the next morning to haul the rancor’s corpse away.

He doesn’t think they ate it. But he was dead by then. He’ll have to ask Ygabba.

His hip burns, his side throbs. He reaches up to his face and his scars have split open. He pulls the skin away and feels that he’s left his ear somewhere. It must be lying front-down; no wonder he can hear the ground breathing.

Maybe he left it with his legs, down in the pit.

No. Those aren’t his legs. Too scaly. They twitch, sudden, from where they vanish in shadow. The pit is deeper than it was before, the bottom sliding out of view down a long, long shaft obscured by twists and ledges. A body lies on one of them, a lightsaber inches from a skeletal hand.

He leans closer. The light shifts. There is no body obscured in the shadow to match those clawed legs; they aren’t even attached to one another.

They can’t be Bossk’s legs. Those were disintegrated, their pitiful remains left to freeze on Jekara. Bossk is light years away from here on new legs, not down there. No bit of him is here on Tatooine. Probably regrown them twice since. His old mentor is alive.

The armor that lies huddled in a crevice further down is not his father’s. He wears that now. What remains of it.

The sightless eyes from the head that has rolled to the ledge below are not his father’s.

The face frozen in a scream, the body half embedded in a rock wall is not his. It looks like him, but it is one of the others. The many many others. He is not like them. That is not him.

The body below it looks like him, but it is not him.

He touches his face again to make sure, splits the tattered skin on his sharp fingers. No, he’s not that young anymore.

The pit is endlessly deep and the miserable remains numerous enough to decorate it all the way down in wires, pelts, gore. Something shifts deep at its center, cruel and hungry. There is a beast in there, a starving thing, an angry thing that has gathered those bodies like a hoard.

He whirls to the throne, smashes his fist into the grate release on its arm and slides down, blaster ready.

He lands on sandy ground, patches of the rock wall still rust-red with old forgotten stains, bones long gnawed down by lesser sandworms. As he turns a wide circle he sees no trace of the bodies.

No ghosts, no visions. No monster, no shadow. Nothing in the pit but him.

The door to the old beastkeepers’ quarters is open, probably as it was left years back, when Jabba left the palace for the last time. Nobody’s used these lower levels since. He gave Dorai better quarters than this, and there’s no brutal menagerie to keep down here. But– just in case– he waits, watches, as if the phantoms will come again, as if the floor will melt into that deep pit.

The ground stays where he put it.

The grating is already back in place; the mechanism doesn’t open it for long. He looks up through it, sees the throne room behind the bars, the waiting throne looking as if it's in a cage.

No– he’s the one in the cage, looking out.

He’s still standing there when Fennec finds him. He stares up almost without comprehension at the way the angle foreshortens her body. He knows her boots, but not from below, and the shift is fascinating.

She stands above him, looking for something– and then looks down.

Her face is blank and calm, at odds with a body tense and jangling. The set of her shoulders doesn’t go with the loose line of her jaw.

“Fett,” she says calmly. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Well, she’s found him.

“...Here I am.” It’s a croak, his mouth so dry it won’t even stick to itself.

She leaves; a moment later, the grate grinds back, and she appears at the edge, arm extended. “Grab on.”

He does, and she yanks him up until he can grab the side of the pit and finish the job, rolling out of the way before the grate closes again.

“There are tunnels down there, you know,” he says to the throne room ceiling. “I could have followed them out.”

“There was an idiot man down there, you know,” she pants. She sits down beside him, peering through the gaps in the grate to the dark pit. A bit of sweat glistens at her hairline, a bit of steam rising from it, but her expression is calm. Placid.

He can see his breath. How late is it?

“I was admiring the view,” he says.

“You’re crazy,” she tells him. “It’s freezing down here.”

It is. It will be colder out in the sands. He knows, has spent his share of them out there, burnt skin exposed to the air to freeze instead. He hopes Dorai took survival gear for herself, and not just the animals. You can’t always tell how cold you are after that much spotchka.

“Come to bed?” he asks the ceiling.

“Yeah,” Fennec says, and stands, hauling him to his feet after her.

They haul the nightsheets onto the bed, shoving the light day ones into heap on the side. She steals his side; he takes Djarin’s, curling on his side. There’s something up against the wall that didn’t used to be there, dark on dark in an indistinct blur.

He blinks, squints like it might improve his night vision, and eventually turns the shadows into the shape of Din’s trunk. Because the damn beroya hadn’t bothered to haul it back to his own room before he left.

He’d promised he’d be back.

Fennec shifts beside him, rolls and pulls at the sheets until he begrudgingly gives her more of them, then rolls again so she’s tucked up behind him. He feels her breath on his shoulders. Her cold nose tucks into the crook of his neck a moment later.

“Void-damned, woman!”

“Stop complaining,” she mumbles into his back. “Big baby.”

“Did you turn into ice up on that tower?”

“Big baby,” she repeats, and determinedly rubs her face against him hard. “Serves you right for being so warm. What do you do– soak up the sun all day?”

“Of course. Can’t you tell from my tan.”

He can feel her chest shake more than he can hear her laugh, but it makes him breathe out a little easier all the same.

“That’s it,” she says drowzily. “Just what we need. A vacation. Find a nice resort planet. Lots of beaches. Go be crime lords there instead.”

“You’d be bored in a week,” he says.

“Give me some credit. Two weeks. …Let’s pick one with blue sand. I’ve never seen blue sand.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“...hold you to that, Boba Fett,” she says. Or at least he thinks she means to, because she falls asleep somewhere around the middle.

Have you ever seen one this big?

Ten days in, the storm still looming out in the dunes, the joke is officially dead.

When he can’t find Fennec, she’s up the tower with Parnel, watching it. Comm reliability is shot; it’s easier half the time to go to her than it is to message.

Sometimes the turbulence settles into a stable vortex out there; a spinning spout of sand will come charging the palace and then shatter on the rocks with a scream.

It is worse to the west. The storm grew while they slept. In the morning, Mezza reports that it’s cut off the Mospic pass. By midday meal, it closes over Beggar’s Canyon. Not long after, Mos Entha’s last communicator relay falls silent.

It’s hard not to assign a malevolence to it, to imagine it saw their escape route and slammed down on it. The sand is hungry. He won’t give it that.

Portmaster Miunb is true to their word, and manages to send one garbled text-comm to warn him the Mos Espa spaceport will be closed before sunsset. He passes the message on to Mezza and Zhosef. They haven’t had the workforce to send any shipments out for days. They send messages they hope will get through instead, ordering the redirect of anything received to storage in the city.

Kark, they’re going to need Shroud when the damn storm blows over.

He hopes the young man made it to Mos Pelgo with his musician in tow. He hopes there’s a chance in hell he’ll come back.

He’ll dig water himself if he needs to. Wouldn’t be the first time. He’ll hand Shroud an armful of black melon with a mostly open heart.

Oro can even have one.

He makes what he can from the records Shroud left, but they’re already hopelessly out of date; reality is three shuffles of the deck newer than the last accounting and untangling it would be like trying to bail out a Tipoca structural leak with a whisky tumbler.

“Better hope the power generation doesn’t go, Boss,” Parnel says when he makes his third trip up the tower. The lift door closes behind him with a finality he refuses to hear. The air pressure changes wildly with the wind and even the normally-silent sounds can shudder and slam. That’s what it is; the machinery’s not taunting him.

“I’ve survived bigger falls,” Fennec says, leaning farther over the edge of the observation ledge than he’d like. She pulls back, giving him a wink he can just make out behind her helmet. “What about you, Fett.”

“I’d take the stairs,” he says bluntly and Parnel gives a nervous version of her usual burbling chuckle.

Fennec smirks, sharp and loose. He frowns, and from the way her smirk sharpens, he gets the feeling she can tell even through his helmet.

“No harm meant, Boss. Just looking for a way to keep it interesting.”

He turns his head, looks out at the swirling wall of sand and dust. “Anything new happening out there? How’s that crawler.”

“Just how you left it,” she says. “No movement. Not even those dragonets you found. My guess– the Guild’s not going to be trying their luck out here again for a while.”

She’s probably right. The cocky confidence in her words goads at something younger and dumber in him, makes him want to prove her wrong, for all the good that would do. And he doesn’t want her to be wrong.

…She wasn’t there when he woke up. How long has she been up here this time? “When’s your shift up?”

“You miss me?”

He stares at her, silent, until she gives in. “Rotation’s done in about an hour. You got a job for me?”

He’s not going to tell her to take a nap. Not in front of Parnel. Not the way she is right now; it wouldn’t just go unheeded. It would earn retaliation. Hell, from the way she’s acting, he’d think she finally found the bottom of a bottle, but it’s been decades since he’d seen her hit one this hard. Or, she’s exhausted.

Being drunk gets you stupid; being stupid gets you reckless; being reckless gets you killed– or worse. Caught. He’s heard her say it more times than he could count. Had even before he’d been old enough to be served in a cantina himself, in the systems where they cared about details like age.

“If not,” she says, when he hasn’t answered. “I’m going on a hunt.” She purses her lips at the way his helmet turns, that tiny bit she knows him well enough to recognize means she’s earned his attention. “Some sleemo stole my spotchka. All of it. Out of my rooms.”

“Must have been a big sleemo,” Parnel says.

“That will just make them easier to find,” she says darkly.

“No job,” he says. “Keep your eyes on out here.”

He takes the stairs down.

H2 has two large tubs of wound cream waiting for him in the med-clinic. He almost makes it out with them unnoticed, heading briskly for the exit when he hears her unmistakable metal gait approaching down the corridor, but meets her in the doorway instead.

She stares at him, optic receptors blinking on and off while she processes. “Master Fett!” she says. “Excellent. Please, have a seat.”

He does not. She scans him anyway, then steals his blood and jabs him with more vitamins, fussing worriedly. “Your hemoglobin levels are exceptional, however the symptoms of scorbutus have worsened. The collagen stability of your skin is failing at an alarming rate and your gums are badly inflamed. I do not understand the root cause.”

She taps at his back with her manipulators, head bowed close to put her audial receptors against his lungs. “Please breathe in deeply for a count of three. Have you decreased your caff-intake as prescribed? I do not have the facilities–”

He gets up. Doesn’t shoulder past her but uses his bulk to step away, pulling his kute back up from where it’s hanging at his waist. He reaches for his chestplate and stops at her shocked cry. “Master Fett!”

He looks back, and for a moment he thinks he’s left a piece of his back in her manipulator. Then he realises that he has.

The air stings against the raw lawyer of flesh that’s been exposed down the length of his left side. Whatever was under the long sheet of dead, crinkling skin H2 is still holding feels damp and tender.

“Oh dear,” she says. “Master Fett, this is most unfortunate.” She lowers her arm, optics rotating as she focuses closely on his back. “You do not appear to be bleeding. However, there is some residual moisture. If you would permit me–” She bends forward; she doesn’t breathe, she’s a droid, but he’d swear he can feel her get closer, somehow. It shivers up the sensitive new skin of his back.

He shrugs his kute up over his shoulders before he can find out what she was asking permission for. “It’s fine,” he says shortly. “Just the wind drying me out.”

“Master Fett.” She holds out the skin to him. “I believe you are understating the severity of this occurrence. I do not understand the root cause. However, in light of the extreme response of your tissue to the environmental conditions, at this time, I am considering recommending bacta pod treatment to address your symptoms as they appear.”

“No,” he says. “No. Not now. I don’t have time to be out that long.” He looks over to the corner of her clinic, to the sideroom door where he knows the Hutt bacta pod is stored. “I feel fine. A headache, some old bones. Some old wounds. If this starts to incapacitate me… if it becomes a liability. Then.”

He doesn’t wait for her answer before he leaves.

He goes through half of one of the tubs of cream in the fresher– bends and twists until it feels like his hips are about to fold inside out, but he slaps handfuls of the stuff against his back, feels it soak into what the mirror shows him is raw-looking skin, almost pink-tinged like from sunburn, and already starting to dry out in the air.

He’s fine.

He gets back to work.

There are fewer workers in the galley for eveningmeal than Mezza’s and Zhosef’s timetables tell him there should be. Fewer guards than he thinks there should be too, even with the squads on watch rotation. He sits alone in the corner booth, and pretends he can’t hear the whispers.

He hears them anyway, and doesn’t need Mezza to tell him the storm’s found its own tail when she delivers the evening report to him personally. Her long face is downturned, her eyes dull with tired worry. He doesn’t ask why she’s made the trip down from the power hub. Not much point in risking the comm system, after all.

He takes the report with him until he finds somewhere dark to read it, somewhere almost quiet, where he might be able to hear himself think over the wind and the storm and the heavy whispers-– the throne room. Stares at the holo-capture of the thing, holds it in his hand like a declaration of hostilities.

It’s not a perfect circle. Far from it: lumpy and lopsided, the southeast side, where it began, dragging the rest down towards it. But there are no gaps in it, not anymore. Just the space where the eye’s waiting to form in the center. Just the space around them.

He sits with it.

Jora enters, at some point, speaking to him. He cannot understand her, but her fear stains the air in the throne room. He feels mad with the stink of it.

He turns slowly and she falls into focus.

“It’s new,” she’s saying. “Fresh. It’s– close, it’s close to–”

“Show me,” he grumbles.

For a moment Jora looks like she’s half-ready to run instead of leading him to more bad news, but Fennec steps beside her, with a hand on her shoulder, and steadies her.

“It’s close to the living quarters, but everyone who bunks here was either on shift, or left with the ship,” Fennec says quietly. Her face is serene, skin perversely dewy-fresh. “Whatever it is left when it couldn’t find anything to eat. We’d know if it were here: it’s too big to hide, and if it made another exit hole we’d have another blip on the seismo readings.”

Her eyes look gentle if you don’t know her, her bearing projecting safety and reliability, and Jora leans toward her as if pulled by gravity. The Twi’lek’s breathing evens out a little, her shoulders relax.

Fennec smiles reassuringly. Kindly. Boba can only see the calculations behind her eyes because he’s known her for decades– knows that she’s playing Jora like an instrument. Like a mark.

He’s never seen Shand look like that at someone she cared about, and he knows to some extent she does care about Jora. Greater or lesser, she cares about her more than this, more than nudging her into place like a dejarik piece ready to take a blow….

Jora doesn’t see it; her posture is straighter and her walk confident as she shows Boba to the scene of the incursion, a massive spidering crack through the rock wall with a deceptively solid packing of sand filling in the shoulder-width tunnel that caused it.

“That’s no worm’s hole.”

“It’s probably something that eats worms,” Jora says, confidence starting to wane again.

“Well, I hope it found ours,” Fennec soothes, cupping her shoulder again, eyes predator-dark. “What do you think, Boss?”

The endearment rings flat, leaves him uneasy. Stops him for a second before he remembers the issue at hand and forges forward.

“We have enough safe quarters above-ground for the workers that are left?”

He sees Jora working through the layout in her head. “If some of us double up and someone can sleep in the maintenance bays, it should be okay to seal off this whole wing.”

“That’s the way,” he growls, with an approving nod, and she gives him a shaken, quasi-involuntary salute. “Go tell our lucky recruits they’ve won upstairs quarters. Shand, watch her back in case it comes back to hunt for snacks. Report back here when you’re done.”

It takes most of the evening for them to track everyone down. The last stragglers, two junior engineers so exhausted they fell asleep in a maintenance closet, only finally showed up when it was time for eveningmeal, Jora tells him in her report, hours later.

“Everyone’s resettled. Mezza’s sealed the lower-west wing blast doors and reset the seismometers,” Jora reports, looking exhausted but proud. Successful, then.

“Good job. Take off. I hope you chose yourself one of the better rooms, young lady.”

She nods. “Mezza says I can sleep in her office with her. It’s the best spot except your quarters,” she adds shyly, glancing at Fennec, hopefully, and then at him, less so.

“Good of her. Go pull yourself up to a databank for the night, all right? You’ve done well. Need you rested for the next problem that pops up.”

“Yes, Fett,” she says, and gives a salute that’s less flinch-induced this time. Excellent form.

He waits until she’s gone, but Fennec says nothing one way or another. She seems content to wait. Fresh as a Naboo daisy, despite the air that’s clawing away at their bodies’ water, molecule by molecule.

“Shand,” he says. “With me.”

She nods, and follows him to his room, a silent and companionable shadow. She says nothing; just stops outside the quarters like a servant, waiting expectedly. It’s not like her, this demureness.

Or it is, but not like any good part of her. Not a part of her he trusts to turn his back on.

“Come to bed with me,” he says, reaching out for her arm, trying to pull his friend back toward him and away from the chill in her shadow. “Fenn, there’s nothing any of us can do tonight. Come to bed.”

“Now that’s the best offer I’ve had in a long time,” she murmurs, and it twists in her beautiful mouth like a lie. She looks at him as if he’s a stranger, a curiosity– a mark.

His hand slips from her shoulder and he feels suddenly alone. He backs into the room, watching her unfeeling eyes until the door slides shut in front of him.

He throws the night-sheets onto the bed and crawls into them. The mattress swallows him like the maw of the ocean, like the oncoming wall of sand. No-one here to pull him back up tonight. They’re gone. Djarin lost in the black, Shand lost in time. He has not felt so alone since…

He falls asleep fighting not to think of the many terrible answers to that, ‘since when’.

It chases him into sleep. At least when he finds himself wandering the Palace he knows it’s a dream. He’s had this one before; never in the Palace, no, but in gleaming white halls, through the berths and bays of a Firespray. He would run from room to room, looking for his father, that’s the dream.

And his father is never there. So it’s no use looking for Djarin and Shand, and yet he does, miserable, lonely, starving for comfort, slouching through the Palace, finding no relief, no kindness. He stands alone watching the last stragglers of their workforce from odd angles as they march away into the sky; he listens from within the walls and under the floors, dragging himself in a widening spiral until he’s circling the palace from the outside, calling for Djarin and Shand with a hoarse, wailing voice.

The dream changes.

Something answers him, a high shivering whine from far, far away– quickly growing closer.

It’s the vibrations of a ship’s engine, over the wind– after long minutes of searching blindly he can finally see it too, a silver sliver in the sky fighting the air on its way down.

“Djarin?!” he calls but his voice is not his own, is not a voice at all.

The wind smacks the little ship so hard it almost goes into a rock-spire; it corrects. Djarin is a damn good pilot. For a moment it looks like it’ll make it safely down to the observation platform.

And then the drone of the anti-grav falls into a stuttering interference pattern as a stabilizer fails. A landing thruster fires to no avail. He sees the ship swing out of sight but he can feel the crash as it slams into the wall of the mesa, sliding down to the flats below with a long death-scream of ripped metal.

He whirls away from it, looking for help, looking for something, but there are only many crawling feet and a noise inside the palace that goes in and out like mocking laughter, and he tears his way towards it to kill it–

–He wakes, exhausted, robe tattered, alone, facing down the door of the mostly-empty vehicle bay where the proximity sensor is wailing out an alarm.

A dream. A dream.

And yet the sensor sobs out and floods the air with red. And yet pounding feet…

Mezza is the first into the vehicle bay, despite her age and size. She’s already half into protective gear when she realizes she’s not alone.

“Sir.” She looks up at him, horror on her wide face. “We registered Djarin’s ship coming in on approach. It lost a stabilizer. It has crashed on the Flats below.”

No, this is a dream, this is not when he wakes to an empty helmet in his hands, this is not when he wakes to the dark acid heat, this is not–

Djarin is not dead, it is a dream–

“H2?!” Mezza is shouting far away. “There is a medical emergency in the vehicle bay. Fett is–”

He will never know what he is. The sand will not take him, but the darkness lunges for him, and the stones of the floor grab his body and set him up for impact.

Chapter Text

He wakes and he’s drowning.

He flails, breathes out hard through his nose to try to stop from coughing, if he gets bacta in the respirator that’s it, then he’s really fucked, but his sinuses are burning and he can’t breathe—

Light. Air. Distantly, the screaming wind.

The respirator is yanked from his mouth and he heaves a breath, another, another.

Yanks out of the feet holding his shoulders and bends sideways to vomit bacta and acid over the side of the pod.

He spits something bloody and hard from his mouth, his throat burning, and he coughs until he retches again.

“Boba!” Fennec shouts in his face—

He rears back, mouth open and full. He stops. Swallows. Coughs some more.

“Fenn?”

“Kark, Boba,” she says. She sounds relieved. He knows that voice; he tries to smile for her, just a little. He doesn’t remember what he sounds like, but maybe he sounded something like that, those years ago now, when she recognized him, out in the desert, with her guts blown open.

She says something else, gaze sharpening, but he can’t hear it over the wind. He watches her lips move until the med-clinic lights are too bright and he has to close his eyes.

“Boba!” She squeezes his hand, hard enough to hurt, then holds on tight when he tries to jerk it back. “Boba, you have to get back in the pod!”

That was the thing, wasn’t it. He’d been taken out early. He was the lucky one.

His head screams and the lights behind his eyes explode into red.

He wakes and he’s wet. He’s drowning, he’s going to drown– his hand slams against the lid of the bacta pod and it’s pulled open before he inhales.

“Easy, easy– hold on there, Boss.” Feet grip onto his upper arms. Parnel.

He gasps through the respirator.

“H2, he’s up again!”

The lights are so bright; closing his eyes doesn’t help, but he tries anyway, swings out–

“Whoa, whoa, it’s not time to get out yet. H2!”

Cold manipulators on his chest, gently pushing him back, H2’s fussy voice, so worried. He’s probably been drinking too much caff.

“He can’t keep doing this. It’s not going to help him if he keeps breaking the cycle!”

“I cannot give him any more sedatives at this time,” H2 says. His skin shivers with that buzzy wire in her vocodor, the one that goes when she’s upset. “He has reached the maximum dosage for his size and species. Any more could result in irreparable damage–”

“If he gets out of that pod again, it could result in irreparable damage!” Fennec snaps back. She must be stressed too.

The bacta clings to his skin, muting their words. It tastes sharp, suddenly, he wants to spit it out but the respirator is in the way, and he’d tell them but they’re fading off into smears of red behind his eyes.

He wakes and he’s drowning, but that’s all right. It’s warm here, whatever’s holding him, and it feels like a desert morning after a storm. He’s only seen that once, only felt once what it was like to have the air on Tatooine so full of water it could barely hold onto it. Fresh water, pushing all the buried things to the surface and pounding them clean, and the electrically edged stink of water where water hadn’t been in so long was an experience he’d never known from Kamino.

Once in a lifetime, Gab'borah Hise had said, clapping his hand on Boba's shoulder. Boba’d been so small then, so skinny after his time in the slave camp. Not as skinny as Ygabba though, standing beside him in the memory, her bony hand clutched in her father's other one.

The sands had run with water; the ground too cracked to know where to put it all. He’s probably too cracked for it all too, his scars split and open.

Someone’s on the floor, crawling toward him.

They scrape. Metal. Had H2 fallen?

No. No, it’s not H2, because they’re breathing. Soft, shallow gasps; panting. Good way to hyperventilate. He’d tell them that, but he can’t move. Waterlogged. That’s a joke. Waterlogged on Tatooine.

They must be injured. Good idea to come to medical, then. He’d made sure the guards knew that. Your untreated injury was an injury to your whole squad. Told them that himself when he got the chance. Didn’t have a lot of chances, hadn’t had one in months.

The other one stops moving. Starts again– shouts so loud Boba can almost hear it, and is off the ground.

Boba loses him. Drifts.

Something important is pushing from behind his eyes, beating on his migraine until all he can see is stars-–

Boba. Something touches the outside of the pod. His eyes fly open. He slams them shut again at the screaming light. Boba, I’m here. I promise.

Din. Din.

He slams his hands up against the inside of the bacta pod. Again. Again.

An alarm is screaming. It’s almost louder than the wind.

“Fett!”

He wrenches his eyes open, squinting through the brightness and the blur. Where is he? Where is Djarin.

Zhosef’s cloth-wrapped face appears above him. “Fett, you have to calm down! Bast it– H2!”

The bacta tastes sharp again. He screams out in fury, but it gets caught on the respirator, and he sinks back, his eyes drifting shut.

He wakes when they pull him from the pod. Fennec looks pale, shaken. Zhosef has their gloves off and layers of their sleeves rolled up so high that Boba can see the dark skin of their wrists and fine hair that the bacta clings to. It feels intrusive. He closes his eyes.

He’s only had his eyes closed a second, but it’s gone cold around him. He shifts— looks for Din, but the bed beside him is empty. Has Djarin wandered off already? Damn covert Mandalorians won’t sit still to heal. Toxic self-sufficiency. There’s a wan looking youth sitting in a folding chair, watching him like a guard.

“Djarin,” he says to the girl beside the bed. That’s one of Mezza’s engineers, something must have gone wrong if H2 is drafting out of that pool. “Where-?”

“Please, Lord Fett, don’t try to move. H2 says your system can’t handle any more shocks.”

“Djarin— ship came in. Where–”

“…they. They’re out looking for him, sir.” Her eyes dart away, becoming glassy and runny as she blinks. “There’s half a dozen guards down at the wreck, they’ll find him.”

“He was here? They— should bring— there’s more beds—there’s room, we’ve got the resources.”

“They’ll find him, sir. They’ll bring him back. We’ll do— we’ll do something nice for him.” Her voice breaks and she turns away, folding her face into her shoulder with what finally penetrates as grief.

She starts to sob, far away and muffled by the ringing in his ears. The lights of the med bay start to streak across his eyes. They must be broken, they’re making everything so blurry, so bright. So bright–

They’ve chained him down with something when he wasn’t looking, little plastic line digging into his skin. The girl is asleep, exhausted, her hands slipping from the comm on her lap. He rises like a ghost and rips the restraints free and walks weightless away from the shrill of machine alarms, looking for darkness and Djarin.

They catch him again at the edge of his plateau, his voice raw with the screaming, they drag him back to more restraints and more needles.

Shand’s voice is around him but she’s never where he can see her, and he tries to tell her These fools think Djarin’s dead but he’s strapped into a respirator and can’t speak

They plunge him into the sea for a while, a deep still sea. Must be a sunny day in Tipoca city, now there’s a calendar event. He’s so deep he can’t even see the white spires above him.

H2 watches him from within catching distance as he slides on his vambraces. He holds out his arms when he’s done, showing her. “Still upright.”

“So it appears. Master Fett, I cannot advise this. You have only been out of the bacta pod for three hours. Your last healing cycle was only for eight. Your system has sustained repeated shocks. I have not yet diagnosed the underlying condition.” She stops, managing to make a bulbous metal face look worried. “By all accounts, you should not have survived the desert last night. I cannot help you if you are not here, sir.”

“I’m not going to drop dead on you, H2,” he tells her, ignoring the ways his ears have started to ring. He needs to find Djarin. “This is no time for any of us to be lying around; that storm isn’t resting and neither can I.”

“Rest and recovery are not synonyms, Master Fett. I cannot explain how you are even walking. Your skeletal scans–”

“But walking, I am,” he says. “And if I think I need the pod again, I’ll walk myself right back here.”

“Please do not be offended when I tell you that I do not trust your judgment on this, sir.”

“But it’s the only one I’ve got,” he says, and leaves her to her clinic.

He goes to his rooms first. There aren’t enough guards to stand the full rotations, nevermind the doubles Shand had been running them on before. But apparently there are enough to place them at the accessible entrances and exits. He won’t get to the site of the crash without Shand or Parnel on his heels.

He stands in the window well and looks out, searching for the plateau through the storm. All he can see is red and brown dirt. Even the suns are nothing but far away circles of bright in the sky.

Where the void-damned kark would Djarin go. And why won’t he show himself.

What is he hiding. Why can't he face him.

Cowar-- no.

No. Never. Not his Beroya.

He'll find him. But where.

He’s no closer to an answer when Shand finds him, drags him back from the window as the suns are setting. She looks tired, older than usual, and unhealthily pale. Her lips are almost blue in the sickly haze of the dust-filled sunset.

She stares at him, eyes too wide, too wet, searching– and then jerks around, staring after something he didn’t see.

“Treat your scars,” she says, her voice scraping out from a too-dry throat, and takes off after whatever it is that isn’t there, pressing a hand to her side. “They’re starting to bleed again.”

There are fingermarks in his wound cream that aren’t his. He curls his above them, and they’re all wrong. Longer, but not as wide. Blunt at the tips. He uses the other pot, staring out the open refresher door while he does, watching.

He goes to his workroom, sticking to the shadows the whole way. Only two pairs of guards cross his path, and he hears them coming long before they have a chance to see him. There’s no one else. None of Zhosef’s workers, none of Mezza’s tired mechanics. Not even her droids.

There are two days worth of reports from Mezza stacked in his drop-box. That isn’t a surprise. What is, is the datapad on his workstation that he knows he didn't leave there. He feels the hair on the back of his neck that hasn't been there since his skin started peeling away stand up.

He stalks to it, telling himself it must have been Fennec. Only two other people can access this workroom, are coded into the lock and have the revolving access code. He was out for almost two days in medical; she must have needed something only he had.

The datapad doesn't have a report from Mezza. It's days old, so much so that it takes him a moment to place it. It’s the report from Parnel. The catalogue of the storerooms, her notes on the visible contents, their priority for hazard review…

It must have been Fennec. She was always going to his reports instead of her own. They both did, her and Djarin, said it was easier. Just like it was easier to take his robes instead of having their own, he'd say.

If either of them would show themselves.

Behind his helmet, he tastes the dusty air, searching for a trace of–- anything. Oils from the skin. Sweat. Fear.

Tink

He’s in the corridor before he’s finished hearing the sound, his head whipping after the faint, chiming ring of pure beskar.

Then nothing.

Nothing.

He stalks back into his workroom, fury growing in his guts. It churns like it might burn through him.

He swipes at the first report Mezza’s left for him, leans into the rage that she has so many eyes, that he’s let her take over so many systems and sensors, that without her he has no idea what’s happening around his territory, in the sky, in his palace.

It’s the sensor logs for today, from midnight to eveningmeal. He stares at them, flicking through the pages, not taking it in. The storm is a bloodstain across the map. The ground shakes and trembles and he does not know why. Half his palace shakes and he does not know why.

There was nothing in the old below-ground living quarters wing, the one they sealed off, but the desert is bright red with it. A log of sequential readings tracing a line from the Palace walls to the plateaus.

He snarls and flicks another page. The internal sensors, access doors, the vehicle bay and hangar, the power hub, the watchtowers, the cupola. The hydroponics.

Someone was there. This afternoon, an hour past midday. No one had gone up to the hydroponics room since the day the storm appeared on the horizon. The catwalks were too unsafe, closed and access-locked to only top staff. And Shand. And him. And Djarin.

He can’t believe for one minute that the old Ugnaught missed this. What isn’t she telling him.

He’s in the lift to the power hub. The lights of the access panel swim in the black, blurring into nothing.

He’s in the engineering-office. It’s dark, except for the glow of the black-backed displays, and the reds and purples and oranges and yellows of the storm, the ground, the palace on them. Empty.

No.

There’s a sound; to the side, a blaster charging, the air pressure shift of a door sliding open.

Jora stares at him, her headpiece undone at the chin. He can’t see her right hand, or the blaster he knows she holds in it; he can see it on his HUD though, outlined where his armor senses it through the wall.

“Fett,” she says, dark eyes wide. “It’s late. Are you well. H2 said you had left medical.” He hears the blaster power down, sees the thermal outline of her right arm relaxing through the wall.

“Mezza,” he says. Swallows. Remembers. The living quarters. They had sealed off the wing; Mezza had let Jora doublebunk with her. “Is she in there with you?”

“...No. Miss Shand was going to tell you. Have you not seen her?”

“Not for hours. Tell me what.”

Jora’s pretty face scrunches in misery. Her gaze drops down to the floor.

“Jora,” he says, and doesn’t know if he’s warning her or concerned.

He sees it in her expression when she looks back up. She’s left. Mezza has left them here. Sent in her final reports and ran from the wind. Coward.

Coward.

“She left, sir,” Jora says in a rush. “And Zhosef. This evening. They ran the numbers, sir. The storm is coming– not tonight, Mezza said, not tomorrow. But soon. The Palace will be safe, but with everyone who was still here… we will have the food, Ygabba said we wil be fine for food, but not the water. Even with the emergency supply, not with so many of us.”

She stops, chest heaving like she ran here– her gaze searching his visor. “Mezza and Zhosef and most of the staff. They are in a cargo-mover, going to a settlement near Mos Espa. They will wait there until it is safe to return. Two squads of guards are with them, for safety. Two remain. We couldn’t all leave,” she says, voice strained. “Not with you so unwell. You will need the bacta pod again, H2 says. It would not survive the cargo-mover.”

They had considered it. He can see it all, clearly. They had considered loading his unconscious body like one more piece of freight into the back of the transport, taking him from his palace in the night, no doubt keeping him sedated if he resisted—

Cowards. His throat burns with rage.

“Who’s left?” he asks, voice coming from somewhere else, somewhere calmer. Floating above the pool of acid inside his guts.

She swallows, but looks relieved. She must think he’s not upset.

“Us,” she says. “Miss Shand, of course. H2, she would not leave a patient, and if we cannot go before the storm lands, she will be safe if she powers off. Parnel would not go without H2. Ygabba. She would not leave without you. Two cooks to help Ygabba. And two squads of guards.”

“Djarin?”

She crumbles. Folds in as if she were a droid herself without a power supply. “They did not– They did not find him, Fett.”

“I see,” he says. But he almost can’t see her, anymore. The lights in his eyes bleed red aross his field of vision. “My apologies for disturbing your rest. Good night.”

He is somewhere dark where the ground carries whispers to him. He tears through the space around him, smashing rock and silt and hard, sharp-sided things.

He is outside the doors Parnel stained with glowing slashes, following the tracks in the dust that lead in and out of storerooms that might explode and which take him nowhere.

He is in his bed, coughing and coughing and spitting blood and fragments of hard, sharp things too big for his mouth into the dark.

He is in the sands, screaming.

He is in his rooms. He feels bloated and wild, restless with something unfulfilled arcing off him into the stone. There is something wet sticking his helmet to his face. Sweat, or blood. Or maybe H2 had him in that damn pod again and he’s forgotten. Din can tell him.

No. He can’t.

Djarin. Where is Djarin?

He snarls, swiping angrily at the air and sweeping his arm across the bed, in case the rumpled nightsheets hide more than pillows.

Djarin’s trunk is still up against the back wall of his bedroom. He stalks to it, wrenches at the lid– it opens without resistance. The trusting fool hadn’t even locked it when he left.

There’s not much there; Boba still searches through it, furiously, throwing what he finds to the floor. Two spare kutes, no longer neatly folded; some sheathed vibroblades; a curled krayt dragon carved from bone; two pairs of Boba’s old pants, offered to the beroya years ago, and a few similarly given shirts; a tiny, soft blanket, a single sock, and some skeins of yarn.

The smallest skein is attached to a little hooked blade, one of Din’s bevrudule, because Djarin is steeped in the ways of his people, in everything Boba had only glimpsed from his father. He holds the bevrudul in a fist, and shakes.

He is in his rooms. The moons may be up, but he can’t tell through the dust and sand that coat the black sky with murk. His hand is clenched tight around a bevrudul; his fingers begin to ache the moment he thinks of it, his wrist burns as the tendons awaken.

He drops the bevrudul, and it lands on the sheets that have been tucked around his legs. Everything he tossed from the trunk to the floor has been folded and put away. The yarn that was hooked to the bevrudul has been unwrapped, the skein rewound and tucked in on top of the little blanket.

His ears ring. He closes his eyes and swallows down the burning acid in his dry, parched throat.

Ting.

He staggers to his feet, clutches at the wall; pulls himself forward by the bedposts until feeling returns to his legs.

Ting.

A flash of metal through the door to the front room. He charges it.

Nothing.

Again, by the door to the hall.

Nothing.

He races for the stairs at the end of the corridor, realises he has his eyes closed only when he catches himself on the doorway down.

Metal, at the bottom of the stairwell.

Halfway down, he sees H2, tottering carefully up. She clutches the hand-groove with one of her manipulators, waving the other arm when she sees him.

“Master Fett! Master Fett, finally. The lifts are down in this wing, sir. Sir, you must come with me, you are overdue for a cycle in the bacta pod. Your last bloodwork was most distressing, sir.”

“Djarin,” he rasps at her. He crouches, weight on his toes, gauging the distance between her and the far wall of the stairwell. He doesn’t want to knock her down, but he needs to get past–

“Pardon me, Master Fett?”

“Did you see him.”

“...The guards were unable to locate the Mandalorian, sir,” she says, with clear distress. How in the hell the Empire had managed to put together an H2-1B with over-functioning empathy protocols…

“He was just here.” The words rip through him. “Where’s Shand.”

“...I have not seen Miss Shand today, sir,” she says. “Sir, please come with me.”

Djarin had been injured. He must have been. A crash like that. Then crawling himself across the clinic floor. Yes. Medical is as likely as anywhere else. He’ll pick up the trail there.

Following H2 through the clinic doors, he turns at the sensation of footsteps–

Boba–

Something silver flickers in the corridor. Something red. But when he reaches where it was, it’s gone.

He wakes in the bacta pod, squinting. Shivers race up and down his skin, despite the body-heat warmth of the bacta. Something is standing over him. Dark; staring down. It’s watching him, but it doesn’t have a face--

The alarm tied to his heartrate starts sirening. Shand presses her hand to the pod, and he can just hear her through the way the bacta blurs everything into soft, rounded nothing.

“Easy, easy, Fett. Calm down in there.”

He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, the bacta is draining away to the sound of the session-complete chime, and only H2 is there to meet him.

An hour after firstmeal, and he’s starting to wonder if the sight of Fennec from within the pod was a bacta dream. It’s like realizing a piece of him has been missing for hours and he’s been walking around without a foot.

Reckless makes you dead, she used to say.

He’s losing something essential. It’s slipping through his fingers and he doesn’t know what it is.

Boba--

He can hear Djarin’s voice. They’re here, somewhere. They’ve gotten through most of the shit the galaxy’s thrown them so far.

Breathe. One step at a time. Eat something. Rest. See if there’s anything he can do without putting himself back in the pod.

He has to hold himself together for them.

His vision sparkles as if he’s going the way of poor Ygabba; flashes of silver in the corner of his vision.

It only gets worse as the day goes on. There’s something wrong with his eyes, something badly wrong. He sees spots of red when he looks around, phantoms in the corner of his vision.

He rubs his eyes over noonmeal and there’s a kid looking up from the bench beside him, a little thing all wrapped up in a red shawl, trying to get his attention.

He blinks, and the kid’s gone.

H2 is surprised to see him waiting when she walks into the main clinic from the bacta pod room. He doesn’t blame her.

“Master Fett! What has happened?” she rushes to his side with small, protocol-droid casing steps. “Is it your teeth? Your skin? Your vertebrae? Are you hallucinating again, sir?”

“...Eyes,” he says. “Maybe. The last one.”

She scans him again. Again. The cadence of her voice is starting to flutter with distress. “I cannot find a source of visual irregularity.” It catches. She turns to him. “I am sorry.”

Her vocabulator is straining above its ability to inflect. It riddles the words with static. “I am sorry.”

She’s frightened. For him.

“Don’t talk like that. I’m not dead yet. I’ve got things to do, yeah? But I’ll come back and let you check me over later.”

“I do not recommend–” cuts off into a similarly flat, “please consider taking an escort.”

“Who’s left to take?”

“Parnel is available. I am available.”

“You’re needed here.”

“Am I?” The pause between phrases is too long. “Who is left to heal?”

Parnel and H2 trawl him at a respectful distance.

He’s not sure what to tell them. That he’s looking for Djarin? It will only worry them. Make them question his sanity half as much as he is, maybe.

But there’s that certainty in him. He can’t believe Din is dead. The distant echo of his footsteps is not an illusion, he doesn’t damn well believe in those. Hallucination, maybe, yes, but it’s not, he must find Din. If it is–

It’s not a hallucination. Din has to be here to find.

The air gets sourer as he follows his ears, chases every sigh of the wind down into the deeper levels.

Parnel and H2 trail him like guards.

…They do so because they care.

They feel like strangers. Like threats in his home.

He’s never been good at telling the difference between a stranger and a threat. A threat and a target. Not since he was a boy and he learned that there wasn’t a difference at all.

He hears a door open, he swears he does. Just out of reach. Always just out of his reach; his hunter who is also the hunted is too good and pure a Mandalorian to be within reach of an exile’s unfaithful son.

It’s nothing Din’s ever said. It’s what he is at the core of him. He’s tried not to be a killer. No hut’unnla torturer. But cruelty is stamped all through him, cruelty and the absence of kindness.

Djarin has enough self-preservation to stay away from him. He hates him for it.

“Fett?”

He’d forgotten Parnel was here.

“Fett, we’re getting into the unsafe areas. What do we need here? Is it something H2 can get for you? There’s things your lungs can’t handle down here, I know mine can’t!”

Is it something H2 can–

Is the Mandalorian something that he’d let anyone else in the galaxy touch for him?

“You both stay ten paces back,” he snaps. “He’s down here somewhere. I hear him. Don’t you hear him?”

“I hear many things and they are all extremely upsetting!” H2 shuffles down the hall after him. “You are behaving extremely erratically, sir! And there are many anomalous life readings--”

“Shut up,” he hisses, wrenching open another door. It leads to an unfamiliar stairway, plunging down into the dark. No bootprints in that old dust; Djarin isn’t there. He leaves it gaping open behind him, stalking forward.

Fett, I’m here. I’m here! He feels the ghost of pressure against his chest plate and the feeling of being too big for his skin intensifies. Boba, please--

“There’s a chemical leak down here I haven’t located yet! Some of these rooms are full of unstable ordnance! Fett, you’re going to blow us all to the black!”

Strong toes grip his elbow-- nothing ghostly at all about that. Parnel’s weight is negligible; he drags her a few steps, but she grabs at one of the wrenched-open doorways to slow him, digging her other foot and the calloused fingers of one hand into the metal frame until he shakes loose of her.

“Djarin!” he bellows.

Boba, I’m here! Stop, I’m right here, please!

“Where? Where are you?”

I’m right in front of you. Stop, Boba--

The distant echo is lost, overwhelmed by a new noise, a warbling, electronic shriek behind him.

H2 is not programmed to scream. The noise she is making is an involuntary error-sound, the feedbacking howl of an overloaded vocoder.

Boba turns back furious and sees the droid overwhelmed-- trapped in a swarm of meter-high mechs that are pouring from a dark, open stairwell. The med droid is almost consumed in the wave, surrounded and overrun by clicking metal legs and bulky transparisteel bubbles that bounce and buffet her. She curls in on herself, locking her knee-joints and covering one flickering optic sensor with the housing of her main-hand module.

“What the squark are those? Are those brains?” Parnel yells. “H2, stay still!”

Whatever response H2 intends is lost in a shower of sparks; the power cable to her vocoder nicked by a clumsy spider-leg and overloaded by her systemic distress. It explodes in sparks and she rips it away from her face with a claw-like manipulator. The whole silver body is starting to twitch in displaced distress.

“Fett, do something!”

“So that’s where they all got to,” Boba says, distantly. “Wondered what Fortuna did with them.”

“What?!”

H2, I’m coming! a voice whispers at the edge of Boba’s consciousness.

Something shifts in the swarm of spider-droids, and they jitter out of the way of some unseen force as one like a flock of Gibbit birds. One staggers as if pushed, the biotic liquid inside sloshing and stirring around the residential brain. It clatters over to the wall, climbing up the surface to leave more space.

H2 pulls her hand-module away from her eyes and stands trembling in the empty space-- staring at empty space. At nothing in front of her. She reaches out for it, manipulator grasping at air.

Parnel shoots through the channel on hands and feet both, spider-like herself in her speed.

“Let’s go, H2! We’re out, we’ve got to go, we’re out.”

The droid starts to gesture frantically and Parnel grabs her wrist.

“I can’t understand you! I’ll fix it, okay, you can tell me whatever you need to tell me, but we’ve got to go! We’ve got to go.”

H2 nods jerkily and starts to stumble after her, and the monastic tide parts in front of them.

The many-legged transport bodies of the B'omarr monks shift and mill in the hall, without intent, but they leave an empty patch of ground, scuttling around it deliberately. Some of them turn as if looking at it, briefly, before they go back to their long-delayed exploration, dispersing slowly up the walls and into newly-opened doors on whatever impulse drives their senseless wandering.

He lets them go. Ignores the patchy comm messages that come later:

–leaving--
–repair shop— spa--
–dangerous– power--
– unstable--
–please— Fett--
–please–--

The words slide off his brain as he prowls through the dark. Djarin is here somewhere. He is not a beskar-wrapped corpse out in the Wastes. He is here, and Boba will find him.

The hunt in the bowels of the Palace might be days long. His prey is never far, but never near. He stops to rest. He begins again. He eats what moves.

When he finds her, it is because she slips.

It’s a muffled cry of pain in an adjoining room, the sound of something shattering. It pulls him out of sleep on a tarp-covered bench, padded and wide and tucked into one of the few storerooms not marked with a slash, and finally leads him to her.

She’s gone when he gets there, but she was here. There are pieces of her on the floor, shattered pieces that it feels unimaginable to see her without. Her face looks up in pieces, bleeding, staining the length of her braid.

He stops. Fear douses the rage heat like a wave of seawater. She can’t be--

No– it’s a mask. It’s a mask. The hair is real, what is tangled in it are pieces of a mask. He can see the cords that held it on, tangled with her hair.

“Fenn? Fenn, are you all right?” He lurches out of the room– where the hell is he, what was he doing down here. She’s halfway down the hall but she turns to him slowly. “Fenn, you scared the hell out of me, are you--”

“I fell asleep.” Her voice is toneless. There is nothing behind the words. He hurries to her side, but when he gets close enough he sees that she has no face.

There’s the rough shape of it. The gape of a mouth to speak out of, nostrils. Eyesockets deep and shadowed. An unfinished thing.

“Fenn?” his heart is hammering up through his throat.

(Fenn, the dreams are back, he begs)

She considers that for a while, eyesockets fixed on him. “Yeah.”

“What happened to you?”

“I fell asleep. It started getting stuck. I had to cut it off.”

“How can I help?”

She shrugs. “I’ve got others.”

She lifts her arm and shows him the masks dangling from it, an assortment of faces hung by red cords.

She selects one and puts it on her face.

Even seeing it, he doesn’t understand: Fennec stares at him from between her hands, beautiful, her lips resting in a small smile. Her eyes are dark and empty, painted on with tiny, delicate strokes, but they’re hers. He’d know them anywhere.

It’s nothing like the stuffed heads Jabba had kept on the wall in the throne room, her eyes are nothing like the tauntaun’s glass stare. But it’s not her. It’s a mask; it’s cold; it’s still.

The features are sculpted, but it’s Fennec behind the empty sockets, it has to be. She presses the mask against the blank of her face, disappearing the dark gaping hole of a mouth, the blank holes of her eyes.

The inked-on brown eyes blink at him, focusing the same way they focus through a rangefinder, down the length of a blaster. The smile widens. Her eyes are warm and real, her skin soft and alive and unworn.

She looks at him from her early twenties. Purses her lips. Looks down at the armful of masks. Shakes out the remains of her braid so the uneven locks of her hair splay out loose and wild, the shortest pieces floating out above her head, the longest still twisted in the memory of their plait. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“Fenn.” He knows this one. This is the one that reassures, who smiles a knife into your back. “I’m so sorry.”

“You’re a sweet kid, Boba.”

“I have to go. I’m sorry.”

He thinks he can feel someone pulling him back as he clings to the railings of the catwalk, but it’s just the wind. The sand in the air scrapes against his armor, obscures his view through his HUD and the transparisteel visor itself until there’s no difference. He pulls himself along on the railing, jetpack control primed on his vambrace, and only knows he’s reached the other side of it when he smacks the stone wall with his hand.

The door to the hydroponics isn’t locked anymore. Sloppy.

No. No, not knowing his prey. It’s deliberate. It means… something.

He’s not sure what he’s expecting to find inside. Djarin? Waiting for him, modesty preserved by only a curling hetipurg leaf?

Yet somehow, it wasn't plants.

He stares. He’d forgotten what it was like to be surrounded by growing things. Living things. The wind whips behind him, blowing in sand, and he jerks forward, lets the door seal behind him.

He hasn’t been up here in– months. Even before the storm. It was a frustrating trip, the catwalk dangerous at the best of times, and to such little end. Except it’s beautiful. Could be beautiful. If the sunlight was strong enough to make it through the comb-clustered windows as anything more than a dingy haze. If half the plants on one side weren’t brown and wilted, or dried to crispy twigs. The irrigation system must be clogged on that side.

He can see the racks for honeyhives set up along one wall, and somewhere deep in the dry-rotted dust of his memory, he thinks he can recall Din talking about bringing back bees sometime. He hadn’t, obviously– the racks are clean, not filled with a dead colony. But he meant to, enough that he had the racks installed.

Frowning, Boba steps closer to that side of the room, where the plants are still green and a few stubborn blossoms are still blooming. He looks closer at the back row of green.

There may not have been bees in here, but something had been eating the plants. Line after line of the soft herbs and leafy green vegetables are grazed down to just a few centimeters of stem and leaf; an entire shrub has been nibbeled into sticks and only a few unmolested clusters of peppery-smelling leaves. It must have liked that one.

He puts his hand to his blaster, and looks carefully around.

But the room is empty. Except for the plants.

He waits there– doesn’t know how long, thinks he may have lost an hour or two between one blink and the next. And leaves, with more answers than before, and a burning certainty behind his heart. Djarin was here.

The wind almost blows him from the catwalk before he’s even on it, snatching his hand from the railing as he leans out to begin the dangerous journy back.

He throws himself backwards, back into the tunnel, and clutches his hand to his chest. He can already feel it swelling, the skin under the glove going hot with bruises.

He starts on his hands and knees the second time, and crawls back to safety in his own palace.

There’s a silver puck on Din’s bed that wasn’t there before. Cheap, palm-sized holo-recorder, the kind you pass notes around. Leave reminders about maintenance on.

His hand feels too large and clumsy, and he almost knocks it off the bed reaching for it. The activation button almost crushes under his touch.

Mezza’s image springs up, just head and shoulders, her wizened face softened by the data limitation.

“Should you find this, I have chosen to leave the palace before you return. It grieves me badly to do so, and not to greet you when you arrive.

“I would not have done this thing if I did not believe it was a matter of survival, for myself and for all who remain. I leave this to beg you to follow us. I am leaving the coordinates of a settlement in which I have friends. It is still out of the reach of the storm at the time of this message.

“It will please me to see you again. It will grieve me if I do not. Consider this. Mezza out.”

She must have left this before the crash. Not come to retrieve it after its target was gone.

She might have left this safety net days before. She might have been contemplating leaving the day Djarin took off. Hedging her bets. Waiting.

Coward.

He screams, turning to smash his fists against the stone wall of Din’s rooms. Screams again at the sting of it in the hand he injured earlier, then bellows back at the wind when it dares to try to howl louder. He feels the post of Din’s bed crack under his next blow, and shreds the stuffed mattress like meshthread with his fingertips.

He doesn’t know when he leaves the rooms; the upper corridor; the Palace.

But he tears chunks from the plateau rock outside the hangar with his fists, smashes the ground with his body, and screams rage to the sands until he finds something living buried in it. It barely offers a fight, but its roar challenges him and the catch of its long claws on his tattering skin turns his vision red. He bites until the sands match the color, and feasts.

He’s in a corner, curled on himself. He feels exhausted; like he’s been running. Or like he’s so frail now that any movement feels like running.

Over the roar of his own lungs he can still hear Ygabba’s voice.

“Have you seen Boba?”

“Mm-hmm. In the throne room, earlier.” Fennec sounds unconcerned. “I see you’re packed.”

“Yes. It’s bad now, it’s time to go. The Mos Espa plateaus are still out of the worst of the storm. They’re safer now. This palace will be fine, but– it’s not going to be very nice to live here until this is over, Miss Shand.”

“I’ve had worse.”

“I’ve found the last of your staff,” Jora says, steps coming up from the vehicle bay. “We’re going to under-haul one of the cargo movers. On low speed with minimal lift, our weight will keep it stable.“

“I can’t find Boba,” Ygabba frets.

He sways as he pushes himself to his feet, but he manages to keep his steps quiet as he slips over– until he can look around the corner and see them.

There are few members of the staff he trusts more than Jora. None more than Ygabba.

But he can’t be sure. Not of anything, anymore. He can fight, but he’s not sure he can win, if they come while he’s vulnerable. He doesn’t want to hurt them.

“He’ll be fine,” Fennec says. Her armorweave layer bulges with the faces tucked away; she’s wearing the youthful, kindly poisonous one, the one that probably reassures young children and skittish animals.

Ygabba’s neither of those things, and her eyesight is bad on a good day. The spell doesn’t take her like it does the others Fennec tries it on.

“We can’t just leave him alone.”

“It won’t be for long,” Fennec says reasonably. “This storm’s too big to hold more than a few days. Go ahead and take the rest of the staff. I understand that things are too frightening for them now, but Boba will be just fine.”

“What about you, ma’am?” Jora asks. “Will you be fine?”

Fennec turns the charm full on her and Boba watches uneasily as she melts, almost sagging forward into Fennec’s hand when the assassin brushes her chin with a finger.

“Don’t worry about me.”

“I do, though.” It comes out sounding almost drugged. Jora looks into her eyes under an almost helpless thrall. “I do worry, ma’am. Please come with us.”

Fennec tuts and chucks her chin. “You’re very sweet, Jora. I’ll see you after the storm.”

Ygabba turns her head away slightly– her ear closer to Fennec. Maybe she can hear what she can’t see, the unnatural power Fennec exerts.

“...if you find Boba, try to convince him to leave, all right, Miss Shand?” She reaches forward for Jora’s arm for support. It only looks a little like she’s physically pulling her out of Fennec’s reach. “There’s still room on the transport, if you change your minds.”

“That’s kind of you.”

“Please be careful. Fennec,” Jora dares to add, and Ygabba has to pull her almost bodily away.

“That was kind of them,” Fennec says to the empty hall.

No, to him. She might have been aware of him the whole time.

“They both care about you.” The words finally come, to her. He can speak with only her there to hear. “Jora, but Ygabba too, don’t take her wrong. Just because she was never as impressed with you as I was, doesn’t mean she doesn’t like you.”

“I know.” She looks up. “There’s room on the transport, they said.”

“Yeah. I heard. Not for me, though.” He shakes his head. “I can’t leave. We worked too hard to get to this place. I can’t leave. It’s not safe.”

“Of course.”

He’s coming to hate that soothing, reasonable tone in her voice.

She turns toward the vehicle bay, and he sees the moment the mask no longer fits her; he sees it come away at the edges before she raises her hand to pull it away from the unfinished pseudo-face beneath.

She stands holding it for a long time, looking down at it with what might be concern. Or might be the angle of the light on her empty eye sockets.

The mechanisms of the large bay door start to grind open. Ygabba must have given up waiting.

Fennec jolts as if shocked, jamming the smiling mask under her overlayer and fumbling hurriedly for another, pulling out face after face. There are more now, checked and discarded too quickly for him to see. He steps closer, feeling as if he’s pulling the weight of the hallway behind him, can just make out the slightly ruddy features of the reckless drunk dangling from her wrist.

Her coat is almost empty when she finds what she’s after, a tattered string to a weathered mask, blood-spattered and unhealthy and her hand shakes as she brings it up to the rough cast of her face. The bay door has already started to grind shut.

He hears her gasp and choke– sees her convulse as she puts it on, hands dropping to her stomach in phantom agony.

She looks to him with despair in her eyes. Only at death’s door did he ever see this terrible honesty in her.

“Fett. Boba. Something’s wrong. We need to go.”

“I can’t leave.”

A tear trickles down her face. “...I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll bring back help.”

The bay door slams with finality– she glances at it, recalculates, and bolts for the main door.

He doesn’t stop her. He wouldn’t. She’s right. They do need to go. She should.

He wanders out after her. It’s easier, out in the sand. He doesn’t feel as heavy. He can hear the underpowered grav drive of the transport starting to creep away– it’s not far, and it’s not moving faster than Fennec can run.

The cords of her masks trail her, tails lost in the sand that’s building up over the plateau.

The transport slows; the pilot sees her running, hand outstretched and turns toward her.

Jora is behind the controls, naked relief in her eyes as she slowly, carefully maneuvers back to pick up this last straggler.

Something twangs taut in the sand, a tripped wire. Boba turns, slowly, and sees it tangled in the doorway, a thin line of red. It’s tangled through the door mechanism. There are more, slack in the sand, a dozen of them at least.

As he watches, another pulls taut. Another.

Fennec screams.

His head whips toward the sound– she’s stopped, meters away from the transport, tearing at something – her wrist, the cords on her wrist, throwing them off one by one, but they are writhing back, the length of them, crawling over her like stinging coral-worms.

He jerks the vibroblade from his vambrace and lunges for the door, grabbing a hank of the tangled cords and sawing at them to free her.

Karking things slice through his gloves, stinging like the coral-worms they resemble, refusing to give to the edge of his knife. They convulse, terribly and he can only watch as Fennec is dragged from her feet, dragged back by the strings embedded in her arms, her face, her scalp– watches her claw at her face, trying to free herself, watches her dragged on her back, the awful tendrils drawing her back past him into the dark maw of the Palace.

Out on the plateau, two cooks are wrestling Jora back into the transport as she fights. She tried to come after Shand. She’s still reaching out the hatch when the transport lurches back to life and crawls away into the blowing sand.

Fear paralyzes him. That door. That open mouth, that dark hell.

He never got out. He’s been in there the whole time and now she’s trapped with him too.

He screams his despair; the wind answers, louder, mocking, and the last of the sunlight is drowned out.

Chapter Text

The vents clog and the last of the main generators trips its safety override when the storm comes down. After that, only the red flicker of emergency power, the laughing shriek of the wind outside. He tries to leave; he finds himself back on the throne.

He’s losing time. The light– it keeps taking him back to the wet acid heat where the only light came through thick undulating membranes. The seconds were hours, there. He spent a lifetime there and crawled out to Jabba’s sand barge still smoldering.

He doesn’t know how long he spends in the throne room between moments of lucidity.

His armor feels strange– he loosens it notch by notch as the hours or the days go. It’s too small, built for a frame smaller than his own.

That’s not possible. It’s the armor of Jango Fett, he can’t be larger than Jango Fett. His father was the biggest man he knew.

It bites him. It strangles him. His father must be furious with him.

He’s done so much to make him proud, but so much to shame him. Last of the Haat’ade, he had loved and hated his people, and Boba had only ever had the hate.

He wears it until he can’t any longer, until he’s gasping with the constriction on his chest and his arms feel numb. Through ringing ears or maybe a faulty audial he hears Djarin’s voice ordering
Boba please it’s suffocating you

Ordering him to take off what is not his
We can adjust it – it’s not more important than your life. You have to live to honor it, Boba, please take it off–

He knew when they met that it was Jango’s and not his, he would never have given it back if Boba left him the choice
this is not the way

He peels it off piece by piece and leaves it on the throne, cuirass propped against the seat with the pauldrons still attached, helm over the wide arm. He drops the boots in front of it, drapes his ammo belts over it, and collapses with the effort at the foot of the throne.

He thinks for a second his vision is going, but it’s only the last of the emergency lighting flickering out.

Where has Shand gone-?

Where is Djarin-?

Maybe upstairs. He needs to eat something, drink something, his throat is dry and cracking.

He’ll see what Ygabba’s got in the kitchen.

No; no, she’s gone. That’s right. All gone.

The last of the night-stew has congealed in the bottom of the vat. It’s fine. He scrapes the bottom clean, it’s fine, eating it from his hands and then licking at the leavings until the skin is raw. He sags beside the cold, silent corner oven.

He tries the steps to the tower, once, but it makes him sick. It’s high; the winding stairs are fragile and empty, wrong in a way that he can feel in his gut and his inner ear. He crawls back down to lie at his father’s feet before the throne, wrapped around the empty boots and shaking with vertigo.

Shand visits him, sometimes chatting to him, bringing him hydropacks and whatever food she can figure out how to make edible. She perches on the side of the throne at his father’s right hand, gossiping about nothing. There’s no-one to gossip about. The stories are old, and worn, and exaggerated. She tosses it off with the same blank, dismissive voice as her status reports. Nothing to report on, but it is what he paid her for, when there was anything but darkness.

Keep talking. Please keep talking to him, he can’t hear me.

She complains about the maintenance to keep her guts in order now; yesterday she opened her last bottle of machine lubricant, she’ll have to raid Parnel’s locker for gun oil and you know how Parnel gets about her locker. Her nutrient gel was running low but H2 had insisted on that three month backup, so she’s started sneaking them out of the medical stash, that’s fine. They’ve got a few days of sterilized water left; after that it’ll be whatever they can salvage, or the emergency rations. Does he think it’s an emergency?

Sometimes he goes down to the old rancor pit to sleep; it’s a little quieter there, feels a bit safer. Fennec stands on the grate to report dutifully; when she isn’t there, there’s only the helmet on the throne to keep an eye on him, and something in the wall wheezes and sighs and sings to him.

He can see the edge of the masks at the bottom of Fennec’s chin. The bottom of her boots. Her masks clatter like the Nar Shaddaa windchimes when the pressure shifts.

The plants in hydroponics are dying; she went up there to see if any of the water in the irrigation cyclers was salvageable, since they’ve gotten down to a day of water, but it’d leaked and the floor was actually flooded. On Tatooine. With the moisture retention that good, the plants might even rot.

She saw Din up there.

“Djarin?”

“What?”

“You saw Djarin-?”

“Where?”

“In Hydroponics!”

“I was just up there the other day.”

It’s gone from her eyes. She goes on with her report.

One of the big sandworms comes nosing into the throne room while she’s away. He feels strangely unbothered by it; he felt it coming, inching over the floor as if it was over his own skin, and he’s been ready for it for hours. Lazily, he crawls out of the pit to meet it.

He finds himself next to a pool of ichor. Something was here; he’s not sure what. His stomach feels distended, his face sweaty. That’s dangerous. Don’t want to use up your own sweat on Tatooine. He gives a cautious sniff, but the ichor doesn’t seem to be acidic. It was something to live with, not something to digest with, might be all right. He drags his hand through it, and the feeling is pleasant.

Fennec has broken into the emergency water; there’s nothing left she can wring from the Palace systems. She offers him one of the packs, reaching down through the grate.

“I’m good,” he says. “Keep it.”

He tells her about the little rootgrubs the Tuskens eat to shock a system back into working, even drag a man from shock. How foul he’d found the experience.

It’s not bad, though, the taste isn’t so bad at all, and the ichor soothes the dry cracking on his lips. That part he doesn’t tell her: he didn’t leave enough to share, and regrets it now. He can only make it up by letting her keep the water.

Fennec is absent; he sleeps.

He wakes. Fennec is absent, but something dangerous is with him, something huge and predatorial. He has to warn her; but it has a hold on him, and he can’t move without waking it.

His ears are ringing. He woke in the throne room alone, knowing that he had to warn Fennec about something, and desperation drove him back to the tower stairs. He falls to his knees when he’s no more than a few meters up them. Crawls up, up, looking for her, looking for Djarin.

Their rooms are empty and untouched but his own has been disturbed. Djarin’s trunk has been opened. His closet stands ajar.

Something was here.

He tosses the room slowly, laboriously. It’s hard to move when he’s so far from the rock and sand, unsure of his footing. He throws the sheets from the bed, drags open the doors of the closets, looking for. Looking for a trace, looking for a spoor.

Feeling under the bed, his hand hits a pile of loose stones– little almost-sharp chips of stone as if something had been boring through the rock under his bed. He remembers Jora’s fear; the cracks in the wall; Mezza’s downturned face and judgemental eyes. You are warned.

Anger twists in his guts and the boiling acid in his stomach powers him like burning fuel in an engine. He draws out a handful.

It isn’t rock. The chips are the wrong size and color, long and oddly smooth and yellowed.

One of the teeth spills over his palm and it hits the floor, and a memory echoes after it. Sleepy impressions of loose pearls under his tongue, his mouth full of stones, a patter of hard pebbles clattering against the floor as he coughed in his half-awake stupor, hour by hour, night by night.

There are so many of them. Some are a bit too long, too sharp. Some are much too sharp. Much too long to have fit in his mouth. Some of them are pitted, degraded down to jagged stumps, roots gnarled and twisted.

No

What is in his mouth now?

Void, what is in his mouth now?

The teeth fall from his shaking hand. He skitters backward like a crab, hands and knees, head swimming. He is trying not to be aware of his mouth, trying not to register anything his tongue feels, trying not to imagine what could be the aftermath of–

No

His head is pounding. He feels like something is waiting inside, pressing slowly on his innards, his tearing skin and his aching skull, waiting patiently until he cracks like one of Fennec’s kuvara and it escapes him.

He reaches behind himself, standing up without taking his eyes away from the bed and the black shadows under it. The world tips sideways. He has to run. Makes his way backwards through the open bedroom door and the front room, feeling until he finds the main door seal and slaps the wall until he hits the control. The mechanisms of the door grind and choke under the trickle of emergency power, and the servos squeal in outright protest when he slams his shoulder into the edge of the sliding panel and forces it wide enough that he can flee down the red-lit corridor, to the stairs.

He’s pounding down them, running as if the truth has slipped out from under his mattress to pursue him, as if every shadow might hold some threat, when the emergency power flickers for the very last time.

Darkness falls around him, and he falls too, feet sliding out from under him–

The step catches his skull with its edge, hard enough to see stars in the darkness, and then–

Then his brittle, traitorous body cracks, skin tearing, bones crackling, joints going loose, and the thing is born out into the darkness, howling eerie and echoing, and the unconsciousness takes him mercifully.

When he comes to, he’s sprawling on the throne beside the armor, limp spine bent against the back and seat, pelvis so far forward it’s almost off the edge.

Agony skitters under his skin and throbs in the hot, swollen spots that mark his arms, the back of his head, but it’s already old pain, soured and stained. He tries to guess how long he’s been left here, tossed over his own throne like a discarded blanket, but his mind slides away from it. Time is an absence; a sucking wound where he used to keep thought.

The thing that was born shifts in the darkness around him. He holds his breath and can hear the shuffle of scales. The wind is high and distant; the stone is almost all he can hear now, carrying distant vibrations to his ears. The creak of the catwalks high in the dome, that he hears. The beast trapped in a nearby wall is breathing, sobbing softly with the wind, shivering. It must be close. He strains his ears so he’ll know if it approaches.

The regular bang of a broken shutter repeats, somewhere on the far end of the palace, until the metal yields with a scream. And softer, subtler, a susurrus of many, many spindly legs, all around him, climbing and picking.

He realizes that his eyes have been open the whole time only when a glimmer of light reaches him. At first it’s just a spec, but as the sound of metal on stone intensifies, the darkness cracks open and reveals a fist-sized patch of light.

…the old glowing stone. The monks had had the whole place walled with it, but one of the long line of crime lords that inhabited it after them had covered that honeycombed tile over with plaster and stone.

The monks are picking away at the cover up now. Another speck of light flickers and grows, eating away at the darkness like a caustic thing as the robotic manipulator scrapes away more and more of the concealing wall.

There’s enough light now to see that he is surrounded. Not by the monks, they’re ignoring him, taken with their new project.

But there is something in here. The thing from the darkness– he can see the ridge of spines, the rough edge of the scales he heard. It has a long, reptilian body flexible enough to coil in the darkness. Something several meters away might be a set of legs, throwing more angular shadows over the sinuous length.

He closes his eyes and goes as still as he can. He has to wait, he can escape this. Somehow, he’ll escape this.

Behind his eyelids it is still dark. He is still hidden, with his eyes closed.

He settles in to wait the beast out.

Fennec finds him and reports; she manages not to wake the thing in the throne room, her reassuring murmur too low for it to hear. Her masks click and shift, soothing, masking her sounds as much as her undone face.

The monks are exposing some kind of pattern in the ceiling. It’s made the throne room too bright; too exposed. He slips down to the pit to hide. Familiar and comfortable now to take her report through those bars, becoming acquainted with the soles of her boots.

From time to time she takes a mask off and replaces it in the middle of a conversation, not acknowledging it, but it lets him get a sense of what each is for. The one that convinces. The one that does not care. The one that smiles too wide. The one that makes the bad decisions.

He asks Fennec about Jora, when her face and her voice are young and controlled, her smirk sculpted onto her mouth. She says: “a few weeks after I dropped her off in Mos Espa, we ran into each other on a supply run and started talking. She was still looking for work. I said we had it: she said she wasn’t dancing. I said I didn’t want a dancer. I wanted someone who knew the Palace. I hired her as quartermaster that afternoon.”

He asks Fennec about Jora, when her cheeks bloom hot with a spotchka-drunk and her movements are halting and impaired. She says: “Funniest kriffing thing, a few months after I dropped her off in Mos Espa, I found her hustling sabacc in Mos Eisley. I said ‘bet I could teach you a few tricks’. She bet me a night in her room I couldn’t. We sat up there playing strip sabac, and when we were both naked she asked me to up the pot. So I did. If she won the next hand, she could have anything she wanted from me. If I won? She’d come give us a trial run.”

It’s an outrageous lie. She’s not even trying for believability; the name of the game is how outlandish she can make it, how many hardened mercenaries she can make blush.

“So I agreed, of course, and she leaned forward to put down a 23. Pure Sabacc. She told me technically, I was never going to win, because I hadn’t taught her anything. So I put down three-fourths of an array and pulled the idiot out of her cleavage. She’s a woman of her word; she signed on on the spot. Don’t worry, I gave her the entry bonus of her dreams.”

He asks Fennec about Jora, when her breath smells like decay and blaster-burnt meat and clotted blood. She says: “Remember when Jabba’s old vehicle crew ran off with his private yacht. Right after we invited ourselves in? I was out scouting for them. I found her instead, halfway down Beggar’s Canyon. She’d made it that far in the night. On foot. If a womp-rat hadn’t tried to take a bite out of her, she’d have made it.

“I saw the rat first. She’d pushed it out in the open so it didn’t draw scavengers to her. She beat it to death with that kriffing ankle chain, and then she crawled into a hole to die of infection instead of getting recaptured. Because she’s a Twi’lek and they all got raised on heroic stories instead of cautionary fables.”

She tips her head, acknowledging her own foolishness, and meets his eyes through the grate as the other faces will not do.

“I guess you made me sentimental, Boss. I didn’t want her to die. I was so scared she’d die before I got her in. I had to stay until the medics were sure. I can’t believe you didn’t call me on it. It added three days to the job, you thought it took me five to catch that crew-? I was with her. Until she woke up. I gave her my comm in case she needed anything.”

“Now I think she’s in love with me. And I… care. That I could hurt her. I care a lot. I hate it, Boss.”

She never wears that face for long. She can’t. She had less than an hour of life when he found her, and he can’t make it any longer this time.

He meets them all, one by one, and wonders if there is anything left of Fennec that is not the masks.

He wonders too, sometimes, which one broke. What part of her he might never meet again.

He screams in the night, not because of the dream– Djarin in his arms, beloved face pressed into his neck– but because he wakes from it and he hears her heart begin to slam in her chest. He hears her run– up to the sickening heights– he hears her stop.

He hears a sick cough, and then the sound of weeping.

He lies alone, except for the creature in the room with him.

The monks have started to move the glowing tiles. They are taking them from other parts of the wall that are not part of the pattern, bringing them closer.

He can see the shape of the creature in the room with him now.

He runs. He smashes the control to the pit gate, and he runs, and he falls.

Chapter Text

The emptiness in his guts tells him that it’s been days. He’s been trapped in the pit for so long, hiding in the dark and close.

Boba lies crushed between the coils of muscular tail, breathing shallowly. There’s a sickly light down here, brightening hour by hour until the old scratches on the wall are valley-deep and the throne room looks like a starry night above. Spider legs skitter in the dark, picking over the scaly mass of the creature and leaving barely-felt pricks on his arms and legs and spine. Everything is moving. Everything is alive. If he moves, everything will know.

Decades in Jabba’s court and he’s never seen them move with purpose like this. Never seen them moving together in organized groups. Now they march like ants carrying glowing stones from room to room, arranging them in patterns that mean something only to them.

He shuts his eyes and breathes deep, pressing his tongue up against the roof of his mouth and tasting the decay around him. He thrusts his tongue out as if he’s trying to catch a raindrop but finds only dust on the tip of his tongue.

Dust… cold. Bitter. Newly stirred.

He tastes movement.

Not her-- perching up in hydroponics until the wind brings her back down to him. She’ll come back. She can’t leave, she’s part of this place, she’ll fall when it falls into his waiting grasp. He’ll let her hide. He tastes the other. The elusive one, the one that vanishes.

As the tongue writhes against his palate, he tastes Djarin.

Through his skin he can hear footsteps. Close by in the long, twisting halls.

Eyes shut, he starts to crawl forward, clawing his way over the treacherous mounds of scaled flesh, arm over arm pulling his torso. Arm over arm, brain screaming a warning whenever he gets too close to understanding how easily the rest of his body follows, how the body beneath him is uncoiling, how the scrape of stone against his stomach goes on and on and his dragging legs push at odd angles.

He hears the shatter of glass behind him and feels something fragile and wet pop against his skin. Metal creaks and gives. The monks scatter, footsteps sharp as they dig into nearly-vertical rock, clattering as they crowd the grate above.

He finds the door out of the rancor-pit with his hands and ears, the gap in the rough wall, the emptiness behind. He lunges through-- falls, lands hard on his elbows. He cannot think of his knees.

His stomach lurches and he retches onto the stone.

He can hear it steaming. He slowly opens his eyes, looks down between his hands. Even in the faint glow of the emergency lights and B’omarr stones, he can see the stone pitting.

His teeth scrape deep into his tongue as he cleans it, spits again into the corner, where the shadows are too deep to see.

The world sways like he’s drunk, but he’s moving faster now, faster, ramming his shoulder against the wall as he seeks the footsteps, smashing through doors and passages into blind alleys that do not take him closer, or bring him maddeningly close and yet with too much distance between them. He lunges for his prey and instead finds himself tailing down a blind alley into a room full of old flesh, little lumps of desiccated brain dotting the walls like broken coral. The monks clatter around him, a blind idiot entourage, wet living brains moving among the dead and dry. His feet claw the stone, his abdomen pulses in a strange (no) the slither of scales fills his ears until the footsteps are only audible up through his gut. He does not want the dead. He shoves his way out of the tomb, disoriented, his only direction the direction of the hunt.

(Djarin.)

He lashes his tongue out into the air and jams it into his upper mouth, smearing rot and leaking ordnance and boot polish, jet fuel, sweat-- over his senses.

(Djarin.)

Someone must have weakened the doors guarding the old spice refinery, because they give like plaster under Boba’s ramming shoulder, wrenching out of their moorings as he tears through the corridors. Something drags at his feet and catches around his hips but he kicks free and hears more walls crumbling behind him.

The door is still hanging from its hinges where the monks broke it in their flood out to freedom. The stairwell beneath is narrow and dark.

He can taste the disturbed air below, and his skin hears the quick, sure steps of his prey fleeing.

Hunting acid gathers in his mouth. He opens his eyes and the world is milky and simple, a filter that frees his attention to finally see the trail of lingering heat he has been following.

“DJARIN!” he howls, a shriek that boils up from his empty gut and echoes through the sand around him. He screams again, and plunges down the steps, heedless of the depth, securely anchored by the bulk of his tail behind him and his digging-feet crushing into the rock walls. Monks skitter around him with interest, in front of him or dragged along with his bulk to be scraped off in a doorway, following behind dragging their bent and broken limbs.

Old dry-rotted wood splinters around him as he surges through the skeleton of some old lecture hall or monastic library, shattering the finer stone detailing as he bashes his way through.

The castle babbles at him, the vibrations through its base painting a wavering holo-picture in his bones, tells stories of places forgotten and thin walls and it is so much, it is too much, he can taste Din’s heat within striking range and the high shivering sound beneath his belly reveals an eggshell-thin floor that has been eaten away from below, but it is too late. He plunges onto the heat below, the tender meat in the hard shell.

He slams his body down, and the floor shatters like old bone.

He falls.

The stars fall with him-- some catch up on the walls, their glow quickly dwindling as gravity hurls him down, others fall along with him, below him. The light, weak and impotent, reveals nothing useful, only gives him dizzy flashes of steep water-carved walls and stripes of brown-white-red-red-red. It is the sarlacc again but the maw is too dry and the gullet too hard, it is not the sarlacc, the fall is too long and studded with jolts of pain along his many, many ribs as if the darkness is trying to club him to death as the jagged walls catch him and rip at his claws and belly scales as he tries to grab purchase, and twist him until he cannot tell which direction he is falling.

A star lights in the darkness briefly, its fusion core roaring, and something drags him against gravity, uselessly, for long seconds.

The light blinks out. He wedges himself against the after-images of curving ravine walls, slips, falls another ten meters, and finally finds ground, coming to rest in soft silt.

Some of his ribs are broken, but none of the important ones.

He hears the faint scrape of beskar shifting against a stone wall. He can hear the labored breathing of his prey, taste the offensive, oily heat of its jetpack.

The stars refuse to clear from his eyes and he realizes that there is light, the walls pulsing with a sickly glow that makes the veins in the stone look infected and painful.

These are the mines the B’omarr worked, once. These glowing rocks are embedded through the palace, covered over but still weeping out their light into sightless tile.

Here they show a deep ravine coiling up above him, twisting like an intestine, red and inflamed and striped with disease. The pitting in the rock is just visible around the seams where the foul air ate it away.

The light is nothing, and the light is enough. It is enough to get a glimpse of his prey, a reflection trickling over armor that he cannot see. He hears it, though, he hears it move and he sees the light catch on nothing as it scrambles for shelter.

It is cornered, huddled in a tiny crack that branches off from the deep ravine. Wedged into a dead end as if its shiny shell will save it. The air is acrid, the walls stained with patches of something leathery that scrapes off under his scrabbling claws and hangs like peeling flesh, the stone smooth as bone below. His hunger drives him on, belly rustling in powdery layers of dead lichen and rotten stone as he curls up to block any escape behind him.

He rears up and slams a fold of lower body against the crack to widen it, plunging in up to his shoulders and catching smooth hard metal with just the sharpest tips of his clawed fingers.

He rams his hip into the wall again, and feels blood pouring over him.

...blood pouring from the wall, not his prey; blood, cold, reeking with acidic sepsis. The wall is wounded, splitting and oozing.

Boba, you have to stop, Boba--

He throws himself forward as the stone opens like a maw and vomits red onto him. A wall of liquid, a tidal wave bearing down with no city-shield to prevent destruction.

All of his arms catch something hard. The water rips at his prize, a tug of war that he wins-- but the water wins the greater battle, covering him, knocking him flat, stretching him out.

He shoves his body upwards and takes a breath.

The water drags him under.

He goes sound-blind, unable to adjust to the low throbbing pressure that crushes into his ears and muffles his skin. The water grabs him and shakes him as a massiff would, burning and foul and acidic in his cuts and mouth. He spits, breathes, goes under again. He can just see the strange intestinal shape of the ravine he’s being flushed down-- writhing lines of stone cut into agonized organic shapes by this flood long ago, walls closing above him,

Djarin’s armor is still in his grip and he folds around it as best he can, making a ball of himself, knowing if he loses it now he will never regain it again.

He’s whipped around a sharp turn, bashing the tip of his tail, a sharp ledge of stone tearing a strip of fire down one of his legs, and then he hits stiller water like a sandbank, plows into it and rolls, and begins to sink.

He can hear a voice through the bones of his skull, a vibration telling him to wake up Boba wake up--

Light through the red. It stinks with charring blood, burning iron. Warm now. Something is pulling him toward the surface, grabbing his chest and lifting him.

He thrashes his tail and surges forward, finding sand-worn rock, climbing with legs and belly and tail until he breaches the surface, drags himself out and onto an island in this underground pool.

He can feel the corrosive water eating through his scaley hide slowly, a distant pain compared to his lungs.

Expelling the water is agony.

Breathing in is worse.

The air is deadly still. He gasps for oxygen that is not there, feels his lungs fill with chlorinous fumes.

BOBA!

His ears are ringing. The hunger is smothered under the pain, the fear. There is no more rage, no more hunt. There is only the understanding that he will die here alone, as the poisonous air strips him inside and out. He doesn’t know how far they traveled-- knows it was far. Knows it’s deep.

The surface might as well be away as the surface of the moons; both equally unreachable and unknowable from here.

The conflicting messages from his senses are starting to come together, too late.
Boba, stay with me. A whisper as distant as the sky, as close as his skin.

“I hear you,” he says, his voice just a rasp. Djarin is… here. He can’t see him but he can extrapolate him. He has Mandalorian armor in his arms, and it is wrapped around someone. He has someone in his arms. It is Din’s armor; Din in the armor.

The surface is a long way away, a long way up, but Din’s jetpack was always the more reliable one. High-beskar housing like that, it survived the fall and a little dip in the water.

It must have. Boba tasted fuel and saw a sun in the darkness. Din has a chance.

It’s not too late. No fatherless child this time.

He hears a distant sobbing.

How much of his propellant has the Mandalorian burned? When did he last refuel?

“Your pack. Ration the fuel. Outcrop to outcrop. You can--” he coughs and does not know if the taste of blood is because his lungs are punctured or because they are dissolving.

He can’t hear over the rush of the water pouring into the cavern; even his bones are deaf with its shaking. He curls in on himself, messy loops of tail kinking painfully together. He coughs again, the effort of it splintering already cracked ribs.

Darkness closes around him, fetid with sour breath and fear.

Darkness seals around his neck, conforming to ridge and spine.

The darkness hisses like an activating helmet filter, and he coughs and coughs and sucks in air that is stale and processed through a dying rebreather, but it is breathable, and his lungs fill and his head clears.

Through the transparisteel visor, he can see.

There is a battered shape in his arms. The HUD doesn’t respond like his own; the image takes shape as he cycles through available overlays with increasing desperation until the heat-image snaps in and he can see Din in his arms, eyes dark and empty, chest flinching as he struggles to breathe shallowly.

...The line of his mouth is wrong. There’s something wrong with his head, the way his hair is splayed out. The infrared doesn’t offer any detail besides that.

Din reaches up with fumbling hands and draws Boba in, pressing his forehead to his own helmet.

“T-take.” It’s more than an echo now, more than the memory of a voice in the helmet speakers. “Take care of--”

If he speaks he’ll cough up what remains of his lungs; he shakes his head, presses his denial into Din’s brow.

Red, a sea of red, and you are drowning in it

He brought Din down to this place. He brought them all here. Didn’t know he was sliding back into the maw until the teeth closed over them.

Din is coughing, that fatal cough that’s going to cycle foul air through his lungs until he dies, but his fingers are rigid on Boba’s shoulders.

The last heave of Din’s lungs is so convulsive that it feels like the world shakes down around Boba’s shoulders, and he howls like the wind somewhere far above.

It howls an answer. The ground shakes again, hard enough to throw Boba half into the water. He twists so that Din lands on him, his head lolling loose and rattling against his shoulder.

He grabs it with one of his left hands and stabilizes it. Not going to let Beroya wake up with whiplash.

Then the light pours in, cracking open far above, blindingly bright. The bent walls that looked like an intestinal twist become a winding ribbon, an open path to a sky far above.

The ceiling melts away-- the sky grows wider, wider as more thin rock gives up and falls in a shower of light and sand that is filling the pit and damming the red river. In the distance, more than a hundred meters up he can just see the upright silhouette of her, a splinter in the desert’s skin, standing too close to the edge as the sand torrents around her.

He cannot see her face but he knows that it is hypoxic-blue and that blood is dribbling from her lips and that she will stare down death to save them.

Then the streams of sand breaking around her join and become a flood that surges over her, and she is gone.

He lunges forward, back into the water, onto the new ridges of sand, then into the falling torrent of it.

It parts like air for him and he lunges up it, clings to the rock wall with ragged foot-claws and the muscles and folds of belly and groin and the vast rest of him. He can hear her frantic heartbeats somewhere in the growing mound, her helpless thrashing against it, and he slips up on her like a kinrath on a hatchling rill and then she too is in his arms and he breaches the mountain of sand.

The air is cold and stings with blown sand; the wind is deafening and the light is only the faintest red glow visible through the storm, but it is clean. The grains scour the acid from him and Din and he surges up, arms crushing tight around Fennec on his left, Din on his right.

He thrashes and surges, uncoordinated, up the wall of the cave, finding a spot soft enough to burrow through, dragging his body meter by meter out of the cave and up to the wind-wrecked surface.

The sand feels welcoming, yielding against his battered body, bruises and fractures up and down the unknowable length of him.

Time loses its meaning as he swims toward the center of the storm, head just enough above the sand that Fennec and Din can breathe. If they’re breathing. He can’t tell. They have long since ceased to struggle.

He knows the dark shape of the palace almost by feel; his deep-set membrane-shrouded eyes can only make out a blur of dark and darker. But the deep rock changes the break of the sand under him. His belly finds a solid surface only a few moments after he expects to, and then he is dragging his armfuls up the approach to the northwards face of the palace.

There is no chance in hell he can see to input a code, keep his reshaped sharp-tipped hands steady enough. He shatters the panel over the manual override with his tail, hooking a protruding spine through the handle of the hydraulic release and jerking it free after a few false starts. The doors sag halfway open and he spills through the aperture they make.

Back into emergency lighting; back into air that has only been still for days. He drags the doors shut behind as best he can, shoving gracelessly at the metal with muscle and scale; the wind shrieks through the little gap but the sensation of being sand-polished eases.

Din’s helmet insulates him from the noise. He does not know where the audio controls are, if they even have a helmet control, he can’t adjust the sensitivity. All the noise is his own wheezing breath; all he can feel is the throbbing ache of bruises that must cover every square meter of him.

If they are breathing, he cannot hear them. If they are stirring, he could not possibly tell.

He holds them close against him, two limp bodies clutched in the claws of a krayt.

Chapter Text

For a long time he lies stretched along almost the entire length of the vehicle bay, so dazed that he doesn’t realize at first that the light has changed.

The streak of light pouring in through the gap in the bay doors is brighter now; tinted red with dust, not stained. The wind has lost the hiss of high-speed sand.

He reaches up with his topmost arms, fumbling at the release of Din’s helmet. He cannot think about how he knows to move; if he does it is paralytic. The buy’ce falls from hands, slipping between his claws and rolling down the long line of his body to wedge in the space between Din’s knee and that particular section of torso.

He’s mostly torso. He can feel his legs somewhere down there, too many of them. Well out of arm’s reach. Either set of arms. There are two of those, one where he expects, and then another protruding from a new joint just below. And then– an unfamiliar more beyond the legs, more back, more spine.

There’s humanity left to him above the hips— or the curve of muscle where hips should be, the vestigial remainders of a waistline without a pelvic bone to anchor to. His skull is shaped mostly as it should be, his eyes face the right way. He recognizes his chest, wider but still the same shape, swelling when his lungs expand.

He’s fairly sure he has more than one set of those now. That’s going to make the bacta pod a problem.

Yes. The extra lungs are the only sticking point there. Definitely.

Below the arbitrary point of articulation it is all ribs and scales and relatively tiny legs that have no trace of biped left to them.

He thinks about it too long, trying to slot the knowledge of more and different to his body in parts he doesn’t have muscle memory for, only instinct, and something like the way an eyetwitch feels fires off under his skin. The spikes along his– tail– stand up rigidily before relaxing back down.

As he shifts, there’s a clatter from Fennec’s side– one of the masks slipping to the ground. More fall as he extracts his arm from under her neck, lowers them both so he can hold her nearer the floor.

There are fewer than he remembers; tattered cords spill along the floor and over his arm, attached to nothing. As he gingerly moves one of the masks from her chest, its cord gives too, like a cobweb, and it crumbles in his hand.

Blank. They’re all blank. Is that a good omen or a bad one, he sure as shit couldn’t say. He’s too afraid to reach for her pulse with these sharp fingers.

Something flicks against one of his other biceps and he whips his head to the side with a hiss of scale to see what’s moving.

…now, with eyes accustomed to the light, he can see that Din has changed too. The full bow of his upper lip is warped around two jutting fangs; they dent his bottom lip, pushing out a central pout. His fangs look like a bocatt’s, but his ears… they jut down out of his hair from a point too high on his skull, elongated and velvety like an oro-deer’s.

One of them flicks, the soft edge of it clipping his arm.

“Din?” he breathes.

It flicks harder. Fennec stirs in his arms.

“D’n?” she murmurs.

Alive

They’re alive. They’re alive–

Fennec grunts as he hauls her close again, pressing both her and Din against his wide, armored chest. Din makes a sound of pained protest but he can’t ease off, can’t let them slip away now.

“You’re alive.”

“Yeah,” Fennec says semi-coherently. “You too.” She thumps his side, a light sting over one of his many, many bruises.

Din’s eyes flutter open; they’re no darker and larger than they always have been, Boba thinks. He’s almost sure.

Din tries to speak and gags, ducking his head to cough. Boba can feel the moisture against his skin with perfect clarity but not the impact of it; his senses are so far from what he knows.

“Easy, Beroya. Udesii. You breathed a lot of bad air down there.”

“Better than breathing sand. Feel like I swallowed half the Dune Sea,” Fennec wheezes.

Din looks up urgently, and then turns away to cough harder, nodding in what is probably agreement.

“Serves the both of you right. The hell were you thinking, Shand? Standing that close to the detonation zone?”

“I was more than a klick and a half from the detonation zone,” she snaps back– well, it would be a snap if her voice had the strength. It’s more of a limp slap. “That damn ravine ripped open like cheap clingmesh. It runs all the way up to the mesa.”

“Then why the hell’d you open it?”

“Because there was a pair of idiots dying down there.”

“I’d have managed.” He wouldn’t have. “Djarin wouldn’t, because he took his buy’ce off like a madman--”

“You were dying,” Din husks. He looks up, his mouth and chin spattered with bloody mucus. There’s a soft wheeze to the edge of his voice. He’s one of the two most beautiful things Boba’s ever seen. The other is in his other arm with her hair in a wild puff of loose strands and frayed cords– he can see where they’re knotted into the hair, not her skin, not anymore– and a judgmental look on her regal face.

“You can see me now?” Din asks, sudden and urgent, those large, liquid eyes opening wide. “You hear me?” It leads him into another coughing fit.

“I see you, Beroya. I see you.”

“I’ve been trying– I’ve been trying to– you couldn’t see me,” he rasps out. “No one could see me. I made it out before the ship wrecked, barely cleared the ridge. Hit the wall. They ran past me. They looked through me, they were shouting for me but–” His throat starts to flutter with panic. “Nobody saw me, something was broken, I could barely move, they were right next to me, they wouldn’t look at me--”

“Easy, easy, Udessi-” Boba whispers urgently, carding a hand through his hair, petting his back with another.

“Fennec– you could–”

“Sort of,” she mutters, squinting through her horror. “Only if I wore the right… face.” She looks down, down Boba’s long torso to the pile of blank masks on the bay floor. Boba looks too. They seem old, the ceramic discoloring. As they watch, cracks begin to run up the side of the topmost one.

Her hand flys up to her left temple and she grimaces. Din’s rising panic gives way to fear for her, as it does, when he puts himself dead last. Boba keeps stroking his back, and grips her bicep, and keeps her pulled close against him

Din pulls one of his gloves off, reaching over barehanded, and Fennec lets him put his fingers over hers. He traces the web of pale, hairline fractures in her skin from where they radiate out from her temple. Her eyes flutter closed as he brushes over the left one, tracing the cracks up to the bridge of her nose.

“I couldn’t remember,” she says, opening her eyes just to rub at them. “I didn’t trust what I was seeing– nothing was right. People who weren’t there. People who were but– wrong. Sometimes you were that clone kid from Pantora and Din was somewhere else when he was there--”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Din says softly, pulling in his hand.

“Your face doesn’t make any sense,” she mutters back.

He reaches up to trace the line of fang jutting from his own mouth, gives a rueful shrug. Point scored.

Boba stares at both of them, able to joke with each other after having their souls turned inside out, vulnerable bits bared in a grotesque literalism.

They’re both still shaking. They’re all still shaking, he can hear the rustle of restless scales. But Shand and Djarin have pulled themselves back into their respective armors, and he … doesn’t fit his anymore, metaphorically or literally, actually, that realization a horrible decoration atop this slime sundae.

“Boba?” Din’s ears flick in concern, long velvet points stirring through his stiff hair, dried and frozen into disarray by whatever nightmare brew of salts and oxidized metals were in that water. He shifts his weight, braced on his elbows over Boba’s chest, searching his face.

“I’m– I’m the one--” He sounds insane. It was me hunting you. I ate Dorai’s beasts. I’m the one who threw the crawler. But look at him. Can they see him-? Can they see him as he is-?

“--You can see the scales, can’t you? You see the change in me--?”

Din nods slowly, reaching out and tracing the band that lies over Boba's pectorals, broken into shapes almost like pieces of his beskar’gam. Boba can feel the difference in sensation where toughened skin gives way to plate. The sudden fear that he might be hallucinating, still a half-step of reality away from them, melts away.

“The hole– it was me, I was– I thought it was a dream, the cracks, the damage–” he rasps out.

“Yeah. I know. I… saw you. Sometimes. Down in the pit. I tried to keep you company,” Fennec says. “I didn’t know if you could see it. Thought maybe we just weren’t talking about it.”

He had seen it. Hadn’t. He shuts his eyes and the world mutes to a warm-colored blurr. With an effort, he shuts his eyes again, the second opaque layer sliding over.

“I don’t know what I am now.”

“You’re beautiful,” Din murmurs. Boba can hear the slight warnings of a lisp in it now as his lips brush over those fangs. It’s hopelessly endearing. “Like a legend.”

“...It’s not bad on you,” Fennec says, her way of agreeing. He opens his eyes twice, and hers are so dark, so sharp. Layers of perspective back in place, mask over mask fused back into self. Everything about her feels a little more real. The sunlight slanting through the mess he made of the bay door catches on the silkweb-thin cracks of red across her left eye.

“You should have left. I didn’t mean this to happen to you.”

“Our place is here,” Shand says. “We do not abandon each other.”

Din grips one of his left hands tight across his chest, drawing it to his mouth like a religious zealot beseeching a prophet. Boba shivers and it crosses the length of the vehicle bay, scales rattling and shivering all the way down.

“You both need to bathe before you suck on that, Djarin,” Fennec says, and it startles a laugh from them both.

Din’s ends in an ugly cough; Boba shifts the hand Din’s holding to clutch his bare one instead, keeping him upright while he gasps for air over Boba’s side.

Boba pets Din’s hand with the heel of his own, trying to keep his claws from touching the beroya’s skin– then urges Din to turn his palm upwards, trying to see if the pads of skin there really are thicker than they used to be.

Din pulls his glove back on, wiping at his mouth.

Footsteps, the ground whispers to Boba’s skin. Approaching.

A second later Fennec snaps, “Incoming!” just as a humanoid outline appears at the bay door.

He’s seen this silhouette in the Tatooine sunlight before, and he’s absolutely done with it. He moves without thinking, pushes himself back up against the wall of the vehicle bay, carrying Fennec and Din along with him on the span of his chest. Stomach. Whatever all that is now. He lets instinct coil his lower body in a spines-out bulwark around them.

He sees only Skywalker enter the bay, but he hears another set of footsteps. Or– not precisely hears. Feels, except with sound. In his skin and bones and on his tongue, a shadow where heat should be and is not quite, the weight of nothing on the floor.

Din grabs for his buy’ce, fumbling it on, long ears flattening down the side of his head as it slides neatly over them.

“Who’s the other one?” Fennec demands, leaning close and protective over his chest. “He looks familiar. Do you know him?”

“I don’t see another one. I hear him, though,” Boba returns, almost subvocal.

“I don’t see him now,” Din mutters through the vocoder. “But there’s still a shadow when he moves.”

“Din?” Skywalker calls. “Are you–”

Boba sees the moment when his eyes adjust and he truly takes in the scene– his steps fumble. The other set stops too.

‘Well. I’ve never seen that before.’

Luke’s eyes flick to the air beside him where nothing stands, and back to Boba.

Boba draws himself up, torso upright, lower hands settled on his lovers’ shoulders protectively, upper arms crossed.

“What are you staring at?” he demands as haughtily as he can.

“You’re alive! –My apologies,” the Jedi says, the words running together too fast and apparently ahead of his brain, because when he realizes what he’s said his mouth purses and he visibly collects himself.

“We’re fine. What do you want?” Boba says, glaring him down like an uninvited salesman, daring him to say a word about it, the myriad ways in which nothing is fine. His spines bunch, scales lifting like they can fill every last space left in the docking bay.

The Jedi gives him a long, blank stare, mouth clamped so tight it might be a vacuum seal to keep his jaw from hanging open. Finally he seems to find an approach; his pursed lips twitch into a smile. “Greetings, Exalted one. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight.”

It takes a moment to place the words. Another bewildered moment to read them as some kind of… humor. As if Boba and the Jedi could share an in-joke, about that meeting.

“None of that. Or you’ll wish you let the rancor eat you,” Boba growls. He swallows down bile that no longer burns. His esophagus is either numb or… reinforced. “Why are you darkening my doorstep this time?”

“I thought you might be in trouble.”

He says it so plainly that Boba can only blink both sets of his eyelids at him. “Whatever gave you that idea.”

Something digs against his upper ribs– a ring of metal he feels like a shiver, a bit of pressure. A beskar pauldron against his scales and then an elbow.

“Commander Skywalker. Where is my son?” Din demands, pushing upright, his voice hoarse but as sharp as his new fangs.

Skywalker raises his hands defensively. “He is safe, you have my word. He’s less than a hundred meters away. I left him with one of your staff. An Ugnaught woman he recognized and trusted.”

Because Skywalker thought he was going to find… something mangled in here. Three corpses. Or two, and something else, depending on what his damned visions showed him. Some decent instinct stirred in him to keep the child from having to see his father’s body. Boba would have done the same. He swallows that away, tries to build his anger back up.

“Mezza’s here?” Fennec demands, rising to the challenge for him. “Did you bring her into the storm-?”

“The storm has passed. They were already gathered when I arrived,” Skywalker soothes. “They allowed me to go in first and make sure it was safe.”

‘Very kind of them. Tell them it’s not safe. Tell them this dustball has no safety,’ nothing urges him.

Tell ‘them’? ‘They’ gathered? ‘They’ allowed?

Boba can hear them, he thinks, if he lets his skin listen. The faintest impression of a stirring group, somewhere out on the sand.

“Well, Is it safe?” Din asks, practically.

‘It’s not safe, it’s Tatooine.’

Skywalker nods patiently. “It is.”

“Is what has happened to us…” Din’s visor tips toward them, pleading for understanding. “Our changes. Are they transmissible?”

‘The Force is not contagious,’ nothing says flatly, and Skywalker tries and fails to restrain a curious glance to the side.

Nothing’s edge has dulled and twisted inward when it speaks again. ‘I… did some substantial experiments on the subject. It isn’t.’

Skywalker looks unhappy as he internalizes that. Boba enjoys the visible effort it takes to recenter himself in his Jedi smugness.

“It’s over. The imbalance that was centered on you has passed. I’m so glad to see you’re all okay.” He looks to Din’s helmet with a frown, squinting like it might help him focus. “Grogu has been very worried. Are you okay?” He gestures to his own face, tracing a delicate T. “If you’re hurt under there, he’s been teaching me how to heal, I might be able to help–”

“I’ll be fine. But I do not know your companion.”

Luke rocks back on his heels, wide-eyed. “You see him?”

“I saw him without the beskar. Now I can see his shadow. I hear him move.”

“I see him,” Fennec says darkly.

“I hear him,” Boba points out sweetly.

“Huh.” Skywalker blinks, and there’s that slack jaw, combining with the round-eyed gape to leave him looking more the idiot farmboy and less the idiot sage. “...You’ve been touched by the Force. It seems to have left a mark.”

“You call this a touch?” Din asks, openly skeptical.

“Did it leave anything unmarked,” Boba says viciously.

“It was aimed at you.”

“By who?” Shand says, her cracked gaze narrowing sharply. “Are they here?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it. It’s been a storm waiting to happen for a long time. I sensed it on you, when we met before.”

“You sensed a lot of second-hand spice, shut your mouth.”

Luke plows on. “In Ben’s house, where everything else was in balance. When I thought you were a storm trooper, I could feel the disturbance in your wake. But when we met again in Jabba’s court, it had changed. It surrounded you. It was building like a pressure front..”

Fennec’s lip twists and Skywalker turns his innocent helpfulness on her. “I don’t know who changed it, either. It was just– aimed. All the darkness you built, aimed at you.”

As he speaks, the phantom tingle of footsteps crawls up Boba’s skin. His spines shiver and stand out sharper with an involuntary motion as nothing strides closer to him.

‘The catalyst was after Bespin. It wasn’t on him then. Sometime after that he pissed off a Force user. At least one. Badly. It wasn’t a Dathomirian, but I can’t tell if--’

Fennec paws for her thigh, raising an apparently weak arm– though the hand holding her blaster is steady as gravity. She points it at a spot roughly two meters from the tip of Boba’s coiled tail. “Tell your friend to stop moving or I’m taking a shot.”

‘Put that away. Be reaso– I can’t believe I’m arguing with you. I can’t believe you’re pointing a blaster at me.’

“I don’t think it will help,” Din murmurs. “I don’t think he’s here.”

‘Just because you can’t see me through a pure beskar helmet doesn’t mean–’

Boba lashes out. It’s only half conscious, but his lower body rolls so that his clawed feet can dig into the stone floor, and the rest of his spine unfurls and smacks against empty air.

The nothing is a patch of air just a sliver of a silk-thread thicker than the rest, a spot of warmth maybe, but only as much as the reflection of moonlight is warm. Beyond faint but there-- and then it’s gone.

Boba feels nothing appear behind the Jedi’s shoulder and pulls himself back into an aching, defensive pile.

‘He’s still disturbing the Force. Now he can do it on purpose. You are not safe here.’

“I came to help,” Luke says patiently.

‘You’ve helped.’

“They need counsel.”

‘Get off this dustball and never come back. You should never come back to Tatooine. Counsel dispensed. Time to go.’

“They need my help.”

‘Luke, please. Your friend is alive. He’s fine. That’s the best you could expect. Let it go, leave this planet, please–’

“The best– look at them.” Luke glances at them and then, pleading, back to empty air. “They’ve been changed, can they be restored? Is this a thing that can happen? Do you know of this?”

‘Surviving a curse like that isn’t ‘a thing that can happen’,’ says the nothing, tense. ’They balanced themselves. I don’t know how. Don’t disturb it. Take it as a gift from the galaxy and get the kid back somewhere where plants grow.’

“A curse?” Boba snaps, and hears the echo of Din and of Skywalker too.

‘It’s... the closest term for the Sith ritual of turning the Force on a victim. Does the word matter?’

“A curse.” His lips twist over teeth he can feel have all grown in sharp. Karking Jedi. Karking nothing. “Like a spacer’s story.”

‘He doesn’t believe it. The giant– krayt hybrid doesn’t believe in curses.’ The thrum of tension and protectiveness in the voice of nothing slides sharply back to indignation.

Luke sighs, his smile dimming into a rueful grimace as he massages his temple with one gloved finger. “Father,” he murmurs, still audible to Boba. “He can hear you.”

‘I know.’ That feels pointedly directed.

“‘Father.’” Boba repeats flatly, fixing his glance on the rough position of the interloper. “I see where you got your charm from, Skywalker.”

“Hold on… that is General Skywalker,” Fennec says, squinting down the barrel of her blaster. “I thought he died with the Republic.”

“I think he did--” Din breaks off into violent coughing, leaning over Boba’s arm and away from Skywalker and the nothing to retch– Boba can feel his gasping breath and the faint moisture when he raises his helmet over his mouth.

Acid starts to rise up his throat from deep inside his gut– not a disorder, but ammunition. “If you aren’t here to help, get out. My man’s injured.”

“I am here to help, I promise. And if you don’t trust me, that old 2-1B out there can probably fix up that cough.”

“You said ‘they’ were already gathered. Who’s ‘they’?” Fennec says, finger relaxing away from the trigger.

“About three dozen members of your staff. I understand they’ve been sheltering nearby; they came back as soon as the storm died.”

It sounds like a lie. Boba would believe that Ygabba had been willing to risk the edge of the storm, and Jora. Mezza, all right, for Din’s sake. But the rest of the staff–? Numbered in the dozens?

“Is H2 all right?” Din rasps against Boba’s side. “Her vocoder was torn.”

‘Explains the patch job. I did better work when I was nine.’

“Yes.” Skywalker frowns, a little wrinkle appearing between his brows. “They’re all okay. I made sure before I came to find you. Although you should probably get surveyors out here. The Ugnaught says her seismometers are mostly overloaded.”

“...I over-drove them,” Fennec mutters. “And it still almost wasn’t enough to know where to blast. You’re lucky you’re big, Boba, or it would have been a needle in the Dune Sea.”

“Very lucky.”

“Blast–? Did you– are you the reason there’s a moat?”

As one, the three of them turn to look at the Jedi. He looks back at them, just as puzzled. Boba swears if he turned sideways there’d be sunlight shining through that empty head.

“We need to see,” Fennec decides.

“I can’t go out there like this.”

“Sure you can,” she says. “Shoulders back. Head up. Rule with fear.”

“We are with you,” Din says simply.

The last pieces of his broken world slide back into place. …Into balance.

He could never have killed them. He’d have died for them, but he hopes that the universe itself would have swallowed him before he could really harm them.

It is terrifying to think they might share the sentiment.

“Din. You– commed,” he says awkwardly. “To say you were coming back. I received it.”

“I’m glad.”

“No– you– at the end, you said–”

“Later,” he promises.

It is the most damning promise Boba knows. Soon. Later. After this job. Before you know it. I’ll be back. An incantation that presages death.

With Djarin he almost believes it will be.

“Later.”

Din reaches up to his shoulders and draws him down to his height– and a little further to Fennec’s. He leans his helmeted brow against Boba’s, against hers, and for a moment they breathe together.

Then they step out into the ever-brightening sun.

‘Moat’ was something of an understatement, as it turns out. Deep ravines have opened up, webbing out across the flats, ringing the mesa in a network of narrow bridges and pitfalls. The darkness at the bottom of them looks almost solid; what was water already dried into a toxic sludge by Tatooine’s moisture-greedy atmosphere.

And past the last of the land bridges that now connect the Palace to the rest of the planet, they are waiting. About three dozen of them after all, all of them folk who had intended to weather the storm in Mos Espa. Mezza and H2 are there as reported, and Parnel with them. And Jora and Ygabba, to be expected.

But some of Jabba’s old guard are there, too, and some of Boba’s new recruits. Terza. Nir’g, and the last squads that had stayed until they'd gone with Jora and Ygabba in the end, before the sands came down. Zhosef with a handful of their laborers, and some of the engineers. And Dorai, perched aboard a bantha. He thought he’d seen the back of her for good.

Skywalker leads the way out, flagging down a few guards who pull out blasters, going on ahead so that by the time Boba’s bulk fully clears the hanger everyone understands what’s happened.

A ragged cheer rises up, and he almost balks.

He doesn’t blame them for the blasters. He understands that. There’s almost ten meters of him, from whatever’s going on with the heavy scale around his skull to the last vertebra of his tail. He can’t really walk; it’s more a slither, or an effortless swim as his lower body sinks into the sand comfortably and instinctively. That’s going to really give Jora a headache when she has to requarter him….

The cheer he cannot quite believe.

Fett. The whisper rises around him, excited. Fett.

Then: The Krayt’s Claw.

The cheering starts again, fuller throated.

“I really wish you hadn’t told them about that,” he whispers, not daring to look down at Fennec where she walks beside him. Head up, shoulders back, show no fear.

“If I hadn’t, Ygabba would have,” Fennec snickers.

“What is the Krayt’s Claw-?” Din puts in quietly, and Boba realizes horribly that he’s never heard that story. Of all the void-damned timing.

“Well, you see, when our fearless leader was about thirteen–”

“Later,” he hisses.

The staff looks on with awe, save three.

One is Ygabba, having one of her worse eye days. She doesn’t really react until he gets closer and then she leans way around to look at the sand pouring in around his tail.

“Oh, he really is bigger.” The Gamorrean next to her nods sagely and pats her shoulder. “It’s going to be a challenge to feed you now.”

“You’ll rise to it.” He takes her hand and she pats along the scales and claws, but squeezes back with the same bony strength he felt so long ago, when they were two children in a slaver’s camp.

One of the unimpressed is Dorai, who lowered her rifle with the rest, but didn’t holster it. It rests across her bantha’s horns as she stares at him.

What she calls him when he passes her is one of the few Ryl phrases he knows, and it is– given the circumstances of his birth– almost physically impossible.

“There will be repayment made,” he says firmly, as if in negotiation and not in the body of a massive reptile.

“Yes there will,” she says, her eyes a little wild but her mouth set in a nonchalant snear.

Rylothian melodrama. He’s very glad she survived. He’s probably going to have to double her pay.

Then– the last of the gathered who does not stare in wonder and back away in fear–

Is small and green and clambering from Mezza’s arms, pelting toward them clumsily across the sands.

“BOO! BOO!” DAD! You’re okay! Dad!

The idea rings clearly through Boba’s skin, a wild happy voice from something bigger than its little physical form.

Din sucks in a gasp and falters, sagging against Boba’s side.

“Pofa!” Grogu cries. “Boo! Penn!” Uncle Boba! Dad! Aunt Fennec! I came back! You’re safe, I was scared, you fixed it!

“When did he learn to talk?” Fennec says, sheer bewilderment making her the uncharacteristically last on the uptake.

Din is already back on his feet, darting forward at startling speed to meet his child, barely disturbing the sand beneath his toes as he runs, snatching his son up close to his chest and weeping out fervent Mando’a between another round of coughing. Boba is a lightning-quick slither behind, scooping the both of them up as a unit and circling them all in a sweep of his tail that gathers Fennec in too.

“We’re safe, little one. We’re safe, that’s right.”

The child babbles to them and– there is the sound and then there is the meaning of it in an urgent cacophony that almost defies words, mostly a sensation of helplessness, of trying to hold back the storm over and over and worry and discontent at being so far from family when danger was at the door, and even Fennec helplessly lapses into praising the little mite, praising and reassuring and promising that his help was invaluable, that all is finally well.

The child can feel his father’s breath failing– let me help- even as Din tries to talk him down, beg him to spare his strength. Instead he turns away, dark eyes searching the group, and then cries out deafeningly for Day-sky.

The summons brings the Jedi at a quick trot.

I’m here, Grogu. I know.

“...you can help him? Make sure it doesn’t--” Din breaks off into choking. “Make sure it doesn’t hurt him–”

“It won’t, Din, it won’t. Let us help, please.”

A long pause and then the helmet dips in a nod and Boba reluctantly unfurls just enough that Skywalker can reach in and touch Din’s chest, his hand splayed out next to the child’s.

Boba can feel something shifting where they touch, how the child’s bright unmediated light tugs and pushes at Skywalker’s sun-warmth demandingly. They’re changing something inside his Beroya, gathering darkness and rot away from light and life. Din stays still, trying not to breathe or disturb them– and then with a last pulse of warmth, suddenly he moves, turning away with a warning croak. Boba helps guide him down to kneel on the sand, holds his helmet tipped up above his mouth as he wretches clotted blood and stinking metal.

He reaches up with a shaking hand, draws his helmet back down, and takes a deep breath of filtered air that swells his chest. A full, healthy lungful, that doesn’t immediately trigger more convulsions.

Din sags in relief and inwardly, so does Boba.

“There you go.” He rubs at the little bare patch of neck below the helmet seal, under the collar of the ruined kute, brushing it gentle with the backs of his knuckles to keep the claws pointed away. “There you go.”

“It’s– better. Thank you. Are you all right, kid?”

The child coos, offers up a definitive but sleepy positive.

“It looked like the kid was doing all the work,” Fennec notes, so arch and judgemental Boba knows she’s just as relieved as he is. “What are you even teaching him?”

“Manners, mostly.” Skywalker gives them all a soft, fond smile.

“When did you learn those?” Boba growls, taken aback by the warmth of it.

“He means ‘thank you’,” Din says.

“No I don’t. Fuck off, Skywalker.” Or he will have to thank him and that might kill him.

But the Jedi leaves, showing a mercy unusual for the breed, and leaves them in their huddle, where Boba can fold up his body around them and Fennec can stand watch while Din speaks, for this first time, directly to his child. The world happens around them, and Boba just– for a while, he lets it.

At some point he isn’t sure of– because he can hear the sandworms stirring leagues below the sand but his brain cannot actually process anything but the clamor of his lovers, and the child– Dorai slides from the back of her bantha and starts passing around a truly impressive amount of booze.

“Is that where all my spo– she took all my spotchka? I gave her a bottle because I felt bad for her and she--”

“Pebii! Penn!” Blue drink! Why can’t I drink the blue drink like Aunt Fennec? I like blue things. Blue milk blue cookies blue puc blue slug blue krill blue–

“Boba, she took all my spotch–”

Boba kisses her. And then Din, who presses back hard with his helmeted-forehead. And then the child’s little brow as he continues to list the blue things he finds edible.

“It’s a party, Shand. Nevermind. We know where to get more.”

He can feel Skywalker beaming out there somewhere, drinking with his guards, and he simply has to ignore it. Nothing hovers nearby, watching, and he turns his body away to hide his family from it, and kisses them all again for good measure, very carefully with his hardened brow and lips and sharp teeth that none of them seem to mind.

The celebration breaks up, eventually. The suns are out and high in the sky, and they all have to move into the Palace and work. Not that Boba can, as such. It’s maddening, all the things he suddenly cannot do. Anything that involves the upper floors is out; there isn’t room for him and the lack of solidity under him when he tries the stairs makes him feel almost nauseous.

He’s put out enough to let H2 corner him to take his new baseline, a strange game of prodding around his chest until she finds skin thin enough to take blood from, and endless scanner recalibrations to get anything useful back.

“Djarin and Shand stayed much closer to human baseline,” she scolds him, the naughty krayt who turned into a lizard just to make her operations more difficult. “Establishing a new care routine is going to take extensive trial and error! I do not have the facilities for this.”

“If we ever get enough laborers in the palace again, I’ll try to get a real medbay set up. All right?” he sighs, resigning himself to the infinite appeasement he’s going to have to do to keep those who are worth keeping.

She stops in her tracks to stare at him, her wide eye-lenses flickering, and then abruptly runs another scan over his head.

When H2 releases him, he looks for something he can do that is active but not in the way of people better-suited to be working in a palace built for hominids and spider-droids. He finally settles himself into the lower floors, clearing out the rubble he left in his deranged chase. Most of what he broke was decorative; carvings, or doorway insets. Even a krayt his size didn’t manage to do real structural damage to the old place, which is… a reassurance, he supposes.

He doesn’t need Mezza to tell him that the floors under the old B’omarr library are fragile. He can feel the absence of stone, the emptiness in the sound. More of the rooms caved in during the chain reaction that opened up the ravines. The monks that didn’t get caught up in the red tide scuttle thoughtfully around, tracing these new passageways in their aimless contemplation.

“Seal up the door. Mark it on the maps as dangerous, get new seismometers around it in case anything else was rotten down there, keep sending organic scraps here and don’t molest them. Let them– let them just keep it.”

“It is decided,” Mezza notes, and he thinks that’s a seal of her approval.

She drafts him as a temporary seismometer after that and sends him off to mark safe passages.

At some point Skywalker finds him, just following and watching with wide-eyed interest. He wants to know what Boba feels. How he hears. That’s not a Jedi talking, now, that’s a good little moisture farmer getting to know the enemy, and it’s almost respectable.

“Don’t you have someone else to bother?”

“There’s not really enough room up in the hydroponics section. Some of the plants are still alive, though, I was able to save them.” He sounds happy about that. “I think Din’s going to need them, now. The fangs seem mostly defensive.”

Boba stops, turns and deliberately coils to block the corridor both behind and before the Jedi. “He let you see?”

“When we were alone.” A beat. “I promised I wouldn’t let any of the ghosts see. The echoes in the Force… they mean well. They do only seek to offer guidance. My father just doesn’t like this planet.”

“Nobody sane does.” But that stirs a memory. A loose thread, a little irritation in his hide…

“He was General Skywalker. The Jedi. Your father.” Boba listens to the stone as he says it, to the whole hivelike structure of the palace, to make sure the nothing-intruder isn’t listening in.

“Yes,” Luke says, oddly solemn.

“He died near the end of the Separatist Wars.”

“...in some ways that’s true.”

“What the flying kriff was he doing ghosting around Bespin during the rebellion-?”

“Only a part of my father died in the Clone Wars.” Luke’s eyes flash up to his as if he’s only just understood why Boba avoids the name, his brain just a little shy of his mouth. “The War with the Separatists. He… what remained. Was there. On Bespin.

“I think. Leia tells me,” Skywalker says, with an obvious effort– and it’s horrible and fascinating how Boba can feel his emotions rolling around him, the way they change the resonance of the universe, salt thickening the sea, cracks weakening a stone. He doesn’t know what the textures of them mean, but there are so many.

“Leia tells me that he had issued a reward for the capture of the Millenium Falcon. He gave you Han Solo in exchange for your work.”

The world roils around them again– and smoothes back into place. Skywalker lets his complicated feelings slip away like an ill-fitting cloak.

Jetii osik.

“Anakin Skywalker.” All but the face of the Jedi in the war. Bold and beloved. That… had become the father of the Inquisitorius.

“Yes.”

“Your father.”

Luke nods sadly. “Yes.”

The dual revelation is more than anyone should have to deal with today, especially him. He stares Skywalker down unblinking, refusing to lower himself to reacting to…all of this. The Hero With No Fear had a kid.

Wait. No. A sister, that news had exploded while he was out in the wastes earning his keep with the Carkoon’s Skirt; that Bail Organa’s surviving daughter was a foundling, with a lost brother. Two kids.

The Huttslayer is the daughter of the Hero With No Fear, now that tracks. But he knows how viciously the Empire had been willing to treat the Alderaanian princess. You heard the rumors that she’d thrown off a skirtopanol cocktail like watered down wine, but the bare fact that she’d been interrogated wasn’t the part of that story in question.

Had Vader known, when he set the worst of the galaxy’s underworld on Skywalker and Organa. Had he known who they were.

Would Boba have taken the contract if he knew the depth of the betrayal-? The failure of parenting?

Probably.

Luke waits until it’s clear he won’t respond, and simply goes on. Chattering. He’s good for that.

“He was a powerful Force user, more disciplined and better trained than I am. No doubt he could sense what I sensed even more clearly. If he says it was after you left him on Bespin, he’s probably right.”

“I’m sure he’s right. It was a busy few months. I stepped on a lot of toes and didn’t stick around to keep track of which of them knew your magic nonsense.”

Zuckuss will tell you Boba Fett's future too, hisses a rival hunter in his memories, dangling from Boba’s grip above a long fall. Everything is red, a sea of red, and you are drowning in it!

But was Zuckuss turning his destruction back on him, or just trying to buy him off with a warning that one of his other foes or rivals had already armed the detonator? Did the so called ‘seer’ have the ability to set off that kind of charge-? 

The bastard survived the fall anyway; one hell of an overreaction to a minor scare, if it was him. And one years and years delayed.  

"Why did it take so long? Why the delay on the timer?" 

Skywalker pauses. "It wasn't delayed. It was always looking for a way in." 

He looks at Boba for a moment, and if even he's considering his words before he speaks they must be as volatile as rhydonium. 

"Now that I can-- see the blast pattern, I guess. I think I know what the 'curse' was." 

Boba tips his chin, pointed teeth locked tight.  

"It was trying to destroy what you loved. Or- lead you to do so. I don't think you loved anything back then, though." 

Boba stares. How dare the Jedi see that and say it to his face. 

“It’s over now, though,” the Jedi reassures, kindly. Void-damn him for thinking Boba needs it. “You did not turn the destruction against your family. You overcame your darkest selves. You saved each other.” His eyes are soft when he says it.

Disgusting.

“I think-– it may be possible, in time, for you to control the manifestation of the Force. You might be able to return to your old shape, with meditation and control. I’m willing to stay and help. And then I wouldn’t have to separate Din and Grogu again, or Din from you and Miss Shand.”

“Stay on Tatooine? What do the echoes of the Force think about that?”

“Ben thought it was a good idea.”

Ben. That old hermit who lived near the Skywalker place-? No, it’s that kind of day. The hermit was probably a first cousin of the famous Kenobi, or something.

“I’ll think on it. Don’t make yourself at home just yet.”

“Of course, Exalted One.”

Boba hisses and spits in front of him, making Skywalker skip back a step away from a puddle of acid that steams on the stone floor.

He can feel the fear roll off him– and dissipate like mist.

Jetii. Osik.

He chases Skywalker off, back to the new friends he’s corrupting from the Palace staff, and clears another hall. The rest of the afternoon he spends trying to figure out how to conduct business when he no longer has two feet to walk on, and cannot meet people eye to eye without most of his belly on the floor.

By the time the delegation from Mos Pelgo gets in that evening, he’s given up and just accepted that Jabba’s old dais-throne is the only surface besides the floor that’s going to hold him, and that he’s stuck there. He’s too long to lay across the throne exactly like the old slug did, but he can get part of his torso across it in a reasonable facsimile. Fennec is enjoying herself thoroughly, goading him to float them all around, and Din simply stands behind him at his left shoulder, in the shadow of Boba’s younger self.

The child is sleeping in Skywalker’s care, happily exhausted from the party and Ygabba’s celebratory dinner. The woman had somehow managed to come up with cooked food for all of them; even Boba felt himself running close to the brim. Have to remember to ask Dorai how often he was supposed to be eating. Have to hope she was in a forgiving mood when she answered.

He can sense when Din’s attention flickers to the child, a double-entry on his constant scan for danger. And he can hear the child’s sleep, if he listens carefully, a little pool of stillness stirred by occasional tiny dreams and ideas.

Din doesn’t want the kid up on the throne until security’s at full strength. He doesn’t blame him; they’re all targets up here, even with this seemingly harmless crowd. That’s all right; there’s plenty of Boba now. They can all take potshots at him.

He can keep himself in a reasonable pile, his own lower back against the throne at about the right height, but he’s painfully aware of how… exposed he is. How much flesh he’s showing.

His chestplate still fits, more or less, but his kute was destroyed and most of his backups are unlikely to fit anything below what would have been a navel, if he’d ever had one. At least the kama doesn’t require him to have legs in the normal place, but the only modesty it’s preserving now is symbolic. He’s not sure where his bits are, and he’s in no mood to find out.

His upper arms are bare below the shoulderpieces; and his lower set naked but for vambraces– that arrangement felt the most natural, for vanishingly small values of ‘natural’.

He wavers between feeling monstrous and absurd.

He sets his wide jaw and braces for the reactions of the newcomers.

If he was expecting screams, he’s greatly disappointed. There are a few sharp inhales. The Mos Pelgo Marshal looks him up and down with wide eyes and then looks past him, behind his shoulder, where a glint of metal indicates that Din has nodded back to the man.

The closest thing he gets to the outcry he feels is warranted by this new state of affairs is Oro, who gives a gasping little “Oh–” with a comically round mouth.

“Oh that’s… oh he’s really a krayt,” he whispers, and Boba for his many sins can hear it clearly through the stonework. “I mean I know Jora commed us about that but… I didn’t think she meant it like this.”

Shroud turns slowly to his partner, signing very patiently: “‘Fett has become half krayt.’ What did you think she meant?”

Oro goes silent-– blessedly-– but his hands chatter for him, and oh void damn it all he heard about the ‘Krayt’s Claw’ thing from Lliewel and the rest of the guards. The dirty version, not the mythical version. Boba tries to ignore the knowledge that if he dug in hard enough, he might actually be able to sink through the platform and into the floor.

Fennec is shaking with silent laughter and the vibration is close, loud, and unignorable.

Marshal Vanth has been surveying the group on and around the throne and appears to come to some conclusion.

“Well, I am mighty pleased to see that you’re in one piece, more or less. You know I’ve got no quarrel with you, Lord Fett, ma’am, and Mando is a friend of mine who I would be sorry to lose.”

Another silvery nod behind Boba’s shoulder.

“I’ve been sheltering a few of yours and they told me things had gotten pretty bad, but… they seem to be resolved?”

“They are.” He looks on, both sets of eyelids open wide, daring a challenge.

“Now Mos Pelgo’s happy to offer any help you need with folks displaced by the storm, who might not be amenable to relocating to the larger cities. That aid is unconditional.” Vanth pauses and forges on. “That said, and this has no bearing on my prior offer–”

“Get on with it.”

“If this is to be a long-standing state of affairs, I do notice you’re not using about half of your armor. If you’d be willing to make a trade--”

He rears up out of the throne, uncoiling until the ceiling is in easy reach. Din stiffens beside him.

Fennec is outright trembling with restrained mirth.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’,” Vanth says, with an amount of aplomb that Boba resents on a personal level.

“That armor belonged to my father, and to his Mand’alor before him. It stays in my family. What I cannot use will be reforged for the child, when he’s old enough. It is not for the use of outsiders.” His voice rises until the room rings with it, a wailing echo on the edge of his syllables.

Din draws in a sharp breath beside him. Fennec’s laughter stops abruptly.

The still pool at the edge of their awareness splashes into vapor and he hears an awareness on him, glancing over to see a pair of sleepy dark eyes peering out of the floating pram next to Skywalker.

He clears his throat until the extra harmonics feel like they’ve settled, swallows down a little acid. “Let this be the last time you mention it, Marshal.” He lowers himself slowly, settling back into his coils again.

“Heard and heard, sir.”

Grogu looks over in surprise at his voice, and waves happily to the marshal. Vanth’s smile and wave in return are both shaky: it only soothes Boba’s pride so much.

And that’s the end of it.

By moonsrise, Jora has one of the bigger storerooms cleared; carpets are set down, his furniture moved from the tower rooms he can no longer easily reach or fit into. He appreciates the efficiency, but.

But.

It feels like a condemnation that everyone is taking this calamity, this remaking of him and his in stride when he still hasn’t come to grips with it. As if this is a thing that happens, as surely as crime syndicates rising and falling, politicians gaining and losing power. Sometimes the mayor’s overthrown; sometimes a crime lord becomes a monstrous half-and-half sentient krayt dragon. Either way, the suns rise or they don’t.

“This planet is full of madthings, and us included for coming back here,” he gripes, once he’s settled into his temporary quarters. Fennec has settled onto a coil like her own couch, arm looped companionably around one of his stubby reptilian legs.

“You’re not wrong,” she says. “Next time I get cursed, I’m doing it on Zeltros.”

“You’d be bored to pieces in a day.”

“Too Inner Rim,” Din puts in quietly, a new strand braiding neatly into the comfortable old joke. He and his child are nestled up with the ridge of spines providing a protective barrier, lounging. Boba likes the weight of them all on him. He likes knowing where they are.

Grogu coos thoughtfully. “Sowba,” he enunciates, and brushes their minds with a happy image of crunchy, wriggling krill by the handful and fat hopping pucks in the mire.

“That’s right, ad.” Din nods firmly. “Sorgan is wonderful this time of year.”

…Boba finds himself worrying at how appetizing the sense image was. He doubts it’s because of the sender’s bias. He brushes that worry off and just lets his gratitude for the thought trickle back. Grogu gives him a look of absolute delight.

“I don’t know how well I’d do in the damp.” He folds over himself until he can reach the child, and the father, and he has two left hands to give both of their long ears a stroke. Din’s flicks against his hand in startlement, and then he grins shyly, lips curling around his fangs. His eyelids dip in contentment and Boba does it again.

“Pofa!” Grogu says, delighted, flooding him with unfiltered pleasure that Boba can finally hear him properly. He’s not ready to handle that– and as soon as he thinks it the childish clamor of joy fades down to something less intrusive.

Sorry Uncle Boba I haven’t been able to talk much in a long time Miss Grey-Tano didn’t want to talk about frogs Day-Skywalker doesn’t really want to either comes in a sense-impression-spill that laps the edge of his mind without overwhelming it.

“Jate,” Din murmurs, his words and his meaning full of pride. “Good barracks-voice.”

He lets himself bask in their presence for a while longer, feeling their hearts beat and their lungs work with his skin, listening to Grogu chatter himself into fresh sleepiness as his father listens and comments thoughtfully. Just another second, and then nudges Fennec with a foot, Din with a hand. “You three should get up to bed. I’m exhausted. I know none of you are better off.”

They share a glance.

“Are we too heavy?” Din asks.

He snorts in response.

Shand shifts to get a little more horizontal. “I’m comfortable. Djarin?”

“I’m comfortable. What about you, kid?”

Grogu snuggles a little closer into his scales, yawning dramatically. “Pofa wa.” Uncle Boba is warm.

“You don’t have to stay,” Boba makes himself say.

Another shared glance.

Grogu coos, concerned. Do you want us to go?

“No, but… I’m not a bed.”

“Could have fooled me,” Fennec says cheerfully.

“I like it here. It’s safe,” says Din, so honestly it leaves him breathless.

“Ah, all right then.”

He circles them in his body, and folds over until his head rests, almost perpendicular, against Din’s shoulder. A sleepy foot gathers Fennec just a bit closer, tucking her under its bulk. She makes a perfunctory complaint, snags one of the blankets Jora piled into the room for comfort, and then drops off, her body going that bit slacker against him.

Grogu sends a good-night-thought; shares the oddly comforting sensation of a scaly mattress beneath and his father’s big chest as a headboard, how good and alive and together everything feels, and then that trails into incoherence and dreams.

Din holds out a while, and Boba is almost asleep himself when he whispers: “You would bequeath your armor to my child?”

“Yeah. Of course.” he whispers, trying not to stir the rest of him. He’s not practiced at discretion in this body. “He’s your kid. And you’re my– the message you sent me. What you said at the end. It’s me too, Din. I. You pair. Yeah.”

“Boba…”

“Leave me out of this,” Fennec mumbles. “Today’s been weird enough.”

“Thought you were asleep.”

“Because I’m just that good.” She falls back asleep– he thinks she does, anyway.

“Ni kar’tayli gar darasuum,” Din murmurs.

“Yeah. That.”

Fennec’s hand curls around one of his foot-claws and squeezes an acknowledgement. Damn the woman, she really is just that good. Well, she can just keep watch then, not that anything’s getting past the wall of his body to them.

He feels sleep reach for him like sand, and the torpor of his body is a welcome relief. He can be still. He can sleep, still, and dream only of what’s within reach.

Let the Palace fall like a house of sand. All the legacy he needs is here, safe, in his coils.

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