Chapter Text
Windu doesn’t die, again , but Boba sacrifices most of his father’s helmet in the assasination attempt. What he digs out of the wreckage still resembles a Mandalorian helm, but it’s warped out of shape: beskar prefers buckling and bending to breaking. That said, the joints are always the weakest point of any system. The supplemental rangefinder was snapped off in the blast and now lies in tiny pieces amongst the bulbous shape of the rest of the helmet.
He’ll have to find someone, somewhere, good enough to rework beskar but trustworthy enough not to kill him and steal it off him. A Mandalorian, he guesses, but stars knows where he’s gonna find one of those.
He has ideas. Boba is very good at making plans. Less good at patience, but it’s a skill that (ironically) he’ll have to learn with time.
Still. He can work the long con. He has ideas. He has plans.
He asks Aurrus Sing to pierce his ears, and he waits.
--
Nineteen years later, a silvery beskar hoop hugs tight to each of Boba Fett’s earlobes underneath his father’s (salvaged, melted down, and reassembled) helmet. No one in Jabba’s court has ever seen them, and indeed few people ever see him without the helmet anymore. He likes it that way. A piece of Jango, but also a piece of himself, and only for himself. A secret held close to the chest.
Working for Jabba the Hutt as a contracted bounty hunter isn’t exactly what his childhood self had in mind for his life in a world post-Windu. He has designs on something bigger eventually, but for now, the pay is good, the work is steady, and the entertainment is…entertaining.
Recently, he’s been drawn to Jabba’s newest novelty: a mystic.
He’d shied away from anything resembling spirituality for most of his adult life, but what this kid does is more like theatre than Jedi magic. He deals a set of tarot cards patterned in the faces of mythological figures from Tatooine’s slave religions--a definite risk in a place like this, but the otherness of it all lends credence to his act. In a word, Jabba finds it cute, like an elaborate costume, rather than dangerous, like an omen.
Boba has to admit the kid is good to have around for business. His card-dealing gimmick can be used as entertainment or to soothe the minds of nervous clients and vendors, no matter how loudly they boast that they don’t buy into any sorcerer’s mumbo jumbo. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the kid himself is none too hard on the eyes.
He keeps a hood up over his face most of the time--part of the act, Boba supposes, and most of the people in Court cover their faces anyhow--but beneath the shadow, Boba can catch flashes of a dimpled chin sized perfectly to dig his thumb into while his other fingers explore the contours of white teeth and a pink tongue. Every so often, he sees a glimpse of eyes so blue they hurt to look at, the color of lightning striking the oceans on Kamino. Fitting eyes for a mystic.
Boba doesn’t know the kid’s name, and he’s never asked for a reading from him, but he’d love to do a different kind of scrying with him: open those heavy robes like a book and follow the mystic’s fate line down, down, down… somewhere infinitely more cloistered and private than Jabba’s court, always thick with smoke and reeking of sweat.
As if drawn by a magnet, those blue eyes rise and meet his, unerringly, from across the room and underneath the visor. Boba knows there’s no way the kid is actually looking into his eyes, only guessing, but the effect is still nothing short of a harpoon in the belly tugging his feet across the sandstone floors.
The other court goers part around him like water and it only spurs him onward: he’s the gravity sink to this one’s magnetism. Unstoppable force meets an immovable object. Electrifying, or it could be, if either of them let it. Boba’s got a good feeling. Lucky, they used to call him.
He comes to a stop in front of the squat table where the mystic sits on a wide pillow and performs his readings. He doesn’t speak, only looms overhead and waits. He’s hoping the kid will tilt his head upward to address him, but the mystic denies him. He keeps his gaze dead ahead as he speaks, his voice reedy and young like a piece of sandalwood.
“Would you care for a reading?”
Boba nods and takes a risk by settling down cross-legged on the other side of the table. If this surprises the mystic, he doesn’t show it, only keeps shuffling his tarot deck with surprising sleight of hand for someone so green.
He sets the cards on the table in front of Boba and inclines his head.
“Cut the deck, please. Wherever feels natural.”
Bo obliges, choosing a place somewhere near the bottom to shift the cards around. The backs are painted with an abstract design that reminds him vaguely of the night sky.
“Thank you,” the mystic breathes as he sweeps the cards back towards himself. He lays them out one at a time, naming each position as he goes.
“Tatoo I, Tatoo II, Ghomrassen, Guermessa, and Chenini. Keep a close eye on her,” he taps the card in the “Chenini” position for emphasis, “She’s special.”
When he’s finished, the cards are laid out in the shape of each celestial body’s position in the Tatooine sky, or how Boba imagines it would look if all five were visible at once.
“Do you have a question?”
“If the cards are already down, what does it matter what I ask? They won’t change their faces now just because I asked about the weather instead of the fate of my eternal soul,”
He thinks he catches the barest twitch of those bowstring lips, but it’s there and gone like a phosphene, blinked away.
“Intention matters. Do you have a question?”
“Hn. Should I expect rain soon?”
The mystic’s hands pause in their movements and Boba catches that flash of desert sky blue again, sharp as cracked agate. Under the helmet, he smirks to himself. There you are, witch.
“Are you making fun of me?” The reediness is gone, belying a spine of durasteel beneath.
“No, no.” He reaches out and rests a gloved fingertip over the card in Chenini. “I’m just searching for something special, that’s all.”
That blink-and-miss-it smile again. “Might be hard to find it here. Not exactly the bright center of the universe, Tatooine,”
It’s the most personality he’s shown in the entire time Boba has known of him, and he’s instantly drawn further in, aiming to tease out more of that irreverence, that spine. The kid seems like he’d be a fun time under all the cloak and dagger.
“I don’t know,” Boba rejoins, letting some of the heat creep into his voice the way smoke curls into spirals near the palace ceilings. “I think I already have,”
There , a rush as good as a canteen of water in the middle of the Jundland, the kid swallows and Boba gets to trace the up-and-down arc of his Adam’s apple like the bobbing of a starfighter entering atmo. His hands only shake a little as he reaches for the first card, Tatoo I, and flips it over.
On the card’s face is a krayt dragon, but it’s upside down. The kid continues through each of the cards, turning them one-by-one and revealing the rich tapestry of some story Boba doesn’t have the language to interpret.
Tatoo II: the tentacles of the Pit of Karkoon rising from the sand, Ghomrassen: a Tusken Raider with six gaffi sticks floating above their head, Guermessa: a naked woman bathing in a desert oasis, and last but not least, Chenini: a proud throne that stands empty, the two suns rising in the sky behind it like a halo to an absent ruler.
“Well,” says the mystic. “I don’t know about rain, but you’ve certainly got a storm coming.”
“Is that so?”
“It is. You should tread carefully, particularly in matters of professional ambition. Trust that you’ll inherit what’s yours by right. You should also be careful of the lovers you take,”
For all that he holds up the stoic mystic act, the kid’s got a shitty Sabaac face. His attempt at nonchalance is choked up by the gentle way his fingers hover over the woman in the oasis.
“What do the cards tell you about lovers, then?”
He hums lightly and shuffles the deck around again before throwing down a single card. When he sees its face, he laughs, and Boba wants to swallow the sound, to chase it down into the core of him. The card shows a young man with a bright red cloth around his eyes and a broken shackle trailing off one ankle. He’s about to step off of a cliff, but he’s smiling.
“The Fool,” the mystic laughs. “It sounds mean, but it actually symbolizes new beginnings. Tells me I should look before I leap.”
“Fascinating,” Boba breathes the word out like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. He digs a generous tip out of his pocket and sets it on the mystic’s side of the table, almost brushing his hand.
“I’m Boba Fett. I enjoyed the reading very much,”
“Of course. Thank you for your attention.”
“Does the scryer of Jabba’s palace have a name?”
“...It’s Luke. Don’t go wearing it out, though. I’ve got a reputation to uphold,”
The cards are swept back into his hands with no friction, almost as if they floated patiently back under the palms of their master once their job concluded.
“Of course. Well, I’ll be sure to see you around, mystic Luke,”
The mystic-- Luke --makes a vague assenting noise, but the heat sensors in Boba’s HUD clue him in that he’s blushing beneath that hood. Beneath his own helmet, Boba grins as he turns to head back to his Firespray for the evening. Chenini is already beginning her short-legged ascent into the sky when he steps into the cooling night air, away from the press of bodies and the sticky smell of spiced smoke.
Something special, indeed.
*
They come together slowly over the following months like two currents circling the same drain. Luke’s tarot readings are just an excuse to talk to him at first, but Boba soon finds himself taking actual hints from the stories Luke tells with his little pictographs. Nothing major, of course, but there’s an extra tightness in his spine when the Reversed Canyon card appears and advises caution. Maybe it’s just paranoia getting to him, but he thinks there are a few scrapes he wouldn’t have managed to avoid were it not for Luke’s insights.
Each time he returns, he thanks Luke for his foresight and requests a new reading, throughout the course of which he’ll ask for Luke to do small self-divinations too. This is the best way to get Luke to open up: he explains the meanings of the face cards to Boba, and with them, little pieces of himself as well.
Each small snippet of lore is a new piece of the puzzle, and Boba’s eager to put them all together into a shape that lays beside him, laughs in the gaps of his silence, fights beside him, maybe, even.
…It may be safe to admit his growing crush on the mystic is spiraling a bit out of control. Rain on Tatooine, indeed. But he doesn’t think he’s alone in his interest. Luke blushes red like a sunburn every time Boba so much as thinks praise in his direction, and Boba notes with no small satisfaction that he’s the only person in the entire court that can draw those kinds of reactions from their resident fortune-teller. The rest of Jabba’s lackeys don’t even know the kid’s name , let alone the various destinies and warnings the Fates spell out for him under his own hand.
It’s during one of their typical sessions a few months after that first meeting that Luke sits up like he’s been shot and casts his eyes frantically across the throne room as though someone had started screaming his name.
“Everything okay?” Boba asks.
“I’m not sure. I’ve got a bad feeling,”
Boba’s still undecided about how real he finds Luke’s gift, but there are any number of environmental cues that can give people Bad Feelings and Boba didn’t live this long by being a fool.
“Okay, just let me--” Boba’s risen half-way out of his seated position when Luke’s eyes zone in like a honing beacon and he points unerringly towards the two heavily-cloaked Gand representatives that are next in line for an audience with Jabba.
“There,” he says, tone flat with the leveling force of absolute certainty.
It’s only because he’s already looking at them that Boba sees the whip-fast flash of a hand seconds before one of the Gands reaches for a canister on their belt and holds it aloft like a grenade. Seconds later, all of the windows in the throne room slam shut just as the unmistakable hiss of gas rattles out of the canister like a death knell.
He doesn’t need his HUD readout to confirm that they’re all being poisoned, and he snaps into job mode before he’s even fully finished standing. He looks back towards Luke and finds him standing as well. With barely a thought to the implications, he tugs off his father’s helmet.
Luke is still looking around from side to side at the chaos that’s descended as sentients scramble for some type of escape or way to breathe without dying. Boba takes advantage of his distraction to fist a hand in his cloak and draw him in close enough to see the lightest smattering of freckles over the bridge of his nose. He tugs the hood off of Luke’s head and only takes a small moment to think blonde, he’s blonde , before he’s forcing his helm over Luke’s skull.
Luke is still recovering from the shock of being manhandled and doesn’t struggle even as the helmet hisses and seals to his skin.
“Boba, what--”
“Take care of that, would you? It’s an heirloom.”
And before Luke can respond, Boba shoves off, fighting his way through the panicked press of bodies to set his sights on the Gands again. He makes it about halfway across the floor, lungs burning and eyes stinging, before he finally gets a clear shot at one.
Without any more fanfare, Boba raises his wrist gauntlet and fires his whipcord at the Gand closest to him, hauling them in before the little bug even knows what’s hit them. Their body slams up against the hard line of Boba’s chest plate and they struggle weakly before Boba plants a broad hand over their breath mask.
“Nothing personal,” he says, and rips the respirator from their jaw with brutal efficiency.
The mask is halfway over his scalp when the Gand pulls a knife from their belt and slashes wildly in his direction. Luck and chaos combine into a gash across Boba’s upper arm, between the gauntlet and the shoulder plate. He hisses but doesn’t slow, grabbing the offending arm and twisting it until he feels something pop underneath his fingers.
The Gand collapses to the floor with a weak cry and Boba finishes strapping the breath mask around his head, stooping to follow the line of the respirator supply down to the oxygen canister on the Gand’s belt. He removes it and his whipcord from the body, cranking the canister valve to let sweet air flow into his lungs at a fast enough rate to flush out what he’s already inhaled.
That handled, he takes stock of what’s happening around him. The Gamorreans have already dealt with the other Gand, wrestling them to the ground with an axe blade at their neck, and someone’s had the wherewithal to seal the poison gas bomb under a vac-dome.
About three-quarters of Jabba’s petitioners have collapsed outright from the lack of oxygen, but the slug himself seems right as rain, barking orders at his surviving subordinates and taking long draws from a pipe that seem to be helping with his constitution. Boba chalks that up to slug biology and starts looking for Luke.
Before he can find the curve of his helmet in the crowd, a hand closes around his good arm at the elbow and he spins to find the black visor tilted in deference.
“This way,” Luke says, and the sound of his voice through the modulator is something Boba’s going to have thoughts about later, but for now Luke’s already dragging Boba off towards a side hall.
Luke leads the way to the door blocking off the servants’ quarters. It’s sealed off like the rest of the pneumatic entries and windows, likely by some accomplice of the Gands’, but before Boba can suggest an alternative way around the door hisses open to admit them.
Luke doesn’t even pause in his stride, only keeps tugging Boba along with a proprietary hand. His thumb is rubbing up and down in the pit of Boba’s elbow; he’s willing to bet Luke doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.
A lazy tendril of gas follows them through the threshold, curling weakly upwards like a sarlaac’s tentacles, but after a few long strides, they’ve outpaced the gas enough that the air looks and smells normal again. The windows at the far end of the hall are still open and Boba briefly mourns the lost opportunity to see what Luke’s hair would look like under the suns’ rays.
Even still, he has to admit that the sight of his green helmet perched atop those slim shoulders makes something reach inside his chest and squeeze. He likes the idea of Luke wearing something of his. He’d wear something of Luke’s, too, if ever it were asked and offered. Maybe he could carry The Fool tucked underneath his breastplate, close to his heart.
He’s pulled from his reverie when Luke pauses in front of another door, keying in the code before shuffling both of them inside. The door reseals behind them, and just like that, they’re alone and safe. It’s over.
Luke spins around to face him and reaches out a hand, but he doesn’t seem to have a plan for where he means to touch, and his palm hovers over Boba’s chest plate.
“Are you alright?”
Before Boba can answer, Luke’s questing hand finds the gash in his arm, still weakly drooling blood onto the sleeve of his kute. Luke hisses in sympathy and draws back, scrabbling at the bottom of the helmet with both hands in an effort to pull it off.
“Here, allow me,”
Bo’s fingers brush the wispy hairs at the nape of Luke’s neck as he presses down on the release. The helmet hisses as the vacuum seal breaks, and Boba pulls it off gently with a solid palm on either side.
Luke sighs in relief and glances up to meet Boba’s eyes. He realizes suddenly that this is the first time they’ve seen one another completely unmasked. The helmet hovers harmlessly in the air, still held aloft by Boba’s hands, and Luke’s hood is hanging limply from his shoulders. They’re almost of equal height, Bo realizes, and by unspoken agreement they both hold the position for a few moments longer, each transfixed by the sight of the other’s face, unfettered.
He wonders what Luke must be thinking and feeling, whether it’s the same as the weightless feeling in his own gut at the sight of those blue eyes in the full context of flaxen eyelashes and gold, fluffy hair.
Luke breaks the spell first when his eyes flit to the side, where Bo’s kute is starting to drip red onto the floor.
“Oh, your arm. Here, sit down, I’ve got something for that,”
Bo tucks his helmet underneath his good arm as Luke guides him to sit on the bed with one flighty hand on his waist. Some cosmic deity is surely laughing at him: here he is, in Luke’s room, on Luke’s bed , one of Luke’s hands on his waist, and yet he’s covered in his own blood and reeking of poison gas.
Luke disappears through an adjacent doorway Bo assumes must lead to a ‘fresher, so he takes the opportunity to look around. Luke’s room is mostly bare, but where there are belongings everything is arranged in tightly-restrained zones of chaos: the floor is clear, but the desk is overflowing with sheets of flimsi and bits and pieces of parts--is his mystic mechanically inclined?
In addition to the bed, desk, and chair, Boba can feel the hard outline of a trunk behind his foot, hidden away underneath the bed. Aside from that, there’s nothing else.
Luke comes shuffling out of the ‘fresher with a medkit tucked under one arm and smiles reassuringly at Boba as he drags the chair over to sit in front of him.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got some experience with small wound care,”
“Wasn’t worried.”
They end up with Luke’s legs taking up space to the right and Boba’s taking the space to the left. Their knees are brushing, and when Luke leans in to inspect the damage, he’s close enough that Bo could count his freckles if he wanted.
“Is it okay if I cut this?” Luke gestures at the torn sleeve of the kute and snips the medical scissors a few times for emphasis.
“Yeah, go ahead. I’ve got a sewing kit on my Firespray,”
Luke perks up at that even as his steady hands start the methodical work of cutting fabric away from the injury on Bo’s upper arm.
“You’ve got a Firespray? What are the specs on that like?”
Boba snorts at the obvious excitement, relaxing even as the number of spaces where their bodies meet grows: their knees brushing, Luke’s hands on the skin of his arm, Luke’s head leaning ever further in his orbit as he takes tender care to be gentle with the scissors.
He’d missed it earlier, but with him sitting so close he realizes Luke must’ve taken his cloak off in the ‘fresher. Underneath, he wears a black jumpsuit with a high collar. Boba wonders idly whether Luke changes into desert whites if and when he ever leaves the palace.
“Are you hiding a pilot somewhere under all that cloak and dagger?”
Luke bites his lip to contain his grin. “Might know my way around a flying object or two,”
He pulls back, satisfied with the opening he’s made in Boba’s flight suit. After another minute of digging around in the medkit, his hands come back up with a spray bottle of Bacta, a square of gauze, some medical tape, and a little amber vial with no label. Boba catches his wrist in a loose fist.
“What’s that, in the bottle?”
“Old moisture farmer’s trick. It’s just an anti-inflammatory mixed with a muscle relaxant, I promise. Gets you up and moving sooner,”
Something scratches at the back of Boba’s head: not a warning, exactly, but a suspicion. He remembers that Luke’s cards are emblazoned with figures that break chains and scorn masters. He realizes, suddenly, that he’s never asked for Luke’s last name.
“Moisture farmers, huh?”
“Yeah. Moisture farmers. Can’t really afford a day off when you’re sucking clouds through a straw, I guess. Sit back,”
Boba obeys, appeased by this extra glimpse into Luke’s inner life. Luke starts with the Bacta spray, and Boba only hisses a little as the sting lands and the sick-sweet scent hits his nostrils.
“Sorry,” Luke grimaces in sympathy before leaning in to blow on the skin , as if his very breath can chase the sting away. Boba thinks he might pass out for reasons that have nothing to do with the lost blood staining his kute .
“I like your earrings,” Luke says it almost like a question, with just a little too much affected nonchalance to be genuine.
“Thank you. Another family heirloom, you could say,”
“Yeah?”
“Mhm. They’re made of the same stuff as the armor. Beskar’gam , we call it, because it comes from beskar.”
“Who’s we?”
“The Mandalorians. A race of warriors, or they were before the Empire glassed their planet and sent them all underground to live like sewer rats.”
“But not you?”
“No, little one. Not me.” Boba lets his tone imply the end of this line of questioning, but Luke doesn’t take offense.
“Well, I like them. They suit you. You look--um, you look good. With them. I mean,”
Boba grins as Luke stutters his way through admitting his attraction and makes no attempt to help him out of the verbal hole he’s digging for himself.
“I look good, do I? Do you always wait until you’ve got dangerous, bleeding men in your bed to start flirting with them?”
Luke blushes red straight to the very tips of his ears and stops what he’s doing with the Bacta spray. He pulls back, putting the spray back into his medkit with just a hair too much force, and Boba raises an eyebrow, but Luke’s not looking at him. Instead, his head is turned to the side where he won’t have to meet Boba’s eye, and his jaw is set hard.
“You shouldn’t make fun of me like that,”
Boba’s heart starts kicking up a furious tempo beneath his ribs even as the rest of his body stays perfectly relaxed.
“Why’s that, little one?”
Luke still won’t meet his eyes, preferring instead to stare into his lap where his hands fiddle with the amber vial, turning it over with his fingertips.
“I might take you too seriously, is all. I lik--I respect you, okay, and I don’t want to make a bantha’s ass of myself because of what you say to me for a laugh,”
Boba hums in understanding, taking a minute to think about his next course of action before deciding that fortune favors the bold as much as it punishes the incautious.
He reaches a hand out and gently tips Luke’s chin back up until they’re making eye contact. Luke’s eyes are dry and sober, but they’re so set in the hard lapis of somber earnestness it makes fondness swirl in Boba’s chest.
“You can take me seriously, Luke. I’m too old for games. I wouldn’t lead you on just to laugh at you for following.”
Luke doesn’t answer with words, but he does nod once, hesitant, like he’s still expecting a rug-pull at any second. He reaches up to wrap to grab Boba’s wrist, gently pulling Bo’s hand from under his chin. He holds Bo’s wrist in place for just a moment before pressing a shy kiss to the palm of his glove, quick and daring as a bird.
After that, Luke lets his wrist go and doesn’t say anything else, only goes back to his first aid on Bo’s afflicted arm. The bleeding has long since stopped as the Bacta’s taken effect, so now Luke moves on the amber vial--the moisture farmer’s tincture.
To Luke’s credit, the stuff does exactly as promised. It relieves the tightness and the swelling caused by inflammation until the twitching of his muscles no longer sends little bolts of sharpness up and down the length of his arm. He supposes it tracks that active people like farmers would have use of it, but why a supposed mystic would know that or have his own supply, Boba can’t fathom. Another piece of the Luke-shaped puzzle he intends to put together.
Luke’s sure hands finish dabbing on the tincture and he completes his work by gently taping down a square of gauze over the whole area.
“There,” he says, pride shining in the timber of his voice, “good as new.”
Boba nods in assent, inspecting the job with a detached interest. It’s good work.
“I never really thanked you, earlier. For saving me,”
Boba waves him off easily, gesturing at his patched-up arm. “Between this and you getting that door open, I’d say we’re about even. Speaking of which, how did you manage to get us out of there? I assume whoever helped the Gands in also helped them sabotage all the exits,”
Luke at least has the decency to look abashed when he grins back this time. “Would you believe me if I said it was a lucky guess? I am a psychic, after all,”
Boba hummed lightly. “We’re definitely revisiting that later. For now, I’m sure Jabba is looking to start an investigation into the attempt,”
He makes to stand up and leave, but Luke stops him with a quick palm pressed flat to his chest.
“Maybe we could just--wait here? A little bit longer?”
Boba sits back down, feeling warmth uncurl in his limbs at the youthful blade of pleading in Luke’s voice.
“We can wait here,” he agrees easily.
Luke seems mollified by that, but he doesn’t seem to have a plan beyond asking Boba to stay with him. Feeling sentimental, Bo makes his own suggestion.
“Maybe you could give me another reading, little one,”
Luke latches onto the opportunity to regain his footing, sitting up straighter and gesturing for Boba to hold his hands out.
“I want to try something different if that’s okay. Which is your dominant hand?”
“My right,”
“Perfect. Can I read your palm?”
Boba nods, genuinely curious about the new methodology. Just how many ways to read the compressed smoke of the future does Luke carry around in that head of his? How many does he trust to guide his own hand, his passions?
Luke pulls the fingers of the glove out one by one to loosen its grip on Boba’s hand, taking his time as he goes along. It’s not lost on either of them that this form of divination is more intimate, requiring more touch and tenderness than the distant gaze of the cards.
Luke pulls Boba’s glove off entirely, laying it gently on the chair beside himself and coming back to cradle Boba’s hand in both of his own. He opens the palm flat like a book, and Boba takes a moment just to breathe and appreciate the feeling of Luke’s skin on his own, trading body heat in the quiet square of space occupied by their hands. It’s a special kind of touch to both of them, being men that work with their hands, even if in drastically different ways: here, handle my future in more ways than one.
Luke traces a careful thumb over the creased lines of Boba’s palm, obviously taking some meaning from the ways they dip and curve and carve deep canyons into the muscles of his hand. It tickles a little and Boba fights to keep from curling both hands into tight fists, to not close the book to that calculating gaze.
“Interesting,” Luke says, finally. “Your love line--here, this one closest to the fingers--is chained. Some people say that means you’ll have more than one love interest in your life,”
“And what do you say it means?”
Luke grins, equal parts shy and cheeky. “I say it means you’ll be very”--a kiss to Boba’s bare palm, his lips soft and plush as the underbelly of a lothcat--“very”--another, further down and close to the tracking-fob-blinking of heartbeat in his wrist--“lucky in love.”
Boba moves then, letting Luke keep hold of his right hand but bringing his left up to cradle Luke’s cheek and draw his face in close.
“Okay?” he whispers. They’re so close one could imagine they’re trading breaths in the still air of the Palace. Each breathing in what the other breathes out: catch and release.
Luke nods, eyes half-lidded and flitting between Boba’s lips, his eyes, his earrings. Like he can’t decide what to look at longest, now that he’s been given such free rein to take in his fill of Boba’s face beneath the masks they both wear. “Yeah, more than okay,”
Boba tilts Luke’s face to the side and brings them together with all of the satisfaction and softness of a prophecy fulfilled, water in the desert, a tiny moon and a voice like bells and contrails saying, “She’s special.”
They go back and forth a few times, trading the momentum centered at their lips before Luke breaks away to laugh and rest his forehead against Boba’s collarbone.
“I, um, I feel like I’m dreaming,”
Boba pulls his other glove off so he can bury bare hands in Luke’s hair and rub slow circles across his scalp. It was intoxicating to have someone so close after so much time at a distance, wondering what they were thinking and whether the circling birds of their thoughts ever alighted on your name.
“Well, don’t wake up on my account,” Boba teases back and Luke laughs, pressing a shy kiss to Boba’s neck where the flight suit ends as if he’s asking for permission with the gesture. Boba fists a gentle hand in his hair and pulls him back up for another long, slow kiss. At the first touch of his tongue to the seam of Luke’s lips, Luke lets out a breathy hah noise that Boba knows he’ll carry between his ears to the grave.
Luke responds to the escalation by bringing his hands up to push lightly on Boba’s shoulders, guiding him down and to the side until he’s propped up against the headboard with Luke leaning over him in a half-straddle, hands still clenching lightly in the shoulders of his kute , more for stability than control. He pauses there, seemingly unsure, but Boba takes the decision off his hands by tugging him down by one hip until Luke is straddling him, knees on the outside of Boba’s hips and hands still pressing down on his shoulders.
“How…how far do you want to go?” Luke is panting lightly, cleared worked up, and Boba finds he’s not far behind. He’s well on his way to fully hard, stiff enough now that Luke would feel it if he moved his hips downward at all.
Bo feels the incredulous beak of a laugh building in his sternum. There’s a wonderment in it: how Luke seems to believe himself the lucky one, how he looks at Boba like he’s a desert mirage one blink away from disappearing into the heat waves.
“How far do you want to take me?”
Luke grins like the Twins themselves wouldn’t burn his skin and finally, finally , rests his perfect weight fully onto Bo’s hips, keeping himself at just enough of a lifted angle to work strangled groans and heavy pants out of Bo’s mouth with every grind forward.
“I want to take you--” each word punctuated by another roll of his hips, more of that delicious friction every time--“to the moon”--a hand cradling the back of Bo’s skull, a thumb rubbing soft yet intent circles into his temple--”to the stars”--another slow roll of those hips against Boba’s center as Luke leans down in close enough to taste, to lick the sweat from Bo’s hairline-- “to the edges of the galaxy , Boba Fett.” Those perfect lips close around his earlobe, beskar and all, and bite down with the most gentle nip Bo’s ever felt from another sentient.
As if electrified, Bo’s hands come up to grasp at Luke’s hips, helping control his rhythm and bringing them more firmly against each other on each pass.
“Do that again, senaar’ika , on my ear-- yes, so good for me,”
Luke’s hums of affirmation turn to groans of appreciation under the praise, so Bo keeps it up, throwing the -ika diminutive onto every vaguely Luke-shaped noun he can think of, not little in the way of lesser but little in the way that all awesome things are: split-apart atoms and crystals that glitter with prescience and all the Forces that hold the universe together one molecule at a time.
Luke’s hips keep time under Bo’s guidance, and he alternates between pulling at Bo’s hoop earring with his teeth and pressing a blend of kisses and lush breaths against the side of Bo’s head.
“ Senaar’ika , surhaa’ika, little one, Luke, my Luke, so good for me, my good one, ner riye, ”
Even with the barrier of clothing still in the way, the friction between them and the combination of erotic touches and words is enough that soon Luke is clutching his shoulders for support as his thighs seize up and his mouth opens in a soundless gasp. The sight of Luke in ecstasy, the imagining of him receiving some mystic vision, thrown from the heights of his pleasure, spurs Boba into his own release. They lay together after, panting, with Luke’s forehead resting on Boba’s collarbone. One of his hands creeps up to land one pinky through the hoop of his earring in a quiet claim.
They bask in the afterglow for long enough that the space between Boba’s eyes closing and reopening stretches long and slow like hot taffy, and Luke’s breaths have evened out enough that Bo could believe he’d fallen asleep (and gods, wasn’t that a thought? his mystic falling asleep on his chest, happy and sated) were it not for the fingers curling in his hair and the thumb rubbing proprietary strokes over his earring.
He knows they’ve overstayed their welcome in the post-coital lazy space when he starts to become aware of the sweat sticking to his nape and the wet mess in his and Luke’s pants. A tight-necked glance down towards his arm shows that he hasn’t managed to reopen anything during their activities, but it still probably isn’t optimal to let it sit in the dry heat like this.
“C’mon, kid,” he breathes against the top of Luke’s head, bringing his good hand up to pat encouragingly at Luke’s flank. “Let’s catch a sonic,”
“Together?” And Bo can’t help but laugh from deep in his chest at the pure, unguarded enthusiasm in the kid’s voice.
“Of course, ner Chenini. Together.”
*
It doesn’t take long to report his findings to Jabba. A cursory examination of the facts reveals the ruse for what it was: a rival syndicate with eyes on Jabba’s supply lines had sent the two Gands, banking on the galaxy’s common knowledge that the creatures didn’t breathe oxygen and thus would require gas canisters to survive Tatooine’s atmosphere.
What their intelligence didn’t cover was that some species of Gand were very capable of breathing oxygen in the absence of other breathable gases. The plan: use their biology-made excuse to smuggle both oxygen and poison gas into Jabba’s throne room without arousing suspicion. Kill everyone inside, reap the rewards.
Naturally, they had help, and the Rodian acting as their inside man goes the way of the Rancor pit rather quickly after Boba tracks him down. Luke is curiously absent for the festivities, and Boba finds himself drifting as well: an evening with Luke promises to be more fun than standing around being the muscle for Jabba’s post-assassination-attempt-survival party.
He follows the hallways towards what he remembers as Luke’s quarters but finds his room empty. Following a hunch, he heads for the landing pad outside.
Luke’s form is a little black smudge at the end of the deck, legs dangling off into the chilly night air. The three moons are already taking their place in the sky and shedding a soft white light over the whole scene.
“Evening,” Boba announces his presence, but somehow he thinks he’d have a hard time sneaking up on Luke by accident.
“Evening,” Luke parrots back easily, eyes fixed on the horizon line.
Boba grunts a little as he settles down on the ledge next to Luke, letting his legs dangle and removing his helmet to let the desert air kiss his skin.
“Not one for parties?” Luke says, not making eye contact. He isn’t angry, but there’s a certain closed-off energy to him that invites Boba to knock rather than enter freely.
“There’s only so many times you can watch Jabba feed his pet before the whole song and dance loses its glamour,”
Luke hums, assenting. “I don’t like all of the people so close together. So noisy. Hot, too,”
Boba doesn’t point out that Luke could stand to ditch the cloak and deep black colors he wears if he wants to cool off amongst the riffraff. He can tell that Luke’s building to something and using the rungs of small talk to get there.
“Boba, can I--can I trust you?”
Boba hums, now understanding what’s on Luke’s mind. The door. He must remember that Bo promised to revisit it, and clearly, he’s on the verge of admitting a piece of himself that the Empire declared a crime to have. Force sensitivity. Just like the damn Jedi. Boba’s not a mystic, but he’s not stupid either. It’s the only thing that seems to explain Luke’s reticence, his prescience, and his insights in one fell swoop.
“If I were a less selfish man, I’d give you good advice and tell you not to trust anyone.”
“But?”
“But I’m selfish, and I want to stay near you. I want to know about you, Chenini,”
Luke swallows and nods, glancing into his lap where his hand is worrying at the hangnails of its brother’s fingers. After a moment, he sighs and reaches into his pocket…
…only to come back up with a small black box.
“It’s a skeleton key,” he says. “I stole it off that Rodian Jabba just turned into lunchmeat about a week ago. That’s how I got the door open. I don’t do anything with it, honest, I just like knowing I have a way out if things get hairy. The Rodian must’ve had multiple copies because he still helped with the attack somehow, but--”
Boba’s got a pretty good Sabacc face on the outside, but internally he’s just picking up the slack jaw of his thoughts enough to assemble a response.
“That’s your secret? That you’ve got a skeleton key to the slug’s Palace?”
“Well--yeah. What did you think I was gonna say?”
“Nothing, nothing. You know what I’m going to tell you, though, little one,”
“It’s dangerous, right. If Jabba or one of his cronies--” and Boba knows he’s in deep by the way Luke doesn’t even glance at him as he mentions Jabba’s cronies -- “finds out I have this, I’ll be Rancor food.”
“Mm. Why are you sharing this with me, Luke?”
Luke thumbs the skeleton key back into his pocket and shrugs airily.
“Maybe I felt like being a little selfish, too.”
They’re quiet together for a long while after that, but it’s a comfortable silence now. After a time, Luke strikes up the conversation again by asking how well Boba knows the star map around Tatooine. Boba admits his knowledge is more navigational than cultural, and Luke counters that on this planet, they’re one and the same.
They end up on their backs next to each other staring up at the night sky while Luke tells a book’s worth of stories with the lights above them. At the end of it, Boba invites Luke back to the cramped cabin on his Firespray-- turnabout is fair play --and tries to hide his satisfaction when Luke accepts.
It’s the best he’s slept in years, with his little Chenini tucked in close to his chest and the stars of Tatooine keeping watch outside.
*
The next two months pass in a series of scattered nights spent with Luke and the blur that is the times in between. When Boba’s on-planet, he has Luke read his fortune and tell him stories about the mythology of Tatooine. When he’s off-planet, he goes through the motions of track, catch, kill, and collect, all the while his mind is already tracing his steps down the ramp of Slave I to go find Luke and drag him off somewhere private enough to hold him close and make him smile.
It should scare him a little, how deep he’s finding himself. He’s started bringing back gifts for his mystic. Odds and ends, mostly, but he never passes up an opportunity to bring back anything even remotely divination-related. Luke seems to enjoy seeing the traditions of other planets and cultures.
His interest is so keen, in fact, that on the second “anniversary” of their arrangement (not that Boba will ever admit he knows the date), Boba Fett proposes something batshit insane to Luke No-Last-Name.
“You could come with me sometime. See the sights for yourself.” Only the tightening of one gloved fist saves him from saying something scary and true like, Run away with me, share all with me.
Luke smiles and reaches out for Boba’s other hand, covering it with his own and rubbing a proprietary thumb over the chained love line on Boba’s palm.
“I wish I could, honest,”
“Why can’t you? What’s stopping you? I see the way you look when I talk about my trips,”
Luke looks down at their joined hands, and for a brief moment, he looks more somber than Boba has ever seen him.
“Bred in the sand, bled in the sand, dead in the sand. That’s what they say. Born on Tatooine, you die on Tatooine. I owe this place something. Not forever, maybe, but I still have to--”
“That’s bullshit,” Boba pulls his hand away and moves to stand. When he glances back at Luke’s face, he looks like a child pale and drawn from fear of scorn. His face looks small. Boba realizes, somewhere underneath the rushing of anger in his veins, that this is the first time he’s spoken harshly to Luke. Their first argument, if his little spitfire cared to fight back.
“That’s my culture,” Luke’s spine shows itself despite his bloodless cheeks belying his anxiety. “You asked me why, and I told you.”
“I understand culture and legacy,” The weight of his father’s beskar’gam is heavy where it cuts into his shoulders, “and I also understand that it’ll eat you alive, rot you on the vine , if you let it. No sense in wasting your potential, your happiness , on the edicts of people long dead and gone,”
Despite the circumstances, part of him is still intrigued to be learning another part of Luke’s character. For instance, what type of angry person he makes. Boba himself is fueled by rage: he doesn’t like when anger makes him feel out of control, but when he knows he’s right, it’s like a fire lighting the path in what words to say and which actions to take. The prescience of knowing where on a bounty’s body to strike them down.
Luke, he can already tell, is anxious when enraged. He stutters, he blanches and blushes in equal turn until his cheeks are a blotchy mess of shamed pigment betraying the depths of his emotions. He’s nothing like the composed, otherworldly fortune-teller who haunts Jabba’s halls. Here, he’s a whelp. His rage is impotent: a blade with no handle that cuts him the more he tries to wield it in defense.
Luke strikes back, clumsy in his desperation to defend himself.
“Those long-dead people are my fucking family, you--you asshole . What do you know about anything, anyways? You track down the desperate and downtrodden for a living. You let that slug in there give your marching orders. You fly a ship named Slave I , for fuck’s sake! Why am I even--I don’t--”
He grows more worked up as he rants, and Boba realizes suddenly that he might’ve broken something he only meant to bruise--pushed too hard when he meant to pull instead.
“Luke--” he starts, his anger sweeping out of him like a breeze through the canyon, but the damage is done.
“No, you know what? I think I had the wrong idea about you after all. I don’t--just, from now on, why don’t you just stay away from me?”
His voice breaks on the last sentence, a death knell for Boba’s surety if he’s ever heard one. And before Boba can fit a word in edgewise, try to soothe what he’s upset, Luke turns on his heel and marches through the door back into the Palace.
Just like a mirage, he vanishes as if he were never there at all.
*
Nothing makes Boba Fett feel more at peace than to know he’s the one in charge of his own destiny. He must’ve forgotten that somewhere along the way, falling for a fortune teller as he did, but no more.
In the barren weeks after Luke calls it quits, Boba throws himself full force back into his role as Jabba’s enforcer. He hunts down stray debts and stray people. If he thinks about the rebuke in Luke’s voice when he’d said You track down the desperate and downtrodden for a living , he hunts even harder so as to say So what? You liked me anyways.
It doesn’t make him feel better , but it does make him feel like he’s in the driver’s seat, so it’s close enough.
He doesn’t ask for any fortunes from Luke. In fact, he doesn’t even spare him a glance beneath his helmet when he enters the throne room. It doesn’t matter if Luke would know he was looking or not: Boba would know. He wraps pride around his heart like yet another layer of armor.
As for Luke, as far as Boba can tell he slides right back into the role he’s always occupied in Jabba’s court. An ornament, a performance, a conversation piece for schmoozing with powerful criminals. It rankles, but he doesn’t belong to Boba anymore than he belongs to Jabba or any of the other assholes that make their living in the court, so Boba avoids him and takes more jobs than he has in years and tries to move on with his life.
Here’s the thing about Tatooine, though: people don’t die in the deserts because they’re too big, although they are that. The journey through the Jundland Wastes would certainly be difficult without a speeder or a bantha, but it wouldn’t be impossible. The problem is the shifting sands and knotted up lostpaths that make their home out of Tatooine’s interminable landscape. One wrong step means you’ll be lost to the sands forever: another bone in a Jurassic ocean floor of fossilized shellfish.
Boba tries his best to convince himself that his dalliance with Luke was something like that: a hole that his boot had fallen into for precious seconds before he’d managed to yank his foot out and move on. The metaphor doesn’t really work. The scale is all wrong. Luke was more like a pit that his whole body had fallen into--a lostpath that could pull him in again with one wrong step, one errant second of eye contact with shuttered lapis.
The way forward, away from Luke, was like the Jundlands. Seemingly simple but covered in pitfalls. He would have to step carefully.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t step carefully enough, because one night a month and a half after their big fight, Boba stumbles across Luke in the throne room at night.
It’s already suspicious: if he hadn’t already known that Luke had a skeleton key, it would’ve been a “shoot on sight” kind of suspicious to find anyone in the throne room when it’s void of Jabba or any of his enforcers. Boba himself is only in here because it makes a good shortcut from the front entrance to the landing bay, and he’s leaving first thing in the morning on an urgent bounty from one of the court petitioners.
Luke looks just as shocked to see Boba as Boba is to see him. He’s frozen in place with a large sack of something cradled under one arm and his eyes wide as satellite discs in the lines of moonlight that shine through the limited windows. His hood is down, revealing his entire face, and Boba is more than a little stung to see the fear that lurks in his small mouth and the visible whites of his eyes. He knew Luke was pissed at him, sure, but afraid? He didn’t realize how much he valued the fact that Luke didn’t treat him like a fearsome weapon until the truth of it was challenged.
“What are you doing in here?” They’re the first words he’s spoken to Luke since his fateful misstep all those weeks ago, and the way the vocoder hardens his voice is gratifying and shameful at once.
It’s clearly the wrong thing to say because Luke blanches even further and curls his shoulders inwards, making himself smaller. He’s still cradling the bag close to his side, but it’s underneath the cover of his cloak and Boba can’t make out the contents from here. Despite himself, Boba moves in closer, aiming to comfort.
Instead, Luke steps backward like he’s been burned and shakes his head.
“Luke, what the hell?”
“It’s, uh, I’m sick. Yeah, bad bantha meat. Projectile vomiting. It’s pretty lethal. You should probably stay over there,”
Boba is pretty sure he’s the most unimpressed anyone has ever been in the history of being unimpressed.
“Uh-huh. And what’s in the bag?”
“Um...vomit?”
If his helmet weren’t on, he’s pretty sure Luke would quail under the sheer skepticism painted over his face. Covered by the helm as he is, he lets his silence do all the talking for him. When Luke holds out, grimacing and looking embarrassed at his own lie but no closer to offering an alternate explanation, Boba sighs and tries again with overly affected exasperation coloring his tone.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way, mystic,” The nickname slips out of him like a secret from the lips of a drunkard, and Boba moves forward to cover his embarrassment at falling from anger to fondness again so quickly.
He makes a grab for Luke’s arm, but Luke flinches away again, harder this time, and Boba finds himself stunned at the intensity of the reaction. He draws up short, palms open and splayed at his sides in a universal signal of cease-fire.
“I didn’t mean--Luke, I’m not going to hurt you. You don’t have to look at me like I’m--” One of them , he means to say, but the ringing echo of Luke’s words to him draws him up short. You take your marching orders from him.
Luke nods his head in a sharp, acquiescing jerk anyways, and Boba frowns beneath his helmet because Luke’s body language is all off. He’s seen Luke in a lot of emotional states: happy, amused, alert, enraged, even melancholy, but he’s never seen Luke afraid . And right now, he looks downright terrified. He hasn’t taken his eyes off of Boba not once during their encounter, and Boba is suddenly unsure whether he’s even blinked the entire time.
“Luke, what’s really going on?” Boba asks it slowly and gently, the way he’d talk to a spooked bantha, to convey his true question of Are you okay? Do you need help? Will you take the help if it’s from me?
“Nothing,” Luke says, and then cringes. Even he can tell that it rings hollow and false like a bad egg on a tin bowl.
“Luke--”
“Look, can you just go already? I don’t wanna see you. I don’t wanna talk to you. I want you to leave me the hell alone ,”
The tone of Luke’s voice is more viscerally raw than he’s ever heard it, breaking like a wave over the shape of the word alone , and there’s only a brief second of cold for the hurt to set in before the heat of righteous rage washes it away again.
“Well, we can’t always get what we want, can we? You clearly don’t want to tell me what the hell you’re doing in here in the dead of night, but it looks like you’re going to anyway,”
Luke’s breathing has picked up, but he still hasn’t slid into the relaxation that would imply surrender.
“Or what?” He breathes after a long moment of silence, teeth gritted so hard Boba can see the bulging outline of his jaw muscles on one side.
“Or I’ll make you,”
Boba’s insistence seems to reignite some of Luke’s fear, because he goes from combative to pleading in the blink of an eye. While he started this line of inquiry as a petty way to get a leg up on Luke, Boba’s starting to feel a sinking in his gut. Luke is obviously desperate for Boba to leave and not find out what he’s up to, and Boba thinks again of the little drawings on Luke’s tarot cards: figures in broken chains spurning their masters. He still doesn’t know Luke’s last name. He’s as afraid to know the truth as Luke is for him to find it.
Before he can say anything else to try and backtrack from the hostile territory he’s marched them into, Luke interrupts with his newest gambit.
“Look, Bo--” And gods if hearing that nickname in such a fraught tone of voice doesn’t make him want to self-immolate--“I promise, I promise I’ll explain everything if you just leave now. Please, for me? I’ll--I’ll come join you in the Firespray later, I’ll tell you everything, I’ll--”
“Luke.”
“Don’t make me beg, Bo. Please, just, don’t make me beg you,”
“What’s in the bag, Luke?”
Luke snaps his mouth closed, refusing to answer. Boba only lets himself savor the pain of regret over what he’s about to do for a moment before he raises his whipcord arm and fires.
Luke yells in surprise and anger as the cord wraps around his body, but it only takes one harsh upwards tug to bring him down to the sandstone floor with a muffled oof! as the breath knocks out of him. He’s only stupified for a moment, though, because when Boba starts dragging him in, he thrashes like a thing possessed.
“Luke! Luke!” Boba tries to calm him by shouting his name, but Luke is inconsolable, trying to flip onto his stomach and shield the bag with his body. Boba tries to straddle him to keep him still, but Luke yells in wordless alarm and bites down hard on the inside of Boba’s arm where the armor gives way to thin flightsuit material. He’s never seen Luke fight before, let alone so viciously, and the surprise is enough to make him straighten up and loosen his grip on the end of the whipcord.
As soon as the line slackens, Luke moves, throwing out an arm to loosen the whipcord’s tangle about his body and belly-crawl out of the mess of rope surrounding himself. He’s dragging the bag along beside him with one arm, and when Boba reaches out to snag it from him, Luke surprises him again by flipping onto his back and kicking him right in the solar plexus.
The force of the impact knocks the wind from his lungs and he balks for a moment as his lungs struggle to recover from their temporary paralysis. Luke uses the opportunity to get his feet back under him, but he’s still squatting on the floor with his body shielding the sack, and so Boba seizes the advantage while he has it and drops his full weight across the length of Luke’s back.
Luke squirms and struggles, but his arms wrapped tightly around the sack kill whatever advantage he has with his feet on the ground under him. He’s strong with the adrenaline and desperation, but he’s still smaller and less trained than Boba who’s covered in Mandalorian iron to boot.
“Luke,” Boba chokes out a growl the second he’s got his breath back, “Just stop, just let me help you, whatever it is--” He snakes an arm under Luke’s body, angling for the bag, but Luke lets out a broken whine of no and suddenly Boba is hitting the ground on his back with no memory of the space between.
“Shit, shitshitshitshit,” Luke scrambles up, leaving the bag on the floor but standing between it and Boba. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to,”
Boba looses a hoarse groan as his lungs seize beneath his armor for the second time in as many minutes. Damn, but the kid packs a punch. And that toss…gods, but he didn’t want to be right about that aspect of Luke’s mysterious past.
“You’re Force-sensitive,” he says, still laying prone on the ground, too stunned to care about the bag or exposing whatever the hell it is Luke’s got planned anymore. Months ago, when he found out about the skeleton key….he’d been right. Luke was cut from the same cloth that cut Jango’s head from his body. Dangerous.
Luke doesn’t say anything, just swallows tightly and stares at Boba like he’s knocking on death’s door, which is a little insulting to be honest. He’s tangled with real jetii before, an untrained fortune teller from Tatooine is nothing. That’s what he tells himself as he finally musters the will to sit up, armor pulling at his joints and reminding him they’re only a few minutes removed from a full-on brawl on the floor of Jabba’s throne room.
“I didn’t lie,” Luke says urgently. “I really did steal the skeleton key from that Rodian. I didn’t lie to you,”
“Maybe not about the key,” Boba allows.
Luke doesn’t say anything, but he brings a hand up to scrub through his hair on one side. He looks as unhappy as Boba’s ever seen him, and if he squints he can make out the lightest sheen of tears catching the moonlight over Luke’s eyes.
“I don’t know what to do,” he admits, voice thick.
Boba nods, less urgently now. The adrenaline has flushed from his system and taken his anger with it. It’s only him and Luke now, like so many times before. He reaches up and releases the vacuum seal on his helmet so he can pull it off and cool his skin in the nighttime air. He wants Luke to see his face for this next part.
“Why don’t you start with that?” he suggests mildly, nodding his head towards the bag hiding behind the black lines of Luke’s legs in the semi-dark.
Luke visibly wrestles with himself for a moment before he slumps and nods mutely.
“It’s plant food,”
“What?”
“Ammonium nitrate. Fertilizer.”
Boba nods quietly, feeling numb to the emotions he should be feeling given the only logical conclusion here.
“Another moisture farmer’s trick, huh?”
“Actually, most of them use hydroponics. Not that I’d expect any of these gluttonous water thieves to know that,” Luke’s lips twist in a bitter smile as he toes the ground with his boot. He won’t meet Boba’s eye.
“You’ve got fuel?”
Luke nods again. “Snuck it in a few nights ago.” He doesn’t volunteer where he’s got it stashed, but it must be somewhere in the throne room.
“What are you using for a detonator?”
He swallows tightly and the moonlight cuts streaks of color across his body.
“Can I trust you? I mean, really, really trust you, Boba?”
“More than you already have?”
“I’m serious. It’s more than just my life at stake here. I don’t know if you can appreciate what that’s like, but if I can’t trust you, I can’t let you leave here, either,”
“If I was going to turn you into the slug, you’d be vapor by now. You’ve already as good as admitted you plan to turn him into chunks,”
Luke looks him in the eye and holds the contact for a few long, hard seconds before relenting and reaching into his pocket.
When he pulls out a blinking slave chip and its remote, Boba closes his eyes in resignation and understanding.
“You never did tell me your last name,”
“It’s Skywalker. Luke Skywalker.”
“Like the Jedi?”
Luke turns that pensive gaze on the slave chip in his palm, rubbing one thumb on its surface as he once again avoids Boba’s eye.
“Exactly like the Jedi.”
Boba almost reaches up to touch his earrings on instinct. Dank farrik , but don’t they make a pair together.
“Okay. So that’s now. Why don’t you start from the beginning? How’d you manage to get a job here?”
With a bone-weary sigh, the last of Luke’s resistance seeps from his muscles as he strides over and sinks down next to Boba. They’re both on the floor of the throne room now, close enough to touch.
“I was raised by my aunt and uncle on a moisture farm outside of Anchorhead. Freeborn Skywalker. They only ever wanted the best for me. We weren’t just moisture farmers, though. My whole family’s either slaves or friendly to them. Our farm was a waypoint between Mos Espa and Anchorhead for people trying to run away but too scared to brave the Jundlands. We took out chips for people, too,”
“Do your aunt and uncle know you’re here?” On this insane suicide mission , he doesn’t say, but Luke seems to hear it all the same.
“No,” he says simply. “They don’t know much of anything anymore. They’re dead.”
Boba doesn’t reach out a hand or apologize verbally, but he does nod with a solemnity that conveys his empathy. He knows what it’s like to lose a guardian to some faceless organization of people convinced they know best.
“The slavers?” He asks, just to confirm.
Luke shakes his head. “Jabba’s grunts. I was giving someone a lift to Anchorhead--hidden in an empty water tank, that’s how we used to do it--and they came to collect that bullshit water tax the slug started enforcing. It was blood from a stone though, we just didn’t have it. So they took blood instead. There was nothing left of the homestead when I got back.”
He sighs deeply, picking at the cuticle of his thumb with the thumbnail of the opposite hand. Boba wonders if he’s ever shared this story with anyone else, but he doesn’t ask, just waits patiently as Luke gathers his thoughts again.
“There was this old wizard who lived out beyond the Dune Sea. Ben Kenobi” --Boba’s next blink was long and behind it he saw light eyes, a red beard, and his own juvenile voice calling for his buir -- “was his name. He came and found me after everything and told me my father was a Jedi.”
“I didn’t…Maybe another time, that news would’ve excited me. I always wanted to know more about my father. But everything was so fresh… the only question I had was whether my father was also a slave. And Kenobi said yes. So here I am. I learned all of the mystic traditions from my aunt, and one of the dancers here helped get me the gig. The rest is history.”
“And me?”
Luke spreads his arms in a self-deprecating gesture of What can I say?
“You made me feel like a person. You made me feel seen. You also…you let me look at you. I didn’t take that for granted, even when I was mad at you,”
“That reaction makes a bit more sense now,” Boba agrees. He doesn’t exactly apologize for the scene on the landing pad, and neither does Luke, but a weight feels lifted from the space between them all the same. They share the silence together for a moment before Luke breaks it.
“So,” Luke says, injecting false levity into the tired rasp of his voice, “what happens now?”
“The way I see it, there are really only three things that can happen. Either I threaten to turn you in, we fight about it, and someone ends up dead, I leave now and pretend I didn’t see anything, or I help you,”
“Help me? You would do that?”
“I didn’t say that, but yes, actually, I would. If I’m being honest with myself, I can’t turn you in to the slug. That means I’m not loyal to my employer, which is an unsustainable situation to begin with. I equally can’t leave you to carry out this plan on your own, because if something were to happen…
“So that leaves me with one option. I help you. But I have to know, Luke: say this plan works and we kill the slug and all of his lieutenants without dying in the process. What then? What’s your plan after that?”
Luke shakes his head, clearly at a loss. “All I know is, I want to make sure no one has to go through what my family has gone through again on Tatooine, or anywhere else if I can help it. I’ll do whatever I can to make that a reality.”
“Well, we’re gonna need a lot more steps in this plan if that’s the goal. If we just wipe out the Hutt presence on Tatooine in one go, we’re likely to get trapped in the power vacuum. If we don’t fill it, some other asshole will take over where Jabba left off and we’ll be right back where we started,”
“So what are you suggesting?”
“We’ll have to replace him. We’d have to either find someone we trust to take Jabba’s place or one of us will have to do it,”
Luke shakes his head, not in disagreement but in disbelief, and scrubs both hands over his face.
“This is getting to be a lot more commitment than just a one-and-done suicide mission planting a bomb under his chair,”
“C’mon now, buck up. I thought you said you’d do anything?”
“I would, and I will, just--ugh, I’ve got a lot less freedom to move if I take this on, and I don’t know anything about being a daimyo. I don’t know anybody else I trust, and I can’t ask you to do it,”
“Why not?”
Luke looks at him with an expression that reads, Be serious.
“It’s too much responsibility, and it would tie you to Tatooine like a weight. I can’t do that to you. It’s not even your fight,”
“Hm. It’s not exactly a burden, you know. Virtually uncontested power over an entire planet, doing something positive for the universe for once. Plus, there’s this certain mystic I know whose favor I’d really like to curry,”
The expression Luke turns on him after that is a mixture of wretchedness and gratitude.
“Why?” he whispers. “Why me? Why would you do all of that for me?”
Boba only hesitates for a moment before deciding if he’s in for a penny, he’s in for the whole treasury. He reaches out with one hand to clasp the back of Luke’s neck and bring him in close for a mirshmure'cya. As their foreheads brush and Luke sinks gratefully into the contact, Boba breathes out.
“You let me look at you.”
They stay there for a long while before common sense invites them to go find another, less risky place to enjoy each other’s company and talk strategy. Boba’s Firespray, being a bit detached from the eyes and ears of the palace, provides an ideal sanctuary. Boba still makes Luke bring the bag of bomb-fuel fertilizer with him rather than leave it under the throne like he’d planned, and he promises to explain once they’re secreted away.
“Trust me, I’ve tried the whole blowing someone up remotely thing before. There are too many variables you can’t control. You might kill someone you hadn’t meant to.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“How much do you trust me?”
“A lot, considering I’m not getting picked out of the Rancor’s teeth right about now,”
“Hm. Well, if you ask me, the best way to go about it is the party barge. A ruse to get us out to the Pit of Karkoon, and then we sabotage the barge and otherwise kill any powerful person on it. This way, there’s no chance of the Hutt sniffing out your explosives or being immune to poison or any of the other shit that makes them so damn hard to assassinate. You said a dancer got you this job? How many of them trust you and want the Hutt dead?”
“Basically all of them. Oola speaks for them, but none of them are happy being the Hutt’s playthings, that I can guarantee,”
“Alright, so we’ll get them on our side to help. They’re usually invited along with on the barge as ‘entertainment,’”
“You mentioned a ruse?”
They ended up settling in the ship’s big eyeball of a cockpit, and Luke looks small and alert from where he sits in the copilot’s seat with his legs pulled up to his chest. Boba thinks privately to himself that he could get used to seeing Luke here, by his side, trusting and strategizing.
“This is where the trust comes in. I’ll take you to Jabba under the ruse of turning you in, but it won’t be real. It’ll just be an excuse to get us out to the Pit,”
“Yeah, to throw me in it,” Luke snarks, but he doesn’t respond with the kind of alarm that would signal he thinks Boba is leading him to slaughter.
“Exactly, but I’d be there the whole time, and so would our dancer friends and any other Palace slaves we can safely rally to the cause. We grappled a bit earlier, but can you handle yourself in a real fight?”
Luke hums, considering. “That old wizard I told you about, Ben Kenobi? He gave me a lightsaber. Said it was my father’s. It’s buried in a marked lostpath tunnel about a click from here. I was afraid I’d blow the whole thing if I got caught trying to smuggle it inside,”
A lightsaber, kriff. Boba’s going to have to dedicate a lot of time later on to dissecting the conflicting feelings of distaste and arousal that rise in him at the image of Luke looking as deadly and skilled with a blade as the Jedi of the past.
“Have you been trained to use it at all?”
“I used a training remote the old man gave me to practice a bit by myself in the Jundlands. It’s not exactly graceful, but I can swing it against someone without lopping my own limbs off, yeah,”
“Good. I’ll smuggle that in for you, and I’ll make sure you have it when the time is right. You take care of the grunts down below, and the dancers and I will handle the people above. We can still use your detonator, but for afterwards. We’ll blow up the entire barge and leave it in the desert. That way, we’ll know for sure that they’re all dead or soon to wish they were.”
Luke nods at that, gaze faraway as he considers.
“It all just feels so real, and yet so not. I never thought, well, I never expected--”
He cuts himself off and Boba watches, patient in the silence, as he swallows thickly.
“Thank you,” he says.
“I think I owe you a thanks as well, Chenini. You are about to give me the world, after all,”
Luke huffs a laugh at that, nodding to himself and smiling as fondness overtakes his features.
“Chenini, that’s right. You had the throne card. It all makes so much sense now. I just never could’ve imagined that the bounty hunter I gave a reading to all those months ago would turn into my partner in crime,”
“Oh, that reminds me, I’ll have to send a missive and cancel the contract for tomorrow I accepted. Hopefully, it doesn’t raise any red flags in the court,”
Luke coughs pointedly and Boba glances at him in question only to find Luke’s cheeks are tinged pink.
“Um, about that bounty…don’t, uh, don’t worry about it. It’s--I just, I didn’t want you to be around when everything blew up, so to say. I didn’t want you to get hurt,”
“You faked a bounty to get me off-planet,” Boba states, voice blank with shock. Luke cringes a little, reading anger into his tone, and Boba can’t correct him quickly enough by leaning in close enough to share breath. He pauses just before their lips touch, giving Luke time to pull away, and when he doesn’t, Boba closes the gap between them and kisses Luke with an intensity he hopes conveys his thanks.
That Luke had risked his entire plan to concoct a fake bounty that would ensure Boba was off-planet, that he would neither kill him by accident nor have to fight him when everything came down, it’s more consideration and love than another being has shown Boba Fett in years , and what’s more, it confirms that Luke had felt the exact same way about him during their time apart. As much as Boba had avoided looking at Luke, Luke had looked awry of him as well, thinking about him and not. Two souls circling the same sinkhole, destined to rejoin.
Boba breaks the kiss and pulls back just enough to speak. “Thank you, cyar’ika , my little eye,”
Luke sighs happily, eyes still closed, and chases Boba’s touch, leaning their foreheads together in the quiet of the cockpit.
“Stay here tonight,” Boba whispers to him, and Luke nods wordlessly, as if it weren’t even a question.
Dawn is only a scant few hours away by the time they make their way back to the ship’s quarters, cuddling together in the cramped space just like they did before. Luke is nuzzling happily into the side of Boba’s head when he gets the idea.
With one hand, he reaches up and unclasps the beskar earring on the opposite side from where Luke is pressed against him. His father’s helmet, reborn, and now about to do a very different sort of protecting for a very unlikely ally. It was almost poetic.
He holds the earring up to Luke’s eyeline and says, “Here. I want you to wear this.”
Luke hums sleepily and leans up on one elbow to make better eye contact.
“Yeah? You sure?”
“It might get scary, when I’m pretending to turn you in to Jabba. I want you to have this on under your hood as a reminder of what we’ve agreed to. What you are to me.”
Luke doesn’t say anything, just nods with a smile and takes the earring to slide home in his own earlobe. The two of them, now a matched set. Manda above, but he may as well read Luke the marriage vows right now.
Instead, he settles for, “It suits you,”
“It suits us, my liege,” Luke snarks back, and Boba pulls him back down for another kiss at the heat that surges in his gut hearing Luke call him liege , even in jest. Luke laughs and follows his pull easily, and they kiss languidly, without urgency, for long minutes as the ship is silent around them.
When they break apart, Luke rests his head on Boba’s chest one more, listening to the beating of his heart.
“Do you have any fortunes for us?” Boba says into the dark.
“No,” Luke says easily, “but I have a really good feeling about this.”