Chapter Text
“I gotta bring the kid by for a bit,” Djarin says, when Boba pokes his vambrace to let the call through, Ghomrassen just having set but Chenini still shining ghostly through his suite. Djarin doesn’t often call - preferring to send two-word text missives and the occasional deep-space satellite relay corrupted picture - but right now he’s clearly got his hands full: Djarin’s comms don’t even have his bucket in frame, just a clawed hand flailing in and out of the image and some determined baby grunting. “You busy?”
“That little bitch ditching out on child support?” Boba rasps, scraping at his dry eyes and levering himself up. Djarin’s been pretty sanguine about leaving his spawn with the fucking Jedi, but then again, if Boba had full beskar, the jetii’s home coordinates and the fucking darksaber, he’d be a lot more relaxed about anything to do with the jetii too. Considering Djarin overall is just a lot more sanguine about shit than Boba in general, it’s probably time to arm the cannons and give Fennec a higher caliber if Djarin’s telling Boba he’s no longer cool with leaving his kid at the baby wizard academy while he goes off working.
“No, they’re just in quarantine,” Djarin says, preoccupied, the image briefly flickering across his head as he wedges a can of something against his shoulder and uses the edge of his helmet to pop the lid off an aerosol nozzle. “Grogu can’t catch it, it doesn’t transfer to womp rats.” There’s a hiss as Djarin starts spraying down his armor, briefly fuzzing the image as he pays special attention to the seamed vambraces and joints; Boba, squinting, recognizes the logo on the can as a type of decontaminant favored by long-haul cargo freighters to get rid of a particularly virulent strain of asteroid spore that’s immune to hard vacuum.
Okay, sure, you could probably use that as disinfectant. “Should you be spraying that on the kid?” Boba hazards.
“He’s fine, I did valesine first,” Djarin says distractedly. This is supported by the image jerking abruptly; there’s a distant little whee! as the kid, presumably greased to the ears, slips out of Djarin’s grasp and Djarin has to scrabble to catch him.
“So… the jetti’s sick,” Boba concludes, deciding it’s probably fine. Valesine’s useful for pretty much anything. “Bad?”
On the one hand, it’s a beautiful dream to nestle into bed to, the knowledge that somewhere fucking Skywalker is hacking and wheezing and yarking his guts out or some shit, just generally completely fucking miserable. On the other hand, Djarin’s spraying himself with cargo cleanser and occasionally flashing Boba with green goblin baby ass as he juggles his buttered womp rat. It’s possible this is the kind of shit that means Djarin will have to pass his ship through an industrial sani-station before being able to land it on any planet he doesn’t want to bring some kind of germ genocide to. “What about the other kids?”
Djarin snorts. “They got a New Republic medship coming in,” he says, briefly dropping into Basic on the name. “They’ll be fine. They’ve all got it, they’re staying in place - it’s all human or mix so far, the only Togruta’s already gone home for a bit. Skywalker’s calling it holiday vacation.”
Okay. Great. “So the kid’s fine,” Boba confirms, sprawling back in bed and blinking stickily at the ceiling. Sometimes he wishes Djarin would sync his fucking systems to an interstar chrono, though to be fair, he would first have to start giving a shit about what time it is for other people.
“Well,” Djarin says. “I didn’t say that.”
-o-
Grogu, it turns out, is teething.
“But he already has teeth,” Fennec points out.
This is true. It’s an even little row, pretty visible from where the kid is currently flat on his back on the bar, biting down on a shai gourd and huffing violently through his nostrils, his eyes slit with the ferocious concentration of a newly blooded verd hell bent on completing his first keg stand.
Djarin stops unloading the crate of produce onto the bar to briefly hold two fingers up in front of his helmet. “He’s growing more. Bigger ones.”
“He is pretty carnivorous,” Boba admits, reaching over to put his finger in the kid’s claws; he’s been opening and clenching his little raccoonite paws in time with his violent huffing and seizes Boba’s gloved finger fiercely, growling under his breath. “And those teeth do look pretty… juvenile. Flat. Things that hunt tend to have fangs.”
“He’s getting them.” Djarin’s stance is all pride, despite sounding mostly annoyed. It took Boba a bit to understand that that’s largely the vocoder and his deference to Basic when Fennec’s around: she’s done enough time with enough of the wrong kind of crowd to have picked up some mando’a, but between Boba’s and Djarin’s respective accents they all tend to err in favor of clarity. Djarin hefts another vegetable onto the bar, this one a massive Kashyyyk yam. “He’ll be fine. Once they come in.”
With a massive crack, Grogu finally bites through the gourd, the rind splintering between his tiny little jaws and shooting slimy purple seeds in every direction. The gourd cracks entirely in half, the pieces falling to the sides around his head, leaving him with virulently lavender pith on his ears and his big black eyes blinking up at the ceiling. He pants a little in victory, spits up a seed, then throws back his head and screams.
Djarin picks up a radish and sticks it in the kid’s mouth like a particularly nutritious ball gag. Grogu snarls, bites down and resumes glaring at the ceiling. This time, his expression says with storm-the-shield-generators-and-take-the-planet conviction, victory will be his.