Archive of Our Own ^beta

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. 

Chapter Text

Grogu, it turns out, also needs sunscreen. Most anything that lives on Tattooine needs sunscreen, but most anything also opts for just using headgear and clothing instead of slathering up in expensive and time-consuming chemicals usually rated for every species but yours. “Why do you think we wear helmets, kid?” Boba tells him, knocking his knuckles gently on the goblin’s flat head. “S’for more than just bullets and bitches.” 

Grogu mumbles resentfully at him through his yam. “Don’t teach him to say bitch,” Fennec calls from her side of the lounge, making sure to pronounce each word clearly and distinctly. 

“Sure. That’s his job,” Boba allows, jerking his head at Djarin and straightening from his crouch, groaning as his knees crackle. 

“Yeah, how do you say bitch in mando’a?” Fennec says interestedly. 

“Bitch,” Djarin says absently, one hand typing on the datapad but his head dropped back against the couch, the familiar preoccupation of someone reading off their HUD. Grogu had objected violently to anything covering his head on their morning excursion, so now he’s spending the afternoon whimpering around another yam in Djarin’s lap with his ears slathered in bacta, getting largely unsympathetic reminders about the existence of perfectly good pram sunshades in between Djarin translating several tigs worth of seized transit records entirely in Waryghing trader slang for Boba. 

“What’s that do about your plans for his helmet?” Fennec says with her usual wolverine’s curiosity, nodding from Djarin to Grogu facedown on his thigh, his sunburned ears slumped sadly and a steadily growing patch of baby drool spreading down the calf of Djarin’s kute. 

Djarin turns his helmet enough to make it clear Fennec’s getting a Look. He raps his knuckles on the kneepads and thigh plates he’d taken off and stacked beside him when Grogu had made it clear yam time was going to be in his lap. “Mandalorian armor is custom. His beskar’gam will be shaped to his needs, not the other way around.” 

“Aw.” Fennec adopts an expression of glutinous oversincerity. “You hear that, kid? Your dad will still love you if you grow up to be an immodest hussy.” 

“It’s about devotion, not modesty,” Boba says not for the first time, returning to his own datapad and the anti-inflammation pack for his elbow. Djarin’s a lot like a bad joint: put enough pressure on and it’ll send you head over ass, but with enough care and repetition you can get it to recover and once again start functioning. “As long as the kid grows up sufficiently violent and honoring his weapons he can wear whatever beskar bra he wants.” 

Djarin’s vocoder gives a faint crackle, the equivalent of a howling Wookie laugh in anyone else. “Speaking of.” He puts down his datapad and taps Grogu’s back with a fingertip. “Have you practiced today, Grogu?” 

Grogu snarls, sticks out an arm without raising his head and sends a fresh carrot rocketing across the room to smack into his hand. 

-o-

“Okay, maybe we shouldn’t have told him his dad would still love him if he was a nudist,” Fennec says, looking down at the abandoned potato sack garment in the middle of the palace hangar bay floor. 

Boba scratches his jaw with the edge of the blaster cartridge he’s been unloading from the Firespray’s ammo lockers. “Maybe it’s the heat?” 

“Isn’t he some kind of lizard?” 

Boba shrugs and keys open another ammo locker. Kryze had cornered Djarin over his midlife crisis of a starfighter, using her rock-grater Kalevalan posh accent and characteristically delicate manner to leverage things like “you’re going to make the baby sleep in your bandolier?” and “there’s not even a toilet,” which is why Djarin now keeps a M12-L Kimogila parked in Boba’s palace hanger with the digital keys metaphorically thrown at his head. Boba can’t say he’s happy about it, because the only reason Kryze muscles sugar onto Djarin is because he’s more useful to her if he shows up in a heavy fighter instead of a princess mosquito with a baby carrier where the droid support should be, but he can’t deny the fucking thing makes his Firespray look like a snail taped to a stun baton in terms of speed and firepower. 

Which is why they’re currently unloading Boba’s ordinance and sticking it in Djarin’s ordinance to go Hutt hunting. Boba has decided he’s going to keep all Kryze-related comments to himself until she has an aneurysm over the necessary threat displays and orbital bombardment capabilities near and dear to every Mandalorian’s heart and forces a dreadnought onto their shiny new mand’alor, upon which Boba’s snatching Djarin for good and not giving him back. 

One of the bay droids lurches up to the discarded potato dress and starts attempting to scrape it up. Boba scratches his chin with the cartridge again, then turns to the gaggle of half-grown verd clustered at the other end of the hangar, checking over all their gear and weapons and demonstrating their inability to gossip silently through internal helmet comms. “Hey, you,” he says. They all snap to attention. He points at the potato dress. “Find the kid.” 

The entire troop shoots up and shoots off. Them, Boba can’t blame Kryze for: Djarin’s armorer saddled him with four, and they commed all their friends, and now a bunch of barely grown Mandalorians are constantly brimming with enthusiasm and eclectic weaponry in Djarin’s general vicinity. Boba’s not sure about how he feels about his outfit being used as a Mandalorian internship, but then again, his palace has never been cleaner. Djarin had been pretty pissed himself until Boba had pointed out the benefits of delegation and the usefulness of scrubbing floors and repairing plumbing in building a warrior’s character. 

Boba would also be making them haul all this ammo from ship to ship, but he’s not letting that pack of pikas anywhere near his guns, let alone the inside of his ship. He’d given the most responsible-seeming one a vambrace chip with basic access codes for the lower palace floors and less than two hours later had to drag them all out of a janitorial closet where they’d accidentally sent out a scrub droid spewing corrosive gas from the improperly mixed cleaning chems they’d poured into it. They make Grogu look like a special forces veteran. Boba would assign the kid as their sergeant if not for how the brief mental image of a tiny jetii commanding a squad of nearly identically-armored soldiers made him put his head between his knees at three in the morning when the hysterical laughter went a little too hysterical.  

Fennec clicks, a look-here signal. A familiar pram drifts past them as they round the ship, spinning slowly as it hovers across the hangar floor. Grogu is starfished out on his back inside, staring up at the ceiling with the expression of a sixty year old alcoholic wondering how they’d let it come down to rock bottom. Two halves of a carrot are lying on either side of his face. He has not decided to reapply any clothes. 

“Does he even have other clothes?” Boba says aloud. 

“DJARIN,” Fennec booms out at the hangar. “DOES THE KID HAVE OTHER CLOTHES?”

Grogu sits up, slaps the pram and snaps it shut. Boba politely levels his gaderffii at Fennec. “May I introduce you to a wonderful new technology called comm units?”

Djarin appears at the mouth of the hangar, carrying a basket full of more hard vegetables that he drops on the Kimogila’s ramp and shoves inside with his boot. “I did laundry this morning. He has clothes at school.”

Boba points helpfully at where the bay droid is still patiently failing to pick up the goblin’s burlap tutu. “Might have to wash it again.” 

Djarin sighs, walks over to punt the droid out of the way and pick up the kid’s dress, gesturing with his vambrace to sync the pram with his armor systems and reconnect tethering again. “Okay, so we get him clothes on the way back,” Fennec says, eyeing the vaguely creepy ovoid of the pram. “And some real chew toys. What does he even do in there?” 

Boba was also wondering that, actually, because the kid sometimes seals himself in there for a couple hours or so at a time and doesn’t seem to be sleeping, but then again, there’s worse things than sitting by yourself in the quiet dark. “Sulk?” 

Djarin knocks on the lid. Grogu unseals it and squints. Djarin opens his palm flat like a commander demanding a report, something Boba finds a hilariously endearing gesture when he applies it to the interns and his baby alike. Grogu snuffles and smacks at something inside his pram. 

A hologame crops up from the front of the pram, something silent but horrible, full of rapidly lunging creatures covered in flailing tentacles and gnashing teeth. Grogu rakes his claws across one with narrow-eyed prejudice, the shape exploding into fizzly photons and presumably making a little digital dying scream. 

Djarin turns to Fennec. “Total Annihilation Assault 3,” he says, handing Grogu another radish. 

“I see,” Fennec says thoughtfully. “You any good at it, squirt?” 

Grogu screams, sinks his teeth into the radish and slams the pram shut. 

Djarin moves one shoulder at Fennec in a shrug. “We’re working on it.” 

Chapter Text

So far, they’ve been consolidating territory on Tatooine, their work against the Hutts mostly limited to defensive prep and deflecting the probes inflicted onto their operations. One of Boba’s first - and frankly ongoing - steps had been establishing surveillance and comms networks: if you don’t know what the hell is going on, it’s that much harder to do something about it, and whenever some merc team makes planetfall with the intent to fuck up a little Fett action it’s been critical to intercepting them. 

Boba hadn’t really appreciated how much of a dent the actual interceptions had been making in terms of their resources, however. Not until Djarin washed up with his hands metaphorically strangling the air for something to do. The bastard’s beroya through and through: that first time, he hadn’t even waited for Boba to ask, just put a hand up flat in the middle of Boba asking Shand if they had the resources to handle this one before the fireteam could get their bearings dirtside or if they’d have to wait for them to make it to the palace. 

Djarin said, “How do you want them?” 

Boba had sat back. He’d said, “Gone.” 

So these days Boba focuses on hiring enough splicers and techs and engineers and admins to manage the cargo movement and maintain the ports and keep his satellites up and sort through all the resultant fucking data, and Tatooine has a growing reputation for supernatural activity: if you land on the planet with wrong intentions, like, say, planning a little bit of murder of the king, you won’t leave so much as a skull in the sands. Boba doesn’t actually give a shit if Djarin kills them or sells them to Trandoshan gland harvesters or sits them down for a firm fatherly lecture on seeing the error of their ways; all he knows is that the entire issue has been barely a blip since. 

Djarin is an extremely relaxing person that way.  

He’d gotten a little less psychotically focused once he’d started regular kid visits, however, but at that point Boba’s operation had stabilized enough that they could go a few weeks without Djarin working out his issues in highly kinetic ways. And these days, they can afford to go off planet and raid some Hutt targets themselves. Make a couple points. Take the fight to them.

Which is why they’ve stopped on Kal’Shebbol, which is Outer Rim enough that people don’t immediately scream and run from Mandalorians in full armor but federalized and developed enough to have goods from further away than the next moon, cuisine beyond just the charred carcass of the most populous native vermin and only mildly ruinous prices. They’ve found the apothecary sector, where Fennec is now hitting on a pretty counter boy and Boba is reading the ingredients lists on Pantoran sluice balm while the goblin carefully selects, unscrews and sniffs various tester vials. Djarin loped off a couple minutes ago, silently transferring pram admin over to Boba’s armor the way he does when he wants to go slaughter something particularly toxic or try to rupture his sinuses via G-force doing tricks in his little starfighter. 

Not that unexpected, since this is one of the higher end markets, not exactly luxury but with specialists and artisans enough that it doesn’t matter. The clientele trends rich. Boba’s also recognized enough in these parts that they’re getting a respectful bubble, but nobody here is familiar enough with the work to identify Djarin’s ruthlessly balanced center of gravity for what it is. That, paired with the shopping trip, pretty obviously has the Mandalorian in ostentatiously unpainted beskar pegged as a trophy consort in very expensive fetish gear. A dolled-up Twi’lek passing by on the arm of a mogul type had already given Djarin a respectful game-recognizes-game nod. 

Fennec and Boba had been mutually entertained, but Djarin doesn’t give a damn, palpably getting bored after he and Fennec found some nice breathable flaxweave dresses for the kid. Djarin doesn’t shop, he does targeted acquisitions, so it’s no surprise when he fucks off. Makes things easier, even. 

Technically, Boba’s stopped by this planet to get the kid sunscreen that won’t give him more chemical burns than the actual suns would. Slightly more technically, they’re here to pick up a customized disruptor rifle Boba and Fennec had ordered as straight-faced tribute to the new mand’alor, who has now burned three out of four limbs with his own darksaber due to refusing to stick to his more familiar weapons in favor of a chance to wave around the shiny, shiny sword. No wonder Djarin hasn’t painted his armor. And got that fucking N-1. Boba’s pretty sure if he dangled a piece of tinfoil on a string in front of Djarin the moron would peck at it. He’s his own damn trophy consort. Boba can’t wait to shove the karking rifle on him so he can get back to disintegrating things instead of trying to tickle his own balls with supercharged plasma. 

Beside Boba, Grogu painstakingly screws the latest jar shut and pushes it back onto its display shelf. He’s frankly way less of a problem than Djarin. The more crowded and busy the environment, the less they have to worry about the kid; he sits there gnawing on his latest gourd and watching everything in the shopping district like it’s a favorite holodrama, which, okay, maybe Fennec has a point about him being sort of a screen baby. There’d apparently been all those years between the Jedi Temple and getting his gai bal manda, after all. Djarin had apparently found him in some pirate hideout; it’s probably a miracle the kid isn’t already addicted to holoporn or touchslot gambling or some shit. 

“Al’verde,” one of the pikas says respectfully, from some ways away. They tend not to get too close to Boba anymore after he tossed one of them off a palace balcony for firing their flamethrower a little too close to a core cooling unit Boba had just spent six hours personally repairing in the palace. The entire troop of them is here, all bright-visored and shiny-helmeted. “We have achieved the objective.” 

“Good, great,” Boba says, waving a hand vaguely at the hoversled already loaded with their purchases. He’d sent the pikas out with his less critical, illegal and fragile shopping lists, so hopefully whatever garbage they actually brought back won’t be too inconvenient or at least not radioactive. “Get it all secured on the ship. And then stay there. We’re almost done.” Maybe they should try getting addicted to holoporn. It might at least keep them to their rooms. 

Boba spots Djarin over their shoulders: he’s coming back their way, a large plastofiber crate over one hip. Dream of the Tides Aquascape Specialists, the branding says in Aurebesh and Mon Cal on the side. It’s sloshing. 

“Did you get the kid a pet?” Fennec says, in the interested tones of one who uses any scurrying thing on palace grounds for target practice and would certainly welcome more, especially if they weren’t sufficiently terrorized yet and came with a cute jingling collar. 

“No.” Djarin opens a slot on the top, extracts a furiously struggling crustacean in a lot of alarming colors and tosses it at Grogu. 

Grogu catches the thing midair, his ears standing almost straight up in excitement. He starts rotating it, the thing dripping and struggling madly above him as it spins; the verd are all staring in uneasy fascination, but at least they’re interrupting sightlines from the rest of the market to what the kid is doing. The sea bug glitters in the sunlight, jewel-red and aquamarine blue and buttery yellow. Grogu yodels softly in wonder. 

Then he snatches it down and bites its head off. 

“Hm,” Fennec says, as Boba slowly wipes the spray of sea bug guts off the side of his face. “Think we could teach him to use a blaster?”

Chapter Text

Looking at Djarin, you’d think he has all the parenting instinct of a dead rustlizard. Looking at Djarin through a Mandalorian lens and adjusting your perspective T-shaped appropriately does not actually make that much of a difference. In Boba’s experience, the Mando’ade familial feeling runs like a laser: incandescent, cutting and incredibly focused. Djarin’s got his one kid and that’s it. Everyone else can go fellate nexu. 

Jango had been the same, which is why Boba had made the catastrophic assumption that allowing the steadily growing pika pack in his palace would be harmless. 

And at first, it was. The pikas were all verde, extremely young but adults nonetheless, and took orders unquestioningly and enthusiastically if with variable results in execution. Even when more and more of them seem to be cropping up, they’re appropriately in awe of Boba and think Djarin is the Manda made flesh, so they don’t actually try to make trouble, they just generate a certain percentage ambiently as a natural result of being little idiots with big weapons. 

Then the parents start arriving. 

First it’s just one mom with a streak of jam crusted on her visor, a baby Twi’lek strapped on in place of a jetpack and another two giggling Humans held upside down by the ankles as she strides in, has a fifteen-minute internal-helmet-comms-only conversation with Djarin and then strides right back out again, though not before ditching her kids in Grogu’s general vicinity. Then it’s a pair of Togruta with cortosis-weave wrapped montrals who turn their four unhelmeted spawn loose right in the shipyard, though since pre-adolescent Togruta are almost completely at the mercy of their hunting instincts what this mainly does is decimate the sandspider problem that’s been causing the majority of the palace’s wire-casing degeneration problems. Then a shuttle unloads an entire pack of Mirialans in matching dusty sage armor, but since most of them are waist-high and all of them are carrying agricultural equipment and seed-pod crates, Boba doesn’t take issue with them setting up in the hydroponics wing of the palace. 

From the moment the verde hanging around the palace began to include not just the pikas but actual adults, Djarin has also made sure that none of them are in any way Boba’s problem. Since Djarin was raised in a survivalist bunker with a bunch of armed religious nutjobs, he thinks idleness is a sin and community incohesion a war crime: anyone caught fighting gets diagnosed with insufficient work detail and remedied accordingly. Anyone who really pisses him off finds no one willing to be their sparring partner during morning prayer, leaving them to either meditate in the corner in silence or help the kids doing their first live fire exercises. 

“How do you tell?” Fennec asks, absolutely fascinated. She’s been having a lot of sex with the jam-visored parent when they show up to have silent comm conversations with Djarin and swing their kids upside down by the ankles. “I passed five people brawling in the west upstairs gallery twice last week and they haven’t been sent to the baby mines.” 

Below them, the latest offender chases a tiny Wookiee with a dented jetfuel canister in their mouth, trailed by a crying Zabrak towing a Human toddler with alarmingly fluorescent vomit all down their shirt. “You know how sometimes you play stabhands with friends in a bar,” Boba says, “and sometimes you play stabhands with some jackass you just want an excuse to cut some fingers off, and the rules don’t change but everyone can tell which is which?” 

“Yeah?” 

“It’s like that.” 

So between that and Boba’s actual day job, apart from some occasional entertainment the situation has been eminently ignorable. It’s only when he’s woken at the crack of dawn by an honest to kark prayer call, the vocoder-boosted song demanding every able-bodied mando’ad get their asses in armor and to the training yard, that Boba realizes he’s got a problem. 

He’s pretty sure not all the Mando’ade who have turned up are the same flavor of Creedbound as Djarin, but since Djarin - who does dawn and dusk drills, well, religiously - is who they’re here for, they’ve all joined in. That means the masses of chanting beskar bastards have multiplied until they’ve moved from the left interior gallery to the second interior atrium to finally the main courtyard under Boba’s suite, and not a single child of any age has been left out. 

The din is apocalyptic. Nearly forty children and half again as many adults are praying together, armor ringing as they drop down, roll, push up, jump, high block, low block, strike and then finish with a thunderous crash of vambrace against chestplate in salute. Boba drags a hand down his face, trying to ignore the ringing in his ears and the instinctual urge to open fire on the source of the noise. The kids below are splitting off, the smaller ones in their training leathers letting out gleeful yells as they start running laps around the courtyard, the toddlers circling up in front of one of the Togruta to start clapping their hands and jumping in place, the verd distributing brightly colored foam shapes for them to hit each other with. Grogu is down there in his beskar dress, hopping determinedly up and down in between bashing the hell out of one of the kids next to him with a pink noodle.

The rest of the adults are now in rows, in full armor, doing pushups. Djarin is counting cadence, a rhythmic, almost poem-like recitation of different styles of weapons and their associated moral virtues and tactical advantages. It’s like something out of a ha’at’ade wet dream. 

Boba, a sufficient quota of neurons finally coming online, narrows his eyes. 

It’s not a Mandalorian war camp, except for how anywhere any Mando’ad sets up shop is a Mandalorian war camp. So in that sense, it’s both rather effective threat display and rock-hard insurance. There’s a mercenary company’s worth of Mandalorians garrisoned in Boba’s palace right now, and with all their ships parked here, it’s visible from orbit. Even if most of them are heavily modded antiques, not a single one sporting the kyr’bes war paint of the Mandalorian fleets of old, it’s still a bunch of gunships in his yard and the combat crews to fly them. 

Of course, all these bunker Mandos have survived so far by operating on a hit-and-run principle. They aren’t on Boba’s retainer and they aren’t his people. If the palace gets hit, they’ll defend it - but only for as long as it takes to get their kids out. Then they’ll take all their ships and tech and verde and be gone, dust on the solar wind again. 

Then again. These Mandos haven’t exactly been treating his palace like just another bunker. 

Boba leans on his balcony wall, considering. 

His palace has been changed. An entire gallery has been repurposed into a ritual armor-care hall, the open walls letting the desert breeze whisk away the fumes of solder and epoxy and polish. The creedbound have set up daylight rooms with the help of the agricultural Mirialans, places where the orthodox can remove their armor and helmets and take in necessary light and air. The kids are hollering a chanting game in the courtyard at the top of their lungs, not worried about who or what might hear, shouting out the names of the Great Mountains of Manda’yaim and what kind of apex predator you can expect to wrestle on your way up to their peaks. 

They’re not hiding. 

Boba has no illusions about whether they’ll discard this place if they have to. Even Manda’yaim was abandoned, in the end. But for the Mando’ade to abandon home, the Empire had had to glass the planet first.

Mando loyalty can be a hell of a drug. 

Besides, Boba’s starting to get an idea of how Djarin has been vanishing Fett opposition while also having time to hand-select produce for his angry green baby to chew on. 

He comms Fennec. “So at what point did all this stop being on the house?” Mand’alor or not, Boba highly doubts the majority of these Mandalorians are here for the honor of orbiting Djarin’s shiny bucket. Kids can’t eat glory. 

“Oh, Djarin’s still free,” Fennec says, by the sound of it in the middle of her own morning exercises. “But the tech crew I added to our own slicer roster since the beltway thing and the gardening club since they started bringing me homemade tukeel. They’re all buying their own fuel and ammo and the hunter teams collect bounties if the targets have them, but room and board in the palace is as good as pay, too. We don’t even charge hangar fees.” 

“Hm.” Boba closes the call, thoughtful. 

If he were to evaluate the situation from a personal lens, he’d probably currently be discovering heretofore unheard of calibers of enraged bitterness and spite. So he doesn’t. Surviving his childhood and its fevered grip of vengeance had made him a practical man. It turns out Djarin’s familial instincts are less laserlike and more radioactive; fine. Boba knows how to capitalize. 

Besides, he likes Grogu. The little green rat is amusingly small and charmingly vicious; the same had once been said of Boba. He might never get very tall, but he’s already quite powerful. He’ll only grow. The jetiise might have had him first, but they have lost him so comprehensively that even Luke karking Skywalker failed to pry away the beskar built around his heart. 

Boba may be neither Mandalorian nor poet, but there’s enough of both in him to savor elegance and vengeance both. He finds he is not so old and practical, now, that he cannot still indulge his inner child. 

As if hearing his thoughts, Grogu stops whacking the baby Wookiee around the ankles and twists around to look up, ears pricking as he focuses on Boba. His babble isn’t audible amidst the rest of the noise, but he lifts his pink battle noodle to show Boba and shakes it demonstratively. A wave, or a salute. 

Boba raises a hand back and smiles, not worried about how the scarring turns it all into a sideways leer. It’ll be good for the little sprout to have his friends.