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Fennec entered the cockpit and sat heavily in the jumpseat. Boba could see her wince slightly and stretch out her shoulders and wrists – usual strain from holding a blaster for so long – but she didn’t seem to have gotten a scratch otherwise. Something in her expression was odd, though.
“Mando get his kid?” he asked, breaking the silence. “Your comm was kind of short.”
His part of the plan had been to lead any fighters launched into a nearby asteroid field, which had made both him and them unavailable on comms for while – not ideal, but a necessary risk. When he’d gotten back in contact, Fennec had told him the mission was complete and to come pick her up, but hadn’t said much else.
Fennec grimaced a little. “For a while,” she said. “Then Luke Skywalker came – the Rebellion hero?”
“We’ve met,” Boba said dryly. Perhaps for the best he hadn’t been there, then. He punched in the coordinates for Tatooine and glanced to make sure Fennec was strapped in before he jumped to hyperspace. He had finally gotten the seat installed when it became clear that looking for his armor was going to take longer than he’d thought, but there were times when he regretted giving someone such close access to him while he was piloting.
This was one of them. He saw Fennec eye him knowingly in the bright reflection of the glass, but when he didn’t say more she continued, “Saved us all from getting killed by darktroopers, then said he was there to take the kid.”
“What did Mando do?” Boba asked, wondering what had happened. There clearly wasn’t a Mando-shaped smear on the ship from him trying to kill Skywalker for the suggestion, Fennec would have led with that.
“He argued a bit, but eventually let him go. They flew off in an X Wing just before you commed.”
Boba hummed, staring out at the bright-blue streaks of hyperspace. It wouldn’t have been the decision he would have made, but then again he probably would have dropped a force-sensitive kid off somewhere else well before getting attached to them, not dragged them around the galaxy trying to find a Jedi.
He may have, kind of, made his peace with the Jedi after making it out of the sarlacc with his second chance, but he still wouldn’t have been eager to go looking for them.
Particularly not Skywalker, who he doubted would have been happy to see him.
“Kid’s safe at least,” he finally said. “And Gideon?”
“Alive,” Fennec said. “Mando said he’d send us our share of the bounty once he turned it in.”
“Good,” Boba said.
They sat in silence for a while before Fennec got up to get some food, leaving Boba to stare out at hyperspace alone. He settled further down in the chair and tried to enjoy the relative silence of the hum of his ship like he used to.
Somehow, though, he didn’t. He’d been in forced company these past few years, and he’d gotten used to it. First there were the Tuskens, who had stumbled across his scarred body, stripped of armor by the Jawas, and decided if fate had seen fit to let him get out of the sarlacc and stay alive long enough to be found, then they would help.
It had been long, fevered days, strapped carefully to a bantha, swaying with its step in the covered basket he was placed in, and feeling the rise and fall of its breathing, learning to expect the way it let out a long sigh that tugged painfully at his wounds whenever they had to stop before reaching the next oasis. Then when he was carried to a tent and tended, left to be watched over by some elders, he could see the vague shadows of their hands moving through his blurred vision and hear the speech that punctuated the handsigns as if from underwater. When he was lucid but still not well enough to walk, he’d been put in charge of watching the children with some of the elders, so it hadn’t been quiet then either. The opposite, most of the time, with the children both speaking and signing at him rapidfire whenever they paused their games and remembered he was there.
There had been some silence, when he was as well as he would be after years of recovery, and it had unsettled him. He’d almost gone back and asked if he might be able to join the tribe permanently, after a few days of silence in the desert. But he was his father’s son, and he couldn’t live out the rest of his days herding bantha from oasis to oasis in the desert.
He’d gotten used to the silence once, he’d told himself, he could again.
Then he’d seen Fennec Shand get shot by some green bounty hunter, and though they hadn’t exactly been friends, he’d still decided to see her body handled more respectfully than just left to the elements without ceremony.
And then, she’d still been alive, and he’d wondered if that feeling of mildly incredulous admiration for her tenacity had been the same feeling that had made the Tuskens save him back then.
He’d taken her back to the little base of operations he had, the bacta and medical supplies he’d scavenged to help with his own symptoms used up almost completely to help her live long enough for him to track down a medical droid that might be able to save her. His credits, at least, he’d been able to access some of, even if he hadn’t been able to find his ship or his armor. Although she’d been out of it for the first several days, her breathing let him know she was still alive, and the feeling of another living thing in his space made it less silent.
Even now on the ship, he could somehow feel there was another person aboard, like their two lives held suspended by cold metal were connected, just by being alive in the void.
As much as he sometimes hated Fennec’s knowing looks when he avoided talking about something, he’d also gotten used to her quiet way of getting him to open up, and her ways of opening up in return. She was the first person in a long while he’d actually built a personal connection with, even if it was only due to proximity.
He let out a sigh and shook his head. Well, he’d have to get used to it again after this, he supposed. He understood wanting to pay debts, so when Fennec had asked what she could do to make them even, he’d told her if she helped find his ship, his armor, and pay his own debts then they’d be square.
And when they were square, well, they’d probably be friendlier than they’d been before – you don’t save someone’s life and travel with them for months without starting to either like them or hate them – but Fennec would probably go back to bounty hunting solo. Being thought dead, he’d found, was good for throwing people who might want to kill you off your tracks for at least a little while. She’d be fine on her own. He’d be fine on his own.
He stared out at hyperspace again, glad his helmet was on so he didn’t have to see how morose his face probably looked in the reflection.
Fennec came back several hours later just before they dropped out of hyperspace next to Tatooine and they both looked at the red, desert planet as they approached. He bypassed the port and Mos Eisley and landed on a convenient ridge he knew of above the place formerly known as Jabba’s Palace.
If it wasn’t still being called Jabba’s Palace now, it probably wasn’t being called “Fortuna’s Palace.” He doubted Fortuna had enough power to really make a name change in the eyes of the locals. He sent off a comm message before getting his blaster and jumping out of the ship after Fennec.
They stood on the edge of the ridge and looked down. Unlike in Jabba’s time, the place seemed dead. A few speeders and a single ship were parked outside, but other than a single guard at the entrance no one was in sight. He tilted his head towards Fennec and she raised her rifle to her shoulder.
“No one close,” he said. His infrared couldn’t penetrate all the thick walls, but it could tell that there were no other guards to see this one drop.
Fennec set her sights and fired, a clean shot through the guard’s skull and they dropped.
He held out a hand to her and he could see her nose scrunch in confusion. He had never treated her like someone that needed help when it wasn’t asked for.
“I was going to offer you a ride down, but if you’d prefer to climb...” he shrugged, gesturing to his jetpack with his other hand.
“Handy,” she said, and adjusted her rifle to her back, stepping beside him and putting an arm firmly around his neck.
He wrapped his up on her ribcage rather than down on her waist – not the most comfortable, but better than putting pressure where the skin and cybernetics met further down on her stomach. He’d taken to flying again after five years with no difficulty, but having a passenger did make things a little tricky. He hadn’t carried passengers all that often. He increased power to the left jet to compensate, and a short trip later they dropped in front of the dead guard.
Both of them knew the layout and the plan – kill any resistance, but the main target was Fortuna. By all accounts there was no one in his meager band of mercenaries who would try to keep the place once he was dead.
He stopped before the throne when the dust had settled and looked at it.
“Want to be king for a day?” Fennec asked.
Boba snorted. “Maybe a night, even. Vanth will be here tomorrow.” But he thought about it. He’d lived here, on and off, for almost his whole life since his father died, and the slug sitting on his throne had been a constant throughout. Maybe it would be nice to look down from it, rather than in front of it or behind it for once.
He settled into the chair and saw Fennec snag the bottle of spotchka before coming to lean on the arm next to him. The chair was extremely uncomfortable. Mostly a hard slab of stone that he wouldn’t like to sit in for very long if he wanted to keep feeling in his legs. He wondered if it had been uncomfortable to the old slug.
Probably not, Jabba had never been the type to tolerate discomfort.
Fennec glanced at him after she took a sip of her spotchka.
Boba shifted a bit again and grimaced behind his helmet. “I think I’ll stick to bounty hunting,” he said finally, grateful that the armor bracing his knees made standing a bit easier than it might have been otherwise. He was getting old.
He wondered if his father felt this old before he died, or if it was mostly the sarlacc. He shook the thought away and turned to Fennec again. “Want to see the view?” he asked, gesturing up at the higher floors.
When they reached the top, still checking each room for any stragglers as they went, they both looked around at the stripped bare room that used to be Jabba’s private quarters.
“Looks like Fortuna got rid of most of the décor,” Fennec said.
“Paying off debts, probably,” Boba said. “He was always good at record keeping but bad with money.”
He wandered over to the edge of the room, where the wind was blowing the dust around. “Last time I was here,” he said, looking out of the slatted window carved into the stone, “Was just before I died.”
“Are you saying I’m speaking to a ghost?” Fennec asked jokingly.
Boba looked down at the sand below. “Maybe not a ghost, but someone different than who went in, anyway. I’ve never been quite that close to death before.” Seen it, sure. Caused it, sure. Even been in some bad situations. But he’d never before fallen unconscious thinking this is it, I’m probably never waking up again.
“Seems like a thing that happens to people on Tatooine,” she said, sobering at the memory of her own brush with death. She paused for a moment, as if wondering whether she should ask. “Was it really Luke Skywalker who knocked you in?”
Boba snorted. “No, it was his hanger on, Han Solo, while he was still carbon freezing-blind. He got in a lucky hit to my jetpack and I fell in.”
Fennec’s mouth twisted for a moment, like she was trying to control a smile and failing, and then she managed to school her face again and nod seriously.
He rolled his eyes. “Go ahead and laugh, it would have been a dumb way to die.”
Her cheeks puffed up with air for a moment before the air burst past her lips and she started to laugh, head back and mouth wide. He stared at her for a moment before her laughter seemed to catch him, and he started chuckling too.
When her laughter subsided, she watched the desert with him catching her breath. “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?” she said, “I almost got killed by a green bounty hunter, and you got knocked into a sarlacc by a guy who couldn’t even see where you were.”
“The best-worst bounty hunters, for sure,” he said wryly.
“I can see why you’d prefer people think Luke Skywalker did it, though,” she said. She pointed a finger at him sternly “If anyone asks, it’s Mando who got me, all right? No one would believe that kid over Boba Fett.”
“Deal,” he said.
He glanced at the time and realized they should probably keep searching the rooms for anything valuable. They only had the day and night after all. He turned away and went out the door, not bothering to close it behind him before going to the next room.
“You never did say how Vanth managed to track down your ship,” Fennec said.
That was true. She’d still been early in her recovery when he’d gotten word that Vanth had tracked it down. Fennec had been out of it enough that he hadn’t really bothered to explain why they were moving from the cave they’d been in. He honestly hadn’t thought she remembered the cave. “He’s got some unusual connections, for a small desert town marshal. When he figured out who I was, he’s the one who offered to bargain for it. He must’ve already known where it was.”
“I suppose hearing about Boba Fett’s ship might be something you’d remember,” Fennec teased. “Especially if you’d been running around in his armor for five years. Jumping at shadows.”
“Lucky for him I’m not as reactionary as a lot of bounty hunters when someone else has their stuff. These days, anyway.” He certainly hadn’t been as calm when he’d been salvaging the pieces of Jango’s armor he could find when he was younger.
Fennec hummed. “Place looks clear. You said we get to salvage?”
Boba nodded. “We can keep what we find until they get here.”
Fennec gestured for him to precede her to the stairs. “After you.”
There was a lot of worthless junk. They could tell even without inspecting it too much themselves it was worthless, as it had clearly been picked through by others before them. Fortuna had done a pretty good job of cleaning the place out of valuables to try to pay his debts.
“What do you think Vanth is going to do with this place?” Fennec asked as she crouched, picking up another jewel that looked like a Tatooine Emerald and holding the stone up to the light before huffing in annoyance and tossing it aside. Just pretty colored glass, he guessed.
“Don’t care,” Boba said firmly, sweeping the room slowly to let his scanner try to pick out anything that might have been missed.
Fennec tapped him on the leg and glared up at him. “You don’t have to care to have ideas. The Bounty Hunter’s Code says not to ask, not that we can’t speculate amongst ourselves. Just doesn’t seem like a small town marshal’s scene, hiring bounty hunters to take out a crime lord.”
Boba paused. He did, in fact, have an idea. “I think he’ll use it to bargain with the Tuskens,” he said. “They’ve wanted this place gone for a while. Generations, really.”
Fennec hummed in interest and moved another larger piece of metal aside so his scanner could see what was underneath. “Bargain for what?”
His scanner finished looking through what was visible and flashed nothing of interest. While there could be something buried, he’d rather take a look at some of the other rooms. “Nothing here, let’s go to the next one,” he said, instead of answering.
Fennec rolled her neck as she stood up and followed him out, but her silence was pointed.
He sighed slightly. “I really don’t know. I only talked to Vanth twice, I don’t exactly know him. I just know he and Mando worked with Tuskens to take out the Krayt Dragon.”
Fennec entered the next room first, which was a mess of both finished clothes and loose cloth. “Maybe he’s got a baby Hutt he’s going to put on the throne,” she joked. “Did you hear Jabba had a kid? I wonder what happened to him.”
“Haven’t heard of him being on Tatooine for a while,” Boba said. “Then again almost dying really cut me off from the gossip chain, so who knows.”
His scanner picked up a corner of cloth and Boba walked over to tug it out from the pile. It was a pretty big piece, and slightly stiff. “Armorweave,” he said, handing it to Fennec.
“Huh,” she said, taking off a glove to feel it. “Expensive stuff.” She rolled it up to take with them.
The next room was a surprise, mostly clean and bare of junk. Up against one wall was bacta tank. Boba breathed in slightly in surprise.
Bacta tanks were rare in the outer rim, and rarer now even in the Core than they used to be. Hutts didn’t react the same to bacta as most others did, so there wasn’t really a reason for Jabba to have one for himself. Boba hadn’t even known there was one in the Palace.
“A reward for Jabba’s most faithful, maybe,” Fennec said, touching the outside.
“Or a punishment,” Boba said grimly, thinking about how a bacta tank could be used to bring people back from the brink of death, and how someone like Jabba might have used that in unsavory ways.
Fennec swung her rifle behind her again and stepped up to the control panel, flicking the on switch. The tank lit up with a hum.
“Seems to work,” she said. “Bacta levels are good.”
She paused, as if considering her next words. “You should use it,” she said.
He looked at her in surprise and she tilted her head and raised an eyebrow at him like she was disappointed.
“I don’t know how long it’s been since you got out of the sarlacc, but I do know you’ve been using all the topical creams and bacta you can find, and you still look like you’re half a step from being a corpse.”
He sputtered at her in slight outrage.
“I don’t mean your skill, but you look like you haven’t healed. A bacta tank could help with the deep tissue damage.”
It probably could. He’d never been injured enough to need one. Boba looked into the light of the tank for a long moment. “You sure?” he asked. Vanth would come in the morning, so they probably didn’t have time for both of them to use it.
“I haven’t got much damaged tissue left to heal,” she said. “It would do you more good than me.”
He reached up and took his helmet off. “You’ll stand guard?” he asked, surprising himself by actually trusting and wanting her to do so.
Fennec looked a little surprised too, but she easily answered, “Of course.”
She stepped out of the room, and he looked into the glow of the tank for a moment before reaching to take off his armor. When he pulled the mask over his face and felt the tank start to fill, he wondered if this was what the cloning pods were like. He’d been, apparently, taken out of his pretty much as soon as he was a viable human at his father’s request, but he’d seen the pods from the outside sometimes. He closed his eyes and let the bacta wash over him, the sedatives mixed in pulling him under.
Fennec met him with food the next morning. She’d been right, he did look and feel better. He’d gotten so used to feeling halfway to terrible all the time, and it had been so much better than he’d felt at first that he hadn’t realized how bad he’d still felt.
“Time’s almost up,” he said. “Let’s check the last rooms.”
After clearing the last room they walked back through the main room with the dais. It was eerily quiet, like a tomb, in a way neither of them had ever known Jabba’s Palace to be.
Back on the ridge where the ship was, they saw a dust cloud approaching from the west, several speeders.
“Where should I take you?” Boba asked. Their deal, like his with Vanth, was over and they were even. If anyone ISB figured out Fennec was alive, she might get another bounty on her, but she was pretty good at hiding. The Guild didn’t particularly care if you used to have a bounty on you, or if someone mistakenly declared a bounty collected, and would likely renew her membership.
Fennec looked at him sideways and then tilted her head in thought. “Are you kicking me out?” she said, and the tone was joking but the pause had been too long for it to be anything other than calculated.
He turned to look at her. There was history there, but none of it too bad. No more so than a lot of the competitively antagonistic relationships he’d had with a lot of bounty hunters over the years. She’d never tried to backstab him, cheat him, or steal from him. And in the past few months since he’d helped her they’d become pretty friendly. Apparently friendly enough to trust her to guard him when he was in the tank and vulnerable. Turned out familiarity did build trust.
“Are you going to start paying rent?” He asked.
Fennec’s face turned serious. “You pay me a salary to be your sniper, and you can take some of my wages for room and board.”
Boba raised an eyebrow at her. “You get a percentage of any bounties I need your help with, and you pay rent.”
“A regular salary, plus a bonus for every bounty I help with, and rent can’t exceed twenty-five percent of my salary,” she countered.
He thought about it. It would be pretty generous of him to agree. Then again, he’d been in a generous mood lately – nursing people back to health, playing taxi service around half the galaxy. The deal, generous as it was, would be plausible deniability for both of them. If anyone asked, they could truthfully say sharing the ship was a business arrangement, and most people would probably assume Fennec was paying out the nose for it.
Instead, the deal would be tacit acknowledgement that they were friends.
“Deal,” he said.
Fennec’s face twisted into a slightly smug and knowing smile, but she professionally stuck out her hand for a shake and he amusedly took it. He hoped she wasn’t used enough to his body language in armor to know he was amused, but somehow, he thought she did.
He adjusted his blaster again and turned back to the ship, seeing the speeders down below starting to gather outside the empty palace.
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The trip to Mos Eisley, where the nearest Bounty Hunters’ Guild was, was short. He went in on his own and he saw more than one person fumble their glass in shock when he walked in. Looked like no one had forgotten about him, at least.
“Well I’ll be, it’s Boba Fett,” the Toydarian proprietor said.
“The one and only,” he said wryly, though from the outside he supposed it might sound like arrogance. “I’m looking for work.” He didn’t ask if his membership was still valid. It had likely been cancelled after so many years and the rumors of his death, but they could deal with it and just show him the pucks.
The Toydarian signaled quickly to their underling, who gaped for a moment before scrambling to bring out the pucks they had. Boba picked up one of them, looked at the bounty and immediately looked at the guild owner unimpressed. “I’ve had bounties higher than this put on my empty caf cups.”
They went slightly green in embarrassment and rushed to sort through the pucks, in the end leaving just two, one by the New Republic for a former Imperial admiral most recently spotted in this sector, and another by a business mogul for someone who’d stolen from them.
He paused, and then picked up the one for the admiral, Scapen.
Might be time to announce his return to the New Republic. Turning in a bounty would make it harder for them to try to arrest him for something.
He stepped back out into the light of the twin suns, feeling grateful as ever for the return of the protective embrace of his armor. The civilian locals eyed him, as wary as most people were of bounty hunters, but they also didn’t look at him with the fear they used to when he was working for Jabba and the Empire. The fear used to make him feel secure, like no one would screw with him if they were too afraid, but now their more casual wariness felt better. He nodded to the twi’lek walking by with her child as he passed and headed back to his ship.
He passed the puck to Fennec and she snorted when she saw it was from the New Republic.
He checked the comms, and there was a message waiting for him, from Mando.
I’m transferring two shares of Gideon’s bounty, it read. Thank you.
Fennec reached over, checked the amount, and whistled. “I might have been tempted to keep the bounty if this is just part of it.”
“I guess we should be glad Mando’s more honorable than either of us,” Boba said, and swiped the screen away. “I’ll transfer you your share.”
“I’ll be checking,” Fennec said teasingly.
They both strapped in, and he prepared to take off, rotating the ship once they were high enough. If he looked down, he would probably see Jabba’s Palace in the distance, the place where he’d spent a lot of his childhood once he’d been orphaned, the place where he’d spent a lot of his adulthood.
He didn’t look down.
Hunting involved a lot of investigating much of the time. Which meant a lot of time in hyperspace traveling between contacts.
A lot of time for conversation.
“How did you get out of the sarlacc anyway?” Fennec asked suddenly, breaking the silence. She had an air of nonchalance, but he’d seen the question burning behind her eyes every time the topic of his almost death had come up. Maybe now that there wasn’t a debt between them, she felt secure enough to ask.
“Dumb luck,” he said.
She snorted. “No, really. How?”
“Dumb luck. Jabba’s barge lost control and crashed into the sarlacc shortly after I fell in, punctured a big, gaping hole in it. I managed to crawl out since it didn’t have the strength to keep me in.”
He sighed. “And then, if Vanth is right, the Jawas stripped my armor off me while I was passed out. If helping sarlacc survivors wasn’t considered lucky by the Tusken tribe that found me, I’d have crawled out of the sarlacc just to die in the desert.”
“As lucky as I was that you were wandering by when I got shot, I suppose,” she said, leaning back.
“Yeah,” he said, staring back out at hyperspace. He snorted. “Not lucky enough to find my armor or my ship for five years when they were both on the same damn planet as me the whole time.”
He was still a little sore about that. Lucky enough to live but not lucky enough to avoid being lost, without the things that made him Boba Fett for a whole five years. He looked at the reflection of the helmet in the window screen again. In the washed-out colors of hyperspace, it almost looked like it could be Jango’s, even though that original one was long gone.
By the time they’d tracked down a lead on where the Imperial might be hiding – one of Fennec’s contacts, not his, surprisingly – they’d settled further into a comfortable routine, and Boba was starting to hope maybe he’d found someone to rely on. He’s not sure if he’d ever be comfortable calling someone a friend – Jango had impressed upon him too many times that having friends wasn’t smart – but one of the closest personal relationships he’d had in a long time.
The Imperial base was in a valley. He knew that, in terms of avoiding casual scanning from atmo, building in a valley was smart, but it also meant there was a lot of strategically unsound high ground surrounding it. Then again, most of it did seem to be underground which would make any approach difficult.
At the kitchen table in the ship, they talked strategy. Boba surprised himself by suggesting several that put Fennec behind him up on the ridge to make best use of her sniping skill. Even when they’d made plans to confront Mando, he’d always placed her in front of him. He couldn’t remember, in fact, ever proposing a strategy that put someone else at his back since he became experienced and known enough to call the shots in any group mission he – often reluctantly – went on.
The quiet, surprised smile Fennec gave him when he proposed the idea warmed him too, and he gladly answered her questions about how strong his armor was, so she could factor it into her ideas.
In the end, they both relied on their knowledge of Imperial tactics and the fact that these ones were clearly underfunded and didn’t have the numbers to pull off those usual tactics.
They turned on the jammers on the ship to keep any potential calls for reinforcements from going out, and Fennec found a good nest and settled in to start picking off the guards patrolling the front. Boba flew in low along the side and crept around to set charges on the exterior wall near the main entrance. Through his helmet’s sensors, he could see some of the heat signatures gathered there, probably trying to figure out where the fire was coming from.
He set more charges along the weakest point of one of the side walls, then ducked around the back to set them off. The explosions rocked the base, and he went back around the side to go in through the hole he’d made, calling out over the comms as he did.
He slid the gaderffii stick out of the holder he’d made next to his jetpack and hit the first stormtrooper under their chin, making their neck snap too far back with a crack. The thump of the trooper dropping like a stone was loud, but not as distinctive as blaster fire. He made his way to where they’d figured the elevator shaft would be. The dust and debris from the explosions meant that most troopers were just able to see his heat signature, which wouldn’t tell them that he wasn’t friendly.
He pried open the door of the elevator shaft and put the gaderffii stick away on his back. He’d probably need blasters for this part.
Boba jetted down to land on top of the elevator on the bottom level. He ripped open the emergency hatch and dropped a smoke canister in, dropping down to take stock before the smoke entirely filled the room.
Two guards and their target. Pretty pathetic that this was all the resistance an Imperial admiral could muster to save his own skin.
He shot the two guards at close range and then pointed his blaster at the former admiral.
The man was older with wiry, pale skin and grey hair like most Imperial admirals he’d met, and he clenched his jaw but raised his hands above the smoke. Boba’s reputation worked in his favor, here – the New Republic didn’t have the death penalty, but Boba would absolutely shoot the man if he was too annoying to bring in alive.
He roughly checked the man for weapons, blaster still pointed at his head, before cuffing him.
“I can pay you double what the New Republic is offering,” he said, his voice high and thready with age and fear.
“You can’t even afford to keep your bunker properly defended,” Boba said, grabbing him roughly by the arm and shoving him ahead. “I know you can’t afford me.”
When they stepped out of the base, Fennec was waiting outside the door, rifle held casually but not put away at her back. The stormtroopers she’d picked off lay on the ground, their distinctly yellowed armor further evidence that Scapen was probably not the well-connected target the New Republic was hoping for.
As long as they paid, though, Boba didn’t care.
Scapen continued to occasionally pipe up with only slightly more believable offers than the one he’d made below, but Fennec and Boba, after a silent glance at each other, said nothing.
Boba shoved him immediately into one of the tiny hold cells once they were aboard, but knew that even with the door shut you could still usually hear something when you were in the kitchen. Before Mando’s ship had blown up, he thought he’d seen a mobile carbon freezer and wondered if he could find space to install one.
He was starting to get a feel for when Fennec would strike up a deeper conversation. It was usually at least a couple hours into hyperspace, when they were both sitting in the cockpit staring out so they didn’t have to look directly at each other.
“What was your first Hunt?” she asked.
“I went with my father a few times,” he said. “Played lookout mostly.”
Fennec hummed. “That’s how I started out too,” she said. “Being a lookout for my mom.”
He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. As much as some people had this notion that Hunting was an easy path to getting rich, if you were able to do what was necessary, it was a relatively difficult industry to enter. It made sense that Fennec had a Bounty Hunter parent like him.
“What happened to her?” He asked.
Fennec sighed. “Killed on a job. I’m older than she was, now.”
“Me too,” Boba said quietly. It seemed almost callous, to reduce how Jango died to ‘killed on a job,’ but he got the feeling there was more to how Fennec’s mother died that she just wasn’t ready to say too.
But there was a warmth between them that said they didn’t need to talk about everything now.
Maybe they would both die tomorrow, but probably not. They had time.