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When Fennec comes wandering back into the palace and tells him Din said "It's on the house", Boba imagines a number of scenarios, running through possibilities as easy as breathing.
He imagines Din showing up just at the right time, imagines one Pyke after the other falling at their feet, imagines thanking Din and then paying him anyways, imagines Din refusing just for Boba to make up his debt with a warm meal, companionship and Spotchka instead.
What he does not imagine, in any way, shape or form, is having his life saved by Luke Skywalker.
"I'm sorry," Luke says from where he's standing atop the crumpled shell of one of the ridiculous oversized droideka, Grogu cooing happily where he's strapped to his back in a frankly ridiculous looking backpack. "I know you don't have any reason to like or even trust me, but Din said you might need help. So I’m here to help."
Boba thinks back to the way it felt to be eaten alive in the Sarlacc stomach, how the sand scratched against his skin as he clawed himself to the surface. How years before that the beskar of his father's helmet felt ice-cold when he touched it against his forehead.
But he looks out at the faces of the people of Mos Espa now, all of them safe and unharmed, looks at the way Din reaches out his hand to help Luke climb down from the droideka, and he thinks that, maybe for the first time, those memories don’t seem as close as they used to.
"I'm a changed man," he says with a shrug and watches a small knowing smile spread on Luke’s lips.
And then that's that.
He watches them dance around each other for the better part of a week after that, tension so thick he can see it in the way the dust gets kicked up and flows around them in the hot desert air.
They never tell him what it is they're fighting about, but he thinks he has a good idea of it still - history repeats itself after all, and the stories involving Jedi and Mandalorians are rarely ones of peace. They are, he thinks to himself, not nearly as unique as they think themselves to be.
He's not quite sure why Luke stays in the first place – why he chooses to meditate atop a palace he once swore to burn down, or tries to pet the very same animal that once tried to bite his head off – but he and Din seem to be locked in some sort of stalemate revolving around the kid, neither being able to leave the other behind.
The kid, in turn, seems absolutely unphased by their squabble.
Perhaps he senses the inevitability of it, the simple fact that no matter how much they disagree, with every second they spend together they just become more intertwined, a constant freefall towards commitment. Or perhaps he's simply seen much more vile things in his long life.
It doesn’t really concern Boba, in the end. There is enough space. And they are good tenants, helpful in cleaning up the rest of the Pykes, in keeping the peace even when they themselves seem ready to combust at any moment.
Still, he wonders sometimes, as he watches them, what that would be like, to have someone to be this in sync with even when nothing lines up. To belong somewhere like they belong with each other, to know, without the shadow of a doubt, that no matter what happens, even before you know it yourself, you’ll always have a place to return to.
“So what are you being so pressed about?” he asks Din on a rare quiet afternoon, when the suns are too high in the sky to set foot outside and Grogu is snoring against his shoulder, trapping him in place.
He is pretty sure he has the answer and even more certain he shouldn’t get involved, but it’s been a week and there is only so much pining and brooding one man can watch.
Din stays stock still for a long moment – so still Boba isn’t sure if his chosen tactic of getting out of answering the question is simply to fall asleep – until eventually, his helmet tilts ever so slightly, in what might have been a sigh. “I’m no longer Mandalorian,” he says.
Boba snorts out a laugh. "Why? Because you took off your helmet?”
“Yes,” Din says and there is a graveness in his voice that reminds Boba oddly of the way he used to swear to his dad that he’d brushed his teeth every night he was gone.
He lets himself sink down onto the couch beside Din, stretches his arms out on the backrest until he can run a soothing hand along Grogu’s back. “The first time you saw me I wasn't wearing my helmet,” he points out. “And yet you let me put on my armor, yet you recognized me as one of your own. Why can't you do that for yourself?"
Din lets out a small huff of breath as if he was about to argue, but then he goes still again, contemplating. Boba gives him time, just settles further into the cushions, and watches light slowly drift along the floor, the suns oblivious to the turmoil of men.
“It’s– terrifying,” Din says finally, so quiet Boba has to lean closer to hear him. “I don’t know who I am without it.” His helmet tilts down towards the child in his arms, splotches of green reflecting against the beskar. “I don’t know what I’d be to him.”
Boba feels a stab of something old and ugly in his chest, something that makes him think of how proudly his father polished his armor and how Boba never met any other of their kind growing up.
“You’d be his father.”
“But he’s a foundling. A Mandalorian foundling.”
Boba looks at the way Grogu’s little hands are holding onto Din’s cape, and how during their whole conversation he hasn’t stirred once. “And you think he gives a kriff about that?”
Din pulls the kid closer to his chest, stays silent. Boba lets out a slow breath, tries to calm his own heart. Tries not to wonder if his father ever fought with that, that feeling of not being enough for the person you love, the person you’d try everything to come home to.
“When I was a kid I loved watching my father put on the armor,” he says when his heart finally starts to settle. “I loved the ritual of it, and the meaning, sure. But most of all I loved that it kept him safe. Because that’s really all I ever cared about. That the person beneath it came back home.”
He leans over to put a hand over the ka'rta on Din’s breastplate, the other gently resting against the back of his neck, the way he used to place his hands on his father's armor whenever they said goodbye. “If wearing the armor means coming home to him,” he says. “Don’t you think maybe that’s enough?”
It all comes to a head eventually, two weeks in.
Most of their fights are quiet - Luke too controlled to act, Din too used to lying in wait for his prey to react to his inaction. They have whole conversations with nothing but looks shot at each other across the room, show their conviction to their beliefs in the way they hold themselves, only ever argue with words when they’re tucked away in the darkest corners of the palace.
They think they're being subtle now too, and they would be really, if it wasn’t for the fact that they chose the one room to hide away in that is directly connected to the throne room by a small inconspicuous vent. A vent that means he and Fennec have quietly been part of their conversation since Din slammed the door and hissed, "Why are you being so stubborn?"
So far Boba has counted four I don’t understand ’s, all of them coming from Din, and at least five It’s not that simple ’s from Luke.
"Want to take bets?" Fennec suggests at what Boba assumes must be halfway through the fight, just as Din snaps “But why can’t I stay with him?”
Before Boba can think of who to set his money on, there is a loud crash and then Luke shouts, so loud they would have heard it without the vent, "Because I’m in love with you!"
There is a long silence – so long Boba debates going upstairs to check if they somehow accidentally murdered each other – and then Din’s voice comes over the vent, maybe a tiny bit shaky, "You are?"
Another, even longer silence, then, much, much quieter, "Yes."
"Okay. Alright. Wait here," Din says, and then about two seconds later they watch as he storms down the stairs into the throne room. "Challenge me for the darksaber."
Boba tilts his head at him, trying his very best to keep his face from giving away the fact that they just eavesdropped on a supposedly very private conversation. "What?"
"I don't want it,” Din says and draws himself up in front of them. “You're already sitting on a throne. Challenge me."
"He does make a good point," Fennec says. “Might be a good Pyke repellant too.”
Boba shoots her a look. Din takes another step forward, unclips the darksaber from his belt to hold it up between them as if that would change Boba’s mind. It doesn’t.
But this does, this has – watching them dance around each other for two weeks, locked in their own private war, fighting over paths they never chose themselves. And so he stands up and fights.
Din doesn’t pull his punches, but neither does Boba. In the end, nearly predictably, comically in a way only the worst things ever are, the fight ends the same way it started – with Luke. It’s just a split second, just one jerk of Din’s head to where Luke is bolting down the stairs after him – either done with waiting or reasonably concerned by the sound of plasma scraping against beskar – but that split second is all it takes for Boba to get his whipcord around Din’s wrist, pull the darksaber from his hand and punch him across the room.
Luke is at his side in an instance, hands roaming over his body, his expression stuck between outrage and confusion. “What in the Force are you doing?”
“You said we have our own destinies, right?” Din counters, voice just a little bit rough through the modulator. “That we have to go different ways because you’re the last Jedi and I’m the Mandalor. Well–” He gestures to the darksaber in Boba’s hand. “I’m not the Mandalor anymore. So now I can do with my destiny whatever the kriff I want.”
Luke opens his mouth to argue, makes a vague sweeping gesture between them, then closes it again. For a moment he just stares at the wall, brows drawn and lips pressed into a thin line, then he seems to visibly deflate. “I didn’t know that was an option.”
Din shrugs. “Well, I made it one.”
“What about the mines? And redeeming yourself?”
“We can still go there, I guess.” He looks up at Boba. “But someone very wise once told me there are many ways to be a Mandalorian.”
Boba huffs out a laugh and reaches out his hand to help him up. “That’s not what I said.”
Din squeezes his hand. “I felt it was implied.”
For a moment Boba watches as Luke looks between them, as his eyes catch onto their joint hands. There is something strange that passes between them, a small knowing smile on Luke’s lips, like an understanding–
Then Din lets go of Boba’s hand to turn towards Luke and takes his face into his hands. “What matters,” he says and leans their foreheads together. “Is that I love you too.”
Boba is not even remotely surprised when his protocol droid finds them wrapped around each other in a supply closet, not an hour later.
Din wakes him from a nightmare that very same night. It’s nearly more startling than the dream itself.
He shoots up in bed, one hand reaching for the vibro knife under his pillow, the other grappling onto the fabric of Din’s shirt, adamant to keep him in place to go in for the kill. Din stops the knife just before the blade reaches his neck, one hand wrapped around Boba’s wrist, firm in a way that says he’s done this before.
It takes Boba a second to adjust to the dichotomy of darkness and moonlight, but when he does it’s to find brown eyes looking steadily at him, sleep rumpled hair and–
“You have a mustache?” he asks, voice sleep rough and dreams forgotten.
There’s a small huff of laughter from the door, the sound so eerily casual it sends a shiver down his back. He looks past Din to find Luke leaned against the frame, chest bare, the moonlight etching his scars into his skin like dried riverbeds.
There’s a smile on Luke’s lips, small and knowing, and Boba is suddenly reminded of how he woke up two nights ago to the sound of someone screaming. How really between all their shared ghosts the palace makes for quite a convincing haunted house.
He drops his hand, stores the knife back under his pillow.
“Do you want us to stay?” Din asks, nothing in his voice but quiet sincerity. Boba feels something stir in his chest, something that feels strangely like pressing his nose against rain-stained windows to watch his father's ship accelerate out of Kamino’s atmosphere.
But Din said us – him and Luke, an inevitability even when it’s been barely any time at all – and something about that feels insurmountable, terrifying in a way not even his dreams ever are.
“That’s alright,” he says. “I’m fine on my own.”
He’s not surprised either, when the very next day they pack up and leave.
Where they leave a strange empty space in the dust dancing around the palace, a cohort of Mandalorians starts trickling in to take their place.
A woman who calls herself the Armorer sets up a forge in his basement. A man named Paz nearly gets his arm bitten off by the rancor. Some come to challenge him, but most come accepting in a way that’s nearly suspicious, as if someone had sung the gospel of him to anyone they met on their travels.
He doesn’t really question it, in the end. There is enough space.
It’s only at night – when the only sound is quiet snoring down the hall, when even the dessert quiets down – that he wonders why even with most rooms of the palace full, he still feels like he’s back on Kamino, staring out rain-stained windows.
The first kid they bring is a girl named Rey, her wit sharp, and teeth even sharper. The second one is a boy named Ben, who hides behind him from both her wit and teeth. Then comes Finn and Armitage and Hennix and Tai and Voe and then, eventually, Boba stops counting.
The palace gets cramped, discussions are had and territories fought over, sometimes to the point of exhaustion that leave Boba taking sporadic naps in the rancor pit, just so that no one will find him to ask for his opinion. But with every kid they bring they stay longer, and sometimes days turn into weeks, and sometimes they don’t leave for months at a time at all.
And sometimes, maybe more often than not, he finds them sprawled out in his bed, Luke already half asleep while Din pulls him down to the mattress with a shrug and a smile and says, “All the other rooms were taken.”
He doesn’t really question it, in the end. Even when, with the three of them cramped together, there is barely any space.
When Fennec comes wandering back into the palace and tells him Din said "It's on the house", Boba imagines a number of scenarios, running through possibilities as easy as breathing.
What he does not imagine, in any way, shape or form, is having Din leaning against him as he cleans his blaster, or Lukes legs slung over his as he idly flips through a book, all three of them looking out over dunes filled with Jedi and Manadlorians alike, running, training, laughing. Safe.
He doesn’t want to question it, but still, he wonders sometimes–
“Do you not want to move them anywhere else? Someplace more–” he trails off, gestures vaguely at the gaggle of kids chasing Paz across the landing pad. “They are here to train with you, to learn from you. You keep them safe.”
Luke puts down the book, smiles at him, small and knowing. "They come for us, sure,” he says. “We find them, bring them here. But that's not why they stay."
Boba frowns. "Then why do they stay?"
"Same reason we stayed," Din shrugs. He puts the blaster down, reaches out to take Boba’s hand. Luke moves closer, places one hand over the ka'rta on Boba’s breastplate.
"Because of you," Luke says. "Because you're home."
Boba looks at them, thinks of watching his father leave, and how even though he always returned, there was part of him that was worried he wouldn't. He thinks about the Mandalorians and Jedi and the duality of love and loss, how these two parts of him now sit right here, wrapped around him.
He looks around the room – at Luke’s books stacked up on every available surface, Din’s helmet resting on the pillow of their bed, his fathers old collection of holovids collecting dust on a shelf at the window – at how everything about them is intertwined now, their things, and goals and lives.
"Huh," he says, and feels something settle, anchor down and lock in place. "We really are changed men, aren’t we?"
"That we are," Luke huffs with a small laugh, just as Din squeezes his hand.
And really, that's that.