in blinding dream

by silentwalrus

Summary:

The pair of droids doing the decanting rinse and dry the babies straight out of the tube, making sure the weighing isn’t thrown off by any excess clinging fluid, and the clones are fluffy-headed and freshly clothed by the time the padded droid arms set them down in the pen, but it’s like the little bastards are trying to make up for their new totally dry environment by sliming the absolute shab out of everything they touch.

Notes:

[cocks wordcount] welcome to the jango breeding factory. Sorry to everybody looking for his sopping wet hole or whatever You won’t like it here

Title from castle of glass by linkin park

Chapter 1

Refitting his kom’rk with a wide-range projector is annoying, fiddly and takes up a good couple of hours, but that’s about all it has going in its favor. The Taung II operating system running his armor was designed for the kind of bastardized patches and foreign splices an active mando’ad beroya tends to end up doing, but the projector unit he pried out of some shitty holo interface he picked up at some convenience kiosk at his last refuel stop, the hardware meant for gaming sims. Still, the need is there, and the damn thing does start paying dividends almost immediately, letting him project his workscreens on the ceiling in full definition, haptic interface active up to two feet in front of him, which in turn lets him lie down on his back on the spongy floor. 

This is helpful, since by that point there’s at least half a dozen freshly decanted clones in there with him, another two lowered in every minute, and it’s hard to re-align magnaseals on anything, let alone in bits as small as a kom’rk’s inner workings, when there’s a drooling baby trying to headbutt your ankle into submission.  

So Jango lies down. After a couple minutes, he has to separate one of his displays and have it project some colorful singing blobs video instead, enlarging it to cover the entire left wall of the socialization pen, which at least distracts most of the kids from forming an increasingly untenable pileup around his legs. It doesn’t distract the one currently slobbering on his kom’rk, but it’s not like it’s about to affect beskar. Even in those amounts. The pair of droids doing the decanting rinse and dry the babies straight out of the tube, making sure the weighing isn’t thrown off by any excess clinging fluid, and the clones are fluffy-headed and freshly clothed by the time the padded droid arms set them down in the pen, but it’s like they’re trying to make up for their new totally dry environment by sliming the absolute shab out of everything they touch. 

They’re not exactly quiet, either. Some of them are trying to caterwaul back at the singing blob shit, repetitively annoying in the way of good children’s programming everywhere. Most of them are far more interested in each other, the new physical reality afforded them outside of the suspension fluid of their tubes; Jango distractedly has to stick a foot out to separate a few, when the yelps and burbling growls of toddler tussling start to veer into cries of pain. The machinery of the cloning racks hums underneath it all, the vats smoothly shifting position as each ready tube slides down into place for the bustling droids. 

The babies still inside move with interest, pawing at their glass familiarly to rotate themselves inside their tubes, tracking the movements of the droids and each other. They’ve been aware for weeks, blinking interestedly out at their surroundings, reacting with nothing but curiosity to flash-sims and projected environments and Jango’s buy’ce alike. In the past week, tapping on the glass got them to paw back. 

To qualify for decanting the clones have to develop to roughly the physical age of two standard. So far, this batch is running at a hundred percent viability, though it’s entirely possible the kaminiise weeded out anything less so in the earlier gestational phases, especially for this kind of product-show test batch. Still, one hundred babies, filling up this pen up two by two by two. 

By the end of this first socialization period, Jango is going to have to choose one of them. By the end of the day, one of them is going to get lucky. 

Lucky. Ha. 

His thoughts are getting dangerously close to clarity, so Jango turns up the volume on the blobs and switches his typing language to Galactic Basic. The content of what he’s actually typing is pretty helpful, too. Hey, verde, remember me? Not dead, Manda’s best-laid bets aside, and yes, I’m in your inbox with another famous Fett campaign, so whether you’re a true believer or a thwarted heretic or just a real big fan of cash, listen up… 

The fact that he’s sending these messages in Basic will say plenty, in and of itself. Jango scrolls through, selecting names for those whose information he still has, doing a bit of digging for those he hasn’t. It’s mostly hasn’t. The dead don’t often contact the living. 

Not unless something has gone very, very wrong. 

The absurdity of it, in whole and in part, keeps his mood up and something not unlike mad laughter bubbling just inside his chest. Being surrounded by babies doesn’t hurt either - sometimes it feels like he’s spent the entire past six years high out of his mind, on one substance or another, and this is at least on the less biochemically toxic end of things. That in turn keeps his pheromones mostly stable, which keeps the pen full of exploring clones mostly calm and not dissolving into a hundred-strong chorus of overstimulated hysterical wails. They’re all far too young to smell of anything but drooly baby, but in such a big group, dynamics are becoming apparent nonetheless, most of them crawling over each other and Jango, only a handful more concerned with rearing and biting like a teething strill at anyone that rolls close. 

Those are, of course, the ones most interested in Jango, though mostly they keep getting distracted every time one of their likely-koti vode get too ambitious trying to stand up and accidentally bodyslam them into a new set of priorities. One of them right by Jango’s shoulder does manage to get their fingers stuck in their own hair. They let out a shocked yelp when they try and fail to yank it free from the curls, their scent spiking in distress and their face a little cartoon of betrayal.

Jango reaches over and tugs their fingers free. The baby stares at him. Jango stares back. Somewhat uncertainly, the kid opens their mouth in a clumsy display of their barely-sprouted fangs. 

Definitely yaiha, that one. Jango curls his lips back and shows them his own exponentially bigger fangs. 

Predictably, this makes the kid’s eyes round and immediately reach for Jango’s face. That gets the attention of several others. That means that when the incoming transmission beeps, Jango answers the holo trying to pry multiple sets of baby fingers out of his nose. 

It’s just Cort, anyway. Just Cort, Jango tells himself, like this is just some catch-up call between a couple of good old Concord Dawn childhood friends, but it’s enough to dial back the dizziness and mitigate the sudden spike of pain over his left eye to a dull throb. 

“I’ll spare you su’cuy, you shabla cunt, given the kind of cred the name Jango Fett ’s been racking up outside Mandal’ase,” Cort Davin says as the holo sizzles into shape, the fury and the relief unable to mask each other in his voice, though the former does briefly take over when he spits out the Basic pronunciation of Fett. “Six fucking years, Jango, and then this fucking email? What in Kad’s blood-soaked balls are you doing?” 

His eyes track over the clone currently trying to rip Jango’s ear off, and he shows some teeth, adding, “Getting knocked up can’t have taken up all your time.” 

Jango, expressionless, switches the outgoing call-field to a 360 view of the room. 

Cort stares. “Alright,” he says some moments later. “Okay. Maybe it did. Does.” 

Yeah, Jango fucking wishes. 

“Who the fuck did you even let on you? Let alone enough to…” Cort trails off, faint jealousy dying completely under disbelief as he visibly does the math. “They can’t all be yours.” 

“No?” Jango says idly, detaching another determined little drooler from getting their hands stuck in his hair. Three years breathing silica and spice taught him patience, if nothing else. “News to me.”

Increasingly wary now, recognizing Jango’s tone, Cort says, “Where are you?” 

“At work,” Jango says blandly, sitting up. “Want to join?” 

“Kyr’jettii’la Jango, under contract for the Republic,” Cort says slowly, every word its own disbelief. “Alor. What is this?” 

“Don’t like the pay rate?” Jango says. “Bad news, verd, that’s not even half as high as they’ll go.”

“The Republic. The Jedi. Have hired you. Why would they… blood money, reparations under the table?” Cort’s clearly still got that bad habit of thinking out loud. “For the Jedi Killer?”  

The absurdity Jango’s been working so hard to coast on cracks. “The Republic wanted their empire unthreatened. They got their Dral’han. The Republic wanted Mandalore with no standing military, no centralized government. They got their Duchy. Now they want Mando’ade for an army of their own.” Jango feels his own nostrils flare. “They will get them.” 

Not that he blames Kryze. Not really. Not when she thinks she’s doing what he should have been. A Mand’alor takes oaths, and for all that she was neither confirmed in temple nor elected by the T’sad, she is a trained politician and the speech she’d given at her ascension to the Duchy had echoed them quite thoroughly. It is a right and a duty to serve our people. By any means necessary. On that podium in the cold light of Sundari, the bubble left to them by the Republic among the glassed wastelands, Jango can very well understand Satine Kryze’s position. A puppet regime or another Dral’han. By any means necessary. Fractured and fractious, mando’ade survive. Better to submit than to die.  

But Jango is Mand’alor. No other has since been nominated, let alone elected by the T’sad. He did take the oaths, in temple, under Ka’ra, and he is not released from them, not in grief, not in slavery, not in madness, not in sin. It is his right and his duty to serve his people, by any means necessary, and the Manda does not, has not ever taken half measures. If he is not dead, then to that end he must give his mind and his spirit, his flesh and his blood, his blood, his blood. 

Whatever Cort can see in his face, it has him half-turning away even lightyears apart in holo, neck bared, eyes averted in deference. The tinny music of the children’s show blares its sickly cheerful refrains. 

The clones have all fallen silent. When Jango glances at them, they are all quiet and still, watching him, every single pair of round dark eyes. 

Jango looks away. He folds down his breathing, thinks about the code overhaul he’s been working on to better sync his HUD and his Firespray’s systems, the various early-childhood development studies he’s been reading and cross-referencing with the kaminiise projections of accelerated growth. Gradually, the kids start to fumble around again, grunting and mumbling and getting slime on everything in reach. 

After a few minutes, the fuzzy blue shape of Cort gestures and says, “You’ve got…” 

When Jango wipes under his nose the back of his hand comes away bloody. Not unexpected. Not unusual, these days. He’s probably burst at least one blood vessel in his eye, too. He grins at Cort, full fangs. “Should’ve seen me a month ago,” he says. “Now I don’t even black out.” 

Cort exhales, unsteady, the set of his mouth only growing more disturbed. His eyes flick around the room, at the pen, the walls, the security cameras; Jango left the holo showing him 360. “That bad?” 

“Worse,” Jango promises. “You saw your contract. Feel free to refer,” he adds. “To anyone who doesn’t mind dropping out of the world half a decade.” Anyone who will set to work in this charnel house with him, after all, is either someone who would knowingly follow him into hell, or one he would gladly feed into the meat. 

He lets Cort’s unsettled, determined face hang up, fuzz out. It’s not the only call of this type he’ll be getting, if probably the shortest. Cort has the advantage of being able to read him better than most. He will act accordingly. 

Darth Tyranus, Darth Sidious. Jedi Killer, Mand’alor. These Republic Sith either don’t know a manda’lor must be kar’tigaan’ad to take the oaths or think Jango just isn’t. The Force is hard to sense through beskar. He’s never been without, in front of them. He’s never exactly had all that much to sense, either. 

But he can fucking tell when his brains are being scrambled like nuna whites for fucking breakfast, when the saber that boiled through his family’s bodies is once again singing so, so close, right shabla there on the darth’s hip. Of what Jango has, he was trained to listen to. Do they think it just won’t matter? That there’s nothing he can do, within their plans or outside them, that might force them to care? 

He fucking hopes so. He’s to be a teacher, here. Some lessons, it’ll be a pleasure to spread. 

Jango reaches out, doesn’t look, snags a kid by the back of their sturdy little medical-wrap onesie. “This one,” he says aloud, not particularly bothering to direct it at the security cameras, setting the kid on his hip as he stands up, shuts all his kom’rk projections off, walks out. 

“Boba,” he decides, to the kid now staring up at him with his fist in his mouth, all alone. It is luck, after all, of a kind. 

Chapter 2

Boba, of course, turns out koti. This is a special level of torment all the Manda personally gathered together in congress to bestow upon Jango for his admittedly not-insignificant steepage of sin. 

“Oh, they think have one just like you is a curse, huh?” Jango snarls, hauling 49 and 22 up under each arm and snagging 84 by the ankle as he goes. “Try have one with no fucking brains instead. Climb up,” he orders 22, who obediently twists in his grip and clambers up his body until they’re riding Jango’s left shoulder. Which, thank fuck for beskar’gam, seriously: these little fucks are getting way too heavy for this shit. 

Seventeen, Sixty-Six, 99, Twenty-Six and Two are the only yaiha, which is about right, distribution percentage-wise, for all falling out of Jango’s genome: Arla and both buire were koti through and through. And while it means Boba will probably be a proper Vhett bruiser the second he so much as smells puberty, right now he’s still small enough to get in the shabla vents. 

Given that all of the ventilation ducts in the cloning wings are equipped with lethal gas dispersals complete with security systems against tampering and Boba is about as kar’tigaan as a dead sloth, Jango wants him the fuck out right fucking now, thanks. 

Luckily, the accelerated aging doesn’t have all the Alpha batch growing at the exact same rates.

Seventeen is already waiting as directed by the most likely entry point, kicking his legs idly, sitting on the top of a stack of crates more than tall enough to get one little idiot access into the ceiling panels. “Off,” Jango orders, and endures a couple moments of 22 standing up on his shoulders and balancing there, arms out and giggling, before they backflip off him and land bouncing on their toes. 

84 and 49 Jango holds out in front of him. “Sync,” he orders, and all three koti hold their little kom’rk out towards the datapad in Seventeen’s lap, 84 still dangling peacefully upside down. 

“We’re live,” Seventeen reports as he wedges in his own earpiece, the datapad booping cheerfully in confirmation of linking the three trackers. 

“Good,” Jango says. “Get that little shit out of the ducts. Work together. Seventeen’s op control. Get the fucker out in under ten and it’s one extra treat each.”

22 salutes, bounces and zips up into the vents like a greased eel. Forty-Nine and 84 are hot behind them. Seventeen crosses his legs on his crate and leans back against the wall, half-lidding his eyes as if whatever he’s looking at isn’t on exactly the same plane of reality as the facility map on the datapad in his lap. 

Seventeen is not as kar’tigaan as a dead sloth. 

He’s also not the only one, though 77 is currently sleeping off a bad reaction to the latest round of differentiate vaccines. Seventeen’s just the only one kar’tigaan and yaiha, which Jango well knows is a combination sprung directly from the dankest sweatiest folds of Hod Ha’ran’s unblessed fucking jockstrap. Right now, though, it means that when Seventeen suddenly says, “Left, next branch, 22,” it’s a pretty good bet that Jango’s going to get Boba yanked back out onto floor level in well under the next ten minutes.  

He sighs and holds out an arm. Seventeen gives him a cool look, but deigns to unfold a leg and allow him one skinny foot. Jango withholds a chiding and re-wraps the slipping brace stabilizing the remaining bruises around the kid’s ankle. These hundred the kaminiise call the Alpha batch are a hell of a lot more durable now than they were at decanting, certain zabrak and togruta gene expressions boosted and further proprietary kaminiise edits spliced in for higher muscle density, accelerated cellular regeneration, greater neuroplasticity. The fact that Jango can currently bowl one of these cadets down a three-flight staircase and only get a cackling again, again! , however, doesn’t mean they can’t get hurt, only that they know they can be dumber about it.  

Seventeen, for example, doesn’t go vent climbing, oh no. He tries to go riding aiwha. He makes Boba look like a fucking evaar’la etiquette school valedictorian. He’s kar’tigaan alright. Where the Ka’ra didn’t give Jango more than a vague smack upside the head, they’ve groped Seventeen good and downright fondled 77, and where at least 77 is a shining koti angel with an equally shiny rock where his brain should be, Seventeen is on track to give the dar’jettii a run for their money. He’s Jango’s main problem, insofar as anything can be when he’s not spending all his time swearing at 26 for taking the screws and hinges off anything he can touch and keeping Two and 99 from slitting each others’ throats in their sleep. (These days, Jango’s net search history is mostly yaiha siblings what to do and how to raise yaiha same age together and yaiha twins HELP. He can’t keep relying on 77, who only works as mediator because he cries hysterically whenever Two and 99 visibly fight, and not just because all that does is make the bastards sneakier.) 

At least Seventeen currently defers to Jango’s greater breadth of experience, if in a pointedly mercenary sort of way. Jango is going to start having to arrange training trips offworld soon. He’s going to have to find a proper kar’tigaan trainers for Seventeen and 77 both, and that’ll be its own mess: kar’tigaan’ade in 77’s vein usually just become legendary pilots or snipers or ori’ramikade, but those like Seventeen tend to become either gorane or the kind of strategists that clan heads trade prize-marriages and blood feuds over. There’s pretty much no fucking way Jango will be able to get either to Kamino. 

In theory, the mand’alor is technically goran be te goranase, but in practice the Mand’alor is Jango and maxes out his connection to the Ka’ra by turning his brain into an upside-down inside-out mirror factory and being faster on the draw than anyone else. What he can teach Seventeen and 77 of Ka’ra, he already has, letting them fade in any Force-probing senses into the mass of their vode. What he can teach all of the cadets about the Force will come a little later: they haven’t yet started, truly, on how to properly kill with your hands. Jango is going to have to figure something out for Seventeen and Seven-Seven. 

The educational planning gets interrupted by a laconic, “Objective completed,” from Seventeen, immediately followed by a crash, a clatter and a rapid pitter of running feet rapidly advancing down the halls. The three koti blow back into the storage room, wild-eyed and smeared head to toe in grease and dust, Boba yowling from where he’s slung bodily between 49 and 22. The two cadets expertly flip him upright, plant him pinwheeling on his feet directly in front of Jango and come to a vibrating stop all in a row, amped to the ears from their high speed run through terrain it shouldn’t technically be possible to achieve high speeds in. 

Boba opens his mouth, face already set into petulant resentment, but Jango gives him a single quelling look. Boba wilts. Jango deliberately looks away from him and over the three koti, then nods and signs endex. 

22, 49 and Eighty-Four don’t so much collide with Jango as run directly up him, hollering all the way. “Very good,” Jango praises, raising it in his scent, bracing a couple of intermittently flailing limbs as the three of them scrub their cheeks against his shoulders, his hair, each other. Boba looks away. “You’ve earned your rewards. What do you want?” 

Instantly the three drop off him and skitter off into the corner, whispering together, clustered close and hiding behind their hands. Then, as one, their group unfolds and turns big pleading eyes up to Seventeen. 

Seventeen is unmoved. He’s watching Jango. He jerks his chin up, at the open vent cover. “Take one out,” he tells Jango, half-challenge. “Show me how to kill it.” 

The gas dispersal units. Jango shouldn’t be surprised. Why do you think it’s a bad idea to go fucking around in the ducts was one of their very first mutual lessons, as teacher and students, for them in recon and advance planning and deductive reasoning and for Jango in how because I said so is not a good enough reason for these little nightmares to keep from sticking their psychotic little noses in something. Not that they especially learned all the right lessons, given that what Jango got out of that whole episode was gray hairs and what they got was an obstacle course he has to regularly bribe them off of, but at least they all survived. 

Show me how to kill it is a familiar refrain, too, not just from Seventeen, and not the first about mechanical systems either: their ostensible main opponents are to be droids, after all.  

Instead of at the room’s cameras, Jango pointedly glances at the three koti now crowding the base of Seventeen’s stack of boxes, practically vibrating but knowing better than to mouth off. “That what your squad wants?” That was an early lesson, too: no alor gets anywhere without support. 

Seventeen shrugs one shoulder, lazy. “They know I let them combine favors.” 

Like Jango needs the reminder. He refuses to learn the convoluted math the cadets immediately developed into a mercenary little prison economy. These three probably want Seventeen to teach them how to ride aiwha, and use his favor to get Jango to supervise. 

But Seventeen holds firm, giving Jango a smirk. “26 already karked the cameras.” 

So the rest of them are watching. Jango will give the little nightmares this: they’re great about sharing. 

It’ll be good punishment for Boba, too. He already sulks about not getting Jango’s attention when he thinks it should be all to himself, and while he’s too young to get much out of a systems disarm demo the way the others will it’ll still be good for him to see. 

Jango cracks his neck. “Here’s how to do it without a multitool.”

Notes:

“Kar’tigaan” means “star-touched” and i think i stole it from @PaxDuane or possibly just saw it floating around various fics. Yeah i’m funny

Chapter 3

Tyranus visits regularly, though not, of course, under any kind of routine. It’s to convey most up-to-date information on the army’s future equipment specs, check in on the kaminiise progress, and of course have a brief chat with Jango about how dear little Boba is doing, which always simply inexplicably ends with Jango shivering on the floor of his bathroom, possibly coming down with something, possibly having just eaten something bad. 

Yeah, it’s a shit fucking story Dooku’s selling him. Lucky for Jango, Kamino has its own routines, namely storms that mean hours between atmo breach and landing, which is more than enough time for Jango to sling Boba into Cort’s outraged arms, shout the Alpha cadets into an afternoon of surprise essays and inject just enough spice into his thigh to turn his brain into a lightly broiled krill pudding. 

This time, Dooku visits the day before Boba’s birthday. 

“I hate this,” Cort hisses, jabbing the third of seven detox hypos into Jango’s shoulder. “At this rate you’re going to need to regrow a liver.”

“Got a better way?” Jango slurs. Better Darth Dooku meet Jango Fett the very, very slowly detoxing spice addict going through gradual and expensive cloned-tissue lung regrowth treatments than a man with, say, slightly less of a need for enormous amounts of money. “M’listening.” 

Cort just hisses at him and pushes his head back towards the toilet like they’re nine again, which is an appreciated counterpoint to how the uncontrolled worry in his scent feels like it’s starting to laminate Jango’s sweat to his face. Cort’s far from incapable of managing himself, but at this point it’s as much an involuntary reaction to his closest yaiha being in such consistently shit shape as the spice-tremors wracking through Jango. 

“Bring Boba,” Jango manages after the next round of retching. The emergency detox regimen is starting to do its job, the forward planning capabilities in his brain starting to re-engage thrusters. He gestures drunkenly at the case of hypos. “He should know how to use these.”

Cort hisses further but does as he’s told. He comes back with a wide-eyed Boba and a curious Seven, who must have been the babysitter du jour, and even walks them both through the detox kit before dumping a clingy Boba in Jango’s arms and then towing them all to the Alpha cadets’ floor, where Jango is left on the ground and further surrounded by disgruntled people very ready to wander over just to wrinkle their noses at him. 

Jango lets his head loll back against the cool floor and shuts his eyes. When he continues to not drop dead, Boba loses interest in cringing against him and gets drawn into the strategy hologame a couple of cadets have started somewhere in the vicinity of Jango’s knees, someone’s pointy ankle wedged uncomfortably against his shins, occasionally leaving bruises when they start to flail around to argue or cheer. 

Jango dozes there, on cold floor that won’t bring him thanks from his joints, for far longer than he once might have expected. The chatter and thuds and occasional shrieks of a room full of barely supervised preteens washes around him like the warm, silty water of the vhetta’s canals, cooling him of sticky touch of fever, of late-summer sun. They all smell like and unlike him, just different enough to register as a multitude, just close enough to his own scent not to reach inside him and touch family and trigger the maw of grief. 

Jango loves Boba. Not that he didn’t expect to: it was the whole point, and kids are easy to love. He just hadn’t expected how much it would… help, is probably the word, even if it’s in no one’s best interests for Jango to recover all that much anytime soon. But it is helping. 

He thinks on it as he sleeps it off and rises into the next day, Boba’s birthday. Technically  all the cadets’ birthdays, though right now they’re roughly somewhere between nine and eleven, physically. All born two, more or less, so it makes Boba six. It’s a significant age. 

Jango knows a couple of the trainers have put together a shrine in the most frequented common room, in the corner out of the way; the verde from Manda’yaim proper have just quietly put little portable ones in their quarters, in the way that’s become standard to the devout in Sundari and Keldabe both since the Duchy took over. Technically, it’s any verd’s right to request Jango wake any personal or clan shrine, dedicate any memorial. So far, everyone has known better than to ask, and until now Jango has known better than to offer. 

But he has been getting stronger. Scar tissue, toughening under time. To survive is to change. And if he’s alive, then he cannot give half measures. 

To build a shrine requires an offering: a victory or a sacrifice. To celebrate a birthday requires an adventure. When Boba wakes, trudging into the kitchen and collapsing soggily against Jango’s legs, Jango ruffles his hair. “Want to go hunt a saberjowl?” 

Boba pops back off him, instantly awake, eyes round in delirious bloodlust. “Yeah.” 

Of course, the kid’s six, so Jango helps Boba catch and kill one of the aittha eels for bait, then sends him and Cort up in Cort’s Kom’rk, keeping them on comms as Jango takes a skimmer out onto the water. Saberjowls are usually warded away from Tipoca’s more sensitive systems by automatic electrospike charges, but the outflow and trash from the city’s domes attracts enough wildlife to have an entire microcosm of the planetary ecosystem throughout the seabed pylons, the largest predators orbiting just past the defensive embankments. Saberjowls are big, but their very size is what keeps them from being a difficult target: when you’re the biggest predator in the pool, you don’t get any practice when something smarter than you slips up behind your back. 

A bit of fiddling with a long-range Amban rifle and a high-penetration plasma charge, some creative maneuvering on the skimmer, and Jango’s got a cackling Boba and a dead saberjowl to cable-tow via Cort’s ship back to Tipoca. The carcass is far too big to take in through any of the usual entrances, so Jango takes them to one of the future deployment hangar bays, the one that’s probably going to double as a practice ground for parade formations. 

Now for the hard part. 

Jango entertains Boba’s excited crawling over the carcass and brief foray into sticking his head into its lolling jaws, but the idea that rose with him this morning is more than it was, a need like a push growing between his shoulderblades, a pressure from outside himself that he so rarely feels. Cort figures out what he’s doing pretty quick, once Jango starts taking off his beskar. “Come on, Vhett’ika, help me get the camp-grills, nobody wants to cook dinner in their backplate if they can help it,” Cort tells Boba, and Jango distantly promises not to start butchering the fish until they get back, yes, Boba, you get first cut. 

He finishes stripping his armor, everything off and neatly stacked, a knife and a container of medwrap emptied and set aside to act as a ready bowl. He sits on the floor facing the wall, legs in cross, and breathes. 

He hasn’t opened himself to the Ka’ra in years. Nearly a decade. It hurts, it disorients, and it can be dangerous for kar’tigaan’ade like him, out of temple, alone, as dangerous an exposure as any radiation or cold. There are no lights to guide him. There are no hands to catch him if he falls. 

It also makes the dar’jetti’s touch inside him burn like acid, but right now that’s not unwelcome, in its own way. When you beg to a god, you want it to be genuine. 

So Jango breathes it all in. The Manda, the dozens of trainers in this wing, the thousands of kaminiise scientists and engineers and techs in this building, the hundreds of thousands of little lives growing throughout Tipoca, all in their rows and columns, more sparked every second. Cort, re-entering the room behind him, more and more trainers silently filtering in, bringing their squads; Boba, a bright light hanging back cautiously under Rav’s arm. Jango breathes in the dark until he’s not the only one breathing, until there’s a damp, hot, dragging wind blowing through: until somewhere behind him, something has an open maw, just shy of the back of his neck. 

Jango exhales. He takes the knife and lances the veins at his wrist, lets the blood start to fill the bowl, and begins to pray. 

This sign comes forth easy under his hand, familiar, his body almost guiding itself as he dips three fingers in the blood and draws directly on the cool plast of the wall. It’s the same shape he carved into his own inner thigh that second year on the spice freighter, digging in with his fingernails night after night once he realized he had begun to let himself drift, stopped looking for the exits, for opportunities. Here in the hangar he can’t reach very high, but he just kneels down and continues to pray down and out across the floor, flexing his clean fingers to keep fresh blood flowing into the bowl, his other hand smearing out long, rough strokes of red. Around him, the name of god begins to take form. 

Some of the trainers behind him hiss. Some of them swallow. 

Cort is the one who dares to take a step closer, though still not within reach of Jango. “That’s not the Kad.” 

“It’s not your blood,” Jango replies distantly. It’s not like they all don’t already know this place is cursed. This is just giving it a path to walk down. 

By the time he’s done, the entire room is humid and still, a cave despite the cold, clean hangar lights. He connects the final stroke, sits back and lets Cort and Vhonte gingerly pick their way over the marks to bandage his wrist and clean the blood off his hands. Slowly, the breath of every living thing in the room falls out of sync. 

Jango stirs, retrieving his left kom’rk and clasping it over the bandage. He stands and ignites the flamethrower as a pilot light, the way he usually uses when he needs a makeshift welding torch, and begins to burn new lines into the plast, a different symbol in char overlaying the blood. 

That goes much quicker. It doesn’t obscure the first crest, not even close, but it overlaps, much darker, will be obvious for far longer than the blood that fades and flakes away. 

The black, hot breath shudders once against Jango’s nape: a laugh. And then it’s done. 

Jango turns back to the room slowly, mindful of his balance, but to his vague surprise it’s taken less of a toll than he’d expected. The last time he’d done this was in the main Ha’at compound, and thank fuck for the feast right after, because he’d nodded off half-under the karyai barely two seconds after the first mouthfuls of meat hit his stomach. Maybe it had just been a matter of him being eighteen.  

Everyone in beskar’gam have their helmets off, watching him as carefully as he’s watching his own balance, though the worst of the pressure is slowly easing out of the air. The cadets are all rapt with the same kind of near-uniform interest they give demo introductions to a new kind of blaster.

Not that they have the context for it, but Jango’s fairly sure it’d be the same even if they did. He has little interest in fostering tendencies to fear here. 

He walks out of the symbol, careless of the tackiness under his bare feet. “Dad?” Boba says uncertainly. He’s curious too, but he tends to pick up a lot more from Cort and Rav scentwise just from being younger. “What’s… uh. That?” 

Jango picks him up, setting him on his hip even though he’s far too old for it. “Kad Ha’rangir,” he says, taking them over to the wall and knocking a knuckle against the lines of scorched plast. “The Destroyer. This is their sign. This room can be used as a temple, now,” he adds, realizing he might have to back up a little bit in concept, and turns around again, as much to let Boba inspect the whole of the crest as it is to give his voice to the rest of the room: the cadets don’t know this either. They’ve picked up a few swears and vague concepts just from being around him and the trainers, Jango knows, but no formal theosophic education yet. “This is a dedication. You call on them for war.”

Boba braces on Jango’s shoulder and leans over a bit, examining the blood and char at his feet. “Because you’re making an army?” 

“Yes. Very good.” When Rav and Cort scoop up the rest of his armor and approach him he allows it, setting Boba on his feet again and holding out his arms to be re-dressed. 

Boba, chewing his lip, ducks out of Rav’s way but stays close and casts a wary glance between Jango and the scorched and flaking blood. “Wha’bout the other one?” 

Jango can’t help but smile. Boba might not have the gengineered aptitudes of the others, but he pays attention, learns just as strongly as they do. 

“Hod Ha’ran,” Jango tells him, though he still turns his voice to the room as much as to Boba. “Don’t repeat the name, unless you want their attention. In Galactic Basic, it’s most commonly translated as the Trickster. This is inaccurate.” He shifts his weight to let Rav raise his foot and get a boot back on. “Ha’rangir and Ha’ran often walk together. War begets chaos, and chaos war. So, no need to invoke them, no? Like stray tookas, no matter what you do they’ll turn up.” Jango jostles Boba’s head gently, making him smile a bit. “Besides, anyone would tell you chaos is antithetical to a good army. We practice discipline for a reason, and it, too, is integral to our success. So why invite this?” 

Jango shifts his weight again so Rav can get the other boot, flicks his fingers at the drying blood. “Your trainers have spoken to you of ramikadyc. Yes?” 

“Yes,” the cadets chorus dutifully, Skirata’s bunch slightly out of step with the others. 

“Then you know what you need to fight.” Jango lets his gaze sweeps their ranks, the endless rows of dark, dark eyes. “Ha’ran is the rejection of boundaries. They are not a foundational necessity of ramikadyc, but they incarnate the core of the concept. That which denies and opposes you seeks to impose its will upon you; it is everything that says, you can’t. To reach ramikadyc, to believe you can , is to break the chains on your spirit, and gain the freedom to act beyond any limits. Even that of your own body and mind.” 

None of what he says is untrue. He’s quoting Jaster for over half of it, the rest an aggregate of various scripture from temples they’d visited, either those that had dedications to Ha’ran as an aspect of either Ha’rangir or Arasuum or as an individual god. But anyone who has felt their luck turn in the field, the breath on their neck, knows what a mando’ad’s prayer is, what it means to invoke any god. If the Manda did protection, they would not wear beskar’gam. 

Cort and Rav have finished, stepping away; Jango flexes his arms and rolls his shoulders, lets the skin resettle. “That is what we build here,” he says softly, and this time he meets the trainers’ eyes, much less iterative but no less intent. “We can be handed any weapon, any ship, any armor, and not have it be worth half as much. We can be pitted against any obstacle, and do what it takes to win.”

The tension in the room has shifted, grim unease sharpened into anticipation, the coil of feeling that charges before any hunt. They know what they do here. 

Jango nods back at the saberjowl’s body, releasing the threads of attention he has gathered and held. “This is part of it, to wake a shrine. The skull, for Kad. And the meat, for us.” 

-

“I forgot you can be good at this,” Cort mutters under his breath as he helps Jango carve, fixing 14’s grip on their vibroblade before they bounce it off the tougher-than-it-looks saberjowl hide and snapping his fingers at 86 and 50 to quit them trying to stick bloody fingers in each others’ ears. He’s pretty obviously not talking about the butchery. 

“For my sins,” Jango grunts, which makes Cort’s mouth pull briefly, so Jango flicks blood off his blade in a way that deliberately spatters Cort’s face. 

“Shab,” Cort swears, recoiling, then hurls his own machete aside and tackles Jango. 

It’s just like before, throwing each other down on blood-slick floors, hissing at each other and Rav’s catcalling, and they score points on each other until they’re both throwing aside armor, pieces clanging down every time somebody gets a pin or hold, cadets yelping and cheering as they watch and start their own spars. Cort finally gets too nervy about Jango’s rattling lungs and hesitates just a little too long, some koti instinct kneecapping him at just the wrong moment, and Jango crashes him down in a full pin, fangs to the back of Cort’s neck. 

Cort struggles, at least, so Jango briefly closes the bite, not bothering enough to break skin. “That’s what you get for going easy.” 

Cort groans, half laugh, half frustration. “You little shab-mouth sleen. Don’t tease.” 

Jango grins, mean, feeling if not sixteen again then at least some glancing echo of that ease. “I only make threats, not promises,” he reminds Cort, which makes the man thunk his forehead against the sticky floor and groan in full annoyance. 

Jango rolls off him still grinning, accepting Boba’s smug keldabe for the victory and Rav’s longsuffering collection of all his flung-aside clothes and armor, though he doesn’t bother this time with putting it back on. Dressing and cooking an entire saberjowl takes every hand and then some, cadets sent running and fetching to raid the cafeterias and personal spice stashes, putting their recent lessons in field cooking and campcraft to use in ripping off scales and prying the spidery bones out of the thick, dense meat. The hanger could more than handle any smoke, but there’s not enough appropriate combustibles to make real fires, so they rig up enough various cookplates and portable burners to make the meal. 

The food is rough and good, the alcohol sparse but strong. The cadets have their own datapads and training knives these days, which inevitably starts up multiple games of jahaat’la and cubikad, the rules growing increasingly bastardized due to what’s probably a genomically endemic tendency to cheat. Vau and a couple of the others have brought tattoo guns out, and Jango sends T’sida for her full kit, knowing she’ll have party inks, and lets the cadets loose first on the supply of glowing colors and then each other. 

Under normal circumstances, this is when things would turn a bit more relaxed, the singing and games turning to gossiping and more social activity, but even with a few of the trainers’ ships parked in this hangar there aren’t exactly any comfortable places in range to shuffle over and fuck. But Jango is - Jango. 

Jango has exceptional pheromonal control: he’d had to get very good, very fast upon becoming Mand’alor, and upon being sold he’d had to get even better even faster. He knows how to keep koti in line, how to ally and bond and divorce, how to not provoke other yaiha - not unless he wants to. He’s only refined it further, these past couple of years - those very first months, Boba was painfully sensitive to both Jango’s moods and his own, not having had the pre- and post-birth bonding stages of a born infant, and now with a bunch of adolescent yaiha around he doesn’t even have an instinctual reaction anymore to getting whacked in the face with their misplaced spurts of territorialism. 

Some things, however, are beyond control. He knows how he smells, especially after the spice and meds drag through him: sick, damaged, bereaved. So while he could, theoretically, do his job, suffuse the room with the pheromones that make the kids sleepy and the adults loose, everyone here would know it to be the work of a paid professional, no different from a brothel stud on the clock. The yaiha make the yaim, and it’s pretty fucking clear to anyone with half a pheromone receptor that the only kind of home Jango is making is the kind with half a burning starship on the front lawn and rotting corpses strewn halfway through the karyai.

It doesn’t make Jango feel… good. The kids aren’t as affected by it, because they’ve never known him otherwise, and the older verde aren’t as affected by it, will sit with him in it sometimes, no strangers to loss themselves. But Saba, Rav, Vhonte. Mar’e and Teuro, who probably would’ve been the first wed to him if Jaster had survived; Jari’la, who left her clan to be the frontrunner after Jaster didn’t. Cort, who at age nine had done his best to befriend a freshly orphaned and even more freshly adopted by the Mand’alor eight-year-old Jango, which must have been about as rewarding as sticking your dick in a rabid strill’s mouth and telling it to chew. 

They’re all here. They’re not dead. 

Jango picks himself up and finds Cort again, stripping his undershirt off as he goes. He throws it in Cort’s lap. “Hey. Redo my kyr’bes.” 

He ends up straddling a couple of crates and someone’s folded-over ship blankets, cheek on his crossed forearms, Cort behind him with the tattoo gun and medkit. “Kad’s cock in a sock, you can’t make anything easy for me,” Cort complains when he gets a clear look at the scarring fucking up the ink on Jango’s back. “What’d you do on that freighter, promise every guard a blowie if only they’d throw in an extra kiss with the electrowhip?” 

Jango stretches, getting comfortable. “Not up for it?” he says blandly. “I can always ask someone else.” 

“You are the reason for all those yaiha stereotypes, you absolute cunt,” Cort swears, but gets to swabbing over his scars with the disinfectant. 

Jango closes his eyes, starting to drift the moment the needles sink into his back. Cort’s no artist, but the kyr’bes is simple blackwork, already laid out for him, and he’s got a good sense for how to set the rhythm, long, steady strokes warming Jango’s skin, unspooling his thoughts. It’s good, steady pain, better than sex, nothing like spice. His body responds accordingly, calling, and he can tell it’s working when the various music playing begins to turn down, the laughter and chatter becoming something more languid than bright. He can feel it when Vhonte settles nearby with Saba, beads clinking as they start unbraiding hair, when several others do find space to start touching under each others’ armor, when Cort’s breathing behind him becomes deeper, slower, not forced to Jango’s beat this time but finding a more meditative rhythm of its own. 

Jango opens his eyes again when Boba tumbles up against him, sauce smeared at the corners of his mouth and a neon yellow scrawl of a tattoo pulsing in time to his heartbeat on his cheek. “Sixes got dice stuck up his nose and Rav held him upside down to shake it out,” he reports breathlessly. “An’ Skirata’s shab’ikas’e got all their knives stuck in the ceiling -“

“You can’t call them shab’ikas’e. You’re six,” Jango tells him, groping one arm out vaguely backwards until Rav hands him one of the medical wipes from Cort’s kit, scrubbing it against Boba’s mouth. “They’re bigger than you.” 

“Mpphhfftthhhhey’re always gonna be bigger than me,” Boba complains, though he grips Jango’s wrist with both endemically sticky hands and keeps it still to scrub his own face clean against the wipe Jango’s holding. Good kid. Now if only he’d remember to do his hands. “S’why I gotta be snea - I mean, smarter,” he catches himself, flashing a near-reflexive look of well-crafted innocence. “And work soooooo so super hard.” 

“That’s right.” Jango finds his grin going softer, a little-felt pull in his cheeks. “Good day?”

Boba grins so wide it shows off his current two missing teeth, one modest little koti fang coming in crooked. “Best day. And even better, every next year. Right?”

“Right.” Jango strokes Boba’s hair back; it’s not the lightest color nor loosest curl phenotype expressed so far in the clones, but it’s up there, fluffy and easily tangled. Jango will have to insist on either a haircut or braids soon. “You’ve been Boba for a while now,” he adds. “Want to change your name?” 

Boba’s taken aback, eyes flickering back open to give him an uncertain glance, then back over his shoulder, at all the other cadets. “Uh… Do I have to?” 

“No,” Jango assures him. Boba’s as good a name as any, after all. He’s pretty sure one of the other kids has started calling themselves Truck. “A shrine dedication is just a good time for a change, that’s all.” 

“Oh. Like new tattoos?” Boba briefly admires the glowing dots and spirals on his own forearms, then frowns a bit, stretching up to examine Jango’s back. “Yours is just the old one over again, though.” 

It’s Jaster’s symbol. The only thing Jango’s ever remotely felt drawn to keeping on his body, through all the various party tattoos and experimental fooling he’d tried like any other mando teenager. The only thing he can really imagine keeping, biting duty and bittersweet memorial both. But Boba has a point. Things have changed. Jango can’t, shouldn’t only be carrying what he was before. 

Jango beckons him along his body, back towards Cort. “You’re right,” he says aloud. “What should I add?” 

Boba’s eyes, impossibly, shine even brighter. 

-

Right, Jango thinks several hours later, back freshly slathered in medgel. Sentiment and symbolism are all well and good, but asking a six year old to program that nav for you is how you end up with Jaster Mereel’s Ha’at Mando’ade kyr’bes sharing space with a cartoon mythosaur in beskargam firing a flamethrower and holding the darksaber. 

Notes:

Jango, meth crusted under one nostril, lifting his head out of the dumpster he blacked out in: oh shit im the POPE pope

Notes:

Yeah i made up my own words for alpha omega from butchering nouns or maybe adjectives on mandoa dot org