The Lines We Draw

by ShaeTiann

Platonic soulmates AU: Like many people across the galaxy, Boba and Han are chosen by the Force to balance and compliment each other, but the Clone Wars and the rise of the Empire keep them apart. When their worlds finally collide, what choices will they make?

6. Chapter 6

Durga the Hutt was in an absolutely foul mood, which meant his throne room was empty and utterly silent. Boba followed the majordomo down the long, stained red carpet, refusing to stare around at the artwork on the walls. Durga liked displaying his wealth by buying up famous art pieces - an easy task since the rise of the Empire, which had seen the closure and subsequent looting of museums across the galaxy. There were at least two authentic Parmieers and a Hati'chanu hanging somewhere in the room, while a hand-woven pre-Reformation tapestry graced the wall behind the dais.

The Hutt sat in his gaudy repulsor chair more like how a humanoid might, rather than lounging. [[Ahh, Solish,]] he rumbled. [[I know your retainer contract is nearly up, but a problem has arisen.]]

Boba waved off the majordomo when they tried to translate. "You know I don't accept work without knowing what the job is first."

The Hutt huffed. [[One of my haulers panicked at the sight of an Imperial patrol and jettisoned a large shipment of slaves into space. He has made his apologies, and even made a full repayment, but the damage he caused to my business relations is unsalvageable.]]

Boba really hated working for Hutts. Durga was a Black Sun Vigo, which made him worse than most, and the best that could be said about him was that he wasn't the hedonist that Jabba had been. That said, he still dealt in the worst the galaxy had to offer - slaves, spice, and tomb-robbing. Boba had a lot of sympathy for the people who ended up on a Hutt's bad side - which was far too easy to do by accident.

"And what do you expect me to do about it? Make him apologise to your business partner? Bring him in? Kill him?"

Durga grumbled. [[This captain cost me a lucrative ongoing deal with the Malastaran Magistrate a year ago-]]

Boba felt his eyebrows hit his hairline. The Magistrate kept a 'hunting preserve' on one of Malastare's moons, and hunted slaves there for sport. He'd wondered where the man got his targets from; question answered.

[[-and death will not teach him his lesson. Bring him in alive, preferably intact.]] The Hutt smiled horribly. [[I will use him as a reminder to anyone else who thinks to get creative with their contracts. His name is Han Solo; he flies a modified YT-1300 freighter, which will make a suitable addition to my gallery. If you must kill his crew, it would be an acceptable loss. I doubt even you could bring in a pair of live Wookiees.]]

Boba really, really hated working for Hutts. "Getting the ship will cost you double."

He didn't mention that the retainer contract - good until the end of the next month - would likely run out before he found Solo. Targets who had their own ships were much more difficult to track down, for obvious reasons. There was zero doubt Durga was well aware of this - Hutts never forgot contract details or lack thereof - and was probably counting on the chase to keep Boba in his employ past the end of the retainer. So Boba would do all the legwork, make very careful notes, and if he hadn't found this Solo guy by the end of the retainer, he'd have a pile of intel to hand off to someone else.

The Hutt's eyes narrowed. [[Done.]]

"One smuggler, preferably alive, and one ship, preferably intact." Boba agreed. He turned and left before Duga could push the issue further.

YT-1300s weren't rare, but the line was old enough to be considered vintage. They had been CEC's first attempt at a modern, updated version of their classic XS light freighters - a line which had been successful enough to last for half a millennium during the last war with the Sith Empire - and the deal to make one the centerpiece craft in the Space Raiders holoseries had been fantastic advertising, boosting sales across the galaxy into the Republic's waning years. But as so often happened with the first of a new line, the ships aged poorly. The ones that remained in active service now were there only through the sheer skill of their pilots and mechanics. Not hard to find, but the owners were notoriously reluctant to part with ships they'd had to pour so much of their energy into maintaining.

Boba could ask Vykk; his soulmate had almost obsessively tracked most of the known available YT-1300s and their sales in his search for his baby. A fond smile crossed Boba's face under his helmet. Dork, indeed. But he preferred to keep a strict barrier between his profession and his personal life. Vykk might suspect what Boba did for a living, but Boba had never told him outright, and he preferred to keep it that way.

The last thing he wanted was for their lives to collide violently.

It wasn't the first time that Boba's best possible source was also as close as family and thus not a source he would involve in his business. He closed the Legacy's boarding ramp and hauled himself up to the rotating cockpit. He had other people to turn to; a few in-person calls and a couple thousand credits would get him what he needed.

---

Solo proved to be as elusive as Boba had predicted. He managed to dig up the captain's Haulers' Guild license, which looked real enough but bore all the hallmarks of skipping the review process. Ninx and Zend readily admitted that Solo had acquired it from them, but also said they hadn't seen or heard from him since shortly before the Empire had blown up Alderaan.

"Think he was there when it happened?"

Zend scoffed. "We wouldn't be so lucky. You got any more questions for us, Mister Solish, or can we get back to work?"

Boba considered it for a moment. "No more questions. But if you happen to hear from or see Captain Solo, there's a thousand credits in it for you to let me know."

Zend smirked and accepted the slip of flimsi with his comm code and a thousand-credit chip to buy her silence. "We'll see."

Solo hadn't been an Alderaanian casualty; Boba was sure of it because Solo had paid his debt to Durga via droid (with the added touch of a now-priceless Alderaanian vase) a couple weeks later. It was unlikely that Solo would have known the Empire would destroy the planet; buying an expensive but ultimately useless souvenir on the way offworld wasn't characteristic of the profile Boba had constructed. Even a Jedi wouldn't have predicted things that well.

It did occur to Boba that maybe Solo was a Force user, but the visual records of the man suggested he was too young to have been trained by the Order, or at least not trained well. 'Solo' was an old-world Corellian family name with a frequency of 0.0000056 percent in the human/near-human population; it was held by nearly six million people across the galaxy - barely a drop in the galactic ocean of multiple trillions, but an impossible quantity to accurately search.

So, Solo was alive, had acquired an Alderaanian vase from someone generous to appease the Hutt, and dropped off the map. Smart guy, really. Anyone working for the Hutts knew better than to think a slug would ever let bygones be bygones.

He waited until he was back in space and well away from Hutt comms relays before punching in a particular comm code.

The man on the other end looked bored. "Solish. To what do we owe the displeasure?"

He liked to think he was so clever. Boba tilted his head."Karrde. Need information on a smuggler."

"Oh you do, do you?" Karrde inspected his nails idly. "What makes you think I know any smugglers?"

It was gonna be one of those days. "Your usual fee plus fifteen percent says you know everyone."

The man grinned and leaned forward. "Now we're talking. I need some details, though. There's a lot of smugglers out there, if you haven't noticed."

"Name's Han Solo, probably Corellian, flies a modified YT-1300 named the Millennium Falcon, travels with a pair of Wookiees. Known associates: Salla Zend, Shug Ninx, Lando Calrissian-"

"Calrissian would happily sell Solo to you for a bag of crisps," Karrde said with a laugh. "Nothing like an ex who stole your favourite toy to get someone mad."

It sounded like there was a story there, but Boba knew full well that every word he got out of Karrde would cost, and gossip cost extra. "Got info on where I can reach Calrissian? Comm or in person, doesn't matter."

Within a few minutes, Boba was one comm code richer and twenty-five hundred credits poorer. It was a good thing Durga's retainer fees covered business costs. Calrissian was some up and coming businessman these days, to the extent that he'd even hired a live person to answer his calls for him.

"Baron Administrator Calrissian isn't available at this time. If you'll leave your contact information, he'll return your call at the earliest convenience."

Translation: they'll lose it in the compactor and Boba would never hear back. He put on his most civil tone and said, "I'm afraid I don't have the time to wait. Can you please let him know that Solish is calling about a past associate named Solo?"

The secretary let out an aggrieved sigh. "Hold one moment please."

Within thirty seconds, someone else was picking up the comm line. "This is Calrissian. Whatever that double-crossing swindler did this time, I had nothing to do with it."

"Relax, Administrator," Boba said, keeping his tone even and his words just a little slow. "You're not being held accountable for his actions. I've been hired to locate him, and it will help if you have any information to offer, or if I can cross you off the list of potential contacts he might use."

"He's not getting anything more out of me, that's for sure! I used to have a comm code for him but he changed it in the last year. The last message I sent got bounced back from a dead code."

"What kind of message?" Boba asked absently, making a note in the file on his datapad.

The other man scoffed. "Reminding him that he'd better be taking good care of my ship!"

History, indeed. "When's the last time you saw him?"

"Three years ago, the Cloud City Sabacc Tournament on Bespin. He won my ship off me, and if you happen to find him, I'll pay you to tell me where the Falcon is."

Something about that rang a faint bell in Boba's memory but he set it aside. Selling the information would put Calrissian in direct competition with Durga for retrieving it, but the risks others took was also none of Boba's business. "Yeah? What's that information worth to you?"

"Fifteen hundred," Calrissian said without hesitation.

"Twenty-five."

"Twenty, plus free repairs and fuel if you ever happen to be near Bespin. I'm managing the Cloud City mining colony these days."

Under his helmet, Boba smirked. "Done. I'll keep you apprised. Pleasure doing business with you, Administrator."

---

Boba's retainer with Durga did run out well before he was able to pin Solo down. For all the leads he'd dug up, Solo seemed to have made friends with some people with the kind of connections needed to operate under the scanners. That meant he'd either found a rich patron… or the smuggler had fallen in with the Rebellion. The only reason Boba wasn't willing to rule a patron out was that political causes weren't really Solo's MO. The man had a five-year history of refusing to get involved directly with big organisations of any sort.

Durga was extremely displeased when Boba pressed the issue of his retainer. As long as Boba was on the Hutt's payroll, he couldn't take contracts from anyone else, including the Guild. He was sick of doing a crime lord's dirty work. At least the Guild's targets tended to be people who had actually done something wrong. Boba handed over a copy of his file on Solo - minus details about deals he'd made in the process - to Durga's chief enforcer, and walked out without rising to the Hutt's bait.

"Free at last," he wrote on his arm.

Vykk responded immediately, "Finally got away from your trash boss?"

"Contract finally ran out. That was two years too many."

"Well," Vykk wrote, "it sounded like an okay deal at the time. Did you get the connections you were after?"

If Boba had seen a better way to get access to Black Sun's upper echelons - a connection very few Guild hunters could claim, and which put him in good stead to take some of the higher-paid bounties - he would never have offered two years of his life to Durga. "Yeah," he wrote, sighing. "I just fucking hate Hutts. They're not all bad, but if you piss one off, you make an enemy out of an entire clan for life, and Hutts live forever."

"Isn't that how it works with Mandos too?" Vykk asked, and followed it up with a cartoon of a winking smirk. Boba had always wondered who Vykk had worked with who might have identified Boba as a Mandalorian. It didn't matter enough for him to risk asking - to risk breaking their unspoken agreement to keep their work and personal lives separate. But the idea that maybe Vykk had met one of Boba's myriad brothers teased him.

"Nah, a Mando will hunt you down in person and end it quick. Hutts will make you pay with every drop of blood left in your hide, and then start on your hide."

If Solo was smart, he'd find a hole to crawl into and pull it in after him. But a smuggler who would space a bunch of Hutt slaves to save his own skin was unlikely to be that quick on the uptake.

"Wonderful, thanks for helping me sleep tonight."

Boba shook himself and cleared his arm. "Sorry. Grim thoughts. How are things with that girl you met?" He had next to no interest in romantic entanglements, but Vykk seemed to fall into and out of them with all the regularity and cheerful abandon of his namesake. It was amusing and exasperating by turns.

"Either she's gonna kill me or she's beginning to like me. It's hard to tell yet."

"The old Vykk charm not doing the job this time?"

"It's doing something. Just not sure if it's backfired on me."

Boba didn't have many friends beyond the covert. It was nice to have someone to gossip with about nonsense. It had got easier once Vykk had left the Navy but remained on spacer time, like having a sibling just a comm call away. Despite their mutual mobility now, they had never been able to arrange a time and place to meet. Vykk had his jobs, Boba had his contracts; and Boba had wanted to keep Vykk as far from Durga's business as possible.

And now Vykk was working with some resistance group somewhere. Boba knew he'd helped blow up the Death Star in the Yavin system and been taken in by the people he'd helped. That was for the best: if the Empire ever found out Vykk had been involved in that, he'd never be able to land on a civilised world again. But it made the possibility of meeting each other anytime in the near future incredibly slim and dangerous. They'd never even discussed it.

Maybe that was for the best.

---

Boba generally saw the Empire as being more of an obstruction than a business opportunity. Imperial officers looked down on everyone, including the hunters they occasionally hired as pawns in their political rivalries. So when the Guild representative commed Boba with a particularly difficult offer from an Imperial, Boba's first answer was, "No."

"Listen, I get it, nobody likes the Empire. But this one asked for you, specifically, and we literally can't afford to turn it down."

Boba's hand paused just shy of hitting the End Call button. He'd built up Solish's reputation carefully as a person who could find the unfindable and occasionally solve the unsolvable. Jango had taught him well, after all. "What do you mean, 'can't afford' it?"

The Guild rep's proboscis wrinkled in the Rodian equivalent of a grimace. "It's from Lord Vader himself. You know what happens to people who refuse him."

Vader was a particular type of Imperial asshole, the sort who wouldn't hesitate to waste Inquisitors against the Hunters' Guild. Boba scowled. "The fuck does he want?"

"Wants you to find out who blew up the Death Star over Yavin last year."

Resisting the urge to take his buy'ce off and rub his temples, Biba sighed. Vykk had been there. Vykk would know. There was no way he was ever asking his soulmate to give up a potential friend. "He just wants the name?"

"Just the name." The Guild rep snorted. "Bet he thinks it's a Jedi who escaped the purges."

"Sounds likely," Boba agreed hollowly. He knew too many survivors, hidden safely among Mandalorian coverts.

"Anyway, when you have a name, he wants you to keep it secret and report only in person."

That didn't sound like a Sith Lord on the hunt; it sounded like a Sith Lord trying to keep secrets from the Emperor.

The rumours regarding the Death Star's destruction were wildly varied, which smacked of an information-control operation from Rebellion agents: trace the spread of a leak based on which bits of misinformation were carried forward. Boba spent weeks haunting spacer cantinas, listening to hearsay, trying to parse the constants. All the rumours agreed that the pilot who'd fired the final shot had done it using a single snubfighter with a torpedo, exploiting a tiny weakness in the battle station's defenses.

It wasn't Vykk. The confirmation brought a surge of relief. Vykk had opted to join the fight with his freighter; he'd written back to Boba after the fight, begging, please don't kill me, but I did something stupid. He'd flown backup, shot a couple of TIEs, but that was it.

It wasn't until he was propping up the bar in Lo-Min's on Nad Shaddaa that Boba got a lead.

"What's the word?"

Faje, the scruffy human bartender, arched a brow at Boba until he tossed a credit chip over. "You want the scuttlebutt, or something specific?"

"Gimme the scuttlebutt."

"Ever hear of The Skywalker? It's a thing from Tatooine," he said, when Boba tilted his head. "They freed a ton of slaves there before Jabba's people caught them. They were executed, and the next night something tore through Jabba's operation like a hurricane. Now the Hutts can't put roots on the planet. Locals chase 'em off and even the Sand People go after 'em. Anyway, the name cropped up again a few months ago and a bunch of the minor Hutts are stockpiling in case The Skywalker is coming for them next."

"If it's a Tatooine thing, why are the Hutts here scared?"

Faje gave him a dark grin. "Cus they heard it was The Skywalker who took out the Death Star. Right after the Death Star takes out Alderaan, The Skywalker destroys it so it can't hurt anyone else. Coincidence?"

Boba scoffed. "Sounds like one to me. Hutts jumping at shadows."

Rolling his eyes, Faje folded his arms. "I heard it from a spacer, not a Hutt. If you don't like the message, don't blame the messenger."

"Because a spacer is such a reliable source," Boba said.

"Solo might be full of himself, but he's not the type to tell tales. And he tips well."

Point taken. Boba tossed Faje another hundred before leaving, tucking away the fact that his previous target was the rumour source for later consideration.

Later, in his bunk, Boba grabbed a pen and wrote, "Ever get the feeling like your life and someone else's keep revolving around each other but never really connecting?"

"Yeah," Vykk replied. "This old geezer I know says it's some Force mumbo jumbo."

Boba laughed. "Sounds like something Kenobi would say."

Vykk was silent for a minute. "You know Kenobi?"

He hadn't been expecting that reaction. "Yeah. He helped me out long time ago. After my dad died. I haven't told anyone else about that. YOU know him?"

"He hired me for a job a while back. For what it's worth, I'm sorry about your dad."

"It was over 20 years ago. If you see the old man again"

Boba paused. Kenobi wouldn't recognise his name as Sentra. But… Vykk wasn't part of the tribe. And things were getting dicey with the Empire, according to the goran; they might have to get even more restrictive about security.

He bit his lip, torn in a way that ached in his heart. Vykk was his vod, as much as any aruetii could be. Nobody knew who Boba Fett was, except Kenobi and what few of Boba's siblings remained. And Vykk had already trusted Boba with some dangerous information: the Empire would go absolutely rabid if they found out one of the former Jedi High Councilors was still alive.

"Tell him Boba said thank you."

"Boba?" Vykk responded after a long silence. "That short for anything?"

"Maybe."

"Well, maybe I'll tell him."

Boba settled back against the wall, his heart beating a little too fast. He hadn't told anyone outside the covert his name since joining them. It wasn't that he believed in their particular conservative line of thought, but they had a point about security and protecting themselves. More than one Mandalorian outpost had been destroyed in the last two decades by Imperial agents stealing beskar'gam and sneaking in to identify everyone's faces unmasked. It was no longer considered safe to remove one's buy'ce even within the covert now.

But Vykk wasn't an Imperial agent. There was no way he could be. And Boba had been using 'Sol'yc' - Mando'a for both 'first' and also 'solitary' - as a name since he'd started hunting. Giving his name out after so long was… terrifying. But also a relief, in a way. It was nice to be known by someone he trusted.

It took Boba a bit of groundwork to get a confirmation that the pilot who had allegedly fired the shot (one single shot; he kind of wanted to meet the person and ask them how they managed that) that destroyed the Death Star was a male-identified human teenager from Tatooine named Luke Skywalker. A bit more searching turned up the name Anakin Skywalker - oh, he remembered that Anakin alright, Kenobi's personal headache - also connected with Tatooine and an implausible Boonta Eve podrace win when he'd been nine before disappearing for a decade and reappearing as a Jedi General. Odds were good they were related, and if one crazy Skywalker pilot had whatever it was the Jedi wanted, the other probably did too. No wonder Vader was after him.

He wasn't certain what to expect from Darth Vader. Most Imperial higher-ups posed behind a big glossy desk to look important; Vader, it seemed, preferred to silhouette himself in front of the big dramatic windows Imperial designers loved so much. He didn't even turn around when Boba entered.

"Well, bounty hunter?" a deep, measured voice asked. "Do you have anything to report?"

Boba tilted his head, trying to place the taller man's accent. "I got a name for you. Skywalker. From Tatooine."

Vader didn't move, but the temperature in the room plunged, enough so that the chill translated through the plates of his beskar'gam. "Your payment will be forwarded to your account. Leave."

Rude shabuir. Boba turned his back deliberately and returned to the Legacy.

---

"I swear I will never again complain about how cold space travel is."

Boba snickered at the words that appeared on his arm. Wherever Vykk had been hiding out for the last while, it was a barren, icy rock, and he was hating it. His soulmate had stayed with his Alliance friends - Boba had actually squealed a little with joy the first time Vykk had referred to them as such. The man needed more stability in his life, and more people who wouldn't exchange him for a chunk of credits.

It was probably for the best, too: Vykk had admitted there was a bounty on his head from that one job a few years back, and he'd had a shootout with a hunter on Ord Mantell not too long before going into hiding on Planet Ice Hell. Idly, Boba wondered who had drawn the short straw to track down someone like Vykk. It definitely hadn't been himself; Boba had been on the other side of the galaxy dealing with a child abduction on Christophsis when that happened.

Grinning, he wrote back, "Still no luck with that lady, huh?"

"Cmon Sentra, I don't want her because it'll make the bunk warmer. I want her cus she's the smartest person on this rock and not afraid to say exactly what she thinks."

That was dubious, considering she hadn't shot him in the last three years. Either she had the patience of a Jedi Master, or she actually liked him and hated herself for it. But teasing Vykk was still a lot of fun.

Three weeks later, Boba got an incredibly unwelcome summons from the Guild. Usually he looked forward to work, but when the work took him to an Imperial Super Star Destroyer to stand in competition with a number of other hunters whom he had to pretend he wasn't friends with, it was unpleasant. Vader was there again, stalking around like a living shadow. There was something impatient about the way he leaned forward, almost eager.

Vader wanted Han Solo. He had the Millennium Falcon' s last known trajectory - into an asteroid field, what the kriff - and the extrapolation that its main hyperdrive was nonfunctional. That had been eight days ago, when the Imps had rooted out Rebellion bunker on Hoth.

Zuckuss would be going into the death trap to try to smoke the smuggler out; if there was one person who could navigate it, it would be the Gand Findsman. Boba exchanged a glance with Dengar; they were both more than happy to sit back and trace where Solo ran to after Zuckuss spooked him from hiding. Boba pulled up the map in his buy'ce' s HUD, setting the onboard computer to extrapolating where a souped-up light freighter could go with a busted hyperdrive.

"-No disintegrations!"

There was a black-clad finger in Boba's face, and he rolled his eyes. That had been one time and it wasn't even his fault the target hadn't left more than a few atoms behind. "As you wish." This was boring; they could have done this over holo, but Tall Dark and Dramatic had to throw his weight around to make a point.

Bossk was about ready to make himself an Imperial sandwich; Boba's sensors were picking up a subsonic hunting growl as the Trandoshan eyed two of the bridge staff who'd been making rude comments about them.

He cleared his throat. "No offense, Your Lordship, but we're wasting time. Are we done here?"

Vader stared at him, impassive behind his mask. A bridge officer wearing Admiral's bars was watching Vader and visibly controlling an amused smile.

"You may go. But do not interrupt me again."

Boba just stared back at him in response, expressionless mask versus expressionless mask. It was impossible to lose a staring contest when nobody could see you blink. Vader turned away first, leaving the bridge through a door that probably led to an office or something.

Beside him, Dengar breathed out quietly. "You're one lucky sonuvabitch, Solish."

Boba scoffed as they were escorted back to the hangar bay. "Imps are all the same, doesn't matter what rank they have. The good ones either get out or get sent into situations that'll kill them."

By the time he was back onboard the Legacy, Boba's onboard computer had assembled a short list of systems that would be reachable within the given time frame on an emergency hyperdrive, plus a few more that were within a month's travel. Closest to Hoth were Anoat (nothing but floating ice rocks and Imperials) and Ison (nothing but a faded dwarf star). A bit further out was Mataou, which had Hutt ruins and farmers; Zhanox, a mining planet populated almost solely by Ugnaughts, where a ship crewed by a human and Wookiees would generate a lot of interest; and Ione had a massive Imperial presence right now. Going further out was Anatapar, but it was such a new planet that the ecosystem was primarily bacteria, and nobody had set up so much as an outpost station for fear of disrupting its development.

And then there was Bespin. It was within two months' travel on a crapass drive, well-settled enough that they could get repairs without too much hassle. A quick check of the planet's records confirmed that Calrissian was still running Cloud City - and rather successfully, too. Was Solo really stupid enough to ask his angry ex for help?

There really was only one way to find out.

---

If Calrissian was unhappy to see him, he didn't show it. "Solish. What brings you here?"

"Hunting a target. Heard from Solo lately?"

The handsome man scowled. "No. But I'm guessing you think he will be."

Boba shrugged. "It's a strong possibility, given the situation."

"Oh yeah?"

If Solo did show up here and Calrissian already knew what was wrong with the ship, it might give things away too soon and spook the smuggler back into hiding - or doing something desperate. Sometimes that was a valid tactic, but right now it would be less than ideal. And Calrissian had enough of a history for messing with Imperials that he probably wouldn't react well to hearing about Vader's interest. "I don't want to say anything just yet, if you don't mind, but if there's a place I can base my ship from, so I can keep an eye on the local traffic-"

Calrissian turned to nod to the cyborg aide at his shoulder. "Yeah, I'll give you access to one of the executive platforms. The security there's a little better."

Boba took shameless advantage of the Baron Administrator's reduced rates while he was waiting to see if Solo would turn up. His comms were lively as Zuckuss spotted the Millennium Falcon fleeing an asteroid crater tenanted by an enormous space worm (the Findsman took holos; Boba couldn't believe how huge the thing had been). But then the ship dove straight into the Imperial formation, likely using the much larger masses and electromagnetic signatures of the Star Destroyers to conceal itself, and everyone lost track of it. It was a classic maneuver, so old it had been used more than once in adventure holoserials, and Boba sighed. Solo doing more research than everyone else among the fleet was exasperating.

"Have you told people to do a visual scan?"

Over the comm, Dengar wheezed a laugh. "You try convincing the Imps to let a bunch of hunters get up close and personal with their hulls."

"Fair point."

Vykk had been quiet for a while; the last Boba had heard from him, he'd needed to rescue a friend who'd been caught in a snowstorm on Planet Ice Hell. It was a relief to know Vykk hadn't frozen to death whilst searching, although his soulmate had no answer for how he'd managed to find his friend in the frigid dark. "I just picked a direction that felt right," sounded like more mumbo jumbo; when Boba had said as much, Vykk had responded, "Shut up," followed by, "Shit that's an alert."

Boba was starting to wonder if Vykk had been on Hoth too.

He timed it. Almost six weeks to the day that the Imperial forces pulled out of the Anoat system, the Millennium Falcon limped into Cloud City. Boba didn't quite beg Calrissian to pretend like things were fine between himself and his ex, but it was close.

"Look, let them stay here. Delay them long enough for someone to come collect them. Put a homing beacon on the ship in case they try to pull a runner before the hyperdrive is repaired. But don't pick a fight right now. In a few days, they won't be a problem for you anymore."

Calrissian ground his teeth but agreed.

With his admin-granted access to the maintenance corridors and security, Boba was able to track Solo, two Wookiees, a golden protocol unit, and a slight human woman as they followed Calrissian through the halls. He had to admit that Calrissian did a good job of selling the prosperity of Cloud City.

It was Boba's bad luck that the protocol droid got snoopy and followed an administrative R2 unit into the monitoring room Boba was using. Regular blaster bolts wouldn't do much to a chromed job like that - the plating was shiny for that reason in specific - and Boba had to nail the droid with a shock probe from his gauntlet instead. Piling the droid's scattered pieces into a crate, Boba handed it off to one of the refinery Ugnaughts with an instruction to get rid of it. He felt kind of badly, but it couldn't be helped: protocol droids were horrible at keeping secrets unless you wiped their memories entirely, and it would definitely have made some excited, well-meaning comment about seeing a Mandalorian in the city if he'd tried to shoo it away.

He opened the door into the service corridor and froze. There was a Kaminoan in the hallway, dressed in a Cloud City maintenance uniform and apparently checking the readouts from a power junction.

Nobody knew what had happened to the Kaminoans after the Empire's rise. Palpatine had ordered a complete shutdown of the Kaminoan cloning facilities, which sounded bland on the surface, but Boba had been there afterwards. The shattered ruin of Tipoca City had been left to list slowly into the ocean; columns of smoke beyond the horizon had suggested that other Kaminoan cities had suffered the same fate. Boba hadn't seen a Kaminoan in nearly thirty years.

The Kaminoan woman here glanced over at him with eyes the deep, luminous black of hyperspace, smiled, and winked at him before sweeping gracefully around a corner.

Boba wasn't the type to chase a mystery without some serious research and some backup; he pulled up Cloud City's employment records instead. Kina Ha, techtronics specialist, wasn't a name he recognised from his childhood on Kamino. But he had the creeping suspicion that she'd known who he was on sight.

---

Of course, Vader couldn't just pull up stakes and get to Bespin immediately when Boba had commed. Imperials had places to be and planets to subjugate after all. It was another week before His Dramaticness was en route. Boba had to remind him that bringing a Super Star Destroyer directly into the inner system would probably alert Solo, and that they should consider using shuttles.

"Do not presume to tell me how to conduct my business, bounty hunter," Vader snarled over the comm.

Boba scoffed at him. "Right now, your business is my business. I know the word subtle isn't really in your vocabulary, but for once maybe you should brush up on it."

The Sith Lord rocked back a little. "Your opinion is noted," he said, and cut the comm. Boba had a moment of satisfaction knowing he'd got under Vader's skin.

In the meantime, Solo and his friends passed the days exploring Cloud City and chafing over the delays in the ship's repairs. Boba spent enough time eavesdropping to learn that Calrissian's mechanics really were having difficulty dealing with Solo's modifications, and that the Falcon's hyperdrive setup was anything but regular. The motivator might have been an easy thing to replace, except it wasn't the model of motivator that came standard for an Isu-Sim SSP05, and when they installed the correct motivator, the alternator wouldn't engage, and their options were to either take a risk with an irregular motivator or install a compressor. That suggestion had been met with angry words from Solo, followed by the techs making hasty promises to try to locate another Koensayr JV-29.

Boba shook his head. YT-1300 owners really were a different type of pilot.

He hadn't received too many messages from Vykk in that time. The first thing his soulmate said was, "We're safe for now," followed immediately by, "but it feels like we're being watched. Puts my back up."

"Mind your security then. How soon can you move on?"

"That's the problem, the ship needs work. We're waiting on a part right now."

Boba frowned at the neat text on his arm. That sounded… incredibly coincidental. He didn't believe in coincidence. But… what were the odds that Vykk and Solo were the same person? There was really only one way to find out, but...

But.

But.

What if he was right?

Vader was on his way here. Boba had no idea what he wanted with Solo or the woman - an Alderaanian named Leia Retrac, whom Boba's sources had confirmed was a high-level Rebellion agent. He didn't seem to care about the Wookiees either way.

If Boba was wrong, it wouldn't be a problem. But if Boba was right… he would have to tell Vykk everything, and probably facilitate their escape somehow. And then Vader would get here, take his infamous ire out on Calrissian and probably the rest of the city, and then Boba would go from hunter to hunted alongside Solo and his friends.

Dammit. This was why he kept his personal and professional lives separate!

There were over five million people who would probably suffer the consequences if Boba took the risk of asking Vykk if his real name was Han Solo. Boba tried not to care too much about his business collateral, but his business collateral was usually grown adults who were also living half on the wrong side of the law and who knew what would happen if they got caught. Not working class families with children.

He couldn't do it. Not even if Vykk was Solo. He'd have to find another way-

The sound of someone at the Legacy's ramp brought him bolt upright in his chair. The exterior camera showed him the Kaminoan woman, tapping lightly at the hatch. Blaster drawn, he slid down the ladder and opened the door. "What do you want?"

"You have a dilemma," the Kaminoan declared quietly. "But you're not alone. Continue with the original plan."

He'd aimed his blaster without thinking about it. "Who the hell are you?"

She smiled. "You already know who I am. Continue with the original plan, Boba Fett. All will be as the Force wills it."

Karking Jedi. He put his blaster away, growling, "I hate that line."

"And with good reason. But this time it will be in your favour." She offered a spindly bow. "All shall be revealed."

Boba watched her go and crossed his arms, feeling uncharacteristically petulant. Shoving aside the urge to sulk, he closed the hatch and instead pulled up his encrypted HoloNet connection. There was work to do.

---

By the time Vader arrived, Boba had an airtight argument to convince him to hand Solo over into Boba's care once the Sith Lord had whatever information he wanted from the smuggler. His argument in favour of keeping Retrac and the Wookiees was less certain - Retrac was a known agent, and the Wookiees would likely end up in chains (again, his traitorous memory whispered) if the Imperials had any say in the matter at all.

"There's a standing bounty on Solo and his crew from Durga the Hutt," he said steadily. "If you're just planning to kill them after you get what you want, let me turn them in." He knew better than to offer part of the bounty as incentive: Vader would just be offended.

"We shall see."

It was probably the closest thing to a promise Boba was going to get.

Vader turned to leave. "In the meantime, you will accompany me to a meeting with our quarry. Come."

The instant the door opened, Solo started firing. From his vantage point at the back of the room, Boba allowed himself to be impressed. Most people would have collapsed in a quivering mess or frozen upon seeing a Sith Lord waiting at the banquet table. Vader yanked the blaster from the smuggler's fingers and handed it to Boba without looking. "We would be honoured if you would join us."

It was the most awkward luncheon Boba had ever witnessed, even compared to some of Durga's feasts. Nobody ate anything, not even Calrissian, who stood to get a good deal out of it all. Vader had agreed that Cloud City could continue to operate privately if Calrissian cooperated in this operation.

"I want to know about a certain Rebellion pilot: Luke Skywalker," Vader intoned, as if he expected anyone in the room to just volunteer information.

Solo, Retrac, the two Wookiees; they all glared at Vader wordlessly.

"That's what this is about?" Calrissian asked.

Vader didn't appear to even look at him. "That is none of your concern, Administrator. Your guests are going to bring Skywalker here to me, willingly or not."

Solo and Retrac blanched; the fur on the Wookiees' heads flattened in a species approximation of horror. Vader raised a hand and summoned one of his officers. "Lieutenant Sheckil, see our guests to their new quarters in the city's holding cells."

Calrissian's shoulders stiffened as stormtroopers hauled the others to their feet and cuffed them. "That wasn't part of the arrangement!"

Under his helmet, Boba raised an eyebrow and asked, "Well, your standard guest quarters certainly aren't secure enough to keep them in one place. Do you have a better idea?" Beside him, Vader stood silently, watching the exchange.

If looks could kill, the one the Administrator shot him would have incinerated Boba on the spot. "No." He turned and stormed out in a swirl of cloak.

Vader followed the stormtroopers and captives out, leaving Boba alone with the remains of the worst meal never eaten.

---

Whatever he'd thought Vader wanted Solo for, this was not it. After that initial question about Skywalker, the captives were separated and subjected to a series of torments that, while non-fatal - not even in the realm of causing permanent damage - were definitely not intended to loosen their tongues either. There were no deals or bargains offered. Only screaming.

Boba went back to the quarters Calrissian had given the group and found a crate containing the pieces of their protocol droid, the one he'd ordered disposed of. Apparently the Ugnaughts couldn't keep things away from a determined Wookiee pair. After a moment's hesitation, he brought the crate down to the detention level and left it on one of the anchored sleeping platforms. Putting their droid back together would keep them occupied, and it wasn't like there was any intel the droid could surprise them with now.

It had nothing to do with feeling guilty for everything; if he kept saying that, maybe he could convince himself it was true. When he went back to his bunk on the Legacy for the night, parts of his arms and chest and back looked red and sore. It didn't hurt, but he guessed Solo was spending a very uncomfortable night on those hard metal slabs. At this point, he didn't even need to ask who Vykk was: the evidence was written on his skin.

After a week of senseless torture, Vader demanded Boba's presence in a conference room in the administration levels that the Sith Lord had claimed temporarily for his personal use.

"You've hunted Jedi before, bounty hunter. How does someone like you subdue them?"

Someone who can't use the Force, Boba translated. "I'm guessing you're not asking about killing one, you seem capable enough of doing that on your own. You catch 'em off guard. Distract them with combat while maneuvering them into a trap. Stun them out with either a stun shot or drugs, but that only works for a short time; you need to have some means of containing them before they wake up." Boba had never needed to bring in a live Jedi; he refused to work with the Inquisitors. But he knew how other hunters handled that. "Stasis casket works, although it seems to do a job on their state of mind. Force-suppressant collars and cuffs are pretty standard-"

"Not an option," Vader interrupted.

Boba tilted his head; objection acknowledged. "And I know a few hunters who keep a full carbonite-freezing setup on their ships, specifically designed for keeping sentients alive and intact. Before you ask, I don't have one."

Vader stared at Boba as if waiting for an explanation; Boba didn't provide one. In honesty, he'd never needed such a costly setup: the Legacy was a Firespray class, intended for live prisoner transport, and had temporary containment blocks in the lower level. None of them would stop a determined Force user, but that's what the suppressant cuffs were for.

"Carbonite freezing." Vader sounded thoughtful. "Unpleasant, but effective. It will do." He marched off without warning, and Boba tried not to look like he was hurrying to keep up. Vader swept past the cyborg secretary without acknowledging the man's greeting and entered Calrissian's office unannounced. "Administrator. I wish to inspect the suitability of your carbonite freezing array."

The Administrator's lips pressed together tightly. "Right now?"

"Yes. Time is of the essence."

Boba shrugged when Calrissian glared at him. It wasn't like Vader was going to explain himself if he didn't want to.

The facility, in the industrial lower levels, was dark and mostly lit red for the comfort of the Ugnaught workers. Vader prowled the platform, watching the workers processing supercooled, carbonite-stabilised tibanna into transportable flat blocks.

"This facility is crude, but it should be adequate to freeze Skywalker for his journey to the Emperor."

A muscle in Calrissian's cheek twitched. "Lord Vader, we only use this facility for industrial carbon-freezing; you put him in there, it might kill him."

"I do not want the Emperor's prize damaged." Vader sounded like he'd already considered this, and Boba had a bad feeling about what was coming next. "We will test it. On Captain Solo."

Biting his lip until he tasted copper, it was everything Boba could do to not react. That was…

Shit.

The prisoners - all of them including the Wookiees and Retrac, for some reason - were escorted in, hands cuffed in front of them. One of the Wookiees had their droid, half-reassembled and complaining vociferously, strapped to his back. It would have been funny if the entire situation hadn't been so utterly dire.

Solo took in the room and then leaned in threateningly over Calrissian's shoulder. "What's goin' on, buddy?"

While a stone-faced Calrissian explained, Boba stepped over to Vader. "What if he doesn't survive?" he asked, ignoring the curdling in his gut. "He's worth a lot to me."

Vader didn't even twitch. "The Empire will compensate you if he dies. Put him in!"

Both Wookiees howled and started fighting, sending several stormtroopers over the platform edge to the maintenance walkway below. Boba raised his blaster to stun them out - better that than being executed on the platform - only for Vader to unexpectedly shove the weapon back down. Boba was too stunned to even react to that, while Solo got into the Wookiees' faces and shouted at them until they calmed down.

The look on Retrac's face as she stared at Boba told him the only reason he was still alive was that she hadn't learned how to kill with a thought. Yet. But she was damn well going to figure out how.

Boba was still distracted by trying to figure out what Vader's game was. It felt like he was trying to make some sort of point, but to whom and why? Maybe there was more going on than Boba knew. He took a couple steps back, out of the light, as two troopers hauled Solo over to the platform and forced him to stand in the centre. Boba couldn't see his face from that angle, but the devastation in Retrac's eyes as she clung to the Wookiees was clear.

It was almost a relief that Boba didn't feel anything when the carbonite process started. Injuries that severely damaged the skin, particularly burns, could often be felt by someone's soulmate, but the freezing process was preservative rather than destructive. They pulled the final slab out and let it slam back onto the platform.

Boba had seen enough carbon-frozen bounty targets that the sight wasn't upsetting; his concern lay in whether Solo had survived.

Calrissian knelt and checked the bioreadouts on the monitor. "He's alive. And in perfect hibernation."

"He's all yours, bounty hunter," Vader said. "Reset the chamber for Skywalker, and take Retrac and the Wookiees to my ship."

Boba scowled. "My bounty is on Solo and his crew-"

"I'm certain Durga will still pay you for Solo," Vader interrupted with a note of condescension in his modified voice. "I have a use for the others."

There was no way Boba could force the issue here; not with a Sith Lord and two squads of stormtroopers to deal with. All he could do was nod and direct the pair of Cloud City employees who stepped up. Solo's chilly prison was loaded onto a repulsor cart, and they pushed it through the uncommonly deserted halls to the lift and Boba's landing platform.

---

Boba directed the Legacy to drop out of hyperspace just beyond the system and hurried out of the cockpit, nearly braining himself on the curved door frame in his rush. He grabbed a spare blanket from the cabinet and started some water heating for caf on his way past the tiny kitchen unit. Solo was gonna need it.

The controls on the carbonite panel were simple, and Boba resisted fidgeting while he waited for it to defrost. After a couple minutes, Solo tipped limply out of the gap into Boba's arms with a wheeze, shaking as his body struggled to warm up. Boba eased him to the floor and wrapped the blanket around him.

"Who-? You," Solo snarled as his eyes focused blearily on Boba. "Where's Leia, Chewie, and Garra?"

Boba sat back on the hard metal floor and held up his hands. "Vader wanted them. I don't know why. Look, I'm sorry about all this, Vykk. I didn't know!" He sighed and dropped his hands to his knees, staring at the floor. "Not until it was too late."

Solo went rigid, clutching the blanket around himself. "What did you call me?"

"You- you must have been, what, five?" Boba glanced cautiously at his face, seeking recognition or denial. "You told me your name was Vykk when I told you mine was-"

"Sentra," Solo breathed in shock. "No. It can't be…."

Hesitating for only a moment, Boba pulled his helmet off. He'd cultivated a neat beard and let his hair grow a bit, so that it wouldn't be Jango he saw in the mirror every day, but even at thirty-four he was still recognisable as a clone. "My name's Boba. Boba Fett. You've probably seen a few of my brothers around-"

Solo dropped his face into his hands, laughing shakily. "Rex is gonna give me so much shit for this. It's really you."

"Durga hired me to bring you in, once," Boba said with a straight face. "I might have delayed on it until my retainer contract ran out-"

"You're the one Salla warned me about!" Solo swung a lazy, playful punch at Boba's shoulder, and he just let it land on the beskar. The other man winced and shook his fingers out, muttering, "Ow…"

"I have something for you." Boba held out the blaster - Han's blaster, the one Vader had yoinked and then handed off without a thought - grip-first. "Figured you'd want it back."

Han accepted it carefully, almost reverent. "Got a lot of memories with this blaster. Is that stupid?"

"You're asking a Mandalorian? Weapons are part of our religion." Boba grinned. It was an old joke between himself and Din. He stood up, offering a hand. "Come on, Solo. We have some unfinished business and some people to rescue."

His soulmate stared for a moment before taking his hand and letting Boba tug him to his feet. "Call me Han. And there's something I need to do first, I gotta comm the Fleet." He paused. "Uh. Can I?"

Boba had to help him walk since he was still a little wobbly, but once they were settled in the cockpit, Han was looking around with interest. "Always wondered what the inside of this ship looked like. It's one thing to see schematics on the HoloNet, but-"

"Yeah, the rotating crew compartment is unusual." He gave Han access to the comms and started the navicomp programming a hop back to Bespin, setting it to land as close to the correct side of the planet as possible.

"This is Captain Solo calling Home One, anyone out there?"

"You have good timing Captain Solo," came the immediate response. "Commander Naberrie started the fleet moving to Bespin two days ago, he said you were in trouble."

Boba spoke up before Han could say anything more. "There's a Super Star Destroyer and support fleet sitting right on top of the standard system entry vector from the Core. If you're not looking for a fight you should reroute."

The person on the other end laughed shortly. "Oh, we're definitely looking for a fight, don't worry about us."

Han said, "Tell Luke that whatever they're planning, they better be ready to pull it off as soon as they make contact. Vader seemed to be in a pretty cheery mood, but that's not gonna last."

"Vader and cheery do not belong in the same sentence. Commander Naberrie is already on his way in to distract Vader; will you need a lift?"

Boba shook his head and Han said, "No, we're going back to retrieve Agent Retrac and my crew from Imperial custody. We'll catch up with you later."

Boba pulled the hyperdrive lever and got them both steaming mugs of instant caf. "So who is Luke Skywalker and why's Vader going nuts over him?"

Han scoffed as he cradled the mug in his chilled fingers. "Luke Naberrie, you mean. My friend; Leia's brother. They decided to use 'Skywalker' in their rumour-mongering to get Vader's attention."

Boba frowned. "Well, it worked, but why?" Nobody willingly sought Vader's attention if they could help it.

His soulmate's smile turned rueful. "Skywalker was his and Leia's dad, before he became Vader. His old family wants a word with him, someplace where the Emperor can't reach, so they've been trying to lure him for ages." He winced and rubbed his chest. "Just our bad luck Vader decided to use us as bait."

It made a certain amount of sense; Cal could always tell when Din was in danger. Boba stared at Han. "Anakin Skywalker is Vader? That shabuir?"

"You knew him, huh?"

"I'm shocked any woman would touch him. He was kind of a brat." Boba had been, too. It took one to know one. "So what's the point of it all? What's the goal?"

Han shrugged and sipped his drink with an appreciative sigh. "That's good stuff. Every other Sith Lord eventually tries to kill their boss and take over; after twenty-odd years, Vader hasn't so much as twitched. Kenobi figures it's because he thinks he has nothing left - the Jedi are officially gone, his wife faked her death before the kids were born. Nobody knows who his soulmate is. So they're giving him a personal reason to do something."

"'Surprise, you have a kid!' Most Mando'adë would burn down Coruscant for that, yeah. So who's 'they'?" Boba asked, although he suspected he already knew.

His soulmate's grin lit up the compartment. "Luke. Kenobi. A whole ton of Jedi who escaped the purges."

Boba took a minute to absorb that information. "Well, shit." He stared out the viewport at the swirling hyperspace vortex. He couldn't get a comm out to anyone until they hit realspace, and once they landed on the Imps' scanners, there wouldn't be time to comm anyone. "I hope they brought backup."

---

The Imps definitely noticed the Legacy' s arrival in the system - well inside the safe entry vector, because both Boba and Han knew how to skip a blockade - and sent a swarm of TIEs howling after them. With his soulmate on the turret, Boba found it much easier to focus on evasive flying. The Legacy and TIEs were about evenly matched for speed in atmosphere, but that meant that while the fighters couldn't get the drop on them, they also couldn't get beyond range.

"Han, see that red switch on your right? Flip it up. I'm gonna get 'em clustered. Once you see them nice and tight, hit the button underneath." Boba pulled the Legacy around towering Bespin cloudbanks in a series of weaving curves.

"'Void-7 Seismic charge'? Aren't those meant for asteroid mining?" But the clack of the switch cover being flipped up was audible over the shriek of the twin cannons.

"I get 'em from this old Besalisk named Dex. You should see what it does to ships." The growing twilight was making visibility difficult, and the Legacy' s aft thrusters would be shining like a beacon for the Imp pilots in the gloom.

"Guess I'm gonna!"

Boba checked the aft cam feed and stopped weaving just long enough for Han to get a solid target lock on the cluster of fighters. The charge detonated satisfyingly in the middle of the flight, shockwaves shredding metal and transparisteel like a vibrowhip. It didn't get all of them, but the pack was whittled down to a more manageable three. Han picked them off one at a time without needing to load the second Void-7, then chuckled. "Wonder if we can fit a launcher like that on the Falcon."

Boba snorted. "You often find yourself in situations like this?"

There was a long silence, and Boba glanced over to see his soulmate giving him a deadpan stare so dry it made Tatooine look like a tropical paradise. "Sentra, what do you think I've been doing the last three years?"

There's still a bounty on his head, and he's been gun-running for the Alliance despite that. Boba winced. "Right. I'm gonna set down next to the Falcon, if there's room."

"Should be. Can I borrow your comm? Mine got confis-" Han's words died as Boba held up Han's personal comm unit.

"You mean this?"

"Got anything else of mine you're holding onto?" Han asked wryly as he reclaimed the communicator.

Wordlessly, Boba handed over a set of slicing tools, a slim vibroblade from Han's boot, and the folding utility knife that had been clipped to his belt.

"Did they know you had these?"

Boba shrugged and hit the control to start the landing sequence; his soulmate twitched as the crew compartment began to rotate forward. "If they did, they didn't care."

Han opened a frequency and the cabin was immediately filled with a cacophony of blaster fire, distant alarms, and indistinct yelling. "Leia, are you there?!"

"Han! Where are you? What about the bounty hunter?"

They exchanged a look and Boba shrugged. "Might as well tell her."

"He's on our side," Han said quickly. "It's Sentra."

"WHAT?!"

Han winced. "Later, okay? Can you get to the Falcon' s platform?"

"We're right outside, I really miss having Artoo around to slice the locks."

"On it," Boba muttered. "Tell 'em not to shoot me, okay?" He didn't wait for a reply, grabbing his blaster and his own slicing tools. He left his buy'ce on the table; the odds of him getting shot at because nobody recognised him in a helmet were too high.

Slicing a lock from the inside was always easier than slicing from the outside. The door popped up on its track and Boba shot a smoke can from his left vambrace into the space between Han's crew huddled in the shallow cover of some decorative columns and the Imperial squad advancing on them down the hall. One of those people was Calrissian, surprisingly; the Baron Administrator did a double-take when he saw Boba there.

"You!"

Boba sighed and took aim past him, sending a couple stormtroopers sprawling. He was probably going to be getting that reaction a lot today. "I'm guessing Vader reneged on his deal, Administrator?"

Calrissian snarled, "They took over the Admin block. But I always leave myself a back door. I called an evac as soon as we were free."

"Mm hm." It was a good call. "I'll try to keep the property damage to a minimum, then."

"How considerate of you."

Boba rolled his eyes; the Administrator had no room to talk right now.

From somewhere behind him, Han yelled, "Leia! Catch!" and a slim metal stick whipped past Boba's head to smack into Retrac's palm. She bared her teeth in a grin that really made Boba appreciate that he wasn't her target at the moment, and then stepped out from behind the column, violet blade of her lightsaber batting Imperial shots away.

Han tucked himself in next to Boba, shooting past the effective shield Retrac was putting up. "I'm so glad we decided to leave that on the Falcon. Imagine if Vader had found it."

It figured someone related to Vader would be a Jedi. Or something like one - Retrac struck Boba as being far too angry to have made it in the old Order.

Things ended fairly quickly after that. The last stormtrooper collapsed and Boba stepped out of cover, only to get the unlit business end of Retrac's lightsaber pressed against his chest.

"If you betray us again…" she hissed.

Boba shook his head. "I didn't betray you before. But like Calrissian, here, my options were limited, and I did, in fact, give a damn about the innocent people here." He glanced up at the automated evacuation alert that was still ringing through the corridors. "Not that it mattered, in the end. I'm with you. Kenobi helped me out years ago, and if he thinks this is important, then I'm here to help."

Retrac stared at him as if seeing someone new and took a step back, lowering her saber hilt. "I'm still watching you."

Boba glanced at Han. "She's Mandokarla, alright. I approve."

"Nobody asked you," Retrac snapped. "Come on, we need to meet up with the others."

Boba got an on-the-fly introduction to Han's crew, Chewbacca and Garrawallooroo. They eyed him suspiciously, but as soon as Han made it clear that they were soulmates, Chewie chuffed and ruffled Boba's hair. Garra still grumbled something about some mistakes being unforgivable, but she took the rear guard with him, making certain no stormtroopers snuck up on them on their way through the panicked crowds in the mid-levels.

They were in the lift when his comm pinged urgently. Everyone stared as Boba answered, "Solish."

"It's us, we're on Cloud City," Din said. "Where are you?"

"Vader's trying to lure Naberrie to the carbonite-processing facility, we're on the way to back him up."

Cal's voice cut in, "Wait for us there, the Goran had something for you."

Puzzling, but he'd learn what it was soon enough. "Will do."

"More Mandalorians?" Han asked.

Boba grinned as he put his comm away. "And Jedi. We've been sheltering a lot of them."

Retrac's eyes went huge. "Seriously? I thought Mandalorians and Jedi hated each other."

"We don't have a good history together, no, but there are several soulmates between us who were trying to bridge the divide, and we all saw what Palpatine did to the Republic as a bigger threat. It's easy to conceal an identity under a helmet and a new name," Boba explained. "And clans won't give up the ones they've claimed. Family is too important."

It was more than just Din and Cal waiting for them when the lift opened; Kenobi was there, looking like an itinerant spacer, along with a short older woman who looked vaguely familiar and was dressed in an Alliance uniform with General's pips, several Mando'adë that Boba recognised as former Jedi, the Kaminoan woman, and an older human man with a shaved head whom Boba remembered only from his nightmares.

Boba strode forward into his space, ignoring the greetings happening around him. "Windu." It didn't help that the Jedi Master was nearly a full head taller than him.

Windu stiffened. He looked odd in spacer's duds. "Fett."

He prodded the other man's breastbone. "We need to have a talk after this is over, you and I. So you'd better fucking survive this."

The Jedi's eyebrows twitched upwards slightly although his expression didn't change. "Then you should do the same."

"I don't plan on dying anytime soon," Boba growled, and turned away to his friends. Din and Cal were staring at him, and Cal waved a hand in front of his own faceplate.

"You, uh. You're looking a little exposed there, buddy."

Boba snorted a laugh. "The time for hiding is well past. I'm guessing you're planning to make a point to Vader? Then he should see a few familiar faces in the crowd," he said when Din nodded.

Din reached under his cloak to the back of his belt and unhooked something. "The goran said this is yours."

Everyone around them froze at the sight of the rectangular hilt resting on Din's palm; Kenobi cursed softly. Boba shook his head. "I don't want it."

Cal hesitated, then tugged his buy'ce off; underneath, his red hair was a tousled mess, but his eyes were bright. "Maybe not, but it wants you. We can all feel it."

Gritting his teeth, Boba reached out and wrapped his fingers around the Dha'kad's hilt. A voice he'd never heard before, and yet was intimately familiar, blazed across his mind.

Ni kar'tayl gai sa'Mand'alor.

Hissing, Boba forced his eyes open. Everyone was still staring at him. Din was the first to un-freeze, pulling his own helmet off to reveal his wide-eyed expression of complete awe. "Even I felt that. I didn't think…"

"Let's hope Vader didn't, despite my best efforts at hiding you all," the Kaminoan said tartly. She turned toward the sealed door to the carbonite-processing room, flipped a panel open, and tapped a few buttons. The door snapped open and the air filled with the crackling roar of a lightsaber duel in progress. "So who's first?"

Kenobi's face twisted with determination and he moved forward immediately, followed closely by Windu. The group of Mandalorian Jedi looked at Boba - who nodded back, understanding what they were asking - and then took their helmets off, clipping them to their belts before entering.

The room hadn't been pretty before, but now it was a wreck, melted scores in the floor and fixtures slowly cooling in the air. Compressed tibanna misted from the end of a severed pipe dangling over the freezing pit and killed visibility. On the control platform on the far side of the pit, Vader and a slight human dueled, red blade crossing blue at a terrifying speed.

Windu extended his hand and a blast of pure energy knocked the combatants apart; Luke took a controlled tumble down the steps while Vader was thrown into the control column. Kenobi ignited his lightsaber, the blue beam cutting through the darkness, and called, "I think that's quite enough, Vader."

Vader picked himself up from where he'd been thrown. "Kenobi. We meet again, old man. You should not have come back." He started to march toward them down the steps.

One after another, lightsabers in blue, green, amber, and violet ignited around the edge of the circular platform. Boba clenched his teeth and hit the switch on the Dha'kad, lending its weird lightning-edged black blade to the circle. Something thrummed through him, taking root in his chest, and he felt his stance shift to something more balanced, more suited to wielding a blade.

Vader stopped dead. "You are all fools."

"Anakin. Skywalker." A woman's clear voice cut through the background noise. The petite woman who'd been with Kenobi pushed through into the dim red half-light.

Vader staggered back a step. "No. It's not- How?"

"Palpatine sent troops to assassinate me." She bared her teeth in a fierce smile that looked exactly like Retrac's. "So we gave him what he expected."

"You're lying! This is some trick! He promised-"

"What's more believable, Skywalker?" Windu asked. "That we dressed someone up to look like Padmé Naberrie? Or that Darth Sidious would lie to secure your loyalty? Search your feelings."

Retrac moved forward, violet lightsaber gripped tightly, to take her brother's hand. Luke smiled at her, then said, "There's two of us, too. Twins."

Vader dropped to his knees. "You-" He fumbled with his helmet until the bulk of it came off, leaving him wearing only the respirator. Underneath, his cheeks shone with tears in the half-light. "I can't-"

Kenobi eased around the gaping pit and went to one knee in front of Vader. Boba tensed; people who were confused and distressed were the most unpredictable, and Vader had a reputation. That was why all these Jedi had come: to ensure nobody died trying to talk sense into him.

The Jedi Master offered his free hand and said, almost too quietly to hear over the background rumble of machinery and over a score of lightsabers, "Your family is here for you, Anakin."

Vader was clearly fighting with himself, trying to reason things against the lies he'd been telling himself for over twenty years. "Y- you took them from me…"

"He didn't do anything. We got away from Palpatine," the woman - Padmé, and now Boba remembered her, from when she'd been Senator Amidala - said firmly. "He would have killed us. To keep you under his control. Palpatine is your enemy, Anakin-"

"He's my friend! He was there for me when nobody else was!"

Kenobi sighed. "We were always there for you, but you never came to us for help. What were we supposed to do?"

Everyone seemed completely ready to let him work through it on his own time; everyone except Retrac, who was glaring at the man who should have been her parent. Boba could sympathise: he was getting frustrated as well. But it also wasn't his fight.

Retrac let go of her brother's hand and stepped forward. "Palpatine isolated you! He filled your head with lies that the people who loved you most wouldn't keep loving you if you opened up to them."

"Leia-" Luke protested.

"No! He needs to hear it. If you try to get him to reason through on his own, he'll go in circles." She held a hand out to Vader. "The Emperor ordered Tarkin to destroy Alderaan because they sheltered us from him; he thought Mother was still there. He destroyed an entire planet to keep you from finding out that he'd been lying the whole time. To kill her. I know this because Tarkin told me so when he made me watch." Her expression was absolutely murderous. "And then he scheduled my execution, so you would never find out. So when you're finally done feeling fucking sorry for yourself, consider what's more important to you: having your family back? or doing something about the person who's kept you on a leash for twenty years?"

Harsh, but true. And Vader had ordered her tortured. Boba couldn't even imagine being in that kind of position.

Retrac turned her lightsaber off and stormed out, muttering, "I'll be outside." Her brother reached out to her, then sighed and shrugged when she ignored him.

Vader stared after her. "She reminds me of you, Padmé."

"Funny," Naberrie said with a smile, "We always said she took after you."

Someone in the room coughed to cover a laugh. It sounded suspiciously like Windu, except Boba suspected the man had never laughed once in his life.

Vader looked down at the half-helmet in his hands. "Is that why you're here? To ask for my help against Palpatine?"

Naberrie shook her head. "We're here for you. Whether you help us against Darth Sidious is your choice, but we'd rather not lose you with him. Not without trying."

He scoffed, the sound a burst of static through his mask. "And if I refuse? Do you intend to kill me?"

"We're here to make certain nobody dies today," Windu said. "If you refuse, we'll leave peaceably."

Vader turned his head slowly towards Windu, the unnatural amber-red colour of his eyes seeming to glow in the dimness. "By all rights, I should kill you. All of you." His gaze passed over the circle of Jedi and stuttered when it caught on the Dha'kad in Boba's hand.

Boba stepped forward, until he saw Vader's eyes widen in recognition. "And what would be served by killing any of us? Your Emperor rules through fear. Is that the kind of galaxy you want? A mass of slaves, too afraid to live, while the wealthy abuse their privilege? D'you know what that sounds like?"

"I brought peace to the Empire!" Vader insisted, rising to his full height.

Boba scoffed. "You didn't even end the fucking war. It just changed labels." From the corner of his eye he caught Kenobi's approving nod.

"The Empire has done nothing but destroy people's lives," Luke said quietly. "It's the peace enforced by a slave master, not a benevolent leader. How can you stand by and let it happen?"

"I-" Vader halted and turned to look at Naberrie, pleading, "I only wanted our family to be safe…."

Silence fell; the implicit, Well, you failed, hung like a blade overhead.

"What do you think the Emperor would do, if you turned your son over to him?" Cal asked suddenly. "Would he really be safe? Would he even be the same person, once Sidious was through with him?" There was a hollowness to his expression that spoke of a deep, intimate familiarity with such things; Cal and Din had made a reputation in rescuing Force-sensitive kids from Imperial hands. He cleared his throat and asked, "How many Inquisitors have you trained?"

Vader shuddered.

"Come with us," Luke insisted.

"It's too late for me," the towering, black-draped figure whispered. "The Dark Side is too powerful…."

A hand touched Boba's back; he spared a glance to see Han standing next to him. "It's never too late to do the right thing," the smuggler said. Boba tolerated his taller soulmate resting an elbow companionably on his shoulder; anything to make a point, right now.

Besides, if anyone was an illustration of turning around to try to make things right, it was the two of them.

Vader stared at them for a moment before turning back to Naberrie. "What do you intend to do, once the Emperor is defeated?"

"Rebuild. You'll need to be seen claiming the throne, it's what people would expect," she said promptly. Vader made a sound of protest and Boba arched a brow in surprise: Vader didn't want to rule? Naberrie smiled and shook her head. "I'll be there to help you. We'll use your position to make structural changes and eventually you'll be able to step down. And maybe we can try to be a family," she added.

Vader looked toward the door where Retrac had gone and visibly winced. "I trust you, my angel." Before anyone could say anything more, he activated his comm. "Admiral Piett."

"My Lord," came the immediate response. "We are currently under attack by Rebel forces, although they seem unwilling to commit to a full offensive. I suspect they're planning something."

"Lock down outgoing fleet communications, pull back the fighters. I want you to hail the leader and negotiate a temporary ceasefire."

There was a long pause and then the Admiral said hesitantly, "My Lord?"

"Do you remember the matter we spoke of some time ago, Firmus? It's time."

When the Admiral responded again, there was a new energy in his tone, almost eagerness. "I see! It will be done immediately, my Lord."

Vader closed his comm and tilted his head in an almost playful attitude at everyone's astonishment. "My chosen Admiral is also my soulmate. We've spoken at some length about how the Empire is failing." He stooped to collect the helmet he'd dropped. "We will cull my fleet; anyone loyal to the Emperor will be temporarily marooned on Varonat. I assume you have a plan to face the Emperor?"

Kenobi nodded. "We should discuss it in detail in a more secure location, though."

"Agreed." Vader put his helmet back on with a decisive air. "I will go with you to your ship. I fear I cannot trust my own ship's security at this time. It will be dealt with shortly."

---

Boba - as the new Mand'alor - was asked to join the weird mixture of Alliance and Imperial leadership on Home One, a lumpy Mon Calamari cruiser that was still dwarfed by Vader's ship, the Executor.

He wasn't entirely comfortable suddenly having a leadership role; on the other hand, he was right in the middle of a group planning a major offensive against the Empire, and after twenty years of being treated like pests to be exterminated, his people would want in on it. He sent out a message to Veraad's goran, a call to arms with the provision that those who were currently defending their aliitë from Imperial occupation were not required to come. There was no sense in risking children and the infirm for the sake of battle.

There were people waiting for him when he parked the Legacy in Home One' s starboard hangar, and Boba hesitated at the top of the ramp before setting his buy'ce aside. Everyone here knew his face already.

Kenobi was eyeing the Legacy' s hull with open appreciation. Now that they were in full light, it was apparent that the Jedi had more white hair than auburn now. "You've been maintaining her well," he said by way of greeting, and then made a soft noise of surprise when Boba dragged him in for a hug.

"I know I thanked you years ago," Boba muttered, "but I don't really think I did it properly."

Kenobi hugged him back, then pressed their foreheads together for a more traditional greeting. "You don't owe me anything, Boba. I'm glad to see you're doing so well."

Standing behind him, in the more commonly-seen Alliance infantry gear, was a pair of older men, one with a heavy scar wrapping around the outside of his left eye and the other with a thick white beard. As soon as Kenobi let Boba go, they punched him in the shoulder with armoured knuckles, one right after the other. He rolled his eyes. "Which ones are you? I can't tell since you changed your haircuts."

Rex growled and gave him a firm kov'nyn. "You're a little shit."

"I'm still older than you."

"You don't get to claim that anymore, vod'ika," Cody said, poking the grey that was only just starting to show at Boba's temples.

Boba swatted at his hand and hugged him. "Fuck off, old man."

Cody laughed and squeezed back hard. "That's more like it."

The Millennium Falcon' s ramp lowered, and Han was immediately confronted by a furious Alliance medic who clearly thought someone who'd been in carbonite for thirty minutes needed a full examination. Boba snorted as Retrac - Leia, she'd insisted - convinced the medic that Han would submit to a screening as soon as the Fleet was in hyperspace. Boba's soulmate pouted but agreed, since both Wookiees were also fussing over him.

Boba was just turning to look for the deck officer to ask where he was supposed to go when a human man with sparse, greasy-looking grey hair planted himself in the way.

"I understand you're Solo's soulmate?"

Taken aback, Boba asked, "That gonna be a problem?"

The other man pursed his lips. "Nah." He stuck a hand out. "You prob'ly saved his life a few times. Name's Gann, Han's my sister's kid."

Boba shook his hand the Corellian way, earning an eyebrow twitch. "He mentioned you. Glad to see you survived Shrike."

Gann scoffed. "I wasn't stickin' around for that. Been in hiding with my soulmate and her sept. Half of 'em are here; whole packa' Selonian Jedi is not something anyone wants to mess with." He slapped Boba's pauldron before heading over to badger Han.

Luke flagged him down halfway across the hangar. There was a massive bruise forming on his left cheekbone and the shoulder of his grey jacket was singed, but he seemed cheerful. "We didn't have a chance to properly meet. Luke Naberrie."

"Boba Fett."

They clasped forearms, Mandalorian style, and Luke said, "The Darksaber feels different now. Like it's woken up."

Boba's hand drifted to the hilt hooked to his belt. "You can feel it?"

"Yeah. The crystals are semi-sentient and Force-reactive." He gave Boba a charming lopsided grin. "The crystal chooses the wielder; technically, it's a soulmate thing."

Boba grimaced. "That doesn't actually make me feel any better about this. I'm not trained to use a weapon like it."

"You take care of it, it'll take care of you. Biggs!" Luke called to one of the officers reviewing datapads nearby. "Where's everything happening?"

"Deck seven forward lounge," the other responded, eyeing Boba with intense curiosity. "Guess there's gonna be more Mandalorians arriving soon, huh?"

Boba shrugged. "It's likely. We'll arrange a rendezvous en route."

Biggs grinned. "Things are getting exciting awfully fast. Let's hope it pays off."

Everyone here knew each other, and it was getting a little overwhelming. Boba was starting to make his excuses when Han caught up to them, slinging an arm around his shoulders. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Well." Boba motioned back to the growing cluster of people near the Falcon. Even Calrissian was there, smiling and shaking hands. "You got people who are happy to see you. Didn't want to drag the mood down." Behind Han's shoulder, Luke was giving a fond headshake and eyeroll, and Boba frowned back. "I'm the bounty hunter nobody knew they could trust until three hours ago. Things are still a little tense."

Han drew himself up - it was so unfair that Boba's soulmate got to be taller than him, too - and offered his hand. "You're also family. They'll ease up once they get to know you. C'mon, the rest of this ship is full of weirdos you've never met."

Now Biggs was rolling his eyes; he and Luke exchanged grins. "As opposed to the weirdos he has met," Biggs teased.

"You tryin' to imply something, Darklighter?"

"That's Commander Darklighter to you." He winked and checked his datapad. "You got time still, Mand'alor, no sense lingering in an empty lounge."

Boba winced; it was going to take ages to get used to the title.

Having Imperials onboard - Vader, Admiral Piett, General Veers, and four stormtroopers who arrived unmasked, showing that they were dechipped remnants of the original 501st - had everyone on edge. General Naberrie confided in Boba that the presence of Mandalorians was reassuring to everyone; so he crammed as many of his people (his people; that was also going to take some time to get used to) into the lounge as possible, where they stood guard around the perimeter. Boba got a seat at the table alongside Naberrie and Vader, with Din and Cal standing on guard just behind him. Naberrie had Kenobi and a Togruta woman with cinnabar skin and blue markings on her montrals, whilst Vader had his officers. The Togruta and Vader seemed familiar with each other; there was an odd tension between them that made Boba uneasy.

"Perhaps you should start, General," Vader said carefully. "You wouldn't have tipped your hand if you didn't have a plan."

Naberrie smiled grimly. "It's twenty years in the making. Our plan is this: with your consent, we'll pack out your fleet with Alliance troops. I don't know how many of your crew are being removed…?"

"Enough that some assistance maintaining operational strength would be appreciated," Admiral Piett said when Naberrie left the question hanging.

"Grim, but we can work with that. Everyone will need to be in uniform, stormtrooper armour if possible. The point is to make this look entirely like an internal coup, rather than outside interference; to do otherwise would disrupt your legitimacy." She gestured to Luke, standing to one side in a fresh undress uniform. He'd cleaned up, but the bruise on his face had been left untreated. "You will ostensibly be delivering Luke to the Emperor. Your entourage will include as many Jedi as we can stuff into armour."

"A distraction. And a trap," Vader said. He frowned over the rim of his rebreather. "The fleet losing communications without notice will have raised suspicions."

"That was your call," Boba pointed out - not accusingly. It had been what he would have done in the same situation. "You wanted to keep the rumour mill contained, so word wouldn't get back to the Alliance that you had their Jedi."

Admiral Piett nodded in approval. "A sound suggestion, my Lord." Vader tipped his head in assent.

Naberrie pulled up a hologram on the table-mounted display, showing Imperial Centre in blue with an array of orbitals picked out in red. "In the meantime, we need to disrupt Imperial communications so nearby patrol groups can't be recalled to bolster their defenses. We considered offlining the power grid, but there are essential services which rely upon it, particularly medical facilities. Harming civilians is not in our interests."

She tapped a key and the hologram zoomed in on one orbital in particular, a skyhook structure with a long cable anchoring it to a surface-level tower. "This leaves us with sending a team into the primary communications node between the satellite network and the ground. We can't just destroy the network, because you-" she gestured to Vader- "will need to make a broad holocast about your succession, so nobody will doubt the transition of power. So this team needs to secure the skyhook node and then jam the network."

Piett frowned. "That will disrupt our communications, as well."

That was a good question: jamming communications was merely blasting patternless static on every available communications frequency. It was child's play to implement, but even allies would be affected.

Kenobi spoke up. "Our slicers have a remedy for that; when we're done here, they have some equipment for you."

"Outstanding."

Naberrie waited a moment but nobody else had further concerns to raise. "The rest of the Imperial battlegroup - and any Mandalorians who choose to join us," she added with a nod to Boba, "will follow to take care of the Imperial Centre defense forces. I want to keep as much of the action away from civilians as possible, but I fear that can't be helped. Enough of us remember what happened during the Siege of Coruscant."

Boba spoke up. "If we can stage boarding action and seize the ships instead of fighting them, ships crashing into the city won't be a risk." He looked at Vader, whose eyebrows were climbing towards his hairline. "For that to work, I need the latest details on the defense fleet, what we'll be dealing with." It wasn't quite the ground-pounding most Mando'adë specialised in, but it would be similar enough to not matter.

Vader nodded. "You shall have them."

Naberrie frowned. "You'll have a long fight from the docking bays to the bridge, per ship. Are you certain?"

"Who said anything about landing in the docking bays?" Boba asked, a grin stretching his cheeks. "We're going right for the bridge. We've been using assault pods to crack pirate ships for years." An assault pod could hold a full squad, and was designed to punch straight through a ship's hull like a giant pointed rivet. They were generally considered primitive and had fallen out of use by government militaries long before the Clone Wars, but Mando'adë understood that there was nothing civilised about warfare. The most civilised it could get was in preventing noncombatant casualties; and to do that, an action needed to be quick and decisive. Piett looked perturbed at the idea but Veers was nodding.

"Are you willing to lead that offensive, bounty hunter?" Vader asked derisively.

Boba's eyes narrowed; he might not have the experience, but he'd been trained from childhood the same as any other Mando'ad. "I wouldn't have suggested it if I wasn't. And I'm the Mand'alor."

A commotion at the door broke the tension between them; at Boba's right shoulder, Din stiffened and muttered, "Buir.…"

"Do not think for one moment that I will allow you to leave me behind," the newest arrival snarled as they pushed through the security team. The Mandalorian stalked forward, tugging their spiked buy'ce off to reveal a red-skinned Dathomirian Zabrak.

Boba pressed a palm over his face. "Did you forget to tell him, Din?"

"No."

Kenobi was staring openly. "Maul?"

The former Sith ignored Kenobi, instead leaning right into Vader's space. "For all that Sidious has stolen from you, he has taken ten times more from me. I will be facing him."

Vader stared at him for a moment, then shrugged and turned his attention back to the hologram. "Fine."

"Do not pretend to ignore me-"

Another Mandalorian pressed forward and caught Maul's arm. "Cyarë, you got what you wanted, ease off." Rhykk Takaad pulled Maul back from the table and pressed their foreheads together, speaking quietly.

Boba glanced back at Din and murmured, "He's getting better."

Din nodded. "He's been trying."

Naberrie cast a bemused glance over at Maul before focusing on Vader and Boba again. "Are there any further suggestions or alterations to be made? No? Then we begin in sixteen hours. Get some rest. And may the Force be with us."

---

The three-pronged assault started precisely as planned, with Vader and the Jedi engaging the Emperor in his throne room just as an assault team led by Leia and Han shut down the comms array. Boba, riding in with a Keldabe-class Mandalorian battleship liberated some years earlier from the Zann Consortium, was too busy coordinating the assault on the defense fleet to allow himself time to worry. Either the others would succeed, or they would fail; either way, he had to be prepared to react.

Contrary to Vader's expectation that Boba should be at the head of his assault, he was in the Shereshoy' s war room, coordinating with over three hundred infiltration squads and a Mando'adë battlegroup of eighty-three, directing the attack on the Imperial defense fleet and making tough calls as needed. A battlefield commander couldn't do their job properly when they were dodging blaster shots, after all.

It almost felt too easy. The defense perimeter around Imperial Centre was intended to keep forces from landing; they weren't prepared for the ships themselves to be targeted. That wasn't to say there was no resistance - there was plenty of that, more than enough action for eager warriors to sink their teeth into. But once the initial invasion of the Imperial Star Destroyers had passed, Boba had the opportunity to check on the other groups.

Vader and the Jedi had engaged the Emperor, and with the assistance of several Jedi dedicated solely to battle meditation, the Sith was unable to unnerve the fighters as he had the night he'd razed the Republic.

The assault on the comms relay, however, was going poorly. Boba redirected one of the Mando'adë corvettes to dock and send troops to assist; now that the element of surprise had been lost, there was no reason not to throw a few hundred people at the security squads attempting to breach the control room. It only had a little to do with the fact that Han was part of that team.

"Mand'alor." One of the communications slicers flagged him down. "Trouble on one of the ships, the engine crew is threatening to overload the reactor unless the bridge crew is released."

Boba didn't curse out loud; they didn't have time for indulgences. "Put me through to our mutineers."

"This better be someone in command. We demand that you cease and desist your hijacking of the Dauntless at once, or your people are going with us."

Boba scowled. "You think we care about your ship? We're following the orders of Lord Vader, himself. Once his will has been carried out and your loyalty is confirmed, you will be released."

"A likely story! Order your people to release our crew-"

The engineer's voice was drowned out by a squeal of static as a communication from the Imperial Palace overrode all frequencies. On the screen, a holo of Darth Vader appeared; his armour was visibly smoking and he was bracketed by four people in red Imperial Guard robes which bore scorch marks dark enough to discern even in the holo's washed-out range.

"People of the galaxy," Vader intoned. "Today I have taken action long overdue. Emperor Palpatine's crimes are many, from the orchestration of the Clone Wars to the terror with which he has ruled you since his rise to power. Today I have proven my loyalty to you, to true peace, by acting on my mandate as defender of the Empire. Emperor Palpatine has been executed for his many crimes; so justice has been served. Worry not, for while things will change, your lives will be uninterrupted. All hail Emperor Vader, and a new era of peace and justice!"

Boba sat back in his chair while the crew around him cheered, rubbing his temples. They had decided to let Vader make his own speech, in the name of preserving authenticity, but the man was a terrible public speaker. He was going to need a speech-writer if they wanted any hope of avoiding riots.

But it was over; the worst of it, anyway. They could worry about making Vader socially acceptable tomorrow.

---

"You're a hard guy to find, you know that?"

Boba tore his stare from the crowd below to arch a brow at Han. He'd chosen his perch in the first mezzanine carefully: he could keep an eye on things but go mostly unnoticed in the shadow of a support column. He'd cleaned and repainted his armour for the celebration of successful peace talks between the Empire and the Alliance; Han had apparently been forced to subject himself to a tailor, and he almost looked civilised in a blue military-style suit with his bloodstripes on the legs. "You'd never make it as a bounty hunter, if you thought that was hard," he deadpanned.

Han snorted and offered one of the two glasses he was holding; the contents were virulently green and effervescent, smelling faintly of mint. "C'mon, it's a party, lighten up a little."

They tapped the rims of their glasses together in a wordless toast and drank. It was fruity and tart but inoffensive and low on the alcohol scale. Boba shrugged as Han pulled up at the railing beside him. "It's a party, yeah, but on Imperial Centre. I worry I'm gonna relax too much and then we lose one of you to a hunter who isn't me."

"Vader cancelled all Imperial bounties on Alliance personnel."

"There are other people you've pissed off. Durga still wants a word with you." Boba scoffed. "He commed, wanted me to steal you out of the middle of the peace proceedings."

Han grimaced. "Well, that's rude."

They shared their drinks in relative silence - the music from the band playing below was lively, the musicians' own rendition of a popular song from almost thirty years earlier, and Boba idly wondered how long it had been since anyone had been allowed to perform anything other than officially approved music. In front of the Emperor, at least. Vader sat on the hot seat on the dais; he was still wearing armour, but it was different and subtle, layered more like decorations over robes in a dark berry-red and cream. He even had his helmet off, although the breathing apparatus still covered his lower face. A very different look from the last guy, making a very unsubtle point.

The entire celebration and the peace proceedings had been holocast across the galaxy, although between Vader and General Naberrie they'd agreed beforehand to give the impression that Vader had approached the Alliance and not the other way around. It would be impossible to keep the Alliance's presence in the operation over Coruscant a secret; they might as well acknowledge it and give the new Emperor credit for starting something that might one day become real peace.

"So. Mand'alor." Han deliberately butchered the pronunciation, making Boba laugh. "You okay with that, your Highness-ness?"

Boba leveled a finger at him even as he was grinning. "Don't start that shit. Mandalorians don't do social classes. I'm just someone everyone decided they want to listen to." He frowned for a moment. "I don't even know much about leading. My ba'buir was supposed to have been a good leader. Maybe the goran kept copies of the stuff he wrote." At Han's astonished blink, Boba grinned and explained, "Mand'alor the Reformer was a real bookish type, even by Mando'ad standards."

"Mand'alor the Reformer," Han mused. He rested his elbows on the railing and leaned there. "That's a hell of an act to follow. You got a fancy title too, yet?"

Boba pressed his lips together and his soulmate's grin blossomed. "Oh, this ought to be good! C'mon, what'd they call you?"

Sighing, Boba knocked back the rest of his drink. "Mand'alor te Sen'tra. Shut up." He shoved Han's shoulder as the other laughed. "It's a loaded fucking title! Some jerk from the Wren clan came up with it and everyone liked it best."

"Okay, explain Mand'alor the Jetpack to me." Han's poodoo-eating grin wasn't going away and Boba grumbled.

"Mandalorians name our things after other things. Laara'sen, sen'tra, cin vhetin. It's a poetic language. The Sen'tra is the starbird, rising again from the flames of its own demise; in Mandalorian lyrical speech, it means revival and rebirth. Renewal." He reached over and prodded the Alliance logo - an abstracted image of a rising starbird - on Han's shoulder. "We named the devices which let us fly on flames for them. And now everyone is calling me that. Mandalore the Renewer." He laughed, self-deprecating and wry. "And I thought Jaster's legacy was a heavy one."

Han draped his arm over Boba's shoulders. "Okay, I kinda get it. It's a trend you're going to continue, right?"

Boba scoffed. "I'd be happier if it hadn't started."

"Would you, though? Would the Mandalorians have shown up if the armorers hadn't chosen you?" At Boba's sharp look, Han tilted his head, staring at Boba from under his brows. "Hey, I do pay attention to how things work. A lightsaber doesn't make you Mand'alor any more than it makes Leia or Luke a Jedi. It's a sword, one with an attitude, but you only get as much authority as everyone else gives you. Right?"

Boba sighed and nodded. "Right."

Your soulmate is wise, for all he mimics ignorance. He'd make a fine Mandalorian, if he were not so adamant about avoiding joining groups.

Boba rested his hand on the Dha'kad, willing it to silence. It didn't communicate often, at least, but it did have opinions.

Han noticed and arched a brow in question; Boba shook his head and changed the subject. "What are your plans now? I heard they offered you a commission?"

His soulmate pulled a face. "Yeah. I'm not taking it. Not much of a joinin'-up type, you know?"

"You've been with the Alliance for three years, Vykk."

"Yeah, an' you know why?" Han aimed a finger, somehow not spilling the drink in his hand, over at a pair of people who were talking animatedly with one of the Imperial officers. "Those two kids. On their own, they're scary. Together? They can make anyone believe in them." He paused, then said, "Also, I was hiding from a bounty hunter."

"It did work. Smart call."

Han reclaimed his arm and turned to rest his hip against the rail. He finished his drink, then cupped the empty glass between his hands. "I'm not joining up, but Luke has some ideas about rebuilding the Jedi differently and everyone is listening to him. Prob'ly gonna help him with that, stars know he needs someone to watch his back, and his sister would murder me if anything happened to him because I sat out. What about you?"

Boba chuckled at that. "Been exchanging intel with Vader's people. There's some factions of the Fleet that cut and ran as soon as Vader's announcement went out. We're gonna track 'em down and offer them a single chance to get with the program. We also found some evidence of Palpatine's secret projects all over the galaxy, including a big one in the Unknown Regions. I wanna reach out to the Chiss, see if they've encountered anything."

"The Chiss?" Wrinkling his nose, Han said, "As long as they don't shoot you first."

"Nobody knows that part of space like they do. If we tell them what we're after, they might let us know where to go, make things easy." Boba shrugged. "I'm not expecting to make friends or anything, but I know they don't want outsiders around the Ascendency."

Han nudged him with an elbow, grinning. "There you go: you might not want to lead, but you're just doing it anyway. C'mon. Chewie said there's a sabacc game starting, Alliance versus Imperial."

Boba squinted at him. "Are you trying to get Mandalore in on this, Captain?"

His soulmate's grin was unrepentant. "Would I do that?"

"In a heartbeat." Boba left his glass with a passing server droid. "Wearing a helmet all the time doesn't automatically mean we don't work on our sabacc faces. Challenge accepted."