Chapter Text
Kix woke suddenly, something in his hindbrain urging caution even before he was fully conscious. He kept his breathing steady while he tried to assess his surroundings, trying to work out what could possibly have made him react that way; he was home, after all. Any kind of threat that wanted to reach them here would have had to blow up half the palace before they could make it this deep into Boba’s security.
Warmth on one side of him, a strong arm slung over his middle, the faint smell of spices; Boba, still sleeping. Something hot and leathery on top of his feet, breathing; Princess. And more than half on top of him—ah, that was it. Rex, who had as always squirmed to the top of the vod-pile in his sleep, was awake and tense.
It couldn’t be real danger, or Boba and Princess would have roused. Bad dream maybe?
“Vo! No nu!”
…Or maybe Rex had woken up to see what looked like a baby version of the Grandmaster of the Jedi Order sitting on top of him, and thought he was hallucinating or something.
Kix could sympathize.
“Su coo vo!” Grogu said happily.
“…General?” Rex said. He sounded mildly concussed.
Grogu made a grumpy noise. Kix wished he wasn’t stuck under Rex—he wanted to see Rex’s expression. It was probably hilarious.
Kix heard a soft swoosh and then a thump: the now-familiar sound of a very small being using the Force to summon a datapad from wherever he’d left it.
“Good Morning New Vod,” the datapad voice said. “Question New Vod Aliit Grogu.”
“I—what?” Poor Rex. Kix should probably help him out. Soon. After he’d had a chance to hear more of the conversation.
“Kix Same Face Bo’Buir. Kix Vod Bo’Buir Yes. Kix Ba’vodu Grogu Yes Aliit Grogu Yes.”
Grogu was good with those buttons. Such a smart kid. They really needed to upgrade the datapad to a more natural sounding voice, though.
“New Vod Same Face Bo’Buir. Question New Vod Bo’Buir Vod. Question New Vod Ba’vodu Grogu.”
Kix could practically hear Rex’s brain overheating, and finally took pity on him. “He’s asking if you’re his uncle,” he said. “Since I look like Boba, and I’m his uncle, and you look like both of us.”
“New Vod Aliit Yaim,” the datapad voice added.
“And because you’re in the private family rooms,” Kix said, then something occurred to him. “Oh, that’s Grogu,” he said. “Din and Boba’s son. No relation to General Yoda except being the same species and having the Force, at least as far as any of us know.”
“Question New Vod Aliit Grogu. Question Please.”
“Well? Aren’t you going to answer him?” Kix grinned into his pillow.
“Oh,” Rex said. He cleared his throat. “I. Yes. I’m Boba and Kix’s brother, so, um, I guess that makes me your Ba’vodu. Hi. I’m Rex.”
Grogu squealed with glee; Boba snorted in his sleep and tried to bury his face in Kix’s side.
“Gro'ika, ori’vaar,” (it’s very early) Din groaned from Boba’s other side. Kix wondered when Din had joined the vod-pile. His voice wasn’t modulated; he was there without his helmet. Kix felt warm all over at the evidence that Din really was ready to embrace the vode as his clan.
“Bu!” Grogu squealed, then turned to his buttons. “Buir. Buir. New Vod New Ba’vodu Grogu Yes. Question New Ba’vodu Play Grogu Big Please.”
“You can ask Ba’vodu Rex to play with you after he’s had a chance to get dressed,” Din said. “Remember how we talked about being patient.”
“Lek, Bu,” Grogu said, heaving a pitiful sigh.
Rex would crumple within a minute, Kix thought. Maybe less.
“Maybe we can play after breakfast, um, Grogu,” Rex said. “Also… hi? Boba’s ven’riduur, right?”
“Din Djarin,” Din said. “Olarom, vod. (Welcome, brother.) We’re very glad to have you.”
“Why is everyone talking,” Boba said grumpily.
“Your son was very excited to meet his new ba’vodu,” Din said, his voice fond.
“Bobu Bobu Bobu,” Grogu said, excited.
Boba extricated one arm from the vod-pile and patted him. “Morning, kid.”
“Question New Ba’vodu Bantha Face Why,” Grogu’s datapad said, and Kix started laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe.
Eventually, they all disentangled themselves and said proper good mornings before Din and Boba took Grogu back to their quarters to get ready for the day. Kix offered to lend Rex some clothes out of his frankly excessive Boba-provided wardrobe until he had a chance to collect his luggage, then gave him first dibs on the fresher.
He only called Rex “Bantha Face” twice, which he thought was very restrained of him.
By the time they reconvened for firstmeal, Grogu’s datapad had acquired a “Rex” button, which Grogu immediately used to charm his new ba’vodu into letting Grogu ride on his shoulders.
And give Grogu most of his sweet roll.
And promise to play with Grogu after they finished eating.
It was fine, Kix thought. Everyone was a soft touch for Grogu. It was hard to resist the combination of hopeful big eyes and tentatively angled ears and the datapad voice saying “Ba’vodu Play Grogu Big Please.”
Give it a day or so and Rex’d start to build up some immunity. Maybe a week at the outside.
After breakfast, they all split off for their morning duties. Boba and Fennec were giving Rex a tour and introducing him around, Skad and Din were looking at the bounty rosters for the month, Krrsantan was taking a meeting with the leader of a Wookiee shipping consortium that was angling for a long-term contract in the sector, and Kix had open clinic hours. Drash was taking Grogu for “Introductory Mechanics” training (which was basically an attempt to teach him what different tools were called and not to put ship parts in his mouth; it seemed a little odd for a kid that young, but Din had been surprisingly insistent that it was necessary.)
Kix sensed a story there; he’d have to remember to weasel it out of Din some time.
Kix had immunized three babies, given one emergency rehydration protocol, and treated one set of plasma burns (with referral to the appropriate remedial welding safety training holo-course as part of the aftercare instructions) when his comm started beeping urgently. He stepped into his office and took the call.
“Kix you’ve gotta help me, the boss is gonna murder me, I am going to die,” Drash said, her words tumbling over one another in her haste to speak.
“Slow down,” he said, crossing the room to grab his emergency field kit. “Where are you, and what happened?”
“I just turned my back for a minute, I swear,” she said, her voice going even higher. “I don’t know how—I didn’t—”
“Drash!” he barked out her name like a command, using the tone that made panicking shinies pay attention. “What happened?”
“I lost Grogu,” she wailed. “Kix, I swear, I swear to you we were doing our lesson and I turned around to put the tools away and when I turned back around he was gone!”
Kix sighed and put his kit back down. “Breathe, Drash, it’ll be okay,” he said. “You know he likes to run off like that sometimes, he gets an idea in his head and just goes. I think it’s a Force thing, all the Jedi I knew did it too. They feel something shiny in the Force and go after it. I’m sure he’s fine. Boba and Din won’t be mad, he does that to everyone. I know for a fact he’s run away from both Fennec and Santo before.”
Drash made a muffled sobbing noise, but when she spoke, she sounded a bit more composed. “R—right. I knew that. Okay. We just… we just need to find him.”
“You look in the hangars and kitchens,” Kix said. “I’ll check the family floors and then go to the throne room and the rancor pit. If he didn’t go to get something from his room, try to sneak a snack, or visit Sweetums, we’ll get the others to help look. Worst comes to worst, we’ll get everyone to try to emote being sad really loud, that’ll draw him out.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I can do that. Okay. Thanks, Kix.”
Kix sighed and drained the rest of his caff in one go before putting up the “closed unless you’re dying” sign and heading upstairs to check the family rooms. Grogu wasn’t there, and Kix didn’t see any signs of him (he was quite good at using the Force to get to snacks he wasn’t supposed to have, but terrible at hiding the wrappers afterward).
Kix half-suspected that Grogu had gone looking for Boba and Rex, hoping to emotionally manipulate his new ba’vodu into extra playtime, but if that was the case, they’d know soon enough.
He was opening the back door to the throne room on his way to check the rancor pit when he heard it.
“—Big Want Play,” said Grogu’s datapad.
A laugh. “I bet you do, ad’ika, but the grown-ups have to do their work.” A woman’s voice, but it wasn’t Fennec or Drash or Garsa or anyone else he knew.
Kix started running without even consulting his higher brain functions. He skidded gracelessly to a halt just in front of the bar in the back of the throne room, where the new bartender was doing something with a datapad and a crate of bottles—restocking and inventory, likely—and Grogu was perched happily on the bar watching her, his own datapad clutched in one chubby little hand.
The bartender—what was her name again? Payne? Jay?—looked up from her work, startled. “Um… hi?” she said. “Dr. Mereel, yeah? The Daimyo’s brother? Can I help you?”
“Look Kix New Friend Grogu,” Grogu made his pad say. “Kaysh Mando Jate Jate. Buir Talk.”
Kix wasn’t sure what to address first; his head was spinning with the aftermath of adrenaline. He held up a hand. “One moment, please,” he said, and sent Drash a quick textcomm letting her know that Grogu had been located safely. Then he looked between the bartender (friendly and puzzled) and Grogu (excited and smug), and sighed.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “This little guy ran away from his teacher this morning, we’ve been in a bit of a state trying to track him down.”
“Grogu Look New Friend Force,” Grogu said through his buttons, pouting. “Mando Friend Big Happy Buir.”
“Grogu,” the bartender said, leveling the kid with a fairly impressive “disappointed ori’vod” look. “It’s scary for your aliit if they don’t know where you are.”
Grogu’s ears drooped. Kix seized the opportunity to emphasize the lesson using his Padawan-wrangling skills.
“Drash was very worried when she couldn’t find you, Commander,” he said solemnly. “She was so scared she cried.”
Grogu’s entire body slumped; Kix felt a pang of guilt as he reached for his buttons again. “Grogu Big Sorry.”
“You can let Drash know the next time you see her,” he said, reaching out to rub Grogu’s back. “We know you didn’t mean to scare us, and we aren’t mad at you. We love you.”
“I know it’s hard to wait when you have a fun idea, ad’ika,” the bartender said, her voice warm. “But next time, remember to be kind to the people who care about you and wait for them, ‘lek?”
“Lek,” Grogu sighed.
The immediate crisis resolved, Kix turned back to the bartender. “I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name,” he said, sheepish. “I’m Kix Mereel, I run the medbay and the clinic. Also I’m technically the Surgeon General of Tatooine, though I haven’t done much with that, yet.”
“Jain Manari,” she said, smiling. “Technically, right now I’m a bartender, though I’m hoping to apprentice with Fennec Shand. I’ve also got a lot of younger siblings at home, so…” she gestured at Grogu. “I guess I’ve got big-sib vibes or something.”
“Kaysh Mando Friend,” Grogu’s tablet said.
“My Buir’s Mandalorian,” she explained. “Grogu got really excited about that.”
“New Friend Mando Buir. Grogu Mando Buir. Same.”
“I thought that smu—ah, courier that Boba hired was your dad?” The bacta smuggler hadn’t worn beskar’gam; Kix would definitely have noticed. Maybe they were part of the Duchess’ faction? “Are you, um, New Mandalorians?”
She snorted. “Maybe when banthas fly,” she said, making Grogu giggle. She pulled up one of her sleeves for a moment, revealing a slice of red-painted metal; a vambrace, Kix realized.
“I grew up in a Mandalorian community,” she continued. “Only one of my parents is Mando’ad, though; Papa calls us an interfaith family. He didn’t want to convert, I guess—didn’t want to give up his birth culture.”
“Buir Talk,” Grogu’s buttons insisted. “Mando Friend. Happy Buir.”
“I already talked to the Daimyo, isn’t he your Buir?” She talked to Grogu, looking as engaged in the conversation as she would with any adult she was talking with; Kix approved.
Grogu looked down at his buttons, then made a frustrated sound, apparently not seeing what he wanted. “Bobu,” he said, waving his little hand at the throne, then pressed his “Bo’Buir” button.
“The Daimyo’s your Bo’Buir?” Jain asked. “And your Buir is someone else?”
“Jate. Kaysh Big Good Mando.”
“A different Mando’ad?” She tilted her head to one side thoughtfully. “Oh! The one with the gorgeous set of unpainted beskar?”
Grogu crowed in delight. “Lek! Bu!” He looked up at Kix with a pleading expression.
“That’s him,” Kix said, rubbing his thumb over the wispy hair on Grogu’s head. “Al’verde Djarin. Grogu’s right that he’d probably really like to talk to you later.”
She looked puzzled. “Not that I’m not happy to meet him, but I’m not sure why he’d want to talk to me in particular,” she said.
“Bu,” Grogu said, then went for his buttons again. “Buir Big Want Mando Talk.”
“He… likes to talk to other Mando’ade?”
Kix paused. Honestly, he only had a vague concept of what exactly Din’s role with the Mandalorian government involved; most of what he’d seen so far mainly consisted of Din sitting through long comms from the Mand’alor while he cleaned his blasters and made occasional comments or suggestions. “He’s some kind of advisor to the Mand’alor,” he said. “I don’t know a whole lot about it, but I think they’ve been trying to get in touch with the Mandalorian diaspora to make sure everyone has a chance to participate in the reconstruction. They’ve found a lot, but new groups keep cropping up. A lot of them have been living off-grid since Empire Day.”
Jain blinked. “There’s a Mand’alor?” she said. “Like, a real Mand’alor? Not just some Republic puppet they call the Mand’alor?”
Kix nodded. “Bo-Katan Kryze.”
“What, again? Seriously?”
“I wasn’t… around when it all went down,” Kix said, “But Din was there, he could tell you more. Apparently they pushed the last of the Imps off Mandalore about… two, three years ago? They’ve been working on rebuilding ever since.”
“We’d heard rumors,” Jain said. “But… there are always rumors, and none of them were ever true before. And it never seemed all that relevant. Our covert wasn’t even from Mandalore, originally; before the Imps pushed them out, most of them were mercenaries and hunters working out of Republic space.” She rubbed her forehead. “Wow. I guess I really should talk to your Buir, ad’ika. Then maybe I might need to comm my Buir and see about setting up a meeting or something.” She laughed. “This was not the way I expected my first week to go, I have to admit.”
“Welcome to Mos Eisley palace,” Kix said drily. “Every day’s an adventure.”
“That’s what I’m hoping for,” she said, grinning.
She was very cheerful for someone who wanted to be an assassin, Kix thought. Still, it’s not like he was qualified to judge. Maybe it took a while to refine your sardonic eyebrow and air of ennui.
“It’s almost midmeal,” he said. “Why don’t we head to the dining hall? I can introduce you to Din and he can fill you in on the whole Mandalore thing; he certainly knows the details of everything better than I do.”
“Nom nom!” Grogu said, grinning.
“Yeah, Commander, I know, Grogu big want food,” Kix said affectionately, kissing the top of his head. Seriously, the kid was a bottomless pit.
Grogu giggled. “Lek!”
Jain shut down her datapad and slid it back under the bar. “Sounds like a plan,” she said. “Lead on, Doctor.”
“I’m not technically a doctor yet,” Kix said. “I’m a combat medic. I’m working on qualifying, though; I’m hoping to finish before the end of the year.”
“Oh, Open University?” Jain said. “I did a degree with them a couple of years ago, my parents didn’t want me working until I was a little older.” She rolled her eyes. “I’d have been fine, they’re just overprotective.”
“Mandalorian parents, overprotective?” Kix picked Grogu up and let him clamber to his favorite perch on Kix’s shoulder. “Surely you jest.”
She laughed, and they chatted idly about holonet coursework and Jain’s impression of the palace so far as they made their way to the dining hall. Din came over to reclaim his son and was indeed delighted to learn about Jain’s Mandalorian family connections; soon, the two of them and Grogu taken over one corner of the long table, deeply immersed in what sounded like a Mando family gossip session.
Kix sat with Boba, Rex, and Fennec.
“Did you know Tynn Manari’s co-parent is a Mandalorian?” he asked.
“Huh,” Boba said. “I did not. Interesting.” He looked thoughtful. “Now that you say that, though, I’m not surprised. He’s always felt kind of… familiar. Mannerisms, turns of phrase, that kind of thing.”
“Yeah, Din’s running Jain through every clan he knows to see who she’s related to,” Kix said. “Or at least, that’s what I think is happening. They went beyond my Mando’a fluency level pretty quickly.”
Boba smiled. “There are a few clans they’re still trying to find,” he said. “Maybe she’ll know one of them.”
“Mandalorians are crafty,” Rex said. “If they don’t want you to find them, you won’t. Not without getting stupid lucky or paying a fortune, anyway.”
“Your siblings are the same way,” Fennec said. “One of the few contracts I ever failed was on a clone. A little blonde kid.” She cast an expert eye on Rex’s short-cropped hair, which still showed blonde scattered through the silver. “Were you two based on the same variation? I never saw any other natural blonde clones. Of course, I’m not exactly an expert.”
Boba was staring at her. “Buir’s older sister was a blonde,” he said. “Our Ba’vodu Arla. She was killed by Death Watch. I always thought Rex probably got his hair color from whatever ancestor she inherited it from.” He shook his head. “When did you take a contract on a clone, Fen? And why?”
“It was right after Empire Day,” Fennec said, cutting up a pallie. “Not an assassination contract; retrieval. One of the scientists from Kamino was paying. The kid had run off with a squad of older clones, but apparently she was some kind of control specimen and the Kaminoan wanted her back.”
“Omega,” Rex said. “You’re talking about Omega. She’d have looked maybe… twelve standard? Running with a batch of non-standard clones. One really big one, one with cybernetic parts, one with half his face tattooed—”
“That’s them,” Fennec said. “She was a sweet kid; they were incredibly protective of her.” She made a face, half-rueful. “Probably for the best, all things considered.”
“The longnecks made a girl clone?” Boba looked between Rex and Fennec, shaken. “I mean, one that they knew was a girl? And they let her be?”
“She was like you,” Rex said. “Didn’t have the standard alteration package, aged like a natborn. Even the names—letters in some natborn language, I think. Alpha, the first—” he gestured at Boba—“and Omega, the last.”
“I always thought I was the only one,” Boba said, looking down at his plate. “I—I always knew I was the only one. Alone, even among the millions. It never even occurred to me that it might not be true. It never even occurred to me to check. I—oh kark.” He looked up at them, his face gone pale. “She was the new Prime, wasn’t she. With Buir dead and me gone, she was the fallback. She must have thought I abandoned her, she must have thought—”
“Boba, no,” Rex interrupted. “She never thought that. She knew you had no idea she existed. And she was fine; she never deployed to the war, and Clone Force 99 took her off Kamino when they left, right after Order 66. Adopted her, really, and she adopted them right back.”
“Buir must not have known about her,” Boba said quietly. “He thought the Kaminiise gene mods were what made the difference between a clone and a child; if he’d found out they made another unaltered clone, he’d have wanted to raise her.”
“I think Nala Se hid most of her pet projects from Prime,” Rex said gently. “She didn’t want anyone getting in the way of her experiments.” He reached out and laid a comforting hand on Boba’s forearm. “If I were betting on it, I’d say she’ll probably turn up here with Echo when he visits,” he said. “She’s always wanted to meet you, Boba. She told me once she thought of you as her twin.”
“I feel a little like I should offer a retroactive apology,” Fennec said.
Boba snorted. “No debt, Fen,” he said. “If we start counting over old tallies, I doubt you’ll be the one to come up the loser.” He nudged her with his shoulder. “I am glad you failed the contract, though. It would be a shame for my older sister to have actually kidnapped my younger sister back to certain death on Kamino.”
Fennec gave Boba a narrow look. “That was terrible,” she said. “Being engaged has made you sentimental. Save that kind of thing for Djarin and your hordes of siblings.” She didn’t move any farther from Boba on the bench seat, though; Kix thought she actually leaned into him a little more.
“Of course, vod,” Boba said, with a smug little smile. “My mistake.”
“The things I let you talk me into, Fett.”
“Well, I hope Omega does turn up,” Kix said. “She sounds like fun.”
“She’s always been a menace,” Rex said. “So, yeah; she’s a lot of fun, at least when you don’t have to try to cover her tracks.”
“So… she’s just like the rest of the vode, then.”
Rex laughed. “Pretty much. I think she turned Hunter prematurely grey.”
“The duty and privilege of any vod’ika,” Kix agreed, and from there the conversation turned to various cadet shenanigans he and Rex had witnessed; Boba listened eagerly to their stories, a wistful smile on his face.
Honestly, Kix thought, it wasn’t at all surprising that Boba was prepared to take on ori’vod duties for however many thousand surviving clones he could dig up; what was surprising was that he hadn’t done it sooner.
After the midday rest—which Kix cajoled Rex into spending with him so that he could make sure the man actually got a nap—he handed Rex off to Boba again so that they could actually have the official-business conversation that had been interrupted the day before, and returned to the medbay for afternoon clinic hours. It was a slow afternoon; Drash came in to get a bacta patch for a pinched finger and stayed to keep him company.
She’d taken to doing that pretty frequently, lately. Normally, Kix would have chased her out of his medbay, but Drash was very good about making herself scarce when Kix had a patient or needed to focus, and she was never averse to helping Kix take inventory or sitting beside him on the couch in his office to quiz him on his study modules. She also had a lot of useful things to share about living with a cybernetic prosthetic; the technology had come a long way since the Clone Wars, even out here on Tatooine, and Kix was thinking about doing a sub-specialization once he got his basic medical quals out of the way. There were a lot of amputees on Tatooine, thanks to generations of exploitative hard labor practices, and until the modders had set up shop most of them hadn’t been able to get anything but the clunkiest prosthetics. Custom neuro-tuning and cosmetic work were still out of reach for many, but Kix thought there was a lot of potential for mass-producing some of the Mods’ techniques. If they could get the unit cost down and figure out a way to make medical support more accessible, he thought he might be able to get Boba another profit line for the gotra that would also help a lot of people on the Rim. It would even pair nicely with the bacta business.
“So,” Drash said after a while, fiddling with the access port on her wrist. “Is the boss gonna get what he wants? More of your brothers coming to stay here?”
“I don’t know how many of them will stay, but I imagine we’ll at least get a fair number coming to visit,” Kix said.
“And you?” She didn’t look up, flicking the port open and shut. “You gonna go live on their secret clone planet, wherever it is?”
“Nah.” Kix shrugged. “I mean, I’d like to see it, but I like living here. There’s good work to do. Good people. I never really had a chance to put down roots, before. Turns out I kind of like it.”
She didn’t look up, but something in the line of her shoulders eased. “Good,” she said. “I mean. Santo would have missed you.”
He nudged her ankle with the toe of his boot. “Santo would, would he? Well, I’d miss Santo, too. I’ve really enjoyed spending time with him.”
She bit her lip, but he could see a grin trying to slip out around the corners of her mouth. “Good,” she said. “It’s terrible to see a Wookiee cry.”
“Good thing we don’t need to worry about it, then,” Kix said. He cleared his throat, turning to his next module. “Think you could help me with my Devaronian anatomy flashcards?”
She took the offered datapad, her smile a little smaller and softer than usual. “I’d be happy to,” she said.
It took Kix three passes to get all the flash cards right; he wasn’t in top form. But, he thought, it was only natural for him to be a little distracted, what with everything that was going on. Still, he managed to get where he needed to be eventually and clear his module test before Boba commed him to give Rex a clinic tour. Drash came along, claiming she didn’t have anything else to do. She spent most of the tour trying to talk Rex into telling stories about Kix during the war, not stopping until Fennec pulled her aside for something on the way in to latemeal that resulted in her spending the meal huddled in one corner of the dining room with Skad, having an intense debate over a datapad.
Kix and Rex ended up in the middle of a working discussion with Boba and Fennec, who were trying to decide between two competing security plans for the new mushroom garden they were sponsoring in one of the caves outside of Mos Espa. It was weirdly similar to some of the conversations they’d had during the war, if you ignored the topic: like any time that senior staff had been putting their heads together over meals or caff, trying to work out the best uses for limited resources.
It was nice, being able to contribute.
After they’d eaten, Din came up to Kix with a sheepish angle to his shoulders.
“What would you think about keeping Grogu with you tonight?” he asked, angling his body to make it clear he was talking to Rex as well. “Boba’s… it’s been a lot, the last few days. Good things,” he added hastily, “but I feel like he needs a little room to process, and Grogu’s so attuned to his moods that he won’t do it if the kid’s with us.”
“Sounds like fun,” Rex said at once.
“Absolutely,” Kix agreed. “It’s been too long since we had a cadet sleepover. You take care of Boba, vod, and we’ll look out for the little Commander.”
Din relaxed. “You should be careful,” he said. “Keep calling him that and he’ll think he’s in charge around here.”
“You mean he isn’t?” Kix asked, mock-innocent, and Din laughed.
“Sure, okay, good point,” he said, then grew more serious.
“Thank you,” he said. “For everything. You being here—both of you being here—I don’t think you can possibly know how much it means to Boba. He’s been… very alone, for a long time. He has us now—me and Grogu and Fennec and the others—but there was always something he needed that we couldn’t quite give. But since you woke up, Kix, it’s like a shadow lifted. I can’t tell you how glad it makes me.”
“I don’t think it’s just me,” Kix said. “But I’m glad to be here, too. I’m glad to have you all.” He glanced at Rex. “I don’t think our people were made to be alone.”
“The GAR, or genetic Fetts?”
“Either,” Kix said. “Both, maybe.”
“Either way, you’re right,” Rex said. “Every trooper I ever met would go a little peculiar if they weren’t living with a few close brothers.” He paused, tilting his head thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s what went so wrong with Prime,” he said. “He was the least clannish Mando I ever heard of; didn’t seem to give a kriff about anyone or anything but Boba, even though the other trainers all socialized with each other.”
Din sighed. “From what I know, a lot of things went wrong with Boba’s buir,” he said. “Long before he ended up on Kamino. But he was good to Boba, for all of it, and Boba loved him. He knows that Jango wasn’t without fault in everything that happened, but…”
“Family’s family,” Rex said. “For good or for bad.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Prime wasn’t… he wasn’t real to most of us the way he was to Boba. He was like a, a legend, or a holo-star. Only the oldest few batches really interacted with him much. It’s hard, sometimes, to think of him as just… a person, like anyone else.”
“Whatever he was, or wasn’t, I’m glad I got to meet his family,” Din said. “If the rest of you are anything like Boba and Kix, they’ll be credits to our House if they accept Boba’s offer.”
They followed Din and Boba upstairs, where Kix tried very hard not to laugh at how serious Din was as he packed Grogu a little overnight bag containing two sets of sleep clothes, his favorite blanket, his stuffed bantha, and a tiny hammock. Meanwhile, Boba packed up a few of Grogu’s favorite snacks “in case he gets hungry” and then caved to a request for “Bo’Buir Sleep Song Please” and sang two verses of what sounded like a lullaby in Mando’a before Grogu would consent to let Kix hold him.
Maybe that’s just how natborn parents were with their little ones? Kix certainly didn’t have a very good gauge of what normal parenting was supposed to look like other than “definitely not an assembly line full of nurse droids.”
Once Grogu had given his parents several rounds of enthusiastic goodnight headbutts, they went next door to Kix’s rooms. Kix and Rex exchanged looks and then started laughing, helplessly; Grogu joined in after a few seconds, his bubbly little laugh every bit as unfairly cute as the rest of him.
“You’re a lucky kid, Commander,” Kix told him, when they’d finally settled down. “Your parents love you a lot.”
“Lek,” Grogu said happily, and started chewing on one of his stuffed bantha’s tusks.
Kix had been a little afraid that Grogu would refuse to be put to bed, but he seemed tired from his various adventures and agreeably allowed himself to be washed and changed for bed and tucked into his little hammock.
It only took three and a half bedtime stories for him to fall asleep, too, which was pretty fast in Kix’s experience. He and Rex went to sleep soon after; it wasn’t quite the same as a vod-pile, but it still felt so comforting to drift off with a brother at your back.
Kix wondered how long he could convince Rex to stay on Tatooine.
Grogu slept through the night—or at least he didn’t wake Kix up and was still asleep in his hammock in the morning—and started the day in a cheerful mood, insisting on giving Kix and Rex each multiple hugs and head-bonks by the time they got him dressed and downstairs for firstmeal. Boba and Din hadn’t come down yet, but that was fine; sometimes they ate privately in their rooms, especially if Din was about to go off-world for a while or Boba had a lot of meetings scheduled. Maybe they’d decided to take advantage of their child-free window to take some extra private time together. They certainly deserved it, with everything that had happened recently.
They ended up coming down about halfway through the meal, while Kix was trying to convince Grogu that his breakfast did not have to contain frogs to be perfectly edible. It was, Kix decided later, entirely Grogu’s fault—the kid was adorable but distracting—that he didn’t notice anything had changed until Fennec looked down at the table, dropped her spoon with a clatter, and then smacked Boba hard on the shoulder and called him something very rude in Bocce.
“What was that for?” Boba said, and the tone of his voice—somehow both smug and full of barely-restrained glee—had Kix and Rex both sitting up straight and turning to look at him in alarm. It was a tone they knew very well. A tone that meant that the ARCs had gotten bored and were about to do something “interesting” that would make the rest of the officers regret everything up to and including ever having been decanted in the first place.
What the kark had Boba—
“You know damn well what that was for,” Fennec said, grabbing Boba’s hand and slamming it down onto the table with a clang of beskar. “You swore up and down you weren’t going to do a Corellian wedding, and now you come in here sleek as a Hutt’s backside and radiating self-satisfaction, wearing this?” She waved at Boba’s hand; the entire table craned their necks to see…
To see that the black-painted hand plate that Boba normally wore had been replaced with a different one. A shiny silver one with a blue triangle painted on it.
My Armored Heart had spent a lot of time on the significance of wearing your lover’s armor. And discussing how the riduurok, traditionally, didn’t need any participants and witnesses besides the beings making the vows.
Corellian wedding, Kix thought with a jolt, and turned to look at Din on Boba’s other side.
Din waved a black-painted gauntlet at him, somehow managing to convey an incredible depth of languid slouching in the tilt of his helmet.
“You said you needed us to take the kid so Boba could emotionally process!” Kix yelped, affronted. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t have been willing to aid and abet his brother’s romantic pursuits. It just would have been nice to be asked properly. And to have time to get them a present.
Din shrugged. Somehow, Kix just knew he was smirking under his helmet. “One thing led to another.”
Boba leaned back, slinging his arm around Din’s shoulders. Din slumped into his side like maybe Boba’s armor was some kind of beskar-magnet. “And then I emotionally processed the realization that I didn’t want to see the suns rise even once more on a world where I wasn’t his riduur yet,” Boba said. “So… I didn’t.”
“Dammit, Boba,” Fennec said, sighing. “Congratulations, but there are people who care about you who might have wanted to be there.”
“Traditionally, it’s more the celebration than the actual vow that Mando’ade invite people to,” Din said. “We can still celebrate the riduurok however we want; we just didn’t want to wait any longer to swear the vows.”
“Yes!” Drash said, punching the air. “Mudhorn Invitational is a go.”
Grogu cheered, incidentally flinging a spoonful of his nutritionally-balanced frog-free breakfast goop into Rex’s beard.
(Kix wasn’t entirely sure it was an accident. Grogu seemed to have taken against the beard on the grounds that fur was for banthas, not ba’vodue.)
“Don’t you usually exchange vambraces when you get married?” Kix asked. My Armored Heart had made a big deal about the vambrace thing.
“It’s common, but not required,” Din said. “Mostly people just pick whatever makes the most practical sense. Boba and I have pretty different vambrace load-outs, and there’s not a goran (armorer) on Tatooine to adjust anything. We may do pauldrons or something later.”
Kix nodded, his eyes going to Din’s shiny shoulder-plate. On Din’s mudhorn signet, running down the length of the horn, the white sheaf of grain from Boba’s clan sigil had been delicately painted. He looked over at Boba’s chestplate; the blood drop on the Fett sigil had been replaced with a mudhorn.
He wondered, suddenly, if lovesick Mandalorians ever doodled various possible combinations of their own clan symbols with those of their crush, the way the trooper on sanitation duty had once found a sheet of flimsi on the General’s office floor covered with handwritten variations of his name and his senator’s. (Apparently “Padmé and Anakin Naberrie-Skywalker” had been the favorite, having been circled five times and surrounded with a number of doodled hearts. If Kix remembered right, Brewer—so named because of his magic touch with the caff machine—had seen significant popularity in the ship’s barter economy on the strength of it. The 501st, as a whole, had been fond of their general, but that didn’t mean they didn’t think his “secret” relationship was fascinating and hilarious by turns.)
Krrsantan said something in Shyriiwook.
“Ambassador Krrsantan would like to state that he will be planning the joining-feast,” 8D8 said.
“You can do the fancy diplomatic one,” Fennec said. “I want the podrace.”
“And the festival,” Drash added. “There has to be a festival; you can’t just have a fancy thing for offworlders, gotta have a way for our people to celebrate. I don’t think we’ve ever had a married Daimyo before!”
“My gran collected royal wedding souvenirs,” Skad said. “She had a teapot she got on Alderaan when Queen Breha married Senator Organa, with their faces on it and all. And a collectible plate from when King Yos Kolina’s wedding on Mon Cal. Maybe we should make something like that, for souvenirs.”
“Nobody is going to want a collectible plate with our faces on it,” Din protested. “What would you even—why would you want to eat your food off of someone’s face? That doesn’t even make sense.”
“You don’t use them,” Skad said. “You collect them. Obviously.”
“That makes even less sense,” Din said plaintively.
Kix was fairly sure Din had never collected anything in his life, unless maybe you counted weaponry.
“Didn’t we get a business proposal last week from a potter over by Anchorhead who wanted to do some kind of artisanal ceramic business?” Fennec said. “Maybe we can get them started with a limited-edition run of officially licensed Daimyo Fett Royal Wedding commemorative drinkware. Put the seal on the bottom, maybe number them.”
“People love when you number shit,” Skad said, nodding sagely.
“I’m not going to talk you out of this, am I,” Boba sighed.
“After you eloped when you specifically said you wouldn’t? Not a chance,” Fennec told him, with a predator’s grin.
“You should invite Luke to the feast,” Kix said. “Maybe Princess Organa, if she wants to come? And Ahsoka, and maybe some more of our brothers?”
Krrsantan growled.
“Ambassador Krrsantan suggests that we coordinate with Minister Rau to ensure that the Mandalorian contingent are adequately represented on the guest list, given Al’verde Djarin’s position in their government,” 8D8 translated.
“We’re going to have to invite Kryze, aren’t we,” Boba groaned, then another thought struck him and he sat bolt upright. “Oh, kriff me, we’re going to have to invite Solo.”
“Maybe he won’t come,” Din said, consoling.
“Ugh, we can only hope.”
“Bo-Katan definitely will, though.”
Boba sighed. “I would only do this for you, ner dinui,” (my gift) he said.
Din tugged Boba back to lean against him, leaning to touch their heads together gently. “I know, cyare,” he said. “Vor entye.” (Thank you/ I accept a debt)
“N’entye,” (no debt) Boba murmured, curling one hand around the back of Din’s neck. “No debt between us; we are one.”
“Mhi solus,” (We are one) Din said, and Kix was just starting to feel like maybe he should look away, or leave the room, or something—seriously, how could two men in nearly complete armor, one of whom was actually wearing a helmet, manage to create that much sexual tension—when Grogu’s datapad announced “Grogu Big Want Snuggles Please” just before the kid Force-jumped across the table, knocking over a bowl of mujafruit slices into Din’s lap on his way.
Yeah, Kix thought, smiling to himself as he watched his brothers try to sort out the jumble of food and giggling baby. He’d made the right choice.
He was home.