Chapter Text
Obi-Wan stares at the morning paper for a few long, long moments.
“Jan,” he says, “did you have anything to do with this?”
“Hm?”
“It appears that your friend’s husband is dead.”
Jango looks up at him through too-full lashes, in a way that might have been ‘demure’ or even ‘timid’ were he actually the hyperfeminine creature he was forced to play. “The man had a heart attack, Ben.”
“You already read the paper?”
“No.”
“Daisy told you?”
“Not that, either.”
Obi-Wan fixes his temporary spouse with a glare. “Did you kill this man?”
Jango puts a hand to his chest in mock offense. “Me? Kill someone? I’m just a weak, dainty, civilian woman, aren’t I?”
Jango definitely killed this man.
Maybe poison. Maybe something else. But it was definitely Jango.
Obi-Wan should object, somehow.
“Alright,” he says instead, as he has no Jedi authority here, and the legal system certainly isn’t going to interfere. “I’ll stop asking questions.”
“Good man,” Jango says, and Obi-Wan can only sigh. A good man wouldn’t let his spouse commit murder.
--
Jango has very few dresses that are black, and very few dresses that are not built for voluminous petticoats. He has one that is both black and understated, and that is what he wears to the funeral.
He wouldn’t normally attend the funeral of someone he’s killed, but Daisy needs support, and Jango’s decided to be that support. The girl’s eyes are mostly dry, but rimmed in red, and she’s holding her swaddled baby to her chest throughout the service. It’s a bit cold for such a small thing, but Jango imagines that’s what the many layers are for.
At times, Jango pulls Daisy closer to him, so the taller woman can lean on him for support.
(She wouldn’t normally be taller than him, unless she were both wearing heels and taking full advantage of her thick blonde curls, but currently…)
There is a dinner after, arranged mostly by Daisy’s mother—a demanding but somehow ditzy woman, blown in from another town to support her daughter in this terrible time—and Jango spends it largely at Daisy’s side, sitting close and letting her cry on his shoulder.
They get some odd looks for that. Jango has suspicions as to why, but he won’t know for sure until he understands some more of this planet’s very… peculiar biases.
“More wine?” Obi-Wan asks, stepping close enough to put a hand on Jango’s shoulder and squeeze.
“That would be lovely,” Jango says.
Jango wonders if Daisy’s tears, soaking into the top of his [arm’s-eye], are grief or just relief.
She hasn’t distanced herself from him, and of everyone, she would know that he’s responsible. Jango rather thinks she appreciates it.
Or she’s scared that he’ll hurt her if she tries to go against him.
Hm.
Obi-Wan returns with drinks: red wine for himself and Jango, and a glass of sparkling water for Daisy.
(As Jango’s learned, she worries over whether alcohol would affect her breast milk and thus her child. As such, she does not drink. Jango doesn’t know well enough to advise her either way; Boba was raised entirely on formula.)
Jango stays behind to help clean up, and Obi-Wan does as well. He even does the dishes.
Daisy seems wondrous at that, especially since Obi-Wan had said, firm and kind, “you have a baby to look after and a husband to mourn. You don’t need to do anything unless you think it would help take your mind off things. Let us do the work.”
Daisy’s mother seems torn at their involvement, especially given that she’s by now learned of the details of their reputations among the townsfolk, but she does not send them away. Many hands and all that.
(Were Jango actually ‘Janet,’ he’d probably have the honor of having the best husband of the town, at least by any reasonable standard.)
--
“You know people have started to gossip,” Obi-Wan says, doing his best to keep his tone mild.
“They always gossip,” Jango says. He gives Obi-Wan a sloe-eyed stare, sitting back in his chair and crossing one leg over the other. It’s very unladylike, and the way Jango drops his head upon his fist strikes Obi-Wan as almost… indolent. “What about this time?”
Obi-Wan considers, not for the first time, how to go about explaining the situation. Finally, he just cuts to the chase, “yourself and Daisy. There are mutterings of… infidelity. What they call lesbianism.”
The term’s equivalent in Basic is a little outdated, but not an insult. Here, it is contemporary, and quite rude.
“Let them.”
Obi-Wan rolls his eyes. “If we want to maintain enough freedom for me to do the research to get us out of here—”
“We still don’t know that it was some of your Force Magics.”
“—then we need to keep at least enough reputation to not get kicked from the libraries,” Obi-Wan stresses. He breathes out heavily. “Please do not interrupt me. Also, the Force is not magic. Magic is a matter for witches, such as those of Dathomir. There is overlap, but it is not the same thing, and they are not my magics in any way.”
Jango does not scoff, but Obi-Wan thinks the man would rather like to.
“You know as well as I do that there are more than a few options for how we ended up in this hell,” Jango says. He has that odd look that he always has when he says such things. Obi-Wan wishes he could grasp at the Force, get a better read on what that negative emotion is, but he can’t. His best guess is either discomfort or guilt, and while the former makes sense given the situation, his intuition says it’s the latter.
“At least consider how such rumors might affect Daisy,” Obi-Wan urges. “She’s the best friend you’ve gotten here, isn’t she?”
Jango makes a face. “Friend is pushing it. I feel more like I’m mentoring her than anything.”
“That’s because you’re not as young as you look,” Obi-Wan says drily. “Of course you feel more like you’re mentoring her. That doesn’t mean she’s not your friend, Jan.”
Jango purses his lips and looks away.
“She’s recently widowed and, while the life insurance policy may keep her afloat financially, she’s a single mother,” Obi-Wan says, and he is not a little nervous that his soft, kind tone may work against him. “This place is not kind to single mothers.”
“I’ll be more careful,” Jango mutters. “I hate the standards here. Even if we were f—fu—having intimate relations, and we’re not.”
“Well, she is half your age. It would be rather inappropriate in that regard.”
Obi-Wan is rather sure that Jango would like to throw something at him.
“Shall we discuss something else?” Obi-Wan tries.
“How about the rumors of your possible work affair?” Jango suggests.
Obi-Wan groans. “Wishful thinking on their parts, I assure you.”
Now that… that one manages to get a laugh out of Jango.
--
Jango finds a new dress in the closet. Like all such dresses so far, it’s not something he’d have picked for himself, ever, even if he were a woman. It is a rich, bright red, and trimmed in white fur at the collar and cuffs. It is full, with a judicious use of petticoats, and there are matching pearls at the vanity.
“This is for the holiday party,” Obi-Wan surmises, and Jango sighs.
There are several holiday parties.
He does not want to go to a holiday party. It is not a generic holiday party, either, but something called Christmas. It is very religious, and most who do not subscribe to the religion in question are somewhat ostracized by the sheer ubiquity of it. This is true of all times of the year, but somehow even more so in the early winter.
Jango is one of those people, as is Keno—as is Obi-Wan, but they do not have the luxury of actually saying this to their neighbors and fellows. They are locked into pretending to be ‘Catholic,’ and there is no way out. At best, their discomfort is interpreted as being at odds with the commercialization of the ‘birth of Jesus.’
Jango barely knows who Jesus is.
“How many do we have to go to?” Jango asks. He looks over the invitations on the caff table. There are six.
“The one for the school staff,” Obi-Wan says, “as I imagine I don’t have much of a choice there.”
Ugh. Civilian professional niceties. How incredibly tiring. “Fine. Do I have to come?”
“Yes.”
“Drat.” It deserves a stronger word. He can’t say those stronger words.
It’s odd, considering he killed a man several weeks ago. He can commit murder, but profanity is off the table?
“I suppose I could try to rip them up and see which ones we can’t destroy,” Obi-Wan suggests. “Presumably, whatever it is that controls us has the final say on whether we’re allowed to deny any at all.”
Jango does not have a better idea, and reaches for an invitation himself.
Neither of them can tear any of them.
Each time they try, they freeze up before they can do more than bend the paper.
Fuck.
--
The parties are dreadfully boring and vain and just the same as every dinner party they’ve attended since waking up on this blasted planet, but with tinsel.
It almost makes him wish he were guarding a Senate gala instead. At least then he’d be able to excuse himself from conversations he dislikes with the excuse of patrolling.
“Your momma’s going to return in just a bit,” Jango’s voice catches his attention, almost cooing, and even higher-pitched than usual. “She just needed to freshen up a bit. Okay, ad’ika?”
Jango is holding Daisy’s baby, cradled in one arm and tickling its tummy with the other hand. Jango’s smile seems almost genuine, and Obi-Wan wonders for the nth time what family Jango still has where they started. All he’s been told is of the dead and estranged.
Obi-Wan has mentioned Anakin a few times, but Jango has kept his cards closer to the chest.
“Hello there, young one,” Obi-Wan greets. The baby stares at him, eyes wide and silent, as though he’s the strangest thing it’s ever seen. “Oh, don’t act as though we’ve never met, dear.”
“I don’t think he understands you yet,” Jango says, but he seems more amused than anything.
“Perhaps,” Obi-Wan says, “but I’ve always believed in the value of speaking to children as they are simply small adults with more limited vocabularies. Most seem to appreciate it. My brother certainly did.”
Maybe if he brings up Anakin… but no, Jango’s expression has gone fixed. It still looks real, a genuine smile, to anyone who doesn’t know him.
“A possibility,” Jango allows.
Obi-Wan thinks that Jango holding the baby has more to do with Daisy needing a break from her child than with needing to use the washroom. Daisy loves the baby, indubitably, but even the most loving parent needs a break, and she’s been away nearly twenty minutes by the time she returns.
Jango is more than happy to hold the baby, almost every time Daisy needs someone to do so, and continues to hold even past the point at which she returns.
Obi-Wan wonders if he should comment on how Daisy appears to still trust Jango, even after the suspicious death of her husband, but certainly not here. Perhaps when they get back to that dreadful house of theirs.
“The dinner was nice,” Daisy says, with a glass of something that bubbles like champagne but likely isn’t. “Did you like it?”
It was so bland. Most of the flavor comes from the fats, especially from dairy products, and there is very little spice. Obi-Wan had loaded several of his dishes with the weak table pepper. Jango had nearly blanketed his own plates.
He thinks a few of the other guests were concerned by the degree of spice they were adding. Obi-Wan is not a man who thinks every meal needs to burn his nose hairs off. He is plenty fine with a plate that is mostly vegetables or something sweet. It’s just that here… so much of the flavor is just the dairy.
And then there’s the ‘jello’ monstrosity. It has meat in it. Meat and fruit and cheese.
He had some to be polite, but why. He’d rather eat those bugs Anakin is so fond of.
--
Jango wants to shoot someone.
He generally wants to shoot something, these past months, but right now he’d prefer to shoot a person. The only time’s he’s been able to let off a little steam, to release the pressure of his anger and disdain for everyone here, is at the carnival game.
And killing Daisy’s shitheel of a husband.
The bright spots of tonight have been getting to hold the baby, and watching the horror on people’s faces when he turned his soup nearly black with ground pepper. He often has to stay to Obi-Wan’s elbow, smiling at his ‘husband,’ adding the odd joke to conversations, but only if they don’t sound too clever, and seeing how much alcohol he can consume before whatever this curse is stops him from ‘being improper.’
What a fucking joke.
Some of the older women at the event, those with grown children and such, are gossiping in a corner. They don’t seem particularly invested in acting as arm candy the way Jango and the young ladies are. Daisy is the only exception so far, widowed as she is, but that’s little consolation. People are generally more interested in talking to her about the death than any other subject, and Jango wants to shoot all of them, too. It would be nice to make people stop prodding the wound of her husband.
(Not the wound of the death. Just the husband himself. Daisy, as far as Jango can tell, has very little mourning in her heart for that man.)
“—your brother like, Mr. Kenobi?”
“Ah, quite young, actually. I half-raised him after my father’s death,” Obi-Wan says, with the studied pleasantry of a man who attends far too many political events, from negotiating treaties to glitzy balls, as the picture of a serene Jedi. “He’s very interested in cars and planes, near anything with a motor. I had to dig him out of the garage, covered in machine oil, more times than I can count.”
Someone laughs. It’s polite, neither mocking nor genuine, and Jango lets it pass. That one’s doing his best to be a functioning member of society, probably.
Jango’s not. Jango’s stuck pretending to be a functioning member of society. Jango is in fact a man who kills, and not infrequently, for almost anyone with the funds to hire him.
Keno—Obi-Wan is a functioning member of Jedi society, probably.
Jango’s a little jealous.
Obi-Wan certainly hasn’t had to look in a mirror and realize he’s allowed the deaths of dozens of babes-in-arms, and toddlers, before he bothered to pay enough attention to realize how different his definition of ‘unsalvageable’ was to that of his employers. Obi-Wan probably hasn’t had to fight to get his mistakes placed in maintenance or coding just because their spine was a little underdeveloped to be on the field.
Obi-Wan hasn’t been waking up, and holding a baby that isn’t his, and wondering if all his millions of clones were just as sentient as this child seemed to be. Just as sentient as Boba. Just as sentient as Jango.
Obi-Wan doesn’t look in a mirror, remembering his own face less than that of the boy he’s raising.
Boys.
Millions of boys, and probably more than a handful of not-boys born of Jango’s own DNA.
Jango looks in the mirror, and sees a woman, and he wants to see himself. But when he tries to remember his own face, something he doesn’t bother to look at more often than it takes to shave and wash, he remembers the Alpha batch. The nulls. The almost-adults with his own face, that he sees day in and day out, and it always takes a few moments for him to realize what he’s searching for.
“Jan?” Obi-Wan mutters, putting a hand to Jango’s waist and pulling him close. “Are you alright?”
“Just peachy,” Jango mumbles.
“Talk about it when we get home?” Obi-Wan suggests. Jango shrugs, noncommittal, and wonders if he can grab another drink.
“Oh!” one of the older ladies exclaims. It’s not Gertrude or Beatrice, but they seem just as delighted as the speaker. They are all looking at Jango and Obi-Wan. “Mistletoe!”
Jango has heard of mistletoe and its traditions. With naught but trepidation, he cranes his head back and looks up. There is a sprig of green leaves and white berries hanging above his head.
Hells.
“Well, go on then,” one of the men says. He sounds amused.
Jango hates him immediately.
“Jan?” Obi-Wan prompts. He probably won’t do anything without Jango’s permission, unless that control kicks in, but…
“Duumyc,” Jango says, softly like it’s a word of endearment instead of a short ‘approved’ like he’d say in battle.
Obi-Wan is gentle with it, more so than Jango would have been if their roles were reversed, he thinks. The man sets down his drink, turns to face Jango fully, and cups one too-soft, too-smooth cheek in his hands. No stubble or wrinkles to feel here, and the slight callouses on Obi-Wan’s hands send shivers down Jango’s spine. It’s more than just the usual bone-deep joy that he is engineered to experience at the slightest touch. The man’s other hand goes to Jango’s thankfully-clothed shoulder.
Jango doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He settles on placing them lightly upon Obi-Wan’s jacket, fingertips slipping under the lapels.
He has to go to his tiptoes to meet Obi-Wan in the middle. Plush lips, just barely moist with wine, press to Jango’s, though he can’t fully feel it past the waxen layer of the lipstick he is wearing.
He also can’t keep track of details because of the earth-shattering pleasure that strikes him when their lips meet.
It’s like nothing he’s ever felt before. Jango has had sex, and it’s good, even great sometimes. He’s experienced the highs of spice, if not of his own free will. He has held his newborn son and nearly wept with joy.
And none of it quite compares to the insane surge of adrenaline and dopamine and whatever the hell else is making him lose his mind right now.
His knees buckle, and his heart pounds, and his stomach does backflips and cartwheels and whatever the hell else can describe the wondrous twisting in his abdomen.
Someone is whooping. Jango can barely care, because Obi-Wan’s hand has migrated from Jango’s shoulder to his waist, pulling him close and keeping him upright. One of Jango’s feet pops up, like a holorom character. Jango can’t decide between looping his arms around Obi-Wan’s neck or just holding on to those woolen lapels for dear life.
Obi-Wan tilts his head a little, and the kiss grows deeper, and Jango tries to press himself ever closer.
(He is wet. His core is hot and tight and he is growing wet.)
It is not a purely sexual pleasure, for all that the element is there. It’s just some approximation of love, of affection and yearning and devotion like Jango has never felt before. It’s not real, he knows, which is why he’s never felt anything like this, but it feels real, feels like something out of this galaxy, and he wants. He wants Obi-Wan like a dying man wants water. He needs.
There are catcalls and jeers and Jango’s head is spinning when Obi-Wan finally rips himself away.
“Damn, Ben, if that’s how she reacts every time, I can see why you don’t kiss in public,” one of the men jokes.
Jango’s ‘programming’ takes over, and before he can consciously even process the sentence, he ducks his head in false embarrassment and hides against his husband’s chest. He can still barely think for the love that is flooding his body like the whole of Kamino, can barely hear past the thunder of his own heart.
“It’s alright, darling, they’re only teasing,” Ben murmurs, running a hand up and down Jango’s back.
“Yeah, doll, you only moaned a little!” another snickers.
Jango doesn’t stiffen as much as Obi-Wan does. He feels the man turn to glare at the man who thinks himself such a joker. “Excuse me?”
“Fine, more of a whimper,” the idiot laughs.
Obi-Wan steps away when he turns more fully, tucking Jango into his side; Jango stays hidden to his shoulder. “I repeat, excuse me?”
Now, the doubtlessly intoxicated man seems to realize the comment was inappropriate at best.
Jango doesn’t care much.
He’s a little too busy catching his breath.
Fuck.
Fuck.
--
“You’re sure this is the place?” Alpha asks.
Anakin rolls his eyes. “We have the police approval to go wherever we need to, so if it’s not, we won’t even get that much trouble from it. A delay, sure, but I don’t think I’m wrong.”
“The police just let you do things!” Boba shouts, not for the first time.
“Perks of being a Jedi,” Anakin answers, the way he has every time it’s come up.
Alpha snorts as Anakin starts fiddling with the keypad to get into the building. “They let you hotwire security too?”
Anakin shrugs. “What they don’t know won’t hurt ‘em. If they’re upset, they can bill us. If Obi-Wan and your dad are actually being held prisoner here, the cost of the security damage won’t be our problem.”
“It will if they’re not here.”
“So it’s a good thing they will be,” Anakin snips back. “It’s three in the morning, man, can we please try to keep the—”
He is interrupted by the beeping of the keypad. The door swooshes open.
“And there we go!” Anakin cheers. He puts away his tools and strides in like he owns the place, because half the trick to success is just confidence. Alpha and Boba follow him, the kid’s lighter steps pattering in the attempt to keep up with Anakin’s longer strides. Anakin would slow down, except he’s got a bad feeling, so he’d rather get where he’s going as fast as possible. The kid can jog a bit. It’s fine.
“Skywalker—”
“Come on,” Anakin snaps, and even the way his robes flare out like a cool holohero doesn’t make him feel better against the concern he feels rising. He doesn’t know what it was, if maybe the building walls had some minor dampening, or if it’s just the conceptual proximity now that they’re inside, but his bad feeling has really ratcheted up in the past half a minute.
He’s nearly running when he reaches a set of double doors and, rather than slicing in like he did to get into the building, he just uses the Force to rip them from the hinges. Somehow, this doesn’t set off an alarm, but… well, Anakin always has more of the Force’s favor than anyone likes to admit.
The doors do not hit the Fetts, but honestly, Anakin barely notices.
The room beyond is dark at the moment, and largely chromed steel. There are many screens, and many wires, and many tubes. The computing machinery is massive.
Anakin doesn’t notice much of that, either.
He’s a bit preoccupied by the tall cylinders that look like bacta tanks but definitely aren’t.
“Dad!” Boba shouts, trying to run and being immediately caught by the neck of his shirt.
Anakin doesn’t feel bad about the little choking noise the kid makes, given the panic clawing its way up his own throat. “No!”
“Let me go, hut’uun!” Boba shouts.
He doesn’t know what that means. He shakes the kid. “Calm down! Don’t touch anything!”
“Any reason?” Alpha asks from behind him.
Anakin actually acted more on instinct than on real thought, but he untangles that pretty quickly. “We don’t know what this is. They’re plugged into a million wires. We don’t know what happens if they get removed wrong. What if there’s a kill switch? What if they end up brain dead from pressing the wrong button?”
Boba stares up at him with wide, watery eyes. “It could kill him?”
“Maybe,” Anakin says. He lets go of the kid’s collar. “I need to figure out what this is first. Fast, too, in case whoever’s running it has a remote control mechanism.”
“Just you?” Alpha asks.
Anakin shrugs. “You have any slicing skills?”
Alpha huffs. “No. The ship might have a droid that can help, though. Not a full astromech, but at least one of those miniatures you can plug in?”
It might make things faster. “You can go grab that, then. Then do a perimeter sweep. I’m going to call the Jedi and let them know what I’ve found.”
“You’re calling the Jedi?” Boba asks, quiet and fearful.
Maybe he’s worried about his dad getting arrested. Bounty hunters aren’t always the most law-abiding of citizens. “If I can’t undo this, the person they send will. Plus, they can do more in terms of arresting everyone who made it happen. I’m just a padawan, and just one person. Even if I can get Obi-Wan out, we need help to follow the money trails and all that.”
He has no idea who’s going to be sent, but he hopes it’s Quinlan. He’s good at what he does, and Obi-Wan would probably appreciate him being there when he gets out.
“Grab the droid, do a perimeter sweep, got it.” Alpha says. “Boba?”
“He can stay here,” Anakin says. He’s pretty sure Boba would throw a fit if he were asked to leave his dad now. “Keep watch and let me know if anyone comes investigating. I’m counting at least a dozen captives here, and we don’t know if this is the room is the only one with prisoners.”
“And you?” Alpha prompts.
“I’m going to start with seeing what I can do to isolate the system from outside interference so the culprits can’t wipe their records from outside the facility,” Anakin says. “Then I’ll start untangling what those wires and systems are doing. There are way more screens than would be needed for just vitals.”
He drifts over to one of the consoles. Relief floods his body that it is at least a standard, Basic keyboard. He doesn’t have to futz about with an alphabet he doesn’t know.
Alpha hasn’t left yet.
Anakin lets instinct guide him, for both the activation of the system, and the password. Alpha definitely gets suspicious when Anakin closes his eyes and lets the Force impart some muscle memory to log in, but Boba just gasps, impressed as he should be.
Anakin opens his eyes, starts navigating, and finds profiles on… all the people he sees. Fun.
Obi-Wan’s has an alternate name to it, ‘Ben,’ and a sort of… it looks like one of those character creation screens on the hologames Anakin plays at Aayla’s sometimes. There’s a bank of clothing options, mostly. Details about an unfamiliar life, too.
“What about Jango?” Alpha asks.
(He calls his father by name pretty often. Anakin doesn’t ask. Not everyone has a positive relationship with their parents. It’s not his business.)
Anakin tries to find Jango, but he clicks wrong—or maybe the Force guided him, and he clicked right—and the screen changes.
A jingle plays, though low and tinny through the speakers of the console, with a half-animated… holoshow opening? Maybe? That’s what it seems to be. Anakin leans in, brow furrowing, and he hears Boba asking for Alpha to lift him up so he can see.
There are many people, most of whom he doesn’t recognize. But here and there, he sees a face that matches one of the bodies in the not-bacta tanks. A young woman with long, blonde curls. A middle-aged man with close-cut hair. An older woman with laugh lines and a wide frame.
Obi-Wan, and a woman that looks like she could be Fett’s younger sister. Anakin’s heart flips. He’s started putting the pieces together.
“She looks like Omega,” Boba whispers.
“Who’s Omega?” Anakin asks.
“Our cousin,” Alpha says, which twinges to Anakin as a not-quite-lie, and he… does not have the energy to pursue it.
The title sequence, if that’s what it is, ends. Anakin thinks that Obi-Wan and the young woman looked incredibly happy together. In love, even. He’s not jealous of someone else having Obi-Wan’s attention, he’s not, because that attention probably isn’t even real. That’s not actually Obi-Wan, just… some character based on his face.
“Skywalker,” Alpha says lowly, “can you go see that… character page, again? For Jango, this time.”
Anakin wants to keep watching this holoshow or whatever it is, figure out what’s going on for real, but he has a very bad feeling about Jango right now, and he thinks that Alpha has the same suspicions as Anakin himself does.
Jango Fett – Janet Kenobi
The costume bank for his character matches the form they’ve built: fluffy, feminine, and short.
“That’s my dad?” Boba asks. He sounds appropriately horrified. Anakin wishes he’d avoided doing all this until Boba was distracted. Too late now.
“We’ll get them out,” Anakin promises. “I… really need to call in another Jedi. Alpha, go get that droid you promised. Kid, go guard the door. I have to cut this off from the outside before we do anything else.”
He’ll have to prevent a lot more than that, namely making sure to cut off information transfer while ensuring they, whoever they are, can’t cut power to the facility. Who knows what would happen.
“Roger that,” Alpha says.