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In hindsight, he should have seen it coming. The informant he’s been working with to track down surviving brothers, Caij Vanda, though endlessly chatty, has proven helpful a time or two before, turning up two brothers, Swoops and Dire—recently escaped and recaptured by bounty hunters working on an Imperial dime—as well as a set of stolen beskar greaves.
So he goes to the plateau Caij picked out for their meeting spot, and he goes alone, drawn in by the promise of new intel on a missing commander, and gets drawn on, which is just rude, but it all works out in the end.
Boba studies the newcomer, and the empty stretch of sky where Caij’s thermal detonator apparently launched itself into the air.
“Oh hey,” the man says, looking up with a hapless grin. “Uh, sorry—did you have dibs? I have a private client, but I know she also has a public bounty.”
Boba raises his eyebrows. Briefly, he considers insisting on a fifty-fifty split—but it’s been a long day, and the man did get the jump on Caij, so Boba just grunts and shakes his head. He lowers the blaster he’d leveled at the stranger and bends to scoop up one of Caij’s fallen blaster pistols—even if he didn’t care for electrified bayonets, Crosshair would certainly find a use for them. He engages the safety and holsters it. “She’s all yours.”
“Yippee.” The stranger reholsters his own blaster with a pleased little nod. “Hear that, Caij? Just you and me.”
“Oh, fuck you, Kestis,” Caij gripes from the ground, where she’s shamelessly trying to wriggle free of her bindings, though there’s no real heat to it. “What’d I ever do to you, huh?”
The newcomer nudges her, almost gently, with the tip of his boot. “You know what you did, Caij, and you know you deserve it. Would you rather I turn you over to Imperial forces?”
“You wouldn’t!” Caij squawks, redoubling her efforts to free herself.
The bounty hunter—Kestis, apparently—crouches down next to Caij, looking downright friendly, though with bounty hunters, it was often a mixed bag of crazy and competent. Boba would know. “No, I wouldn’t. But turnabout is fair play, and all that.”
Deftly, Kestis checks her bindings and liberates a vibroblade from her boot, plus another thermal detonator. He’s a familiar face—and a striking one, too, between the ginger hair and facial scars—which leaves Boba wondering if the bounty hunter doesn’t have some wanted posters of his own. He’s traveling light, for a bounty hunter—no armor, a cord of stims, and only a pair of blasters and what looks like an extendable staff—but he goes about the business of binding and subduing Caij with a practiced familiarity that reminds Boba, briefly, of those early days before he was removed from his father’s care.
Boba's business is done here, though, so he leaves him to it.
He mentions the encounter to Omega in passing the next day, when they’re running through her clinic’s medical inventory.
Either intentionally or subconsciously, Omega keeps her clinic as distinct from a Kaminiise facility as possible. Like most clones, Omega shares a bone-deep appreciation for color, which led her to commission Mox to paint pastel murals of forests and mountains on the walls. Although professionally clean, the hard edges of her workspace and medical equipment are softened by jewel-toned blankets, wall hangings, and potted plants. Even the sterilizer is an organic floral brand, in contrast with the astringent citrom cleaner Kamino stored and used in bulk.
“Twenty-four chill pacs,” she says, which Boba dutifully jots down. She pauses. “Did you just say Kestis? As in bounty hunter and terrorist Cal Kestis?”
“Sure,” Boba says, because that does sound right.
“And this was yesterday?”
“Yup.”
“Boba!” Omega mimes strangling the air in his direction, the way she’s been doing since they were thrown together in Nala Se’s lab as Jango Fett’s dominant and recessive templates. “You have to tell us when things like this happen! What if it was you he was after, instead of Caij?”
“Why would he be after me?” Boba’s bounty was, all things considered, fairly modest. Wolffe and Rex had some kind of competition going to see who could hit the highest Imperial bounty, but with Kamino down the drain and Hemlock’s labs destroyed, no one was really interested in the back-up copy of Jango Fett’s unaltered DNA. Boba kept a low profile. Well, pretty low. Low enough, for a clone.
Omega places her face in her hands. “Did you at least tell Phee?”
“Of course.” Boba will, at least, tell Phee on his way home, if she is on-planet, and if Boba had the time, energy, and inclination to do so.
The look Omega levels at him is all-too-knowing. With a sigh, she steps away from the half-inventoried cabinet to snag her datapad. “What did you want to know about him?”
Boba takes over where she left off, tallying up their remaining bottles of disinfectant spray (twenty) and wound glue (three). “Just wanted to know if you knew anything about him that isn’t listed in his guild profile.”
“You might be better off asking Cross or Hunter about him. All I know is Kestis popped up in the last few years out of nowhere and started collecting bounties like trading cards. And he has his own bounties, too—from the Empire, Sorc Tormo, the Braccan Scrappers’ Guild—” Omega cuts off, scrolling through the same public data entry that Boba has already reviewed. “Little gods, Boba,” she says. “Have you seen his kill count?”
Boba has. It’s in the hundreds, which Boba thinks is impressive for a hunter who mostly takes warm bounties.
“Mostly Imperial troopers,” Boba points out, because he had run a few of the ID numbers. “And a swath of Haxion Brood lackeys.”
Omega runs a few on her own. "Huh. You're right."
“How’s he a guild member, if he’s got so many crimes?” Boba asks. Technically, the Bounty Hunters’ Guild was an association outside the jurisdiction of the Empire, but it yielded to imperial pressure like hot bantha butter.
“I mean, he does have a guild bounty, it just looks like no one’s ever claimed it. Although,” she scrolls down a bit, parsing information, “many have tried.”
A blue-tinged holo flares into life between them, manifesting the unsmiling mugshot of Kestis, looking scarred and dead-eyed and weirdly baby-faced despite it all. It was a poor match for the amiable, animated person Boba had run into—and not just because Kestis now had the ability to grow stubble. How had that haunted kid end up as one of the galaxy’s most dangerous and wanted men?
Boba looks up from the mugshot to find Omega staring back at him, a quizzical look on her face. Then her eyes widen. “Ugh, gross. You're into him, aren't you?"
Boba can neither confirm nor deny.
She drops her datapad in disgust, and Kestis's holo flickers out. “Why do you only like people who can kill you?”
“It’s genetic,” Boba counters quickly, because he has the fucking receipts to prove it. Years of receipts, starting with Jango Fett's bucket list of bad interpersonal decisions and ending with Omega’s metastasizing crush on Fennec Shand.
Omega points a finger at him, accusing. Silently, Boba points back, judgmental. In silence, their accord is struck, and Boba returns to counting tongue depressors.
After the fall of Kamino, Boba had fit into the Bad Batch like a splinter in skin. With Omega, it was natural—her openness and faith in others made it easy to be her brother, but just because Boba and the Batch shared a sister didn’t make them brothers. Boba settled in with the grace of wet nexu, hissing and spitting and lashing out at anyone who tried to get close.
It wasn’t until a mission for Cid, tracking down a med-droid she needed for a need-to-know project that had led them to a sketchy mod-parlor. In the original version of their retrieval plan, Boba’s job was to provide backup, if needed; when that plan fell apart in the face of retrofitted Separatist droideka, Boba was shunted off to help Tech break into the medical center while the rest of the Batch peeled off to the fight. Boba knew better than to throw a fit mid-mission, but he was still seething and silent and so so tired of not having a part to play.
In the relative safety of a darkened antechamber, Tech said, “I do not envy you.”
Boba, who knew enough about the control panel Tech was working on to know it was the kind that could melt itself if tampered with, posted up beside the door to keep watch. “Yeah? Is the part where you tell me why?”
“Yes,” Tech said. Boba rolled his eyes. “All of us—Clone Force 99—were tailor-made for our roles, and honed through experience and hardship, to be the extreme limits of what our DNA can do. As a result, we know how we fit together: Wrecker is our strength; Hunter is our spine; Echo is our fear; I, obviously, am the brain.”
“And what was Crosshair?” Boba asked, because he never saw a wound he didn’t want to poke. “Your spite?”
Tech didn’t take the bait. “He was our eyes. Which, I suppose, means that we have been flying blind without him.” The control panel hissed warningly, and both Boba and Tech paused to look as it began to smoke.
“Hm,” Tech said. Boba tensed. A hm from Tech could mean either I forgot to run Gonky’s daily diagnostic or This panel will explode in approximately 6.4 seconds.
“What?” Boba prompted.
“He would like you, you know,” Tech said. “Crosshair.”
More of that, then. Boba sneered. “What, because he’d really see me?”
“No. Because you are both assholes.”
“Oh,” Boba said, a little touched despite himself. And then, because he was a wound-poker and he knew wouldn’t like the answer: “What about Omega?”
Suddenly, the door to the med center swished open, revealing a creepy display of surgical equipment and glowing organs and mechanized prosthetics, and Tech smiled. “She is our heart. Our hope for the future.”
Tech stepped into the med center. Boba followed. Omega had been the same thing for him, when he’d been an angry, bloodthirsty terror trapped in Kamino. She was the closest thing he had to a true batchmate; she shored up his cruelty with her kindness and he, the reverse, and together they were as unyielding and true as beskar.
“And what does that make me?” Boba asked, and he hated the thread of vulnerability in his voice. “Balanced?”
Even as he said it, Boba doubted it. He had, after all, been subjected to his own tests and evaluations from the Kaminiise, who had never hesitated to note his flaws: his crooked teeth and chalky bone density and shitty three-cone vision and chemical imbalances. Every other clone was an improvement of an ugly first draft—stronger, smarter, more resilient, more tactical—whereas Boba was only a perfect copy of his father’s imperfection.
“Hardly,” Tech said. He approached the nearest display and tossed something to Boba, which Boba caught on reflex. “It makes you unpredictable.”
Boba found himself looking down at a cybernetic eyeball, blinking with the familiar pattern of a thermal detonator. Boba glanced up again and found Tech holding out a full jar of more explosive eyeballs. “Do not tell Hunter I gave these to you.”
The next time Boba sees Kestis, it’s on a commuter shuttle on Rendili. Boba doesn’t visit the Core much—he is, after all, classified as intellectual property within the legal framework the Empire inherited from the Republic, which is a logistical nightmare for interplanetary travel. But, as Jango Fett used to say: when there are no opportunities, create them.
Kestis is crunched into a corner with his boots on the seat. There’s a new and painful bruise swelling across the bridge of nose and an ugly split lip, and he’s managed, somehow, to tuck most of his body under a heavy poncho.
Amused, Boba slips into the seat across from him, nodding once to Kestis’s attentive little companion droid and receiving a flick of their antenna in response. Like this, Kestis doesn’t look much like the galaxy’s deadliest mercenary—he looks like he got kicked out of a cantina after losing a fight.
Quietly, Boba settles in. While he waits, he catches up on work, alternating between reading the latest report from Hunter’s work dechipping brothers in the Outer Rim and Echo’s notes on the decryption he requested. It helps that Rendili’s not a pretty planet—too much industry—but in between the shipyards and factories, the planet’s eerie marshlands gleam silver and shadow under a pair of twin moons.
To his shame, Boba doesn’t catch Kestis stirring. Instead, he glances up between paragraphs to find himself looking into a pair of wide-awake green eyes.
They measure each other for a long moment. Boba feels all too aware of Kestis’s blaster, holstered but convenient, and the extendable staff he spotted earlier—which, belatedly, he realizes might not be an extendable staff at all.
Good morning, the little droid says.
Kestis blinks, focuses on his companion droid. “It’s night cycle, BD.”
It is 0505 per local planetary time, the little droid, BD, informs them. Sunrise will begin in six minutes.
“Oh,” Kestis says. “Well, then, it’s a good thing I woke up for that.” BD whistles in agreement and skitters over to the window. Kestis smiles sheepishly, all tension dissipated, and clarifies, “We like sunrises. BD-1’s got a collection going—we’re trying to get one recording for every planet we visit. I think he’s planning to make a reel of them, for—well, to share with friends.”
That’s—adorable. Boba doesn’t really know what to say about it. Luckily, Kestis is chatty enough for two.
“We’ve met before, right?” Kestis says. “On Koboh? You’re the clone.”
Kestis says it warmly, with none of the disdain or misplaced resentment Boba knows some brothers receive, but twelve years ago, Boba would have denied it up and down the length of the shuttle that he wasn’t a clone; he was Boba Fett, Jango Fett’s only son. Ten years ago, Boba might have said he wasn’t a clone—he was the clone, first replicated and the only unaltered template for the surviving GAR army.
Now, Boba doesn’t respond; it isn't a question.
“And you’re a Jedi,” he says. “Isn’t that right?”
Before Boba was returned to Kamino, there had been a few scant years where Jango Fett taught Boba the tricks of the bounty hunting trade, and the man had insisted research was the first and most important weapon in a hunter’s arsenal. Before, during, and after taking jobs—a bounty hunter could never be too careful. And Boba isn’t a bounty hunter—Hemlock had seen to that—but he is careful, especially when it comes to special interest projects.
It had taken time to find someone who could confirm Boba's suspicions, based solely on Caij Vanda's mysterious leaping thermal detonator and the oddly timed holes in Kestis's record, but he had, eventually. Ditto had just been a shiny when he’d been assigned to serve on the Albedo Brave under Jedi General Tapal—one of the last to ship out before the order was given. He hadn’t seen much action, but he remembered Tapal’s student fondly, a little redheaded named Cal. Good kid, Ditto had offered up. Bit shy. Went down over Bracca, when—well, you know. Glad to hear he’s still out there kicking.
Not so shy now, though. Kestis smoothly unfolds from his travel nap pretzel, stretching like a loth-cat—a casual move that puts him in a better position if a fight breaks out. Lightly, he says, “The Jedi are dead.” Then he cocks his head. “And you don’t want a Jedi, do you? You want a bounty hunter.”
“Actually, I want you.” Boba grins, fast and sharklike. Ditto had some other interesting things to say about the young commander. “I have it on good authority that you’re good at tracking people.”
Slowly, Boba pulls out a pair of modded goggles, both lenses a lacework of shatters, and places them gently on the narrow train table between them. Outside the window, the sunrise Kestis’s droid companion promised spills over the horizon like a cracked egg, limning the cracks in Tech’s goggles with copper light. “We’re trying to find a missing man. Think you can help with that?”