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The morning Cal arrives in camp, Boba almost walks right by him with a polite nod. Cal always had a knack for that—blending in with a crowd, no matter if the crowd is a bustling spaceport or a greasy cantina or a fizz-rock festival. On Tatooine, Cal is sand-crusted and smiling and as languid as a krayt dragon basking in the suns, sitting in a loose circle with two of the tribe’s scavengers and despining a thornfruit like it’s second nature, instead of a pain in the shebs chore. Someone—probably A’Kiir—has thrown a headcloth over his hair for the sake of propriety, but the gingery scruff and peeling, sun-pink skin gives him away.
Boba stops short and stares.
“Good morning,” Cal says brightly. Behind him, the scavengers—Sahna and A’Beni—titter with amusement.
“Morning,” Boba says automatically. He looks around him and finds the same fifteen tents pitched in the impassive Jundland Wastes, the bantha herd drifting to the west, following the scant morning shade. It is business as usual in the camp: the warriors tend the herd and watch the horizon, the elders busy themselves with fiberwork, and little Hekki grumbles his way through the sandwashing. But there, beside the tribe’s newly acquired speeders is a busted model Boba doesn’t recognize, mainly because it seems to be three different models cobbled together—Cal’s handiwork, without question.
Privacy in the camp was either earned or stolen, and the tribe's attention was plain. From across the camp, he catches sight of A’Kiir and Lahah staring outright, watching his reaction like shriek-hawks.
Boba looks back at Cal and finds him grinning widely—and obscenely, by Tusken standards. BD-1 peers out from behind him, where the droid had been dozing on the jetii’s back and whistles his own greeting.
Where language could not suffice, tactile, visual gestures were often best, among the Tuskens. Boba bends down and Cal, always intuitive, rises to greet him on one knee, as Boba guides him to touch cheeks in the Tusken way, then foreheads in the Mandalorian one. Under the delighted whooping and yowling of the campsite’s response, Boba growls, “How.”
“Heard you got eaten by a sarlaac,” Cal drawls in Basic. “Had to check it out. Your breath smells awful, by the way.”
“What, the sarlacc told you to walk into the desert?” This close, Boba takes a moment to examine the man properly. Under Cal’s sand cloak, he’s wearing the lightweight, conservative robes that Boba has only seen him in once before, on Jedha, well-suited to the unforgiving heat of the suns. Save for the sunburn on his nose and the tips of his ears, Cal looks unharmed, either from their months apart or his time on Tatooine.
“No,” Cal says, rolling his eyes. “I followed an echo to the Jawas, and the Jawas told me about the Tuskens, and, eventually, Master Kenobi led me out here.” Looping his hands around Boba’s wrists, Cal tugs him to the sun-warmed ground. Boba allows it, but glares at Sahna and A’Beni, both watching the exchange with avid interest despite not speaking a word of Basic. He bares his teeth at them and they claw their hands at him in response, teasingly. “Helped translate too, although I’m not entirely sure how, uh, accurate his translations are.”
Cal’s answer finally settles in Boba’s mind, like a stone dropped into a pond. “Master Kenobi. As in—Obi-Wan Kenobi?”
“Yeah,” Cal says. “He’s kind of a busybody.”
“Isn’t he dead?”
Cal scowls. “Doesn’t stop him, apparently. Anyway, Skywalker told me where to find the sarlacc pit—”
“Skywalker?”
“Yeah.” Cal gestures with a gloved hand. “Yay high, blond hair, weird mouth.”
“I know who he—why are you talking to Luke Skywalker?”
Cal shrugs and settles back down on his heels. “Dunno. He’s researching Jedi culture and tracked me down. Called me Master Kestis, which was—weird. Inaccurate. He’s cooped up on Tanalorr now, studying some of Cere’s old library and interviewing the anchorites about old stuff. Sister Taske thinks he’s a delight. Would it be better if I were wearing a mask right now?”
“Just pull your goggles down and your cowl up,” Boba says.
Cal does so, and Boba glances around at the camp again and finds them all still watching. From his vantage across the camp, A’Kiir signs, TAKE RESPONSIBILITY.
Boba narrows his eyes. “What exactly did you tell them, Cal, to inspire such a warm welcome?”
“Oh, uh,” Even through his goggles, Boba sees Cal’s crow’s-feet crinkle up with mischief. “I think I told them I was your husband?”
Among the Tuskens, there is no one concept for marriage. Instead, they acknowledge a tapestry of relationships to allow for several strong bonds within the relatively small Tusken community, from shen amah, the hearth spouse, with whom you raised your children, to the very common atti amah, the tent spouse, with whom you shared a tent and the daily chores of life.
The word that Cal used—sah amah, oasis spouse—means the Tuskens understand Cal to be a warrior from another tribe with whom Boba has a long-term, recurring, nonbinding sexual relationship, making it perhaps the most accurate description of their relationship they’ve ever used.
Given the small size of the Tusken camps, oasis spouses are fairly common, especially between neighboring tribes and at festivals. A’Kiir has an oasis wife with one of the trading camps to the north, while Lahah is very proud to have two oasis wives among the Cloud Herd tribe, themselves tent spouses of each other. It was something of an honor, to be well-regarded enough to represent your camp in such a way, and maintaining a somewhat regular relationship—one visit a year, at least—was emphasized, to build and maintain intertribal relationships in the isolation of the Jundland Wastes.
A quick, hushed aside with Lahah—who is beside herself with glee at the revelation of his “cactus flower,” as she calls Cal—reveals that the Tuskens also believe Cal to be the child of a mysterious and unhinged wizard who haunts the Jundland Waste and subsists on morning mist and evil spirits alone, and—Boba’s just going to let that one go. There are some things he doesn’t need to know.
(They had long since resolved that Cal’s weird jetii magic is an inseparable part of his day-to-day perception of reality, which Boba accepts and has no desire to understand, outside of how it is immediately relevant to any given threat or problem. Arguments about philosophy aside, it is a system that works for them.)
The result of all this was that the Tuskens are pitching a courtesy tent, regardless of whether Boba wants one or not.
“A what now?” Cal asks, when they are both shooed away under the pretense of watching the bantha. The Tuskens are awfully quick to trust Cal with the herd, but Cal quickly proves to have a knack at luring grazing strays back to the herd with no effort.
Truly, no effort. All Cal needs to do is glance in the direction of an offending bantha and she comes trotting back like an obedient massiff. There are, again, some things Boba does not need to know.
“A courtesy tent,” Boba says. “For partners who are—reuniting.”
“Ah,” Cal says, realization dawning. “For quiet sex while the whole camp pretends not to listen?”
Boba pulls a face, recalling the tent they’d pitched for Lahah and her wives. “It is not always quiet.”
Cal struggles to bite down a smile, and BD-1 breaks away from sheepdogging the bantha to give a scandalized whistle. When Cal has wrangled his expression into something neutral, he asks, “Will it bother you? I can—if you prefer, I can head back—”
“No,” Boba says. “It’s not a problem. It’s just…”
He trails off, not entirely what to say. Cal settles in next to him, bumping his shoulder in that way that used to drive Boba nuts. Now he leans into it, letting the other man take some of his weight.
“Perhaps it would help if you told me how the galaxy’s most feared Mandalorian bounty hunter ended up as a Tusken bantha herder. Is this”—Cal gestures at the bantha and the camp and the sliding sands around them—“a midlife crisis? Are you planning to be a leathery old Tatooine grandfather, banging pots together to keep pests away?”
“Banging pots together has never kept you away,” Boba notes.
Cal huffs, but lets the conversation rest. He’s always had the uncanny knack for knowing when to press on a bruise and when to keep his hands clear. Instead, he fills the air with chatter about Merrin and Mosey’s new ship, about the strange courtship ritual between Zee and Monk, about Greez’s latest culinary misadventure. Kata is turning twenty soon, which Boba doesn’t want to think about, and she’s planning a trip with Cal and Merrin to track down information about her mother’s side of the family.
By first sunset, when the day’s heat is tapering off into a lingering chill, Cal is a line of warmth along Boba’s side. He slants Boba a sideways look, half a question, half an invitation.
Boba sighs, but lays it out simply for Cal: the sarlacc, the Jawas, digging for melons with the Rodian, the Pykes, making his gaderffii. When he’s done, the horizon is blushing pink with second sunset, and Cal looks contemplative, but also… troubled.
“So,” Cal says. “You lead the Tuskens on raids now?”
“I offered advice,” Boba says shortly. “And what they choose to do with that advice is up to them.”
“Speeders are certainly faster than a bantha,” Cal says. “More breakable, though.”
Boba recognizes this tactic. Cal plans to lead him through some kind of ethical argument about the nature of culture and intervention and consequences, like Cal hasn’t instigated five separate riots all on his own. “You don’t like it.”
“I haven’t said that.”
Boba rolls his eyes. “But you were getting to it.”
Sheepishly, Cal scratches his neck, looking caught out. “I have a bad feeling about it all, is all. These sorts of relationships—the Tuskens, the Pykes, the townsfolk—they don’t change overnight. Speeders and train heists may have won the battle, but the Pykes will remember the loss bitterly.” Cal shakes his head. “Sorry, just… why here? Why now?”
“These people matter,” Boba says, certain of it. “To me, if to no one else.” He has found something here among the Tuskens, something that he had been missing all those years running bounties for the Empire and Jabba and whoever else would pay for his services. But he also knows that he’d never be fully content here, with his armor stolen and his name tarnished by Solo’s pathetic crew. The Tuskens might honor him with a place among their number, but he is, first and foremost, a Mandalorian. Boba looks pointedly at Cal. “Among others.”
Cal smiles back at him, quiet and pleased and all too aware of how fleeting their time together must be.
Together, they lapse into silence. They watch BD-1 skitter between banthas, conducting scans on piles of droppings—for what reason, Boba does not want to know. After a long moment, Cal must sense some shift in Boba’s mood. He asks, “Now what?”
Boba shifts. “My armor is still missing, and we need to settle matters with the Pykes.”
“Then we’ll do that,” Cal says simply, folding himself into Boba’s we as naturally as anything. This was one of the things that drew Boba to Cal time and time again: peace-loving jetii though he may be, he always welcomes a fight.
“Tomorrow,” Cal adds, glancing behind them at the camp. Boba did not look, but he was certain when he did, he’d see one or more of the elders telling shadow-tales to the uli-ah and Lahah and her warriors arm-wrestling at the fire and the extra tent pitched at a slight distance, offering what small privacy could be offered in the desert.
“Tomorrow,” he agrees. He stands, dusting off his sand-shroud, and holds his hand out to Cal, who takes it.
They retreat to the courtesy tent after second sunset, urged on by the dropping temperatures. Seated by the fire with some of the other warriors, Lahah signs, HAVE GOOD SEX, which Boba resolutely ignores. BD-1, ever curious, follows them inside and is shooed away by Cal, fleeing back to the safety of the huddled bantha herd.
“You too, Master Kenobi,” Cal says, waving a hand through empty air as if to disperse candlesmoke. “Get.”
Boba, halfway through unwrapping his sandwraps, freezes, looking around the empty tent—but there’s nothing to see, and Cal has already refocused on his own footgear.
The tent is humbly furnished. Boba’s sleeping mat has been liberated from his usual space in the warriors’ tent, piled up with blankets and bantha furs. With a sigh, Boba picks the furs out of the mess and piles them off to the side, despite the chill in the air.
“The red blanket, too,” Cal says, so Boba peels that one off as well. They’re left with a few blankets and one thick quilt, so Boba adds his sand-shroud to the mix, and Cal follows suit with his cloak.
There’s a basket, discreetly tucked into the corner, with a bottle of sweet vinegar water, salted black melon seeds, a stack of old, soft cloths, and a small clay pot of pungent, slippery ointment, the sight of which causes Cal to shudder slightly and lean away when Boba uncaps it.
“You are responsible for that pot,” he says matter-of-factly. “I will not be touching it.”
Boba rolls his eyes and recaps the jar, setting it aside for now. “Clothes off.”
“Wow. What seduction,” Cal says, but he wiggles out of his shirt. “It’s a wonder you don’t have lovers lining up outside this tent.” Cal’s clothes go into a little pile and, impatient, he climbs into the nest of jetii-approved blankets to help Boba with his own.
When they are both acceptably naked, Cal crawls into Boba’s lap and then further still into his space, pressing his cheek to Boba’s cheek and palms to Boba’s shoulders until, with a soft whumph, they tip over onto the blankets, Cal sprawled on top, as pleased as a mechanic after a shipwreck.
Boba braces his hands on Cal’s hips. In the chill night air, that point of contact—every point of contact—is a brand. Cal shivers under his hands and dips in for a quick, teasing kiss to his mouth—then more, to his cheekbone, forehead, eyebrow, other cheek, chin, mouth again, until Boba, exasperated, cups Cal’s neck with both hands and drags him down for something lasting. Cal hums with interest, which usually means he’d be talking if his mouth were free.
Some days, it is hard work to keep Cal quiet.
When they break apart, Cal asks, “How much would you pay me not to make obscene moaning noises right now? Thirty credits?”
“There are kids in this camp, Cal.”
“Oh?” Cal grins. “That sounds like at least fifty credits to me.”
That sounds like another reason to keep Cal’s mouth occupied, to Boba. He cants his hips to destabilize Cal and flips them, dipping back down again for another, deeper kiss.
In the past, Cal—and others, in other contexts—has accused Boba of being unyielding. It is with his signature single-mindedness that Boba spends the next few minutes divesting Cal all banter, quippery, wisecracks, and jibes, until his wayward jetii is breathless and shifting impatiently underneath him.
“You drive,” Cal says, “a hard bargain. And I mean that—”
Boba gives it up for a lost cause and just covers Cal’s mouth with his hand, thumb hooked under the chin. It doesn’t truly muffle Cal’s cackle, but it gives Boba a chance to focus his attentions elsewhere. He latches onto Cal’s neck and slides his other hand lower, down Cal’s chest and the expanse of his stomach to—
“Cold!” Cal says. He wiggles—not away, necessarily, but in protest, certainly. “Fuck, your hands are still cold, Boba.”
“They will warm up,” Boba says, not unkindly. Then, just to be a jerk, he presses his cold hand more firmly into Cal. It does something, inside him, to watch him squirm. He keeps his grip, stroking his thumb along the underside of Cal’s dick until his hands were no longer cold and Cal was hard. Cal, for all his talk, has gone silent. Boba glances up to find Cal watching, his eyes dark with want.
Boba removes his hand from Cal’s mouth and lowers himself down on top of Cal. Cal welcomes him, cupping Boba’s cheek and drawing him in for another kiss even as his hips hitch beneath the weight of Boba’s own.
They grind together, slowly trading kisses and caresses and bites until they’re both hard and flushed and warm despite the night chill. Boba taps a finger against Cal’s entrance—a question, which Cal answers by widening his legs. Making sure to keep the lube pot clear of Cal’s reach—nothing quite killed the mood like one of Cal’s weird object memory visions, especially if they involved other people having sex—Boba stretches him, slowly and carefully, going from one finger to two with his gaze fixed steadily on Cal’s face, watching his expression and occasionally kneading at Cal’s thigh or steadying an ankle with his free hand, until Cal is taut with impatience underneath him.
“Ready,” Cal says, when he can take three fingers easy.
Boba clicks his tongue at him, giving him another slow thrust with his fingers. “Impatient.”
“Ready,” Cal says, more insistently. He snakes his hands down to grab at the backs of his knees, drawing them in and apart in a clear invitation that frames his chest and face in a tidy little V.
Well then. Boba draws his fingers out. He wipes the excess lube on Cal’s inner thigh, a move that never fails to make Cal wrinkle his nose, and takes a moment to slick himself up. Then he lines up and slides in as slowly as he can, taking his sweet time and enjoying the way Cal’s cock stutters in response.
Cal makes a noise, quiet but obscene, like he’s trying to flatten out a moan.
Boba pushes in until he meets resistance and then, with considerable restraint, goes still inside Cal. “Better?”
Cal scowls down at him fiercely. “Not if you don’t get a move on, Fett.” Cal tightens around the tip of Boba’s length and then lets his thighs go, hooking his ankles behind the small of Boba’s back in an attempt to draw him further in. The shift in position makes them both groan. Boba steadies himself with his hands on Cal’s waist, effectively pinning Cal in place, and gives his hips a little rock.
Then another, and another, each motion a little deeper and more certain than the last, Cal’s hips hitching back to meet him. Cal presses a hand to his own mouth to muffle a groan, just as Boba bottoms out with a sigh, his dick a hard, hot line in the sheath of Cal’s body. “Good,” Boba offers, pressing a close-mouthed kiss to the inside of Cal’s knee.
“Mm” is all Cal says, his mouth still a tightly pressed seam in an effort to remain quiet, but tenses his abdominals and the squeeze makes Boba bite down a noise that time. Boba rolls his hips, using his grip on Cal’s hips to provide extra leverage. With a steadying breath, Boba settles into a rocking movement up, establishing a rhythm, and keeps it going steady until Cal’s hands close around his wrists and give him a warning squeeze.
They’re both close at this point, so Boba takes Cal in hand again and gives him an indulgent stroke, base to tip. Cal’s hips jerk rewardingly and his eyes go wide, tightening up around him. Boba gives another thrust, harder, again, until Cal tips over into pleasure with a full-body shudder.
Boba keeps going, coring Cal out in a way that leaves Cal open-mouthed and wide-eyed and utterly silent, until Boba catches the tide of his own orgasm, grinding himself into Cal’s heat and holding himself firm to the root until the last ripples leave him lax and sated, still inside Cal.
He takes a moment to catch his breath, then pulls out.
“Good?” Boba asks.
“Good,” Cal says. He makes a face. “Sticky.” Then, he props himself up on an elbow, grinning. “And that’s fifty credits to me, no?”
Boba raises an eyebrow. “Oh? I’m not ready to cash out yet, Kestis. You’ll have to do better than that.”
Cal’s grin turns into something indecent and incandescent, and he pulls Boba back into his orbit.
In the morning, Boba wakes to find a jetii pressed against the length of his front. Already, the night chill is burning off with the rising suns.
Boba opens his eyes and sees BD-1 peering intently at him, antennae flicked up with interest.
“Out,” he says.
BD-1 offers an unsolicited observation.
“Out,” Boba repeats, more firmly. “Out, BD. Cal.”
“Nmm.”
“Cal,” Boba says, nudging the other man. “I’m going to scrap your droid for parts.”
BD’s antennae flatten with offense.
“You aren’t,” Cal mumbles. “He isn’t, BD.” Cal lifts a corner of the quilt and BD, who doesn’t even have thermal receptors, skitters underneath, cuddling up next to Cal with a smug and pointed look at Boba.
Right. That’s Boba’s cue to get ready for the day.
He shrugs on his sand-shroud and tides the tent up as best he can. By the time he’s done, Cal has wrangled himself into sitting, looking marginally more alert.
“You still talk in your sleep,” Boba observes.
Cal rolls his eyes and beckons Boba to him. Boba goes, settling on the pile of blankets beside him.
“Off to town today?” Cal asks.
“Yes.” He’ll settle business with the Pyke Syndicate, and from there… who knew. Armor, trade discussions, maybe make a dramatic return from the dead.
A goodbye is imminent; Boba can tell. Perhaps not today, but soon, and Boba knows by now that Cal doesn’t always have a say in his going. Maybe Cal will go with him to find his armor; more likely, he’ll be called away to a podunk corner of the galaxy for some dire nonsense, and they won’t cross paths again for months. Still, Cal says, “I’ll stay in camp until you get back.”
Boba doesn’t take his word for it. He leans in, pressing his forehead to Cal’s in a gentle mirshmure'cya, and takes a deep breath, grounding himself in the smell of musk and dry earth and woodsmoke, focusing on the pleasure of breathing.
They are here, alive and together. It is enough, for him, for Cal, for now.