#after this Boba malfunctions and stops being smooth but that's after Jax can't see him

[mandalorianbrainweasel]

Older Boba/That One Cadet?? I like that very much!! How about a first kiss? :3c

Thank you for prompting this because it made me look up his name. Jax! His name is Jax. I love him. I'm sorry for what I put him through in this.

They're like fifteen and this didn't go how I expected, they took over. As you'll see by the word count.

a taste of wasting time

T. Boba/Jax. 1580 words. Inspired by every summer camp I've been to, but the kids have actually been taught weapon etiquette which unfortunately includes the Bullying. Dumb teenagers, mean kids, Boba's potty mouth, survival training but fun, mushrooms, first kiss.

Boba likes the nights on Concord Dawn.

Staying back on Mandalore, in Sundari, is fine. That’s where most of his family is. Para and their riduure, Paz, Kix and Fox, Sati’bu, Ba’tat Arla, the Babas.

He loves his family and he doesn’t really feel a desire to be spending all his time in the Slave I for another couple years straight and he doesn’t really ever feel like spending more than a couple weeks up here with the Mereel side of the family.

And he’s not even here with them, right now. Out of all of the family members he’s stuck with right now, it’s Omega. Sure, a few of the counsellors for the training camp are clones, and more than a few of the other verd’ike are clones, but that doesn’t mean a lot. Most of the other clones that Boba even knew before Para’s quest were Alpha class or Commandos. A few others he’d seen, yeah, but no one is really family-family instead of clan-family.

He’s in a squad with two other clones and three kids from other clans. Omega is off with her squad, well away from Boba, and it’s funny how a training camp that they were both at is the only time in the last two years that he’s gotten space from his sister.

He pokes at the fire in front of him, mostly occupied with staring at the sky while his squadmates are off setting up camp. He got teased for being the spoiled one and how this was probably all he could do.

Omega would probably have tried to take their faces off with her teeth.

He’ll show them, later. This is their first night in the wilds and he’s a damn good shot and Be’baba has been running him through training almost every day since Ursa Wren dragged him to Mandalore. And that didn’t stop after he got his first beskar, like he knows some of the other clans do, leaving training to the Academy clubs and these training camps.

He doesn’t know about what the other clones will have been used to since leaving Kamino, but he knows he’s been shooting and camping long before they ever got to.

“Oh, hey, you got the fire going,” one of the other clones in his squad says, dropping down beside him. It’s the one with the red tint to his hair—Jax—instead of the one who has her dark hair buzzed low—Vril, he thinks.

“What, think I couldn’t even manage this?” he asks, glancing at him derisively.

Jax shifts uncomfortably.

“You didn’t,” he realizes, furious.

“You like in a palace,” Jax points out.

“And you either live in a really nice apartment or on a clan compound,” he points out. “I learned how to start a survival fire when I was four. And I learned how to cook on a fire a couple years later when Buir decided I wasn’t going to fall into a soup pot.”

Jax snorts and covers his mouth before he breaks into giggles.

“Seriously, my squad last year wasn’t nearly as” mean “shitty.”

Jax at least ducks his head, ashamed.

“You do realize I live with my ori’vod, right? The Mand’alor? Do you really think they’d leave me defenceless and unable to take care of myself? We may be a family, but shit happens to everyone.”

“Hey,” Vril shouts, “Stop yelling at Jax.”

Boba and Jax both swivel their heads to her and Boba.

Well, Omega is preferable right now. Even if she might insight a feud over this. And she’s still a last ditch place to go. This area of Concord Dawn is pretty safe for someone wandering on their own.

He tosses the stick into the fire and heads out into the trees, strolling until he’s far enough they won’t hear him break into a run, angry tears prickling at his eyes. He wants the Lieutenants, and Para and Mij and Fordo and Ven’ti, and the Babas. He wants people who don’t want to see the worst in him. He remembers Korkie talking about this kind of thing, when Boba first started going to the Academy. Hell, he remembers stuff like this himself from his first months there.

He makes himself another fire when he comes to another clearing and has made sure none of the animal tracks around it are the kind of things that would bother him or be bothered by him. No tent, but he’s slept without a tent or a sleeping bag plenty of times.

Maybe an hour has passed when he hears more human-like footsteps, and he unholsters the blaster he brought—not one of Buir’s blasters, not for a few more years—and fires a warning shot.

The bolt of plasma sends a tree branch cracking down, and a clone yelps.

He doubts it’s Vril.

He sighs and reholsters the blaster. “I’m this way,” he calls, making another skewer of friendly-familiar mushrooms he’d found around here and setting it at the edge of the fire while he grabbed his own from where it had been roasting.

Jax steps through, rubbing his head. There’s a little scratch on his cheek that looks like it might bruise. “Hey. You...really got far out here. I don’t think I’d have gone this far.”

He shrugs. “I’ve always had to be kind of alone.” He peeks a mushroom off of the top of the skewer and pops it in his mouth.

Jax stares.

“There’s more,” he points out, motioning to the pile he’s made and the roasting skewer. “Wait for it to get brown, though.”

“Oh, uh. Okay.”

Again, Jax sits next to him.

“Sorry about, uh. All of that. I set her to rights about what we’d been talking about. The others, you know, they didn’t believe you?” Jax laughs hollowly. “They told me to come get you back because they’d get in trouble if you died out here, and Vril was too stubborn to come apologize.”

“I’m not going back until in the morning, then,” Boba decides, smiling as he eats another mushroom. “Let them sweat. I have my comm and I was going to ping our counsellor soon. Probably my ori’vod, too. Need to tell some member of the family, but if I tell my sister she’s liable to commit homicide. If not get her squad to join her.”

Jax laughs and finally it sounds like something that he’s letting himself be fully amused by.

Boba averts his eyes and goes back to munching, but he picks the skewer he set for Jax up as soon as it’s hitting the perfect shade and passes it to him.

Eventually, Jax eggs him into an actual conversation, and they chat about education modules—though Boba doesn’t mention his are for university classes. They give a report to the counsellor who agrees with Boba’s decision to let them get anxious with a kind of vicious smile that makes Boba wonder what happened last year. When the counsellor commends Jax for avoiding getting drawn in by bad influences, he really wonders.

But he doesn’t ask, not when Jax looks so beat up about it.

The next morning, after a night where they’d doze until an alarm warned them to check the fire, then doze some more again, they head back to their squad’s initial camp, after bagging up the rest of the mushrooms that they don’t eat for firstmeal.

When they get to the camp, they watch from the woods as the counsellors are scolding the rest of the squad about losing two members and how they’re going to have to send out a search party! Now why would those two have run off, hmm? Did this have anything in common with last year, hmm?

Jax finally has enough and Boba shrugs and starts whistling as they head into camp, the bag of mushrooms over his shoulder.

“Hey, Ordo, I got some of those mushrooms you like,” he tells the counsellor who had been in charge of his squad last year.

She grins, pushing the other young teens out of the way and going for them. “I don’t get how you always find these, Fett’ika! Seriously. I should never have told you they were my favorite, now you have bribery available.”

He sticks his tongue out at her.

“Anyways,” she adds, “We’re adding you two to Squad Beta. It’ll be fine.”

Boba raises an eyebrow. That squad is one from the above year. “If you say so.”

“Saxon’s in charge of them,” Ordo adds with a roll of her eyes.

“Oh, yes, then it will be fine,” he agrees.

Jax looks between the two of them. “Really?”

“Yeah, Aden’tra likes me best,” Boba says.

The rest of the camp goes fine, though Boba doesn’t find out what happened to the rest of his first squad of the year. They’re all packing up to leave when Jax takes him aside, then knocks him back into a tree and kisses him.

“I, uh, sorry. I hadn’t really said that. About the first night,” Jax says, looking down as Boba stares, shocked at him. “I, uh. Really like you. I’m sorry, if that was, uh!”

Boba kisses him this time, then grabs his comm and types in his code. “That’s me. You can ping me whenever.”

“Boba!” Aden’tra hollers. “Come on, Korkie promised to make the fritters if we get back before nightfall!”

He snorts. “I gotta go. Send me a message, okay?”

“Yeah,” Jax says, “Okay.”