#sw gifs

[mulderscully]

AHSOKA | 1.07

I won't always be there to look out for you.

[maythe4th]

HAPPY 44TH BIRTHDAY HAYDEN!  April 19, 1981.  ˗ˏˋ ꒰ 🎂 ꒱ ˎˊ˗

[lamaenthel]

Train Your Daughters To Be Stronger

[read on ao3]

Jango sucks on his teeth as he thinks. He shouldn't bring her back to Kamino. He knows that. He has a plan. He doesn't need the distraction of a little Togruta, his focus needs to be on training Boba as his apprentice. He should just drop her off at an orphanage. (But he knows what Jaster would do.) Jango Fett "finds" a Togruta youngling on a job. Things change from there.

Characters: Jango Fett, Boba Fett, Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Padme Amidala, Count Dooku/Lord Tyranus, CT-7567/Captain Rex Rating: M for Mature (violence) Wordcount: 22,565

Ke barjurir gar’ade, jagyc’ade kot’la a dalyc’ade kotla’shya. Train your sons to be strong, and your daughters to be stronger. — Mando’a proverb

These days, Jango Fett doesn’t get out of bed for less than half a million credits. He doesn’t have to. For becoming the clone template and staying on Kamino to train them, Lord Tyranus pays him five million a year that Jango funnels into five dozen investment accounts. After three years, they’re already up by thirty percent. By the time his decade is up, he’ll be sitting on a cool hundred million at least.

But still, he takes on the odd job. Part of it is the fear that Tyranus will welch on his end, or the grand plan will fail and Jango will emerge from his exile on Kamino with nothing but a clone of himself to show for it—if he’s lucky. The other part is to get the hell off Kamino, to see a sky filled with something other than lightning, to see a wall that’s not blinding white… maybe even touch grass, if he’s feeling adventurous.

(And partly, it’s because he needs to remind himself that he can leave. He is a guest of the kaminiise. He’s not in prison. He’s not a slave.)

The planet that Chomai F’tarr, his potential employer, has taken over for herself doesn’t have grass. It doesn’t even have a name, just a set of numbers. A small desert planet that’s bright red from orbit, nothing but sand in every direction and hotter than sin. Not too different than Chomai’s home planet, so it makes sense she’d pick it.

Jango’s not fond of Zygerrians. He doesn’t care for slavers, not after what he’s been through, but with Chomai’s offer of a million credits…

(He can overlook a lot for a million credits.)

“My brother must be removed from his position before he drives our enterprise into the ground.” Chomai has sleek fur, dark gray streaked with white, and wears a chain encrusted with red jewels around her slender neck. “He has left me with no choice. His recklessness will doom our whole family.” Her pointy ears twitch as she speaks.

“So you’ve said.” Jango lounges on the red chaise opposite of the overgrown cat, slouching like he hasn’t a care in the world. Can’t let on that Chomai’s palace gives him the creeps. The occasional wail of despair from one of the Zygerrian’s slaves leaks through the paper walls. He ignores it, like a professional.

She hands him a datapad. “I’ve outlined his itinerary. He is very predictable, but his security is formidable.”

Jango’s eyes skim over the details. “Seems easy enough. I should have him out of your fur by the end of the month.”

“Excellent. Let us drink on it.” Chomai snaps her fingers. “Girl!”

A little Togruta slave girl barely older than Boba emerges from behind one of the curtains, carefully bearing a silver tray with two shots of glowing pink liquor. She’s bright orange and wrapped in blue silk the same color as her eyes, with little bells on the fringe that tinkle when she walks. When she silently offers Jango his drink, he gets a good look at the collar around her neck.

(He can overlook a lot for a million credits. Doesn’t mean it’s easy.)

“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Chomai croons, petting the Togruta’s head. She tolerates it, but from the way her jaw is clenched, Jango is reminded of a massiff that wants to snap. “She was a gift from a lover of mine trying to earn favor.” A dark laugh. “He claimed she was a Jedi. He tricked her village into handing her over to him, promising she’d be trained.” Chomai’s sneer turns into a frown. “But she’s not. I’ve never seen her do anything a Jedi can do.”

“Shame,” Jango lies. He hopes it’s true for her sake—female slaves don’t have bright futures to look forward to, and having the powers of a jetii would only make her life worse. 

“I keep her as a pet.” Chomai smiles at the girl in a facsimile of fondness. “She is adorable, even if she is useless. And being raised in servitude is good for her temperament. She will fetch a good price when she is of age.”

She looks four, maybe five. Jango doesn’t know what Zygerrians consider “of age” and is afraid to ask. He schools his face in a neutral mask before he takes off his helmet to drink. “Just so you’re aware, this doesn’t take the place of a signature.”

“Bah.” Chomai waves dismissively. “Do not fear, Fett, I’ll sign your contract.”

“And pay in advance.”

“Half.”

“Full amount.” Jango bares his teeth in a grin. “You know my reputation. I don’t break contracts.”

(He’s suddenly very curious if the Togruta girl can see his eyes through his visor.)

Chomai looks unhappy, but she’s not willing to argue, not when the problem of her brother is so close to being solved. “Very well. I’ll ensure the money is wired before you leave.”

He almost—almost—blurts out that he’ll go down to half if she throws in the girl. But he swallows it at the last second and instead says, “Then, in that case…” and raises the shot, avoiding the little Tog’s big blue eyes. “Oya.”

“Sünmendbee.” Chomai throws back the shot with a shiver of delight. “Now—”

Jango sees the little green laser dot on her chest a scant instant before Chomai’s breast explodes in a shower of gore. In under a second he tosses his glass aside, tucks the little girl under his arm like a bolo-ball, and rolls behind the chaise for cover.

“Easy, Fett, I’m not here for you.”

Jango would know that drawl anywhere. He stands with the Togruta kit still tucked under one arm and squints at the door. “You just cost me a million credits, Bane,” he says crossly.

“And I just earned a million.” Cad Bane lets out a dark, raspy snicker as he strolls through the door. The Duros snaps a holo of Chomai’s body still twitching on the floor. “Sorry, pal. Just business.”

Jango grunts and toes Chomai’s corpse, frowning. “Let me guess—Jomai F’tarr?”

“The very one.” Bane grins. His knife comes out. He removes a finger next.

“Exploding rounds a bit overkill, aren’t they?”

“He warned me that she’s been wearing armor.” A shrug. “Didn’t feel like taking chances. Was she trying to hire you to take Jomai out?”

“Yep.” Jango sighs, disappointed. It’s not like he needs the money, but a million credits is a million credits. “Some family.”

“Don’t suppose you feel the need to seek revenge on behalf of your client?”

“Seeing as she didn’t pay me yet, no.”

“Good thing for me.” Bane tips his hat before he drifts back towards the door. “Well, I’d best be going. Happy hunting, Fett.”

“Can’t even be bothered to throw me a stack for the fuel, of course,” Jango grumbles under his breath. He can’t blame Bane for the hasty exit, not with a million credits on the line. He briefly considers trying to race him to the client—and suddenly remembers he’s still got a tiny Togruta slave under his arm, politely waiting for whatever comes next. He gently puts her down, wipes the blood off her face and considers his next move.

He may be a bastard, but he’s not about to leave a slave child barely out of toddlerhood alone with the corpse of her owner. He could take her back to Shili, to her family. Maybe even collect a finder’s fee. But Shili isn’t known for wealth outside of the royal clans of Corvala. He doubts it would even cover the fuel it’ll cost to get there, and as he considers it further, he finds he doesn’t really want to give her back to the people who handed her over to a stranger claiming to be a Jedi without question. They clearly weren’t too attached—and with such osik judgement, who’s to say they wouldn’t lose her again in a fortnight?

“What do you want?” Jango asks her bluntly. “Do you want to go home?”

The girl blinks at him. She’s like a convor, eyes taking up half her face. “Niikhmönüü?” she asks in a squeaky voice.

Jango doesn’t speak Zygerrian, but he recognizes it. “You don’t speak Basic, do you?” he asks.

She bites her lips and looks down like she’s embarrassed. “Uuchlaarai,” she whispers, fiddling with the bells on her skirt.

Jango sucks on his teeth as he thinks. He shouldn’t bring her back to Kamino. He knows that. He has a plan. He doesn’t need the distraction of a little Togruta, his focus needs to be on training Boba as his apprentice. He should just drop her off at an orphanage. 

(But he knows what Jaster would do. Even if Jaster wouldn’t have come within a parsec of a Zygerrian on purpose.)

Jango closes his eyes and sighs, finally accepting what he subconsciously decided the second he picked her up. “Let’s find the key to that collar,” he mumbles, kneeling beside Chomai’s body. 

Underneath the collar, the skin on the girl’s neck is softer than silk, and scarred with two ugly burn nodules from being shocked into submission. He rubs them as he walks back to the Slave I.

(He can overlook a lot for a million credits. But, as he told Bane—Chomai never paid him.)

---

The Kaminoans don’t put up as much of a fuss as Jango expects when he shows up with a stray Togruta in tow. They do a full workup on the girl and find her free of diseases, inform Jango he isn’t to let her around the clones for a month—until her vaccinations have had time to kick in—and turn her back over to him with a datapad full of information on Togruta biology. He says the gai bal manda that same night, with Kal Skirata to witness, and gives her a soul. She nods solemnly, not understanding a single word, but she seems to work out that it’s important. 

“Ni kar’tayl gai sa’ad, Arla Fett,” he says to her, knowing she can’t understand, but needing her to hear it anyway. He squats down and cups her cheeks, runs his thumbs over the rhombuses on her cheeks. “I am Jango. I’m your buir now. Su’cuy.”

Arla tilts her head. “Um… soka,” she repeats awkwardly, pointing to her chest.

Kal laughs. “Close enough. Ibic cuyi yust.”

Jango hugs her. At first she’s stiff, but it’s like a switch goes off, and then she relaxes and melts in his arms. That’s when he discovers that when she’s happy, she purrs.

(He graciously pretends he doesn’t hear Kal sniffling.)

---

Boba, two years younger—ish—quickly becomes obsessed with his new sister. He screams when Jango pries his little fingers off Arla’s lekku—she’s quiet and polite, and if his pinchers hurt, she doesn’t let it show—and every night Jango finds Arla in his bed, curled protectively around Boba like a strill, purring like a motor. 

She picks up Basic quickly and Mando’a even faster. Jango starts tying her to his back while he’s training the Alpha cadets and she spends every moment silently watching with her big blue eyes, never in the way, never a distraction. More than once he forgets she’s even there and walks into a fresher with her still perched on his back, only remembering after he sits down and hears a panicked squeal.

She’s quiet at first. Even when she hurts herself, she catches any cry before it can escape. Once she’s comfortable, once she learns she won’t be punished for speaking or laughing or crying, she starts chattering in a mix of Mando’a and Basic, with a few foreign words that sound Zygerrian thrown in. She still flinches at loud noises, and she has a tendency to go silent when she’s nervous, but she’s not afraid to laugh out loud anymore.

Kal is enchanted by her. He takes her for an afternoon and introduces her to the Nulls. Upon her return he gleefully informs Jango that she bit Jaing and Mereel for tickling her (he insists it’s fine, they needed to learn, and Jango tells her later how proud he is that she stuck up for herself), but Jango has to put a moratorium on giving her candy after she bounces around his quarters until four in the morning hyped up on sugar.

Once the carnivore is on a proper diet of meat—actual meat, not that fungus-based protein osik the Kaminoans make—she shoots up like a weed and stands a head above the cadets her same physical age. Her little montral buds bloom and grow, lengthening into draconic horns that tilt backwards, and her lekku reach her shoulders. Her face markings split, and the day Jango notices they no longer touch in the middle of her forehead he wants to cry.

---.

She doesn’t know her birthday, so a year to the day that Jango gave her a soul, he declares Arla six. She can’t—can, but shouldn’t—eat normal cake, so Kal and Mij conspire to make her a monstrosity out of ground nerf. It looks like a pile of osik, but when she smells it her eyes light up. While Boba and the Nulls clumsily destroy the uj cake Kal baked, she inhales the pile of meat in one sitting and gives the two grizzled Cuy’val Dar purring kisses of gratitude. 

(Jango does not ignore the sniffling this time, but Kal takes the ribbing in stride, though when Mij joins in he starts swinging.)

---

The literature the Kaminoans gave Jango claim that young Togrutas need lots of hunting practice, so Jango hides sachets of roba jerky around Kamino and sets her loose. Arla crawling along the white floors on all fours following a scent becomes a common sight. It unnerves the kaminiise and they ask him to make her stop. He ignores them. Often she’s joined by Vau’s strill, and even though the crotchety old bastard wants nothing to do with her—or so he says, but the little smile he wears when he watches her crawl through the halls says differently—Lord Mirdalan is as enraptured by her as Boba. Whenever his children go missing, Jango usually finds them curled up alongside Mird in a musky pile in some out of the way corner, jerky on their breath.

Arla takes to training with the same ease she takes to everything else. She’s relentless, determined, extraordinarily graceful. She’s a crack shot and fights like she’s dancing. Once she learns her forms she’s unstoppable. She has an eerie talent for anticipating her opponents’ next move, and more than once Jango wonders if her village was right about her having powers after all. 

(But he tells himself it doesn’t matter if she does, because she’s not like the jetiise. She’ll never be like them. And he puts it aside because Arla is his daughter now, and any jetii that wants her will have to go through him.)

---

She doesn’t remember her parents when Jango asks. She doesn’t remember Shili. When he asks what it was like with Chomai F’tarr, her giant eyes well up with tears and he never asks again.

---

Arla doesn’t understand why she can play with Boba and Ordo and Mereel, but not the Alphas nor the CTs. One day Jango finds her staring down at them, nose fogging the glass. He tries to explain that they’re not like Boba, they’re just drones, but she looks even more confused. 

“But they’re clones?”

“They’re not like Boba, ner Arl’ika. They’re soldiers.”

“So are the Nulls.” Arla tilts her head like a pup, like it’ll make sense at a different angle. “Kal Ba’vodu says they’re—”

“You never mind what he says about it,” Jango cuts her off sharply, and makes a mental note to tell Kal to watch his shabla tongue around his daughter. “They’re different. Programmed to follow orders and not much else. They’re just cannon fodder.”

Arla frowns. “They don’t look different,” she says softly, nose pressed against the glass. “And they don’t feel different.”

He doesn’t ask what that means. He picks her up, takes her back to their quarters and distracts her with a puzzle. She still stares at the CTs when they pass over them, but she doesn’t ask again.

---

Jango still takes jobs, though he finds himself going on fewer and fewer as the years go by. He takes on enough to keep his reputation alive, but mostly he stays at home and teaches his children. Even though they have separate beds, there isn’t a single morning where Jango finds them sleeping apart, and even fewer when he finds them in their room at all. Usually they’re curled up like puppies in a pile under his covers.

Jango soon learns that Arla has an uncanny ability to sense his moods. She knows when he needs a cuddle or a distraction, and she knows when he needs to be alone. Sometimes she leaves him and lets him have his time, and others she refuses to leave his side, as stubborn as a strill. He usually ends up grateful that she didn’t let him win. She brings a strange sense of balance to his family. Serenity. She’s soft with Boba when Jango is too hard, but also pushes him, trains with him day and night. He still misses them when he has to leave, but he doesn’t become paralyzed with guilt for leaving Boba alone. The weight of Jaster’s legacy, ever present on his shoulders, just doesn’t feel as heavy as it used to with a third bearing it. 

Jango reaches for his trusty bottle of tihaar after a particularly rough day and realizes it has dust on it.

She has bad dreams some nights, kicking and whimpering in her sleep. Jango doesn’t know if they’re memories or her imagination, but he learns that if he wakes her up cold, she won’t be able to get back to sleep the rest of the night. He holds her tight to his chest and quietly sings Mando’a songs until her heart stops pounding. Boba clings to her from behind like a little jetpack, sandwiching her in their love, shielding her from her dreams. It’s those times that Jango curses the Zygerrian race as a whole. He tries not to wonder if he left any other children behind, reassuring himself that the other slaves would have taken care of them. 

(They would have taken care of Arla, too, he knows. They may have even known who her family was. But he tells himself that it doesn’t matter, because Arla is happy with him and safer on Kamino than with the di’kute that gave her to a Zygerrian.)

A week after Boba turns seven, Jango wakes up with both children tucked under his arms and stares out at a rare, sunny blue sky. He makes them egg sandwiches and takes them out fishing. Arla swims around the boat like a little orange shark, scaring everything away. Jango forces her back in the boat. Eventually Boba catches an eel the size of Jango’s leg. Pulling it in, the fin on its back slices his arm halfway to the bone, but Boba doesn’t cry, not once. Mij stitches him up, and the whole time Boba holds Arla’s hand hard enough to turn it white. They make tiingilar out of the eel and fall asleep on the sofa watching holovids.

---

Jango starts taking the children out with him on easy jobs. Partly to get their faces out there, to introduce them as his apprentices and give them the bare bones of a reputation; partly because he misses them to the point of distraction when he’s gone. The day they run into Cad Bane, he recognizes Arla immediately as Chomai F’tarr’s slave girl. He laughs until he turns purple and knocks one of his breathing tubes loose. He stops after Arla bites his trigger finger, then it’s Jango’s turn to laugh.

---

There’s unique traditions among the Mandalorians of Concord Dawn. As they weren’t nomads like their ancestors, the local tradition of graveyards was adopted and modified into what became the taap’echoy—the traditional place of mourning for members of a clan to remember their dead. Mandalorians cremate their dead instead of letting them rot in the soil, but on Concord Dawn, when a person dies without a descendant or a clan member to pass their beskar down to, it’s buried deep in the ground under their mourning stone like aruetiise do with bodies. 

When Arla is twelve, Jango takes her and Boba to Clan Fett’s taap’echoy—where the beskar’gam of Jango’s great-great aunt Ruusaan Arla lies buried. They dig all night, reaching her coffin around dawn. 

(The story goes, Great-Great Aunt Ruusaan was the last surviving member of Clan Arla. When she married Jango’s Great-Great Uncle Jona, he didn’t leave Clan Fett, but he agreed that their daughters would inherit Arla rather than Fett and rebuild the clan. Three months later, they were both killed protecting Jona’s sister’s children, and to honor her sacrifice and keep the memory of Clan Arla alive, the name was passed down along the line of first-born daughters. Her beskar was laid to rest in the soil, symbolically bestowed to the daughter Ruusaan herself had been carrying.)

Jango knows he could’ve just bought Arla a new set, as hard to find as beskar is to find under the Kryze regime. Stars know he can afford it. But he wants her to have a piece of his clan’s history, and who better to reclaim it than the last living Arla of Clan Fett? 

(And, to that point, he never wants her to doubt that she’s his daughter, no matter how he found her. Aliit ori’shya taldin.)

Arla, covered head-to-toe in gravedirt, holds the armor like it’s a holy relic. Her eyes go big—bigger than usual. “I get my own beskar’gam?” she whispers. She crouches and hugs it to her chest, overwhelmed with emotion.

“Of course you do.” Jango gets down on one knee and cups her round cheeks. The rhombus markings that were on her cheeks when he found her have split into wings. “You are a Mandalorian. You are my first daughter. You are Arla Fett.”

“Vor’e, Buir.” Arla throws her arms around Jango’s neck, purring deep in her chest.

“But what about mine?” Boba whines, brow furrowed.

Jango can’t help but laugh, because it’s exactly what he said when his father presented his sister Arla with her grandmother’s beskar’gam. “You’re too young yet, son. You’ll get yours in a few years.” Also, he’s not positive how many other mourning stones have beskar buried beneath them—he only knows about this one because of the family tradition.

Boba joins in. All three are filthy, sweaty, and exhausted; Jango wonders if his father ever felt this happy when he held his children in his arms.

---

He takes the plates to Sundari, to an armorer he trusts. The ancient Twi’lek, in full beskar’gam that’s as blue as the forge he works, spends a day and a half repairing the flaws and shaping the pieces to fit a smaller frame. One of his lekku is amputated halfway up, capped with nerf leather. “That one I can tell you made,” he says, pointing to Boba with a decrepit chuckle and a leather-tipped jab. “Looks just like you. Where’d you find your daughter?”

Jango considers lying for a moment, but ends up saying “Zygerria,” because it’s not quite the truth, but not a far off enough lie for him to feel guilty about telling.

“Ah.” The armorer huffs sadly. “You did well getting her out of there. Evil creatures.”

“Tell me about it.” Jango watches Arla play peekaboo with the armorer’s pet convor. 

“You know, if the jetiise were good for one thing, it was driving those chaakare to near-extinction. They’re still slavers, but they’ve never gotten back the power they wielded during the Old Republic. They had entire armies of slave verde back then. Poor ade. Bred for war, raised knowing their only future was to die for their masters.” The hammer rattles inside Jango’s rib cage every time the armorer brings it down. “From what I hear, the jetiise were able to sabotage the collars of the verde, so they could disobey orders without shabla val nari mishi’an. They immediately turned on their masters.” Clang clang clang. “They wiped most of ‘em out in one night, coordinated across the galaxy. Pure carnage. Well deserved, I say.” Clang clang clang. Arla laughs at the convor, a high tinkling sound. “In the end, the slaves freed themselves, not the jetiise. But the jetiise sure cleaned the Zygerrians up.” Clang clang clang. “Hundreds of dynasties wiped out. And good shabla riddance, I say. It’s only a shame they didn’t get them all.”

“Ner Arl’ika!” Jango calls, turning away, feeling clammy. “Did you pick your colors out yet? We’ll go see the sal’gotal’ad later and get your paint.”

“The sal’gotal’ad?” Arla raises one brow marking. “Is there special paint you’re supposed to use? I’ve seen Vhonte Ba’vodu touch up their armor with speeder paint.”

“You don’t have to use anything special, no.” Jango leans forward; at twelve—ish—she’s too tall for him to go down on one knee anymore. He’s never known a grown Togruta under two meters at the forehead, he has no reason to think Arla will turn out any different. “You don’t have to use anything at all.” He taps his naked breastplate. “But if you don’t want to have to touch it up every time you bounce off the corner of a table—and, my love, we both know you do that at least twice a day” —They both laugh— “We need to get the good osik.”

“If you say so, Buir.” She flashes him a fanged grin. “Can we go to the arcade now? Boba wants to do the 4D dance machine and it needs two people.”

“Go ahead.” Jango sends them off with a pocketful of credits and a smooch on Arla’s forehead. Unlike Boba, she’s not too grown-up to accept a kiss from her buir in public. 

---

The next day Arla picks out a bright scarlet paint, but after the first stripe across her chestplate, her excited grin turns to a frown. After whispering with the sal’gotal’ad, she returns with a paint that’s a deep, rich maroon. “This is better.” She swipes it on, and grins. “Ori’jate.”

“She’ll need to be refitted every year until she’s fully grown,” the armorer informs Jango. He’s got a set of laminar sheaths in his hands—forged with additional beskar that Jango shelled fifty thousand out for—to protect her lekku. “Her lekku will keep growing for her entire life, but they usually slow down once they’re mature.”

“Any idea of how long they’ll end up?” Jango eyes his daughter’s wagging rear lek, animated and happy as she paints. Boba helps by doing detail work on all the nooks and crannies. 

“Depends on where she’s from. Did you know her buir? Usually they match.” Jango shakes his head. The armorer shrugs. “Eh, hard to know, then. I once saw a Tog from Kiros whose lekku went all the way down to her ankles, and she was evaar’la yet. Suppose she’ll be tying them around her shoulders by the time she reaches middle age.”

Arla’s lekku grow in spurts, but so far they’ve stayed proportionate to her head, barely brushing her shoulders. Jango tries to imagine them to her knees; he can’t help but wonder where Togs hide all the shabla neck muscles needed to keep the weight of those things from turning them quadrupedal.

“You’re a good buir, you know.” The armorer claps Jango on the back. “Not too many still honor tradition like this nowadays, not with the New Mandalorians in charge.” His disgust of the Kryzes is palpable. “She’s even a foundling! Kandosii, Jango. Remember: gar taldin ni jaon’yc; gar sa buir, ori’wadaasla. Jaster would be proud.”

Jango watches his daughter. He suddenly wonders if she looks like her mother.

---

They’re walking through the deep space fuel station of Eburnea on the tail end of a job when Arla comes to a sudden stop, her eyes narrowed. She draws her 19X—one shot to the head, and the Pantoran following them falls to the ground. The disintegrator rifle hidden beneath his cloak clatters to the floor.

Jango stares at the rifle. He had the Pantoran tagged in his HUD for the last five minutes, but never spotted the disintegrator. As quick as he is, if the Pantoran had gotten off a shot… if it had hit one of the children… he’s getting sloppy in his old age.

“Knew it,” Arla says triumphantly. She spins the blaster before she tucks it away. “Don’t worry, Buir. I’ve got your back.”

Jango pats her between her montrals. “Never doubted it.” 

They don’t wait for station security to come sniffing around. They leave on the Slave I as fast as they can and only when they get into hyperspace does Jango ask, “How did you know he had a disintegrator?”

Arla shrugs. “I just had a feeling.”

Jango doesn’t ask her to elaborate, but later, when he goes to sleep with Arla and Boba cuddled to his chest, his eyes don’t want to close. 

---

After some digging, Jango finds out the Pantoran worked for a sentient trafficker on the Black Sun Syndicate’s payroll. He’s gone from Kamino for two weeks. When he returns, he has two new blaster burn scars and a crate full of datatapes.

Three weeks later, a span of high-profile arrests rock the Core, and the Jedi are lauded for their success in bringing a galaxy-wide sentient trafficking operation to a close. They thank the anonymous source that sent them terabytes of evidence. 

(The jetiise are good for one thing, Jango remembers.)

---

Jango’s mid-pour of his caf one afternoon when Arla barges into the kitchen, more upset than he’s ever seen her.

“Come with me,” she says, already dragging him towards the door. 

Deprived of his afternoon caf, Jango is caught between annoyance and amusement at his daughter’s antics. “What’s got your lekku in a twist?”

“You’ll see,” she says darkly. Her rear lek thumps against her back as she walks, painting an angry drumbeat. 

His curiosity turns to suspicion as she leads him through Tipoca City’s white halls, all the way to where Dred Priest’s cadets are housed. Where she is not supposed to be, because she’s not to be fraternizing with the CTs.

No one notices them slip into the back of the training room. The wall of cadets arranged in a ring are too transfixed by the four within them beating the ever-loving osik out of each other, bare-fisted and bleeding profusely. Priest overlooks the fighting with his arms crossed, a sadistic smirk on his ugly face that grows wider with every blow.

A battle circle. And just like that, the mystery of why Mij has had to patch up so many of Priest’s cadets is solved. None of them have ever revealed the source of their injuries; when questioned, Priest always claims it’s from standard combat training, but he’s never had an explanation for why they occur three times more often than the other squads. 

Jango is disgusted. This isn’t training. There’s no lesson being learned here. This is violence for violence’s sake, brutality for the amusement of a sadist. Jango knew what Priest was before he invited him to Kamino, but he put him in charge of a hundred cadets anyway because the bastard is also one of the deadliest soldiers Jango has ever met.

A bald cadet in the ring takes an uppercut to the chin. Arla rumbles with a growl, low and deep in her chest, and Jango is tempted to join her.

“Atten-tion!” Jango bellows. The room falls silent, the cadets snap their heels together, and the smirk falls off Priest’s face like a leaden weight.

“Afternoon, Jango.” Priest strides forward with confidence, though there’s wariness beneath the bravado that most wouldn’t notice. “What can I do for you?”

“Tion’gar di’kut’la?” Jango shoves him hard, blood boiling. “Tion’gar suvari ibice verde cuyi waadas’la? You’ve got a million credits beating on each other for your entertainment!”

Priest shoots a glare at Jango’s daughter. “As I explained to your little mongrel—”

Jango sees red and shuts him up with the full strength of a beskar-studded fist. Priest reels back, wheezing from the shock, and Jango hits him again before he can recover. The cadets watch silently as Jango hits their trainer again, and again, until he hears the tinkling of teeth fall onto the tile floor.

“Udesii, Buir.” Arla wraps her arms around Jango from behind and pulls him off. “Udesii. Kaysh suvari.”

Jango takes a few seconds to catch his breath, to stamp the wildfire of his rage into embers. “No more battle circles,” he tells Priest, though with how loud he’s groaning, he’s not sure he hears him. He turns to the cadets, to the sea of faces identical to his own. “No more, do you hear me? You tell him no if he tries it again. On my orders. He’s here to train you, not abuse you.”

The bald cadet—no, not bald, now that Jango’s close he can see that he has his platinum-blond hair buzzed close to the skin—steps forward. “Sir, yes Sir!” 

“And if you ever call my daughter a mongrel again, I’ll throw you into the fucking ocean.” Jango kicks Priest in the gut one more time before stalking away, holding onto Arla’s hand like a lifeline.

---

“How did you know?”

Arla has her arms crossed and her lips pursed in a pout. Her eyes are locked on the floor instead of Jango, who can’t help but pace back and forth, full of furious energy and nowhere to put it.

“I asked you a question, Arla,” Jango seethes. “How. Did. You know?” 

Arla throws her hands up. “I just had a feeling, okay?” 

“A feeling. You had a feeling that Dred Priest was running battle circles?”

“No, not… kind of, I guess?”

“Tell me the truth, daughter.” Jango skids to a halt and glares at her. “Now.”

Arla hesitates, wringing her hands. “Do you ever just walk into a room and feel that something is… wrong? Off? It felt like that.”

“Of course. That’s called instinct. It’s what keeps you alive. It doesn’t alert you to forbidden battle circles in an area of Tipoca City you’re not supposed to be anywhere near. How many times do I need to tell you to stay away from the CTs?” 

Arla deflates. “I was… I just… I had a feeling that something was wrong! And I followed it, and I ended up there and saw what Priest was doing!”

“You followed—” Jango breaks off, threading his fingers through his hair. 

Arla hugs herself. “I’m sorry I made you mad, Buir. But isn’t it good that I did it? Because you were able to put a stop to it. Priest won’t hurt them anymore.”

Oh, he’ll hurt them. Once he picks his teeth up off the floor, he’ll take out all of his humiliation on the cadets, and after his woman finds out… Jango is half-tempted to throw them both in the ocean. He’ll have to have another talk with Priest just to keep him from killing them.

“I don’t want you around them,” Jango says, jaw clenched. “I gave you an order, but you defy me over and over again. You’re such a good girl otherwise, Arla, why won’t you listen to me about this?”

“I’m not trying to be disobedient.” Arla wilts like a dying veshok stalk in her shame. “When I get these feelings, I can’t just ignore them. It’s like something is shouting at me, and if I don’t listen, it just gets louder.”

Jango’s heart cracks in half. He crouches down, runs his thumbs over the wings on her cheeks, and touches his forehead to hers in a reverent kov’nyn. 

“These feelings I get… Is there something wrong with them?” A tear rolls down Arla’s cheek. “Is there something wrong with me?”

“You are my daughter. You are a Mandalorian. That is what matters, Arla Fett.” He makes a fist, rests it over her heart. “What’s in here is all that matters.”

---

Later, when the adrenaline has faded, what begins as a stern talk about staying away from the CTs ends in a shouting match, with Arla being confined to her quarters for a standard month and a promise that the next time he finds out she’s been down there, he’ll take her armor and make her earn it back one piece at a time.

---

Arla repents in time to turn thirteen and embark on her verd’goten. Jango decides to mix traditions and takes her to Shili to hunt an akul. Boba tags along, though Jango forbids him from interfering. The three travel deep into the wilderness to find a tribe who lives in akul territory. After two days on foot, they find a small village. Once they get a good look at Arla and Jango explains why they’re there, the tribe invites them to stay the night.

First they speak to the chieftain and pay her for the privilege of hunting on her land, then they’re taken before a shaman who wears a crown of akul teeth coated in iron. In a dark, smoky tent, he bites the head off a thimiar and splits its guts open to read the secrets of its entrails.

After several silent minutes pass, “Tomorrow is a good day for a hunt,” he finally announces. He’s ancient, with wrinkled blue skin, sits hunchbacked, and is weighed down by a heavy set of violet-striped lekku that droop to his waist. “You will find victory when Bogan’s moon is high.”

“Oya!” Arla says, beaming.

The Togrutas are hospitable beyond expectation. They give Arla a strip of akul leather so she can familiarize herself with its scent and teach her the signs of its passing; the footprints, the scat, the gouges it leaves on the trees after sharpening its claws. The chieftain shows her how to hang and prepare the body and patiently goes through what organs are safe to eat (heart, lungs, kidneys), safe in small quantities (liver, brain), and utterly toxic unless prepared correctly (testicles). She demonstrates how to pull out the beast’s fragile teeth without breaking them with an iron pinching tool, then gifts it to Arla.

After being served enough meat to put a rancor into a food coma, Jango and his children settle down to sleep in a tent prepared for them. Their bed is made of fragrant, freshly-picked pine boughs and covered with furs.

“Do you think they know who my people are?” Arla whispers once they’re nestled within the furs. “Or maybe… maybe they’re my people? What are the odds?”

“I didn’t see much orange out there,” Jango replies casually, willing his heart to stop beating so damn hard before Arla hears it. 

“True.” Arla rests her head on Boba—he’s already asleep, worn out from the walk and the feast. “I guess it doesn’t matter. I’m a Mandalorian. You’re my people.”

“Never doubt it.” Jango pets her between her montrals until she falls asleep. 

The next day, after the shaman rubs a thumb full of blue paste on their foreheads (for luck), Arla leads them deep into the forest, letting her formidable nose and Togruta instincts—and, undoubtedly, her feelings—guide their hunt. They break twice to eat and rest; once by a river floating with chunks of spring ice, the other in a towering grove of trees that are ten feet in diameter, with red bark and a near-black canopy that blocks out the sun.

In her maroon beskar’gam and ocean-blue kute, Arla practically disappears into the foliage. Jango and Boba have to scramble to keep up with her.

“Does she know where it is?” Boba pants. After chasing after his sister all day, he’s exhausted, while Arla seems to gain strength by the hour.

“I’m… not sure.” Jango watches Arla leap from branch to branch above their heads like a kowakian monkey-lizard. She seems to have a destination in mind, but shab if Jango knows where she’s headed.

But he does notice she’s thriving here, quite literally in her element. He has a handful of hideaways in mind for when this is all over, and he considers adding Shili to the list.

Darkness falls. Three of Shili’s six moons are high in the sky. Mindful of Boba, who’s about to drop from exhaustion and desperately trying to hide it, Jango is about to call it for the night and make camp when Arla’s head turns on a swivel and her nostrils flare. The blue in her eyes disappears, overcome with black as her pupils expand.

“It’s close,” she says, a feral grin splitting her cheeks, and takes off.

Jango glances at the sky; he’s not sure which of the moons is Bogan’s, but the red one is higher than the other two.

If it was hard to keep up with her before, it’s nearly impossible now. Jango trips over every root and fallen branch, Boba not faring much better. 

Petrichor gives way to the stench of feline musk. Jango hears snarling and growls that make his whole gut clench in fear. He can’t see Arla. He takes a firm hold of Boba’s arm, jets up to a high branch and scans the forest.

“There!” Boba shouts, pointing.

Arla and the akul face off in a clearing a few dozen meters ahead. It’s enormous; a massive feline, with red fur striped with blue and a mouth big enough to swallow Arla whole. They circle around one another, two predators sizing the other up. Arla holds her blaster in her left hand, steadying it on the one holding a knife, eyes locked with the creature. 

“We’ve got to help her!” Boba lurches forward. 

“This is your sister’s verd’goten,” Jango reminds him, though he’s fighting his own urge to rush ahead and help his daughter. Every instinct he has is screaming at him to protect his child. He fights it off, breathes through it—this is his test as much as hers. If he trained her well enough, she’ll survive.

The akul strikes first. Arla rolls under the swipe of its massive claws and scores a slice on its side. It spins with a scream of pain and lunges again. Arla lets it tire itself out, dodging every deathblow, jamming it with blaster bolts that don’t penetrate its tough hide. All while Jango watches with his heart in his throat, his fingers clenched around Boba’s arm tight enough to leave a bruise.

“Buir…”

Jango tastes blood. “Just watch.”

The akul lunges. Arla doesn’t dodge in time, and they both roll down the hill, out of sight.

“Arla!” Boba cries out.

Jango’s already in the air. He jets over the clearing, over the hill, lands next to the pile of stinking red fur and rips the five hundred pound creature off his daughter with one hand.

She’s covered in steaming blood, red from head to toe, moonlight reflecting off her manic grimace. “I did it,” she pants, “I got it in the heart.”

Jango searches the creature. After a few seconds he pulls out the knife that’s buried to the hilt in its chest. He helps Arla to her feet and embraces her tightly. “You did it.” She shakes like a leaf in his arms, adrenaline coursing through her like electricity. “You did it, daughter. Gar cuyi verd jii. Jii bal darasuum.”

They hang the beast from a tree and bleed it dry. Before they pull its teeth, skin it, and dress it for the tribe, Arla cuts its heart out of its chest and eats it while it’s still warm, her face transcendent.

(Boba wants to try it too. Arla makes him swear he won’t spit it out if he doesn’t like it. When he gags, she claps her hand over his mouth and makes him swallow.)

---

Upon their return, the tribe celebrates by dropping everything and gathering for a massive feast on the edge of the village. They devour the beast raw. Younger Togrutas ensure certain organs are passed to the elderly, while others hurry to make sure the dangerous organs are out of reach of the many colorful kits pouncing on the flesh. They don’t stop until they’ve reached the bones, which are parceled up to families for roasting. 

The shaman’s grandson offers to tan the hide for Arla and send it on when it’s ready in a few weeks, an offer she gladly accepts. The shaman helps her pick out the luckiest teeth, and after carefully hand-drilling minute holes in their bases, dips them in molten tin to protect them. 

Three days later, the first thing Arla does when they board the Slave I is bestow a thumbprint of blue paint on her buc’ye.

(“For luck,” she whispers when she’s done.)

---

Arla no longer leaves their quarters without her beskar’gam. Although they’re only meant to be worn during combat, she even slips on the beskar lekku sheaths. She adopts a swagger as she stalks the halls of Tipoca City so her akul-leather kama will sway behind her. She shows anyone who asks—and many who don’t—her akul teeth, dipped in beskar and embedded into the crown of her buc’ye courtesy of the armorer.

(Getting them coated in beskar set Jango back eight grand, but he couldn’t very well allow her to wear them coated in tin. She’s a Mandalorian. And what the hell is he squirreling all of his money away for if not for special occasions like this?)

She thinks she looks so tough. Maybe she does to strangers, but Jango thinks she’s adorable. He does his best to keep his expression neutral and lets her keep her delusion of toughness. 

(And he remembers when he was the same. Jaig’ika, Jaster had called him, little hawk; fully fledged, but still crashing into branches.)

Jango takes her on more dangerous jobs. She’s primarily in charge of guarding her unarmored little brother—Boba whines about getting his own beskar’gam more and more, and Jango’s located another set in the taap’echoy, but there’s currently an inoculation-resistant strain of Keratos running rampant on Concord Dawn and he doesn’t want to risk it—but by Mandalorian tradition Arla is now an adult, and that means she is allowed to participate in adult life. Like working for a living.

In their line of work, that means bars and firefights. And Jango doesn’t go to bars.

Jango shoves down the urge to tackle her every time he sees a blaster bolt whizz past her head. He reminds himself she’s grown. He trained her as a warrior, as a survivor. She doesn’t need him to protect her anymore. She’s not just his daughter, she’s his apprentice, and she’s a damn good one.

She’s eerily good at dodging bolts anyway. She always seems to know where they’ll land. She’s trained to deflect them with her beskar, but she rarely needs to. After they hunt down a bounty on Bothawui, she liberates their quarry’s chuka and starts carrying it in her off hand, using it interchangeably with her vibroblade. 

(She almost gets them executed by their client after he spots it on her belt. In her defense, Jango didn’t know the Bothan stun stick was that culturally important, either.)

After she accidentally discovers that she can use the chuka to bat a blaster bolt back towards its sender, she spends hours practicing the technique with Boba. He shoots stunners at her from behind an M3 blast shield, then they invent a new battle strategy they name kad bal aran: sword and shield. Boba stands behind her and shoots while she smacks blaster bolts at the training droid. They become frighteningly good at it.

Jango suspects she trains with more than just Boba. Sometimes she disappears for hours, conveniently reappearing just as Jango decides to check the CT training domes, sweating and clearly fresh off a high-intensity workout. But he can’t figure out how she’s doing it. Or why.

---

An updated vaccine is released for Keratos a few months later. Jango’s busy planning their trip to Concord Dawn when his comlink alerts to a frequency he always dreads seeing. He makes sure his quarters are empty of children and locks the bedroom door behind him before setting up the holoprojector.

“Lord Tyranus.” Jango stares impassively, making his face a stone mask. “It’s been a while. What can I do for you?”

The hologram nods its head, a simulacrum of pleasantry. “Jango. I have a job for you.”

“Another assassination?” Jango looks away. He’s no pillar of morality, but Tyranus only ever contracts him for killjobs, and after the last one…

(He still hasn’t figured out how a clone managed to escape Kamino. But he can’t help but see the face of the baby boy that clone fathered when he closes his eyes, and no matter how much money he funnels into the savings account, he doesn’t think he’ll ever forget it.)

“Indeed.” Tyranus chuckles, low and deep. “Is that a problem?”

“ ‘Course not.” Jango crosses his arms. “Who’s the target?”

“The information will be securely transmitted to your terminal, as per usual.”

“And my fee?” 

“I trust a million credits should suffice.”

It must be someone high profile. Tyranus paid him half that for the last one. “That’ll do nicely.”

“This job must be completed quickly. Before the end of the month.” 

“Not giving me much time to plan,” Jango points out.

“I trust in your ability to improvise. Get it done, Fett.” Or else, hangs unspoken in the air. Tyranus’ hologram flickers away.

Jango’s terminal dings with a new transmission. He sees why Tyranus is paying a million when the target’s profile pops up. And just like he expected, it won’t be an easy job. He won’t be able to make this look like an accident, he doesn’t have the time to be that meticulous. He’ll have to go big—a bomb, maybe. There’ll likely be casualties, which leaves a sour taste in his mouth.

But Padmé Amidala is well known for using decoys, and Jango can’t risk missing her.

---

Jango finds Arla in the mess hall. She sits across from Ordo, staring him in the eyes as they play kal’geroya. The knives tapping between their fingers are a blur.

“I’d wait,” Kal advises Jango before he can interrupt. “Unless you want someone to lose a finger, of course, then by all means.”

Jango sighs. “How long have they been at this?”

Kal checks his chrono. “They just passed thirteen minutes. New record.”

Jango sighs again, louder.

“Don’t distract me, Buir, I’m winning.” Arla’s eyes are locked on Ordo’s, unblinking and eerie.

“If the winner is whoever doesn’t stab themselves, how is she winning?” Mereel whispers to Jaing.

Arla strikes out like a serpent, slams the hilt of her dagger into the back of Mereel’s hand and returns to her rhythm without missing a beat. “That’s how, mir’sheb,” she says calmly over his howl of pain.

As amusing as it is, they’re on very limited time, so Jango says, “We’ve got a job, daughter,” and gives her the Look he’s spent a decade perfecting.

Arla goes from tapping the table to tossing the knife across the room in one fluid gesture, burying it to the hilt in a wooden target block—dead center. “I forfeit,” she announces, cheery as a sunrise. She collects her buc’ye, leaves the Nulls with a cheeky wave over her shoulder and happily leans under the arm Jango offers her once they’re walking back.

“So what’s the job?”

“I’ll brief you on the way. Pack light.”

“What about Concord Dawn?” 

“It’ll have to wait. We’re pressed for time.”

“How pressed?” 

“Four standard days.” 

Arla’s mouth opens in a surprised little o. “Someone go missing?”

Jango’s mouth sets in a grim line. “Not yet.”

---

Boba watches them pack with an utterly dejected look on his face. He doesn’t like being left behind. Jango doesn’t like leaving him, either, but this time, he has to.

“What if I stay on the ship?” he asks—he keeps trying to come up with compromises, but Jango rejects them all.

“Not this time, son. I told you this job is dangerous. I need Arla to be completely focused. We can’t afford any distractions. If she’s worrying about you, I won’t have all of her.” Jango ruffles Boba’s hair. It’s getting long, overdue for a cut, but every time he brings it up Boba does his best impersonation of a tooka faced with a bubble bath. “Do know what I was doing when I got the call about this job?” Boba’s lip quivers. “I was planning a trip to Concord Dawn. For you. It’s time you got your own beskar’gam, ner Bob’ika.”

Boba’s eyes light up. “Really? You promise?”

“Vercopa gise epa’a ner sur’haaise meh ni nari jehaat’an.” Jango offers him a smile. “I promise, when we get back it’ll be our first stop.”

Boba looks a little less despondent as they leave. But not much.

---

One good thing about Kamino; the scientists there come up with some pretty impressive toys. They give them to Jango to test on jobs, and he’s never been one to turn down free ammo. While he appreciates the poison grenades and the thylaxium gel that turns his flamethrower white-hot, he’s eager to try out the demi-kill darts—one hit, and the target is virtually dead for five minutes. Their heart slows down to five beats per minute, their breathing so shallow as to be undetectable, then they wake up fresh as a felucian daisy. Or so the longnecks say; he hasn’t had an opportunity, or a reason, to use them yet. 

“She’s pretty,” Arla says softly. She sits cross-legged on the floor of the Slave I’s cockpit, reading through Padmé Amidala’s file. The blue light of hyperspace makes her eyes glow like sapphires. “She’s only twenty four. A senator. She was the queen of Naboo when she was only fourteen. The things she’s campaigned for… she seems like a good person.”

Jango gets out his polishing kit and starts cleaning his WESTARs so he has something to do with his hands, somewhere to look other than Arla’s inquisitive face. “It’s not relevant,” he tells her, hoping it’ll be the end of it. “You can’t think about the good and bad of it. You’re a professional who is offering a service. Once that contract is signed, you are the hunter, they are your quarry, and you don’t stop until they’re yours. Your client is the one who gets to worry about morality.”

Arla puts the file aside and tucks her knees under her chin. And just like that, akul teeth and all, she goes from fourteen to five. “How do you choose jobs?” she asks.

“The pay, mostly.”

“So if they offer you enough, you’ll sign on for anything?”

“Not anything. You know I don’t do slave catching.” The old cadence he memorized as a Haat’la Mando’ade cadet comes back. Power cell out, set aside, check the chamber, open wide! “Or anything to do with kids—other than bringing them back home.” He offers her a smile.

Arla doesn’t bite. “I thought it was women and children. Isn’t that in the Supercommando Codex?”

“Young mothers and children.” Barrel twists, then comes free, clean it well, no debris! “I’ve killed plenty of women. They die the same as men.” 

Arla watches him silently. Jango can practically see the wheels in her big head turning. “But if our quarry is innocent…”

Jango snorts. Scope is last, nice and neat. “Nobody’s innocent.” Put it back and now you’re sweet!

Arla’s face sours. “But if they haven’t done anything worth being killed over…”

Jango bites the insides of his cheeks. “I already told you, that’s your client’s problem.”

Her mouth twists. “Not ours. Not as long as they pay us enough.”

“That’s right.” He puts his blaster down. “Why are you struggling with this? You killed your first man at twelve.” And she’s killed fourteen since then, Jango knows. He keeps count.

The glare she shoots him could melt durasteel. “I’ve only killed people who shot at me first. Or who were about to. This… doesn’t feel honorable.”

It isn’t that he disagrees with her. On flimsi, Padmé Amidala is a saint. She took back her planet after the Trade Federation’s invasion at age fourteen, led the charge into battle herself and took back her capital city. She’s campaigned against slavery, genocide, and corruption for her whole senatorial career.

But she’s also against the Military Creation Act. The wheels are in motion, Jango knows the clones will soon be revealed to the galaxy, and she has too much influence on her fellow senators. Paragon or no, she has to be removed.

(Jango can overlook a lot for a million credits. And he can overlook almost anything to see the plan to its ultimate completion.)

“We’ll do it quickly. Painlessly. She won’t even feel it.” Jango changes the subject instead of letting the weight of Arla’s gaze crush him. “Go be useful and calibrate the guns, will you?” 

Arla stalks out of the room, kama swinging, leaving him alone to stew in silence. He polishes the pieces of his blaster until he can see his reflection, though he looks anywhere else.

---

They arrive on Coruscant the night before the senator is scheduled to arrive. Jango’s intel tells him where and when she’ll be landing—all top-secret information that Tyranus shouldn’t have, but it makes Jango’s job a hell of a lot easier.

They change into maintenance jumpsuits, slice into a few droids and use them to wax the landing pad with one of Kamino’s fun new weapons—explosive nanodroids. Completely undetectable and bearing a yield comparable to Czerka thermite, Jango’s excited to see how well they work. They have just enough to cover the primary pad, so the secondaries flanking it, where the senator’s escort will land, escape their explosive coating.

(Arla is happy because it means less casualties; Jango reminds her that it’s always better to be thorough, but since they don’t have any more, there’s no point in arguing about it.)

Jango programs them with a dual detonation sequence; first the pressure of the ship landing will activate them, then sixty seconds later—long enough for the passengers to disembark—boom. Before they go back to the ship, Arla slices into Coruscant’s live air traffic feed and gets them eyes on the landing pad. 

When they’re done, Jango gives her a bone-crushing hug. She smells like cleaning fluid from the droid that took offense to her portable scomp link and defensively sprayed her. For the first time in her life, she lets go first.

They spend the night on the Slave I. They both pretend to sleep. Neither of them do.

Padmé Amidala is scheduled to arrive not long after dawn. When Jango gets up, Arla is already in the cockpit wearing her full kit.

“They’re descending through atmo now. CAT just reported it.” Arla stares at the small viewscreen. “Thirty seconds.”

Jango’s knuckles go white gripping the back of the co-pilot’s chair. They both hold their breath as the ship lands, the docking ramp sliding down a few seconds later.

A figure in white, flanked by an entourage—small, but bigger than Jango expected—strolls down the ramp. As they reach the end, the camera shakes, the landing pad fills with black smoke and fire, and Jango finally lets out the breath he’s been holding. It was risky, using experimental Kaminoan tech on a job this important, but it would have been a hell of a lot harder to rig the landing pad with anything else.

“That’s it, then. It’s done.” Arla doesn’t sound happy. 

Jango squeezes her shoulders. “Not yet. Always confirm your kill.”

They wait for the smoke to clear. One of the fighter pilots, spared from the blast on the platform they didn’t rig, pulls their helmet off and falls to their knees beside the senator. A mass of brown braids falls over their shoulder.

“Shab,” Jango growls, realizing.

Arla bites her lip. “Is that her?” 

“Yes. She used a decoy. A shabla decoy.” Jango pinches the bridge of his nose, breathes out hard. He knew the dalgaan used decoys, but he didn’t know she could pilot a shabla fighter. It wasn’t in her file. If he’d known… “It’s… it’s fine,” he forces out, fighting to stay calm and not call Tyranus right karking there and tear him a new one.

“But now they know that someone is after her,” Arla points out.

“They already suspected, or they wouldn’t have bothered with the decoy.” Jango slaps her on the back with a forced smile. “It’s fine. This just means we go with Plan Besh.”

She follows him out of the cockpit. “What’s Plan Besh?”

He doesn’t answer right away, because while he does have Plan Besh, Cresh, Dorn and Esk, they’re all half-assed and not ready to go, having only put them together within the last twenty hours. He does a quick bit of mental math and decides which one is most feasible in the shortest amount of time.

“Ner Arl’ika,” Jango starts once he’s slid down the ladder, “the lesson you’re going to learn today is the most important one of your life.”

Arla peers down at him, lekku dangling. “And what’s that?”

Jango forces a grim smile. “The skill of improvisation.”

---

Just before sundown, Jango meets Zam Wesell on the maintenance deck of a nightclub deep in the Frostline; one of Coruscant’s many party districts, primarily Pantoran and overwhelmingly neon. It gets brighter here at night than it ever does in the day. He turns on the solar shading in his HUD with two quick blinks of his left eye.

Zam leans against her speederbike, a small smirk on her face. She’s in her Human camouflage; though Jango knows what she is, she doesn’t like to let everyone know she’s a Clawdite shapeshifter right off the bat. She shakes a little canister at him. “I got what you asked for. You know, I was headed to Nar Shaddaa when you called.”

“Lucky me.” Jango tosses her the chit with ten thousand credits on it; he doesn’t take offense when she checks it on her scanner. He’d do the same. 

She tucks it into a pocket, tosses him the canister. “Was that you earlier? The Naboo delegation bombing?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jango replies blithely. He turns the cylinder over his hand. A glimpse of too many legs inside makes his stomach clench. He pockets it before he tosses it off the edge like his instincts are telling him to.

Zam snorts. “Sure you don’t. Now be careful with those kouhons. They’ve been starved for three days, they’ll bite the first thing they see.”

“That’s the idea.” Jango turns. “Take care, Zam.”

“Before you go,” Zam calls, “I heard a rumor you might find interesting.”

Jango pauses, turns back around. “Go on.”

Zam crosses her arms with a little smile, tilts her head; Jango tosses her a second chit with an exasperated sigh. She pockets it after checking the balance and says, “Word is, Senator Amidala from Naboo was placed under Jedi protection after the bombing. Anyone going after her better be loaded for gundarks.” 

Jango bites the insides of his cheeks until he tastes blood. Shab, a Jedi is the last thing he wants to deal with on a job with Arla in tow. “How many?” he asks.

“Two. A knight and his Padawan.”

So a Jedi and a half. That’s something, at least. Jango nods his farewell to Zam and returns to the speeder where Arla waits.

“What happened?” she asks as soon as he takes off. “Did she not have the kouhons?”

“She had them.” Jango reaches over without taking his eyes off of traffic, squeezes his daughter’s limp hand. “She let me know Amidala is under the protection of two jetiise, now. We’ll have to be careful from here on out. We can’t afford to make any more mistakes.”

After thirty heartbeats of silence, Arla finally returns his squeeze.

---

The kouhons in the canister make Jango uneasy. If one of the creepy little chakaare were to chomp him, he’d have about ten seconds to shoot himself up with the antivenom; if he had any, which he doesn’t. Everything’s so last minute, it’s a miracle he got his hand on anything at all.

Arla doesn’t seem bothered by them, but she’s never been put off by creepy-crawlies. He used to find her playing with the wispy, thin Kaminoan spiders in the maintenance shafts when she’d go jerky hunting. She balances the container on her knees and watches them, staring like a tooka in a high-rise condo watching porgs build a nest outside its window.

They stole a PH4 delivery droid on its way back to the pharmacy that dispensed it, smacking it with their speeder first to trigger the impact alarm and fool headquarters into believing it’s yet another casualty of Coruscant’s traffic. Jango carefully presses down the access hatch. “There. Told you, the encryption protocols on these pharmacy droids are laughable.” 

“Yep,” Arla says tonelessly.

Jango holds out his hand for the kouhons. She hands them over and pulls her knees to her chest. “You said we have to use a droid because the jetiise will sense us,” she says, “and they can’t sense droids like living beings.”

“That’s right. And why else?”

“Because if there’s a way to neutralize your target without a direct confrontation, then it’s always the better option,” Arla recites. She rests her chin on her knees. “But Buir, the kouhons are living beings. Won’t they sense them?”

“They’re bugs.” Jango pops the canister into the delivery chamber. “It doesn’t matter how luxurious that penthouse is, there’s not a single set of walls on this planet that doesn’t have bugs in them. They won’t sense them.” He’s counting on it.

“I guess that’s true.” Arla adjusts her kama. “Do we know that they don’t have the windows shielded?”

“Doesn’t matter. That’s why we’re using this thing.” Jango pats the droid’s black metal dome. “They’ve got a little gadget that splits force fields. Let’s ‘em make deliveries while the customer’s not home.”

“What if they have ray shields?” 

Jango dusts off his knees, stands with a wince as one pops. “Well, then we go to Plan Cresh.”

“And what’s Plan Cresh?”

“You distract the jetiise with a little dance, and I shoot the bitch while they’re watching you.” Jango grins, trying to make it a joke.

Arla doesn’t laugh. 

Jango’s comlink alerts him to the last person he wants to talk to at the moment. “Be right back,” he tells Arla, and escapes to the cockpit.

“Your first attempt failed,” Tyranus says without preamble, face sour—more sour than usual. “You’re losing your edge, Jango.”

“Yeah, well you left out some pretty pertinent information, didn’t you?” Jango bites off. “If I’d known that Amidala knew how to pilot a fighter I’d have been a little more thorough with the nanodroids. This job was hard enough to put together with such short notice, I don’t need you making it harder.”

“Save your excuses for someone who cares to hear them.” Tyranus leans forward, lips twisted in a scowl. “My patience is running thin. You have two days before the vote is called, Amidala must be dead before then.”

“I was about to head out when you called.” A shrug. “She’ll be dead in an hour.”

“Unless you fail again.” Tyranus’ eyes are like black holes in his blue, holographic face. “I have done what I can to feed misinformation about disgruntled spice miners from the moons of Naboo being behind the bombing, but you must take every precaution to prevent the Jedi from tracking you back to Kamino. No more Kaminoan weaponry. They mustn’t discover the clones until it is the appropriate time. They mustn’t discover you.”

The idea that his decade of exile could be for nothing, that the plan would fail at the last second because of his carelessness, sends a chill down Jango’s spine. “Then I’ll kill them, too,” he snaps. “I’ll go big, take the whole building out. I can get thermite in a few—”

“No. If you kill the Jedi assigned to her, you will incur the wrath of the entire Order. Don’t touch them.”

Jango chews on his tongue. “Very well. I’ll call you when she’s dead.” He disconnects before Tyranus can throw another jab at him and stalks down to the hangar, the taste of blood thick in his mouth. 

He’ll have to stay out of sight, which means Arla will have to take a more active role than planned. The last thing he wants to do is potentially expose his daughter to the jetiise, but Tyranus is unfortunately right, and he shouldn’t risk it. He has to stay hidden, stay in the shadows.

“Plan’s changed,” he announces to the waiting Arla. “You’re taking point.”

Arla’s eyes go wide. “I am?”

“I’ll explain on the way.” Jango jerks his head towards the waiting speeder. “Let’s move.”

---

Jango waits on a rooftop half a kilometer away from Arla. She’s perched on the edge of a maintenance catwalk ten blocks north of 500 Republica, waiting for the PH4 droid to return from its special delivery.

Jango is used to waiting. Waiting is half of the job, but he’s getting tired of it. With every second that passes, his anxiety ratchets up. He just wants to know, damn it, know that the kouhons have taken out Amidala, and then he can take his daughter home. Take both of his children to Concord Dawn.

He’s getting too old for this life. His heart hasn’t been in it for years. He’s tired—both in body and soul—and he’s ready to find a quiet place where his children can grow up happy and safe.

(Somewhere far, far away from the war to come. Somewhere no clone trooper would ever step foot. Somewhere Arla won’t be in danger from the millions of drones programmed to kill anyone like her.)

“I see the droid,” Arla announces over comms.

Jango lets out a sigh of relief. “Good. Collect it and—”

“Wait.” Arla sounds nervous. “Oh, osik.”

“What?” Jango barks. “What is it?”

“There’s someone… hanging from it.”

“Hanging?” Jango asks, incredulous. 

“Yeah, he’s holding onto it. What the… hold on, I’ll shoot him off.”

There’s only one kind of person insane enough to hang from a delivery droid in Coruscant traffic. “Arla, wait!” Jango says frantically. “Don’t—”

But he’s too late, and he hears her rifle fire over comms. “Arla? Arla!”

“I got him!” Arla says proudly. 

Shabla haran… Jango feels panic claw at his throat like a rabid animal. She has no idea what she’s done. She has no idea she just killed a Jedi. “Get to the rendezvous!” he orders. “I’ll meet you there. We’re leaving straight away.”

“But I didn’t confirm the kill!”

Jango wants to scream, and barely swallows it down. “Now!”

“Okay, okay, I’m going!” She has the nerve to sound annoyed with him.

Jango uses his jetpack to skip across rooftops, conserving fuel, mentally planning the damage control he’s going to have to perform for Tyranus the whole way. If they can get off world, they’ll be fine. There’s no way to track Arla to Kamino; red armor is hardly unique among Mandalorians, and even if the Jedi saw her akul teeth, he’s dead now, they’ll be—

“Uh oh.”

Jango instantly skids to a halt. “What’s wrong?”

“I think… yep, there’s someone following me.” 

“Lose them!” Jango orders.

“I’m trying to!” Jango keeps jumping rooftops, listening to his daughter grunt and swear under her breath the whole way—he absently reminds himself to have a talk about her language when they get home. He’s halfway to the rendezvous when Arla sighs. “I lost him. I’m clear.”

Under his helmet, Jango grins. “Good girl. Keep going. I’m ten minutes out.” 

“I’m nearly there. There’s a—ack!” She screams. “Where did you—get off!”

Jango slides to a stop on top of a bank, heart racing. “What now?” he demands.

“He fell out of the sky!”

“Who?”

“A shabla Jedi! He’s on top of my speeder!”

Jango listens helplessly—he hears blaster fire, the subsonic fwoom of a lightsaber, the squealing of damaged electronics. “Arla? Arla, answer me this instant!”

“I’m trying to focus here!” 

“Arla!” Jango growls.

“I—oh, shab—”

Jango hears more blaster fire, his daughter crying out in pain, then the channel goes silent.

“Arla?” His daughter is not dead. His daughter cannot be dead. He quadruple checks her vital signs and presses on, hailing her over and over. His eyes are blurry, burning; he blinks the tears away. “Arla? Arl’ika, baby, answer me, please…”

His comlink beeps, the channel reconnects. “B-Buir…” Arla says weakly.

“Arla!” Jango nearly sobs from relief. “Are you hurt?”

“I crashed the speeder.” Jango hears a loud crack—transparasteel breaking. “But I’m okay, I just have to… get out…”

Jango squeezes his eyes shut, traps the panic ripping him from the inside out, and lets out a long, shaky breath. “I’m coming, daughter. Run and hide. The jetiise have your scent now, you have to lose them.” 

Arla sniffles. “Okay. I’m sorry, Buir.”

He hesitates—cold logic bites his chest like the jaws of a wolf, whispering in one ear that he should leave her; the plan is weeks away from its completion, and she isn’t integral to it. He can’t let it all be for nothing for one girl.

The other ear hears the tinkling of bells on the skirt of a five-year-old slave girl, wrapped in silk the same color of her eyes.

(Jango is willing to overlook almost anything to see the plan to its completion. Not everything. Not his daughter.)

“Don’t be sorry. Just stay alive until I can get to you.” Jango activates her location beacon and throttles full blast into the sky. 

If the jetiise see him, then so be it. To hell with Tyranus. To hell with the plan.

---

Jango tracks Arla’s beacon to a nightclub on the forty-seventh level. His HUD warns him that his jetpack has less than ten percent fuel remaining.

He pings Arla’s comm and waits. 

“Buir?” she whispers after a few seconds.

“I’m outside The Outlander.” Jango scans the line. “Are the jetiise in there with you?”

“Y-Yes.” Arla’s voice is so quiet, Jango has to turn up his receiver. “I’m hiding in the ladies’ fresher. They’re looking for me.”

“So you don’t know exactly where they are?”

“No.”

“Do you have your vocabulator muted?”

“Yes.”

“Then speak up. They won’t hear you.” Jango uses a tiny bit of fuel to jump to the roof opposite of the alley beside the nightclub. Nine-point-nine percent. “There’s a back door on the western side. Which door are you closer to?”

“The back. But I don’t know where they are. What if they—”

“Move aside, this is Jedi business.” A young, haughty male voice busts through comms on Arla’s end, quickly followed by half a dozen female voices protesting his presence in Basic and Rodian. Jango turns the volume back down before he goes deaf. “Anyone who isn’t an assassin,” the male continues, “get out of here while you still can.”

“Buir…” Arla whimpers.

“Is that the jetii?”

“Yes.”

Jango steels himself. “Listen to me, daughter. I know you’re afraid, but remember: fear is nothing more than your will to survive overpowering your other senses. Focus, follow my orders, and use it to survive this. Are you in a stall?”

“Yes.” 

Jango winces at a loud bang—the jetii is busting doors down. Arla’s out of time. “Prime your flash when he’s one stall away. When he opens your stall, I want you to toss it, then use your flamethrower to force him back. Even if he’s still got his senses, his lightsaber can’t parry flame. Once he’s out of your face, run for the front door, because the other one will expect you to go for the back. They’ll split up. I’m covering the back exit for when the other one runs out. You keep. Running. Once I take him out, I’ll get yours from behind. Don’t try to fight him. Just run.” 

“O-Okay.” Arla takes a deep breath. The bangs get louder as the jetii gets closer. Jango closes his eyes, imagines his daughter crouched on top of a toilet, shaking in fear. “Ni kar’tayli gar darasuum, Buir,” Arla whispers. “J-Just in case.”

Jango’s heart cracks in half. “Darasuum, ner Arl’ika.”

A loud bang, a hiss of fuel—a shout of pain, surprise. Jango holds his breath and listens to Arla run, then—

“Ahhh!”

“Gotcha!”

“Let me go!”

Jango nearly bites through his tongue. His pulse pounds like a war drum. 

“What the—she’s just a kid!”

“Hold her, Anakin, hold her!” The second voice is obnoxiously posh, thickly Coruscanti.

“I said let me go!”

Humming, screaming—the back door busts open and Arla stumbles outside, her chuka dangling from her left hand, two jetiise on her heels.

The taller, younger jetii tackles her before she can escape and wrestles her into a chokehold. The older, bearded one rips off her helmet.

Jango can’t kill them, and he doesn’t have a clear shot with Arla squirming like a damned squid—-though of course he approves, that’s exactly what she’s trained to do.

“Oh.” The jetii sounds surprised. “She is a kid.”

“I’m not a kid, I’m fourteen!” Arla seethes, and jams her elbow into the gut of the jetii wrapped around her. He lets out a comically high-pitched squeak. 

Jango watches and waits for his opening. If there’s still a chance he can get her out without being identified by the jetiise, he’ll take it. Now that she’s pacified—sort of—their vows state they can’t kill her, so all he needs to do is get them away from her. Tyranus told him no more Kaminoan weaponry, but he doesn’t see another option; he loads up a demi-kill dart and waits.

“Young one, what in the blazes are you doing wrapped up in all of this?” The jetii extinguishes his lightsaber and stakes his hands on his hips. “You’re far too young to have been hired for an assassination this high-profile. Who put you up to this?”

“Ke’shab, jetii chakaar.” Arla spits in his face. Jango can’t help but be proud.

“Who hired you?” The young jetii tightens the arm around Arla’s throat.

“Your mother!” Arla wheezes. 

Fire ignites in the Padawan’s eyes. “Wrong answer,” he growls, squeezing harder.

“Anakin, if she can’t breathe, she can’t tell us anything.” The older jetii crouches down so he’s at eye level. “Udesii, ad’ika. You’re Mandalorian, right? You don’t need to be afraid.” 

Above, Jango chokes—the bastard knows Mando’a? 

“We’re not going to hurt you, little one, but I won’t lie—you’re in a great deal of trouble. Tell us who hired you and we will help you, I promise.”

Arla lashes out with one of her coltish legs and kicks him in the chest, knocking him onto his shebs. 

It’s the opening Jango’s been waiting for, and with a silent prayer of apology, he shoots the dart into his daughter’s throat. She instantly collapses in the one called Anakins arms, unconscious.

The flatline alert in his HUD sends adrenaline spurting through his veins like tibanna. He forcibly reminds himself she’s fine, she’s fine—

“She’s dead!” Anakin exclaims, eyes wide with shock. 

“She’s fine,” Jango whispers to himself. He fires a bolt at their feet to get their attention and jets into the sky.

“There! Follow him!”

Jango skips rooftops, rationing his fuel—nine-point-four, nine-point-three—careful to not go too fast. The jetiise have to catch up, but not get close enough to identify him. He leads them three blocks north and it’s only when he hears footsteps right behind him that he jets straight up into the sky, far out of reach, leaving them to watch his contrails. 

Arla’s vitals bloom to life in the corner of his HUD. “Daughter,” Jango immediately bellows over comms. 

“Buir!” Arla coughs, gasps wetly. “What—”

“I’ve led them away, now run!”

“I’m—”

“Arla, run!” Jango roars.

He jets to the rendezvous point—a grimy diner, with a neon sign of a kragget drinking from a cup of caf blinking erratically in its large window—and lands outside with one-point-one percent fuel remaining. He waits for her inside in a corner booth, ignoring the cup of caf he ordered for the privilege of the seat.

It feels like hours, but it’s only ten minutes before Arla stumbles inside, almost dead on her feet. She falls into Jango’s arms, shaking uncontrollably.

“I’m sorry,” she sobs, “I screwed everything up. I’m so sorry.”

Jango checks her neck for the dart—his heart sinks, seeing it’s gone. All he can do is hope that it fell out far enough away from the scene for the jetiise to miss it. He closes his eyes, tightens his arms around his daughter. “Let’s go home.”

---

They take the long way back to Kamino, traveling hyperspace lanes outside of Republic space. It takes almost forty hours to get back—but, as Jango always tells his children, it’s better to be thorough.

Arla spends the ride curled up in her rack, too ashamed to meet his eyes.

Later, Jango checks the holonet and sees that Senator Amidala survived. He gets three calls from Tyranus and ignores them all.

He fumbled the plan at the last second. The clones can’t be revealed until after the act passes. The Jedi have to be forced into this, they’ll never do it unless they’re compelled. 

Arla twitches like a kicked pup in her sleep. Jango sits on the floor, whisper-singing Mando’a songs until her heart stops pounding.

---

They set down on Kamino an hour before sundown, though the only light that reaches the surface of the stormy planet is from the lightning overhead.

“Looks like another hurricane,” Jango says to his daughter, who still won’t meet his eyes. “I don’t want to get stuck here. Go pack for Concord Dawn. We won’t be here long.”

Arla nods and slips away, silent as a ghost.

Jango finds Boba in the library jamming bangcorn in his mouth, watching old holovids from the High Republic. Something with shabla jetiise, the little traitor. “Buir!” He rushes into Jango’s arms. “How’d the job go? Did you get ‘em?”

“Don’t I always?” Jango teases—not the truth, not quite a lie. 

“Where’s Arla?” Boba asks, peeking behind Jango.

“Around. Go pack. Quickly, now. I want to leave for Concord Dawn as soon as possible.”

“Already? You don’t want to rest first?”

“Nah, I got plenty on the way back.” An outright lie. Jango hasn’t slept in almost fifty hours. “Hurry up, son.”

“Okay!” Boba skips off, merry as a spark-drunk mynock. Oblivious. Jango would prefer he stay that way, but he’s well aware that his entire world is about to change. 

(Failing Tyranus will have consequences. Jango does not intend to stay on Kamino long enough to find out what they are.)

---

Boba is packed and ready to go within minutes, as is Jango, but Arla is nowhere to be found. With her beskar’gam—and tracking beacon—locked away in their quarters next to his own, Jango can’t just ping her, so when he doesn’t find her with Kal, Mij or Vhonte, he borrows Lord Mirdalan from Vau and sets it on her trail.

“Find her, verd’ika.” Jango holds her buc’ye, lets the strill drink its fill of her scent, then follows it through the white halls of Tipoca City. Its bum wiggles as it trots, eager to see its friend.

Jango’s not surprised when it leads him to the CT domes. Disappointed, annoyed, but not surprised.

Mird finally comes to a stop and sits in front of a maintenance doorway, drooling and smiling in its unnerving way.

“Good job, Mird.” Jango tosses it a piece of jerky. It swallows it without chewing and tilts its head; more? it seems to ask.

Jango ignores the beast and slips through the door. The maintenance tunnels are as white as the halls, but half the size. Jango bumps his head against a pipe that hangs down just far enough to be a nuisance, rubs the bump with a wince, and continues forward until he hears voices.

“ …everything up. I’m so stupid.” That’s Arla. He can’t see her, but she sounds like she’s just behind the curve up ahead.

“Hey, that’s not true.” Jango narrows his eyes. It’s his voice—the voice of a clone, but with that rounder accent they all seem to get. “You’re brilliant, Arla. Yeah, you made a mistake, but—”

“I didn’t just make a mistake, Rex, I screwed up the whole mission!” Arla says miserably. “I disappointed him. You didn’t see the way he looked at me, like… like…”

“Like what?”

Jango frowns. Yeah, like what? He was terrified for her life, doesn’t she realize that?

“Like I was a mistake,” Arla whispers.

Jango’s heart sinks. He didn’t look at her like that, did he? He certainly didn’t mean to.

“I don’t think this was just any old job. I think it was a lot more important than he let on. We’re going to Concord Dawn as soon as I get back, and I… I just have this feeling that we’re never coming back here.” 

“You don’t know that.” The clone—what did she call him, Rex? Jango can’t help but wonder if she named him that—says soothingly. “And if that’s so, then… well, that’s how it is. I’ve got your frequency memorized, I’ll contact you when I can.”

Arla laughs, a dry sob. “Yeah, because you have access to a comhub, right?”

“I might one day. We don’t know what’s in store for us. Just the war.”

“Just the war. Right.” Arla sounds as bitter as week-old pog soup. “Let’s hope you don’t die on the first day, ‘lek?”

“Well, yeah.” Rex laughs. “Come on. Give me a hug and go find your buir before he hunts us down and shoots me for talking to you.”

Jango can’t help but smirk—too late for the first bit, and he’s still deciding on the second—but then it drops off his face, because going fifty-one hours without sleep has made him slow to realize that his daughter has been sneaking off to meet with a clone trooper in a secret maintenance tunnel. 

How long has this been going on? And just what else have they been doing down here? He peeks around the corner and sees Arla snuggled up in the arms of the blond cadet who was getting his osik handed to him in Priest’s battle circle.

His blood ignites like coaxium. “Arla!” he barks.

The two separate faster than he can blink, jumping to their feet, staring at him. Both of their faces are awash with guilt—and fear.

Jango eyes Rex, looks him up and down, and with a deep huff, turns away. “We’ve got somewhere to be, daughter.” Jango snaps his fingers. “Move it.”

Arla spares one final, lingering glance at Rex—standing at attention, watching Jango with wide, terrified eyes—before following him. 

Mird trots beside them trying to get Arla’s attention. She gives it a meek head pat and hurries to catch up.

“How long has this been going on?” Jango demands once they’re back in their dome.

Arla avoids both the question and his gaze, choosing to stare at her feet.

“I asked you a question, Arla.” Jango stops. “How long?”

“Six years,” Arla whispers, wringing her hands. “Rex is my friend.”

“Your friend, eh?” Jango narrows his eyes.

“Yeah, my friend,” Arla says, defensive. “I know what you said, that the CTs are just drones, but—”

“Just friends?” Jango cuts her off.

Arla’s nose crinkles in disgust. “Yes, just friends. Buir, come on, he looks just like you. You don’t think I’d…” —her mouth twists— “with someone who looks like my father? Ew.”

It’s… a fair point, and it’s still a relief to hear her say it out loud, but she still looks a little too nervous for his liking. It’s the lekku. They’re stiff, and the stripes are darker than usual. “We’re leaving for Concord Dawn,” he says curtly, turning on his heel. “I’m going to pop into the sanisteam. I want you packed and ready by the time I’m out. Do you understand me?”

Arla nods, wisely choosing not to argue. “Yessir.” 

“And Arla…” Jango softens his tone. “You are not a mistake. Bringing you home was the smartest thing I’ve ever done.”

Then Arla smiles for the first time since they left for Coruscant, and the knot in his chest eases.

---

Jango’s just slipped his shirt over his head when he hears Boba calling for him. “Buir! Taun We is here!”

Jango sighs, not in the mood to deal with the kaminiise. He opens the fresher door, mumbles “Hurry up,” at Arla—elbow deep in a duffel bag—on the way, and…

And beside Taun We, politely waiting for him in their small dining room is a jetii. Not just any jetii. The one that went after Arla, the who called her ad’ika and got a boot to the chest for his trouble. He’s around the same height as Jango, with clear blue eyes, a reddish beard, and a pleasant, diplomatic smile. He bows in greeting. 

“Jango, welcome back,” Taun We says pleasantly. “Was your trip productive?”

Jango buttons his sleeves back, keeping his face neutral. “Fairly.” He signs at Arla to stay behind his back and keeps himself in between his armor and the jetii’s line of sight.

“This is Jedi Master Kenobi. He’s come to check on our progress.” Taun We continues on, oblivious.

“Your clones are very impressive.” Kenobi’s smile is as fake as the artificial lighting. “You must be very proud.”

Jango’s smile is just as real. “I’m just a simple man, trying to make my way in the universe.”

“Ever made your way as far into the interior as Coruscant?” Kenobi’s smile doesn’t falter.

“One or twice.”

“Recently?” Still that damn plastoid smile.

“Possibly.”

“Then you must know Master Sifo-Dyas.”

Jango knows that Kenobi knows. And he knows that Kenobi knows he knows. Still, he keeps up the facade, and strolls to the other side of the room, keeping the jetii’s eyes on him and not his very recognizable daughter a room away. He casually says to his son, “Eh, Boba–uded sso yyp,” and turns around. 

Close the door. Boba’s face changes, and now he knows that something’s wrong, because Jango never uses Kaminoan.

“Master who?” Jango asks.

“Master Sifo-Dyas,” Kenobi repeats. Boba hits the door key, stone-faced. “Is he not the Jedi who hired you for the job?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Really.” Kenobi’s smile finally falters, flattening like his tone.

“Really. I was recruited by a man called Tyranus on one of the moons of Bogda.” Jango steps closer, smiling, getting in the jetii’s space to unsettle him. 

Kenobi doesn’t flinch. “Curious.”

“Do you like your army?” Jango tilts his head, still smiling.

“I look forward to seeing them in action,” Kenobi says. His smile no longer reaches his eyes.

“They’ll do their job well. I guarantee that.”

Kenobi watches him impassively for a few seconds, the gears in his head turning. “Thank you for your time,” he finally says, bowing his head.

“Always a pleasure to meet a Jedi,” Jango replies.

(He wonders if Kenobi would be as pleasant if he knew Jango had killed six of his kind with his bare hands. He suspects not.)

“Sorry, there was one more thing.” Kenobi pauses in front of the hall door. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of someone named Ahsoka Tano, have you?” 

Jango raises an eyebrow. “No, I haven’t. Who’s he?”

“She.” Kenobi’s smile returns, and it’s far too wide to be genuine. 

“I am Jango. I’m your buir now. Su’cuy.”

Arla tilts her head. “Um… soka,” she repeats awkwardly, pointing to her chest.

“She’s a Jedi—or rather, she was meant to be. She’s a Togruta girl from Shili, kidnapped from her village at three years old by a Zygerrian slaver posing as a Jedi, promising to take her to the Temple. That was… eleven years, ago, I believe. She’s been missing ever since.”

 Jango forces a smile. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“We tracked her to a Zygerrian slave trader named Chomai F’tarr,” Kenobi continues. “When we arrived, we discovered that Chomai had been assassinated three days earlier. Ahsoka was the only one of her slaves missing. The window for her to join the Order has regrettably passed, but we haven’t forgotten her. Her investigation is open to this day. We never stopped looking for her.”

Jango inwardly tells himself Kenobi isn’t edging towards the door key, his nerves are making him imagine it. “What’s she got to do with this?” he asks.

Kenobi shrugs. “Well, you are a bounty hunter. Who better to ask about a missing girl than a man who finds people for a living?”

“Haven’t heard of her.” Jango leans against the counter. “Sorry.”

“A shame.” Kenobi slips into the hall, followed by Taun We, and Jango doesn’t like the way the shabla longneck is looking at him. 

(There is nothing wrong with what he did. He saved Arla. He saved Arla. Not just from the Zygerrians. From the jetiise, too.)

The door to the bedroom slides open. Arla stares at Jango, her mouth slightly open. “Am… Was he… Am I…”

“Pack everything,” Jango says with a calm he doesn’t feel. “We’re leaving.”

“But—”

Jango walks into the kitchen and runs the cold water at full-blast over his face.

(It’s that, or scream.)

---

Jango’s soaked down to his shebs, halfway up the ramp helping Boba load the last crate onto the Slave I, when he sees Arla freeze.

“Buir!” She points behind him. “The jetii!”

Jango drops the crate and reaches for his blasters. “Both of you, get on board!”

“Ahsoka, wait!” Kenobi shouts, barely audible over the thunder. Steam surrounds his blue lightsaber, the rain that hits the plasma boiling away with a hiss. 

Jango unleashes an avalanche of bolts in his direction, holding him back, giving his children the time they need to flee. Damned Kenobi deflects every shot, forcing Jango to take to the skies. He jets behind one of the ventilation towers and grabs on.

The servos of the Slave I’s guns whirr and clank as they shift into position. Jango grins; he shouldn’t be surprised they’re going on the offensive—his children are well trained, after all—but he still feels a flush of pride. 

He creeps around the side of the tower and fires a rocket at Kenobi, knocking him off his feet. The Slave I’s guns blast him as he staggers back up, throwing him back again—and his lightsaber flies out of his hands, safely out of reach.

Jango wants to laugh, but he’s got the scent of blood in his nose now, and he wants Kenobi dead. 

(How dare he interfere. How dare he plant that osik in his daughter’s head about looking for her. Any jetii that wants her will have to go through him.)

Jango rockets towards Kenobi, goes to kick his shebs off the edge of the landing pad—

And Kenobi kicks him back, the chakaar, and knocks his WESTAR out of his hand for good measure. They grapple for a few, frustrating seconds, meeting blow for blow. Kenobi pulls back, swings—Jango headbutts him and sends him flying. Kenobi recovers too quickly, rolls to his feet, reaches for the lightsaber that’s too far away to grasp, but it flies toward his hands anyway.

Jango shoots him with whipcord and binds his bastard hands at the wrist, takes off dragging him across the pad. He’s almost got the jetii to the edge when his cord comes to a sudden stop. Jango crashes hard onto the landing pad, his jetpack taking the brunt of the impact, shooting off his back and into the sky.

As luck would have it, his fallen WESTAR is only inches away. Jango reaches for it, manages to pop off two shots at the jetii rushing for him before the chakaar’s boots connect with his chest and send him sailing over the edge.

But the Kaminoans built domes, not towers, and so Jango slides down the fat edge instead of dropping straight into the stormy ocean—though his WESTAR goes flying into the ocean. Thinking fast, he digs his wristblades into the plastoid and slows his descent.

He can’t help but laugh when Kenobi slides right past him and goes over the edge. But it stops being funny when the whipcord goes taught, and Jango almost goes down with him.

With a grunt, Jango releases his whipcord and dumps the dangling jetii before he can pull them both into the water. 

“Buir!” Arla shouts, peering over the edge. She shoots a length of whipcord down and tugs him up. “Are you—”

“Are you alright?” Jango cuts in. She nods. “Then we need to go. Now.”

“But don’t you need to confirm the—”

“Now, Arla!” Jango drags her towards the Slave I. Boba peers down at them from the viewport, his face screwed up with worry. 

Thirty seconds later, they’re in the air. They jump into hyperspace as soon as they break atmo. Only then does Jango remove his helmet and allow himself to breathe.

(He can leave, and he did. He’s not in prison. He’s not a slave. He never will be again.)

---

Three hours later, the comhub lights up with a call Jango doesn’t have the option of ignoring. 

“You are needed on Geonosis,” Tyranus says. No admonishment. No mention of the jetiise discovering the plan. 

“I’m not taking on any jobs right now,” Jango replies stonily.

“This is not a request.” 

“I don’t take orders.”

“You do from me.”

“I’m not one of your slave soldiers bred to obey every order, Lord Tyranus,” Jango says icily. “I’m done. I’m out. You’ve got your army, I’ve got my payment. Let’s keep it cordial and part on good terms.”

Tyranus bows. “If you’re sure there’s nothing I can do to change your mind…” Something isn’t right. Tyranus should be more bothered, with all that’s gone wrong in only a few days, but he’s as cool as a caniphant.

“No,” Jango says anyway. 

“Very well. But, if you do decide otherwise, do so quickly.” Tyranus disappears, leaving Jango alone in the cockpit with nothing but his thoughts to keep him company.

His thoughts are the last thing he wants to be alone with right now, so he seeks out his children. They’re asleep in the Slave I’s singular cabin, wrapped around each other on the narrow rack. Arla still wears her beskar’gam, though her helmet and lekku sheathes have been set aside. She’s curled around Boba like a strill, purring like a motor, her fingers entangled in his hair, while his arms are locked around her chest.

Jango’s eyes fall to her weapons belt, to where Kenobi’s lightsaber is hooked beside her chuka. He takes it back with him to the cockpit.

---

Jango receives another transmission when they’re an hour away from Concord Dawn—this time, from Cad Bane. 

“Jango. Don’t suppose you’re anywhere near the G’tari System.”

“I’m not.” Jango leans back, puts his feet on the console. “And I’m on sabbatical. If you need a hand, Zam Wesell’s on Nar Shaddaa. That’s only two systems over from G’tari, if I remember right.”

“Zam’s good, but I need someone more skilled.” Bane’s hologram grimaces. “I don’t trust this line isn’t being monitored. Can you meet me?”

“Can’t, old friend. Sorry.” The hair on the back of Jango’s neck goes up. Something about Bane’s eyes…

“Fine. But do me a favor—as an old friend, you know. If you don’t hear from me in twenty hours, then ask around at the Yilly-Yilly fuel depot, orbiting right outside of Gor.”

“Mmm.” Jango doesn’t blink. “This the part when I’m supposed to ask what you’ve gotten yourself into?”

“Nothing you can’t fix.”

A small smile. “Is that so,” Jango drawls.

“Look, if you want me to keep breathing, then—”

Jango ends the transmission. “Nice try, old friend,” he mutters to himself. He doesn’t hold it against Bane, because he’d have to expect better from him in the first place. Obviously the chakaar is trying to get his location nailed down, get him out in the open, which can only mean one thing.

Jango checks the Guild’s bounty boards, and sees the newest—and most costly—up at the top.

Ahsoka Tano, alias Arla Fett. Mandalorian trained. Force sensitive. Highly dangerous—shoot to kill. Accompanied by Jango Fett. Five million credits, dead or alive.

A still holo of Arla in full beskar’gam, taken in ultra-high definition from Kamino’s security cameras. A second one of her face and its very recognizable markings.

Jango feels a cold, hollow pit open up in his stomach. He checks the balance of the accounts he’s set up for Tyranus’ payments throughout the years.

One hundred and forty two million spread out over two hundred accounts. All empty.

Jango sits silently for one, two, ten minutes, his ears ringing in the silence. And just like that, he has nothing. No credits. He has his children, but any allies he could have called on are, undoubtedly, already preparing to hunt his daughter down. Not him. His daughter. Tyranus didn’t put up a fight because he knows he doesn’t need to bully Jango into submission. Not when he has money.

The life Jango, planned for, spent a decade in exile earning, is gone. Just like the plan he threw away weeks before its ultimate fruition. He thanks the shabla stars that he filled up on Kamino, because now he doesn’t even have gas money.

Resigned, he dials Tyranus’ frequency.

“Jango,” Tyranus says, eyes twinkling. “Have you changed your mind?”

“Plotting the course to Geonosis now,” Jango says dully. “Give me five hours.”

“I look forward to seeing you.” Tyranus smirks. “And do bring those delightful children of yours. I’m especially interested in meeting little Arla.”

Jango smashes the imager. The holo flickers away, but not before he hears Tyranus laugh.

(It was always a prison. He was always a slave. He always will be.)

---

“This… isn’t Concord Dawn.” Boba looks at Jango, clearly confused. 

“No. It’s not. It’s Geonosis.” Jango flips a few switches, dials up the shields, preparing to make his way through the rings around the ugly planet. 

“What’s on Geonosis?” Arla asks, leaning between them.

Jango pushes away the lek tip tickling his cheek. “My employer needs my assistance with something first.”

“Your employer?” Boba’s face falls. “But you promised we’d go to Concord Dawn and get my—”

“I know,” Jango snaps. “I know, and I’m not happy about it either. Sometimes in life you have to get the unpleasant work out of the way before you do what you want.”

(Jango doesn’t foresee them doing what they want in the near future. Not until he gets that bounty off Arla.)

Arla and Boba both look at him with accusing eyes. “You’re not telling us something,” Arla says.

“You know everything you need to know,” Jango evades. “When we arrive, you’re to stay on the ship unless I say otherwise.”

Arla throws him a sour look and turns to leave.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Jango holds up Kenobi’s lightsaber, waves it at her.

Arla’s eyes dart between him and the jetii’kad, wide and guilty.

“Why’d you take it?” Jango asks.

“So he wouldn’t use it on you if he made it out of the water.” She swings for it. Jango dodges her. “Come on, Buir, I took it fair and square! He lost his weapon, I claimed it!”

“And what were you going to do with it?” Jango asks dryly, “show Rex? You don’t know how to use it.”

Boba’s mouth falls open. “You told Buir about Rex?” he hisses at his sister.

“You knew about that?” Jango shoots his son a glare.

Boba turns bright red.

(Boba was the one who suggested using Mird, Jango remembers.)

Arla is frowning at Boba now. “Did you tell him where to find me?”

“No!”

“Did you know where she was and lie to me?” Jango demanded.

“No!” Boba’s sweating. “No, I-I didn’t know where she was. Technically. I knew the… vicinity. But not the exact spot.”

Jango just looks at him and waits for him to wilt. It doesn’t take long. Once his son looks like a Tatooinian frog-lizard, Jango asks, “Why didn’t you tell me she was ‘friends’ with a CT?” 

“She made me swear,” he says miserably. “A blood oath.” He holds up his thumb. 

“Arla.” Jango glares at his daughter. “If you ever make your brother swear a blood oath to keep a secret from me, I’ll tan your hide until you turn purple.” (Jango has never in his life laid a hand on his daughter. He’s never had to. How does a man smack a ray of sunshine?) “Am I understood?”

“Buir!” Boba says suddenly, alarmed. “I think we’re being tracked.”

The three crowd around the viewscreen.

“Is it the jetii?” Arla asks.

“He must have put a homing device on our hull.” Jango switches off the autopilot. “Hang on, kids. We’ll move into the asteroid field.” He primes the seismic charges. “And we’ll have a couple of surprises waiting for him.”

With a push of a button, the charges are deployed. The first goes off, liquidating the rocks around the jetii’s little Delta-7. When that one doesn’t get him, Jango detonates the second, and watches the chakaar dodge that one too.

“He doesn’t seem to take a hint, this guy,” Jango says, frustration leaking into his voice. 

Jango dives into the shadowed maw of a massive asteroid, its tunnel-like entrance just wide enough to admit the Slave I. The rock walls close in around them, rough and jagged, lit only by the ship’s running lights.

As he hoped, the jetii follows him in. He throttles down, skimming the interior of the tunnel. The ship’s belly kisses stone.

“You’re gonna scrape the paint off,” Arla says dryly. She’s strapped herself into the navigator’s console. 

“Then you’ll just have to touch it up,” Jango mutters. 

The sensors blur—too much interference from the dense mineral veins—but he knows Kenobi’s still back there. 

Jango jerks the controls, dipping them into a crevice, then threads through a gap no sane pilot would try. The thrusters roar as he punches the throttle and blasts out of the asteroid’s far side.

He pulls up hard, flips the ship, and spins it into position.

“Hang on.”

The laser cannons open up, spitting fire into the field. Bright bolts scorch through the vacuum, chasing the little Delta-7 that dances between debris. 

“Get him, Buir, get him!” Boba cheers.

Jango growls. He tracks the delta through a break in the rocks, fires again, but the jetii is slippery, his ship rolling through the assault like it’s got a mind of its own. After almost a full minute, when his cannons are on the brink of overheating, he finally scores a hit on the delta’s port side.

“You got him!” Boba exclaims excitedly.

“Now, we’ve just got to finish him.” Jango hits a different switch. “Missile away.”

The homing missile launches with a satisfying thump, a silver-blue streak in the dark. It curves after the Jedi’s ship, hungry and relentless. Around one asteroid, under another. Dodges, loops, spirals.

Jango leans forward, watching it chase its target like a strill on a scent trail.

A brilliant burst lights up the field. The scanners go quiet.

Boba whoops. Arla straightens, but doesn’t speak.

“Well, we won’t be seeing him again.” Jango smiles to himself.

(He ignores Arla’s eyes on the back of his head.)

---

Geonosis smells like rotten meat and sulfur. Jango’s already sick of it, and he hasn’t even left the dock. He looks at his children one more time—a silent stay put—and walks up to Tyranus, already waiting for him.

“I appreciate you changing your plans on such short notice.” The chakaar has the nerve to grin at him. “Where are the children?” 

Jango’s hand itches for his blaster. “They’re staying on my ship.”

“Nonsense. There’s no reason for them to miss all the fun.” Tyranus peers around him. “Call them, Jango.”

Jango’s hand curls into a fist. “No.”

Tyranus’ eyes slide onto him. “I thought we established that when I give an order, you are to obey.”

Jango has killed six Jedi with his bare hands, but his instincts tell him that if he attacks Tyranus, he won’t win. There’s a strange hum when he steps too close, like a power reactor. Something ancient, something… dark, hovers around the old man. 

Jango reluctantly signals the children to disembark.

“Ah, there we are.” Tyranus steps forward, smiling eerily at Arla. “Let me see your face, child.”

Arla removes her helmet warily. Her eyes flick to Jango, then back to Tyranus.

“Let me get a good look at you… yes.” Tyranus’ eyes run up and down Jango’s daughter, something hungry within them. “You’re healthy. Strong. Your father has raised you as a warrior.” Tyranus snatches Kenobi’s lightsaber from her belt. “I don’t think this belongs to you. Not the normal armament of a Mandalorian, is it?”

“I claimed it,” Arla says frostily. “It belongs to me now.” She snatches it back, bold as brass.

Tyranus’ grin widens. “You have your father’s defiant spirit, I see.” Jango glares at the back of his head. “Lend me your hand for just a moment, my dear.” He sticks Arla’s finger with a device that makes her wince. A number flashes across the small viewscreen—Jango sees M-14,600. “Interesting.” Tyranus’ eyebrows go up. “Very, very interesting.”

Jango doesn’t know what it means, and he doesn’t care. He pulls Arla behind him. “What is it that you want from me?” he demands. 

“Your services as a bodyguard.”

Jango’s eyes flick to the lightsaber hanging from the dar’jetii’s belt. “A bodyguard?”

“Indeed. One can never be too careful, especially with company coming.” Tyranus strolls away like he’s on a leisure stroll. “With me, if you please.”

Jango has no choice but to follow. He keeps his children’s hands clasped tightly in his own.

---

Jango spends a day and a half following Tyranus around like a dog. He meets with the native Geonosians—ugly insects that smell like dirty, rotten, blood-full ticks and speak in a language of clicks, hisses and groans that make Jango’s hair stand up—Trade Federation representatives—Neimodians, enough said—and finally, to Jango’s shock, Senator Padmé Amidala, who is led into the grand chamber with a full detachment of guards on her and Anakin, the young jetii that tackled Arla back on Coruscant.

The senator starts trying to negotiate with Tyranus—cheeky young thing starts making demands, negotiating for their freedom right off the bat. Jango keeps one eye on the young jetii, and the other on his daughter. She stares at Anakin from the shadows. Jango watches her vital signs and sees her heart rate is up. 

What is it that she sees that he doesn’t? He’s barely more than a kid. But the same sort of power that Jango feels around Tyranus when he steps too close lingers around the Padawan, too; something vast, something unknowable.

(Jango also suspects that she might just think he’s cute. She doesn’t see a lot of boys who don’t wear her father’s face. She’s easily impressed.)

“The Republic cannot be fixed, my lady,” Tyranus says in a grave voice. “It is time to start over. Without your cooperation, I’ve done all I can for you.”

The Geonosian leader, Poggle, ekes out something in his repulsive language. The senator and the jetii are led away. 

Arla tracks them. Her left hand rests above the lightsaber hanging from her belt. 

Jango finally catches Arla’s eye, shakes his head minutely; he doesn’t know what she’s thinking, but whatever it is, she’s to stop it. Now. 

---

The Petranaki arena’s nothing more than a blood pit, no matter how grand the towering red walls, how ceremonious the execution. The floor is soft with silt and old blood. Down below, the heat curls off the sand in wavering waves. Three stone columns dot the center, chains swinging in the wind. Sunlight cuts the arena into harsh halves—light and shadow—the stands packed with the Geonosian swarm.

Boba leans over the railing, craning for a better view. “It smells like osik down there.”

Arla joins Boba at the edge. She laces her fingers with his. “You think they ever clean it?” she mutters.

“I think that’s just how Geonosis smells.” Jango shrugs. 

They named the place after Petranaki, some old ritual duel with ceremonial weapons—picador spears, war clubs, whips. That’s history. These days, the crowds want blood and teeth.

(Jango understands better than most.)

Acklays, nexu, reeks. Off-worlders trade them for access, for favors, for shipments of fuel or weapons. Jango tunes out the clicking of the crowd, just enough to stay sharp. He’s watching the floor. Watching the guards. Watching the gates. He assumes that Tyranus is at some sort of risk, or he wouldn’t be here. The crowd hums like a hive of wasps, all wings and clicking mandibles. The arena floor’s still empty, but the Geonosian guards are falling into formation. The Trade Federation’s made their way up here. That means it’s close.

Across the sand, they bring out the prisoners in a repulsor cart. Three of them. Two jetiise, plus Padmé Amidala, easy to spot in all white. Her spine is straight, her chin high despite the binders. She doesn’t flinch when they shove her towards the furthest column.

Arla leans on the rail beside him, her mouth a thin, unsettled line. “Why is this happening?” she asks. “She’s a senator. A public execution like this… isn’t that basically a declaration of war against the Republic?”

Jango keeps his eyes on the crowd. “One in one, ner Arl’ika.”

Tyranus steps out the shadows, face unreadable. He spares Jango a glance—brief, dismissive—and continues speaking to Poggle in clipped, low tones. Jango doesn’t need to hear the words. The posture says it all.

Arla shivers.

Three doors on the far end of the arena open. The first one holds a reek, which bellows once it hits the sunlight. The second has an aklay taller than the Slave I; it scrambles out sideways, eerily bent in half to squeeze through. The third has a nexu, and the moment it’s free, it lunges for the closest Geonosian wrangler atop its mount and rips it to pieces.

The crowd screams with bloodlust. Boba reaches for Arla’s hand and squeezes it. “Udesii, vod,” he whispers. “I got your back.”

“They can’t get up here,” Jango says shortly, keeping his eyes on the beasts. Despite his reassurances, he doesn’t trust them, especially that nexu. They’re climbers. He keeps one hand on his blaster anyway.

“It’s not them,” Arla whispers.

The beasts are herded towards their prey with spears. The acklay goes for Kenobi, first; Jango isn’t surprised that he manages to not only duck its blow, but get it to break his chains. The osi’kovid can’t seem to die, no matter what anyone throws at him. 

(Jango begrudgingly admires Kenobi’s ability to survive, if nothing else.)

The reek goes for the Padawan, Anakin. The boy flips, lands on its back, and starts running it around the arena like a nerfherder at a rodeo, causing all sorts of chaos. 

The nexu goes for Amidala—who somehow managed to climb her way to the top of the column while Jango was watching the acklay—clawing its way up the column. She slaps the osik out of it with her chains, drives it back, but when it gets a good swipe at her and rips her back open, and half her shirt along with it.

Arla looks away. She has her helmet on, but Jango knows that body language; he knows when his daughter is about to cry. Boba squeezes her hand once, twice, says something Jango doesn’t catch—

The crowd screams. Amidala jumps down from the column, uses the chain to swing around and kick the nexu to the ground. It falls to the sand with a cry of pain, shudders, and goes still.

“She can’t do that!” Nute Gunray gestures wildly. “Shoot her, or something!”

“Buir.” Arla tugs on his belt. “Buir, something’s wrong.” 

Jango turns his back on the arena. “What do you mean?”

“I…” Arla leads him and Boba away from the railing—away from Tyranus. She pulls her helmet off. “I have a bad feeling,” she whispers. “We need to get out of here.”

Jamgo’s helplessness burns like acid in his veins. “I’d like nothing more, daughter, trust me.”

“No, we…” Arla swallows hard. “Buir, we have to get out of here. Now. Or we won’t get out at all.”

The crowd screams again. Jango glances over his shoulder, checks that Tyranus is still alive. “We’re working,” he says shortly, painfully aware of Tyranus’ eyes on them—on Arla. He drags them back.

In the thirty seconds he wasn’t looking, everything in the arena seems to have gone to osik: one of the columns lays on its side, the nexu is dead, Kenobi and Amidala have joined the Padawan atop the reek, and the Geonosian handlers are creeping towards them, spears out.

“This isn’t how it was supposed to be,” Nute Gunray whines, turning. “Jango! Finish her!”

“Patience, Viceroy, patience,” Tyranus intones. “She will die.” At his signal, a half-dozen droidekas roll from the eastern end of the arena and convene around the trio atop the reek. 

Arla’s hand spasms. “It’s too late,” she whispers.

Pshew.

Arla jumps backwards with her arm across her brother’s chest. Jango flinches—not much, but a bit—at the violet plasma humming centimeters from his neck. The jetii that holds the saber is bald, with rich brown skin and black eyes that burn as hot as his blade.

“Master Windu.” Tyranus turns, smiling wide. “How pleasant of you to join us.”

(Jango’s hand twitches for his blaster. He forces his pulse to slow, his breathing to even. He can tell Arla is shaking by the way her lekku sheathes tinkle against her cuirass.)

“This party’s over,” Windu says stonily.

All around them, within the stands, hundreds of lightsabers ignite, a sea of blue and green lights amidst the arthopod brown. The Geonosians take off en masse, swarming above the arena, shrieking and clicking furiously.

“Brave, but foolish, my old Jedi friend.” Tyranus smiles, falsely sympathetic. “You’re impossibly outnumbered.”

(Jango remembers what it felt like on Galidraan to put his thumbs through the eyes of the jetii that killed Myles. He remembers the way the globes popped, the fluid gushing from the sockets, the scent of his blood, the way he screamed.)

Windu smirks. “We’ll see.”

(He wants to hear Windu scream.)

Superbattledroids march up the tunnel and rain a hurricane of bolts upon the the jetii. Jango looses a jet of flame in his face, driving him away from his children.

“Buir!” Arla’s got her helmet on, now, and her blaster out. She shakes like a leaf. “What do we do?” 

“We do our job.” Jango nods at Tyranus—at who, as far as he can tell, is his one and only shot at getting his children off this godsforsaken planet alive.

The battle below them begins in earnest. A wall of Jedi meets a swarm of battledroids in the center of the arena. The dikut’la reek is still running around, causing havoc. Senator Amidala jumps upon the back of one of the Geonosian mounts and starts racing around the arena, firing wildly.

(She’s the reason Jango’s in this mess. But still, he can’t help but admire the dalgaan’s mandokar.)

Jango keeps his eyes on the shabuir with the violet blade, bloodlust rising every second the chakaar stays alive. He held a lightsaber to a father’s throat in front of his children. He may as well have pissed in his buc’ye with how disrespectful the action was. 

Arla draws a second before Jango does, aiming at the jetii that lands directly in front of Tyranus. She hesitates; Jango doesn’t. He plugs the Vurk three times in the chest and sends him over the edge.

Tyranus gives him a nod of thanks. 

Jango spins his WESTAR before holstering it. He turns his eyes back to the battlefield and finds the violet in the sea of green-blue; a smile grows. It seems the reek has a fondness for purple.

“Stay here,” Jango says curtly to his children, and jets off before they can argue. He doesn’t look back. He already knows Arla’s reaching for him, and he ignores it, because Windu is running away from the reek like a hut’uun and as satisfying as it is to watch, Jango wants to be the one to drive the light out of his eyes.

Windu slices off one of the reeks horns at the last second before it hits him. The lightsaber goes flying. Jango lands beside it, lunges for it—

Windu pulls it to his hand from ten feet away and ignites it with a self-satisfied smirk.

Jango hears a bellow; the reek’s gargantuan feet smash down inches away from his head. The chakaar rolls him like a drum across the arena floor. Jango hears popping, crackling—and there goes a second jetpack in as many days, the reek smashing up his spare like knockoff Toydarian freighter parts. The overgrown piece of sausage bowls him over, comes to a sliding stop and kicks the sand, snarling. Jango staggers to his feet, dazed—sees the beast is charging for him again—blocks out everything but its left eye, aims, and fires.

One shot, right to the brain, and it goes down like a downed freighter. Jango jumps out of the way, rolls to his feet and scans the battlefield. Blue, green, blue, green, violet—

Jango fires once, twice, three times at Windu, all to the body, all deflected—

(It’s when time slows down that Jango realizes that he’s going to die. Too close, too close, his jetpack fails to ignite, he watches the blade swim across his line of sight, separating his hand from his wrist, turn and comes for his throat—)

“NO!”

Windu flies backwards like he’s just taken a cannonball to the chest, flying at least fifty feet through the air before landing hard on his shebs and sliding ten more.

Arla still has her hands outstretched. She stands frozen, as if what she just did turned her to stone. 

Jango reaches out for his daughter with a hand that’s no longer there. “Arla,” he says calmly. 

She doesn’t move.

“Arla,” Jango says, more urgently. A bolt flies past her head. He sees violet in the corner of his vision, Windu charging back into the fray.

(Distantly, he’s aware that he’s going into shock. He doesn’t remember how to say this out loud.)

Arla’s head snaps up. She stumbles backwards, reaching for her blaster first, then reaching for Kenobi’s lightsaber at her belt, bringing it up just in time to block Windu’s violet blade.

“No!” Jango screams. He fumbles at his helmet with both hands—one hand, the other’s gone, it’s gone—rips it off and tosses it away. “She’s a child!” He stumbles forward, falls to his knees. “She’s just a child!”

Windu’s eyes go wide with surprise. With a flick of his wrist he sends Kenobi’s lightsaber flying out of Arla’s hands.

“Take off…” Jango slurs. The world is turning white around the edges, white like snowy Galidraan. “Take off your helmet, Ahsoka. Let them see you.”

He falls to his knees. He tastes gravedirt. He hears the tinkling of bells on a tiny slave girl’s skirt.

---

Jango wakes up a week later in the Jedi Temple, locked up in their Halls of Healing under round-the-clock guard of at least two Jedi Temple guards in white masks. He soon learns there is also a squad of clone troopers outside his door prepared to subdue him in case of an escape attempt—an unnerving prospect.

(He thinks about the face of the baby boy he left an orphan on Azterri again. His father asked Jango if he could really do it, if he could really shoot himself—he couldn’t. But Jango could.)

They install a prosthetic chassis to replace the hand they so rudely took from him. So far, it’s just a spidery collection of durasteel bones and crylex tendons, but they’re doing an… acceptable job of building him a custom mech. 

His missing hand isn’t actually the worst of his injuries. He was too full of adrenaline at the time to notice, but the reek’s trampling did what would have been a fatal amount of internal damage.

(The fact is, if Windu hadn’t taken his hand off, Jango would have—in the best case scenario, of course—escaped offworld with his children, only to die in hyperspace when the blood pooling in his abdomen outweighed what was left in his veins. It’s a fact not lost on Jango.)

His injuries keep him stuck in bed. Boba and Arla are allowed to visit for three hours every day—also under heavy guard, and never at the same time. They tell him they’re also being held in the Jedi Temple, in a very nice prison known as the Diplomatic Quarters. Normally they house visiting diplomats from Republic worlds. The children have a whole level in one of the smaller towers to themselves, a holoprojector, a hololibrary, whatever food they want on demand at all hours of the day and night, a pool, a gym, and a completely impenetrable force field surrounding the level from every angle. 

Arla receives daily visits from a handful of jetiise; first there’s Kenobi and Anakin, the latter of which seems to have a personal vendetta against her because of the assassination attempt on Senator Amidala. Jango suspects there’s a bit of an angle there—he was sitting quite close to the Senator on that reek, after all. Anakin wants to know everything she knows, everyone who wants Amidala dead, but she doesn’t have anything to tell him. 

Kenobi has the gall to thank her for keeping his lightsaber safe, as he is sure that if Count Dooku would have gotten ahold of it—Jango has to tell Arla that’s Tyranus—he never would have gotten it back after he was captured. She complains he refuses to honor her battle claim over it. Because he’s bored, recovering in bed, Jango reminds her that she has ten fingers and knows how to pickpocket.

(She manages to get it back twice before Kenobi starts carrying it in his hand whenever she’s within the vicinity. She insists he’s trying to intimidate her and he has no honor.)

Boba very much does not like Anakin or Kenobi and isn’t afraid to tell them so, but when a Jedi named Plo Koon is brought up, Boba sort of mumbles under his breath that he’s not bad for a jetii. 

Arla tells him he is the one who was en route to her village when she was kidnapped. She says they had contacted the Jedi about her, so when one showed up within the window they were expecting one, they didn’t question it. Plo tells her stories about her parents and village, about her people. He’s kept in contact with them all these years, giving updates whether there was progress or not.

“Do you want me to call you Ahsoka?” Jango asks quietly.

She doesn’t answer at first. She stares at her knees in silence, cheek muscles working like she’s chewing on their insides. Then she gives a little shake of her head, hugs him tight, and purrs so hard he feels it in his very bruised liver.

---

Two days later, Jango’s prosthetic is covered in a durasteel alloy. The synthskin is next, though the Jedi Healers advise him that he may find that it dulls sensation in his fingertips. 

He starts to get suspicious of it all—or rather, he’s been suspicious from the start, but now he’s getting paranoid—and starts asking his Healers what the catch is. No one is questioning him. No one is interrogating him. No one wants anything from him. They’re letting him rest and heal, keeping his children clothed and fed. It’s all too suspicious.

(The jetiise cannot be trusted. Jango learned this lesson well on Galidraan. The fact that they dare try to earn his trust now, to put up a false front of compassion and charity, infuriates him.)

“What is this going to cost me?” Jango finally demands. “All of this custom built osik, is this some sort of racket? Are you going to punch my ticket for half a million dollars in fees?”

“Ah, ask, I never thought you would.” A hairy green frog waddles into Jango’s room, looking cheerful. “Low is the cost, I think, for a man such as yourself. Information, all we seek. No cost to you.”

“No cost?” Jango scowls and holds up his stump.

“Mmm. Your neck, you almost paid with as well. Good thing, it was, that intervene, your daughter did.” The frog climbs into a chair beside his cot. “Yoda, I am. Grandmaster of the Jedi Order.”

“And what sort of information do you seek from me?” Jango asks, eyes narrowed.

“Curious, I am, about the clones. Made, why were they? Commissioned by Sifo-Dyas, the Kaminoans claim, but hired by Dooku, you say you were. Make an army for his adversary, why would Dooku, hmm?”

Jango thinks about the plan. He thinks about Jaster, and Galidraan. He thinks about the stump on his arm.

And he thinks about the hundred and forty two million credits he earned that Tyranus took away in the blink of an eye. The five million credit bounty on his daughter’s head. The way Windu’s eyes went wide with shock and horror when he heard Jango scream for his daughter’s life.

(To hell with Tyranus. To hell with the plan.)

“I want a clean record,” Jango tells the frog. “Full wipe of everything from before, and immunity from everything to come. For my kids as well.”

“And do this, why would we?” Yoda tilts his head.

“Because it’s the only way your precious Order is going to survive this war,” Jango says simply.

He gets Yoda’s word on flimsiplast—with two witnesses watching them sign the contract—and then he tells Yoda everything he knows about Tyranus and the clones. 

Everything.

(Even what the clones themselves don’t know.)

---

Once Jango can piss without seeing blood and walk ten feet down the marble hall on his own, he’s thrown into Diplomatic Prison with his kids and told to wait.

It’s as terrible as his children described. There’s a small, sunny courtyard garden in the back, lined with a force field that stops him with an unpleasant vibration. It gets painful with pressure and bursts a blood vessel in his palm when he pushes its limits. There are always birds chirping outside and a cool breeze that smells like incense. The furniture is far too comfortable, the food far too fresh, the entertainment too accessible—it all sets Jango pacing like a caged akul, day in, day out. 

What are they waiting for? What are they waiting for?

---

On a random morning three weeks later, two guards take Jango from his bed at dawn, dress him in a prisoner’s orange jumpsuit, and take him before a military tribunal. He’s presented with all the evidence of his crimes. Still holos and cam footage. Signed affidavits from witnesses, testimony from more. Mountains of bodies. He’s charged with murder, kidnapping, extortion, theft; it seems like every felony they could possibly slap him with has evidence, some of which he immediately clocks as forged.

(The most painful part is when they bring up Arla. They paint him as a remorseless killer who kidnapped her in lieu of the payment Chomai F’tarr failed to pass on to him. It takes two Temple guards to hold him in his seat and keep him silent.)

He has no litigator. The trial only lasts a day. He’s found guilty and sentenced to death by a clone firing squad, to be carried out that very evening.

Jango sits and waits for death in a dark cell, completely numb. He shouldn’t be surprised the jetiise went back on their word. But he is. And now all he can feel is a cold fear that sinks into his bones, the knowledge that he is leaving his children behind unprotected.

(A nasty little voice tells him he made that choice himself when he chose to chase after Windu in the arena. For once, he doesn’t argue with it.)

Finally, the cell door opens. Windu, Kenobi, and Yoda all crowd in and sit across from him in silence.

“Can I say goodbye to my children?” Jango asks, breaking the silence like they broke their word. He doesn’t bother railing at them for it. He knows it won’t do any good.

Kenobi tilts his head, smiles that familiar, haughty smile at him. “Why, are you going somewhere?”

Jango’s eyes snap up. 

“You’re not being executed,” Windu says, throwing Kenobi a look. “It was a necessary spectacle. Things will go much smoother from here on out if Count Dooku and his allies believe you’re dead.”

“So what?” Jango stares at him, heart drumming in his ears. “You’re going to keep me locked up here? Kamino?”

“Nowhere,” Yoda says, following up with an infuriating little giggle. “Your help, we still need. Trust, we do, that your repentance is genuine. Betrayed by the Separatists, you have been. Endangered, your children’s lives were. The love for your children you bear… stronger, we believe it is, than your hatred for us. Faith in you, we have.”

“We investigated your claims that the clones were implanted with biochips to control their behavior, and found you were telling the truth. We’ve spent the last month quietly removing them from a select set of clone troopers, then observed them to ensure that they didn’t go mad with violence. None of them have—so far, at least, but with the amount of time that’s passed, we don’t foresee a change.” Kenobi leans forward. “We’ll have to remove them from the whole army, and we will. But we still don’t know who is truly pulling the strings behind this so-called grand plan. Tyranus is certainly involved, but there’s someone else giving him orders. He told me as much on Geonosis.”

“Need your expertise, we do, in fighting a war, while investigate this phantom menace, we do. Keepers of the peace, we are, not soldiers, but with no choice but to fight, the Military Creation Act has left us.” Yoda points at him with his little cane. “Help us, we ask you. Lead the troops from within, you will. Blend in you will easily, hmm?” Yoda chortles. 

Jango considers it. Not because he’s forgiven the Jedi for the slaughter at Galidraan. But because after everything that’s been taken from him, the only thing he has left are his children.

(Jango can overlook a lot for a million credits. He can overlook anything for his children. Even the Jedi.)

Finally, he nods. “Oya.”

MANDO’A TRANSLATIONS Osik, shab, shebs, haran, chakaar, dalgaan, di’kut: Shit, fuck, ass, hell, asshole, bitch, dummy Buir, vod, ba’vodu: Parent, sibling, aunt/uncle Oya: Hell yeah, let's go, etc Ner, gar, kaysh: Mine, you/yours, his Ni kar’tayl gai sa’ad: I know your name as my child Su’cuy: Hello Beskar'gam: Suit of armor Kute: Flight suit Kama: Leather leg flaps, sometimes referred to as a skirt (derogatory) Buc’ye: Helmet (Bucket) Cuy’val Dar: Those who no longer exist Jetii/Kaminii: Jedi, Kaminoan Strill: Mandalorian dog with 6 legs, a musky scent and saggy skin ‘ika: affectionate suffix attached to a name (little) Tihaar: Mandalorian hard liquor Taap’echoy: Place of remember(ing) Aliit ori’shya taldin: Family is more than blood Vor’e: Thank you Verd: Soldier Ad: Child/person Val nari mishi’an: They do the shocking (electric) Sal’gotal’ad: Paintmaker Ori’jate: Very good Evaar’la: Youthful Kandosii: Well done Gar taldin ni jaon’yc; gar sa buir, ori’wadaasla: No one cares who your father was, only the father you'll be Tion’gar di’kut’la?: Are you stupid? Tion’gar suvari ibice verde cuyi waadas’la?: You understand these soldiers are valuable? Udesii: Calm, easy Kaysh suvari: He understands Verd’goten: Birth of a warrior (coming of age ceremony for Mandos) Gar cuyi verd jii. Jii bal darasuum: You are a warrior now. Now and forever. Mir’sheb: smartass Vercopa gise epa’a ner sur’haaise meh ni nari jehaat’an: May fish eat my eyes if I'm lying Haat’la Mando'ade: True Mandalorians Ni kar’tayli gar darasuum: I love you (I hold you in my heart forever) Darasuum: Forever Ke’shab: Fuck off Jetii’kad: Lightsaber Osi'kovid: Shithead Dar’jetii: Sith

[sabellart]

girl help why is animation

[prequelsnet]

@prequelsnet prequels appreciation week: day 5 — found family

↳ The Disaster Lineage

[captain-mozzarella]

Obi and his padawans :3

I wanted to redraw this but I thought it would be more fun if I did a continuation instead :))))

My original file was apparently too big X)

[mndvx]

THE ACOLYTE — Destiny (S01E03) ››› Jodie Turner-Smith as Mother Aniseya

[heartssofkyber]

OBI-WAN and ANAKIN ft. dropping the cloak™

[padmeamidela]

the best of Sassy-Wan™ Kenobi in the Star Wars prequel trilogy

for @userobiwan

[thelordsoftherings]

Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?

[mulderscully]

He's got too much of his father in him.

[deadpoets]

ROGUE ONE (2016) dir. Gareth Edwards

[intermundia]

Mon Mothma in the Andor Season 2 Trailer

[ab-rinart]

Geembus

[ncutii-gatwa]

DIEGO LUNA as CASSIAN ANDOR "Andor" Season 2 Trailer