#GO GNAW OFF SOME ANKLES IN MY HONOUR

[localcreeture]

leonardo tomato

[hyperesthesias]

Boba Fett x Valera

Permafrost

Rating: G

Word Count: 6.4k

Notes: i have a character in one of my novels who is married to a man like boba. so i came up with this. au. 25+aby. 

————————————————————————————-------------

Boba Fett never noticed silence until it was broken. Most of his adult life had been lived in silence. A quietude in his vicinity that transpired even in his mind. His thoughts transparent on the surface, he considered himself an honest man: plain and forthright, without hidden intent. He was known for his directness with his clients, he was no different with himself. Not in any sense of which he was aware. For while Boba Fett was known for his astuteness of a battlefield, insight into the survivalist instincts of a thousand different creatures, there was little of which he was aware within himself. For a long portion of his life, he hadn’t wanted to be; he’d been content with surface thoughts: skimmed water atop cracked ice. It was easier that way, he knew. Much colder, too. But chill was prone to giving clarity – a certain insight not afforded by the comfort of warmth and clouded, melted waters. And now, with the ache in his bones he’d told to no one, with the wrenching in his guts he’d taken without a mire of his features, he was sure he’d drown in those waters should the ice begin to melt.

“Dinner’s almost ready, my dear,” a sweet voice climbed up the hatch to the cockpit. “Shall I serve you here?” Valera asked and sat beside him in the co-pilot’s seat, hands neatly settled in her lap. She looked on him attentively with that pink smile embedded like a quartz on her lips. That quartz had never faded, never withered in the time of their marriage – it may have cracked, chipped, maybe, but it never vanished.

He didn’t know how she did it. He didn’t know how it stayed fastened there, despite everything. And though she may have told him why she still smiled, why there was still a softness in her, and though he understood it as if he were reading words on a sheet of flimsi, he couldn’t comprehend it on some deeper level he felt was inaccessible to him. Surely, it must have been locked beneath that sheet of ice. That, too, was logical. “Yes, I’ll have it here,” he finally answered her, but he did not look at her. He couldn’t. He hadn’t been able to for nearly a week. Because when he looked at her he could feel a warmth of dawn in him – she emanated starlight, bright and blinding, and a shiver would whip through his soul: stern and biting. Her warmth, her gaze, her touch – all reminders of his failures, all reminders of the inevitable, reminders of what he could have done, what he should have done.

No, he hadn’t looked at her in a long while – in an effort to cling to what frost he could in the midst of her daylight, and because Valera always had the disconcerting ability to see him through the visor. His eyes were fixated on the star charts, the controls and lights, the tunnel of stars blurred through hyperspace, but still he knew she could see him despite the black, despite his efforts of obfuscation. She knew him. Better than anyone. Besides his father – since his father.

“Very well,” she nodded once and relinquished her gentle gaze. He could see her from the display in his visor the way she settled into the seat. She curled up and away from him, her knees cradled to her chest as her head languished in her palm, elbow perched on the armrest. She pulled from the pocket in her apron a book and turned instinctively to the page she’d left off on, thumbing through it with deft, calloused fingers.

His hands gripped the yoke a little tighter as he felt his own callouses rub against the inside of his gloves. His joints ached as his fingers curled around the controls, his clenched jaw sent a sharp pang through the back of his skull and straight through to his eye. The pain was getting worse. Pain he hadn’t admitted to her yet. Pain he didn’t want to admit to anyone. But especially her. He made her a promise the day he married her: to always protect her. And despite what he might’ve told himself, what surface truths he wanted to whisper to himself in the midst of silence, Boba Fett was afraid. He was afraid of breaking his word, of disgracing his honour – he was afraid of failing her.

Calloused hands spoke where words remained quiet or inept. Scars have voices of their own. Pelted flesh contain more stories than flimsi or datapads could ever hold. He knew her scars, intimately. Just as she knew his. He knew how she’d received each of them – the stripes on her back, the chafing on her ankles, on her wrists, the smaller inflections of her skin along her jaw nearly to her ear from shards of glass her slaver had thrown at her. He had no regrets breaking the contract that scum had put out to retrieve her – he had no regrets killing him, either. Fett didn’t take kindly to slavers. Neither had his father.

He’d never let a quarry go. He’d never returned to them and told them they were free – free from him, free from their servitude. Valera had been the first and only one. But when she threw her arms around him and wept into his shoulder praising gratitude to him in Basic and in a language he’d never heard, even the twin stars of Tatooine above them had sparked warmth in him, around him. ‘I’m indebted to you,’ she’d said. ‘You owe nothing to anyone. Ever again.’ He’d meant it. But when she persisted in wanting to repay him with at least a meal, he agreed – only in favour of a home cooked meal over rations or cantina food.

It was the last time he’d see her, he was sure. For that, he’d been glad. He couldn’t afford attachments. They weren’t made for men like him. The only bonds that couldn’t be severed were the grit understanding between he and his clients. Or so he’d told himself, but even then he’d broken that bond for her. ‘It wasn’t for her’, he remembered he’d rationalised, ‘It was based on principle. It was because the client lied to me. He didn’t fess up. If he’d told me she was a slave, I would’ve walked away.’ It was the truth: he wouldn’t have given her a second thought, it wouldn’t have been his business. But the client had made it his business when he tried to pull one over on him. ‘No one lies to me and gets away with it.’ That’s all it had been: principle, the ice whispered in cracks and groaning audible only to him, even then.

He’d never given much thought to the concept of fate, either. A foolish superstition, it was just another escapist reality for those unwilling or unable to make their own path. Predetermined luck. Worse than the concept of the Force and Jedi fanaticism. He’d at least seen the work of the Force with his own eyes when he’d been at Vader’s side. But the idea of ‘fate’ was something far more ludicrous – a crutch for the weak.

Until he thought he might’ve caught a glimpse of that, too. Underneath those damned twin stars of Tatooine, again. He’d grown to hate the desert, the heat, after lying in the sand for hours – broken in body, in mind. Delirious with the stench of death and the inescapable pain of acid corroding at him as carrion. His armour, destroyed. Patches of his flesh, gone. He could barely see in the washed out light of day, but what he did see he couldn’t believe. Not at the time. A woman hovering over him, comforting him in words distorted by what might’ve been death throes.

He doesn’t remember anything that happened in the week after he escaped the Sarlacc. His first memory after escaping the stomach of the beast is Valera sitting at his bedside. She was dabbing what parts of his face that were not bandaged with a cold cloth. It stung even his undamaged skin – and everything hurt. His leg was on fire, he couldn’t feel the other, his hips burned and seared, his arms and torso twisted with gnawing, his face in so much pain it’d passed the point of numbness. She soothed him with quiet, kind whispers – with gentle breaths as she lay him back down. She kept him calm as she told him of the loss of his leg, the work she and her droid had done to heal him in the absence of a medical facility for hundreds of miles. It’d taken him some while to remember who she was, to remember where he was. Yet she greeted him with nothing but patience. A patience that persisted even in his unrighteous anger – his contempt of himself that he’d been at the mercy of someone else, with the realisation that he was not as strong as he’d once been. Fury that, despite the strength that gradually returned to him, there would always be a part of him that was left in the Pit of Carkoon. It was mourning disguised as anger that he was different now. And he was powerless to change it completely.

He was never powerless.

‘We’re even,’ he’d said at last, coldness biting at his breath. He could remember exactly where he was when he’d said it: sitting at the edge of the bed, winded from lifting the shirt over his head. ‘A life for a life,’ he wanted to bite at her for no other reason than that she’d seen him – both naked of body and soul. But she’d simply smiled at him with that unequalled warmth inside the darkness of her eyes and shook her head. ‘You owe me nothing. And you never will.’

He felt like a boy again when she looked at him like that – as though she were with him on some other plane; when she spoke to him like that – so softly, as though she would envelope him in a feather. And for a long time as he stayed with her whilst he recuperated, he couldn’t place why. He didn’t feel small, for she was certainly no threat to him – despite the power and distance she could throw a harpoon; he didn’t feel shuffled and avoided as he had been as a boy around the Kaminoans, around Dooku – she invited him to her table, included him as a guest, not a burden. Whatever it was, it’d been a rarity in his life. A garment that was fitted for his boyhood self, rather than the armoured man he’d become. Yet still, much like the way he clung to the Slave I for the sake of his father, he did not want to let her go. It was sentimentality at its weakest, but he had nowhere else to go. It took him the months he stayed with her to realise what it was he felt when she looked at him, spoke to him:

He felt loved.

He hadn’t been loved since he was a boy, when his father embraced him.

And she’d loved him since. She never stopped. Her love did not cease when she was stolen from him by vengeful slavers. Her love did not dwindle amidst the lasting pain of the death of their daughter caught in the crossfire of her mother’s theft, of her father’s failure -- a pain left pressed upon them, between them, around them as a crushing vacuum. Her love did not falter or fade against the starkness of the frozen pool that’d made its home in him long before he’d met her. Instead, she’d made camp there, finding a home for herself in the frost, finding balance in the chill. Where others had met his guard with hostility and impatience – fragmenting the ice into thousands of pieces, only to have it expand and seal shut the cracks, that the malleability, the fluidity beneath, may never be revealed – Valera had found an answer to her love by fishing patiently in the frozen lake beneath. A world with depth and life, though persistently cold as it may have been. She cared enough to look. She cared enough to see. Regardless of how disconcerting it was for him, it was a rare ability he did not take lightly.

It was why he couldn’t look at her now. Sometimes the warmth of her burned him like the stars of Tatooine. He was not afraid of pain – he’d learnt how to deal with the immolating grief in his leg that longed for the one with which he’d been born. He was motionless, expressionless as he’d stitched himself, as she’d stitched him. Much pain had he endured without a complaint, and much more was ahead of him – and still he did not flinch. So why, then, was he afraid?

In the silence, in the quiet – in the stillness of his mind as he sat there remembering her, remembering how much she’d loved him, a whisper emerged from the melting drink beneath the armour within him:

Because I don’t know how to love her back.

It was the ugly truth he’d never wanted to face, since the day he married her. He didn’t know how to love. He knew how his father loved him, and he loved their daughter with what love Jango had shown him. But his father never showed him how to love a mate, a companion. For all the information Jango had left him of surviving in a wayward galaxy, there was still much his father never taught him.

He tried. Fierfek, he tried. Every day he tried. And when his thoughts began to settle, and soft, light slumber crept up behind him, he knew he could have done better job. Being married was the hardest job he ever took. And sometimes he wondered if it would’ve been better, easier to have never married her at all. Easier, yes. Better…

He couldn’t find an answer. Lonelier. Harsher. Something told him he would’ve been a lot more weathered of soul, a lot more calloused, colder than he already was. It might’ve made him better at his job. Not much else. But what else was there for him?

It nearly took him aback as pieces began to fall in their rightful places of selfishness and gaping distances: ‘for him’. But what about for her? Was she really any better off with him? Or had she been better placed on her farm on Tatooine? Would it have been better for her to stay there, unsullied by the blood on his hands?

He took a glance at her from his visor’s display again, watching her read. She turned a page tenderly and nestled her face into the crook of her shoulder. How could he have touched something so soft and not have shattered it to pieces? How could she not have recoiled from him?

He resisted the urge to sigh audibly and instead gripped the controls a bit more taut as a dull ache grew into his back from his jaw.

“Are you alright?” she called to him. She set aside her book and turned her head to see him. His shoulders gazed the edge of his helmet, his arms stiff, his chest stilled. He was in pain. Though what pained him she could only guess.

Valera had a preternatural ability to know if something bothered him. She rarely asked him about it. He was grateful. “Fine,” he said behind gritted teeth. The spasm was growing across his kidneys. “Just uncomfortable.”

“Can I get you water?” she asked.

Sometimes he wondered if she still believed herself a servant. And another great, dark fear -- finned and toothed -- swam beneath the surface of his mind: had he treated her as such? There’d been times he’d have to remind her she was his wife, not his slave. But had she believed him? More to the point, he thought, have I proven it to her? “Water would be good.” As she made for the galley he added: “Thank you.” The uncomfortable thought lingered – had he freed her only to capture her unwittingly? Did she see him as a slaver and not a husband?

Did he even qualify as a husband?

Inevitability of a narrowing ending -- an inescapable tunnel that squeezed tighter and tighter as days pressed onward into limiting days -- had a way of procuring clarity in a way not even a coldness of the soul could conjure. Regrets started to form at his mouth, sudden cavities that sprung overnight and all of them hurt at once. Or maybe it was the kriffing spasm in his jaw.

“Here you are.” Valera returned with a flask of cold water in one hand, the hip of her skirt bustled in the other. She sat down again beside him in the co-pilot’s seat and pulled the book from her apron; and though she turned to the correct page, she couldn’t read a word upon it. Her mind fixated on other things entirely. Cavernous things that echoed in her heart growing louder and louder as gusts of thought whipped through her.

She let a quiet breath and snuggled into the worn leather seat: a gift he’d given her. To sit beside him in his ship was equivalent to sitting beside his soul. It was a form of intimacy for him, and she knew it. She was grateful for it. But lately, they’d only sat in weighted silence. The only time he beckoned her was when he told her strap in, or that they’d landed somewhere. Even when they’d had their spats, the silence had never been so heavy and spined. A great fear had begun to well in her: that perhaps he had no more use for her. That soon, he would consider her a stranger. That the intimacy of sitting beside him, and the intimacy of merely being with him, would be lost.

Valera stifled the scratching pain that’d begun to gather at the back of her throat at the mere thought. She set her book in her lap and rested her head against the back of the seat with a quiet sigh. It was drowned out by the hissing sound of Boba’s helmet as he removed it and its environment controls equalised. She could see his reflection in the permaglass: scarred and steeled. She knew him no other way. He was a pillar – unmoving and built of tempered strength, unbreakable. But sometimes he forgot he was just that: a constructed thing. He was not invincible, he was ‘human’ – as she came to learn, non-human that she was, the term was synonymous with ‘fallible’. But fallible was never synonymous with feeble, in any language. And she never thought him weak.

She noted he did not return her gaze in the reflection. She also knew it was on purpose. She did not begrudge him, but it made her sad. A sinking of her heart deeper into the centre of her stomach than it had been already suddenly made her wish she had never prepared dinner. She was no longer hungry. Her stomach full with wishes instead of nutrients.

Her eyes fell from his image as he drank the water – a small wince at the corner of his eye as he lifted the flask and tilted his head back. He’d been doing that more frequently, believing her mostly ignorant -- though not entirely; he gave her the credit of her observational nature, hyper-aware as it may have been at times. She knew something had happened, especially after their last visit to Kamino, but she didn’t know what exactly. He wouldn’t tell her. She didn’t ask. She knew he would tell her eventually, he just needed time. But it wasn’t the time he needed that bothered her. It was the empty space between them that swelled with uncertainty -- with her own insecurity. Did he not trust her? Did he think her weak? She may not have been a Mandalorian, she may not have been a warrior, but she knew what it was to defend. She knew others thought plainly of her because she did not wear beskar, that she did not like to handle blasters -- though a harpoon was equally dangerous in her hand. She had hoped he never thought as others did, and he said he did not. But in her difference to him, had he grown indifferent to her?

One question, above all others, bothered her the most. And she felt if she did not ask it, she would resonate out of existence and fissure into stardust.

“Bo’aba?” she called.

He turned his head towards her somewhat, but still did not look at her. Even after all the years they’d been bonded, the way she said his name – with that graceful accent of a land he’d never known – thralled the centre of his chest. He swallowed the last of the water. “Yes?”

Valera suddenly lost all her courage when he turned towards her. She could feel it vaporise from her bones and she pushed herself into the corner of the seat. It would be better to wait, she thought. It’s just me.

“Are you alright?” he asked and took the chance to glimpse her. But this time when his eyes fell on her, he felt no warmth from her. The air around her was sullen and dark – a cold and quiet night. A faint furrow built in his brow and he set the flask aside. “What is it?”

She thought about lying. But she loved him too much to deceive him, even if the truth would hurt the both of them. She took a deep breath, feeling the weight of her heart in her gut even heavier than before, and sat up to face him. But this time it was her eyes that would not search for his. “Bo’aba, will you be honest with me?”

Normally, he might’ve taken offence – the implication that he was dishonest a mar to his reputation. But his mouth went dry at the notion of all he had not told her, and he knew he would be a hypocrite if he felt any umbrage. “Yes,” he agreed, in a careful, singular answer.

His voice was quiet, softened. It reassured her somewhat, even if it would be the last time she heard the softness in his voice. With another breath, her eyes wandered upwards and found his. Despite the glitter that gathered at the edges of hers, there was something eeling in his own – a worry she had not seen in a long while. It made her feel foolish as the words gathered at her mouth in a gentle breath: “Do you still love me?”

Boba straightened, his eyes turned stern. Valera immediately regretted asking, and her gaze fell to the floor. He’d never lashed out at her in anger. He’d never mistreated her. But memories of past anger died hard. They rattled in her like pieces of loose gravel, harsh and bruising. Her wrists hurt as passive ghosts grabbed them.

But his austerity spoke only to his own fears. That they’d all been confirmed with one, honest query from his wife. “Why do you ask this?”

She started to shake her head, hoping they’d both dismiss it and move onto an awkward dinner – nothing more, nothing less.

But he didn’t let it go. “Why?”

She sighed and closed her eyes, biting down on her lips. “I just wonder…if perhaps you tire of me. If you feel…stuck with me.”

His furrow deepened and he read her carefully, as his wife, not a client – with an intimacy, with a knowing, with a held breath.

She glanced at him with a sheepish shrug and a resigned simper. “’A contract’s a contract’.”

The breath was expelled and he leaned back, a pained awareness of his mistakes twinging into his sides. He’d pushed her too far away. “You’re not a contract, Valera.” He moved closer to her and rested his arms on his knees as one hand passed through his hair.

She remembered when it was solid black, a colour that purely matched his eyes. Now there was salt peppering his hair and lines beginning to form at the edges of his hardened features. It made her smile, and a pang shot through her cradled heart. They were growing older together, she just hoped they wouldn’t grow apart. She ran a hand through his short, curled locks and her smile grew. “Are you sure? Because, if I recall correctly, the way you asked me to marry you was – how did you put it? ‘Would you like to enter a mutually beneficial, lifelong contract?…Of marriage?’”

A muted grin appeared on his face and he eased his eye up to her. “I said ‘Marry me’, you said ‘What?’, and I…clarified.” He didn’t admit to the nervousness that he remembered had overtaken him in the moment he’d fumbled out such a ridiculous sounding sentence.

Her smiled widened, brightened the entire ship – daylight dawned in the hull and he felt a patch of ice within him dissolve with it. She was the brightest thing on board, despite the stars that passed them by in a brilliant blur. “It was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard,” she laughed. He watched her smile dissolve and the dusk was upon her once again, a waft of cold night air passing his face as she breathed. “But it was still a contract. You’re not known for breaking your word, despite anything.” Her hand caressed the smooth side of his face, her thumb tracing his brow. “You’d stay with me no matter what, unless you were forced to part from me. You’re a man of honour, I know you.”

She did know him. Unsettling as it may have been at times, it was irrefutable. “I stay with you because I love you.” He pried it out of his mouth quickly in a jolting motion – a ragged tooth at the back of his mouth that bruised and scraped his throat for all the times he would not let it free. “I love you,” he repeated in a breath. It was a breath that’d been locked in the depth of his lungs, it ached when it pushed out of him. “I don’t –” He stopped and swallowed, the feeling of vulnerability crawled beneath his skin. He was as naked as he had been when she treated his wounds. “I don’t want to let you down,” he finally said.

“You won’t, you’ve never –”

He stopped her. “I’m sick, Valera.”

Her sight stayed on him and she gave him a tilt of her head. “I know, my dear. I’ve known for a while.”

“But you don’t know how bad.” He fought the urge to turn away from her completely. But her hand was still lingering on his face and there was a part of him – a dying part of him – that didn’t want to feel her fall from him. The loved little boy he thought he’d forgotten until she’d woken him all those years ago. “I haven’t got long.” It’s all he said and his head bowed, his gaze averted.

She didn’t move her hand, but it stilled against his skin. He felt a flush raft through her – the heat of adrenaline, of fear. The ache settled itself in the back of her throat again and she batted her eyes to keep herself from crying – he hated it when she cried. Because there was nothing he could do to help, he said. Because it hurt him to see her hurting, he said. She’d always cried anyway, and he’d always been reduced to a mess of confusion. But this time she didn’t cry, and this time he wasn’t confused.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

He shook his head once. “I kept telling myself I would.” Something else lingered on his tongue – bloody residue from the pulled tooth at the back of his throat. It was heavy and salted and filled with rusted iron: “It hurt too much.”

Her gaze softened and a single tear fell onto her flushed cheeks. “You hide yourself in armour, yet your heart hurts most of all,” she whispered. Her hand fell from his face and rested on his chest. “But you needn’t hide from me.”

He knew she was right. That hurt, too.

“How long?”

“A few years. Doctor wasn’t certain.”

She swallowed and looked away briefly. A deep breath thinned her neck and pursed her lips. “The Sarlacc?” She knew without asking.

He nodded. “Don’t have enough spare parts for how much damage there is.”

“You’ll find a way. We will...find a way.” Her hand ran through his hair again. All she wanted to do was touch him – to keep him close in tangibility. To know he was there, he was real, he was solid. She didn’t want him to leave.

“I don’t plan to go down without a fight.” He forced a simper.

“I wouldn’t expect anything less.” Her smile began to return – a ray of light that broke through heavy clouds as a pillar of embers. Heavenly.

There were times he thought she had too much faith in him. While he recovered, she encouraged him that he would reclaim his strength, that he would persevere with the tenacity he’d always had. He recovered – not without blood and sweat and swearing – and settled with her for a while. The knowing that his strength was there, regardless of whether he farmed with her or hunted quarry had been enough for him then. When she asked him for a child, she allayed his hesitations with the faith that he would carry on the love of his father impeccably. They tried for so long to have their daughter, the cellular damage a hindrance for his own progeny; he resented himself despite her faith. But when she was born, he tried. With everything in him, he tried to live up to Valera’s faith, to his father’s legacy, to prune his own fears. He loved his daughter, as strange and as broken as it may have been at times. And now he could only hope she knew that. It was too late for anything else.

And now Valera invested her faith in him again. Though this time, he was unsure he could provide her with a return – with evidence of her well placed fealty and confidence. There was a part of him that believed she would be left empty handed, both figuratively and not.

But he couldn’t afford to fail her. Not again. Not this time.

His mouth twitched, and the discomfort of vulnerability returned beneath his skin with quick and tiny padded feet. 

Valera was about to stand and return to the galley, but stayed in her seat as she watched thoughts unfold within him. “What is it?”

He peered upward at her and was baited by the steel within him to shrug off the resonating truth. The truth that hummed inside his head in tandem with his growing migraine. 

She didn’t have to ask him again, the way her sights settled on him -- unmoving and assured, she asked him wordlessly to trust her. To speak to her. To not make the same mistakes, not when he didn’t -- when they didn’t...have as much time as she had hoped, as they had wanted.

He sighed and looked away, mindlessly observing the controls that told him nothing he didn’t already know. He flicked a switch and then another and shook his head once. “You’ve always deserved better.” He didn’t say anything else.

Neither did she.

Between them there was a lingering burden of truth. A gravity that had always existed outside of realised words. Until he’d said them. They were tangible now, truth with a corporeal form that sat between them. It was as heavy as slate, and compressed with the ashes and sediment of years’ time.

Fett had the primal instinct to run. He never minded silence. But the one settled between them -- the one that he, himself, had mined and appraised -- was oppressive. He stood from his seat, flicked another switch and turned for the ladder. “We’ll be out of hyperspace in a standard hour.” Ba’slan shev’la suddenly came to mind: the Mandalorian art of strategic disappearance. And for the first time in his life, he wondered how much of his life he’d spent running. Even if he hadn’t meant to.

Valera heard his footsteps recede down the ladder and vanish into the galley. The sounds of utensils were the only thing that pierced the air, and for a moment she believed things would return to the spined silence that’d persisted before truths had been lanced between them. That belief was short lived. Boba was stubborn, the most stubborn man she’d ever met -- he was hard-headed and ferocious about besting every expectation put upon him, including those he put upon himself; and there was a longsuffering patience in his obstinacy that would fuel it through the night with oil. But she had her own meek immovability. One that could not, and would not be ignored. One that sat adjacent to the wick, calm and bated in steadfastness when the time called for it. Time was something they did not have much of, now. She didn’t want to waste the time they did have in a frothing cauldron of reticence. 

She climbed down the ladder and found him serving himself dinner from a pot and into a bowl. He didn’t speak, he didn’t look at her, even as she came beside him. She waited for him to finish so she could serve herself, but smiled when he handed her the bowl with a piece of flatbread atop it. She could hear him, even without a word. She was loved, she was cared for, provided for -- he was trying. 

“I’m happy here,” she finally answered him. “I always have been.”

He served himself and sat across from her, knelt on the floor next to the warmth of the cooker. He always let her sit closer to it, he never needed much warmth. But blue starlight couldn’t be without heat for long. He didn’t want her to drown in the chill, but she still did not leave it behind. She did not leave him behind. “You’re more adaptable than most,” he said and tore a piece of bread.

“Is that why you love me?” she grinned.

“Part of why, yes.”

She hadn’t expected him to answer her jest with honesty. There was a quiet in her, hesitant about what he left unsaid. But she could not leave it unanswered within her. “And the other part?”

He stopped, and wondered if he shouldn’t have said anything open-ended. But this was honesty. There was little he valued above honesty and honour. He set his piece down onto the bowl. This time, Boba looked up and directly into Valera’s eyes. In them, he saw what he had many years ago: a depth, a vast endlessness even the edges of the galaxy could not provide. Something he didn’t understand, something he knew he was missing, something he wanted to learn and keep close. He saw everything he’d wanted since he was a child -- that his father longed for before him. He saw a home. He saw safety. He saw family. “You’ve never hurt me. And I know you never would.”

He trusted her. With his life. With parts of himself that even he had little acquaintance. She knew this, intimately, and never had she used it against him. She was the first and only since his father who had never betrayed him, who never even thought of it. She wanted nothing from him, and yet he’d found everything in her. 

Valera reached across the small space between them and rested her hand atop his. It was warm, though gloved, and she cherished it as a sign that he was alive. His fingers lay languid, still, and they were pliable as she massaged her thumb against them. She felt them curl around her own, but the rarity of their yielding malleability continued as he held her hand in silence.

After a moment, she nudged forward and leaned her head towards him. There was a pleased inflection in his mind as he watched her. It was a Mandalorian custom of a masked kiss, but one she had adopted with great enthusiasm. ‘Any excuse to kiss you, my dear,’ she’d said the first time he’d done it.

So many memories. So many years to which he wondered if he’d done the best he could. So many things he would’ve done differently. But he couldn’t change any of them now. What was done was done. There was no going back.

But he wasn’t dead yet. He still had a chance to change the future.

Boba leaned forward and nudged his head against hers. He could feel the warmth that’d gathered on one side of her skin as he rested there. A breath escaped him as he swept his scarred face across her softness. His damaged nerves couldn’t feel it, but he didn’t need to. He knew her softness would prevail -- as would her mercy for him, and her honesty. This was the faith he put in her. And never had he been left wanting.

His nose caressed the top of her brow as he dragged his unmarred skin along the surface of her face, his hand clasped around hers with a gentle tenacity. He absorbed her warmth, pocketed it with deft secrecy in a portion of himself that was emerging beneath a glacier. He felt her purr beneath him, he felt her nose and cheek nestle against his jaw -- and suddenly he found there was no longer a throbbing in his neck. It’d vanished, just as she’d appeared. A medicinal remedy that required no other payment than a kiss. He lingered there, a little longer than he might’ve before, relishing the relief. Until at last, he rested his lips on her skin. As he breathed in, he smelt the embers of a daylight he’d never seen, of a hearth he’d never had.

Home. 

For a moment everything stilled, and time stopped. For a moment all that existed in the galaxy was the warmth and the melt shared between them. For a moment, he was safe.