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corellianhounds · 20 days ago

Text

Bad Reputation

Media: Return of the Jedi, The Book of Boba Fett

Rating: Teen

Word Count: 3.5k

Warnings: Canon-typical slavery, allusions to involuntary prostitution, brief non-graphic reference to sexual assault.

Art Credit: Ralph McQuarrie

Summary: The less outsiders know about a culture, the more they seem to speculate. (A brief prologue to an eventual series titled “Back In Business,” but can be read standalone, leading up to TBoBF.)

Every Mandalorian has a reputation. They as a culture had a number of them. One that had been exaggerated to falsehood and beyond was of their lust for flesh in one form or another; some of the ancient Mandalorians, the Taungs of legend and history, were said to tear into adversaries and victims with their teeth and eat their fill once a battle subsided (though whether those rumors were substantiated or not was still a debate among scholars), and Mandalorians as a whole were renown for being a warrior culture. Death was met with surety, honor found in battle. In whatever form they took, Mandalorians were nearly always a fighting people.

The rumors did not stop there.

With a guarded culture such as theirs, their anonymity afforded outsiders little insight into their practices, beliefs, customs or ideals. What was known was the emphasis put on family bonds, guardianship and acquisition of younglings and fellow fighters, and raising children no matter the species with the ability to fight and defend themselves. It came to be that outsiders believed them to be hellbent on creating more and more Mandalorians with the desire to convert or destroy every other race and people they made contact with on their nomadic spread across the galaxy, a twisted extrapolation so far removed from the source it painted them as rough, lustful, insatiable, and barbaric.

Some found the myths appalling; others were enamored and intrigued. Mandalorians were the topic of speculation everywhere from cat-houses to palaces, rumors of their sexual appetites proliferating and taking on a life of their own. With such a violent race, people said, It’s no wonder they take what they want, when they want it.

The rumors were baseless speculations and accusations drawn from so little knowledge that they could scarcely be considered more than schoolyard gossip, but people for eons have always told stories, and stories revolve around some kind of conflict. Sex, desire, and fertility have always been topics of interest, and the more salacious you can spin those tales the bigger the audience you have.

The truth was, Mandalorians took said topics as seriously as they did every other aspect of life, and as an overwhelming majority they were knowledgeable, honorable people bound by a common creed; the myths of insatiable savages were unfounded. It isn’t to say there have never been dishonorable Mandalorians, but they more often than not are swiftly handled with the kind of justice they deserve, justice nearly always served by other Mandalorians.

Every once in a while, though, one slips through the cracks.

Una trembled in what little she had that passed for clothing. Her chains clinked together as she waited to be bought by whoever paid the demanded price for transfer of ownership. She was the only female Twi’lek in the slaver’s haul, something the auctioneer emphasized in every language he advertised in, saying she was the only one amongst the backwards natives.

The actual truth was that the men of her home had bought their families and loved ones time to escape as they fought back the slavers that descended on Ryloth— She just wasn’t fast enough. Now she and dozens of her countrymen stood at the back of a raised platform, waiting to be dragged out and sold to the highest bidder.

There were faces of every kind in the crowd: Foremen looking for laborers. Nobles looking for exotic servants and entertainers. Dons, madames, pirates, and pimps, all looking for workers.

Una wished there was some way she could revolt them, something she could to turn them away and keep them from considering her, but her countrymen had already tried to fight back on her behalf and received punishment for it. Nothing that left a mark, but enough to cause an enduring, inescapable pain nonetheless. She’d already thrown up before they arrived on-planet, and even the mud and clay that had covered her legs and arms had been scrubbed off before they were transported to the auction block.

She was last, of course, the prize of the evening. She watched as her cousins and friends and townsfolk were sold off to despicable people of every kind, the crowd thinning until only the most wealthy remained: a courtly woman with cranial horns, flanked by two looming Dathomirian guards; several dons of varying stripes, some accompanied by enforcers, some alone; a madame and a droid with several of the male Twi’leks already with them; spectators and other sentients in nondescript clothing, their attire masking their purpose or reason for being there. There was a Mandalorian with a flock of five women surrounding him, all of them different species and all of them resigned, their eyes turned to the ground.

Something about the man— he had to have been a man— was familiar. Something in his stance or his armor, she wasn’t sure. None of the women moved from where they stood, no chains or guards keeping them in place, and somehow their implicit obedience sickened her more.

Una approached the front of the platform, the lingering threat of the shock collar around her throat compelling her to obey. She couldn’t hear the auctioneer’s voice, her head swimming with fear and trepidation. Though her eyes were filled with unshed tears, she bit her cheek and willed them away. They’d made it very clear that she was not to cry.

Finally the chain tugged on her wrists and she exited the stage down the steps below. With horror she finally gasped, realizing now out of the stage lights that it was that Mandalorian with the retinue exchanging the credit transfer to the seller. Her legs shook even more than before, and her shoulders tensed when she felt hands on the back of her neck, unlocking the collar.

The Mandalorian, she realized. He was a collector, a sleazy lowlife with a harem of women at his beck and call. No one knew how he could afford to acquire and keep them, seeing as no one knew of his place of business and he’d never advertised that he was interested in renting out rooms by the hour. It was rumored he took them and polished them up to be resold to buyers with much deeper pockets, keeping the ones he liked best for himself. An unrelenting hunter, bringing his spoils back to the den.

His distinct paint and armor etchings proved he could be no other, and as the other women guided her along she felt the dizziness and despair return from before. She stumbled along the streets of the foreign planet, traded from one set of hands to another.

There were several twists and turns through alleys, passageways, and districts, so many she couldn’t keep track of where the starport was behind her. One by one three of the women split off alone and bid her farewell, and once the rest of them arrived at a boarded up and seemingly abandoned theater in the entertainment district, several passersby looking at them curiously.

Una was guided inside and the back door closed behind her. The boarded up theater looked abandoned and partially destroyed. There were lights strung between passageways, but it didn’t appear to be populated even by employees, the grand thrust stage in the open air unused even as a niche performing platform for the seating surrounding it.

One of the women’s wrist comms pinged as they traversed the stairwell. They paused on a landing, the woman and the caller speaking in a language Una didn’t recognize. For the first time she heard the Mandalorian’s voice as he interjected.

They will come to you, he said. I will take care of the Twi’lek.

“It’s going to be okay,” the human woman told her when he stepped away, both her and the Mikkian looking apologetic despite what might have been warm smiles. Una couldn’t have believed them less.

Both women split off onto the next level, and when the Mandalorian turned he gestured for her to take the stairs. When they reached the upper levels where none of the windows let light into the building, he gently guided her by the arm and said “Bear with me. I’ll explain everything once we are out of range of the street level security and recording tech.”

Una wanted to run, but she had no idea where she could escape from or where she would go where they wouldn’t find her. She thought she would pass out when they got to a set of double doors, and as he keyed in a code she held her breath and tried to steel herself for what was to come.

Inside she found she was a bit… underwhelmed by the simple furnishings. The room had been converted into what one might call bedchambers, but it didn’t match the Mandalorian’s alleged opulent taste. He closed and locked the door behind her, and Una heard him sigh beneath the helmet before he made a sweep around the room as if looking for hidden cams.

“Please forgive the theatrics,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s the only way to ensure our operation remains undetected.”

He came back to the center of the room with what looked like a set of clothes folded over one arm. “This isn’t how I like to handle things. Ideally you would still be with the other women and they’d be able to explain what we do, and ideally you’d never have to talk to me again. You’re more likely to believe this coming from them.”

The Mandalorian set the clothes aside. In his hand she could see a handheld scanner similar to the ones the slavers had.

“This is only to check you for any chips or trackers. It won’t hurt.”

Una remained silent. The Mandalorian briefly hovered the scanner over the back of her neck, each of her limbs and her torso.

“Did they put anything in your teeth?”

Una’s eyes widened. “They can do that?”

“Yes, unfortunately, though I assume by that response the answer is no.”

She nodded.

He stepped back and dragged a chair to a distant wall, facing the boarded up bay windows away from her. “There’s a dressing screen to the right,” he said. “You’ll be able to see me through it but I cannot see you, and I won’t turn around.”

Una tentatively pulled the screen out, and the corrugated plasticlear screen proved to do exactly what the Mandalorian said it would. Still she hastily changed from the rags into simple, comfortable clothes, her eyes on the Mandalorian the whole time. He too did exactly what he said he would and remained turned away from her. She surveyed the room.

“I’ll keep this short and simple,” he said. “I have a reputation for buying people from the invis market and I let the rumors that I run a private brothel or bathhouse or whatever abound because the less people know the truth, the more they’ll fill in the blanks for themselves. In truth, I help people escape. The women you saw with me— All five are employees by choice, paid and provided for with the ability and skills to leave any time they want. They’ll meet us shortly to explain more over dinner, but they were called away, like you saw. I try not to appear in public more than I have to, and anything they do when they’re with me is to reinforce that reputation, nothing beyond what they’re willing. I won’t get into why or how that reputation got started right now, but I do assure you it’s entirely false. I’ve just found a way to leverage it to my and others’ advantage.”

Una slowly lowered the wine bottle back down, rethinking her escape plan.

“Are you dressed?”

She set the wine bottle aside. “… Yes.”

He stood and turned again, keeping his hands visible and keeping the distance between them.

“I don’t expect you to believe me. I don’t expect you to believe them. I’m still going to give you the resources you’ll need to get off this planet and go wherever you want or need to go and hope you understand that your silence about what we do will ensure we can continue to do it. Do we have an accord?”

“… I’d like to eat.”

The Mandalorian nodded. “Follow me.”

Over the following hour Una heard the Mandalorian’s story corroborated by everybody she met. The dogged rumors of insatiable lust and a habit of “going through” slave girls were baseless accusations thrown at him by rivals intent on discrediting him as a bounty hunter, and as the rumors followed him his employers became more and more scarce until the only ones who would hire him were the ones buying slaves themselves.

Disgusted by the invis market but unable to escape the sordid reputation, he realized there was a way he could leverage it to his advantage.

Outwardly he appeared to buy women from the auction blocks and haul them off to “refine” and resell to high buyers, others remaining behind as his obedient prisoners. His public appearances were accompanied by the women he hired making a show of fawning over him and following his every command, but with their help in the hidden headquarters of the abandoned theater, he used his bureaucratic skills, connections, and network of contacts to help others escape.

What he really made his money in was commissions: most of those who chose to stay in his employment were trained to be bounty hunters themselves, and once they’d been initiated into the Guild, he acted as their broker under a pseudonym, collecting a percentage of the Guild payout on their successes, which in turn kept his operation up and running. In just under five years he’d amassed over fifty loyal hunters bought or traded from the slave market and trained under his expertise, and over two hundred others he’d helped secure the freedom of.

By the time she’d healed and been fitted with some resources to keep her on the move, Una found herself beneath the theater with several others heading out the secret passageways under the city. She hadn’t spoken to the Mandalorian since the first day— Didn’t even know his name— but when she looked back to him conferring with the women who had helped her, he nodded and she nodded back.

After Q’rad, Una found that every Mandalorian she crossed, even those with the most fearsome reputations, was an honorable person who largely kept to themselves and didn’t start trouble (though she found they very easily ended any that came their way). Once, she’d seen a rather boisterous and uncouth fellow with the telltale armor be thrown out of a casino on Canto Bight, only for two Mandalorian bounty hunters to summarily beat him within an inch of his life when he tried to clumsily fight back. It turned out the loud one was not, in fact, a Mandalorian at all, just a pretender who’d found or stolen the armor of the two hunters’ brethren. Time and again she found that she could tell which Mandalorians truly shared the culture and code by which so many of them lived, opposed to the people who’d simply claimed the armor for themselves.

As the years went on, Una saw fewer and fewer Mandalorians in her travels. Eventually she wound up again in chains, this time as a dancer to the syndicate slug on the planet with two suns. It was an unfortunate commonality she had with several girls, including three other Twi’lek women. They had all been betrayed by the Hutt’s majordomo, a selfish, pasty former noble of their species by the name of Fortuna, a male Twi’lek who had gifted them to Jabba and who they all knew had also captured the Secura heir during the fires set to their homeworld.

The last woman, Oola, was the one Una formed the fastest friendship with. The lot of them, alongside a Rodian, a Theelin, an Aruzan, and an Askajian, made up Jabba’s then-current menu of performers. Max Rebo’s band, Barqin D’an and the other musicians at least had the luxury of wearing clothes if they wished, but for the dancing girls they were back in the thinnest scraps of clothing available, compelled to sing and dance and… entertain Jabba the Hutt.

When she heard of a Mandalorian hunter under Jabba’s employ her hopes were lifted, until she saw the green-armored warrior herself. Even if he had painted his armor, she could tell he wasn’t the one who’d helped her all those years ago. He didn’t make an effort to free the slaves, but with numbers against him and slave chips keeping those like her tethered on pain of death, Una knew there wouldn’t have been a way he even could have, not unless he or someone else managed to kill Jabba and his entire entourage. Though his reputation as a cold-blooded killer was well-known it was only partially true; sometimes employers like Jabba paid more for live capture. Beyond that though his fearsome reputation was bolstered by his ruthless efficiency, which it was said could be found in every job he took, from acquisitions to executions. Not only was it rumored he’d taken work from Vader himself, it was said that he’d even turned down permanent employment from the Emperor's enforcer.

The near-silent Mandalorian proved to be one of the few in Jabba’s hire who was an exception to some of the usual constraints: free to come and go as he pleased, not indebted to Jabba in any way, and formidable enough to hold his own without question. The bounty hunter stopped by Jabba’s palace from time to time to refuel; nobody could really say that the Mandalorian rested, per se, and for as slimy as the slug pit was there were well-paying clients and connections to be found in spades, and he liked to keep busy.

The times he lingered, Una found him to be enough of a conversationalist that he’d exchange some surface-level stories, provided nobody tried to dig any deeper, and if it appeared to others like he was just enjoying the rest of what Jabba had to offer there in his personal den of iniquity, she could find respite herself for a time appearing to entertain him. She could count on her hands the number of times it happened, but just seeing his armor there in the court gave her a sense of relief. His reputation and the usual rumors preceded him, but Una and the others never found themselves on the receiving end of more than his company within the throne room of the palace.

And then the sail barge came under assault and the Mandalorian met his demise in the maw of the Sarlacc, pulled down into the acidic depths even as he clawed at the sand in an effort to stave off a grisly and agonizing death. He had fought his way out of every other obstacle in his life; Una had hoped for his sake it would work again.

It was a fruitless hope though, and when the lights were shot out and the chaos continued she barely managed to yank her bindings free and jump for the scorching sand like the rest of the rats on Jabba’s sinking ship. How many survived the explosion, she wouldn’t know until much later when she tried to scrape a living together in the streets of Mos Espa, but the Mandalorian was not among them.

After that it was several more years of much of the same, eaking out a meager living and resorting to desperate measures just to survive. The Tatooine suns kept her from braving the wilderness, and in the city she had to be fast to escape the hands of those much stronger and more wicked than her.

Having blue skin and lekku makes you stand out on Tatooine though, and it wasn’t long before she was caught by Bib Fortuna’s agents and hauled back to Jabba’s palace in chains, a slave again.

When Una saw the assassin in black descend to Bib Fortuna’s throne room, killing the daimyo’s attendants and guards, she jerked against her chains on instinct, bare feet slipping on loose sand, trying to get away. When the assassin stopped, seeing her left, Una squeezed her eyes shut and prepared to meet her end.

A shot rang out. The chains jolted in her hands. Una fell to the coarse sand floor, her irons severed, and she looked around wildly until her eyes met the assassin again.

The woman jerked her head to indicate that she should leave, and Una didn’t have to think twice.

At the farthest end of the throne room near the stone staircase that would take her to the tunnels however, Una paused, looking back at the sound of spurs.

And when she saw the green Mandalorian descend into the throne room, she hesitated.

… Is that…?

Bib Fortuna, vile thing that he was, entreated the silent figure that now stood before him. Una flinched when another shot echoed through the room, a flash of red ending in the Twi’lek traitor’s demise. The Mandalorian stepped up onto the dais, effortlessly heaving the corpulent daimyo’s body aside. The assassin took up a flask and the Mandalorian eased onto the throne as comfortably as if he’d always belonged there.

And as Una silently ducked out of sight and raced on sandstone stairs to one of the hidden exits, she found she was unafraid.

Boba Fett was back.

#Boba Fett #Return of the Jedi #The Book of Boba Fett #Mandalorians #Twi’leks #Back In Business #star wars OCs #Legends/EU #OC Una #my OCs #my writing #hounds speaks #We get a chance to get into how Twi’leks are perceived in this rewrite #and how they perceive Fett #Because realistically. Why would Garsa or any Twi’lek trust Boba Fett taking up residence in Jabba’s Palace and accepting a rancor as a pet #‘‘I’m not like Jabba’’ ok king well you’re living in Jabba’s house and calling yourself a crimelord and accepting pet rancors so #How do we reconcile this #The idea of reputations will be one of the central themes to this story #Not just for Fett but for many of these players #Because what of the reputation of Tuskens? Or of Twi’leks? Or Fennec Shand? Cad Bane or Cobb Vanth?#It takes a lifetime to build and seconds to destroy #Best advertising is word of mouth #What happens when people leverage your desire to rule through respect instead of fear against you #Are you going to be able to stick to your guns and do things the hard way in order to show that you’re telling the truth?#Or are you going to let your anger get the best of you when people stoop to those methods and goad you into giving in to your old ways?#ANYWAY. I’m not actually starting this story yet. I’m aware I have some other things I need to accomplish/finish up first #Which is why I mentioned ^ that this can be read standalone #Additionally: Fett is not a crime lord here. This AU is a way to show how that story could have been fixed w just a few edits #And made to be much stronger and more compelling. And also :) About Boba Fett :) :)#NOT THAT I’M BITTER!!

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