Work Text:
Boba never thinks of himself as a clone. Never thinks of himself as being the same as the boys who share his face. It’s not that difficult. He knows from a young age that they all hate him. For the most part, he understands. Boba doesn’t have their responsibilities. Boba is allowed to walk around freely. The constant threat of not being good enough, of being decommissioned has never applied to him.
By the times he's old enough to understand it, the hatred is returned. Boba grows up resenting their secret words that he doesn’t understand, the way they call each other brother, the suspicious looks directed towards him. He notices the way conversations die when he walks by.
More than once, he had been talking with a clone that looked his age in the cafeteria, only for them to stop short when he couldn’t tell them his identification number, couldn’t say what batch or squad he belonged to. More than once, a clone that looked older than him would question him, ask him where all his batchmates were. Then he would freeze in fear when he realized who he was talking to.
On occasion, when Boba was older, he would make it a project. It was risky, but Boba got so bored when his father went on jobs and the reward of a friendly conversation or even a chance to participate in the games they played together was enough for him. He would make up an identity and see how long he could pretend to be a clone. Boba was always caught out before too long. He always forgot some little detail, and they would figure it out: that he wasn’t one of them. It got more difficult as time went on; squads and batchmates started warning each other about him because they always got into trouble when the Kaminiise found out that he'd been talking to them. Once his father found out about it, he forbid him from ever doing it again.
Boba follows his father’s ways, always. He doesn’t look them in the eye, not the ones that look like his buir, not the ones that look like him. When he overhears the way Jango discusses “the product” with the Kaminiise, he silently agrees. Jango never outright tells him to think less of the clones, their lives and their sentience. He doesn't have to. Boba follows his father’s example in all things.
The clones aren’t… they aren’t real. They aren’t people, not like him and his father. They’re programmed. They’re modified: to be more obedient, to be less aggressive, to grow faster, and that is enough to make them indisputably lesser in Boba's eyes.
(Boba doesn’t know about the chips, not then—and he’ll never know if his father knew about them.)
His father teaches him many things: to hate the Jedi, to have contempt for the Republic and to have absolute loyalty to his family. From as soon as he can properly hold it, Jango teaches him how to fire a blaster like a professional, then how to fly a ship like an ace. He teaches him the Resol’nare, about the history and the stories of their people. Boba grows up looking forward to the day he’s old enough to make his own set of armor. He spends afternoons picturing it in his mind. He has already decided it will look just like his father’s.
There are things Boba likes about Kamino: the sound rainfall against the shiny domed roofs, the days when his father didn’t have to work and he would tell him stories. But, mostly, it is a lonely and cold place for a child to grow. Boba learns to savor the memories of the infrequent trips off-planet, the times his father lets him stick around when he’s on a job. He tries to hold in his complaints for all the monotonous days, sometimes weeks that he spends left alone with some Kaminii minder he has to dodge.
After Geonosis, after his father is killed in front of him, Boba knows that he needs friends. He goes to his father’s. They—they’re not like Jango, none of them are like a buir to him, but they help him. They help him survive and, most importantly, they tell him that they will help him get revenge.
(Afterwards—after the Jedi who killed his father doesn’t die and after Boba becomes a mass murderer at the age of 12, he doesn’t let himself think of the cadets he met who looked like him, or the men who looked like his father that he killed. He doesn’t let himself think of what it would be like to have brothers.)
As Boba grows up, there are things that he wishes he could ask his father. About his father’s past, about the decisions he made. Things Boba desperately wishes he had asked before, when there was still time. But he had been a child then, a child who thought his father was invincible and that his father’s work was a game. And now he can’t ask him anything, not ever again.
The answers Boba imagines he would give feel both unsatisfying and damning.
As an adult, Boba never likes to take his helmet off. He does, after all, have the most recognizable face in the galaxy. He hates being mistaken for a clone, though of course real clones are a rare sight nowadays, and any clones still living look twice his age.
Still. He’s killed over less than a sarcastic, “How you doing, trooper?”
Boba becomes the best bounty hunter in the galaxy, just like his father was. And as time goes on, and the clones die out, it becomes less of a problem. Sometimes, between jobs, Boba lets himself drink a little too much, lets himself wallow in self-pity, lets himself think that this is the reason why he’s alone. He would never admit it out loud, can barely admit it to himself, but Boba is ashamed of his face.
It is always something that he regrets, the fact that when he looks in the mirror, he first sees not his father, but the men his father sold to die.