Chapter Text
You find him face down in the sand not far from your farm.
Almost immediately outside its periphery actually, about four or five yards from the outermost vaporator. The tallest and most valuable out of the three that you own, and unfortunately the one most prone to breaking. The previous night’s dust storm has given you plenty of reason to go check on it now - the small holopad like device you use to monitor the functionality of each collector strobing in warning, a bright orange exclamation point flashing across the screen. Painfully annoying to deal with most of the time, and hopefully nothing more than sand, but you won’t know until you look, and as you walk across your property with your patch-in droid, you’ve got your fingers crossed that whatever damage it’s suffered isn’t anything that requires more than having to brush away a few rocks.
Stepping out of your house, you sink slightly with each step you take afterward. The high morning daylight reflects blindingly against newly formed dunes of sand, residues of last night’s wind blowing unsettled granules into your face, making it difficult to find your balance and to see properly even in layers of protective coarseweave and the scarf you’re wearing covering most of your face. Bringing your hand to your forehead, you do your best to soldier through it, ignoring the gritty salt taste in your mouth and the way your eyes begin to water. Your droid does his best to keep up, too, his wheels whirring as he works hard to maintain his traction, sand flying out from beneath his weight, his discomfort and protest voiced with an occasional beep.
“You could have stayed home, you know. You didn’t have to come with me.” You turn to your right and squint down at the sky blue robot. His binocular-like head turns in your direction and squints back.
Another beep, far more annoyed and less dejected than the previous ones.
“I know it’s your job, honey. It’s just a little bit further. I can’t help that you have wheels. I’m not the one who created you. Trust me, if I was I would have made you a lot nicer.” You grumble the last bit, trying not to trip over your ankles as the sand gets deeper and harder to step through.
A series of upset chirps, his poor little tank-like feet fighting a losing battle against a terrain that seems as if it’s always trying to kill something - robots and non-robots alike. Taking pity on him, you sigh and stop walking, feeling guilty, bending down to his height to brush debris off his head and the piece of metal that protects his wheels.
“You’re right. I’m just stressed about the vaporator. I didn’t mean to take it out on you. I’m sorry.”
A shy tril signals your forgiveness. You stand to your full height and start walking again, this time with more purpose, the vaporator in question appearing on the horizon. “Alright, twenty credits says that it’s the condensers this time.”
It didn’t take as long as you liked to admit for this to stop feeling weird, having conversations with a companion that isn’t even human. When you had inherited your farm, you had been used to living on your own and your uncle had long since passed. An awful man that hadn’t even been living on Tatooine for the last few years of his life, having escaped this bantha-fodder hell hole for a planet much more nice and shiny, not that you were particularly close with him anyway, so it had come as a surprise to find out that you were included in anything that had to do with him at all, let alone something a serious and invariable as his will. But as it turned out, it wasn’t much of a gracious offering. The property and everything on it was maintained by a hired hand who travelled the distance between your farm and Mos Eisley for a sum he was paid monthly, a portion of the earnings the farm’s previous owner won in high stakes bets placed on fathier races. With no measure or incentive to make sure things were actually being properly taken care of, the newly rich attendant let almost everything fall to ruin, and your droid, the frustratingly perceptive and surprisingly snarky assistant trailing behind you with all his might, was nothing more than a cowering piece of metal forgotten in the corner.
He had needed a friend just as much as you did.
“Woah, high roller. Where’re you getting that kind of money? And besides, we don’t mention the people that shall not be named, remember? Jeez, it’s like you’re trying to summon them.”
You glance down at the holopad still blinking, tapping twice to zoom in on the equipment in question now that you’re closer to it, trying to get a better look. The droid’s response is a beep you’re not quite paying attention to, your focus now on figuring out what has gone wrong and how to fix it. “As much as I want to boost your self esteem, you and I both know you can’t fight them. How would you even do that? You’re basically a neck attached to a moving platform, all they’d have to do is knock you over.”
A second noise, far more concerned than the last.
“Not saying I’d fair any better, Patch, but ya know…I have arms.”
Upon rotating the 3D model of the spire, you grin wickedly as you zoom in a second time on the refrigerated condensers highlighted in red, any irritation at this unfortunate find temporarily annulled by your sweet, sweet victory over your poor, helpless robot. “Ha! Told you. See? Right there. Second condenser. And not to toot my own horn or anything, but this is the fourth time I’ve been right which I think qualifies this as a winning streak, so if you want to cheer for me, I would not be opposed.”
You set the device down on the base of the harvester and move on to grab a few tools from the satchel situated around your waist, noticing for the first time that he’s uncharacteristically silent.
You turn to face him, worried. “What’s the matter?”
Staring off at something in the distance, you follow his line of sight. “Oh.”
He chirps again, quiet and on-guard, and this time you realize he’s been trying to get your attention. A tiny sparkle had caught his photoreceptor, a small glint of refracted sunslight angling out from beneath bleached, atomized earth.
“Stay here.”
Armed with only a screwdriver, you aren’t really sure what you’re doing as you slowly and carefully approach the slight deviation in the otherwise smooth surface of the dunes. Your palm sweats around the handle of it the closer you get, nervous but too committed now to turn back. You can’t tell what it is, just that pieces of it are catching, dark green fabric and a broken antenna of some sort sticking out of the sand. You wouldn’t call yourself brave, not really, not at all actually because you’re a hermit moisture farmer who lives off soup and portion bread and spends most of her days talking to a sentient droid that may or may not - some of the time - be plotting her murder, so it isn’t like you to be doing something like this - to be taking such a risk. Each step makes your common sense scream, your experience with things like this able to be counted on one hand (more like a fist) and you nearly turn around more than once, the practical part of you counteracted by your maybe, probably, crazed mumblings that Okay, you can do this. It’s fine. Gotta protect Patch and defend my land like a good farmer lest I risk being haunted by my nerf-herder uncle. Who needs a spear when you’ve got a screwdriver, right? I’ll be fine. This is totally fine. Totally don’t have to pee right now either. Maker, what the hell am I doing?
It isn’t until you’re close enough to reach out and touch them that you realize what had been half-way buried in the storm last night happened to be a person and not, for instance, something much easier and less traumatizing to deal with.
Immediately you begin to dig, with an agenda at first, but soon your movements devolve into something akin to panicked as whatever progress you make is undone by the wind and gravity. The man, you figure this out next, is big - heavy and unconscious and obviously injured, which doesn’t make any of this easy - it certainly doesn’t ease the burden of the fact that you could be mistaken and you might be trying to uncover a dead body, or the increasing possibility that if he isn’t you have the ethical duty to not just leave him in the middle of the desert and that you now somehow have to get him back to your house.
But in the typical let me just ignore this until I can’t sort of fashion, you pointedly tuck all that away for later and manage, pushing up on his shoulder and using his own weight to flip him over onto his back.
Exhaling and embarrassingly out of breath, you sit down and you close your eyes before you can get a good look at his face, relieved - at least for the moment - that if this man is going to go, at least it isn’t ass in the air, suffocating in sand.
“If you end up being weird I’m gonna be so mad.” You grumble as you stand, brushing fruitlessly at your pants, ready to grab ahold of his cape and drag him by the shoulders back to your house.
When you open your eyes again, you get your first real look at him.
Hurt would be an understatement. Injured isn’t any better.
His skin and his clothes and his hair are stained with a tacky, dark brown and tar-black mixture of sand and blood and salt. The granules stick particularly well to the lacerations on his face and hands still oozing, getting lighter and more like the sand around you the further away they are from the cut like some awful form of bacta - built up from hours spent wandering, at first managing to stay up right, taking stumbling and exhausted steps forward, then, by the looks of his shirt, crawling on his stomach when his legs had finally collapsed.
Somewhere along the way he lost his armor. His jetpack and blaster.
Entirely defenseless, he managed to get as far as this, your measly little farm, before he could force himself to go any further.
Recovering, you swallow the urge to recoil, forcing the fear and empathy and initial disgust away somewhere that isn’t the forefront of your mind to be picked apart and dissected later too, along with a whole bunch of other things, hyper-aware that right now you need to figure out a way to get him inside and treated before you no longer have that option.
Grabbing his arms by the elbows, you start your seemingly endless trip back. “Maker, I’m sorry if I make this worse, just please don’t die.”
The hour and a half that follows is surreal, like some strange out of body experience that consisted mostly of you whispering assurances to an unconscious man and to an empty room, but mostly just to yourself, almost as if the affirmations had somehow made it easier to wash his hair and strip him of his clothes, trying to preserve them enough to sew and clean them later, to ignore the way he floated in and out of consciousness, groaning, causing you to look sharply away from his face when it twists full of anguish. Unsure or maybe just unwilling to figure out if he knows what you’re doing, if he knows that he’s safe and that all you want to do is make him better because speaking directly to him makes him - this and its consequences - real.
You had filled a wooden bowl with water and added oils to it. A recipe learned and passed down to you by watching your mother, staring up at her in the refresher, then following her to the kitchen as she carefully stirred until the water was opaque and dotted with bubbles, the concoction used on sunburns and split knees whenever you fell and your father’s callused hands, a sort of soothing home-remedy that worked miracles on cracked skin and blisters, perhaps nothing more than snake oil now and with only enough bacta to take care of a small portion of his injuries, you were sensible with how you rationed it, hoping that gently cleaning the dirt and blood off his face and neck and hands was enough, and that his immune system would do the rest.
He calmed by the time you were finished. You watched his chest rise and fall for a few minutes, somewhere between frozen in shock and ensuring he was still breathing, snapping out of it eventually when Patch came rolling slowly into the room, leaving you with nothing more than to work on mending his clothes.
-
Boba wakes up in a room he doesn’t recognize that is warm and dimly lit.
It is night now, but he cannot tell how much time has passed. Outside, moonlight shimmers softly against the glass of the window high above his head directly across the room, as if the stars hidden away in the daytime had decided to fall and make their new home in the sand. Beautiful. Calming. If he had the energy, he’d be surprised by how safe he feels, how unbothered he is by his vulnerability, but he doesn’t so he moves on - letting recognition of his surroundings skim the surface of his awareness. Around him, everything is bathed in the low orange glow of bloggin-oil lamps, and in his semi-conscious state he’s cognizant that something is cooking, a sort of broth that fills the entire room with the scent of lyseed seasoning and something medicinal.
Hushed beeping and answering whispers catch his full attention. Boba turns his head. The room develops in his vision like the gradual development of a hologram.
“He’s not!” A sharp whine in dissent. “No, I am not about to get close enough to find out. What if he ends up being violent or something? Then who’s going to fix your wiring and make sure you don’t get squeaky? It’s not going to be me because I’ll be dead!”
A table. The leg of a chair. 5 wheels. A boot. His gaze travels upwards.
You.
Sitting a few feet away from his bed with a steaming mug of something cradled in your right hand - the same something that must be boiling near the nanowave right now - your knees tucked towards your chest, making wild gestures with your free hand as you speak to the scrawny droid to your left.
“You go check on him if you’re that worried about it. I did my part.”
Boba swallows and licks his lips, noticing abruptly how dry his mouth is. He hasn’t had anything to drink since falling into the sarlacc pit almost three days ago, leaving him dangerously dehydrated but unable to speak - helpless to interrupt this annoying conversation to ask for something to drink. He tries anyway, though, his chest heaving with the impulse to cough, the movement aborted with every inhale, his lungs pressing against his ribcage like they had been made from shards of glass until finally -
“Stop. Talking.”
Surprised into silence, you set your cup down and lean forward, standing up. “You’re awake.”
“You’re loud.”
“Sorry,” you apologize quickly, quieter now, approaching the bed - your bed - tentatively. “How are you feeling? You’ve been asleep a few hours.”
Boba blinks slowly. “Like I was eaten alive.”
You don’t know what that means, can’t even begin to imagine if he’s being serious or not, but it doesn’t matter because he keeps talking, struggling to sit up as he braces himself on his forearms, pushing himself upright and backwards towards your headboard.
“Careful. You’re too weak to move yet.” You warn, placing a hand gingerly to his shoulder, the other reaching for a glass similar to yours left on the bedside table without any forethought, without noticing the way he looks at you - briefly, fleetingly - or realizing the weight and implications of the tense eye-contact you make upon touching him.
“Drink this. I know you must be thirsty.”
He goes to reach for it, but his hands are too shaky to be of any use, so you have to help him, guiding the cup to his lips and tilting it, careful not to let it pour too fast or too slow. From the looks of it, he’s never been in this position before, has never relied on someone like this, let alone a stranger, and can’t figure out what to do with himself or how to feel about it, his frustration palpable in his attempt to hold the cup anyway.
When he’s finished you get up to refill it, suddenly glad for the space now separating you.
“Where am I?”
“My house.” You answer softly, pouring.
“No, kid. I mean, where-”
Interrupting him gently, you do your best to remain patient. “I know what you mean. I wasn’t finished.”
You set the teapot down quietly, using a spoon to steep the leaves in his drink.
“I’m assuming you know you’re still on Tatooine, but if not…surprise.” You smile a little and make a little wave with the utensil. “We’re a few standard-hours from Mos Eisley. I found you by one of my moisture vaporators. You’d still be there if Patch hadn’t seen you first.”
Boba looks fully at the nervous little robot for the first time. “Your droid.”
“Patch,” you correct. “And yes. We had gone out to repair a condenser damaged in the storm last night. You’re lucky it had stopped before it could bury you completely. We wouldn’t have spotted you at all, then.”
He watches you fill his mug again, tempted to reach out and touch your wrist - stuck with more questions than answers, filled with an urgency to have them explained before his body collapses into another fitful bout of dream-less sleep. He doesn’t, though, not sure he’d be able to even if he tried, and waits for you to finish.
“Why?”
“Why what? Why wouldn’t we have seen you?” A silly thing to say, but you’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s been through a lot.
“No. Why help me.”
His question catches you off guard and you avoid looking at him for a few seconds that pass like cold syrup, acutely aware now that you don’t really have an answer to give him - nothing solid enough to pass as an excuse, certainly not anything definitive enough to be an actual answer, either. You truly don’t know why you’re doing anything right now, just that you’re filled with the compulsion to do it.
“I don’t know…it’s the right thing to do, I guess. Maybe I just hope that if I were in your situation, someone would do the same for me.”
You don’t look at him, but you think that maybe he’s nodding.
He must accept this though because he doesn’t say anything, so you take his silence as an opportunity to sit down at the edge of the bed and help him take another sip. He doesn’t meet your gaze or try to hold the cup this time, taking long drinks until he can’t anymore, pushing weakly at your wrist to signal that he’s finished.
Boba catches his breath, then clears his throat. “What’s your name?”
You smile slightly as you get up and place the dishes into the sink next to your cooling chamber. Looking over your shoulder at him, you’re relieved to see that some of his color has returned. “I should be asking you that.”
You give it to him anyway and he repeats it. The unexpected flush it brings about something else to ignore.
“Should I guess what your name is or…”
“Boba.”
The familiarity of his name touches the base of your skull, travels through your jaw and sets your teeth slightly on edge, but doesn’t establish itself as anything concrete, a fleeting, airy feeling of deja vu and nothing else. Slowly, delicately, you force your mind to switch back into focus, away from dissecting this strange feeling and the fear you know creeps beneath it. It wouldn’t make sense to be afraid now, to second guess yourself. You’re doing the right thing by helping him, and he very clearly needs it. To change your mind, to kick him out, wouldn’t be right, especially since you cannot pinpoint why exactly you suddenly want to, or if that doing so could be explained with any valid reason at all.
You find your seat across the room again, wrapping your arms around your legs, your chin resting on your knee. “Do you remember what happened, Boba?”
“Only that the sarlacc found me somewhat indigestible.”
Sarlacc?
This man was eaten by a kriffing monstrosity worm animal plant hybrid and lived?
Boba reads the surprise in your face and grins in amusement. None of this is funny, but the genuine concern and bewilderment you’re staring at him with now is sort of entertaining in a you have no idea, kid kind of way. He remembers only bits and pieces. He remembers Solo accidentally slamming a pole into his jetpack, igniting it and sending him hurtling into the sky above the pit, only for him to fall in. He remembers falling, tumbling downwards in the sand and towards enormous rows of teeth. Things become more complicated after that. His armor had protected him from what surely would have killed him, but he can’t recall how he got out - can only summon fading images of a being dragged, some sort of chatter like an argument was happening above his head as he was picked apart, robbed of his weapons and beskar. Then a gasp, like whomever or whatever it was that that had been salvaging him for parts was surprised to discover that he was human.
The rest is entirely blank until he was woken by similar bickering.
“How did you? What were you? I mean-”
“I can’t remember much after falling in. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Maker.” You whisper in wonder, looking at him differently now - the sympathy and disquietude still there just given another layer. A coat of something else like maybe you’re on some level impressed with him or amazed that he had survived and without any of the defensive humor clouding your features, you look young enough for him to wonder what the hell you were thinking bringing a man like him inside your home, achingly pretty and incredibly naïve.
This planet should have taught you better.
The ensuing silence is thick - not uncomfortable, almost solid in the room like heavy fog.
“I should let you get your rest.” You finally say, rising to your feet. He has more things to ask more pressing than his desire to sleep, but he’s fighting a losing battle against the weight of his eyelids. They’ll have to wait for the next time he wakes up, whenever that is.
His eyes follow you as you move about the room, gently putting out the lamps, casting you in a soft, golden glow. As each one dwindles, you become more and more of a shadow dancing in his vision and if he had the energy, he’d be off-put by how safe he feels, how natural it seems to be near you, the quiet beeps of your droid and the soothing pitch of your voice.
You’re saying something as you get closer to the bed. The last lamp. But he doesn’t catch it. Only your face, sweet and smiling.
“Goodnight, Boba.”