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Boba, still held on his father's hip, hears an exchange he won't understand for another year or two.
"Oh! Is he yours?" A Togruta woman asks his father. "He looks just like you!"
Jango says, "he takes after his mother," and bursts into laughter that lulls Boba to sleep, resting his small hands on his father's chestplate.
The Togruta woman doesn't get the joke.
On Coruscant with his father, Jango and Boba sit and wait for Jango's target to leave their home.
A stranger, who knows Jango in passing but not Boba, says "hello, little one. What's your name?"
Boba looks up at Jango, who he can tell is smiling under his helmet, and when Jango nods Boba launches headfirst into an excited, childish conversation with the stranger.
"When I grow up," Boba declares, a few minutes in, "I want to be just like my buir. "
Jango snickers, then snickers some more, louder, while the stranger just nods in the way one does to all adike.
Then the target is on the move and they have to go.
Boba knows that he's a clone. He knows he has no mother, only his father and millions of big brothers. He likes it this way. His father never lied to him about how he was born, never bit around the truth. Jango trusts him, and loves him, and being buir and ad'ika is more than enough for Boba without another buir. He's happy that he's just like his father. He doesn't really have to guess what he'll look like when he's older.
His brothers and father are lost. Boba is a teen, sixteen standard years old, with a suit of armor that's too big for him, memories of a rain-soaked planet, jetii who turned on his father, and millions of brothers following a dark terror. Mandalorians are warrior people, yes, but they don't kill without cause. They don't kill innocents simply because they stood in front of a target.
Boba Fett's brothers follow a dishonorable dar'jetii . Boba doesn’t know why, but it doesn’t matter. Boba will not.
Well. What he means to say is: If the pay is good ( it’s incredible ), and he isn't bringing in innocents…
It does hurt him, though, to accept credits from a demagolka such as Vader. He will sift through the guilt at a later date. He will.
Boba Fett, Mandalorian orphan and renowned bounty hunter, currently employed under Darth Vader, really can't help himself.
The opportunity falls right at his feet.
"I feel like I've seen you before," Lando Calrissian says, sides of the conflict forgotten for a second. It's the first thing out of his mouth when Boba removes his helmet for a moment to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
"I just have that kind of face," Boba says. He really can't help himself. It was right there .
His lips quirk up as he puts his father's helmet back on.
"My mistake," Lando says, and Boba is so incredibly lucky that he can turn off the helmet's microphone as he snickers, grinning behind the helmet.
"Do you have siblings, Fett?"
Boba shifts at Darth Vader's side.
He knows what he wants to say, but.
He shouldn't.
He really, really shouldn't.
It's a terrible idea to—
"I come from a very large family, Lord Vader," he says, and snickers into his helmet, quiet enough without the mic that Vader's breathing covers it.
Somewhere deep inside of Vader, unbeknownst to Boba, one Knight Skywalker is cackling.
But Lord Vader himself doesn't seem to get what Boba says.
Of anyone to get his jokes, Boba would have expected it to be someone like Vader. Logically old enough to know about the Clone Troopers, definitely someone who knows about Jango Fett, given his hiring of Boba Fett.
Dar'jetii, Boba thinks, almost sullenly, have no sense of humor.
It's good to be with another Mandalorian, even for a short period of time. Who knows how long it's been since Boba was last around his own people.
But the thing is—
Mando, as he seems to be called, grew up far away from where Boba did. Their experiences are lightyears apart, both figuratively and literally, and sometimes those differences set Boba's buy'ce spinning.
Take, for example, the way Mando sees his face and thinks Boba. For Boba, the names are too many to count, bleeding with grief even decades later.
Take, for example, when Mando asks if Boba could be the one to scan his face into an Imperial database.
Inwardly, Boba thinks, this is another thing he never knew the pain of. I think I envy him.
Outwardly, Boba says, "Let's just say they might recognize my face."
And gets, as he has grown to expect since the vode and his buir died, nothing.
Boba, though, hasn't had the chance to make a clone joke for a good few years. He will readily admit that he turned off the mic in his buy'ce and snickered as soon as the others looked the opposite way.
It gets him every time, even if there's no one left to fully appreciate his goddamn hilarious sense of humor.
He doesn't know how it happens, but Boba Fett, famous bounty hunter, finds himself helping his old enemies. For the very first time, Boba Fett looks at Leia Organa and doesn't plot her detainment, unconsciousness, or death.
What has the galaxy come to, he wonders.
(He’s glad for the change, but General Organa’s face, changed though it is, only reminds Boba of his time under a monster. He doesn’t regret the hefty payment. He does regret everything else.
He tries not to accept employment from people like Vader again.)
(It does irk him, years later when he learns the truth, that Anakin kriffing Skywalker didn't laugh at his Clone joke. It does, however, further prove his theory that dar'jetii have no sense of humor. Anakin Skywalker had fought alongside thousands of his brothers. He would have gotten the joke.)
Boba is sitting on a bed in the healers rooms, steadily bleeding (and healing) from his left arm under a bacta patch, when a medic walks right up to him and says, in a no nonsense tone that rings shockingly familiar in Boba’s ears, "Why don't you have a facial ID in the system?"
And dear gods. The medic, young though he looks, has his kriffing face.
Boba opens his mouth to say an automatic I've been busy lately and closes it with an audible snap.
It would be terrible to—
He shouldn’t, but maybe this time someone will finally—
"I have a pretty common face... Kix," he says, glancing at the medic's name on his uniform. "It might even be worth our time to go ahead and just give me a serial ID. Saves some hassle, if you will."
Kix blinks at Boba for a second, processing. His face gets a little outraged, then a little angry, then a lot confused. It seems that Kix hasn’t quite made the connection to the little boy on Kamino or to his other vod’e.
Boba snickers, though, no helmet to hide the sound or the way he purses his curling lips to keep the sound in. It's a distinctly Jango thing, which makes him love it even more, always, and in this case makes the entire joke that much funnier.
Kix's jaw drops.
Boba starts laughing.
Kix, after a good three seconds' delay, snorts and follows Boba into shocked, vaguely hysterical laughter, tinged with a faint shade of grief.
Boba makes a note in the back of his head to ask Kix what happened to him, for him to be so damned young.
Later, though.
For now…
"I've been waiting years for someone to realize I'm funny, vod'ika, " Boba says, chuckling under his breath, just a quiet sound and a soft huff of air, surprising himself with the softness in his voice. "It seems I can always rely on my vod'e. "
Kix grins a wry grin that sends Boba right back to Jango telling a Togruta woman he takes after his mother, holding a toddling Boba on his hip. It's such a faint memory now, almost a dream, but Boba still remembers his father's chest shaking with familiar laughter, the grin that was surely on his lips as he made a joke just for himself.
"Of course you can," Kix says, wry on the surface, just barely hiding unfiltered joy and grief. Damn, Boba needs to catch up with his vod'ika soon.
(And he truly is younger, despite the head start years ago. It’s curious.)
"We all have identical senses of humor," Kix continues, grin widening.
Boba howls with laughter.