Chapter Text
Technically, Boba Fett was a man from three persecuted groups.
First of all, he was a criminal. Technically, bounty hunters caught criminals and were only criminal-adjacent, but The Empire didn’t deal in technicalities. Plus, he may or may not still have a record from hunting one Jedi in particular in his youth when the Empire still called itself a Republic, but that sin paled in comparison to his second sin: being a clone.
Boba didn’t consider himself a clone, at least not the usual connotation of the word. But, his face, voice, and sometimes his name were too recognizable for him not to be intimately aware of the label others would give him. He made sure to wear his helmet in public at all times, and he calibrated his vocoder to change his voice just a little.
These precautions became more and more unnecessary every year as the clone army was phased out for much more incompetent natborns, but he stuck to them religiously even if they declared him part of the third and final group he technically belonged to.
He'd never been to Mandalore, and no faction or splinter group from the planet would claim him (due to the clone thing), and he only somewhat considered himself Mandalorian. His understanding of the culture was minimal, at best, and the lack of conversation partners made his grasp of the language shaky. This meant nothing to the Imp bastards who saw his chest plate and helmet and assumed he was a “rebellious” Mandalorian who needed to be brought in and interrogated for the whereabouts of his covert.
So, even with his reputation as the most ruthless bounty hunter this side of the outer rim, Boba signed a contract and became one of Jabba’s retainers. Any good predator knew when to lay low and when to strike, and now, so soon after The Empire glassed Mandalore, was the time to lay low.
That didn’t mean Boba liked it. Sticking mostly to Tatooine—of all shitholes—was both grating and boring. Grating because even ten minutes under the suns turned his armor into an oven, and boring due to how entrenched in this dinky little planet the Hutts were. On-planet bounties were never anything worth his time, but that was the price to pay for such a lucrative hideout.
Between bouts of acting as an elite minion and pleasing his employer by showing helmet, Boba found himself in the Hutt’s archives, flipping through the disorganized mess for anything interesting.
Papa always told him that bounty hunters were half detectives, half warriors, and the best in the business trained both their wit and muscles. So he read through old reports—some dated back centuries—and solved a few cold cases the Hutts could care less about using only the information available.
It wasn’t the most stimulating training, but it was something.
Which is how he came across a file for Anakin Skywalker, nine-year-old human male slave and winner of that year’s Boonta Eve Classic. Jabba had wanted to buy him, but by the time his goons showed up, his owner had lost him in a bet to an offworlder. But he still had the mother and offered to sell her as breeding stock. Slave breeding wasn’t a lucrative business in harsh climates like Tatooine, so Jabba didn’t buy her.
Most of this Boba read between the lines. This wasn’t the type of file that would usually lead anywhere interesting, but Boba still remembered his preteen crush on the propaganda surrounding General Anakin Skywalker, so he dug further out of an idle curiosity about a slave who shared a name with the dead Jedi.
A bit of searching through a vast array of enslaved Skywalkers revealed a file on Shmi Skywalker, the mother who Jabba had his goons keep tabs on just in case she had another child. The file was short, just the date she was sold to a farmer from one of the colonist towns named Lars, the date she died with an addendum referencing a massacred Tusken tribe, and a scrawled note that the farmer’s son was raising a boy named Skywalker.
The file on the massacre was both easy to find and encrypted, but Boba Fett didn’t train himself to be a moderate slicer for nothing. The file included holopics. Boba didn’t need to read the barebones “forensics” report to know exactly what weapon was used to slaughter the primitive tribe: a lightsaber.
The events seemed to line up as follows: the Tuskens abducted the farmer’s wife, the farmer and several others went out in force to get her back, most of the farmers died, Lars lost his leg, a Jedi showed up out of nowhere, retrieved Shmi’s body, and may or may not have cut down fleeing Tusken children.
Apparently, the slave boy was General Anakin Skywalker. Over half of Boba’s crush on the man came from watching the Jedi tear apart battle droids with his mind and ‘saber with a snarl on his face. If his opponents had been anything other than droids, the footage would’ve been too violent to show on the news, so it wasn’t a longshot in Boba’s mind to put that same violence in the midst of a tribe of people who killed the Jedi’s mother.
The other factor in his crush was just how damn pretty that man was.
Boba flipped back to Shmi’s file and reread all of it, eyes lingering on the handwritten portion. The archives proved that Skywalker was a common slave name, but it wouldn’t hurt to check.