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“Decommissioned?” Jango stopped, his boots ringing on the metal floor. The spindly Kaminoan, Lino Bivui, turned back towards him, twisting a stylus round their pale fingers. Their cheeks were flushed a pale grey, something that resembled excitement sparking in their dark eyes. It sent a cold shiver of unease running down Jango’s spine, and he tucked his thumbs into the hip pockets of his blacks to stop himself from reaching for the blaster on his hip.
“Yes.”
Jango fought the urge to roll his eyes, the gesture no longer hidden behind the safety of his helmet. Muscles he didn’t know he had ached from training the new batch of troopers, and exhaustion had been a constant companion for the past two years. But he was still here, roaming the halls with the Kaminoan, rather than curling into his bed for a few hours before the training began again.
“What,” Jango let some of his irritation gather in his voice like an oncoming storm, “exactly do you mean by the decommissioning of the clone troopers?” The words ‘of my sons’ went unspoken, bitten back at the last second, because how could he not love them? It would be as impossible as trying to pluck every star from the sky with his bare hands. He was Mando’a, regardless of what people tried to say to him, and some instincts were harder to shake than others.
Lino Bivui drew themselves up higher, confused and affronted and Jango didn’t care. He wasn’t about to ask twice, letting himself finally wrap his fingers around the handle of his blaster. Their eyes dropped to it the movement, as dark and liquid as the sea on this infernal planet, and they sighed.
Telling Jango what it meant may not have been the last thing they ever did, but they sealed their fate when they finished with ‘After all, they’re not human.’
Green blood covered the walls, dripping from Jango’s hands as he worked methodically through the floors, enacting his own brand of justice. When the day dawned on Kamino, the facility was empty and Jango Fett, along with his sons and storage vats, was nowhere to be found.
⁂
Jango didn’t know exactly what time it was — the instinct had slowly eroded with every year of peace that passed — but he knew it was too damn early.
An exploratory press of his hand sideways came away tangled in a cold nest of blankets, some softer than he was used even now, revealing Obi-Wan was already awake and up with their sons. The thought still sent a twisted curl of warmth through his chest, Jango’s heart beating slightly faster whenever he remembered that Obi-Wan had chosen him, and let Jango love him in return.
His train of thought was derailed as the crushing weight firmly settled on top of his chest shifted, one tiny hand pressing into his cheek. “ Bui’ ?”
Jango fought back the reflexive groan, knowing his previous plans last night — of being able to luxuriate in bed with his riduur on one of Obi-Wan’s rare mornings free — were now impossible and half-opened an eye. A blurry face stared back at him, impossibly close and Jango did groan this time, eyes snapping shut again to try and dissuade the eager toddler sitting on him.
It didn’t work.
“ Bui’! ” Jango flinched away from the resounding squeal, the noise sending a blaster bolt of pain through his head. He hooked his arm under the wriggling toddler and twisted them both so they were lying on the blankets, side by side, hoping beyond hope that his restless son would settle.
“ Bui’, up! ”
Jango resigned himself to wakefulness, navigating by touch — making the child next to him giggle in delight and try to grab at his fingers — to press his forehead to his son’s, breathing in the gentle scent of floral shampoo and the faint tinge of engine oil.
Clearly, the Alpha batch had gotten distracted while watching their younger siblings already.
The group was so similar to Jango already that on previous occasions, he had found Jaster’s admonishments falling from his lips, an echo that made him turn pale with looks of teenage defiance turning to worry in a second.
“Good morning, ad’ika ,” Jango groaned, pressing his shoulder back as far as he could, hearing the bone crack with the motion. He squinted down at the boy, a growing sense of confusion washing through him. Which child was this?
The decision to decant the remaining batches from the storage tanks had been a long argued over one. The battle raged until the early hours of the morning, only to resume at first light, proving to be ultimately pointless when they all discovered that the children would die otherwise.
Plo Koon and Shaak Ti had deliberately not looked at the other before they crept from the meeting room towards the tanks to begin the process as soon as they heard. Jango suspected they were the key driving forces — except Jango and Obi-Wan himself — in annulling the previous agreement between the Kaminoans and the Senate and granting all of his sons their freedom.
Jango sat up, the child copying his actions clumsily, a wide grin on their face and eyes fixed on him. A quick check of his outfit: the steel blue of the batch marked to be the 501st Legion originally, helped somewhat, but not enough. He couldn’t be Echo or Fives — those two were never far apart from each other — and he lacked the careful braids of Tup. Jango sighed, roughly kicking his legs free of the blanket and standing up, the child already rising to his feet — wobbling slightly on the uneven mattress and raising his arms to be picked up.
“Kix?” Jango asked as he obliged. The delighted peal of laughter as he settled the boy on his hip let him know he was wrong once again.
The tiles were warm beneath his feet, and Jango smiled to himself as the memory of Obi-Wan collapsing into the bed beside him — his skin sun-warmed and smelling faintly of honey — rose unbidden as he walked towards the door. For all Jango treasured his memories of Obi-Wan, nothing could compare to the man himself.
Obi-Wan sat crossed-legged in a pool of dappled sunlight, a gently steaming cup of tea next to his knee with one child sat in his lap with a look of such intense concentration on his face Jango couldn’t help but grin.
“Cody has been such a good help this morning,” Obi-Wan said, his eyes still closed but his face inclined towards Jango regardless. Cody opened one eye — the other slowly opening despite his best efforts — and nodded enthusiastically.
“Have the rest been behaving for your buir ?” Jango asked Cody who, even at the age of approximately seven, carried the self-inflicted responsibility of the other children on his shoulders.
Cody paused, clearly trying to think of a half-truth as he spotted the child held on Jango’s hip.
“Seventeen said they’d only be a few minutes,” he reported finally. “And that Jesse wanted to find Kix so he wouldn’t be any bother, and Kix is still asleep.”
“ Cyar’ika , we need better colour-coding for our children.” Jesse was already squirming to be put down as Jango lowered him to the floor, trying to run towards the sleeping Kix — sprawled on the floor next to Obi-Wan — even before his feet made contact.
“Oh?” Obi-Wan did look at him then, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he smiled, hair shot through with gold in the sunlight.
Cody sighed a far too world-weary sound, and wriggled free of Obi-Wan’s lap, crossing the room to scramble into the playpen with Boba and Rex instead.
Jango laughed, leaning down to kiss Obi-Wan as he had been wanting to do since he first woke up. The other man laughed against his lips — laughter prompted by the disapproving sigh that echoed from the teenager passing by their open door, one child clinging to his back — and reached up to wrap his arms around Jango’s neck, fingers tugging at the curls at the base of his neck.
“I love you,” Jango whispered, trying to fit years worth of gratitude and love into those three simple words.
“I know.” Obi-Wan’s voice was soft and so full of love that he could have plucked Jango’s heart from his chest and he wouldn’t have protested.
A wail made them break apart, Boba noticing that Jango was in the room and reaching for him demandingly as Cody held Rex balanced on his hip, smoothing one hand over his younger brother’s blonde curls.
Jango kissed Obi-Wan again, quick, gone before the other man could do much more than blink and moved towards Boba. The morning was golden, and his family was safe. It was everything he never imagined he would have on that day when he fled from Kamino, blood on his hands and a sobbing child on his lap while the rest sat silent and scared in the hold. And Jango was so grateful that he had made that choice, as it brought him his family.