▸ Column · Star Wars Outer Rim — a mercenary returned from long off-world campaigns, answered by Boba Fett in his Daimyo-of-Mos-Espa years
BOBA FETT replies.
Replied to by Boba Fett, with a rebuttal from Jabba the Hutt.
The letter
I signed two long campaigns out past the Rim and mustered home eighteen months ago, but the man who hung his kit by the door isn't the one my children remember. My daughter Saraya was seven when I shipped out; she's near ten now, and when I so much as raise my voice she flinches — then apologizes, like the fault was hers. My boy Niko just shrugs and shuts his door. At supper last week he called me "sir," half a joke, and I had to step out into the dark before he saw my face. My wife keeps telling me to "just be their father again," but I can't find that man under the jumpiness and the nights I wake with my heart hammering like incoming fire. How do I rebuild a span to two children who feel like polite strangers in my own house — when I'm still half a stranger to myself?
Boba Fett replies
There's no debt here to collect, so put the ledger away. Your children owe you nothing. You contracted with a war; the war was paid in you. They were never party to it.
So stop trying to force the span shut in one move. That flinch your girl gives you — that's not insolence, it's intelligence. It's telling you the approach is wrong. Read it. Slow down. Lower the voice you keep raising, because a raised voice is the tell that taught her to apologize for breathing.
My father was Jango Fett. He raised me in a barracks full of men wearing my face, on a rain-soaked rock called Kamino. He never once made me afraid of him. When a Jedi took his head in front of me, I kept his armor — not his rank. Your boy calls you "sir" because you've let him believe the soldier came home and the father didn't. Correct it by being in the room, day after day, asking nothing, until the word costs him more than it costs you.
Patience is the only weapon that's ever paid me back. And don't let them see you walk into the dark. A child reads a man's panic and files it as his own fault. Carry it where they can't.
— Boba Fett
Jabba the Hutt weighs in
Hoo hoo hoo. Patience — Fett, I taught you patience, and you still climbed out of my Sarlacc owing me a balance.
But the children, soldier. He tells you they owe you nothing. Wrong. Everyone owes someone; the question is only who. A boy who calls you "sir" needs nothing from you — and that is your failure, not his manners. Become the one who provides what he cannot get elsewhere. The story no one else tells him. The thing only your hands can fix. Make yourself the center of your own house, and they will come to the web. Fett kept his father's armor and called it love. I keep ledgers. Mine are never empty.
— Jabba the Hutt
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