▸ Column · Outer Rim spaceport underworld, Star Wars Imperial/post-Imperial era
BOBA FETT replies.
Replied to by Boba Fett, with a rebuttal from Jabba the Hutt.
The letter
My partner Halvard came back to our quarters last cycle, cracked a flask of Corellian fizz, and announced he'd taken a fleet-logistics directorship out on Kestic Reach — eleven hundred parsecs from the berth we've shared four years. Not "I'm thinking of," not "what would you say." He'd already thumbed the contract, given his current foreman notice, and was scrolling habitation domes on his datapad before he said one word to me. When I asked why he never mentioned even applying, he said he "didn't want to raise my hopes over nothing" and figured I'd be glad, since I never stop griping about our dome-master. But my mother's two settlements over, still knitting from a hip-joint replacement, and my whole bonesetting practice — every client on my ledger — is rooted in this port. I love the man. But I feel less like his partner than like a potted thing he's decided to haul somewhere new. How do I even open a conversation about a move he's already set running?
Boba Fett replies
He signed without you. That's the whole of it. A man who commits his partner to a heading she never agreed to has confused a marriage with a cargo manifest — he thinks he's hauling freight, and you're the freight.
Don't pack. Don't shout. Noise warns the mark, and right now he believes the deal is closed and quiet.
Here are the terms as they actually stand. Your practice. Your client ledger. Your mother two settlements over with a joint still setting. Those are fixed. His signature is paper, and paper renegotiates.
So make him renegotiate — not in heat, plainly, with the facts laid where he can't scroll past them. He doesn't decide where you both land. He opens the question; you both set the terms. If he won't, he never wanted a partner. He wanted someone who'd ride the ship without asking the heading.
I was a passenger on another man's vessel far too long once. It put me in a pit in the sand that nearly kept me. Learn it cheaper than I did: never let the one beside you mistake your service for his property. Hold your ground. Let him come back to the table.
— Boba Fett
Jabba the Hutt weighs in
Hoo hoo hoo. Boba. Always "the table," always "terms." I dropped you into that pit, and still you crawl back out preaching contracts.
Hear me, my friend. He has shown you a ledger he never read. You hold the practice. You hold the mother. You hold the roots that pay and the hands that heal. He holds a signature on a frozen rock eleven hundred parsecs from everything that needs him cared for.
So do not renegotiate. Do not chase. Stay. Let him learn how cold a fleet runs when no one waits at the center of his web. The one who is owed never packs. He waits — and they come crawling back to where they're needed. Every time.
— Jabba the Hutt
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