Chapter Text
[10.16 hours, 18.11.5199]
In all the time he’d known Maul, the Zabrak had barely spoken two words to him together. Most of his language seemed limited to snarls and baleful, sulfurous-yellow glares. Tython would smile back with a curve to his lips all too feral, tip his head in the barest sketch of a nod—all the time waiting. Waiting for his chance to deliver Maul to their Master as a failure—albeit a failure as a result of Tython’s own careful, delicate engineering.
Sidious would know, of course. The bastard always knew. But it wasn’t as though he expected to keep both of his Apprentices. The Rule of Two was an elegant philosophy, made to ensure the survival of the fittest. Maul was an excellent specimen, a sterling example of a weapon honed by and tempered with hate and pain. Sidious’s weapon—a study in pure brute force, and an evolutionary marvel for that.
An assassin, but certainly not a successor. Never a threat to Sidious himself.
And that was, in part, the risk of getting rid of him. It would catch Sidious’s attention, snap it tightly onto his other pet, and show him far too much of the cards his lowly remaining Apprentice held. Tython didn’t particularly care to attract that sort of attention to his person; Maul’s death was therefore never to be risked.
Unless and until the stakes were high enough.
They certainly were now.
Maul stood in the hangar bay, waiting, far more patience coiled about him and holding him in place than Tython had ever thought him capable of. For a moment, Tython almost felt… regret. He was about to destroy a piece of meticulous work, after all, and not only his own personal shield.
But this was a matter of protecting what was his and his alone.
Tython waited until the very last moment to relax his shielding, allowing his rival to get a sense of him in the Force as he approached. Maul looked up, took in Tython’s loose walk and his wide smile, and scowled in return.
In truth, Maul’s voice was soft, astoundingly so. It had a quiet rasp—like a heat haze dancing over a fire pit. “What are you doing here?”
“Our Master sent me,” Tython said pleasantly. “To finish the job when you fail, or course.”
Maul’s jaw tightened—nostrils flaring, eyes ablaze, yet his voice remained soft even then. “I will not fail.”
Tython tilted his head—a mocking gesture. “Such unwavering conviction. You stand against not one, but two of the best fighters in the entire Jedi Order? Can you truly be so certain?”
It had been some time since they last sparred, but Maul was always on his guard with Tython. That was gratifying, that the Zabrak always presented a challenge. Maul met him blow for blow, but raised a quizzical brow.
“Our Master wants the Jedi dead. This serves no purpose but to tire both of us out before they arrive.”
Logical, practical. Totally unprepared.
“You’re so right.” Tython grinned.
The blade slipped from his boot with a whisper of vibration, and in two steps he had it where he wanted: scratching the skin of Maul’s leg. Tython knew his poisons well—it wouldn’t take more than a scratch. It was possible Maul hadn’t even felt it in the moment.
Tython took advantage of their position to drive his elbow into Maul’s jaw, then spun away, putting distance between them in a single bound. Maul looked ready to pursue, but Tython raised a warning finger.
“Ah-ah,” he said, stepping back. “They’re nearly here. Do take care to actually kill them this time?”
Maul thumbed the switch of his lightstaff with a grunt, but said nothing more. He fell back into his waiting pose, and around him the Force once again settled into an angry static—a meditation of sorts, in preparation for a long fight.
Utterly heedless of the venom that was slowly seeping into his circulation.
Crashing blades, violent red and blazing emerald, Darkness roiling, spilling over into the air and battering against the mind—
Now was not the time to be thinking of visions, not when the Force hung still and tense around them, the very Moment taut and poised for shattering. They were caught in a metaphysical bated breath, paralyzed in the face of infinite possibilities flung out in a death spiral. Something was dying, something was fading—some future was falling away forever—
Obi-Wan sank into it, shoved aside his terrible awareness of that part of the Unifying Force. This was a vision that had haunted his dreams for years. The terror of this moment had melted into his bones too long ago to be a distraction to him now, and foreknowledge wasn’t going to be of much help when everything around their opponent was warped and twisted with dire alarms. He could not afford the lapse in focus. There was too much at stake.
The Zabrak fought with seemingly no care to exhausting his reserves. He relied as much on Force-assisted shoves and Force-propelled shrapnel as he did on his blade-work. Of the Forms Obi-Wan knew, only Niman took advantage of a fighter’s surroundings, and there were few practitioners to spar with. Nor would the experience have helped much here: the Sith was much more aggressive than any of them would be.
A blow to the jaw sent Obi-Wan to the edge of the catwalk, where he desperately managed a precarious balance—only to fall anyway. Perversely, he was almost grateful for the few seconds of freefall, at least when he found handholds a couple platforms below. It gave him time to reach out with his senses and reassess the situation above him.
Qui-Gon had taught Obi-Wan to fight, but after the Stark Hyperspace War, the Combat Master had taken to watching both of them in the sales and throwing out commentary and advice. On one memorable occasion, Master Giiett had stayed to watch Obi-Wan and Quinlan spar. Quin had always fought dirty. Despite that, Obi-Wan had held up pretty well, but three rounds into their ‘friendly match’, Master Giiett waved him over and pulled him down to mutter a secret into his ear.
“Pull back,” he’d said. “You already know to trust in the Force, you already know how to move. You don’t need to focus on individual attacks anymore. Pull back, and look for anything you can use against him. Look for your opponent’s intent.”
Obi-Wan had still hit the mat a few times more that day, but on Yinchorr, that lesson had saved their lives.
Obi-Wan refocused just as Qui-Gon threw the Zabrak from the catwalk. Obi-Wan permitted himself a moment’s vicious satisfaction as the warrior fell, conscious of a flare of anger and Darkness buffeting at his shields. Qui-Gon, determined to press his advantage, leapt after him.
Ultimately it didn’t seem as though the fall had taken much out of their opponent. The Force told Obi-Wan his Master was tiring fast, but that was no surprise either. They were exhausted; the Sith probably had nothing else to concern himself with.
Still, as Obi-Wan puled himself up and back onto the catwalk, he thought that perhaps the Sith’s movements had slowed, or become less precise. He pushed away his revulsion at the overwhelming press of Darkness against his mind and forced himself to look at the Sith more closely, hunting for the least sign of weakness, or something to exploit.
Obi-Wan was surprised to find it. Neither he nor Qui-Gon had managed to so much as tag their opponent yet, but Obi-Wan could sense a tiny thread of pain feeding into the anger. Pain, and numbness, and cold. Obi-Wan studied the movements, compared them against their opponent’s dance at the outset. Was it his imagination, or was the Zabrak favoring his right side more and more?
He was also giving ground far too easily—and drawing Qui-Gon along with him. It should have been an obvious feint, yet Qui-Gon kept letting him do it, pressing forward in a relentless attack. Obi-Wan had a sudden moment of dread: at this rate, he might not be able to catch up.
Sith take it, but they could defeat him if they just stayed together!
A leap upward brought Obi-Wan to the right level, but even with the brief reprieve, Obi-Wan could not hope for Force-assisted speed. Lungs burning, he ran after his Master, dimly realizing that the Zabrak was drawing them towards the shielded power generator.
He wasn’t going to make it.
Obi-Wan skidded to a halt between the first and second shield just as they cycled shut around him. Far ahead, one barrier remained between his Master and the Sith. It was a pity the shields did nothing against the Force: all around him, the Force was in Dark, chaotic threads, almost a physically distracting prickle on the skin like blistering heat. Obi-Wan wondered what it felt like for his Master, so deeply entrenched in the Living Force.
And then he watched in disbelief as Qui-Gon deactivated his blade and dropped to one knee, to meditate in the face of this jangling discord.
Perhaps it was a ploy, aimed at convincing their opponent that they were not nearly so far gone. His Master wore serenity like a cloak, even like this, winded from a long fight and preparing for one last charge.
But they had been a team for nearly a decade, and Obi-Wan knew without a doubt that it would not be enough. He reached for the bond—
And ran up against a wall. Tight shields blocked him from the bond, hiding his Master’s mind from him.
They’d never faced an opponent like this. They’d always fought together, a team in perfect synchrony. It didn’t just hurt, it burned, like a dismissal or a total absence of a decade’s worth of trust. Obi-Wan felt a surge of something that tasted like anger. He had no weapons in his arsenal against this. Qui-Gon had blocked him out before, but not—not in battle—
The emptiness of their bond was cold and glaring, completely impossible to ignore. All that remained to him was the hope that he would be fast enough to reach his Master when the ray-shields cycled off.
Qui-Gon was all too keenly aware that he was running out of time. The Sith had drawn him into the heart of Theed’s main generator, to the edge of the reactor’s melting pit. Boxed in, Qui-Gon thought. Behind him, he heard his Padawan pacing. They were both riding the ragged edge of exhaustion, as their opponent had clearly intended.
But so long as Qui-Gon stood between him and Obi-Wan, so long as he had the strength to kill, or at least maim his opponent. Qui-Gon had no further care for what happened to him.
So long as Obi-Wan was safe, and alive, nothing else mattered.
Except at the moment he had the frustrating feeling that nothing he did or tried seemed to matter, either. The Zabrak deflected his blows as easily as if he was batting away an insect, and on the occasions that he’d met with Qui-Gon’s elbow of knee intimately, he’d brushed off the pain like water. He’d slowed down, but not by much, as if it was the pain itself that kept him going. It was enough to be concerning: by now, Qui-Gon’s lungs burned, his arms ached, and he felt as though he were moving through a haze. If he were to draw on the Force, even for one hard shove, he would have no strength left for anything else.
So he did not risk it.
When the ray shields slammed closed, he stopped, and immersed himself in the flow of the Force instead. He opened himself to the currents as he had not done in weeks. Always on the move, in a harried, haphazard rush—how had he permitted himself to forget this? The Force reached back to him, graveled him, held him.
Five shields behind, Obi-Wan was desperately calling into their bond, trying to break through his Master’s shields. But Qui-Gon didn’t dare drop the barriers between them. He could not, not without betraying his intentions.
Oh, gods, Obi-Wan, I’m so sorry.
Damn the Force and the visions it had plagued his Padawan with, and to hells with so-called ‘fate,’, Qui-Gon thought. The Force could do what it liked with him, but not with his Padawan. He had promised Obi-Wan a Knighthood, after all.
You offered me your life on Bandomeer, he thought. This time, let the gift be mine.
When the ray-shield cycled open, he was ready.
It was a struggle, forcing his body out of the stance he’d used for years, and just for one moment to fall back into drilled-in habits, into a form he’d hated so much. Ataru was a form made for attack: pure, straightforward. Makashi was a fast taunt—a cat toying with a mouse. Dooku had always pointed out his weaknesses in the same quick-sharp manner.
But it was it was worth it for that burst of surprise, of something that tasted almost like fear in the Force. Fear that the the Sith had not taken the full measure of his opponent. In that one risky lunge, Qui-Gon landed a hit shearing through the saber staff, slicing easily through muscle as his momentum carried him forward, into the Zabrak’s reach.
Perhaps Qui-Gon should have expected the flash of a red saber searing through his guard. His had been a good hit, one that should have been incapacitating. But despite that, the Sith remained stubbornly standing, while Qui-Gon’s vision greyed and his knees folded under him. There was hardly any pain, only numbness and confusion as he wondered how he’d taken a blow from the Sith’s reverse grip, and furthermore why his opponent hadn’t moved. The Zabrak was just standing there, glaring down at him with those burning, corrupted eyes.
The cry startled him. Qui-Gon sat upright on his knees, as though pulled on a wire. Obi-Wan. That awful cry, it was his Padawan’s voice, and with it came an outpouring of such raw anguish that broke through the barriers in Qui-Gon’s mind like nothing else could have. He nearly blacked out from the pain of it, but grit his teeth and snarled up at the Sith. For Obi-Wan’s sake.
The Sith only smiled.
I am going to kill him, the dark thing said in a voice too soft to be real. I will take great pleasure in making you watch.
Black spots were dancing in his eyes, grey touching the edges of his sight. But he was a Jedi Master, Force damn it all, and unconsciousness would have to wait. He wasn’t about to let this thing anywhere near his Padawan.
Pushing away the rising, tingling cold, Qui-Gon pulled the Force to him with a last prayer for strength, and lunged forward, rising up from his knes with a terrible cry of his own. The Sith parried the onslaught rapidly, poorly-masked surprise turning to annoyance. Qui-Gon even managed to push him back to the melting pit before the shields started to cycle again. But rather than allow his attention to be divided between two opponents, the Sith struck out with the Force and sent Qui-Gon flying back into the wall. It knocked the remaining breath out of him, and he slid down into a crumpled heap. There was nothing more he could do now. He could only watch with stunned horror as Obi-Wan dueled the relentless nightmare.
Maybe it would have been better if he could not see. Watching, hearing this duel was a torment all its own. The Sith certainly meant to make good on his word, his own injuries notwithstanding. Qui-Gon couldn’t fathom how he still fought.
When his Padawan vanished over the edge of the melting pit, Qui-Gon almost gave into the pain clawing into his consciousness and let go. Only the sight of the Zabrak, still standing there and toying with his prey, convinced that Obi-Wan had managed to find some sort of handhold.
Qui-Gon was fighting a losing battle against a failing body now. It was all for nothing, if Obi-Wan did not survive this. Unbidden, the thought slipped through his awareness that it would be better to be one with the Force than live in a world where his Padawan was dead.
At his side, under his heavy hand, Qui-Gon suddenly felt his lightsaber twitch. He pried his eyes open, loosened his grasp on the weapon. It took monumental effort to ismply lift his hand and free the blade to move. But something dangerously like hope awakened in him, forced another breath of air into his lungs and then another, as his lightsaber began to creep across the polished floor with gentle clacking.
There. In a brilliant emerald flash, Obi-Wan flew out of the pit, twisting in midair to land behind the startled Sith. Qui-Gon heard the gasp torn from the Zabrak as the blade sliced through him, watched him fall.
Thank the Force, he thought, and let his head drop back against the wall, his eyes falling shut.
It felt like he’d slipped away for hours when he heard Obi-Wan’s voice again, shot through with worry, desperately calling him back. Conscious thought felt like treading thick mud, but Qui-Gon fought for it, fought to force his eyes open and look at his Padawan and see him.
“There you are.”
Obi-Wan’s face, pale and tear-streaked, slowly came into focus above him. Qui-Gon blinked, once, twice, willed his eyes not to roll back and close. His Padawan was alive, but his distress stained the Force around them. Qui-Gon couldn’t leave him alone like that. He wanted to say something, but his tongue felt thick and immovable.
In the end, Qui-Gon simply threw an arm around quaking shoulders and pulled his Padawan into a clumsy embrace. Obi-Wan collapsed against him, trembling with exhaustion. Hot tears hit Qui-Gon’s too-cold skin, a bitter reminder of the fear that had gripped nim only moments ago.
I’m here, Obi-Wan, he thought, softly sending the words down their reopened bond. He fought to keep his eyes open, desperately clinging to every word his Padawan poured into his ear, even if his mind was far too sluggish to comprehend them. And he thanked the Force, over and over until he was too tired to do even that.
Obi-Wan was alive. That was all that mattered.