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Chapter Text

It was scorchingly hot. That was the first thing that Maul noticed about the planet as her Master pressed the release button for the ramp. She’d done well in the last two missions he had assigned her—or, at least, completed them competently enough, despite being dumped on the planets drugged out of her mind, with only a note from her Master in short, printed aurebesh on flimsi of a single name each time and the clear expectation of what she was to do, to escape the usual level of punishment thrown her way. In fact, as she stood, she could only just feel the fading results of a few minutes of Force lightning and the tail ache of a harsh backhand that had left her jaw bruised deep to the bone—a mercy, she knew, when he had no reason to be. Perhaps, she thought, daringly to herself, he was actually pleased with her. 

“Maul,” the Senator said, cloaked in dark robes which disguised his face, voice cloaked by a modulator—it would not do to have someone connect her to him, which, though a slim chance this far from a settlement, was possible. Maul tensed instinctively, waiting for his verdict. Finally, he said, “Make sure not to use your lightsaber.”

Relief flooded her, quickly tamped down lest he catch onto it. She bowed. “Yes, Master,” she said, keeping her eyes on his pale gungan-leather boots. Vaguely, she estimated a cost—black market, most certainly, and she only recognised the make because she had been ordered to memorise a vast selection of materials used in clothing and accessories for a previous mission. She almost grimaced—it hadn’t gone well. She still had the saber marks across her back to prove it—but she understood the necessity. She couldn’t be her Master’s arm, his carefully aimed weapon—and, perhaps, one day, his apprentice—if she didn’t learn to obey him and carry out his will in exactitude. 

“Go,” he said; and then, as she turned, “I hope you know the consequences should you fail this assignment, Maul. I would hate to have to test out the vents in your room.”

She froze; just for a beat, nearly missing her step, and fear burst forth, her hearts thudding; the sensation coiling around her throat like a serpent, threatening to sink poison into her mind. Behind her, her Master laughed, just once; short and deeper than usual. “Well,” he amended, “assuming you manage to survive this assignment.” A moment later, the ramp of the small ship hissed shut, and its engines whirred, chrome glinting almost menacingly in the dim red light of the mid-day as it rose from the ashy, molten-rock scarred surface. 

For a long moment, Maul wanted to wait and watch it disappear; to make sure that it really was gone—but she didn’t have that sort of time. Her Master had ordered her to dispose of the current Black Sun Syndicate’s leader by the dawn of the next day—less than a single rotation. She took a deep breath, focusing on the rage that simmered beneath her skin with every thrum of blood coursing through her veins, letting it wash over her, and forced it to bend around her, the Force ripped to her command. A bare second later, her vision and hearing sharpened, scents she hadn’t previously noticed bleeding into the air. Squaring her stance, she began to walk, following the faint impression of the sun behind the clouds west, towards the smaller of the two main cities—Aubj’e, the residence of Xomit Grunsheit. 

The Black Sun wasn’t a large syndicate, according to what little research she had been able to do in the hours of travel time, but they had a stranglehold on mineral mining on Mustafar—a business that her Master had attempted to become involved in through a proxy, but had been less than politely rebuffed. Not that it mattered, the reasons behind it—her Master told her where to go and who to dispose of, sometimes specifying how, and she did as told. It was all she had ever known—all she was good at. And it pleased her, in a way—not only because it pleased her Master but, more secretly, in a rarely acknowledged part of herself, it felt good to have power. 

The surface of the planet was scalding, especially through the thin soles of her worn sandals, but Maul pressed onwards, letting the pain feed the seething anger, which, in turn, pushed her forward step by step. 

Aubj’e, like all the other settlements on Mustafar, was made up of great, heavily-tempered metal buildings in shapes imitating fungus—they grew out from the stark cliff facings, seemingly only holding on by a thread. It didn’t take long for Maul to scale the cliff, sharp-nailed fingers digging into the nearly-invisible crags of rock, and soon, she found and entrance, disguised by careful paint to blend in with the rest of the cliff-face—in fact, were it not for her Force heightened senses, she would likely have missed it. 

As it was, she freed a hand from the handhold it had been on, and leaned to the side to tug on the door handle sharply, satisfied when it creaked open. There were entrances on the flat ground at the top of the cliff, too, but they were more likely to be guarded, and her Master had told her she was to avoid discovery at all costs. Despite the amount of the structures that jutted from the rock, most of the buildings were actually within the cliff, and the likelihood of someone seeing her was low—especially since her red and black skin naturally blended in with the environment and the sun had gone down, the landscape lit only faintly by the molten lava rivulets below. 

The darkness behind the door yawned, inky black, and, quickly, she leaped sideways, jerking the Force into submission beneath herself to make sure she didn’t fall. 

Once inside, it was almost laughably easy to creep down the hallways and find Grunseit’s quarters—mostly because the closer she got, the more lavish the decorations became, until, finally, she came to a gilted, gem-studded door. 

As she drew closer, she heard sounds of argument from within; and she frowned as she tugged on her black gloves—if she waited, Grunseit might leave, but if she barged in, she would most definitely be seen by whoever was in there with him. Pursing her lips, she tried to estimate how long she had—four hours, at most. She couldn’t wait. Not ideal, but she could do this. She wouldn’t fail her master. 

The door was meant to appear antique—it had a manual locking system, and so Maul pressed a hard to it, drawing up the anger and hate that boiled beneath her skin, following the emotions to their climax and forcing them out into the mechanism, waiting for what seemed like an eternity before she heard the soft click. 

Whatever she was expecting the see on the other side of the door, a togruta holding a lightsaber to Grunseit’s neck wasn’t it. The woman had her teeth bared in a snarl, canines sharp. Her montrals seemed to tower over her head, the blue stripes thin and almost jagged despite their fluidity. “I said, ” she repeated, “who in the kriffing hells are you, and where’s Maul?”

At the sound of her name, Maul instinctively froze—the anger behind it was only one she had heard from her Master, and it never meant anything good for her. 

“I dunno!” squealed the terrified syndicate leader. “Listen, headtails, I ain’t got the foggiest who you’re talking about! I swear—aiie!” he cried as the white blade inched closer to his green skin. 

Maul felt rage rise in her. That was her mark—if the togruta thought she could take him, she was sorely mistaken. She refused to think of what her Master would do if he found out that someone else had killed Grunseit—and he would find out. 

She didn’t even get the opportunity to pull out her vibroblade—the togruta must have sensed her entertained, because she shoved Grunseit aside and turned, eyes narrowing for a second before they widened almost comically. “No,” she said. “No, that’s not possible!”

Grunseit, who was apparently smarter than he seemed, for someone with such poor security, tried to scramble towards the door. Instantly, Maul ripped a hand through the air, sending him flying into the wall with a whimper, and stalked towards him—only to find the togruta had jumped in front of him, humming white blades at the ready. “You can’t kill him,” she said, lips thinned and eyes narrowed once more. “He doesn’t die now.”

Maul scoffed; pulling her own red blade free—her Master had ordered her not to use it, but in this case, despite the terror of disobeying him, she thought it was a necessary action—she was facing a Jedi , after all; her sworn enemy. She would dispatch her and then take Grunseit with a vibroblade. “My Master has said he must,” she said, simply, and lunged at her, channeling the hatred of Jedi her Master had impressed into her from the moment she could speak into the blows. 

The togruta met her with practiced ease, gaze hard. “Your Master has no say over the right of others to live—even of those such as Grunseit,” she said, sharply, twirling a blade to block Maul’s sharp, erratic attacks, somehow seeming to know where she would strike before she did. Maul snarled, drawing rage and hatred around herself like a thick cloak, saber hissing through the air in a harsh strike. 

The woman deflected it with ease, twisting under it and shoving a palm against her chest, throwing her backwards with the aid of the Force. Maul hit the wall with a hiss of pain and anger, shoving herself to her feet and lunging after the togruta. The other whirled her twin blades, effortlessly smooth motions dipping and rolling, partying her blows at every turn. Maul snarled, baring her teeth, and tried to back the togruta against a wall. 

She avoided the manoeuver with infuriatingly ease, using the wall to leap over Maul and force her to spin around. In her haste, Maul lost her footing, overextending herself in an attempt to stop herself from crashing forward, and suddenly, Grunseit jerked himself up from where he had been laying, a small blade in his hand; lunged at Maul, intent clear. 

She leaped backwards, saber swinging without thought, and it embedded itself in the center of his torso—right through his heart. For a moment, he stared at it uncomprehendingly, and then his fingers went loose, the blade dropping to the ground with a clatter. 

Her Master would be furious, Maul thought, grimly—but, perhaps, if she brought him a Jedi…

Before she could pursue that line of thought, a white saber sliced through her own hilt, the red blade flickering out, and Grunseit crumpled to the floor. Maul’s lips curled, and she whirled around, vibroblade in hand, but before she could bring it across the togruta’s skin, the other white blade ripped it from her hand and found its place beneath her throat. The togruta’s expression was hard. “You weren’t supposed to do that,” she said. 

Maul laughed. “My Master doesn’t care what you Jedi want,” she sneered. 

The togruta’s lips thinned. “None of this should be happening—none of this should be possible,” she muttered. “But—no.” She shook her head. “What’s been done is done. Maul, you’re coming with me.”

Terror ripped through her. “No!” she hissed. Her Master would find her, and his punishment would be worse than anything she could imagine. She’d rather subject herself to the indignity of dying by a Jedi blade. 

Without warning, she jerked herself forward, the blade a burning, agonising brand against her flesh. 

It only took a split second for the togruta to realise what she was doing, and as soon as she did, the blade disappeared. “ No, ” she snarled, sharp teeth flashing. “No, you will not die here.” And then, without warning, the Force curled around her, disgustingly serene, and dove into Maul’s mind, exhaustion rushing over her. 

“No…!” Maul growled, scrabling against her traitorous mind—but, in the end, as with every time her Master had ripped into her mind mercilessly, it was useless, and she felt the floor rush up to meet her—and then nothing more. 

Chapter Text

When Maul awoke, it was with the screaming sense that something was wrong. Long experience in her Master’s care had taught her that when her senses warned her, it was in her best interests to listen—not doing so often led to more pain. 

Peering through slitted eyes, she took in her surroundings and assessed her situation. As far as she could tell, she was in some sort of holding—a brig of some type, going by the small size and construction. Her head felt fuzzy and oddly blank—but, surpassingly, it didn’t ache in the way it did after her Master ripped through her mind. She ran her tongue over her teeth and tried to push herself up only to find her hands had been cuffed behind her back. 

Before she could try and do anything about it, the door slid open, admitting the togruta. Under the fluorescent lighting, her reddish skin seemed washed out, and her expression was worn—but not sporting the anger or hatred Maul expected. “I brought you food,” she said, setting down two protein bars and a flask on the raised steel off to Maul’s side. 

Maul bared her teeth. “I won’t eat anything you offer me, Jedi, ” she hissed. 

The togruta sighed. “Kebisse arasoumi,” she murmured, quietly enough that it was surely meant only for herself. It almost seemed…exasperated, tinged with fondness, even if Maul couldn’t understand what she was saying. Then, to Maul, she said, “If you won’t eat it, I’ll have to go digging around for a nutrient hypo. I would accept the protein bars.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Maul said, trying to sound nonplussed. “My Master will find me, and then—” And suddenly, she remembered what that would mean, and the words died in her throat. He would find her—she was sure of that. It was only a matter of time. Without thinking, she curled herself into a ball, cheek pressing against the cold metal of the floor. 

The Jedi watched her with a shrewd expression. “Sidious will have bigger things to worry about soon enough,” she said, and then added, wryly, “I have the advantage of time. Now,” she said, unwrapping a protein bar and kneeling in front of Maul, “eat.”

Maul tried not to show her surprise that the Jedi knew her Master’s name, but she wasn’t the master of concealment he was—the togruta noticed, lips quirking sardonically. She didn’t say anything, though, just pushed the protein bar towards Maul’s lips. She was kneeling, balanced on the toes of her boots, and Maul made a quick calculation; snapped her leg out in an attempt to throw her off balance. In a flash, the woman leaped backwards, avoiding the blow and leaving Maul sprawled across the floor. She sighed. “You always were a tricky son of a bantha,” she said. “Well, at least this time you’re only a kid. Nutrient hypo it is, I guess.” She rose, taking a bite out of the nutrient bar, and disappeared back out the door, leaving Maul to seethe on the floor, the cold, recycled air combined witht he frigid metal of the floor against her skin making her shiver slightly.

After a few minutes, she managed to push herself back up into a sitting position, leaning against the wall, trying to ignore the way the tiny bolts dug into her scalp. The cuffs on her wrists bit into her skin—heavy, thick steel, coated with a Force-suppressant. She’d worn them before, a handful of times, when her Master had wanted to make a punishment elicit particular terror from her, and her mind prickled unpleasantly with the memories.

She closed her eyes, trying not to think of the all encompassing fear that had filled her as the water had filled the room, lapping first at her feet and then, eventually, climbed its way up to her face, choking her until she had passed out. But her Master had had the medidroid tend to her afterwards, she reminded herself—with a sharp reminder that worse would follow should she fail again, but he had made sure that she hadn’t died. The Jedi—she wasn’t sure. Jedi and Sith, even those as low as herself, were Force-destined enemies. 

A soft laugh ripped itself from her involuntarily. No—the Jedi had seen how much she preferred death to being punished by her Master, weak as she was. She wouldn’t give Maul what she wanted.

The doors slid back open, and the togruta kneeled once more, pulling the sleeve of her shirt up and jabbing the hypo into her skin. It bit deep, the needle large and stinging, and Maul let out a hiss of pain without meaning to. The Jedi looked—almost apologetic. Maul bared her teeth at her in a snarl. “When I get free, I’ll rip your entrails out,” she promised. “And then I’ll take your head to my Master.” And then maybe he won’t punish me too harshly.

The togruta raised a brow. “You keep telling yourself that, kid. In the mean time, I have places to be and things to do. Such is the will of the Force,” she said, sounding almost amused. “Sleep, or don’t, I don’t care. I’ll figure out what to do with you later.”

With that, she pulled the hypo away and rose once more, leaving Maul alone again.

Maul slept, and dreamed of the red lava flows of Mustafar, and the Jedi pressing a Force suggestion to sleep into her mind, and her mind conjured up speculations on the punishments that her Master would mete out on her when he found her. When she woke up, the togruta was leaning against the wall opposite her, peering at a datapad. When she noticed Maul was awake, she said, “You’ve been asleep for a while. I’ve got another nutrient hypo ready for you.”

Maul bared her teeth, hate roiling in her at the togruta’s nonchalance. “I’d sooner starve to death than let a Jedi keep me alive,” she spat.

The woman snorted indelicately. “Obstinant as always…Force,” she said, frowning, “you know, I’d always thought that he got to you older. This…it’s wrong.” She sounded troubled, and also pitying, and Maul growled wordlessly at her. She just sighed in response. “I’ll get the nutrient hypo,” she said, and tucked the pad away, exiting the brig. 

Maul let herself fall into the familiar hatred that always burned beneath her skin. In a strange spaceship, with a Jedi, it was the only comfort she had to turn to. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall.

The togruta administered the hypo when she returned, and then said, “Do you need to use the fresher?”

Maul stared at her, and without thinking, said, “What?” 

“The fresher, Maul,” the Jedi said, infuriatingly patiently. “You know, where you go when you need to take a piss? Wait, damnit,” she said, “I haven’t given you any water. You’re probably dehydrated. I’ll be right back, and then after that I’ll accompany you to the fresher.”

With that, she left and quickly returned with a flask, which she pressed to Maul’s lips. Maul kept her mouth firmly shut, and the Jedi sighed. “For Force’s sake,” she said, sounding exasperated, “it’s not poisoned. I’m a Jedi, not a child-killer. Drink, Maul.”

She shouldn’t, Maul knew—when her Master found her, he’d rip through her mind and find out everything she had done, everything she had allowed the Jedi to do…but her throat was drier than a desert, so eventually, grudgingly, Maul took a sip, and then another, and then, abandoning all reason, greedily gulped the cool liquid, a few drops escaping and dripping down her chin. When the togruta pulled the flask away, she had the gall to reach out and wipe away the droplets. Maul glared at her. The togrugta was impervious, and instead capped the flask, before she reached her hands under Maul’s arms, hauling her to her feet. “Fresher,” she said decisively, and marched Maul out the door.

The ship wasn’t very large, with only minimal comforts, and the fresher was tiny. Surprisingly, the woman reached to undo the cuffs. “Do you really see me as that little of a threat?” Maul asked, insulted. 

The Jedi laughed. “Kid, I’ve faced far worse than a ten year old Sith in training,” she said. “If you do try and escape the fresher, I’ve got two lightsabers and nearly that many decades of experience on you. No offense,” she added. “Now go. You’ve been in the hold for over twenty-four hours—your body’ll thank you.”

Maul seethed reflexively, anger washing over her as she used the fresher, and then washed her hands. Just because she could, she used the force to summon the soap to her and turn on the water, knowing that soon she’d be cut off from it once again.

When she tried the fresher doors, they opened easily, and Maul frowned. Was the Jedi insulting her further? She peeked out, catching sight of the togruta in the pilot’s chair. They were in realspace, the stars dotting the dark void, and ahead, a yellow-orange planet loomed, the vast stretches of dry land visible from space. Mandalore, Maul remembered from her studies at Orsis. 

Maybe she could try and surprise the Jedi, she mused. She seemed engrossed in flying the ship—it wouldn’t be impossible to catch her off guard and seize control of the ship. Mind made up, Maul padded silently towards the Jedi, and when she came into range, she curled her had, focussing on all her hatred and rage towards the woman for capturing her, and imagined her hands around her throat.

Without warning, the Jedi jumped backwards out of her chair, sailing over it and hitting the ground, looking annoyed. Her sabers leaped into existence, and she lunged at Maul, using the force to shove her against the wall. Maul let out a surprised oomph, and a moment later, there was a white blade hovering beneath her chin. “Do we have to do this every time?” the Jedi had the gall to complain. “Listen, I don’t want to have to keep you locked in the hold until I get back, but if you keep pulling stunts like this, I’ll have to.”

Maul bared her teeth in reply. The Jedi sighed. “Look, you’re a Force-damned child, ” she said, suddenly sounding tired. “Just…just stop trying to escape. I don’t actually want to hurt you, okay?”

Anger and hatred should have coursed through Maul at her words, but she found she couldn’t summon them up. The Jedi continued. “You’re afraid your Master’s gonna find you and hurt you, right? So what if I promise you that, if you stop trying to escape, I’ll make sure he doesn’t?”

Maul laughed incredulously. “You can’t do that,” she said. “No one can. He has power you can’t imagine, plans you can’t even begin to fathom.” She didn’t say that she herself barely knew the extent of those plans beyond that they would eradicate the Jedi.

The Jedi smiled grimly. “Maybe not last time,” she said. “This time, though…well, Force willing, I’ll be able to change things. Now, do you agree, or do I have to throw you back in the hold again?”

She hesitated. It was…it was tempting, to not be cut off from the Force again. And…the hold was cold, and uncomfortable. Besides, she could always kill the Jedi later. “Alright,” she said, finally. The Jedi nodded, looking pleased, and powered off her lightsaber.

“Good,” she said. “In that case, you’ll want to strap in. The last time I made a descent through Mandalore’s atmosphere, it was a bit of a bumpy ride.”

Chapter Text

The descent through Mandalore’s atmosphere was, in fact, a tumultuous one. No one tried to comm their ship and demand their reason for trying to land, though—which, based on Maul’s limited knowledge of Mandalore, probably has to do with the fact that they didn’t have a unified government. 

As the ship came to a stop in a giant, baren patch of land, Maul noticed that the togruta’s Force signature had become… wary? No, not exactly—anxious, perhaps? She wasn’t sure—her Master made her into a weapon of death, not one well versed in people and their minutiae. It was annoying—it disrupted the anger that Maul had drawn around herself. Not for the first time, she considered trying to kill the Jedi once more. Unfortunately, by now she knew that, without a solid distraction or ambush, the woman would walk away with barely a scratch, and might even put her in the Force suppressant cuffs again. She shivered a bit at the thought of being cut off from it again. 

“Alright,” the Jedi said, and tapped at her leku as she gazed out over the land. In the distance, Maul could see the tiny shape of some sort of stronghold. “We’re going to meet the Haat Mand’alor, so behave .” She punctuated her words with a stern look at Maul. 

Maul’s face twisted for a second, and she bared her teeth, growling. “I won’t let a Jedi tell me how to act.”

To her surprise, the togruta’s eyes narrowed, her own sharp teeth flashing. “If you know what’s good for you, you will. Mando’ade don’t take kindly to acts of aggression from uninvited visitors—especially two who wield lightsabers.”

“You took mine,” Maul said, sounding sullen even to her own ears. But she filed that information away—maybe she could make some sort of alliance, or use the Force to convince some of the Mandalorians to help her kill the Jedi. Maybe even get them to ally with her Master—she remembered, vaguely, that in the past, the Mandalorian Empire had allied with the Sith. 

The other ignored her, flipping a few switches and pulling a lever, and a moment later, the ramp lowered with a hiss. The air that rushed through wasn’t as hot as that on Mustafar, but it seemed thinner, and twice as arid. Maul could practically feel her nose starting to burn from the dryness. The togruta looked unaffected, but that was probably because she was from Shili, which was practically a giant, dry rock with some sand dunes thrown in. She rose out of the pilot’s seat, gesturing for Maul to follow after. Her back was turned to Maul, which was insulting enough, but the fact that her hands didn’t even hover over her lightsabers and just laid at her sides was almost worse. Her Master would never do that—weak as Maul may have been in comparison to him, he knew that even a mere acolyte could be a Master’s undoing, if they weren’t vigilant. 

They walked for what seemed like an eternity through the dry, flat land. The longer they walked, the more parched Maul’s throat became, and the more she started to suspect she’d develop a nosebleed or cracked skin. Once, the togruta had pulled a flask out and offered it to her. “I know Dathomir is a temperate planet,” she said. “You’re probably not used to extended periods in places this dry.”

Maul snarled at her, batting the flask away. “I can survive anywhere better than a Jedi like you can,” she hissed, eyes narrowed, and ignored the part of her that longed to gulp down the water. That part was the weak part—the part her Master was trying to get rid of, so she could become a proper Apprentice.

The togruta shrugged. “Whatever you say, kid,” she said flatly. They didn’t talk for the rest of the journey. 

Finally, they came in sight of a large complex. It looked like a castle of some sort, probably originally intended as a leisure home, like her Master’s ancestral manor in the country outside of Theed, but it had since been repurposed as a military stronghold, with guards and armaments subtle but noticeable if one looked beyond the end of their nose. Maul, who had plenty of experience infiltrating similar strongholds, prepared herself to do so once again, and then expose the togruta to the Mandalorians and try and strike a deal with them. 

The Jedi, as if sensing her plots, simply walked closer and waved a hand towards one of the approaching armored Mandalorians who was clearly patrolling the perimeter. “Su cuy’gar! Ni tion’lise jorhaa’i ti Jango Fett?”

The Mandalorian paused, and despite not being able to sense their Force presence—were they wearing Force suppressors?—they seemed distinctly baffled. “Jango Fett? Tion’jor? Gar tion’gana bora kaysh?”

“Ah, nayc,” the togruta said. “Ni…gana kar’tayl. Kyr’tsad. Ni ne’lise sibu olar.”

Annoyance flickered through Maul, cutting into her like a dull knife. Just as she was about to open her mouth and demand they speak Basic, the togruta’s hand clamped down on her shoulder—a clear warning. It wasn’t the gentle grasp of her Master, which belayed a hidden strength, but rather a bold-faced command. Maul’s anger boiled over, and she twisted, sinking teeth into flesh. The Mandalorian let out a shout, and, surprisingly enough, aimed a blaster at the togruta. 

“Ow,” was all the damn Jedi said. “Maul, if you don’t take your teeth out of my arm, I’m putting you back in the hold for the rest of the time we’re here.”

“Gar jurkadi adiik?” the Mandalorian said, voice even and emotionless through the helmet’s modulator, but even with that, and the lack of Force presence, Maul was pretty sure that it was meant to sound dangerous. 

The Jedi sighed. “Obi-Wan should have gotten sent back, I’m no negotiator,” she grumbled, sounding inordinately exasperated, and then, to the Mandalorian, “Nayc, ner’adiik besom. Maul, for the love of the Force, please behave. There’s a lot riding on this. I can ask them to get you meat when when get inside if you really want blood.”

That hadn’t been why Maul had bitten her, but she didn’t say that—it wouldn’t matter to the Jedi that no one but her Master had the right to command her. She fumed for a few more moments, letting the anger settle into her bones, and then released her jaw. “Thank you,” the Jedi said, and wiped at the blood welling up from the puncture marks left by Maul’s longer, sharper teeth. “Jii, ni tion’lise jorhaa’i ti Jango Fett?”

The Mandalorian didn’t say anything, but they lowered the blaster after a few beats, and then tapped the side of their helmet, saying something in the foreign language, presumably on a commline. A few minutes later, they nodded. “Ke’shekemi.”

The Jedi followed after the armored Mandalorian after a glance at Maul. She didn’t try and put her hand on Maul’s shoulder again, though—and Maul found herself feeling an indecipherable mix of emotions over that. 

The inside of the complex was even more armed to the teeth, with armored Mandalorians patrolling the halls, at least one blaster at their hips each, and, Maul suspected, with hidden weapons in their vambraces. All of them lacked Force presences—they didn’t even have the steady, barely there whisper of it the way even those were Force null did. It was like someone had simply turned them into black holes, the Force simply nonexistent in them. It was more unsettling than Maul was willing to admit. 

Finally, the Mandalorian lead them into a wide room, square on one end and curved on the other, a large, round table set into the curved portion. A Mandalorian in grey armor with red framing the t on their visor sat in one of the chairs, and a shorter, silver and blue Mandalorian stood to their side. The Jedi raised her hand in a fist, putting it over her chest, and dipped her head. “Su cuy’gar, Mand’alor Fett. Ni Ahsoka Tano. Gar n’arasoumi.”

The silver-blue Mandalorian’s hand went to their blaster. “Gar takisi Mand’alor.”

The other, seated one—the Mand’alor, which was probably some sort of leader—waved a hand. “Jango,” he said. “Nayc. Jetii, ni Mand’alor—Mand’alor Mereel. Jango Fett ven’alor. Kyr’tsad—me’kyr’tayli?”

A brief flicker of surprise shot through Tano’s Force presence. “Al Resole Korda…gar kyrayc. Ibic meg ru’copaani jorhaa’i Jango.”

“Jedi!” Maul finally said, sick of listening to them talk and not know what they were saying. Tano shot her a warning look, but Maul stood resolute. “You forced me to come along—I want to know what you’re talking about.”

“Nothing that I can let reach Sidious’ ears,” the Jedi snapped, her calm and collected demeanor breaking for the first time since they had left the ship. “Mand’alor, Kyr’tsad ven’dajuna kyraycar gar vaal Resol Korda. Gar gana aruetii—Montross.”

The effect was instantaneous. The silver-blue Mandalorian, Fett, pulled the blaster free and aimed it at Tano. “You lie! Montross is loyal! You want us pitted against each other, spilling blood so you jetiise can satisfy your grudge!”

“Nu’jetii!” Tano snapped. “I left, years ago! And now here I am, back before any of this osik happened, and I’m trying to stop it! If the Haat Mando’ade are destroyed, everything else will begin to fall! Montross is aruetii—on my kyber, I swear it!”

The room stilled. That was hardly a light promise—for those who carried lightsabers, kyber was a core part of the self, a physical manifestation of the soul, or at least that’s what the holocrons Maul had read about the non Sith saber carriers said. Sith, they were above that—they created their kyber crystals, forced the Force to bend to their will. 

Mereel considered it. Then, he said, “Ni ven’echoy’mar’eyi Montross. Vaal mhi pare, gar ven’ke’pare Mand’alor’yaim. Jango ven’alori gar yamikase.” 

Tano bowed her head. “Vor etnye, Mand’alor.”

He waved a hand. “N’etnye, meh beek haatyc.”

With that, Fett led them out of the room and down the halls once more. No one spoke, and Maul found her skin itching—from the lack of Force within the stronghold, and the information she had probably missed out because she couldn’t understand a word of the language. When her Master found her, he would find out about that, too, and her suffering would be all that much worse for it. Terror thrummed through her blood in anticipation. 

The room they were shown to was large, a single room with a kitchen and dining room as well as beds in the same room, with a door to what Maul assumed was the fresher. Tano nodded her thanks to Fett and ushered Maul inside. 

Once the door was closed, she made her way into the kitchen. “Any food preferences?”

Maul eyed her suspiciously. Tano had never asked that before—just jabbed her with the nutrient hypo, or, in the last leg of the trip, gave her nutrient bars. It was strange—not the least because at Orsis and her Master’s residences, when she was kept in them, she was never offered an option. 

Tano hummed. “Alright, then. I hope you don’t mind a mainly meat dish. Though,” she said, a little humorously, “going by the way you chomped into my arm, I would think you’d prefer it.”

“I wasn’t trying to eat your arm,” Maul sniffed, trying to hide just how confused she was by the way Tano was acting. First she put her in the hold in Force suppressant cuffs, and now she was asking her opinion on what to eat, after having dragged her along on some sort of mission to Mandalore? It was unsettling. Maul didn’t know what her hand would be when she showed it—what she would want from Maul. Information on her Master, maybe—she was probably just being so—so… nice to try and trick Maul into letting something slip. Yes, that was probably it. 

Maul watched her move around the kitchen, using the Force to aid in her cooking endevors. Her posture was relaxed, and her lightsabers were partially hidden by the hem of her jacket. But that also didn’t mean anything—she was most likely just trying to lull Maul into comfort, into accidentally betraying her Master. 

Maul would kill her before they left Mandalore, she decided. She would kill her, and then convince the Mandalorians to ally with her Master, and then he’d tell her she had done well, and he’d make her his Apprentice. Yes—Maul smiled, an excited buzz of cutting glee and excitement for revenge coursing through her blood. She’d kill Tano, and she’d make her Master proud. 

Chapter Text

After they finished latemeal—because the sun had set in the time between meeting the guard outside the stronghold and being led to their rooms—Tano pulled off her jacket and hung it up on one of the hooks on the back of the door, before she made for the fresher. Maul took a moment to look at it. It had clearly seen better days, not the least because of the tears in the sleeve where she had sunk her teeth through the fabric—not that she felt anything as weak as remorse for it. 

From the fresher, she heard the sounds of the sonic sprayer being turned on, the water hitting the walls with a distinctive, sharp chnk-chnk-chnk-chnk . She didn’t know how long Tano would be in there, so she quickly scouted the living area for sharp objects. There weren’t many of reasonable size, so next she rounded the counter into the kitchen, and pulled out the drawers, relishing in the harsh clack as they hit the ends of their tracks. The first three, including the one where she had seen Tano take the dull, food knives from, she had no luck, but in the fourth, she found a section dedicated to proper knives—probably meant for food preparation, but they’d work. Quickly, she tucked a few of the smaller ones beneath her outer layers, against her torso, where the layers of fabric would keep them from moving and injuring her, but close enough to withdraw in an instant—a technique she had learned through trial and error. 

That done, she closed all the drawers and turned off the lights, and then went over to one of the beds, and pulled back the sheets, kicking off her boots and crawling beneath them, turning on her side and closing her eyes, breath carefully controlled to give off the impression of sleep. She even let the blanket of anger-fear-hate loosen a bit, to make it seem more realistic, despite how empty doing so made her feel. But it would soon be worth it, she reminded herself. 

Not a moment too soon, the fresher door opened, and Tano’s light, measured footsteps fell against the floor. She paused for a moment at the foot of the bed Maul was in, before continuing. 

A few seconds later, the other bed creaked with the sound of the togruta sitting down on it; but rather than the following sound of her body depressing the mattress that Maul was expecting, she instead heard words. Tano’s voice was quiet, worn, and when Maul cracked her eyes open to peer through the dark, she found Tano sitting on the edge of her bed, head bowed, chin to her chest, her hands on her thighs, palms facing upwards, half-cupped. “Ni su’cuyi, gar kry’adyc, ni partayli, gar darasoum. Fives, Denal…”

The words— names , Maul realized, with a sudden start—went on and on. It was some sort of…vigil? She wasn’t sure—she couldn’t understand the words Tano had first spoken, but the aching sense of loss that vibrated through the Force spoke of something like that. Every time Maul thought she’d stop, and lay down, and Maul would get a chance to sink a blade into her back, to end this strange series of events, Tano just kept going. 

Maul’s hand dropped from where it had been inching beneath the folds of her robes. For some reason she couldn’t understand, couldn’t put a name to, it seemed wrong to interrupt Tano. Even the anger that sat in her marrow, that nourished her when she had nothing else, didn’t so much as flicker with the desire for Tano’s eyes to go blank and unseeing—not now. 

Maul resisted the urge to use the Force and throw something at the wall, to relish in the destruction—to, maybe, take in the sharp flush of terror from being startled out of her vigil that Tano would give off. She didn’t know why she resisted it—it just seemed…right, to not. 

Instead she let out a slow, even breath, and pressed her eyes shut, careful not to move and make any noise. There would be another chance to dispatch Tano. 

In the background, the togruta’s worn voice continued reciting names. 

The next morning, Maul awakened just before dawn. Tano was already up, which made her scowl, but she got up too, careful to not give away the weapons she had on herself. The woman was leaning against the wall, and when Maul opened her eyes, she said, “The Mand’alor requested our presence at firstmeal” in a way that suggested she'd been waiting for Maul to wake up.

Maul scowled. “Fine,” she said, and stood, quickly making the bed as close to the way it had been when they had first come in. Tano just watched her, her own bed already made. She hadn’t put on the jacket she was wearing before, so Maul had a chance to get a good look at what she was wearing. Surprisingly enough, they weren't the traditional Jedi robes—they bore similarities, sure, with multiple layers and what looked pretty similar to the wide sash of fabric Jedi wore across their waists, but rather than falling to her calves, Tano’s clothing stopped at the sash, continuing into a pair of pants made of some coarse, seemingly handwoven brown fabric. It gave credence to her claim from the day before that she was no longer a Jedi—but the similarities spoke to a lingering sentimentality. 

“Notice any more rips in my clothes?” Tano said, drily, clearly meant to be a jab at her earlier actions, but it just made a swell of anger-glee rise in Maul. “You should use the fresher if you’re going to—firstmeal starts in about twenty-five minutes.”

Maul may not have been the politician her Master was, but even she knew that it was a good idea to make a good impression on the people you wanted as your allies, so even though it was Tano suggesting it, so she grudgingly ducked into the fresher and washed up a bit, mostly to get the dust from walking from the ship to the stronghold off her face, and then did her best to dust what remained off her clothes. When she stepped back out, Tano had grabbed some seasoned and dried meat from the kitchen, and she offered some to Maul. Maul ignored her and opened the door.

There was a Mandalorian waiting across from the door, leaning against the wall, expression unreadable behind the helmet, and Maul instinctively reached into the Force before she remembered that it was useless, and scowled a bit at that.

Tano slipped out behind her. “Su cuy’gar, Ven’alor Fett,” she greeted, and it was only then that Maul placed the silver and blue armor as that of the other Mandalorian they had met the day before. “Jate vaar’tour, lek?”

“I’m no heir,” Fett said, voice flat through the vocal modulator. “My father doesn’t know what he speaks of.” With that, they turned, making their way down the hallway. Tano followed at a sedate pace—Maul, unfortunately, due to her shorter stature, had to hurry after to keep up.

Soon, they came to a large room, with a long table. The Mand’alor—Mereel—sat in the middle, a large, probabl non-human Mandalorian on one side, an empty seat on the other, which Fett claimed a moment later.

“Tano,” Mereel greeted, taking off his helmet, setting it to the side, and gestured to the two empty seats across from him. “Shebe, shebe. Vercopaani gar ru’nuhoy jate. Tion’sur’haii tran’goten?”

Tano pulled the chairs out, waiting for Maul to—reluctantly—sit before she did the same. “Lek,” she answered. “Beek ru’meshla.”

That made Mereel smile. “K’eparavu!” he said, and a moment later, the other Mandalorians began to take off their helmets as well, revealing a wookie, two twi’lek, a pantoran, a nautolan, and a human, and they began to eat. Fett’s helmet remained on, and they didn’t bother to put anything on their plate.

The food was spicier than anything Maul had tasted before, but not overwhelmingly so—it was almost like it was meant to enhance the flavors rather than drown them out. It was also some of the best food she had ever eaten—far better than any of the special rations awarded to the best performing students at Orsis. Without meaning to, she found herself closing her eyes and savoring the flavor. It was something her Master wouldn’t approve of, but in the moment, she couldn’t bring herself to care.

When she opened her eyes, she noticed that Tano was doing much the same, barely seeming to be paying attention to the conversations carrying on around her. She was, Maul realised, suddenly, swallowing the mouthful of stew, distracted.

Maul smiled internally, the determination from the night before returning, and quickly, she slipped her hand beneath her outer robes, glad for the height of the table obscuring the movement from the others, and gripped one of the blades, before pulling it out in a fluid movement and driving it towards Tano’s side—

Tano’s hand caught her wrist in a tight grip, and the spaced-out expression was gone, replaced by a sharp, burning focus on her. A moment later, there was the sound of blasters being pulled out—Tano’s grip had pulled her hand up enough for the Mandalorians to see the knife. 

Maul froze. Tano easily pried her fingers off the hilt of the knife, setting it next to her bowl. And then, to Maul’s surprise, she sighed, and said, “Maul, how many times have I told you that you need to ask if you want to spar. Trying to stab me during a meal just makes it seem like you’re trying to kill me.”

I was trying to kill you , Maul didn’t say, because even she knew that that was a damning sentence when surrounded by Mandalorians with blasters aimed at her.

A tense moment passed, and then, surprisingly, Fett spoke. “There is a…training area if your adiik needs to spar.” Despite the flattening effect of the modulator, Maul had the distinct impression that Fett was surprised—and…pleased? 

Mereel nodded, gesturing to the others to put their blasters away. “Lek, lek—ni ru’pirimu ti Jango. Gar moruta beek, ru’lor’vram.”

“Vor’e,” Tano said, and then, to Maul, “Maul, say thank you.”

“…thank you,” Maul said, at length. Tano finally let go of her wrist, and returned to her meal, leaving Maul to the hatred and anger that had risen beneath her skin.

The rest of the meal passed without anyone drawing any more weapons. Maul stirred her spoon in the remainder of her stew, and slid down in her chair. Across from her, Fett still hadn’t taken off their helmet, and so their face was unreadable, but for some reason, Maul found herself convinced that their gaze was fixed on her.

It was an unsettling feeling, being watched. It reminded her uncomfortably of her Master, and instinctively, Maul found herself reaching for the remaining blades. Before she could touch them, though, Tano suddenly said, “Here, try one of these,” and plucked some sort of round, white thing from one of the serving platters, setting it on her plate.

Maul glared at it. Tano had clearly noticed what she was about to do, and had stopped her. Why, though, Maul still couldn’t fathom—after all, before, the blasters had been pointed at her and not at Tano. But despite that, she had still stopped Maul from possibly making the incident repeat itself.

Tano had gone back to her own food, either unaware of, or ignoring Maul’s thoughts. Maul scowled, and slid further down in her chair, and then, resignedly, tried the thing Tano had put on her plate after probing at it with the Force as best as she could, and did her best not to ignore Fett’s probable stare and the weird, frayed-wire-sparks feeling that Tano’s actions had sent playing behind her ribs—if only because, admittedly, she didn’t really like the prospect of having a handful of blasters pointed at her again.

Chapter Text

After firstmeal, Fett led them down the halls once more. No longer pinned beneath his inscrutable, Force-void gaze, Maul found that it was easier to keep her hands away from the blades hidden beneath her robes. 

Mereel had sent them off with a wave and a smile and something in the Mandalorian language that Maul couldn’t understand, but which had made Tano dip her head, a small smile curling at her lips before her eyes had darted to Maul, just for the briefest second. Then she had followed after Fett, and Maul had been forced to follow after her.

When they came into a large, open room, with padded walls, Tano stopped, something flickering across her expression, twin feelings of longing and grief rising in the faint Force presence that wrapped around her. It set Maul’s teeth on edge.

Fett sank against one of the walls off to the side, like they were little more than a wall fixture. Waiting, watching. Tano ignored them. Maul wished, teeth aching, to growl at him. Instead, she watched Tano warily as the togruta padded further into the room, and said, “Well, we don’t have all day.”

To spar, Maul remembered, the excuse that Tano had given, the one to lower the blasters burning like heated metal, digging into her skin—pain, anger, distrust. Her Master had once done something similar, and then, when they had been alone, thrown her against the wall, hand curled into a fist as Maul’s fingers clawed, unthinkingly, at her neck, black spots growing on her vision. The memory of it made Maul snarl, this time, short and quiet, because how dare Tano remind her. How dare Tano take her Master’s place, even in this .

Her stance was wide, relaxed. Fett, who had been silent until then, spoke. “The walls are beskar-strong. You can use your jetii’kade.” Their voice was still flat, still unreadable, and that just made it worse. Maul wanted to rip out one of the knives and imbed it in their neck, beneath the helmet but before the armor over their upper chest and shoulders met it, in that sliver of black fabric crawling up their neck.

Tano smiled. “Ori’jate.” And then she unclipped her lightsabers, holding one of them out to Maul, hilt towards her. If she wanted, Maul could press the activation button and spear her through the chest with it, could listen to her dying breaths, could please her Master, maybe, for once. Unaware of her thoughts, Tano continued. “I know you’re not used to using shoto hilts, but after that…unfortunate incident with yours, you’ll have to make do.”

For the first time since Tano had forced her to sleep, Maul found herself wondering what had happened to her own lightsaber—a long thing, built for a double blade, but she wasn’t advanced enough to bleed two kyber crystals at the same time, which was necessary if they were to bend to her will evenly, so it had simply sported one crimson blade on an almost unwieldy long hilt. Maybe Tano had destroyed it. She might not be a Jedi, but she reeked of Light, and Maul wouldn’t put it past her. No matter—she would build another.

Tano was looking at her expectantly—and Fett, too, their visor trained on Maul. Her skin itched, and her tattoos felt like they were shifting.

She took the blade, and settled into her favored stance—an adaption of what she had been able to learn of Juyo from some of the holocrons her Master had allowed her to access, feet planted steady, spine straight; shoulders squared. Brought the blade up at an angle, wrist above. Flicked it on, the white pulsing out and out and out.

Across from her, Tano shifted as well, turning in a half circle, blade singing to life with the scent of ozone until she stood, one leg planted behind her, one leg before, in half a lunge, lightsaber flicking out in a long line behind her, her body angled slightly to the side. Form IV. 

The faint hum of the Force rose around them. Tano watched her. Waiting, waiting. Weak. 

Maul leaped forward, the white blade singing in a sharp arc towards Tano’s neck, and for a flash, she thought she might actually acomplish her goal, might see the plasma split red skin, cauterising as it went, the scent of burning flesh rising strong.

Instead, Tano’s blade came fluidly to meet hers, and she twisted around Maul, dancing to the side and behind, sweeping her lightsaber with a flourish—up, up, and down, swirling, as she brought it over her head and then down towards Maul.

She met it, but only barely. The weight of it hit, and then glanced off, driving Maul back a step, and then Tano whirled once more, leaping over her and forcing Maul to turn to counter it, and then make an attempt at a twisting jab. Tano deflected it with ease, footing sure, blade unwavering. A growl slipped out from between Maul’s teeth, and she twisted to the side to parry a blow.

It was infuriating, to fight against Tano. If it had been her Master, Maul would have been laid flat on the ground in agony in a handful of seconds. Tano let her— let her continue to fight, and that galled her, bit into her skin like a thousand tiny teeth; rage clawing its way through her veins like the worst of Force lightning. She was clearly, clearly more practised than Maul—and yet, she let her fight, rather than disarming her and—and—

There was a sudden sound—blaster bolts, and shouting in Mandalorian, fast and loud and sharp. Tano’s face shuttered, and her eyes went distant, and her blade stuttered. An opening. If Maul wanted to, she could jerk her blade forwards, send the white lightsaber spinning from Tano’s grip, and then drive the blade in her hand through the togruta’s throat.

Maul hesitated.

Her Master would have punished her for it. Her Master would have summoned unearthly, arcing strands of electricity from the tips of his fingers, and driven her to her knees until she clutched her head, throat burning from the effort of muffling screams, and then had the droids drag her away to the cell that doubled as her room, and forbidden her from food or drink.

Tano…wasn’t her Master.

Instead, Maul found herself almost gently knocking the blade from Tano, and raising the tip of the white lightsaber beneath her chin.

The blaster fire ceased. Tano’s gaze became sharp once more, and she looked at Maul, like she knew what Maul had been thinking, and then she smiled. “Solah,” she said.

Maul powered the blade off.

Some time later, after Tano’s blades were back at her hips, she said, directing the question towards Fett, “Do you know what the blaster fire was about?”

Fett, who was leaning against the wall still, pushed themselves away from it with a half juddering, half fluid movement, somehow managing to walk both sides of the blade. “Montross ru’mirci,” they said, and then dug their fingers beneath the edge of their helmet, releasing it and pulling it away to reveal a human face—a boy, a teen, at least as far as Maul could tell. 

The action sent a flicker-sharp fade of a thousand strange, conflicting feelings across Tano’s force presence. “Jate,” she said, finally. 

Fett nodded, curls bouncing slightly with the motion. “‘Alor sirbu gar lise pare ti mhi munit gar liniba.”

Maul scowled. It was irritating to lack understanding of what the people around her were saying at best, and dangerous at worst. 

Fett’s gaze flickered to her, and he twisted his lips up into something that was probably meant to look like a smile. “I am telling your buir that you can stay here for as long as you need,” he said. “Perhaps you can visit the city—there are many fun things for adiik like you to see and try.”

Maul blinked at him. For some reason, she hadn’t expected him to say something like that. It was almost… friendly , a sharp contrast to the flat, genderless tone his modulator created. It was almost kind , but rather than the instinctive mistrust that would usually garner, she found herself believing in his sincerity. 

“That sounds nice, doesn’t it, Maul?” Tano asked. “Vor’e. We’ll check it out.”

Fett nodded, and made his way out of the room, leaving them alone. 

“What would we do in a… city? ” Maul asked, sounding almost as baffled as she felt. The only times she had been in a city were when her Master ordered her to take care of political rivals. 

Tano shrugged. “Depends on what there is,” she said. “We should probably buy some new clothes, though, since neither of us have any to change into. I’ll have to convert from Republic credits to kyr’bese, though. Conversion rate is favourable right  now, I think.”

“My robes are perfectly fine,” Maul snapped, tugging at the dark fabric of the sleeve that came down to her palm without meaning to, and then, realizing what she had been doing, forced herself to stop. 

“Well, I need a change of clothes, at least,” Tano said. “You can come with, or you can stay here and get lost in the halls and maybe get blasters pointed at you again, or lock yourself up in the guest rooms. But,” she added, meeting Maul’s gaze, and she almost flinched before realizing Tano wasn’t about to bore into her mind, “if you like the black better, we can always get you things in that color.”

Maul almost startled. For a second, she thought maybe she was wrong—maybe Tano had ripped into her mind, but she had been quiet about it, and Maul hadn’t noticed. But no—she would have felt it. Her Master had done it gently, once, without warning, as a lesson, and it had felt like rancid black oil curling over Maul’s skin, and Tano isn’t as strong as he is, so probably not. Maul scowled. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll go with you.”

Tano’s lips tugged up one one side, curling, expression uneven. “Then we should go ask about transport,” she said. “If there isn’t anything we can borrow, we’ll take the ship, but that’s a last resort, with how dry it is outside.”

“You’re from Shili. It can’t be that dry for you.”

The togruta let out an inelegant sound, halfway between a laugh and a sigh. “Yes,” she said, and didn’t elaborate. 

Maul followed her back to their rooms, and Tano riffled through the pockets of her jacket, digging out a few small items including a credit chip, and then tucked them into the pockets on her pants, before, seeming to suddenly remember Maul was there, said, “Hey, kid, you want a snack? Sparring probably ate up a lot of your energy. We’ve got, uh,” she checked the kitchen cabinets, “some snack bars, dried meat, and fruit.”

Maul didn’t tell her that once, she had gone a tenday without food, and only minimal, unfiltered water, and so an hour or so of sparring with someone who hadn’t even been trying to kill her wasn’t going to be a problem. There was something…pleasing about having the option. She grabbed one of the deep purple, oblong fruits and then ducked around Tano to get some of the dried meat. 

Tano grabbed some of the meat for herself, before closing the cupboard and biting into one of the strips, closing her eyes for a second. Maul tentatively tried her own, pleased to find that it was spicy in the way the stew had been earlier. Once she had finished up the meat, though, she was left with the fruit, and she stared at it for a moment, trying to figure out how to eat it, before biting into it. It was bitter, and Maul reeled back, baring her teeth. 

Tano laughed. “Here,” she said, taking it from Maul, you have to peel it. 

Once peeled, the fruit revealed green slices, and Maul cautiously took them, biting into one experimentally. As it turned out, they were better peeled, and soon she finished all of them. 

Tano nodded, looking pleased. “Come on, kid, let’s introduce you to Mandalore proper,” she said, pulling the door open, and holding it for Maul. 

After a beat of hesitation, Maul followed. 

Chapter Text

By the end of the second week on Mandalore, Maul had found herself falling into a rhythm. Tano had made no indication that she had any plans to leave the planet, and Mereel seemed more than happy to host them for as long as they wanted to stay—apparently, the traitor that Tano had warned him of had turned out to, in fact, be a traitor. Maul didn’t know much more about the matter, but she got the general idea that they’d been interrogated for information regarding political rivals fairly successfully. 

The routine consisted of taking a meal every so often with Mereel and his inner circle, including Fett, sparring with Tano nearly daily, and occasionally going into the closest city to explore. It was a huge deviation from the schedule Maul had gotten used at Orsis, and even moreso when compared to the barely routine that had existed in the six years before Orsis, when she had been kept in one of her Master’s strongholds, at his beck and call and mercy. 

Being around Tano was…different. The togruta didn’t try and force her way into Maul’s mind at the slightest provocation, and when they sparred, her aim never seemed to be Maul’s humiliation. At night, when Tano thought she had fallen asleep, she’d fall into the litany of names as Maul listened, the knives she’d taken to keeping beneath her robes heavy against her skin but far from her hands, which lay at her sides, immobile, as she breathed evenly in a facsimile of sleep. 

She hadn’t stopped concocting plans for what to do when her Master found her—because, she was sure, it was a when and not an if. Maul might be a failure to him in many ways, but she was also a tool, and one that he had sunk over half a decade and a hefty tuition fee into. If nothing else, he would find her to take personal pleasure in bleeding the life out of her, bit by agonising bit. It was a terrifying certainty, but it was a fear she’d lived with most of her life. 

On the tenth day—the second Centaxday of the fifth month, according to the datapad that Tano had dug out of the ship, Fett approached her in the hallway. She had been wandering, mostly in an attempt to make a mental map of the stronghold, but also partially because there wasn’t much else to do, with Tano holed up in their quarters meditating , unless she wanted to stare at a floating togruta for as many hours as it took for the woman to decide it had been enough. 

“Adiik,” the now-familiar silver and blue Mandalorian greeted, voice flat through the helmet’s modulator. Maul wondered, not for the first time, what the inside of a Mandalorian helmet would be like. She had a decent knowledge of mechanics to grasp most things, and the thought of getting to poke around at something besides discarded droids was incredibly tempting. Unfortunately, Fett had a good foot on her, and probably wouldn’t let her grab it. 

Kid , Maul recognized after a few seconds. She didn’t have any access to learning modules for the language, but being around Mandalorians frequently for a bit had allowed her to pick up some words. She bristled. “I’m almost ten,” she snapped. I could kill you ten different ways , she didn’t say. Her Master might not have had her learn etiquette, but even Maul knew that saying it would be suicidal at best. 

Fett’s chuckle, flat as it was, sounded more like a soft rasp. “You aren’t old enough for your verd’goten yet,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean you aren’t verd’ika—little warrior. Tell me, how is your hand to hand skills?”

Maul eyed him warily. He’d fallen into step behind her as she continued walking down the hall, the pale stone making it seem earlier in the day than it was. “I have experience,” she said.

This time, the rasp was louder, and irritation coiled thickly around Maul’s ribs, chased down with a shot of burning anger for Fett’s dismissal. She quickened her step. 

“Naak, naak,” Fett said, keeping up with her annoyingly easily. “I don’t mean offence. Just…would your jet’bajur allow you practice? You already have knives—is she allowing you to train with them?”

Maul briefly contemplated reaching for one of the blades beneath her outer robes and burying it in the soft flesh of his neck, and found that the thought didn’t bring as much satisfaction as she expected, and scowled. “Not here,” she said, which was partially true, from a certain point of view. And then, without thinking, “And she’s not a Jedi…whatever.”

“Jet’bajur,” Fett repeated. “Jedi teacher…Master, you call them? But you’re right—she would only be bajur—”

Maul whirled on him, knife out before she could even think to draw it, held at an angle from her wrist, hand twisted so it was aimed towards him, her eyes narrowed. “ Tano is not my Master, ” she hissed, and it came out just a touch hysterical, but all she could think of was lightning arcing from Tano’s fingers and digging grooves into her skin, burning hot, and the discordant hum of a rarely used red blade, its hilt held steady in red fingers—

Fett reached out and knocked the blade from her grip, the durasteel clattering against the stone floor. “You don’t trust the blades,” he observed. “You…hold them from you—away, from you. Your grip is weak.”

“My grip is fine ,” Maul said, the words barely passing her lips, quiet. He watched her, silently, the black t of his visor boring into her, and it suddenly occurred to her that he was, in a roundabout way, asking if she wanted to spar. She almost laughed, but that would have been weak, would reveal that she hadn’t known his intent from the start, and that would only give him an advantage over her. So she slid around him, picking the knife off of the floor and tucking it back beneath her robes. 

He hummed, and turned down one of the offshoot halls, calling over his shoulder, “I could make it stronger,”—an unworded invitation. She stopped and looked after him, watched the silver and blue fade slightly with the distance. 

Her common sense told her it would be a good idea to follow after him—that even if he had insulted her it would do her good to get better. And Tano would agree, a thought which rankled her. She pursed her lips and followed after. 

The room they emerged into was much smaller than the room that she and Tano had taken to training in, and painted in dark, muted tones. It reminded her uncomfortably of the rooms in her Master’s own stronghold, the ones where she was made to battle droids until she was shaking with exertion and feverish. She snarled quietly as the sensation of it washed over her for half a beat before retreating and leaving her to find Fett standing across from her, helmet tilted. But all he said was, “You’re ready for the fight,” and produced two knives of his own, one in each hand, stance coiled and ready. 

She struck first, hard and fast, and he parried, the knives hitting each other with a metallic click , before he shoved them away and bore down on her again. 

They were both on the offensive, and Maul longed to feel the irritation that was surely rolling off of him as she met his blows and retorted with her own, but he was a perfect void, so she concentrated on the clash of blades and drew her own simmering anger through her blood and let it fuel her strikes. 

After what seemed like an eternity, they broke apart, Maul’s chest heaving as she drew in sharp, short bursts of breath. Fett seemed unbothered, but he tucked away his knives and unlatched his helmet with a hiss, pulling it off to reveal dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, and Maul felt a flash of vindictive glee. “You fight better than I thought,” he admitted, the words a little raspy and stressed strangely as he drew in his own breaths, and then his eyes flickered over her shoulder, settling on something behind her, and his brows raised. “How long has your bajur been watching?” he muttered. 

Maul jerked her head around, finding Tano leaning against the wall, and scowled. She should have noticed the woman’s entrance, but—she had been caught up in the flurry of the fight. The oversight scraped at her like metal against rusted metal, screeching and painful. 

Tano returned the look evenly. “Alor’ika. Maul,” she greeted. “I need to go into the city. Are you coming?”

Maul hesitated, turning back to look at Jango without really meaning to. The teen looked faintly annoyed—probably at the nickname, but he had stopped protesting it after the first few days. “You should go,” he said, expression smoothing out. “You are tired enough to be less good at sparring, now.” The last bit was said almost… fondly , but Maul had probably heard it wrong. 

“Fine,” she said finally, and tucked the knives away, wiping sweat away from where it had collected around her horns. Tano smiled and turned, heading towards the doorway, and after a beat, Maul followed her.

They took one of the landspeeders, an old thing painted in dusty yellows, from the hanger, its engine starting with a spitting roar before settling into a low whine as it sped over the dry landscape. Occasionally, hardy, greyish green plants poked up through the orange, disrupting the planet’s desert-like surface, and small reptiles skittered away as they approached. The planet was still cracked and less than hospitable, but it was more alive than Maul had thought it was, the first time she had seen it. 

Soon, they came to the city. It was an old one—one of the oldest, by what Maul had gleaned, rebuilt over and over again, surviving dozens of wars and sieges. Some of the buildings were squat and made of stone, while others rose high and thin and metal, their windows winking in the sunlight, and around them, people bustled. Tano wove through the crowd deftly, Maul following behind as they made their way towards the marketplace in the city’s center. Occasionally helmets and faces would tilt to regard them, but far fewer than had the first time they had come, and they soon turned away and carried on. 

The marketplace was a crush of bodies carefully navigating through narrow streets and around bright stands, and Tano went for one with a bright yellow and purple awning, the familiar light blue and tan armor of the butcher coming into view. When the Mikkian saw them, she grinned, setting her large meat cleaver down, her mane of tendrils floating around her head. “S’cuy, jetii, jet’ika. What can I get for you two today? You out of those nerf sausages already?”

“I’m supporting a growing zabrak,” Tano said, drily. “Do you have any shaak or Chandrilan squall?”

“Oh, yeah, my contact on Phindar just sent me a shipment of squall,” Olkeath replied. “Any preferences on the cut?”

“Tendermeat if you still have it,” Tano replied, smiling, her stance and Force presence both open and calm. 

The mikkian nodded. “I should, yeah, let me just go check in the cooler…” With that, she disappeared into the back, fading into the shadows. Maul let her attention wander, taking in the multitude of painted and adorned armor. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a dark cloak, and without meaning to, she turned to better take it in—

And froze as the figure came fully into view—a black cloak, its hood hiding the majority of the wearer’s race except for a pale jaw, hands tucked into the sleeves, moving towards her, and her breath quickened. He has found her, and he was going to take her, and punish her for failing him, and—

“—aul? Maul?” A hand gripped her shoulder, and a presence brushed against the shields around her mind, and she reared back, snarling, hate-terror-anger pulsing through her as she ripped away from the invading presence and ran, ran as hard as she could away from her Master even as she knew it was pointless because even without a bond connecting them he would always find her. 

She burst out into the desert, the ground hard beneath her feet, dust howling around her as the Force raged, and her lungs burned. 

She didn’t know how long she ran, only that, eventually, she collapsed onto her knees, hands hitting the ground and stinging, leaving faint sweats of red. Her chest heaved, the air that they drew in harsh and sharp. Her surroundings were lit only by the moon, everything looking washed out. She felt suddenly cold, her horns tingling from it, and she pressed her eyes shut so hard she saw stars, drew her Force presence in and in and in because maybe if he couldn’t sense her it would take him longer to find her. 

Exhaustion hit her suddenly like a battering ram, and she slumped forward, chest resting in her knees and forehead hitting the tightly packed dirt, too tired to care about the way her horns twinged uncomfortably. A moment later, the darkness washed over her. 

Chapter Text

Maul came to wakefulness with a harshly thudding headache and a searing pain in her hands. Her head was pressed against the ground, her horns practically embedded in the packed soil, and when she breathed, shudderingly, dust puffed up and into her eyes, forcing her to screw them shut against the onslaught. 

For a moment, she remained there, caught in a state of senseless lucidity beneath the beating sun, before, with a terrifying jolt that rent through her mind, she remembered how she had come to be here, out in the middle of the desert, with no one else’s presence within seeing or sensing distance. 

She dragged herself to her feet, shaking without meaning to, mind clear except for the litany of runhidegetaway that slammed against her skull like a ricocheting blaster bolt. She fisted her hands into the dark material of her pants, the fabric scraping against the wounds on her palms, and she flinched, and then a second thought races through her entire being, chanting weakweakweakweak which morphed quickly into stupidweakuselessyoullneverescape . 

“No,” she croaked. “No! No! Nonononono! ” Her throat was parched, her body aching with dehydration, and without meaning to, she stumbled, landing on her knees once more, clutching at her head, fingers gripping her horns and pulling as denials spilled over her lips—useless, useless because Master would always find her, would always take her back, would always punish her, Master was smarter and stronger and—

The sound of a speeder broke through the spiral of her thoughts as it raced over the desert, growing from a distant, rumbling whir to a high whine as it came to a stop, and then boots hit the dirt with a crackling thump . “No, no, no,” Maul mumbled, pressing her eyes shut. It was him, it could only be him, there was nowhere for her to go, to escape to even if she could have moved from where she was frozen, she had been so stupid to think that Tano taking her could change anything . 

A hand pressed against her shoulder, warm even through the layers of her robes, and Maul flinched, and then froze once more, awaiting retribution. 

It never came. Instead, there was the hiss of a helmet disengaging, and then a sturdy arm pulled her to her feet and against a metal clad chest, and a rich voice murmured, half-awkwardly, “Udesii, verd’ika, udesii. You’re ok.” 

“He’s going to find me,” Maul whispered, pressing her frame against his stockier one, hating herself for the weakness it showed but unable to stop it as terror pounded through her. “He’s going to find me and catch me and take me back and then he’ll punish me and it’ll be his right because I’m supposed to be his—his—” A choking sob cut her off, and if her body didn’t burn with lack of water she would have cried thick, dark tears like she had once when she was four and Master had first used Force lightning on her. She shuddered, the sobs wracking her, and curled against the teen, fingers scrabbling against the backplate of his armor. 

He tightened his grip around her, hand coming up to rub circles against her back. “I won’t let him,” he promised. “I swear, Maul, I won’t let him take you. I’ll kill that shabuir, I swear—haat, ijaa, haa’it. Truth, honor, vision, do you understand it, Maul? I’ll—I’ll set a striil on him, on whoever made this happen to you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Maul gasped between stuttering breaths. “It doesn’t matter you can’t do anything no one can nothing can stop him he’s—Master, he can’t be—no, no, no… ”

“I will,” Jango said, and it was so fierce Maul almost believed him, just for a second. “But before that, I need to get you to a baar’ur—you’ve been gone almost a full cycle. Your bajur can’t find you—said you have done something with…Force suppression?” He stumbled over the words slightly, like they were unfamiliar, before soldiering on. “You’re sunsick and hurt, and I don’t need any Force osik to know that. K’olaro.” He took a step back, pulling Maul with him, and then another, until they bumped against the speeder, the motion sending Maul’s head ringing with pain, and she let out a sharp whine. 

“N’epavaru,” Jango murmured, and readjusted her grip on her, and then, a moment later, picked her up, before a harsh, howling sound tore through the air. Maul shuddered and curled in on herself, trying in vain to escape the noise. A moment later, the sound cut off and they dropped unceremoniously into the speeder, nearly going sprawling. 

The sudden separation jolted Maul to her senses, and she skittered away from him as far as she could, pressing up against the far door, watching him through bleary, burning eyes, waiting, waiting. 

His lips pursed, brows narrowing and expression contorting into something she couldn’t name, and then he reached under the seat and pulled out a flask, holding it out to her. “Drink,” he said, and his voice was toneless but she could practically feel the anger rolling off of him, even though she couldn’t. 

A beat passed, and then another. Her throat burned, and her palms, tight and blood-crusted, itched painfully. She shouldn’t take it, shouldn’t allow him to hold that over her, but—but, but, her very being burned, craved for the sweet press of water. Finally, she gave in, and reached out, snatching the flask from him and cradled it to her chest, watching him suspiciously, waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

He didn’t try and take it back, just leaned back against the back of the seat, watching her with flat, dark brown eyes. Without taking her gaze off him, she unscrewed the top and raised the neck to her nose, scenting for any possible poisons, even though, as she realised a moment later, the harsh, dry air had cracked the skin on the insides of it so badly that she could barely smell anything through the stinging pain. 

Reluctantly, she drank, slowly at first, and then greedily, the water lapping at her lips as she drew it in, relishing in the coolness that coated the inside of her mouth and soothed the parched expanse of her throat. She didn’t even realise she’d drunk it all until she tiled the flats almost vertical without another drop falling.

He was watching her still, and she bared her teeth at him, growling weakly without even thinking about it. 

He sighed. “Let’s get you to the baar’ur,” he muttered, and switched the speeder from idling to on, hands gripping the yoke, the silver of the metal over the back of his hand glinting under the sun. His helmet sat in the seat between them, and Maul kept her gaze fixed on it for the ride back to the stronghold, the fight going out of her as she prepared herself for the inevitable. 

The baar’ur—the medic—was a kel dor with a sleek silver breath mask and mirrored eyepieces. When she saw Maul, thin, spiderwebbing lines burst into existence at the edges of her eyes, and she rumbled, “Jan’ika, vercopaani gar ru’dinui kaysh pirun.”

“Lek, Baar’ur Nivesa,” Jango said, and pulled out the empty flash which he had grabbed when they had gotten out of the speeder, shaking it for effect. 

Nivesa nodded, and then gestured to the empty cot. “Sit.”

Maul did, letting the medic poke and prod her, but not answering any of the questions directed at her, too angry and scared tired. Her head was still pounding, and her connection to the Force was thinner than a thread, so when Nivesa pressed a hand to her shoulder to get her to lay down, Maul didn’t follow her instinctual urge to bite, and just let the medic press her against the thin pillows and insert an IV into the crook of her elbow. It didn’t matter anyway. He’d find her and take her back regardless. 

Jango loitered at the edges of her vision, but she ignored him, and stared up at the pale, high ceiling blankly. The anger that had pumped through her veins not long before was gone, leaving a hollow, sticky, hopeless feeling behind, and without her permission, thick tears welled in her eyes. She blinked rapidly in an attempt to dispel them, but it was no use—they fell without her permission, tracking down her cheeks. The Force, which she had drawn away from, pulsed against her, and, too exhausted to ignore it, she finally let go, allowing it to press into her. The tears finally stopped, and she swiped her free arm across her face to try and get rid of the evidence that they had ever been there. 

Suddenly, there was the sound of a commotion outside the medbay, voices arguing with each other, and then the door was thrown open and Tano strode inside, body a taut, coiled line. Her gaze locked with Maul’s, and she reached the cot in seconds, reaching out to touch Maul’s face before dropping her hand. “ Maul ,” she said, and it sounded half-choked. 

Something rose in Maul, expanding from a tiny seed to a sensation that pressed against her skin, straining to be let out, and Maul pressed her eyes shut, trying to ignore it. 

“Is she ok?” Tano said, clearly directed at Nivesa, but it was Jango who answered. 

“Dehydration and wounded palms,” he said, “but Baar’ur Nivesa has tended to her. She will heal.”

Tano let out a shaky breath. “Maul,” she said, quietly, “what happened?”

She grit her teeth until her jaw hurt, tears building up again. It didn’t matter, because it wouldn’t change anything, but she still didn’t want Tano to know—to know how weak she had been, fleeing at the first sign of her Master. But Tano had asked rather than ripping through her mind for the answer, so Maul probably owed it to her to answer, even if she hated saying it out loud. 

“Master found me,” she whispered, the words tasting bitter. “At—at the marketplace, I saw him and he was coming towards me and he was going to take me and—” the words died in her throat, cut off with an involuntary sob, and she pressed her eyes shut even harder, unwilling to see Tano’s expression. 

The cot creaked suddenly with the weight of another body. “What did you see?” Tano asked, and then when Maul didn’t answer, she said, softly, “would you rather show me?”

She didn’t want someone in her mind, but she was certain that if she tried to say it out loud she’d start crying again, so she nodded, and tried not to flinch when Tano’s hand brushed her cheek, her presence brushing against Maul’s mind. After a beat, Maul pushed the memory towards her—a short clip, of catching sight of Master out of the corner of her eye and then realizing that he was coming towards her. 

Whatever Maul expected, though, it wasn’t for Tano to laugh . She jerked away from the togruta, hurt and anger swirling thickly around her, and she found herself trembling. 

“Sorry,” Tano said, finally. “Sorry, I just—that wasn’t Sidious, Maul, it was—well, maybe you want to open your eyes. It’ll be easier if you just see it.”

Maul kept her eyes pressed shut, fingers curled tight. Tano softened her tone. “Please, Maul. Trust me.”

She hesitated, reaching out with the Force to gauge Tano’s feelings, and found only overwhelming sincerity. Finally, after a long moment, she opened her eyes, scanning the room, gaze sliding over Jango and Tano and—

She froze at the sight of a darkly clad figure behind Tano—the same one she had seen at the marketplace. But this time, his hood was down, revealing a pale, almost gaunt face—but not Master. When her gaze met his, he offered a slight grimace. “My apologies for startling you,” he said, voice almost hypnotic. “I was seeking out your Master—my padawan and I came to speak with her, but our trip was delayed by maintenance issues, and when we arrived, we were told you had gone into the city.”

“I’m not her Master,” Tano said, sharply. 

Maul drew in a shuddering breath. Most of the panic had left, but a tiny bit still remained, and she sunk her teeth into it and shook it until it stopped making her want to flee. “Oh,” she said, embarrassment rising in her, and she crossed her arms as best as she could. 

Tano’s hand hesitantly settled on her arm. “As long as I live I’ll make sure you’re safe from him,” she said—no, promised. Despite knowing the impossibility of the statement, Maul found herself relaxing inch by inch. They stayed that way for a while, before Tano cleared her throat. “I need to talk to Master Dauwl and Padawan Zefc,” she said, softly. “It’s so that we can deal with your Master, so he can’t hurt you again.”

“Will you come back?” Maul asked, without meaning to, voice shaking slightly. 

The togruta nodded. “I promise,” she said, and squeezed Maul’s arm gently before rising. “While I’m gone Baar’ur Nivesa will watch over you.”

“And me,” Jango piped up, the first time he had spoken since he had brought Maul in. He sounded—fierce. 

Tano smiled. “You’re in good hands, Maul,” she said, and turned towards the exit, the two Jedi following behind her. 

Jango pushed off the wall. “I think there’s still a holochess set somewhere,” he said. “Did you ever play it?”

“…once,” Maul said, at length, watching him.

Jango grinned. “Ori’jate,” he said, and began searching the room. 

Chapter Text

When night fell, Maul was still confined to the cot in the medbay. The kel dor medic had adjusted the IV drip a couple of times, but the last had been an hour or so ago by Maul’s estimation. She and Jango were still engaged with holochess, and Maul had lost bitterly the first two rounds, rusty on what little she remembered of the game’s mechanics, but the third had been a stalemate, and the fourth was shaping up to be, too. 

The overheat lights had been switched on, and they hummed faintly in the background, casting yellow light across the room’s occupants. Jango had managed to find a fold-out duraplast chair somewhere, and had pulled it up next to Maul’s cot, resting the holochess board on his knees, his helmet sitting off to the side. 

Most of the panic Maul had been embroiled in when he had first brought her in had faded, but some still remained, worrying at the seams of her being, and she felt like at any moment she was liable to come undone. Instead of acknowledging that, though, she surveyed the board, before pushing forward a small piece with a holoprojection of what appeared to be an akk dog, pacing the invisible confines. 

“ Kriff, ” Jango said, emphatically. “You’re getting too good at this game, verd’ika. I should have gone for cu’bikad.” Sighing, he moved his mount, the only action that wouldn’t put any of his other pieces in further danger—but, unfortunately for him, would lose him that piece. Maul took it with restrained glee, watching her other akk dog lunge forward, ripping the mount apart. There was a small, staticky eruption of fireworks, and the killcount on Maul’s side ticked up one. Jango pinched the bridge of his nose. 

The game didn’t go on for much longer, though, because Baar’ur Nivesa swept in from her office and fiddled with Maul’s IV bag, this time disconnecting it. “I’m not happy, but you’re not in danger anymore,” she said. “But I want you to wait until your buir comes to pick you up—she sent me a comm saying she should be here in fifteen. Jan’ika, stop looking like someone kicked your tooka—my patients aren’t free entertainment for you.”

Jango grumbled something unintelligible, and sullenly pushed forward his lieutenant, attempting to head off Maul’s loth cat charger, but too little effect, because Maul moved her other akk dog to intercept, leaving him with only the option to beat a hasty retreat, or lose more pieces. “Is she—talking with the Jedi?” Maul asked, finally.

Nivesa nodded. “Yes, with the Mand’alor and his ver’alore also. Whatever it is, none of them are happy about it. Now, stay still so I can take out the needle.”

Maul froze, hearts suddenly jolting, waiting—but all Nivesa did was, as promised, remove the needle from the crook of her elbow, placing it into a yellow box on the wall, before nodding to Maul and Jango and sweeping off back to her office. 

A beat passed, and then another, and Maul’s hearts finally returned to their proper places. When she looked back at the board, it was to find that Jango had captured one of her lieutenants. Hiding a vicious smile, Maul leaped her unengaged charger over Jango’s skeleton defence, penning his sentinel into the corner of the board. Jango stared at it for a moment before grumbling darkly but without much heat. “Ok, ok, I yield,” he said, and began putting the pieces away. 

Not about to pass up the opportunity, Maul pushed her charger one final step forward, watching as it but the sentinel’s head clean off. The board buzzed, its surface converting into a holo of a fireworks display. Maul smiled viciously. 

“If Tano doesn’t already have you, I would ask Jaster to take you in,” Jango said, looking faintly exasperated, but his features were softened by something…else. He put the last piece away and stood, spine cracking, and let out a wide yawn. “Thank Ka’ra I don’t have patrol tonight.” He ran a hand through his hair, and then went to put the board away, returning a moment later to pick up his helmet, before he paused, looking at Maul. “Do you want me to wait until your buir comes?”

She did—the thought of being alone was almost unbearable, but another, larger part of her reminded her viciously that she’d already shown weakness. She shook her head. “N—nayc,” she said, stumbling a little over the unfamiliar feel of the word. 

Jango beamed. “Jate, jate. K’oyacyi, jet’ika.” With that, he slipped his helmet on, dark skin disappearing behind the silver and blue. Maul watched him retreat out the door, and then she was alone. 

She felt the sudden need to fidget—to do something to break the heavy silence that had fallen with the teen’s exit, but the follow through had been trained out of her by the time she could walk, so she remained almost perfectly still, the only movement that of her chest rising and falling. She kept her mind carefully blank, and began counting the wrinkles on the sheets, ignoring how similar it was to the way she had counted tiles when her Master had deigned to allow her to visit the medidroid. 

She was somewhere in the low tripple digits when Tano appeared in the doorway. Her expression was haggard, and her shoulders slightly slumped, but as soon as she realized Maul had spotted her, she straightened. “Hey, kid. Come on, let’s get you out of here.” She made her way towards Maul’s cot, and reached out, seemingly instinctively, before pulling her hand back—waiting. 

Maul swung her legs around, and then, after a moment of hesitation, reached out for Tano. The togruta quickly complied, taking Maul’s hand in her own and taking some of her weight. It only lasted a few seconds, just until Maul could stand stably, but the sudden joy-relief that pulsed though Tano’s Force signature was almost painful. Maul looked away, training her gaze on the floor, and very carefully did not think about anything in particular. 

Tano led her down the hallways, the occasional pieces of artwork hung up on the pale stone becoming more familiar the longer they walked, until, finally, they came to a stop outside the familiar door to their quarters. 

They stood there for a second, and then Tano said, “Well,” and reached out to push it open and stepped inside, looking over her shoulder after a moment at Maul. 

Maul followed after her. The inside was the same as she remembered it from the morning before. There were a few different fruits on the counter in a bowl, and the beds were made to exacting standards. There was a datapad on the window sill, stacked on top of a few flimsiplast novels Tano had procured from the marketplace. 

“Do you want to help me make latemeal?” Tano asked, breaking the silence. She wasn’t looking at Maul. Her left hand was running over the hilt of the lightsaber at her hip, seemingly unconsciously. “I put the squall in the cooler.”

“…fine,” Maul said, because it probably wouldn’t hurt to add to her cooking skills, which were kind of deplorably minimal beyond wilderness survival. 

The stiltedness lingered between them as they prepped the meat and the root vegetables, following through the time spent frying them—separately, because Tano didn’t want to bother with picking the vegetables out—and settling the plates on the small fold out table that they had set up in the empty space between the two beds. 

Maul poked at a slice of squall, covered in a red coating of spices, shoving it into her mouth and trying to focus on the burn it left behind on her tongue. It didn’t really work, because Tano was prodding listlessly at her own. Finally, Maul said, “There’s something wrong with the Jedi and you’re angry.” It wasn’t true, because she could feel, tightly locked away, only disappointment and regret in Tano, but it drew out the desired reaction, and Tano grimaced. 

“No. Yes. No,” she sighed, harshly, and speared a piece of squall, biting down on it forcefully. “I had forgotten how…much trouble Order Jedi are. It’s not so bad with smaller temples, but those based in Coruscant…they’re generally not willing to look past initial assumptions because they’re too—arrogant.” The last bit was said with a weight to it, and instinctively, Maul knew it had something to do with the togruta’s past. Tano drew in a deep breath, and ate a few more pieces of squall. “I’m…trying to convince them to deal with Sidious,” she said, at length. “But not even showing them my memories has been enough—they’re too doubtful of the existence of Sith period, let alone one hiding in the Senate.”

Maul speared a few cubes of root vegetables. What could she say? She’d already gone against him by remaining with Tano, but a tiny part of her still hoped that, maybe, if she warned him, he wouldn’t punish her as harshly. Finally, she said, “Why are you doing this? You’re not a Jedi.”

Tano hummed. “No,” she agreed. “But many of the people I care about are, and Sidious plans to destroy them, and millions of other sentients along with them.” Her lips twisted bitterly, and she suddenly looked very, very weary. “I’ve had enough war to last a lifetime,” she said, quietly. “I want to stop it from happening again. I…I can’t lose everyone. Not again.”

Maul sat back. The spices tasted ashy on her tongue suddenly as she thought about her Master’s red blade piercing Tano’s chest, of his Force lightning making Jango writhe until he contorted into impossible shapes and then suddenly stopped moving altogether. Oh, she thought, half shocked. 

Tano was watching her, and she said, after a few moments, softly, “Would you like to join me in meditation after we’re done eating, Maul?”

Maul hesitated; and then, slowly, nodded. They didn’t speak after that, just ate the rest of the food. When they had cleaned the dishes, Tano sat cross legged on the floor and motioned for Maul to follow suit. 

It took a few tries—Maul had never meditate before. Her Master had believed it to be a weakness better left to Jedi. Finally, though, she managed it. Voice cracking a little, she said, “What do I do?” and cringed when it came out sounding desperate. 

“Focus on what you’re feeling,” Tano replied. “Close your eyes and let the sensations seep into you—what you can feel, what you can hear, what you can smell. Once you do that, I want you to turn your attention to your emotions—let them run their course, accept them, and then let them pass. Acknowledge that they’re temporary.”

“Not…get rid of them?” Maul asked, without thinking. 

Despite her eyes being closed, she could practically see Tano’s amused smiled, paired with her soft huff of laughter. “No,” she said, “I’ve found that isn’t really useful.”

They lapsed back into silence. Maul tried to do as instructed, letting the panic and anger that had been simmering beneath her skin was through her—and then, rather than try and use it to fuel her, she tried to accept it, and let it fade away. The memories of the previous day flitted through her. 

It took a while, and a few false attempts, but when she surfaced, the Force was calm around her. Tano was watching her, and she offered Maul a smile. “You did good, kid.”

Maul nodded, and then said, hesitantly, “I was…thinking—if they won’t accept your memories…would they maybe accept mine?”

Tano gave her a sharp look. “Are you saying that because it’s what you want?”

“…yes,” Maul said, finally, and found it wasn’t even a lie. “I…I don’t want you to lose those people.”

There was a pause, and then Tano nodded. “Ok,” she said, and rose, stretching. “Tomorrow, though. Tonight we both need sleep.”

Maul nodded, and followed her. Her spine cracked a few times. 

They changed into their sleep wear, and just as she was about to get into her own bed, Maul hesitated, turning around—and found that Tano had already pulled her own covers back in a clear invitation. 

Glad to not have to say it out loud, Maul clambered onto the narrow bed next to her, almost crying with relief at the sheer, alien comfort of a familiar, trustworthy presence to curl against. It wasn’t long before the darkness claimed her. 

Chapter Text

They didn’t talk about it the next morning, for which Maul was pitifully grateful. Tano just removed her arm from where it had curled over Maul and got up, making their firstmeal—a scramble of eggs and some thinly sliced, cured meat—and sitting across from Maul in silence as they ate. Afterwards, Maul took a quick shower in the fresher, revelling, not for the first time, in the absurd comfort of a water shower rather than a sprayer one. 

“I sent Master Dauwl a comm to let him know we would meet him and his padawan in an hour,” Tano told her when she stepped out from the fresher, tugging on her sleeve to get it over her hand. Mandalore had brought another change—that of her wardrobe. While it still mainly consisted of items that allowed her to fairly closely replicate what she had worn before, if she so chose, there were also other items—loose shirts and wide legged pants in various colors and prints, suited to spending hours sparring, as well as a single flightsuit, which Tano had purchased ‘just in case’, though in case of what, Maul still wasn’t sure. 

Tano looked up from her novel, fixing Maul with a firm gaze, and said, “You can still say no.”

“…I know,” Maul said. She hadn’t—had assumed that if she had changed her mind, Tano would…what, use the Force to bow her to her will? Suddenly, she felt silly. She plucked at the hem of her shirt, and then grabbed one of the other books and settled onto her bed, flipping through it without really looking at it. 

It was some sort of fictionalized account of a Mand’alor from centuries ago, and she tried to focus on the words, but soon enough, she realized that she had read the same paragraph five times and still didn’t have a clue what it had said. 

It was stupid. It was stupid and childish and immature of her to be worrying so much about something she had willingly agreed to, but she couldn’t help it, her hearts racing. Instinctively, she reached for rage, to bury herself in it—and stopped. 

Immersing herself in her anger had never done anything but delay her response to the problem, only let her ignore it for a time, until she became so exhausted from the cloying scent of hate and anger as it had ripped her apart stitch by stitch. The previous night…it hadn’t been perfect and it hadn’t fixed things, but Tano hadn’t promised it would, and it had… helped. 

Maybe, she mused, closing the book, it was worth a second shot. 

Even considering it felt tantamount to hiding rations—the night before, she could pretend as emotional volatility that Tano had taken advantage of, but now, in the light of day streaming in through the window, there was no such excuse. It was spitting in the face of her Master’s teachings—no, it was worse: a willing collusion in a ritual antithetical to Sith nature. If he ever found out…

A moment later, she frowned slightly. When had when changed into if? But the thought passed quickly—she had, she found, made up her mind already. She tucked her knees beneath her and closed her eyes, and let the swell of anxiety and fear rise and rise and rise—and then crash down, ebbing out and out and out until it was spread so thin she could barely feel it. 

It was there, she knew, and, though it was hard, she let herself sit with it, and accept it. It simply was, and it wouldn’t help her to pretend that it wasn’t—would only result in an emotional blow out later if she did, and that would leave her painfully vulnerable, she knew from hard experience. She let it sit, and breathed softly.

Suddenly, Tano’s voice broke through the strange serenity that she had fallen into. “Maul? Maul, we need to go—the Jedi are waiting for us.”

Maul blinked her eyes open, and nearly did a double take when, looking at the chrono on the wall, she found that over three quarters of an hour had passed. Quickly, she scrambled off the bed and to her feet, dropping the discarded novel onto the window sill. 

Tano looked amused, but she didn’t say anything, just turned towards the door. Maul followed behind her. 

They had entered the second hallway when a familiar silver Mandalorian bled out of the shadows in what would have been a credit to the best of Force users. “Verd’ika. Tano,” Jango nodded to them, falling into step so that Maul was between the older two. “You go to meet the jetiise?”

Tano hummed, but didn’t answer. “Yes,” Maul said, finally.

A soft, staticky exhale stuttered through the comms. “Do you want me to come?”

The question almost brought Maul to a stop, and, instinctively, she looked to Tano. The togruta raised a brow. “It’s up to Maul.”

She blinked. It… would be nice to have another familiar face there—and, if the Jedi tried anything, they would be outnumbered, which was an incredibly comforting thought. “Ok,” she said. “You can come.”

She couldn’t see through the opaque visor, but she got the sudden impression that Jango was smiling wolffishly. “Ori’jate,” he said. 

The halls seemed to stretch on and on, and they ran into a few other Mandalorians along the way, some of them returning to their own rooms after patrol, and a few small children in partial durasteel armor chasing each other, their laughter echoing off the walls, but eventually, they came to the room. 

It was small, but the outward facing wall was taken up almost entirely by large windows, and light streamed in from the midday sun,  making it well lit, and, more importantly, easy for the Mandalorians patrolling outside to notice if something happened to any of them. 

The two Jedi were facing the windows, hands clasped behind their backs, hoods down. The hunched one, who Tano had said was the Master, was hunched, the curve more noticeable in still. The padawan, though probably shorter when they were both straightened, stood a head taller, and wore a red head covering. When they entered, the Jedi turned and bowed in synchrony. “Thank you for agreeing to help us, youngling,” the Master said, his voice melodious and smooth—a sharp contrast to the gaunt, almost frail appearance of his face. She tried to place his species, and came up short. 

The padawan nodded. “You do us, and the galaxy, a great service,” he said. He was mirialan, with a band of black across his nose, and three diamonds impressed between his narrow brows. 

“I’m not doing it for the galaxy, and I’m not doing it for you,” Maul said, flatly. She didn’t say I’m doing this for Tano, and for Jango, and for myself. 

The padawan hummed, but didn’t address the comment. “You know how to enter a meditative state, right? Good,” he continued at Maul’s nod. “Your—Tano will augment your strength through the Force, and Master Dauwl will create a temporary bond that will allow him to view the memories you provide him. I will remain as an outside party to make sure none of you get pulled in too deep.”

“I’m staying,” Jango said, voice flat through the modulator, but clearly daring the padawan to argue. 

He didn’t; just tilted his head and looked at the Mandalorian for a long moment, before he said, mildly, “More help in case something goes wrong is never a bad idea.”

Maul got the distinct impression that they were having a silent conversation made up entirely of small twitches of their fingers and shifts of their stances. It was annoying. “Are we going to do this?” she demanded. 

That seemed to bring whatever it was to and end. “Take a seat,” the padawan said, and when she did, he gestured to Tano, having her sit next to Maul, and then directing Dauwl to sit across from them. He hovered for a moment, and then said, “Whenever you’re ready.”

For the second time that day, Maul closed her eyes and tried to enter a meditative state. It was both easier and harder than it had been on her bed—easier because now she had two prior attempts to go off of, but harder because she could practically feel the padawan’s gaze critically examining her. 

A familiar hand settled on her knee—Tano, the press of her fingers warm through the loose fabric of her pants, and Maul, surprising even herself, found herself relaxing incrementally. 

The soft murmur of the air around her seeped through her being, and she felt the press of a a large presence against her own—the sharp warmth of a mind, dry and with the high, thin note of a wind instrument hanging onto the edges. (tano?)

(let me support you) came the reply, expressed less in words and more in sensations and flashes of memories. (i don’t want you collapsing halfway through from exhaustion)

She hesitated for a beat before opening herself. A second later, a thread snapped into place, Tano’s mind withdrawing, though a thin pulse of warmth emanated from her to Maul. Maul stretched her senses, searching for the Jedi. 

It took a moment for her to find him—he was like a river smoothed stone, the rest of the world washing over him with barely a ripple, but when Maul brushed against him, he rose, unfolding. (are you ready?)

(yes) Maul said, and didn’t flinch when he pressed and pressed and pressed—

She stood in the center of three droids, top of the line and custom ordered from a remote, Outer Rim producer. They were twice her size, and each wielded its own, deadly weapon—a vibroblade the length of her arm, a baton crackling with electricity, and a disarmingly simple, built in blaster mechanism. 

Her Master watched, impassive, on top of a raised dias behind the one directly across from her. His hood was drawn forward, hiding his face in shadow. “Maul,” he said, without preamble, “your trial is thus: you will disable these droids without the aid of your lightsaber, or be destroyed yourself. Should you succeed, you will proceed to taking care of the current Senator of Naboo, Oelia Faa—she has been an obstacle to the Grand Imperative for too long.”

Maul nodded. “Yes, Master,” she said. 

He smiled, and flicked his hand. The droids hummed to life, instantly converging on her, and Maul spun, leaping to avoid the vibroblade aimed at her neck by a hair’s breadth. The Force hummed in warning, and she immersed herself into the sticky darkness of snarling anger at the situation her Master had forced her into, dodging a blaster bolt which burned a hole into the wall behind her. 

There—an opening: the elbow joint of Vibroblade. Maul lashed out, coating her skin with a thin layer of the Force, fist connecting with the joint and making the droid give out a low whine of protest as the metal buckled, the joint giving out, the blade flung side, and a second later, she whirled to avoid Baton, ducking under the strike and rising fluidly to deliver two sharp blows to its chassis. 

It sparked but continued undeterred, landing a glancing blow that knocked Maul back, stealing her breath and making her gaze flicker. Hatred coiled beneath her skin, and she snarled, hitting it hard on the shoulder and then the opposite leg, sending it into the wall with a crack. It slumped to the floor, and her vision cleared a bit, no longer forcing her to rely on the warnings from the Force as much—and not a moment too soon, because Blaster laid down a hail of fire, forcing Maul to leap and duck, hitting the ground and rolling, shoulder aching from the hard contact with the floor as she came to a crouch. 

She caught sight of her Master’s face, a thin frown visible, and instinctively, she froze in fear—an unfortunate lapse, because two blaster bolts seared into her shoulder, knocking her out of her crouch and to her knees. 

Lips curling, she shoved the pain away and jolted to the side just in time, turning and weaving under the bolts. Another glanced off her temple, making her head spin, and she snarled, leaping forward with a burst of power and sinking her fist through the chassis, curling her fingers around wire inards and pulling until they came free, the droid sparking and jolting and going still, toppling backwards, taking her, on its chest, down with it. 

She stood, dropping the wires, and turned—

Her Master’s face was a snarl of rage as he lunged towards her with terrifying agility, hood down, pale face framed by fire-red hair. “You weren’t to destroy them, you useless piece of filth ,” he hissed, and his hands reached out from his wide, dark sleeves, curled towards her in a terror-inducing, familiar stance, and then terrible red lightning was pouring forth, hitting Maul, and all she could feel was terror-anger-hate-pain and her very blood was on fire and her vision was red and boiling and she was falling falling falling falling—

Hands grasped her, two on her back and one on either shoulder, and she instinctively struggled in an attempt to get free—

(CALM) echoed a thigh, arid voice, and a wave of still-soft-easy washed over her, forcing her lungs out of their frantic rhythm. Her eyes snapped open, and she found her gaze swimming, until it finally focused on the two figures on either side of her—Jango and the padawan. 

“Are you ok?” the padawan asked, surprisingly gently. 

“She clearly isn’t,” Jango snapped. 

The padawan ignored her. “Take slow breaths,” he said, drawing exaggerated ones of his own. “I don’t know what you were remembering, but you’re ok now. You’re safe—so one’s hurting you. Tano—” he said something more, but it sounded garbled. Maul focused on breathing and closed her eyes. 

Some time later, when she didn’t feel like she was going to throw up, she opened them again. The padawan and Jango were still holding her, and Maul shrugged out of their grips, feeling vaguely embarrassed. “I’m fine,” she said. Tano was sitting a few paces from her, a worried expression clear on her face. Maul met her gaze and moved closer, so she pressed against the togruta’s side. “Is that—enough?” 

Her voice cracked a little on the word, and her cheeks heated. The two Jedi exchanged a glance. “Yes,” Dauwl said, “I do believe so. Thank you for your help, Maul.” With that, he rose, sweeping out of the room. 

The padawan shot a glance at Jango, and then followed. 

“Are you hurt?” Jango asked, pulling his helmet off and kneeling down in front of Maul, hands fluttering around her face. 

Maul shook her head. “No. Just—just bad memories. They’re gone now.” It was true—the pain and fear had mostly faded away. She offered a tentative smile. “Vor’e.”

He huffed. “N’entye,” he said firmly. “K’olaro, verd’ika, we will get you some spice cake. Then you will really feel better.” He offered her a hand. 

She took it. It was warm even through the fabric of his glove. Glancing at Tano, she tilted her head in question. 

The togruta nodded. “Go ahead,” she said, rising to her feet. “I have to speak with the Jedi one more time before they leave.”

“I’ll get you a piece,” Maul said, and held the smile that prompted close against her chest, following Jango out of the room. 

Chapter Text

A week after the Jedi departed, a set of greaves appeared in front of their rooms. Maul, who had opened the door to try and sneak down to the kitchens and see if there were any of the kih’kyre—baked bits of dough leftover from breads or pies, dusted with sugar or spice or a mixture of both—almost tripped over them, the not quite bright enough but not quite dark enough cast of the hallways making it hard for her to see as well as she normally could. 

She squinted at the floor, and then kneeled down, brushing her fingers—and a tendril of the Force—over what seemed to be a… something wrapped in a loosely woven fabric. Finding no obvious signs of danger, she picked it up and brought it inside, setting it on the counter. 

There was the quiet rustle of blankets moving, and a moment later, Tano’s eyes glinted in the corner her bed was in—something that Maul’s own also did, to the best of her knowledge, so it shouldn’t have made her almost startle. She pressed a hand into the fabric, meeting something hard once more, and felt strangely caught out—like when her Master had found that she had stolen pencil stubs and was drawing on the hard, pale underside of the plank that served as a bed. Unlike with Master, though, Maul was reasonably certain Tano wasn’t going to break her ribs for it. Despite that, though, she found her hearts racing. 

Tano didn’t say anything, just got out of bed gracefully, tugging the collar of her sleep shirt up against the chill, and crossed the distance. “Now who would be leaving gifts in the dead of night?” she muttered, stepping around Maul and folding back the fabric. She made no move to touch Maul. Maul’s heart rate evened out. 

A moment later, her searching revealed two curved metal strips with a small, black layer of padding on the inside—greaves, Maul recognised, after a moment, dredging up the term from one of the times Jango had insisted on taking her aside and teaching her the names of all the pieces of a set of beskar’gam. Going by the shine, visible even in the wavering half light filtering in through the drawn curtains, they were beskar, also. 

Maul cocked her head to the side, and tried to think of why someone would give Tano beskar greaves. The togruta was perfectly capable of defending herself and avoiding injury, so it couldn’t be that. 

Tano, who had been staring at the two items, folded the cloth back over, and let out a long sigh—the kind that Maul was coming to learn meant a mixture of frustration and shock. Rather than say anything, though, she went back to her bed and sat down on it in a ramrod straight meditation pose, the Force around her swelling in the way that meant she was drawing on it for strength.

It also meant that she would prefer to be alone —something she had told Maul frankly, a few days before, when something had brought up bad memories, and Maul had felt that swell, and had fallen instinctually into a fearful readiness, her only experience with the occurence that of Master drawing on the Force before meting out a punishment of particularly gruesome proportions.

So Maul went down to the kitchens. At this hour, there weren’t many in them—just a couple of Mandalorians around Jango’s age, in minimal beskar’gam, a deep blue nautolan and a yellow, lanky zabrak. She was fairly certain that the nautolan was Clan Awaud, going by the symbol on her pauldron, a common one to see in the stronghold, since Clan Awaud was one of Mandalore Mereel’s largest supporters. Jango had told her a story about how their leader, Ave Beroya, had once saved his father’s life by realising his backplate had been sliced off during a particularly intense fight and covered his weakness with his own body. That particular story had been related during a sparring session resulting from an argument about Maul wearing some form of armor, where Jango had pinned her to the floor and gently pressed a knife to her back as a way to make his point. Maul still refused to wear any regularly, but she had reluctantly agreed to a durasteel chest and back plate for any sparring sessions she had with him. He had also hinted at her eventually sparing with the other Mandos in his age group, claiming that it would be good for her to have experience with a wide range of fighting skills, but she had flatly told him no, not ready to trust anyone else that much.

The zabrak was rolling out some dough, a round cutter off to the side along with another ball of dough and a bowl of spiced and finely chopped meat and vegetables next to it. She was conversing in an unfamiliar language with the nautolan, who was leaning against the counter. When she spotted Maul, her large, orange eyes covered briefly with thin, nearly-translucent eyelids, and then she grinned, nudging the zabrak. “Look, Aam’, it’s Jan’ika’s vod. Hey, kid, you wanna help us with the blasties?”

Maul scowled at her on instinct. “I’m not his vod,” she said. “And I just came to get some kih’kyr.”

The zabrak, who had left off rolling the dough, turned around to raise a brow at her. “Only because if his buir tried to say the vows to you Tano would throw a fit.”

“She’s a former Jedi, I don’t think they’re allowed to throw fits, like, religiously,” Awaud said, but gave Maul a speculative glance. “Kih’kyre, eh? I knew that more had been going missing recently. How about this—you help Aamos with the blasties, and I’ll give you the biggest one in the box?”

“Instead of bribing the adiik, you could just come help me yourself, like you’re supposed to, Meven,” the zabrak said, sounding exasperated. “You were the one wanted blasties in the first place—I don’t know why I’m the one getting my hands dirty.”

“Vinegar damages the sensitive dermal layers of nautolan hands,” Meven said, which sounded like a well rehearsed phrase, and also utterly unrepentant. 

“I haven’t even started on the filling yet,” Aamos retorted. “You’re just a sharalyc shebs’palon, Vesta Meven.”

“I’ll help,” Maul cut in, before they could devolve into further bickering. “But only if I get two kih’kyre.”

Meven grinned, eyes narrowing and headtails twitching at Aamos’ irritated expression. “Sure thing, kid. Hey, be happy, Aam’, you’re getting extra hands—ones that aren’t going to tear the dough apart when they try and fill them.”

“ One time,” Aamos said with a long, overly deep sigh. “Fine. Meven, get the adiik her kih’kyre. You—grab a stool and bring it over here so you can actually reach.”

Maul didn’t. She wasn’t that short, and she probably had a growth spurt coming up. Aamos rolled her eyes, but didn’t say anything. So, once she had finished the kih’kyre, Maul took the empty space on Aamos’ other side, and began rolling out the other ball of dough.

By the time they had cut out the circles and filled them all and set them into the oil to fry, others had come into the kitchen to work on other dishes, so Maul grabbed another kih’kyr and ducked around them, making her way back towards her and Tano’s quarters.

Tano was still meditating, though the tenseness in her posture had subsided somewhat, and at some point she had shifted so her knees were tucked under her rather than crossed over reach other. Maul grabbed a change of clothes and ducked into the fresher.

When she came out, Tano was just in the process of stretching, eyes blinking slowly as they adjusted to the light of the room. “There you are,” she said. “Thanks for letting me meditate.”

Maul nodded. “I had other things to do anyway,” she said. “Are we having firstmeal in here or with the others?”

Tano hesitated for a moment. “With the others,” she said. “I don’t feel like cooking today.” It didn’t sound like a lie , exactly, but Maul could tell that that definitely wasn’t the main reason for her decision. It made Maul feel on edge. Instinctively, she found herself shifting her weight and hunching her shoulders in an attempt to look smaller before she remembered that Tano was unlikely to lash out at her, and forced herself to relax.

“Okay,” she said, and grabbed the handheld datapad from where it was tucked to the side of the counter, and pointedly didn’t look at the fold of fabric sitting prominently in the middle of the counter, where Tano had left it earlier.

When firstmeal came around, Maul had gotten through a third of one of the books she had found on the local holonet library, aimed at prospective Mandalorians looking to learn the language. Maul wasn’t sure how she felt about the concept of herself being a Mandalorian, but the book was useful, so she had set aside the strange tangle of emotions. 

“C’mon, kid, it’s time to get something to eat,” Tano called, and Maul looked up, finding that she had changed out of her sleepwear and into a loose shirt and pants, with her typical wide fabric belt at her waist and her sabers on either hip. A datapad of her own sat off to the side of the counter where she had been sitting. She had picked up the bundle of fabric, and held it delicately, her posture tense once again.

Maul didn’t say anything, just turned her datapad off and dropped it on the bed, making her way out the door. Tano didn’t try and talk on the way to the dining hall, and Maul couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not—part of her was relieved, and part of her was fearful.

When they entered the room, about half the seats were filled with a variety of Mandalorians, some in almost full beskar’gam, while others only wore a limited amount. Mereel was in the middle of the table, talking animatedly in the Mando’a with the devaronian sitting at his side. Jango was on his other side, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else, the tell tale signs of boredom practically shouting themselves to those within seeing distance.

When he caught sight of Maul, his expression brightened slightly, but before he could say anything, Tano spoke. “Mand’alor, ni ne’lise vore beskar’gam.”

The chatter that had carried around the room a moment before stuttered to a halt, and multiple people twisted to stare at them—no, at Tano. It took a moment for Maul to piece together what she had said, but by that time, Mereel was speaking. “Why not?” he asked, his voice higher in Basic than in Mando’a, and lacking the melodious quality.

Tano twitched slightly, looking startled. “I—I haven’t earned it,” she said. “I’ve done nothing—”

“You’ve protected your aliit,” Mereel interrupted. “You have protected me, the Mand’alor. You speak as we do, and you have contributed to the welfare of the clans under House Mereel.”

“I haven’t raised any children,” Tano protested, shifting her stance. Across the room, Jango rolled his eyes. 

Mereel raised a brow. “Then what is Maul? A phantom that you feed and clothe and protect and train? You may not have said the vows, but she is your child, Tano. Unless she wishes to contest that point—Maul?” He turned his gaze towards her.

Instinctively, Maul opened her mouth—and then stopped. Tano…was exactly what she had wished for from Master, when she was younger—a comforting presence, one that praised her and watched over her and, when necessary, helped her. The realization made her cheeks burn. “...no,” she said, finally.

Tano’s head jerked towards her, and she stared at Maul, shock written clear across her face before disappearing a moment later.

Mereel laughed, throaty and rolling. “Ori’jate,” he said. “You’ve earned more than just greaves, Ser Tano, but they’re a good starting point, I think, for you to get used to the weight. Jii, k’olaro epa.”

Maul, who knew enough Mando’a to understand the meaning of the phrase when paired with the context, made her way to the empty seat next to Jango, who had been gesturing for her to come sit down next to him, and quickly piled familiar fried dumplings, some bread, a helping of some sort of mashed root vegetable, and a small bowl of sauce onto her plate. “Eat, Maul’ika,” he commanded. “You need muscle.”

“My muscles are fine, ” Maul said, glad that he hadn’t said anything about what had happened moments before. The rest of the room had gone back to their respective conversations, too, which made Maul relax slightly. 

“Maul, can you…help me with something?” Tano asked from behind her, and a moment later, sat down next to her. The fabric in her hands had been unfolded, and the greaves were bared. It took a moment for Maul to realize what she was asking.

Without meaning to, she smiled. “Sure,” she said, and popped the dumpling she had been eating into her mouth and grabbed one of the greaves, waiting for Tano to draw her leg up before working on fastening it.

“Your buir is more formidable than I remember accounts of him showing,” Tano said to Jango as she fasted the last strap on her right leg. 

Jango laughed. “Trust me, I know,” he said.

Maul ripped off a chunk of bread, chewing on it, and revelled in the strange emotion that had welled up in her at Mand’alor Mereel’s words and had only grown stronger, radiating from her chest out to her fingers and toes, made only stronger when she caught sight of the glint of light off Tano’s greaves. 

Around her, the others carried on, the atmosphere comfortable.

Chapter Text

Over the following days, more pieces of beskar’gam appeared before their door. Maul was never able to find out who it was, but she had a strong suspicion that it was probably Jango. Regardless, as more and more of the armor was fastened to Tano—oftentimes with Maul’s help—she noticed that the almost imperceptible sense of tenseness and discomfort began to fade. She also, despite the initial moments of awkward movement, adapted surprisingly quickly to the extra weight while training, which made Maul wonder if she had worn it before. She didn’t ask, though—they had, at some point, wordlessly agreed to never intentionally seek out information from each others’ pasts, which, despite the curiosity that sometimes tugged at the corners of Maul’s mind, was something she found herself glad of—almost none of her life prior to Tano finding her was anything she wanted to relive or remember much.

About a week later, Tano was gone when she woke up. One of the datapads was on, sitting on the neatly-made bed, with a note pulled up on it. gone to the armorer, it said, will be gone late, and then, at the bottom, there was a dash and the name tano with two characters put together in a resemblance of a simplistic smiling face.

Maul stared at it, confusion churning through her. Why would Tano add her name? It wasn’t like there was anyone else who would have left the datapad. And why the…face? Was it some sort of strange togrutan custom for them to add stylized depictions of facial expressions to their messages? 

She shook her head. It was probably a pointless line of thought—Tano’s quirks were often things that thinking about too much lead to a certain sense of frustrated madness. Not for the first time, she wondered if that was a calculated, intentional act on the togruta’s side. Instead, she cleared the note off the screen and navigated to the collection of books that she and Tano had accumulated between them, and opened what she was fairly certain was a pirated copy of a chiss drama that Jango had sent her a few days back.

Soon enough, though, the constant interpersonal politics and class divide induced drama made her eyes swim and her brain go numb from the overload of information, and she set the datapad down with a scowl. There wasn’t much else she could do—not with Jango doing something with the Mand’alor’s intelligence division and Tano busy at the armorer’s, and thus leaving her with no one to spar with, and nothing new to read since, aside from some technical manuals and academic books, she had read everything, with the chiss drama— The Darkening Tide, apparently the first in a series of at least five novels—being the last unread novel on the datapad.

That only left two things: wandering the halls and hoping to find something to do along the way…and exploring outside. The former was unlikely to produce anything worthwhile, but the latter was something that Tano had expressly forbidden. She had muttered something about a ‘garden of a thousand fountains’ and how it was unfortunate that nothing like it existed on Mandalore, but hadn’t expanded on what she meant, so Maul had assumed it had something to do with her past.

Maul let herself collapse backwards onto the bed with a drawn out sigh. She hit the mattress with a soft thump and the sense of being momentarily compressed, which would normally have been incredibly pleasant, but didn’t do anything but make her feel even more morose. She stared at the ceiling, squinting to search for hair-thin cracks and tiny pits in an attempt to entertain herself, which failed absolutely miserably. 

She sighed again, this time more emphatically, and tilted her head back so that her horns pressed against the mattress, the pressure briefly satisfying before it faded away before the tide of irritated boredom. The problem, she thought, unhappily, was that she didn’t have any experience being anything but a weapon. Orsis, maybe, was the closest to what little she knew of ‘normal childhood’, but even that was, she suspected, a far stretch. The truth was that she was used to being told what to do with no room given for interpretation, on threat of punishment should she deviate, so now, with vast stretches of free time, she didn’t have a single clue of what she was meant to do. Up until today, either Jango or Tano had always been free to spar with her or even just talk to her, and that, along with meditation and finishing the books, had filled up most of the time that she wasn’t sleeping, leaving little room for her to become bored.

Pressing her eyes shut, Maul tried as hard as she could to come up with something else to do, and came up blank. Wandering the halls and exploring outside were her only options.

Fine. Well, then, she’d just do that.

Leveraging herself up onto her elbow, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stomped over to the door, pulling it open more harshly than was probably necessary, and slammed it behind her. That was satisfying, at least for a few moments as the sound echoed behind her, before it was replaced with the sound of her boots against the stone floors.

In the month since Tano had landed the ship on Mandalore’s surface, she had gotten decently familiar with the layout of the stronghold, enough so that she was able to navigate without finding herself lost in the halls. It helped that there were intermittent markers on the walls—tapestries and what she thought were paintings—to help remind her of where she was, but she would have more than likely been able to tell after a few moments of thought even without—the halls of the stronghold Master had kept her in were uniform in shape and size with no obvious markers, and so Maul had gotten good at telling where she was without them, a necessary skill when being caught outside her room without permission would result in harsh punishment.

She walked the east wing, which was where their rooms were, and then looped back around and made her way through the west wing, occasionally catching sight of Mandalorians on their way to or from one place or another, but almost all of them were adults, and none of the ones that appeared to be children stopped to try and talk to her. Finally, Maul ended up in front of the door to their rooms once more, frustration welling up thick inside her, and she wanted to—to destroy something.

Instead, she drew upon the Force to fling the door open hard enough that it banged against the wall, and swept into the room. The chrono told her that it had been less than an hour, which just made her mood grow even darker.

There was only one option left—to go exploring outside. Normally, Maul would have hesitated more than a bit, since Tano had forbidden it, but right now, with the roiling sensation of boredom and irritation and general foul mood that burned through her veins, the thought of disobeying her felt like a suitable response to the fact that she had left Maul alone with nothing to do. And besides, it wasn’t like she’d be out for long—she’d take a large flask of water and the datapad with her so she could find her way back, and she’d be back before Tano even knew she was gone, which wouldn’t be hard because Jango wasn’t on perimeter patrol and it wasn’t likely that any of the others knew that she wasn’t supposed to be outside alone.

Mind made up, she went through the cabinets, grabbing the largest water flask, and filled  it to the brim with water, and then took the datapad from where she had left it on the bed, putting it and the flask into one of the large bags she managed to find. Already, she could feel the boredom fading away and excitement taking its place.

The sound of her boots against the stone floor sounded almost expectant this time, and she smiled sharply as she got closer and closer to the doors. Finally, she came to the doors, and paused. There were two guards standing on the other side, she knew, and despite the certainty that she wouldn’t be stopped, she still found herself hesitating. 

It was foolish. She squared her shoulders and tugged on the strap of the bag, and then pushed the doors open. 

The two guards didn’t so much as twitch, their black visors staring out staidly, and Maul took one step, and then another, and then she was past them.

The first breath felt like a triumph, hot air scorching her lungs, and she burned, but it felt good. She broke into a run, the hard ground pounding against her feet, and a sudden, delighted laugh ripped its way from her throat, high and sharp. 

When she came to a stop, the stronghold was barely visible in the distance, and all around her, the desert buzzed. Small insects and reptiles skittered across the ground, and here and there, in the cracks and wedged between sandy orange rocks, were hints of plant life—greyish green, mostly, and bent into shapes by the winds that howled across the land so frequently, but some of them had small, defiant blossoms, pinks and reds and yellows. 

Maul sat down and pulled out the flask, taking a greedy gulp of water, and wished that she had a holocam to record photos with. The sun had begun its descent, and it was no longer oppressively hot, but she could still feel sweat at the nape of her neck and beading up at the base of her horns. 

She rose, wiping it away, and tucked the flask back into the bag, and continued walking. 

As the sun dipped lower, the wildlife became more prevalent, and Maul saw multiple of what that looked something like a cross between a bird and a small mammal. When they caught sight of her, they froze for a moment before letting out a shrill string of chattering sounds before quickly disappearing into what Maul assumed were entrances to their burrows.

Finally, exhaustion began to creep up on her, and she pulled out the datapad, quickly opening up the navigation program. She was fairly certain she knew in which direction she needed to go, but it didn’t hurt to be certain. Taking another gulp of water, she turned, following the path plotted out on the screen.

Finally, as the sun began to dip below the horizon, she came to the stronghold. It wasn’t hard to get back inside, since the guards knew she was allowed in, so she quickly made her way towards her and Tano’s quarters, rounding the last corner—and nearly slammed into beskar.

“Jango!” she said, once the familiar pattern registered. “I thought you were…busy.” It sounded lame, and also incredibly suspicious. Stupid, stupid, she berated herself.

Jango, helmet tucked under one arm, stared at her flatly. “You have been outside,” he said—not a question, but a statement. “Tano has been looking for you.”

Kriff, she thought, because she felt that the situation deserved it. She wasn’t supposed to be back until after sunset. “Really?” she said, forcing her posture to remain in exhaustion induced laxness. “Well, I’ll just—go see her.”

“Yes,” Jango said, “I think you should.” He sounded—sharp. Maul couldn’t feel his Force presence, which wasn’t anything new, but the tenseness of his expression made her want to drop into an instinctive defensive position. 

Without saying another word, he stepped neatly around her and disappeared around the corner, leaving Maul alone. There was nothing to do but continue on to their rooms.

The bag on her shoulder suddenly felt heavy. When she came to a stop in front of the door, her throat was drier than it should have been—drier than the packed ground of the desert she had been in only minutes before With fumbling fingers, she grabbed the flask and took one last, desperate drink, and then put it away, and opened the door.

Chapter Text

The inside of the room was quiet, almost unnaturally so. Tano was standing facing the window, her back to the door, wearing all the pieces of beskar’gam except the helmet, modified to accommodate her leku and montrals, which sat on her bed. The lights had been turned on, but somehow, despite knowing that they were the same intensity as always, it felt like the glow they cast over her was sickly and pale.

Maul set the bag down on the counter, and stopped. She wasn’t—she didn’t know what to say. Her senses were caught up in the painful turmoil of hot-dry-cold-terror that made her hearts rise to her throat and her palms clammy. 

Thankfully, Tano took the decision from her, and turned, fixing her with an inscrutable expression. “You went outside by yourself, even though I told you not to, ” she said, and her voice was careful and so, so wrong. Maul’s shoulders tensed, and she instinctively took a half step backwards.

Without thinking, words tumbled forth in a terrified jumble. “I—I was only gone for a little bit and I came back before night and I—”

“ Maul, ” Tano snapped, and suddenly her presence was looming, and the room was so, so cold and all Maul could see was the figure of Master in front of her, hissing about how much she had failed and how useless she was, and she flinched, instinctively bracing herself for punishment and baring her mind in an attempt to prove that she wasn’t hiding anything and maybe, maybe mitigate it and—

“I’m sorry Master,” she whispered, forcing herself to resist the instinctive urge to retreat, her skin burning with anticipation for the lighting that she knew would race across the room and over her form. “I’ll do better next time, I won’t fail you, I—”

“ Maul, ” he snarled, and advanced on her, and she pressed her eyes shut—

And drew in a sharp breath when the only thing she felt were hands pressing against her shoulders. She didn’t— couldn’t open her eyes, but the Force still hummed around and through her, and she could sense his presence, and it was…afraid?

No—that didn’t make sense. Why would he be afraid? She was the one who was afraid, not him.

The grip on her shoulders tightened, and, once more, he said, “Maul!” but—no. That wasn’t—that wasn’t him, that wasn’t Master, he would never say her name like that, half fearful and half desperate.

“Maul, can you look at me?” he asked. “You’re with me on Mandalore, Maul, and I’m not Sidious. Breathe. No one’s going to hurt you.”

At the command, she instinctively drew in a shuddering breath, and then another, and another. The panic receded, at least a bit. The room no longer felt freezing, just cold, and not unnaturally so. The hands on her weren’t Master’s—they were too gentle, despite how tightly they had been gripping her moments before. And the Force presence—it wasn’t…

She swallowed thickly and opened her eyes. Tano was peering down at her, a jumble of emotions flickering across her expression in turns. “I didn’t mean to…to trigger bad memories,” Tano said. “I’m—I’m sorry, Maul.”

Maul nodded. She didn’t know what else to do.

Tano released her, and picked up the helmet from her bed, turning it in her hands and keeping her gaze fixed on it. “I’m still upset at you,” she said. “But I…” She sighed. “I shouldn’t have let my emotions overrun me.” Her lips twisted, as if to a joke that only she understood. “Sit,” she said, gesturing to Maul’s bed, and sat down on her own. “Let’s try this again.”

Hesitantly, motions stiff and jerky and wariness still keeping her vision sharp and her heartrate elevated, Maul sat. Rather than let her hands twist at the hem of her shirt like she wanted to, she forced herself to sit still, back straight and eyes fixed firmly on the wall to the left of Tano’s chin.

“I…” Tano tapped against the helmet in her lap, before continuing. “I’m not upset because you did something I told you not to,” she said, carefully. “I’m upset because you broke a rule that I made to try and keep you safe. I was—I was afraid that you would get hurt again.” She pressed her eyes shut, and let out a long sigh. “I remember being your age—I hated being told to do things that, in my mind, there wasn’t any good reason for. I should have explained why I wanted you to not go outside by yourself. That was…a mistake on my part.”

Maul blinked at her, silent not only out of habit but out of shock. Tano had…admitted she had made a mistake. A mistake that she didn’t have to admit to, that most people wouldn’t, in her experience, even consider a mistake. Everyone she had known would have simply taken out their anger on Maul without a second thought.

Tano didn’t seem to notice her shock. “But…you did disobey me, so there will have to be consequences. I think a week of being banned from sparring is probably enough.”

That brought Maul up short—this time, not out of shock, but out of a sudden burst of frustration. “Well then what am I supposed to do? ” she demanded, unable to stem the words. “I’m so, so bored, and I’ve read all the books, and if I can’t spar then there’s nothing I can do!” Tears pricked at her eyes, hot and sharp and thick, and she scrubbed at her eyes furiously in an attempt to stem them.

“…did you…did you leave because you were bored? ” Tano asked, sounding baffled, and then, “that…actually makes a lot of sense.”

Maul pressed her lips together, still fighting back tears. Whatever she did or said, it was unlikely to change Tano’s decision, so it was pointless.

Tano set the helmet aside and caught her gaze. “You’re still banned from sparring for a week, but…I’ll figure something out for you. Now, it’s late—we should eat something.” With that, she stood and made her way into the kitchen, the conversation clearly over.

Maul remained on the bed. Her heartbeats had slowed a bit, but when she tried to move, her body stuttered like a badly rendered hologram. The tears, at least, had stopped trying to escape from her eyes, so she pulled her hands away, wiping them off on the dark fabric of her pants, and took stock of the situation.

All in all, it wasn’t too bad. She had gone against Tano’s command, yes, but apparently, the togruta didn’t have any interest in physically punishing her. It was better than she could have hoped for, even if the punishment she did give Maul was one that would leave her increasingly frustrated and painfully bored over the course of the next five days. But boredom and frustration she could survive.

She kept that thought close to her chest as Tano got dinner together, and as they ate in silence, and with her until she fell asleep that night.

The next morning, Tano was gone once more. This time, there was no note, the datapads left dark on the counter. With nothing else to do, Maul dug through the cabinets for some dried meat and then made herself some of the cereal from the strange red grains that were used in so many dishes on Mandalore and added some shakily diced fruit on top of it. It didn’t look very nice, but Maul had spent years eating things that looked, and tasted, significantly worse.

When she finished, she took a long shower. The memory of Master’s hands on her, even if it had only been a memory of a memory, made her skin crawl, and she scrubbed at it until it was raw and the pressure of the water against it hurt. She welcomed the pain, grounding herself in the sensation, because it was better than thinking about the night before, in all its horrible, terrifying, and confusing multitude.

After getting dressed, she hunted around for something, anything , to do, and came up with nothing. Making something to eat and taking a shower had barely taken up an hour, and had only briefly put off the inevitable, crushing boredom that now tugged at her mind and burrowed into her bones, making her feel restless and hopeless.

She wanted—she wanted to destroy something, to rip it apart and see the results of her work laid bare before her. For the first time she could remember, she found herself missing the brutal sessions with the training droids that Master had forced upon her.

With nothing else to do, she made a loop around the room, and then another, pacing back and forth, back and forth, back and—

Suddenly, the sound of the door opening pierced through the oppressive, prickling silence that had fallen, and Maul’s head instinctively snapped towards the noise, and found Tano, two box and a few pieces of wood and a piece of fabric held between two loops of duraplast piled high in her arms.

Without meaning to, Maul stared at her. She wanted to ask what in the stars the items in her arms were for, but she didn’t trust herself not to say something— wrong.

Thankfully, Tano seemed to have read her expression as baffled, and said, “These are for you. Since you can’t spar—I realized that you didn’t know what else to do, so I asked around for some stuff.” Setting the items on the counter, she spread them out. “Come, look and see if any of them are interesting.”

Hesitantly, Maul turned, stepping away from the now well trodden circuit she had been taking around the room, and made her way over to the counter. Tano stepped back to allow her to get a better view, and Maul took in the items.

As she had noted, there was a box of what appeared to be various tools, some blocks of wood, and the piece of fabric between the two loops. There was also a piece of flimsi with boxes filled with different numbers in some sort of pattern, and a small, clear bag of what looked like numerous colored strands of thread.

“The wood and the tools are for carving,” Tano explained, opening the box and taking out a small tool with a blade worked into the end of the flat piece of metal attached to it. “You can make objects from the wood, or just carve patterns into them. The fabric and the thread,” she indicated the items, “are for embroidering—the flimsi has a pattern that tells you where to use each color of thread to make the finished piece. I figured you didn’t have a lot of experience with it, so I just asked for a simple geometric one.”

Maul remained silent. She wasn’t sure what to say— how to say it. Noticing her silence, Tano added, “Of course, if you don’t want to do any of it, that’s fine too, I just thought I’d offer.”

For the second time in as many days, tears stung at Maul’s eyes—this time welling up too suddenly for her to do anything about them. They spilled over her cheeks, hot and thick, and Tano made a sudden noise of alarm. “Do you not like them? I can—I can always go look for something else—”

“I don’t—I like them fine, I just— why? ” Maul managed to demand between shuddering gasps of air, and dragged her sleeve across her eyes to try and mop up the tears. It didn’t work very well, mostly just leaving her sleeve soaked as more rose to take their place. “You don’t have to—to be so—so nice to me. What do you want? ”

Tano’s face twisted with startlement, and then softened, and suddenly, Maul found herself swept up into an embrace, her face pressing against the cool beskar of the togruta’s chestplate. “ Maul, ” Tano said, her voice cracking and desperate, “the only thing I want is to make sure you’re safe and taken care of.”

Maul drew in a gasping breath, and then another. Slowly, her breathing even out, though she remained pressed against Tano. She found, suddenly, that she didn’t want to let go—didn’t want to leave the warm, comforting embrace.

Eventually, though, she forced herself to step back. Tano’s arms fell away easily from her, clearly an attempt to show that she wasn’t going to trap Maul, which—made something strange flutter in Maul’s chest. She wiped at her eyes again, which had finally stopped tearing up. “I don’t know how to do either of those things,” she said, gesturing to the items on the counter, an unspoken entreaty she wasn’t sure Tano would understand.

Tano’s lips twisted. “How about I show you?” she said, picking up the took and the block of wood once more. 

Maul’s breath caught for a moment before evening out. “Fine,” she said, but she found herself smiling back.

Chapter Text

One month passed, and then two, and then three. Maul worked on embroidery, and on carving, and did not spar with anyone, even after the week’s ban had been met out. At first, she told herself it was simply because she was used to not sparing. Eventually, late at night, when she had woken with the arching, crackling terror of Force lightning burned across the insides of her eyelids, she admitted to herself—and only herself—that the true reason was because she didn’t— couldn’t trust.

The realization made angry tears well up in her eyes, frustration sharp on her tongue. What had changed? She had trusted them, had been willing to let them get close to her with their own blades, sure that they would never use that lapse to hurt her.

And yet—when she thought about Tano clashing a burning white blade against one held in her own grip, or the clack of durasteel against durasteel, Jango’s larger form coming to bear on her, she shuddered without meaning to; flinched away from the mere concept of it.

Jango didn’t notice, or if he did, he didn’t say anything. He had gotten progressively busier with his father’s Intelligence branch, and barely had enough time to eat and attend to his patrols, let alone time to spar with Maul. For that, Maul found herself achingly, bitterly glad.

Tano had definitely noticed—but after the first time she had suggested it and been shot down, she didn’t push. Something told Maul that she would have, once upon a time—maybe years ago, maybe even just months ago, but for whatever reason, now, she didn’t. 

It felt like a betrayal. She had bared herself to them, and now, for reasons she couldn’t fathom, she couldn’t bring herself to do so again; found her breaths quicken, her field of vision narrow at the thought of doing so.

So she worked on the other things—on the hobbies Tano had supplied her with, and tried not to think to hard about the fact that it had been Tano who had supplied them, because if she did, she wasn’t sure she could breathe.

The embroidery was the harder of them—it required both precision and patience, and an unerring willingness to press ahead even when she had done the same stitch a hundred times already and her hand ached from holding the thin needle. In the months since the hoop had first made its appearance in their rooms, she had only gotten a third of the way through the design—mainly the blues and browns, though in the past few days, she had managed to begin on the reds, too. The pattern was a simplified version of an ancient Mandalorian House emblem, when they had been taung rather than a diverse mix of species.

She was in the middle of working on the deep red for the upper left corner when the door to the room opened. Instinctively, she tensed, eyes flicking upwards to catch a glimpse of who it was.

Tano—of course it was her. She was clad in full beskar’gam—she had been going on patrols for the Mand’alor, since she had completed her armor, scouting, as far as Maul was aware, though she didn’t talk about it. Sometimes, she’d be gone for multiple days at a time, though so far it had never been more than three. Even though Maul couldn’t relax fully around her, she found it harder to fall asleep at night without the togruta’s voice winding through the litany of names in her Rememberances. 

She pushed the needle through the fabric; brought it over and down and through and repeated the process, producing five lines of increasing length, pressed tight together. That had been the hardest thing to learn—to press them together so that they produced an almost silken appearance. Tano’s helmet hissed as it was removed.

“It’s the wet season on Jedha,” she said, without preamble. “Traditionally, when someone goes to collect kyber crystals there, they do it in the wet season. The scant rain is said to give those who are touched by it a blessing.”

“You think that it’s time for me to build a lightsaber,” Maul said, flatly, without looking up from the hoop, supported at the ridge by her free hand, held just high enough that she could push the needle down and up again but not so far that the angle put stress on her wrist. She didn’t say, I don’t know if I’m ready. Didn’t say, I think there’s something broken in me. None of those would make a difference. Maybe they would have if Tano was a Jedi, and Maul was her Padawan, but they were neither, and so it meant nothing. They both knew she was proficient with a blade, and in the measure of things, that was what mattered.

Tano’s footsteps traversed into the kitchen, her helmet set down with a soft chnik on the counter. The wide, black pot was set on the stove, its distinctive soft scrape demarcating it, and a moment later, a blade began to hit the cutting board, the weft of it cutting through meat, the sound distinctive even from a distance. “Yes,” she said. “Much longer, and you risk becoming reliant on a crystal that isn’t attuned to you.”

Maybe she thought that giving Maul her own lightsaber would make her want to spar again. Maul didn’t know. In the end, it didn’t really matter. Maul tied off the deep red and threaded the needle in the strands of dying orange sunlight. In, out. In, out. “When do we leave?”

The meat crackled as it fell into the oil of the pot, joined, a moment later, by the aroma of spices, tinged with the edge of bittersweetness. Moratta root—ground and turned into a paste, mixed with a pinch of aurenic peppercorn and dried sb’yn bark, for meats with a distinctive flavor of their own; meant to complement, rather than overwhelm, but leave the tongue burning nonetheless. The heat began to permeate the room. Maul drew another ten stitches before Tano spoke. “Tomorrow morning,” she said. “The Mand’alor’s giving us a week’s leave.”

They wouldn’t be the first time journey to Jedha for kyber crystals—in fact, during the Old Republic, it was the main source for Force users, even Sith, as the planet held neutral. But Maul had been—not expecting, not anticipating, not hoping, but… something. She had thought they would have gone to Ilum. Tano was no longer a Jedi, but for some reason, she’d thought the tradition would have held. Apparently not.

She finished the pentagon, and moved downwards, leaping an off white chasm to the beginnings of the crescent. “Do I need to bring anything?”

The stove clicked off, plates clattering against each other as they were removed. “No,” Tano said. “Well—maybe long sleeved clothing. It helps with the sand.” Her tone was amused, and when Maul looked up, only incrementally, just enough to see her face over the counter, her eyes were crinkled slightly at the corners as she smiled down at the plates of food.

Maul secured the needle in the corner of the taut fabric, and stowed it away under the bed. They ate in silence. The meat was good, and Tano had made a small salad for her, which covered the dietary gap between the omnivorous nature of zabraks and the obligate carnivorism of togruta, consisting of fleshy green vegetables and tart red fruits, with a bitter dressing. 

After the meal, Tano left and came back with a sturdy, brown suitcase, and a cream colored one. The brown one she gave to Maul, and didn’t say anything as Maul haphazardly threw her datapad, the embroidery hoop and thread, and the smaller cubes of wood and carving tools, along with a few changes of clothes, into the suitcase, before shutting it and shoving it to the end of her bed.

The next day, they made the trek out to where Tano’s spaceship had been moved to. Well supplied with water, and somewhat more acclimated to the aridity, Maul’s nose and throat didn’t feel quite as cracked and pained as they had the first time they had made the trip.

The ship was the same as Maul remembered it being—small, but well lit. For the first time, Maul wondered how she had gotten the ship.

Tano put their luggage in their rooms, and then began inputting the travel routes and prepping for takeoff. In this part of the planet, there wasn’t aircontrol, like there would be in larger cities like Keldabe or Sundari, so each individual ship was responsible for takeoff and landing procedures. 

Maul left her to it, and went to the bedroom that Tano had put her suitcase in. It stood neatly upright just inside the door, not far from the small closet. The bed took up most of the space, and there was a small desk that folded up onto the wall. Opposite the bed was a small, round window. At the moment, it showed the orange-brown of the desert outside. At this distance, none of the small but tenacious signs of life were visible. Soon, the only view outside would be that of the dark, soundless void.

Maul laid her suitcase on the floor, and opened it up slowly, listening to the sound of the zipper. The sound of the automated systems from the cockpit filtered in distantly. Tano would be busy for at least another twenty minutes. 

She let the top of the suitcase fall back, hitting the ground with a clattering impact, and pulled one of the chunks of wood out, along with the carving tools meant for the rougher work, before the final details were ready to be etched out. The block was half formed, with what was looking like some sort of animal beginning to emerge from it. Truthfully, Maul didn’t really think about what she was doing when she carved—just let her whims and instincts guide her.

Closing the suitcase back up, she put it in the corner, and sat on the floor, back pressed up against the wall beneath the window, and set the tools down in her lap, before picking up the largest one and setting it against the wood, closing her eyes.

The blade shaved against the softer material, her hands guided by intuition. Beneath her, the ship rumbled to life, and began to lift off. Her grip on the tool and the emerging figure didn’t falter. The metal pressed against wood, and then moved, and then pressed again, removing excess, the process repeated over and over again.

Finally, the ship steadied beneath her as it tore free from the atmosphere and its turbulence and broke out into clear, unmarred space. Maul opened her eyes and set the figurine and the tool down, shoving them and the other tools beneath the bed. A moment later, there was a knock on the door. “We’re in hyperspace,” Tano said. “You should come out and have something to eat.”

Maul rose, twisting her shoulders in an attempt to get rid of the tension that had built up, and slid the door open. Tano, on the other side, had leaned against the wall. “No nutrient hypos, I promise,” she said, smiling a little bit, just the slightest tilt of her lips; a reminder of a different time, but one that was, in some ways, startlingly familiar, at least when it came to Maul’s side of things. “Come on,” she said, pushing away from the wall, and lead Maul into the main area of the ship, digging through one of the two cabinets and pulling out some nutrient bars, each with different colored bands on the front to indicate different flavors.

Maul took two of them—a berry mix, and what was supposed to taste like spiced nerf. They tasted like a pale imitation of what they claimed to replicate, and Maul washed them down with a long gulp of water and a half hidden grimace, and checked the chrono. Another day and a half of travel stretched before them.

Well. At least she’d added new books to her collection.

Chapter Text

Jedha, despite being in its wet season, was still dry enough that the winds whirling the sand into patterns across the air chafed her skin and dried her lips. Maul squinted up at the horizon, trying to gauge if the dark clouds were a usual fixture or if they denoted a potential rain, and took a sip from her water flask. 

They had landed the ship in the capital city’s main starship hangar, and checked their bags, making sure they had enough nutrient bars and water, and then begun the trip to the kyber caves. Technically, there were swoop bikes available for rent, but apparently, it was tradition to make the entire journey by foot. 

Tano, a half step in front of her, made a sound of irritation as a plume of sand was blown into their faces by the wind. “I regret every time I teased Anakin about hating sand,” she muttered, quiet enough that it was clearly meant for herself. Instead of prying, Maul waited for the gust to ebb away, and then brushed as much of the sand off of her own clothes as she could. 

The sand seemed to stretch endlessly before them. The only upside she could find to the atmosphere was that it was cold, and that was only because it meant she probably wasn’t going to get sunburned. 

Suddenly, Tano came to a stop. Maul nearly ran into her before flinching violently away and skidding to a stop—an action which sent her almost overbalancing and cartwheeling her arms to try and stop it. Tano turned instantly, worry creasing between the white markings over her brow. “You ok, kid?”

“Fine,” Maul said, righting herself. “Why did you stop?”

Tano gestured to what initially appeared to be a dark pit in the sand some eight feet from them. “Cave entstand,” she said. “Don’t worry—beneath the sand, everything’s made of solid stone, so it won’t collapse on you.” She might have been aiming for a joke, but Maul felt too tense to laugh. For a brief second, what might have been disappointment flashed across the other’s expression before it disappeared, quick enough Maul was sure she had imagined it. “This is where we part ways,” she said. “I’ll wait for you here.”

Maul hesitated for a beat, eyeing the entrance to the cave. It was—well, dark and small. Somewhere that whispered it would be so, so easy to get lost in and never be able to find the way out of. The hair on her arms, thin and almost invisible, prickled, brushing against the cloth of her clothes in a motion that made her hyperaware of its existence.

Tano didn’t say anything, just watched her, like she knew exactly what Maul was thinking. That just made the sensation worse, and Maul resisted the urge to shake herself out, and adjusted the strap of her small bag, and stepped forward.

The entrance seemed to yawn despite its relatively small size, and as soon as she stepped foot onto the sloping tunnel within, it swallowed her up, the light that had been streaming in from behind her disappearing. If she looked back, would she be able to see Tano standing there? she wondered, and then quickly shook the thought away, and began to move down the tunnel.

The inside of the tunnel was vastly different from the world above. Unlike the outside, the tunnel was humid and almost hot, and after what couldn’t have been more than ten or so minutes, Maul had to roll up her sleeves and tug at the collar of her clothes in an attempt to ward off the heat.

There wasn’t any light, so she had to put her hand on the wall to guide her, the rock scratching at the palm of her hand, making it sting. The air around her seemed to weigh on her, whispering wrongness—though for what, Maul couldn’t fathom. Instinctively, her lips curled back into a snarl.

It wasn’t until she reached a fork in the path that she realized what it was—the Force, or, rather, the lack thereof. She hadn’t been letting it rush over and course through her, hadn’t been paying it more than the barest amount of attention. An amateur mistake, one that she shouldn’t have made—she had spent every moment from the time she could walk paying attention to it with a critical eye, even when it was only so she could twist it to her own ends. And yet, when she cast her mind back, she found that in the past few months, with barely any exception, she had been skittering around touching the Force like some sort of scared tooka kit. The only times she could think of having let it wash over her was when she had been carving, and even then, only a handful of times.

She let out a harsh breath; grabbed the flask of water and took a long gulp, glaring into the darkness, so black even her night adapted vision couldn’t see into it. So—not only had she lost trust, she had lost connection to the Force. Disgusting. Weak.

Pressing her eyes shut, she reached out, trying to grasp at the threads of the Force that danced around her. They slipped from her grasp each time, leaving her wrong footed and scrambling, surrounded by the press of nothing and everything all at once. There were no answers, no hints as to what to do.

She couldn’t turn around, couldn’t leave without a kyber crystal. Couldn’t fail, not now. Pursing her lips, she blindly felt her way down the righthand path.

It felt the same as the path before her, and Maul tried not to despair; pressed ahead, one foot in front of the other, the weight of her bag, with her flask in it, pressing against her shoulder, an almost comforting weight.

Suddenly, without warning, there was a steep incline, and she almost stumbled and fell down it. As it was, she barely avoided it, fingers scrabbling for purchase in the crevices along the wall. She waited a few beats to catch her breath, and then, carefully, began to descend.

After the incline, the path smoothed back out, much to Maul’s relief. It stayed like that until she stepped out into a chamber filled with softly glowing translucent crystals. The light, dim as it was, after so long in the pitch black, burned her eyes, and she had to blink away thick tears as her vision struggled to adjust.

Carefully, she looped around the room, hands hovering over the crystals. None of them seemed to call to her, though—not the way they were described to, at the least, and they all stayed the same, whiteish color.

Maul tried not to feel disappointed, and continued along the path that led out from the other side of the chamber.

Two more chambers came and passed, neither of them with her crystal, and Maul began to get antsy. Surely this wasn’t normal, to go so long without finding your crystal? Maybe it was that she wasn’t listening to the Force—but how could she, when every time she tried to reach out to it, it fell through her fingers like so many grains of sand?

Angry tears prickled at the edges of her vision, and her chest tightened, hearts constricting with the pressure, breaths coming sharp and swift.

In the midst of her panic, Maul almost didn’t notice that she had come out into another chamber—this one larger than the other ones, and with only a smattering of crystals, mostly hidden behind rock formations. There was the sound of running water, like there was an underground river, but she couldn’t see it.

Suddenly, the room was different. It had shifted to a bright, open space, lit by long rays of sunshine which bathed her surroundings in a soft glow. It was empty, except for herself—and, she realized, a moment later, Tano.

The togruta’s montrals stood taller than she remembered, and the markings on her face had become more elaborate, as had the ones on her leku. She wore a soft smile on her face, and held one of her lightsabers, the other clipped to her belt. “Maul,” she said, and her voice was warm. “I’ve taught you everything I can.”

Maul drew in a soft breath, the movement drawing her attention to the armor that seemed to be moulded to her like a second skin—beskar’gam, she realized, similar to Tano’s own, both bearing the same clan symbol on the pauldrons when she glanced at them. “I—I don’t know if I’m ready,” she admitted, the words seeming to burst forth from her without conscious thought. 

Tano tilted her head. “Do you trust me?” she asked. 

Maul opened her mouth, and then stopped. Did she? Tano…had taken her from Sidious, had made sure she was cared for even when she had been hissing and spitting and promising her death. And even after that, she had cared for Maul, had done her best to keep her safe and provided her with things to engage her.

The memory of Tano’s harsh, quiet anger washed over her suddenly, and Maul wavered. What if that happened again? What if Tano decided enough was enough?

She glanced up at Tano, seeking an answer in the other’s countenance, and found it. Tano’s grip on her lightsaber was sure, but it was only half raised, like she would accept whichever answer Maul gave her. A choice—hers, in full.

Maul nodded. “Yes,” she said, and watched as Tano ignited her lightsaber, the white bursting into existence, humming and hot as it brushed over each shoulder before withdrawing.

The light disappeared, darkness bathing her once more. Maul was pressed against the wall, the rock formations digging into her back, but she only had half a second to register it before it was gone.

This time, the room was familiar—the training room that she used to spar in, with its mats and long, thin windows. The room was bathed in a late afternoon light, the sun dipping below the horizon and casting a purple twilight across the walls. Across from her, Jango was kitted out in full beskar’gam.

Maul was too, she realized after a moment—the visor, though she would have expected it to limit her range of vision, actually seemed to enhance it.

Both she and Jango were holding knives, Jango’s shorter, only about the length of his hand, while Maul’s were the length of her forearm. 

“You will not be able to break from this,” Jango warned, words carrying his caution despite the flat affect of his vocoder. “Do you trust me enough?”

Maul hesitated, shifting in ready stance. Did she? Did she trust him enough to be pinned, blades held poised above vulnerable spots in her beskar’gam? 

Jango had been the one to find her, after that day at the market; had been the one to hold her and calm her with gentle words and fierce promises. But—the memory of his expression, tight with barely controlled anger, his words sharp, flashed before her, and she wavered.

Do you trust me enough? he had asked, moments before, she remembered suddenly. A choice—a true one, because she knew that if she said no, he would switch to something else without comment.

She nodded. “Lek,” she replied, and readied herself, before their blades clashed and she was thrown to the ground.

Her eyes snapped open, and the darkness of the chamber seemed to sting. She blinked a few times, taking deep, steadying breaths, and wiped a hand across her forehead to try and get rid of the sweat that had appeared at some point, making her skin clammy.

The motion seemed to jolt something in her, and suddenly, she was surrounded by the press of life—the soft song of the crystals in the cave, which before, had been inaudible to her. They were—beautiful. Her eyes watered, though not with pain and fear, but rather, awe.

Without thinking about it, she was stepping forward, guided by the Force, and her hands closed over a cluster of three crystals. They broke away into her hand, and she tucked them away into the pocket of her pants, taking comfort in the cool pulse that emanated from them, and let the Force guide her steps back through the tunnels.

When she emerged, Tano was still there, though she had settled into a cross legged meditative pose, and was hovering a few inches off the ground. As Maul approached, she opened her eyes, settling back onto the ground. 

Without thinking, Maul closed the distance between them, wrapping her arms around the other. “Thank you,” she murmured.

Tano let out a soft huff. “I’m not going to pretend I know what you’re talking about,” she said, “but you’re welcome.” And with that, she wrapped her own arms around Maul, the two of them standing there, beneath the stars, in silence.

Chapter Text

The trek back to their ship was one that passed in near silence, though it wasn’t uncomfortable, as it had been on the way to the caves—rather, it felt like a silence born of mutual understanding. Of trust, Maul supposed, the crystals she had found seeming to pulse at the thought. 

Tano led the way, but she wasn’t far ahead—Maul was barely a step behind her, and she suspected it was, in part, an attempt to shield her from the lashing winds, which had grown stronger since she had entered the caves. Earlier, she might have felt wrong footed by the action, but now, she merely found herself appreciating it. 

Finally, they reached the capital city, with its towering walls. Late in the night as it was, street lights lit the pathways, but most buildings had dark windows, the inhabitants of the city retired for the night. The hangar was the exception—even this late, it had people bustling around within it, workers and ship crew and sundry others with business within, all cast in sharp relief by the industrial lighting that ran along the ceiling in strips. 

Tano slowed her pace, falling into step with Maul. “You want to get something to eat before we go? I know nutrient bars aren’t exactly exciting after a long day.”

“Sure,” Maul said, surprising herself, and faltered slightly before recovering. “I think the food stalls are off of this room—over there.” The sign was in a regional dialect, which she wasn’t familiar with, but there was a depiction of a steaming bowl beneath the script, so it wasn’t a hard guess. She turned, heading towards it. Tano followed after at a sedate pace. 

As she had suspected, it was a small food market, with various stalls selling a selection of different cuisines—including one run by a scarred twi’lek woman in blue beskar’gam who was tending to a steaming pot, some uj and spicy cakes, as well as dried meat and fruit, in bowls on the table with their names and prices projected onto the wall behind her. 

When they approached, the woman turned, and, catching sight of Tano’s own vambraces, the only part of her amor she had kept on, since trying to get sand out of the entire thing would have been a pain, grinned. “S’cuy,” she said. “What can I get for you two travellers?”

Tano and Maul echoed the greeting. It was nice to see a half-familiar face this far from home, Maul found herself thinking. It was a slightly embarrassing thought, so she cleared her throat, and said, “Can we get some tiingilar and the bantha jerky and dates?”

Tano smiled. “Sure. Ah, give me a klik…” She hunter around in her bag for a moment before withdrawing a credit chip, handing it to the twi’lek, who looked slightly amused. 

She didn’t say anything, though, just put some jerky and dates in a brown flimsi bag, and gave them each a disposable cup of the stew, with shallow spoons. Maul forewent the utensils, choosing instead to raise the cup to her mouth—too quickly the first time, scalding her tongue, and then more slowly, taking measured sips as she listened to the stall owner, Ayana, and Tano chat. She listened to their conversation with only half an ear, instead letting her attention wander as she ate—around the other stalls, and, inevitably, to the kyber crystals she had retrieved. 

What sort of lightsaber used three crystals? she wondered. Not any that she had ever seen. Sidious had had two separate blades, and her old saber had been a staff, but those had only required two crystals. 

She sipped her stew, milling it over. By the time she was finished, she was no closer to an answer, which was a bit frustrating. She resolved to do research once they returned to Mandalore—the Jedi archives, which had the largest collection of information on lightsabers, was available to the public, so it would be a good place to start looking. 

Finally, she finished eating, and turned to Tano—only to find her in deep conversation with Ayana, head tilted slightly and the corners of her eyes crinkling in pleasure as she spoke. She was,Maul realised suddenly, making a friend. It was strange to watch from the outside. Rather than interrupt them, Maul took out a few of the dates and a couple pieces of the jerky, munching on them as she waited. 

Finally, Tano said, “We shouldn’t keep you—Maul, are you ready to go?”

“Mhm,” Maul hummed, and tucked the flimsi bag into her own bag. Then, only just remembering to do so, she turned to the twi’lek. “Thank you,” she said. 

Ayane smiled. “No problem, ad’ika. It was good to meet you two—safe travels.” 

With that, they made their way towards the main hangar itself. Without meaning to, Maul found herself yawning widely. The weight of warm food in her stomach seemed to be pulling her further and further into exhaustion. 

Tano glanced at her, a fond expression flickering across her face—as well as amusement. “You ready to be done with the day, huh, kid?”

“I’m fine,” Maul said, crossly, though it was slightly negated as she let out another jaw cracking yawn. Tano laughed. 

“Me too,” she said. “Thank the Force for autopiloting systems. Ah, here we are.” She strode towards the ship, opening the door and stepping inside. Maul followed after her a beat later, and felt, suddenly, strangely comforted as the door hissed shut behind her. It was…strange. Her first memory of the ship was waking up in cuffs in the hold—and yet, she didn’t find herself flinching as she caught sight of the door to it at the end of the hallways. 

Tano headed towards the navcomp, and Maul made her way to the main area of the ship, pulling out the brown flimsi bag and putting it into the cabinet, next to the nutrient bars. 

Once that was done, she headed towards her room. Her suitcase was against the wall where she had left it, and she dug through it for a new set of clothing that didn’t have sand still hidden in every crease and fold. Once she had changed, she put the kyber crystals into the bag that had held the thread for her embroidery, and tucked it under her pillow. 

There were some wood shavings on the floor still from when she had been working on her carving, but she suddenly felt like leaden weights had been attached to her limbs, exhaustion dragging at her senses, so she stepped around them and crawled into the bed, resolving to deal with them tomorrow. 

The next morning, rather than get up and head into the main area of the ship to eat as soon as she woke up, Maul stayed in bed, slipping in and out of sleep. It was a luxurious feeling, and, surprisingly, not disorienting—it was more like having warm sunlight flicker over her every so often, and each time she came back to the surface, she felt more refreshed. 

In the background, a strange yet oddly familiar hum seeming to slip in through the cracks, permeating her senses. It took her a while to realize that it was the kyber crystals, singing in the force. What a strange thing! Her first crystals, the ones she had used for her saber staff, hadn’t sung so much as they had wailed in pained cacophony. This was infinitely more pleasant. 

Finally, she roused herself fully, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and rising. For a moment, she faltered, unwilling to leave the crystals before she grabbed the bag, tucking it into her pocket. 

Ambling into the main area of the ship, she filled up a cup with water, and took out the brown flimsi bag from the night before, fishing out the remainder of the food within. 

As she ate, she stretched her senses out, and found Tano. The other was still asleep, or deep in meditation, her Force presence calm. It was comforting, in a way she wouldn’t even have been able to imagine a year ago. She smiled slightly, and chewed on a piece of jerky

Once she was done eating, Maul returned to her room, and pulled out her datapad. Leaning against the wall, she spent a while idly reading one of the remaining books she had brought with her, making her way through it at a sedate pace. 

Once she was finished, she rose, and, catching sight of the wood shavings on the floor, set about cleaning them up. When she was done, she took her carving tools and the nearly finished figure out and began to work on it. 

It took a while, but by the end of the day, she had finished it. Tano had come to check on her halfway through, but, seeing nothing was amiss, had left her alone. 

Once she was finished with the figure, she inspected it, turning it over to try and determine what it was. It was canine, and, despite being a bit roughly hewn due to her relative inexperience, seemed more or less proportional. She didn’t know what it was, so she checked the encyclopedia of animals she had downloaded a month or so ago, and, after some searching, found it to be a Loth wolf—apparently, they were Force sensitive, and there were rumors of them being sentient. 

Setting the figure on the bed, Maul considered it for a moment; and then, not really thinking about what she was doing, went and got out the now finished embroidery. Setting it down next to the figure, she stared at them for a moment. 

In her mind’s eye, memories flickered; Tano, older, brushing her lightsaber over each of Maul’s shoulders. Jango, knives in hand, waiting. Trust. 

She hadn’t started those projects without meaning, she realized. She had started them, trust cracked and wary, because, even then, they had been important to her. Tano, Jango; protection, care, responsibility. 

Maul smiled. The trip may have been originally only about retrieving the kyber crystals for her new lightsaber, but it had done more than that. Now all that was left was to complete what she had started. Jango wasn’t here, but Tano was. 

Picking up the Loth wolf, she headed towards the door. Tano was at the navcomp, checking the coordinates for their next hyperspace jump. Maul closed her hand around the figure, and made her way over to the other. “Let’s eat,” she said. 

Tano glanced up at her, and smiled. “Sure,” she said, “just give me a minute. You go ahead—I’ll join you as soon as I’m done with this.”

Maul nodded, and headed towards the main area. After a bit of hunting, she found some dehydrated noodles, and put them into a bowl, adding some spicy meat paste, and boiling water. 

Tano entered just as she was taking the lid off of the now done noodles. “Oh, I was wondering what happened to those,” she said. “Glad you found them. Let me get another bowl and some forks.”

A few moments later, she set down a second bowl and handed a fork to Maul, who served half of the noodles into the empty bowl, steam rising in curls from the hot food. Maul left her bowl on the counter, and drew the figure from where she had tucked it, hidden behind some boxes. “I wanted to give this to you,” she said, holding it out to Tano. “And…thank you. For—just…thank you.” She glanced away from Tano, cheeks heating. 

“Oh,” said Tano, and took it gently. “Thank you, Maul.” It seemed for a moment like she was going to say something more, but she didn’t. Maul found she appreciated it. 

Picking up her bowl, she leaned against the counter, next to Tano, and began to eat. The togruta tucked the figure into her pocket, and picked up her own bowl, following suit; but she didn’t try to push Maul away, just slowly inched closer. 

Maul didn’t comment, but the kyber crystals pulsed, and she found herself smiling into her noodles. 

Chapter Text

For the rest of the return to Mandalore, Maul spent her time meditating with the crystals that she had retrieved on Jedha. It had taken her a bit to figure out that was what she was meant to do with them—despite her time with Tano, the concept of bonding with kyber crystals was something so antithetical to her raising that it had taken asking Tano herself what she was meant to do with them to even think of it. In any other situation, she would have been embarrassed—but, for all that her trust in Tano was, though growing once more, tentative, having to ask her didn’t make Maul feel that way. It had probably helped that Tano had presented her with a set of hypotheticals and allowed her to reach her own conclusion by working through them.

Now, soon to sink through Mandalore’s atmosphere and return home, Maul sat with them once more, for what she knew, without really knowing how, would be the final time she meditated with them before assembling her own lightsaber. She still didn’t have any idea how three crystals would work with only a singular lightsaber, as there had been no holonet connection to allow her to search the Jedi archives, but despite that, she found herself confident that it would work out.

It took her a moment to slip into a meditative state—lack of practice in the months prior had meant that, like a muscle that had been in disuse, she had to spend a bit figuring out how to even do it, let alone actually do it. However, eventually, she found herself slipping into the paradoxical state of extreme awareness and simultaneous dulling of her senses.

Her crystals rested on the ground before her, but in meditation, there was no sense of tactile objects in a definitive way—everything was marked, rather, by the way it echoed in the force. The walls of the ship around her were steady and muted, and in the cockpit, Tano’s signature felt like a contained, comforting yet white hot flame—able to warm, but also destroy, if necessary. At the edges of her senses, she felt the familiar hum of the kyber crystals, and realised that she had accidentally stretched her senses too far.

Drawing them back in towards herself was strange, after so long spent shying away from the Force, but once she did it, she found it was comfortable once more. It was like drawing into a bubble of her own, the edges defined but not restricting—rather, reassuring.

The hum of the crystals increased. There had, at the start, been a sort of barrier between her and them, like their resonances were on slightly different frequencies—almost synchronised, but not quite. In the time she had spent meditating with them, that had reduced exponentially, and there was almost no noticeable difference between her and them. However, there were still specks of it—ones she intended to brush away for good.

Tano hadn’t really explained to her how she was meant to bond with the crystals, but so far, she had found that simply opening her mind up to them and letting herself experience past memories had been enough. It was strange—she wouldn’t have thought that memories of the past would have been able to form a bond that didn’t hurt. But she had found, through them, that there had been spots of brightness in those memories—moments where things had not been, necessarily, good, or nice, but they had been comforting to her at the time, and allowed her to keep going despite the hardships.

Now, as she opened her mind, she realised that there wasn’t much past left for her to give the crystals. She had re-experienced practically everything up until recently—through her arrival on Mandalore, at the very least. Before she could try and formulate a question about that, she found herself steeped in a flurry of emotions—fear, mostly, but also, growing hope. There were flashes of faces and objects—the food she had eaten that first morning, Tano’s exasperated tone as she had covered for her, and Jango’s visor flashing under the lights in clear interest. She let them wash over her, watching, slightly detached, and yet fully aware of the experiences.

The hum of them seemed to increase in vibrancy as the memories went on. Finally, it seemed to come to an apex—and paused, as if waiting for something.

She frowned to herself. What was left? It had seemed that everything had been shared—and yet, it felt like there were incomplete spots. Or, rather, two, large and obvious.

It hit her, then, that they were incomplete spots in her emotions towards Tano and Jango themselves. With that realisation, she blinked in surprise—and found herself, instinctively, opening her mind further, as if to sink into the hum of the crystals completely.

Two memories played out before her simultaneously, which should have felt disorienting and strange, but here, in the heart of the kyber crystals, and herself, it simply felt like the best way to do it. At the same time as she hesitated, hand on Tano’s saber, Jango gripped her, voice filled with worry. Then, blending into each other, Jango promised her, held her close, and her decision crystalised as she gently brought the saber beneath Tano’s chin.

Slowly, she came out of meditation, everything ebbing gently out of her. Despite it, she could feel the kyber crystals clearly, like a new heartbeat with three facets. Now, there was no division between them and her. It was, she realised, suddenly, what she might have expected peace to feel like, in its most potent form. Without her bidding, she found herself smiling widely.

From the cockpit, Tano’s voice came, just loud enough to hear. “We’ll be entering atmosphere soon!” 

She sounded happy—Maul found that she was, too. Her grin widened, and she scooped the crystals up gently from where they had fallen when she exited meditation, and tucked them carefully into a small cloth bag she had managed to find, setting it carefully inside of her suitcase on top of the finished mythosaur embroidery and the loth wolf.

Jango wasn’t there to greet them, and Tano had her own things to attend to, so Maul was left to her own devices when they landed. That was fine by her—she had research she wanted to do, so she helped Tano unload their belongings, and then grabbed her datapad and settled onto her bed, waiting a moment for it to connect to the holonet.

About halfway through her perusal of the archives, her stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten in hours—loudly enough that it would have been embarrassing, had she not been alone. Grimacing slightly, she set the datapad down and rose, padding into the kitchen to see what she could make herself.

There was some yellow flatbread, and a quick perusal of the cooler revealed some remaining shaak, as well as various vegetables. It didn’t take her long to create a decent sandwich, covered liberally in spices and sauces, just like she liked it. Despite her eagerness to get back to her research, she found herself more than willing to savour the delicious, if simple, meal.

Once she finished eating, she returned to the datapad. The food seemed to have helped make her mind sharper as well, and she found it easier to focus on trawling through the many pieces of writing on lightsaber types and uses.

After what felt like no time at all, she found what she was looking for—a paper on the usages of different lightsaber types throughout the ages. About halfway through the article, she found it—a dual phase lightsaber. They hadn’t been used much in hundreds of years, often associated with the more brutal era of the Jedi Civil Wars, but they were ideal for those who favoured the ability to act quickly and without warning, the unique mechanism of the lightsaber allowing the user to extend and retract the blade at will, making for a powerful, unexpected weapon. The more she read, the more she found herself pleased that this would be the base she would work off of. Out of curiosity, she spent a while reading through the biographies on some of the more recent notable dual phase lightsaber users, though none of the names meant much to her.

Finally, she set the datapad down, eyes starting to sting from the amount of time exposed to its screen. She had written down some notes about components to ask Tano to procure for her, so she decided that she had probably done enough for the day.

Now, with nothing else to distract her, her mind turned back to the projects she had completed. She had already gifted Tano the loth wolf, but she wasn’t quite sure how to give Jango the embroidery. She didn’t think she could use the same words she had for Tano—it felt like something too personal to their relationship, unfitting of hers and Jango’s.

Well, she supposed, there was no time like the present to find out. Opening up her suitcase once more—she hadn’t yet put her things away—she drew out the embroidery and looked at it for a moment. She had finished the edges of the fabric, so it could be framed or used as a decoration if Jango desired, and she found herself admiring it for a moment, thinking about how suited it was to him. Tano might have been the one who brought her to Mandalore, but Jango was the one who had made her feel at home and fall in love with Mandalore and its people, its food, its culture. There was nothing she could think of to better represent him than the mythosaur itself.

Folding it gently, she tucked it into her pocket, and slipped out of the room in search of Jango.

It took a bit of asking around to discover where he was—he had, apparently, once completing his tasks, headed for the sparring rooms. There were a number of those, though, so it took Maul a few tries before she stumbled on the right one.

Jango was sparring with a familiar nautolan, though it took Maul a moment to place her, before she recognised her as Vesta Meven. They looked like they were winding down, so Maul leaned against the wall, waiting for them to complete their session. When they did, they clasped forearms and grinned at each other, exchanging short compliments and words of teasing before Meven headed off. Then, Jango turned and tilted his head at Maul, unsurprised at her presence—he had clearly noticed her when she had entered, though Maul wasn’t surprised by that. 

“S’cuy,” she called, pushing away from the wall. “Good fight.”

“It was nothing,” Jango said, though he looked pleased by the praise. “Meven is a good verd—it’s my luck to know her.” He ran a hand through his hair, sweeping the curls that had slicked against his forehead with sweat away from his eyes. “Good to see you back safe.”

There was an offer to tell him about the trip, about her change in mood, but she found that she didn’t want to get caught up on that just now. Perhaps another time. “Ni…ru’gotal’u gar sol…kisol’kebi.” Suddenly feeling hesitant, she dropped her gaze to the floor and pulled the folded embroidery from her pocket and held it out to him. “A mythosaur.” Her throat seized up suddenly, unable to continue.

Jango let out a harsh breath, and for a moment, she thought he didn’t like it, before he said, quietly, “Maul’ika, this…no greater gift could be given to me.” A moment later, gloved hands gently took it from her grasp. When she looked up, his eyes were glossy, and, without thinking about it, she spread her arms.

Instantly, he embraced her. “Vor’e,” he murmured, so quiet only she could hear it, but she could feel the depths of emotion contained within it. When they drew apart, they were both smiling. A few beats of silence passed between them, Jango holding the fabric carefully and with wonder, and then he folded it up and tucked it carefully in one of the pouches on his belt, and said, “It is latemeal. We should go.”

“Yeah,” Maul said, and, together, they headed towards the door. 

Despite the fact that few words had passed between them, she felt like things had settled once more. She wasn’t quite sure what the future would hold, but with Tano and Jango on either side, she knew that she wanted to see what was to come.