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He had always wondered what it felt like to be Darth Sidious.
Throughout the days he had spent nestled into a corner of his prison, nursing blistered hands that were as numb as if they were made from lead, it had been all too easy for his mind to wander. To consider how it might feel for his hands to be the ones that dealt the venom of those forked tongues.
And yet, despite the sparks that flared within him as his frustration mounted, there was no lightning to be found at his fingertips. It didn't seem to matter how hard he tried, or how much his knuckles bled after the frustration grew too much for him to bear.
Sometimes, the boy wondered if his master was watching his attempts, chuckling at his feeble efforts. It would hardly have come as a surprise - there were few places that could escape those hollow shells that stood for eyes.
Now, Maul wondered whether Darth Sidious could see just what his former apprentice had become.
Once, he had boasted to one of his warriors - Saxon, or Kast, he had never seen the need to match helmet to name - that over the years he had become indifferent to pain. And yet if any of the troopers had cared to look closely, the shaking of his hands would have told a different story entirely. Luckily for him, the clones in question had other things on their minds. Or at least, they had, until a flutter of his wrist had sent their own blaster bolts careening back towards them.
It was a shame, really, that they had to die so fast. After all, what was a spectacle without its audience?
It wasn't enough. Of course it wasn't. It was never enough. Even as the ship itself trembled beneath his feet, the hyperdrive generators remained steadfast. Electricity darted back and forth across their surfaces as if it were looking for a way out, reflecting off a pair of amber eyes and turning them into two blazing torches in the shadows.
Far above, far below. We don’t know where we’ll fall.
Maul closed his eyes, and took one step forward.
One step for a mother. The mother who sung him awake and stitched him back together with her refrain. The mother whose eyes had never lost their fire right until the end, when the lines around her mouth - quotation marks around a childhood of words that he had never gotten the chance to hear - seemed more prominent than they had ever been. The mother who had cupped his cheek in her hand and told him to run.
One step for a brother. For the man who had smiled when Vizsla fell. For the hand that had clung to his own as if to haul both of them back to safety. For the words unspoken. For the words that had been spoken, for the cold laughter and jagged retorts and the way he had had to lash out at something, anything to divert the inferno away from consuming him entirely. For the man who had still stayed. For what could have been, if he could have pulled time to a standstill just like he pulled the generators now, before the tide swept his shadow away as abruptly as he had appeared.
One final step, for a child whose laugh was dappled sunlight peeking through tangled branches. A child who had believed he had only to reach up to the sky to pull the stars down and catch them in his hand. A child who had tucked himself away into the tightest corner of the cage his mind had formed, because Nightbrothers don't cry and neither do Sith Lords. A child whose future was built on bones, torn into so many fragments that there wasn’t enough left of him to mend.
Far above, far below. What once was great was rendered small.
Lord Maul opened his eyes, and the sky screamed as he brought down his arms.
The agonised cry of metal on metal was a war anthem, drowning out the sound of blaster fire as more clones - did they ever know when to give up? - cascaded through the doorway. He wouldn’t give them the honour of dealing with them himself, not when the buckling walls could do that job for him. Besides, even if he had wanted to, it would have been difficult for him to tear his eyes away from the rain of embers. The son of Dathomir commanded the tides once again, flashes of silver rippling around him until it was hard to tell where the man ended and the lightning began.
And maybe, just maybe, this was what it felt like to be Sidious.