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Maul remembers the heat of the duel on Naboo long after the memory should have cooled. The hum of engines. The polished floors reflecting every movement with cruel clarity. And above all, Qui-Gon Jinn’s steady gaze meeting his before the killing blow landed. The Jedi master had been infuriatingly calm, as though dying were merely a footnote in a much larger philosophy.

Maul had reveled in that moment. The power in it. The clean precision of a victory earned through years of suffering under Sidious’s hand. When Jinn dropped, Maul felt something in him sharpen—purpose, affirmed at last. Sidious would be pleased. The thought was automatic, instinctive, like a reflex drilled into bone.

But satisfaction has a half-life, and Maul doesn’t like remembering how quickly his evaporated.

The padawan came at him wild, but not uncontrolled. Maul misread the boy. Not his capability—his resolve. The kind that comes from grief still hot in the blood. The boy used it like a sword and a shield at once, and Maul had dismissed him as too young to matter.

A mistake that carved itself through Maul’s waist.

He recalls the moment of impact not as pain, but as a sudden silence. His body losing coherence. His vision flattening. The impossible realization that he could feel the two halves of himself slipping apart.

The platform vanished beneath him.
Gravity dug its claws in.

He fell.

Metal rushed past in blurred smears. The world rotated, red and white and blinding. Maul felt his fingers scrabble for anything—purchase, reprieve, sense—but there was nothing but air and the sick certainty of helplessness. A feeling he’d never allowed himself to acknowledge before.

He hit something—hard, metallic, unwelcoming. A container. A cavity in the machinery of the palace. The breath shot from his lungs in a wet gasp. He tried to pull himself up, but his arms trembled like frayed cables. Blood soaked the metal beneath him in a spreading dark.

The doors slammed shut.

He was alone with the echo of his failure.

When the container dropped into the bowels of Naboo’s waste system, Maul felt every jolt as though it were a personal insult. His severed body burned and chilled all at once, nerves misfiring in phantom patterns. He tried to remember his teachings—to cling to the discipline Sidious had forged into him—but pain kept intruding, fracturing every attempt.

He hated that.
He hated how his breath shook, how each exhale rasped like an admission.

The ride through the waste shafts blurred into stretches of nausea and half-conscious fury. When the container finally ejected into open space—cruelly, silently—Maul felt the dread settle in him the way cold settles into stone.

He had always believed he was destined for more.
Now he drifted among rubbish.

The pull of Lotho Minor’s gravity caught him hours later. Or days. Time had already begun stretching, thinning, losing shape. The container bucked violently through atmosphere and crashed hard into metal and rust and the rot of forgotten machines.

The impact rattled what remained of his spine.
He tasted blood again.

When the doors groaned open, Lotho Minor greeted him with heat and stench and a sky that looked perpetually sick. The air felt heavy, as if the planet resented his presence. Fitting, he supposed.

He crawled out on his hands, dragging the useless half of himself, leaving a dark streak behind. Movements that would once have been fluid now felt animal, desperate. Each breath came sharp enough to cut.

He did not call for Sidious.
He refused to.

That refusal was the first choice he had made in years.

He dragged himself into the maze of scrap and shadow, where things with too many teeth skittered just out of sight. He listened to them. They listened back. His saber was gone. His legs were gone. His purpose cracked down the middle like his body.

But he was alive.

And hate, he discovered, survives anything.

Lotho Minor did not change for him.
It did not soften, or bend, or offer anything resembling mercy. The planet simply observed him the way a predator observes a wounded creature—calculating how long until the flesh goes still.

The first days were about survival.
Dragging himself from shelter to shadow, finding scraps of discarded metal to prop his torso when his arms trembled too violently. Eating whatever he could tear apart with teeth and stubbornness—sometimes meat, sometimes things that did not deserve the name.

He avoided thinking.
Thought made space for Sidious.
Sidious made space for despair.

Maul learned that silence could be a weapon, but here it cut inward. When he slept, he dreamed of bisecting light. Of Kenobi’s horrified eyes, not with hatred but disbelief—an emotion Maul found harder to bear.

He wanted to forget the boy.
He wanted to remember only the hate.

Both wishes rotted equally in him.

The metal caverns offered him new rhythms. The wind moaned through broken piping, creating sounds that might have been voices if he tilted his head just enough. They followed him, echoing, growing teeth as the days stretched themselves thin and confusing.

At some point, Maul stopped trying to mark the passage of time.
He marked only hunger.

His body grew gaunt, his tattoos stretched over sharper bones. His nails cracked. His arms trembled under his own weight. The severed end of his torso throbbed with phantom screams he could not silence. The world tilted in ways that made no sense, and sometimes he would wake with his cheek against cold metal and no memory of lying down.

In the quietest moments, Maul muttered Sidious’s teachings under his breath—not in reverence, but because they were the only words left that still held shape. He hated how automatic they felt. How deeply they had been carved into him.

Peace is a lie.
His voice rasped, unfamiliar.
There is only passion.

The lessons that once gave him direction now tasted like iron shavings. But they were familiar, and familiarity, even poisoned, was something to cling to.

He repeated them until they blurred.

The decision to build new legs came halfway between madness and instinct.
Mobility meant survival. Upright meant power. His body remembered strength even when his mind teetered dangerously close to shattering.

He scavenged metal and wiring from the junk fields, dragging pieces back with single-minded desperation. The first attempts collapsed under him, screeching like dying beasts. He rebuilt. He tore them apart. He rebuilt again.

He burned his hands on exposed conduits. He soldered until the fumes made him dizzy. He talked to the pieces as though they could hear him—harsh, clipped words, berating them for their failures, for reflecting his own.

Sometimes he realized he was shouting.
Sometimes he didn’t.

Over time—weeks? months? years?—a structure formed. Six spindly legs, too thin and too sharp, almost grotesque in silhouette. They were nothing like the sleek machinery of his old life; they were born of desperation, not design.

He attached them to his ruined body with shaking hands and a half-coherent snarl. The process hurt in ways even Sidious had not prepared him for. Electricity surged through his nerves in jagged bursts. His vision flickered. He tasted copper and smoke.

But when he tried to stand—

He rose.

Unsteady at first. The legs skittered. Metal scraped. His balance wavered. But he rose higher than he had since Naboo, high enough to see further, to breathe deeper, to feel something inside him claw its way back from the edges of oblivion.

He hated their clumsy sound.
He hated their unnatural movement.
He hated that this was what he had become.

But he was not crawling anymore.

It was enough.

The months that followed blurred into a long, fevered survival. Maul stalked the caverns like a creature built for revenge. His mind flickered unpredictably—sometimes sharp and lucid, sometimes lost in spirals of memory and rage so consuming he found himself tearing apart metal heaps with no recollection of beginning.

He spoke aloud often, not realizing he was doing so. To the cavern walls. To the scraps of old battle droids. To the empty air. Sometimes to Kenobi, whose face intruded when Maul least wanted it.

“Fear made you strong,” he whispered once into the shadows. “Did it make you merciful?”

No answer came.
There never was one.

But the image lingered, an uninvited ghost.

He knew, eventually, that someone would come.

Hatred has gravity.
And his had grown vast.

The caverns of Lotho Minor had a particular smell—rust, ozone, the stale rot of abandoned machines, and something that might have once been organic but had long since surrendered to time. Maul knew that smell the way he knew the sound of his own breath, ragged and uneven through clenched teeth.

He didn’t remember how long he’d been asleep.
He only remembered waking to a shift in the air.

A foreign heartbeat, steady where his was erratic. The air pressure nudging his hyper-alert senses, telling him something enormous and alive had stepped into his domain of refuse and nightmares.

His spider-legs twitched instinctively, skittering against the metal floor. He hissed without thinking—an animal sound, guttural, scraped raw from a throat that rarely spoke in coherence.

The silhouette appeared first.
Big. Broad. A mountain trying to walk.

Maul’s mind split in two directions at once—fight or retreat, rage or fear, memory or hallucination. He couldn’t decide which was safer.

The figure stepped closer. Golden skin. Dark tattoos. Horns like his.

Brother, some faint, unreachable part of him whispered.
He immediately crushed the thought.

Hallucinations were common on Lotho Minor. This was another.
This was the planet playing tricks again—shadows given form by hunger and fractured sanity.

The figure spoke.
“Maul.”

His name hit him like a blunt force.
Names carried power. Sidious had taught him that. Names identified the weak points in any living creature. Names were leashes.

So hearing his own spoken aloud—after so many years of silence—felt like a grip closing around his throat.

He lunged before the feeling could swallow him, legs clattering, snarling like a cornered beast. The giant moved fast, not with elegance but with force, catching Maul’s wild swing and holding his wrist in a grip that refused to yield.

“Maul,” the voice said again.
Steady. Strange. Rough around the edges.

Maul’s vision flickered.
He saw not the intruder, but the memory of a face—similar horns, similar skin, similar patterns. A brother from long ago. One Sidious had torn from him long before Maul ever knew what the word meant.

He didn’t remember saying Savage’s name.
He didn’t remember speaking at all, not clearly.

But the giant inhaled softly, like he’d been waiting for it.
“It’s me,” Savage murmured. “I found you.”

Found.
An innocuous word that cracked something brittle inside Maul.

Everyone else had abandoned him.
Sidious had discarded him like waste.
The galaxy had thrown him into a pit and forgotten his existence.

Being found was unbearable.

He tried to tear himself from Savage’s hold. Clawed, twisted, spat curses he didn’t remember learning. Savage didn’t fight back in the way Maul expected—he didn’t strike, didn’t snarl, didn’t attempt to assert dominance.

He just held on.
Not cruelly.
Not even forcefully.
Just steadfast.

It was infuriating.

Maul’s strength bled out first. His body trembled violently, spider-legs collapsing under him, scraping the floor in uneven jerks. He felt himself slipping, sinking, and Savage moved forward, catching him before he struck metal.

Maul hated how solid he felt.
How warm.
How real.

It was wrong.
Wrong to be held.
Wrong to be offered anything but pain.

But Savage didn’t let go.
And Maul—half-conscious, half-feral, so starved for contact he would’ve denied it even under torture—clung anyway.

It wasn’t voluntary.
It was survival instinct, primal and pathetic.

But he clung.

The last thing he remembered was the steady thrum of Savage’s heart under his ear.
A sound that didn’t belong on this planet.

A sound that felt like a lifeline.

Dathomir was too bright.

Not in light—its skies were a dull, bruised red, and the fog hung low like a coiled serpent—but in sensation. Too sharp. Too vivid. Too full of stimuli that weren’t the predictable echoes of a metal cavern.

The first thing Maul noticed was the ground beneath him.
Soft. Uneven. Dirt, not scrap.
He was lying on something that wasn’t jagged enough to cut him.

It unsettled him more than the pain.

Mother Talzin worked around him, chanting, weaving magick in shapes he couldn’t parse. Her presence filled the air like humidity—heavy, clinging. He wasn’t used to being surrounded by others. Noise pressed against his ears, too close, too human.

His chest rose and fell too fast.
The world was too open.
His mind had nowhere to hide.

He felt exposed. Flayed. Like his skin had been peeled back and left to sting.

Savage watched from the doorway, a silent sentinel. His presence was large in a way Maul was not used to—solid, steady, lacking the constant calculating hum that lived behind most Sith gazes. Savage’s eyes held confusion, fear, and something Maul didn’t have a name for.

Maul didn’t like that.
He didn’t like any of this.

Every instinct screamed at him to be alone.
Isolation had been safety for years.
Now surrounded, his body tensed as if expecting attack.

When the magick began to repair him, nightsister green seeped into metal and flesh alike, threading through ruined nerves, soldering bone to alloy. Heat swallowed him—searing, merciless—like being forged inside a star. But Maul did not scream.

Pain was a language he spoke fluently.
Pain was certainty.
Pain was predictable.
Pain meant he still existed.

What threatened him wasn’t the agony—it was the after.

When the glow finally dimmed, when the last of Mother Talzin’s chanting dissolved into smoke, Maul felt the weight of his new limbs lying beneath him.

Metal. Cold, powerful, and impossibly precise.

Talzin had shaped them like weapons, not replacements: sharp-edged joints, segmented plating, pistons coiled with magick and rage. Proportioned like legs he barely remembered—but unmistakably constructed, unmistakably Other.

He tried to move.

His hands faltered on the stone slab, fingers shaking as they sought balance.

His breath hitched—not from weakness, but from the sheer unfamiliarity of wholeness, even this artificial kind.

Savage stepped forward to help, and Maul growled low in warning—an instinctive rejection of vulnerability.

Savage froze, hands half raised.

Maul hated the patience most of all.

Patience reminded him of mentors, of masters, of lessons whispered through clenched teeth. Patience was a weapon Sidious used before he carved obedience into bone.

Maul didn’t trust it.

But Savage didn’t push.
Didn’t speak.
Didn’t try to aid again.

He simply stood there until Maul managed to pull himself upright.

It was humiliating.
It was maddening.
It was strangely reassuring.

Maul pushed all three feelings down until they knotted together into something unrecognizable.

When he finally looked up, Savage’s gaze caught his—cautious, earnest, grounding in a way Maul despised.

Not a master.
Not a manipulator.
Not an enemy.

Just someone who had come for him.

Maul didn’t have a place in his world for that kind of presence.
He didn’t know what to do with it.

So he did nothing.

He turned his face away.
Closed his eyes.
Pretended the world didn’t tilt when Savage exhaled in quiet relief.

Rebirth felt too close to vulnerability.

When his mind cleared, Kenobi’s name was the first thing that sharpened.

Revenge was a compass needle lodged in Maul’s skull.

It buzzed behind every thought.
It burned under his skin.
It was the only thing that made the galaxy feel less like a formless blur and more like a direction he could point his claws toward.

Savage followed him through the halls of the Nightsisters’ ruins like a living shadow—massive, curious, maddeningly silent except for the questions he couldn’t quite hide.

“What will we do now?”
“Who are we hunting?”
“Why him?”

His tone wasn’t disrespectful.
It was the steady, lumbering confusion of someone who’d been shaped by magic and orders, but not by clarity.

Maul hated it.

Not because the questions were wrong—no, he reveled in the chance to speak Kenobi’s name like a curse—but because Savage’s presence forced him to think, to explain, to acknowledge another living being in his orbit.

He preferred isolation.
Isolation was simple.
Isolation didn’t require him to make room for anyone.

“Kenobi took everything from me,” Maul hissed one evening, pacing in jagged lines across the cracked stone floor. “The Jedi left me for dead. I will answer their mercy with ruin.”

Savage blinked slowly, golden eyes tracking Maul’s movements.
“And I’m helping you because…?”

A lesser creature would have been gutted for such a question.

But Savage wasn’t defiant.
He wasn’t challenging Maul’s authority.
He genuinely didn’t know.

And Maul felt a sharp, unwanted sting of memory—how many times had he asked Sidious the same questions? How many times had he been met with cold amusement instead of answers?

It irritated him more than he cared to admit.

“You are powerful,” Maul snapped. “Useful. A blade I can point.”

Savage didn’t flinch.
He simply nodded, absorbing the insult like it slid off thick armor.

Maul hated that too.

In the days that followed, Savage’s questions multiplied.

“Why this route?”
“Why hide here?”

It was gentle curiosity, the kind a younger brother might have when trying to understand an elder who moves like a storm.

But Maul wasn’t used to curiosity.
He was used to orders.
He was used to silence.
He was used to the sharp edge of Sidious’ displeasure whenever he dared to ask why.

So Savage’s questions felt like a grain of sand beneath Maul’s armor plates—small, persistent, impossible to ignore. They scratched at him, irritated him, forced him to confront things he wasn’t ready to examine.

And yet…

Savage listened.

He listened with a frustrating, grounded patience that Maul did not possess himself. He didn’t judge. Didn’t interrupt. Didn’t try to reshape Maul’s rage or soothe it.

He simply stood there, a mountain enduring the storm, while Maul tore apart old ghosts with every sentence.

One night, after another round of interrogation disguised as curiosity, Maul snapped.

“Do you always ask so many questions?”

Savage blinked.
“I ask because I want to understand.”

A dangerous word.

Understand.

No one had ever wanted that from Maul.
His master demanded obedience.
His enemies demanded his life.
The galaxy demanded his hatred.

Understanding was a luxury for people whose minds weren’t full of spiraling fractures.

“You do not need to understand me,” Maul snarled, turning away. “You only need to follow.”

Savage was quiet for a moment.
Then, carefully:

“I can follow better if I understand.”

The sentence landed in Maul’s chest like a thrown stone.
Not painful.
Just unexpectedly heavy.

He didn’t answer.
He didn’t have the words.

Instead, he stormed off and pretended it was disgust, not disorientation, that made his heartbeat falter.

Savage called him brother. Maul ignored it at first. The word felt borrowed from a language he had unlearned long ago.

But Savage kept using it. Not as flattery, or manipulation, or strategy. Just… truth. As if Savage genuinely believed it.

It grated.
And it lingered.

Savage was difficult to shake.
Not because he was stubborn—though he was—but because his presence was… steady.

He didn’t loom.
He didn’t nag.
He didn’t try to change Maul’s course.

He simply walked beside him, matching pace without effort, like a tidal pull Maul hadn’t meant to align with.

And Maul, who normally recoiled from contact, found his body adjusting around that presence. Not comfortably—comfort was far too intimate a word—but instinctively, like a predator moving through territory alongside another predator instead of against it.

A pack instinct he didn’t know he remembered.

Savage asked fewer questions.
Not out of fear—he didn’t fear Maul; that was strange enough—but because he was learning how to read him.

A shift in Maul’s shoulders meant he was thinking about Kenobi.
A twitch of his fingers meant a hallucination might be creeping in.
A sudden stillness meant a memory had snagged him like a hook.

Savage didn’t comment on any of it.
He simply adjusted his distance, stepped closer or farther, offered or withdrew presence accordingly.

Maul hated how effective it was.
And how he began to rely on it without meaning to.

The early days were filled with Savage’s clumsy attempts at obedience and Maul’s sharp corrections. Savage trained with the same brutal determination Maul once had. He absorbed each instruction with sincerity that bordered on naïve.

Maul didn’t know what to do with sincerity.

“You rush,” Maul snapped once, knocking Savage’s saber from his hands. “Strength without precision is useless.”

Savage retrieved the weapon quietly, eyes lowered.
“I’ll try again, brother.”

The word sliced deeper than any blade.

Maul turned away, pretending the ache in his chest was irritation.

He told himself Savage was a tool. A means to an end. Someone to hold the gate open while Maul drove the spear home. Nothing more.

But when Savage bled in training, Maul felt something unpleasant twist in his gut. Disapproval? Concern? No. Impossible. He refused to label it.

He told himself he only cared because Savage needed to stay alive long enough for Maul’s revenge.

He told himself that a lot.

Maul had always believed that plans were the only sanctuary the galaxy offered. The exquisite geometry of destruction.

He spread holo-charts across the ship’s war table, their blue light cutting across his tattoos like fractured lightning. Savage stood opposite him, broad arms crossed, gaze fixed with a surprising intensity for someone who professed no love for scheming.

Maul pretended not to notice.

Their plans for revenge grew slowly, shaped by Maul’s mind and Savage’s muscle. Maul mapped out each step with precision born from years of isolation: find Kenobi, break him, make him feel everything Maul had felt in the darkness.

Savage listened with solemn patience, asking questions only when he had to.

“He took everything,” Maul said. The words came quietly, tightly wound. “He completed the betrayal begun by my master. He finished it.”

Savage nodded slowly.
“Then we will find him.”

Not you.
We.

Maul hated how the word settled into him—like a weight or an anchor. Something that felt dangerously close to belonging.

He should have rejected it.
Should have reminded Savage that partnership was a temporary fiction.
Should have kept the distance Sidious had always demanded.

Instead, he found himself saying, “Yes. Together.”

The agreement felt strange on his tongue.
Unpracticed.

Savage smiled—small, surprised, honest.
Maul looked away first.

When the distress signal from a remote Republic outpost flickered across their sensors, Maul felt the electric thrill of purpose coil through him.

Kenobi would come.
Of course he would. The Jedi loved nothing more than predictability disguised as virtue.

Savage followed Maul onto the landing platform, both of them stepping through smoke and ruined steel. Maul could feel his brother’s presence at his back—solid, anchored, strangely reassuring.

He didn’t want reassurance.
But he didn’t push it away either.

Obi-Wan’s ship descended minutes later, and Maul felt something bright and sharp in his chest—hate, yes, but also something too tangled to name.

And then another figure stepped out behind Kenobi.

Jedi Master Adi Gallia.

Not ideal.
But not insurmountable.

Maul smirked. “Kenobi… bring all the Jedi you wish. I will send their bodies to your Order piece by piece.”

Savage rolled his shoulders, eager for the fight.
Maul tried to ignore the warmth in his veins—excitement, anticipation, and a dark, subtle pride at Savage's readiness.

The duel erupted instantly, fierce and scorching.

Maul and Kenobi clashed, sabers sparking like molten lightning.

Savage engaged Gallia, and for a moment, the two battles danced in parallel rhythms—Maul pressing forward with lethal precision, Savage using brute strength and instinct.

But instinct is dangerous against a seasoned Jedi.

Adi Gallia pivoted, blade sliding into a perfect opening—clean, elegant, fatal.

And Savage—

Savage stumbled.

No—he faltered.

Maul saw it happen in the corner of his eye. A flicker of hesitation, a flicker that mirrored every question Savage had asked him, every moment of uncertainty.

Gallia struck.
Savage roared—agonized, primal—as her blade carved through his arm.

Maul’s world snapped into a single, shattering point of focus.

Not Kenobi.
Not the Jedi.
Not revenge.

Savage.

His brother.

Maul lunged, intercepting Gallia in a vicious strike that sent her reeling.
He followed it with a brutal kick that sent her crashing into a wall.

Savage staggered backward, breathing ragged, blood pouring freely.
His stump smoked.
His expression was half-shock, half-fury.

Maul’s voice came out low, feral, cracking with something he didn’t dare name.

“Stay behind me.”

Savage didn’t argue.
Didn’t protest.
He obeyed.

Not because of dominance.

Because he trusted him.

Gallia recovered—briefly.
But Maul was already on her, movements sharpened by fear disguised as rage.
He struck her down in two fluid motions, merciless and precise.

When she fell, the silence felt like a distant scream.

Kenobi shouted something—Maul didn’t hear it.
Savage’s gasping breaths filled his world.

Maul turned sharply.
Savage was slumped against a beam, eyes glassy, blood soaking the floor.

Panic—real, sickening panic—clawed up Maul’s throat.

He knelt beside him in a blur.

“Savage,” he hissed. “Look at me.”

Savage blinked sluggishly.
“You killed… the Jedi?”

“Yes,” Maul snapped. “Now stay awake.”

Savage’s lips twitched in something like a weary smile.
“You sound… worried.”

Maul bared his teeth.
“I need you alive. Do not force me to repeat myself.”

But the words were a thin mask over the crack widening in his chest—an emotion Maul had no language for and no defenses against.

Savage breathed out slowly.
“I told you,” he murmured. “I’ll help you end him.”

And for the first time, Maul felt a flash of something terrifyingly fragile:
He didn’t want to lose his brother.

Not to the Jedi.
Not to his former master.
Not to his own cursed path.

Savage was no longer a tool.
He’d become the closest thing Maul had to a tether to sanity—rough, imperfect, but real.

Maul swallowed hard.
“We need to leave,” he said. Voice tight. “Now.”

For once, revenge was not his next step.

Saving Savage was.

Savage slept for nearly two days after Maul replaced the cauterized stump with crude mechanical stabilizers.
He drifted in and out of consciousness, pain making his breaths uneven, but he lived.
He lived because Maul protected him.
Because Maul chose to.

It was a quiet acknowledgment—one Maul would not say aloud—but the truth settled heavily in him nonetheless.

Savage was not merely a weapon.
Not merely a brother forged by the Nightsisters.
He was the first presence Maul had allowed close enough to see the fractures—closer, even, than Sidious had ever come.

And the strange thing was that Savage did not judge him for them.

He simply endured Maul’s silences.
His eruptions.
His obsessions.
He stood like a mountain beside a storm—imperfect, battered, but steady all the same.

When Savage finally woke, Maul was sitting near him, cleaning his saberstaff in restless motions.
He didn’t look up.

Savage’s voice came rough and weary.
“You stayed.”

Maul’s hand froze for half a second—just half.
Then he resumed sharpening.

“I required you functional.”

But the lie tasted thin.

Savage huffed a low, amused breath that tugged painfully at his injuries. “If you say so, brother.”

Brother.

The word landed softly, like dust settling on a blade.
Dangerous.

Maul didn’t repeat it.
But he didn’t reject it either.

From then on, they moved together with the inevitability of two stars caught in the same orbit—never perfectly aligned, often clashing, but bound by something unseen.

Savage followed Maul into battle without question.
Maul adjusted plans subtler than ever before, instinctively compensating for Savage’s new prosthetic and shifted balance.
They spoke less and understood more.

And for the first time since Naboo, Maul felt the dizzy, frightening sensation of not being entirely alone.

Revenge had always been a blade pointed outward.
But now, after seeing Savage nearly torn from him, Maul felt it point inward too—cutting at his own restraint, his own denial.

Kenobi had failed to kill him.
He had failed to finish what he started.

And Maul, with growing clarity, realized something Sidious had taught him in shadows and whispers:

To break a Jedi, you do not kill them.
You kill what they cling to.

Maul had long believed Kenobi was untouched by attachment—disciplined, irritatingly balanced, stable in the way that had infuriated Maul on Naboo.

But Savage, curious as ever, brought him names. Reports. Rumors.

“Her,” Savage said one night, sliding a datapad across the table.
A holo-image flickered to life—Satine Kryze, gaze sharp and dignified, wrapped in Mandalorian tradition and pacifist politics.

Maul leaned closer.

Savage continued, “She’s crossed Kenobi’s path before. Multiple times.”

There was a subtle shift in Maul’s breathing. Something cold. Something calculating.

“They say she was important to him,” Savage added.

Maul looked at the holo again—at her composed strength, her moral spine—and saw instantly how she would become a fault line in Kenobi’s composure.

A perfect leverage point.

“Good,” Maul murmured, voice low with a quiet, terrifying satisfaction. His lips curved slowly, deliberately.  “We will take Mandalore.”

When Kenobi finally arrived on Mandalore, disguised in shabby armor, Maul felt the rush of triumph coil through him.

He knew Kenobi would come for Satine. He knew, in the deepest marrow of instinct, that the Jedi’s infamous detachment would crumble where she was concerned.

And it thrilled him.

Satine knelt before him, her posture still stubbornly regal even as his shadow cut across the throne room like a split in the world.

Maul stood behind her, the Darksaber ignited with a crackling, unstable hum.

Savage lingered at his side—silent, unreadable, but grounding.

When the doors slid open, Kenobi strode in with the defiance Maul remembered so vividly—the same fire, the same foolish hope.

He froze when he saw her.
When he saw the blade at her throat.

Maul drank in the moment.

Kenobi’s eyes widened, then sharpened, then struggled to return to their Jedi calm. Struggled and failed.

“Satine…” he breathed.

Maul stepped forward, savoring each footfall.

“Look at you,” Maul said, voice low and rich with venom. “A Jedi, so determined to pretend you are immune to attachment. But here you stand… afraid.”

Kenobi flinched—barely.
But Maul saw it.
He lived on such fractures.

Satine lifted her chin, speaking with a courage Maul almost respected.
“Obi-Wan, it’s a trap.”

Maul admired the fire in her voice.
It would make extinguishing her all the more satisfying.

Kenobi moved forward, but the Mandalorians stationed across the room raised their blasters. 

Maul’s pulse thrummed.

“Do you remember, Kenobi,” Maul said softly, “what you took from me? What you left me to become?”

Kenobi’s gaze flicked to him—pain, regret, and steely resolve woven together.
Maul hated how much he recognized in it.

“Maul,” he said quietly. “This isn’t you. This is—”

Maul snarled. “Do not presume to know me.”

He pressed the Darksaber closer.
Satine gasped, but her eyes remained defiant.

Kenobi took a step forward—instinctual, uncontrollable.

And that was when Maul knew.
Knew with absolute certainty.

Kenobi loved her.

Oh, how glorious.
How exquisite.

Maul leaned close to Satine, his voice a razor’s whisper.

“You see, Kenobi… I have found your weakness.”

His face cracked—an expression Maul had never seen on him, raw and painfully human.
Fear.
Desperation.

“Maul—don’t.”

The plea in his voice intoxicated Maul.

“Goodbye,” Maul whispered into Satine’s ear.

The Darksaber plunged through her.

Her breath hitched.
Kenobi staggered as though stabbed himself.

Savage watched in stoic silence.
Maul felt the moment stretch, sweet and terrible.

Satine collapsed forward, falling into Kenobi’s arms.
He caught her with shaking hands.

“Not like this,” Kenobi whispered to her, voice breaking in a way that shattered Maul’s memory of the steady padawan who had once cut him in half.

Satine reached up weakly, touched Kenobi’s cheek, murmured something too soft to hear.

And then she went still.

Kenobi bowed over her, body trembling, grief spilling quietly from every line of him.

Maul watched. But something was wrong.

The triumph Maul expected — that soaring, righteous exhale — it didn’t come.
Instead he felt… nothing.
A hollow thud behind his ribs.
A slow, creeping cold that climbed his spine and settled in the cavern where his heart should beat.

This was the moment he had built his life around.
The revenge he had sharpened himself into.
The triumph he had sacrificed sanity, flesh, and years for.

So why did the sight of Kenobi’s grief feel—

—empty?

Why did victory taste like dust?

Savage shifted behind him — a subtle step, protective, grounding.
Maul felt it.
Felt the weight of his brother’s presence like a hand on the back of his neck.

And suddenly that tiny fear — the one he never voiced, never examined — clawed up from the dark:

If I lose Savage… there will be nothing left.

So he shoved the thought aside, burying it beneath rage.

Yes — rage.
Rage was safe.
Rage was familiar.
Rage had kept him alive.

He tightened his grip on the darksaber until his knuckles burned, until the hilt dug into his palm.

There was no relief.
Only a growing terror that perhaps revenge had never been a cure — only a chain.

And he had bound himself to it so tightly he no longer knew where the pain ended and he began.

The night before Sidious arrived, Maul couldn’t sleep.

He sat alone on the cold throne of Mandalore — a seat that still felt too large, too heavy, too sharp at the edges. The planet bowed beneath his command, the Darksaber rested in his lap, and Savage slept in the adjoining chamber, breathing slow and steady.

Maul should have felt powerful.

Instead, a strange thrum echoed in his bones — a vibration low and primal.
A warning. A shadow stretching across the floor of his mind. A presence he had spent half his life trying to please, and the other half trying desperately to outrun.

Sidious.

The name slithered through Maul’s thoughts like a blade through silk.

He pressed his palm to his chest, suddenly aware of his heartbeat — too fast, too loud.
Soft. Vulnerable.
As though his body remembered fear long before his mind would admit to it.

He told himself he was imagining things.

He told himself he was free.

He told himself he had nothing left to fear.

But the Force around him had begun to tighten — subtle, suffocating.
And Maul had lived under Sidious long enough to recognize the taste of dread.

"Apprentice," the darkness whispered.
"You cannot escape me."

His claws dug into the armrests.

When Savage entered at dawn, Maul nearly leapt to attack — his nerves strung tight as a garrote.

Savage frowned.
“You don’t look well.”

Maul snapped, “Do not question me.”

But Savage didn’t flinch.
He wasn’t the trembling acolyte Maul had first found on Dathomir.
He was a mountain now — carved from gold and conviction.

“Something’s coming,” Savage said quietly.

Maul stared at him.
For a fragile, terrifying moment, he almost confided in his brother — he almost told Savage the truth of their master, the truth he’d never spoken aloud:

He will come.
He will come for me.
He will come to destroy what I’ve built — and he will succeed.

But Maul swallowed the words until they cut his throat on the way down.

“We are strong enough to face anything,” he lied.

Hours later, Sidious arrived.

There was no army, no fanfare.

He simply walked in, as though Mandalore belonged to him, as though the galaxy itself bent around him.

Maul felt him before he saw him — a void pressing on every nerve, a hand closing around his lungs, a darkness so old it tasted like childhood terror.

Savage stiffened.
“What—what is that?”

Maul couldn’t answer.

Because Sidious was standing before them.

The same smile.
The same eyes.
The same gentle cruelty that had shaped him like a weapon on an anvil.

“Maul,” Sidious said, voice warm as poisoned honey.
“My disgraced apprentice.”

The words hit like a whip.

Savage stepped forward defensively — and Maul nearly grabbed him, stopped him, begged him to leave.

But pride cracked through his paralysis.

“I am not your apprentice,” Maul spat.
“I have surpassed you.”

Sidious chuckled.
Not loud.
Not mocking.
Just… amused.

As though Maul were a child throwing a tantrum.

When Sidious moved, the room seemed to bend around him.
The Force distorted.
Gravity itself forgot its purpose.

Savage roared and attacked first.
Maul followed a heartbeat later — the two of them finally fighting as one, blades singing, movements mirrored.

For a moment — a brief, blinding moment — they held their own.

Maul almost believed.

Almost.

But Sidious was not a man.
He was a storm.

And he had come home to remind them.

He parried both their strikes with ease — elegant, effortless cruelty.
He laughed as he fought, delighted by their fear, their desperation, their fractured unity.

Then came the moment Maul had dreaded, but knew was inevitable.

Sidious separated them.

With one movement — one flick of the wrist — he hurled Maul backward, slamming him into durasteel so hard his vision exploded into white.

“Savage!” Maul choked, scrambling upright.

Sidious descended upon his brother like a hawk shredding a wounded animal.

Savage fought valiantly — massive, furious, determined — but against Sidious, strength was meaningless.
Speed was meaningless.
Resolve was meaningless.

Maul watched, helpless, as Sidious carved through Savage’s guard again and again, dancing around him with mocking grace.

“No—NO!” Maul lunged forward.

He was too slow.

Sidious slid his lightsaber through Savage’s chest.

Savage staggered, golden eyes wide with shock — and then with something gentler.
Recognition. And regret.

He collapsed into Maul’s arms, his breath shallow, already fading.

“Brother…” Savage rasped.
“I… I am not like you.”

Maul shook his head violently, gripping him as if strength could anchor life.

“Savage — no — stay with me—”

Savage’s voice was small, childlike.
“I wanted to be more… than what they made me…”

And with one last exhale — he was gone.

The galaxy fell silent.

Maul bowed over his brother’s body, shaking.
He hadn’t cried since he was a child — but now his chest cracked open, and a sound tore out of him raw and endless.

Sidious watched with satisfaction.

“Yes… feel it,” he murmured.
“Your pain makes you powerful.”

Maul lifted his head — slowly, like a beast rising from its own grave.

The grief in his eyes was incandescent.

“You—” his voice broke, but he forced the words through his teeth.
“You took everything from me.”

Sidious smiled wider.

“And yet you remain mine.”

Maul roared and attacked — not for victory, not for revenge, not for pride.

But because the alternative was lying down and dying beside Savage.

Sidious beat him with insulting ease.
He took Maul apart strike by strike, the way one might disassemble an old machine.

When Maul finally collapsed, Sidious stood over him and whispered:
“There is no other path for you.”

Maul tasted blood, ash, and the unbearable truth:

He had never been free.
Not truly.
Not for a single heartbeat.

Not even when Savage called him brother.
Not even when Mandalore knelt.
Not even when he killed Satine.

Revenge had filled nothing.
Power had healed nothing.

And now the only person who had ever stood beside him — the only person he had allowed himself to trust again — was dead at his feet.

Sidious spared Maul not out of mercy, but punishment.

“You will live,” he said. “You will always live… to suffer.”

Maul lay there, shaking with grief so vast it felt bottomless — a wound that would never close.

He was alone again.

Utterly, completely alone.

And the hollow inside him yawned wide enough to swallow whole stars.

After Savage’s death, Maul didn’t descend into rage. He descended into silence.

Not peace. Not acceptance.

A kind of stillness that comes only after a wound too deep for screaming.

He wandered Mandalore’s underlevels like a specter, the Darksaber dragging behind him, the sparking hum trailing a sound like grinding teeth. His thoughts drifted in circles—dark, exhausted spirals orbiting the same truth:

He had lost everything again.

Savage.
His chance at freedom.
His power.
His illusions.

Not even revenge had saved him.

It had never been enough.

It will never be enough, a voice inside him whispered, cruel and familiar.

When Ahsoka Tano arrived, Maul sensed her before he saw her—bright, fierce, a blade cutting through the dark. But not the one he’d been waiting for.

No Skywalker.
No Kenobi.

His heart sank, and his irritation showed.

“Not the Jedi I wanted,” he muttered, almost disappointed. Almost relieved.

Ahsoka’s sabers flashed to life, white and blinding.

“Sorry to disappoint.”

Their duel was swift—almost ritualistic.
Maul fought with the precision of a man who’d long since accepted he was marked for death.
Ahsoka fought with the conviction of someone who still believed death could be prevented.

He disarmed her.
She disarmed him.
Their words cut deeper than their blades.

“Why are you here?” she demanded.

“Because,” Maul said, voice low, “I was cast out. And now—now I see what he plans.”

Ahsoka’s guard shifted. “He?”

Maul’s eyes gleamed with something sharp and terrified.

“My master. Sidious. Darth Sidious.”

Ahsoka stiffened, the truth slamming into her like a collapsing star.

Maul stepped closer, voice hoarse with urgency.

“He is orchestrating everything—the war, the Senate, the Jedi’s downfall. And your precious Skywalker…” He paused, tasting dread. “He is the key to it all.”

Ahsoka’s face tightened.

“You’re lying.”

Maul laughed—not cruelly, but brokenly.

“I wish I were.”

They overpowered him in the end—not through strength, but numbers.
A half-dozen clones wrestled him to his knees, stunned him with electrified restraints. Maul didn’t resist. He only stared at Ahsoka, eyes wide with an almost frantic clarity.

“Listen to me,” he rasped.
“You’re all going to die.”

Ahsoka’s jaw clenched. “Enough.”

“He will turn your soldiers against you,” Maul insisted, straining against the cuffs.
“The galaxy will burn, and your Order with it—I have seen it!”

Rex dragged him toward the holding cell.
Ahsoka tried not to look unsettled.

Maul’s last words echoed down the hall. “You cannot stop it. No one can stop it now.”

The ship trembled as blasterfire erupted in the hangars.
Ahsoka staggered into the detention block, breath sharp, eyes wide with horror.

The clones weren’t her soldiers anymore.
They were something else—something rewritten.

Maul looked up from his restraints with grim triumph.

“I told you,” he said softly. “I told you what was coming.”

Ahsoka swallowed hard.
“Will you help me?”

The smile that spread across Maul’s face was small, wild, almost childlike in its warped joy.

“So the little Jedi finally comes to her senses…”

She sliced through his cuffs.

Maul rose with a shuddering breath, flexing his hands like a predator freed from a cage.

“No weapon,” she warned. “Just create a distraction.”

Maul’s grin widened.

“Oh, child. You don’t know what you’ve just done.”

When he stepped into the hallway, chaos bloomed.

Clones fell like scattered leaves as Maul tore through them with the Force alone—no blade, no armor, no hesitation.
He wanted Sidious’ prophecy to burn.
He wanted the galaxy to hear the echo of his suffering.

And for a fleeting moment—amid the screaming metal and collapsing corridors—Maul felt alive.

The hangar was collapsing around him—sparks cascading like dying stars, steam erupting from ruptured pipes, metal screaming its last metallic breaths. Maul staggered through it, ribs thundering with every heartbeat, hands slick with someone else’s blood.

He saw the ship.

Small. Unsteady. Barely worth the fuel it held.

But it was there.

He threw himself into the cockpit, breath hitching as he slammed his palm onto the ignition.
For a moment, nothing happened.

Then—

The engines roared to life, coughing, protesting, but burning.

He exhaled shakily.

Just as he lifted off the deck—just as freedom trembled within reach—something invisible seized the hull.

The entire ship lurched with a metallic groan.

Maul froze.
He didn’t need the Force to know who it was.

Ahsoka.

Her presence pressed like a hand around his throat.
He felt her through the metal, through the air, through the trembling engines.

Trying to hold him in place.
Trying to drag him back down to a dying ship.

Of course she would try to save even her monster. Even him.

A snarl twisted his mouth.

He pushed the throttle—hard.
The ship screamed.
Didn’t move.

For an instant, Maul closed his eyes.

So this is it.
The end, not in battle, not by Sidious’ hand, not even by Kenobi’s blade, but caught like an animal by a girl who still believed there was something worth saving.

A pathetic conclusion.

A fitting one.

He almost let go.

Almost.

Then—
some small, vicious spark inside him refused.

Not survival. Not spite.

Hope.

The same ugly, ravenous force that had kept him alive in a garbage pit.
That had held him upright through Sidious’ lightning.
That had given him purpose when Savage found him.

He reached deeper—not into the calm pool the Jedi spoke of, but into the churning storm he had lived in all his life.

He whispered through clenched teeth:
“MOVE.”

He didn’t know if he spoke to the ship, to the Force, or to himself.

Something answered.

A violent surge. A fracture of will and fury driving through the engines.

Ahsoka staggered somewhere behind him—he could feel the ripple of her surprise, her grip faltering for half a heartbeat.

It was enough.

The ship tore free with a shriek of breaking metal. Ahsoka’s hold snapped like a bone under pressure.

Maul didn’t look back.

The Venator’s hangar fell away beneath him—fire roaring, bodies falling, Ahsoka shrinking to a pale blur as the entire world tilted into catastrophe.

He punched the throttle again.
The ship shot forward, scraping the last edge of the hangar as another explosion swallowed everything behind him in a wall of red and black.

He was free.
Against all odds.
Against all intention.

The stars opened before him.

He sagged back in the pilot’s chair, trembling.
There was no triumph. 

“Not today,” he breathed, half to himself, half to the darkness closing in at the edges of his vision. “Not yet.”

He set the navicourse through muscle memory alone.

Dathomir.

The ship lurched into hyperspace, and Maul let his head fall back against the seat.

The galaxy burned behind him.
Sidious’ plan unfolded exactly as he had warned.
The Jedi fell.
The clones turned.
Everything collapsed.

And Maul—somehow, impossibly—still lived.

Alone.
Again.
Always.

Dathomir received him like a wounded animal returning home out of instinct, not intention.
The planet was quiet now — a grave, not a sanctuary — and the green air hummed with memory more than life.

Maul spent the first months moving through the ruins like a shadow that had forgotten it once had a body.
He rarely spoke. When he did, it was to the dark, or to the dead, or to the Force itself in a low whisper that felt more like a confession.

Everything had been destroyed.
His brother.
His people.
His purpose.

All that remained was the pulse of old hatred — and even that was fraying.
Because hatred required energy, direction, a living opponent.
And Kenobi…
Kenobi was gone.
Like everyone else.

So Maul stayed and crumbled quietly over years, alone in the dust of a mother he could no longer call for.

The dreams came gently at first.

Bare flickers of a robed form at the edge of his vision. A presence Maul recognized in his bones.

Kenobi.

In the early dreams, Maul roared at the vision, all teeth and old wounds.
He spat accusations, hurled the entire weight of Naboo and Sundari and every scar between them.

The dream-Kenobi listened.
Silent. Sorrowful. Like someone mourning an enemy they wished had been a friend.

As months bled into years, Maul’s rage softened in the same way a blade dulls from overuse.
He still spoke with venom — but the venom didn’t bite like it used to.

Their conversations grew stranger, quieter.

“You haunt me even in death.”
Perhaps you are the one holding on.

“Why didn’t you finish it? Why leave me half a corpse twice over?”
Because ending you was never my purpose.
“Then what was?”
Kenobi simply looked at him, blue eyes dim with some sadness Maul could never decipher.

And, once, in a night thick with red mist— 
What is it you seek now, Maul?
Maul—voice thin as unraveling thread, said something he never thought he would.
“Hope.”

When he said it, he hated himself.
But Kenobi didn’t.
Kenobi only stepped closer, close enough that Maul could feel the warmth of him — a warmth he had not felt from another living being in years.

It took time — agonizing, bewildering time — but slowly the dynamic changed.

The dreams became less confrontational, more confessional.
Maul spoke of his brother, of Talzin, of the nights he woke choking on his own failure.
Kenobi listened with a compassion Maul resented, then needed, then relied upon.

The ache between them twisted into something neither forgiveness nor affection had a name for. Something raw and fragile, born from two men clinging to the same wound from opposite sides.

And then came the night everything shifted.

The dream was quiet — a small clearing, pale moonlight, no visions of battle or fire. Kenobi approached him without caution.

Maul didn’t step back.

For the first time, he didn’t feel like striking.
He felt… tired. So impossibly tired.

They stood close, the air trembling between them.
Kenobi lifted a hand — not to fight, but to touch Maul’s face, thumb brushing the ridge of a tattoo.

Maul leaned into it before he could stop himself.

Kenobi’s expression folded into something aching and tender and unbearably sad.

And then —
a kiss.
Soft, brief, like the brush of a question neither of them dared to ask aloud.

When Maul opened his eyes, Kenobi was already fading, his outline dissolving like smoke in a breeze.

The last thing he saw was the sorrow in his eyes.

Maul woke furious and desperate in equal measure.

Weeks passed. Months.
The dreams grew rarer, and when Kenobi came, he kept more distance, like something was pulling him away.

Maul began to fear the dreams would stop entirely.
That he would once again be alone with nothing but the echo of a man who had become — impossibly — his last remaining tether to sanity.

And then, one night, Kenobi reappeared holding something small in his palm.
A trinket.
Metal worn with age and touch — a Jedi keepsake Maul didn’t recognize.

Kenobi pressed it into Maul’s hand.

“What is this?”
Proof.
“Of what?”
Kenobi said, in a voice barely a breath, That I am not lost.

Before Maul could demand more, the dream dissolved.

He awoke with a ragged gasp, fingers curled tight around cold metal.

The trinket lay in his palm.

Real.

Kenobi lived.

Hope struck him like lightning — wild, dangerous, intoxicating — and Maul’s whole body trembled with the force of it.

For the first time since the galaxy burned, something inside him began to rise from the ashes.

Not revenge.
Not hatred.
Not despair.

Hope.

The most perilous thing he had ever allowed himself to hold.

The trinket changed everything.

Maul turned it over in his palm again and again, memorizing its weight, its subtle warmth, its promise.

Kenobi lived.

But the dreams stopped.

No more moonlit conversations. No more sorrowful blue eyes. No more quiet confessions slipping through the cracks of their shared tragedy.

The silence nearly drove him to madness all over again.

Eventually, silence became unbearable — so Maul moved.

He left Dathomir behind, a ghost abandoning a graveyard, and flung himself into the galaxy like a blade searching for its whetstone.

Alderaan was too clean, too gentle, too full of people who smiled like their world wasn’t a glass sculpture waiting to crack.

Maul hated it immediately.

He moved in shadows, avoiding the polished patrols and cheerful civilians.
His presence alone rippled the polite surface of the city like a dropped stone.

He followed rumors of a hermit — a man of calm voice and steady gaze who had passed through a mountain village years ago.
The villagers remembered him fondly.

Too fondly.

Maul almost tore the mountain apart stone by stone.

Instead, he found something else. A rebel cell, small but determined. They ambushed him, thinking he was an Imperial agent.

They never stood a chance.

But one of them, a fierce-eyed young leader, held her ground long enough to speak, “We don’t fear you. We fight monsters twice your size.”

Maul spared her.
Not out of kindness — but because the fire in her eyes reminded him of someone.
Not Kenobi.
Someone else.
Someone burnt out of existence.

He left Alderaan with no Kenobi — only another dream of what resistance looked like.

Stepping onto Naboo was like stepping into his own grave.

He walked past the very plaza where he’d been sliced in half — where destiny had split him open and left both halves screaming.

He expected to feel rage.

Instead, he felt… emptiness.
A hollow echo where a storm used to live.

He tracked another rumor — a robed man seen near Theed’s outskirts, meditating by the waterfalls.

When Maul reached the site, it was clear no one had been here for years.

He felt the edges of his sanity start to rip. Where else could Kenobi have gone?

Coruscant was dangerous.
He knew that before he landed.
Knew it as soon as the city’s cold metal breath brushed against his senses.

Sidious was here.
Sidious watched everything.

But Maul craved answers more than he feared death.

He stalked the lower levels first, searching for rumors of Jedi survivors, hermits, wanderers. He found only slavers, thieves, and fading graffiti of clone helmets painted in memorial.

He went to the Jedi Temple next, decorated in Imperial flags. There was a trail he was following, a faint pull in the Force. It led him inside the gates, and having nothing else to lose, Maul followed.

Maul followed  until he felt it. That old, familiar, suffocating pressure of Sidious’ presence.

His former master entered like a storm front, elegant and lethal, a black sun around which all shadows bent.

Maul froze a few feet away from the gates, quickly ducking behind pillars of stone, the Force pressing against him like a hand around his throat.

Sidious paused.

Head turning.
Sensing.
Tasting the air like a predator catching scent of an old, wounded animal.

Maul did not breathe.

The Sith Lord’s gaze passed over the garden—
lingered —
lingered —
and then moved on.

The moment Sidious vanished, Maul crumpled to his knees, trembling with triumph and terror.

There was nothing he would find here except for death, so he ran, and he did not stop until he reached his ship.

After months of searching, frustration hollowed him out.

He tore apart maps.
Destroyed datacrons.
Snarled at the stars themselves.

Even the trinket felt cold now.
Abandoned.
Mocking.

And then—

One night, half asleep at his ship’s controls, the Force hit him like a tidal wave.

A direction.
A memory.
A planet of twin suns and old, burning sand.

Tatooine.

Maul whispered the name like a curse and a prayer.

It was where he first met Kenobi — a day of fire and fury and a long fall into darkness.

Returning felt like stepping willingly back into his first death.

But he had nothing left to lose.
Nothing except the slim, impossible hope that the ghost he’d been chasing was not a ghost at all.

He set course for the desert.

For destiny.

For Kenobi.

Tatooine greeted Maul with a punch of heat so abrupt it felt like stepping into an oven mid-scream.

The air itself seemed exhausted.
Thin. Dry. Hostile.

Twin suns glared down on him like judgement — merciless, unblinking.
He had known deserts before.
He had survived deserts before.

But this one felt personal.

As though the planet recognized him.
As though it remembered what he had done here.

A rust-red wind kicked up grit that pattered against his robes, whispering over the durasteel plates of his legs. Sand stuck in the grooves. The metal hissed as it heated.

Maul ignored the sting.

Pain was background noise.

All that mattered was the pull in the Force, stubborn and faint and maddeningly familiar — like a lightsaber hum heard through walls. Like a heartbeat he didn’t know he’d memorized.

He followed it into Mos Eisley.

The people here had seen worse than a robed stranger with a hood shadowing his face. Worse even than the glint of blood-red skin and dark tattoos beneath the folds.

A Rodian vendor watched him warily, eyes darting to Maul’s hilt. A trio of smugglers gave him a wide berth. A Jawa hissed something about “metal legs” before scurrying off.

No one tried to stop him. No one asked questions. Out here, people minded their own nightmares. His passed unnoticed.

He went to a rental dock, where a human man with two missing teeth looked him over once and decided very quickly that he didn’t care who this stranger was or where he was going.

“You pay now. No refunds,” the man grunted.

Maul placed the credits on the counter with a click.

The man didn’t speak again.

Maul took the speeder.

The wind hit like a physical shove as he accelerated across the dunes, the horizon rippling with heat waves. Sand roared past him. The suns carved sweat into the tattoos on his brow.

He growled into the wind. The Force tugged at him like a thread wrapped around his ribs. It pulled, he followed.

Anchorhead was little more than a handful of weathered buildings crouched against the desert like they were hiding from it.

Maul walked through the settlement with purposeful steps. People paused, mid-task.

They were not afraid of him specifically.
They were afraid of anything that did not belong.

But Maul did not belong anywhere.

He moved through it like a shadow, asking questions with clipped patience.

Most pretended not to hear. Some muttered excuses.
One woman, after far too long of studying him, whispered, “There’s a hermit in the wastes. Lives alone. Avoids folks. Don’t know his name.”

She pointed toward a stretch of canyon where the dunes met stone like a wound carved into the planet. 

“Don’t go looking for him,” the woman said quietly. “Some folks don’t want to be found.”

Maul almost smiled.

“I have been looking for him my entire life.”

The Jundland Wastes were not empty.

They were vast — endless — but never empty.

Maul felt watched by the land itself. Jagged cliffs rose around him like giants, their shadows slicing across the sand in long, sharp edges.

Storms brewed on the horizon, spirals of sand twisting like serpents.
Tusken raiders watched from ridges, their silhouettes swallowed by distance.
Bones bleached by the suns lay half-buried under dunes, remnants of creatures too slow or too stubborn to survive here.

It took hours before the suns dipped.
Hours before the heat bled into bitter cold.

But Maul did not stop.

He moved with the determination of someone who had already died once and had no fear left.

Sometimes, he thought he saw him.

A flicker of brown robes in the corner of his vision.
A familiar gait silhouetted against the rocks.

Once, he even heard it — a voice like quiet water:

Maul.

But when he turned, the canyon was empty.

The Force grew louder as darkness settled, thrumming in his chest, tightening like a wire.
He followed it to a narrowing of the cliffs, then beyond, where a hollow of stone opened before him like a mouth.

And there — at the far side of the hollow a fire burned.

A beacon in a world that devoured them.

Maul halted at the top of a rocky rise, breath suspended.
The hooded figure by the fire shifted slightly, tending the flames.

A familiar posture.
A familiar stillness.

Something in Maul’s chest clenched so sharply it nearly doubled him over.

He let out a breath he had been holding for nearly twenty years.

Then he went to him.

The fire crackled as Maul approached, its glow catching on the curve of Kenobi’s cheek, the silver in his beard, the weariness settled into his bones like old sand.

Obi-Wan didn’t rise. He only looked up, blue eyes steady, warm, unbearably knowing.

His lightsaber lay at his right hand.
A small metal flask lay at his left.

A choice laid bare between them.

Maul stopped at the edge of the firelight, breath uneven, robes shifting in the wind. He expected a trap. Expected a blade. Expected… something sharp enough to match the storm in him.

Instead, Obi-Wan spoke softly, “You’ve come a long way, Maul.”

So many lifetimes in those words.

Maul’s throat tightened. His gaze flicked down.
Lightsaber.
Flask.

Revenge.
Or… something he did not have a name for.

His fingers trembled once before he forced them still.

Then he reached down—

—and closed his hand around the flask.

Obi-Wan let out a breath. Relief disguised as a quiet exhale.
And that undid Maul more thoroughly than any blade.

The tea tasted faintly of mint and dust.
Warm. Gentle. Infuriatingly gentle.

Maul swallowed like a man relearning how to live.

Obi-Wan waited through the silence, giving him space, giving him breath. Then, with the same careful grace he used in battle, he shifted to sit beside him.

Close. Too close.

Heat radiated from him, steady as a sun, real in a way Maul hadn’t felt in years — not in the Force, not in dreams, not in memories.

It scraped something raw open inside him.

Maul’s composure cracked.
His breath stuttered.
The world narrowed to the brush of Obi-Wan’s sleeve against his.

Obi-Wan didn’t pull away.

“Maul,” he murmured gently, “you don’t have to—”

But Maul had already leaned in.

The kiss wasn’t delicate.
It wasn’t tentative.

It was feral — a collision born of years of longing and rage and loneliness, of grief rotting in a ribcage too small to contain it.

Obi-Wan made a soft, startled sound against his mouth.

Then—
a huff of laughter, warm and breathless—

And he melted into it.

His hand came up to Maul’s cheek, thumb brushing heat into cold skin. His other hand slid to Maul’s shoulder, grounding him, steadying him as their mouths fit together with aching familiarity.

The desert wind howled.
The fire crackled.
And Maul clung, half-starved, half-livid at his own desperation.

Obi-Wan kissed him through it.
Kissed him like he understood.
Kissed him like the years between them had been nothing but sand waiting to settle.

When they finally parted, Maul’s breath shook.

Obi-Wan’s forehead touched his gently.

“I wondered,” Obi-Wan whispered, voice roughened at the edges, “how long it would take for you to find me.”

Maul swallowed hard.
“What would you have done if I had chosen the saber?”

Obi-Wan smiled — small, sad, unbearably tender.

“I still would have offered you tea.”

They didn’t hurry. 

The speeder ride was quiet, the desert wind sweeping around them as if the planet itself held its breath.

Obi-Wan’s hut was small and dimly lit, but the moment Maul stepped inside, it felt like walking into warmth rather than walls.

A bed.
A kettle.
A single lantern.

A life stripped to bone and truth.

Obi-Wan lit another small oil lamp.
The glow brushed over Maul’s face.

His breath caught.

For the first time in years, Maul’s body didn’t feel like a weapon.

Obi-Wan reached out—slow, steady—and Maul met him halfway.

The night was rough at first, then softer, then something like worship, all heat and tangled limbs and the quiet sounds of two men who had survived each other, survived everything, only to find something fragile and blazing in the ashes.

Obi-Wan’s hands traced the scars on Maul’s back like reading a story he already knew.
Maul held him like a drowning man holds air.

Dawn spilled over Tatooine like a tired blessing—thin, pale, reluctant.
Inside the hut, the air was cool, still smelling faintly of last night’s dust-washed heat, of old stone, of tea, of two men who hadn’t meant to fall into each other but did anyway, like gravity had been waiting centuries for this exact moment.

Maul woke first.

Not with panic—surprisingly—but with a bone-deep awareness of warmth at his side. Kenobi slept facing him, beard pressed against the crook of his arm, breath steady. His presence in the Force was a soft sun-pulse, steady and unbearably gentle… and Maul’s chest knotted with something that felt like terror wrapped inside longing.

He didn’t move.

He was afraid the dream would break.

But then Obi-Wan stirred, lashes fluttering, and opened his eyes with that same quiet, infuriating serenity he always held—even now, after everything.

“Good morning,” he murmured, voice low and rough with sleep, a little smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Maul let out a hoarse, disbelieving laugh. “You sound as if this is ordinary.”

Obi-Wan sat up, pulling the sheet with him, stretching like a man finally allowed to breathe. “Perhaps it should be.”

The words landed soft—but they hit Maul like a seismic charge.

They drank tea—because of course Kenobi had tea—and sat in the slanted morning light just inside the doorway. Maul kept his shoulders tense, hands curled around the cup as if anchoring him to the moment.

Obi-Wan sipped quietly before asking, “What is weighing on you?”

Maul swallowed. His voice was a rasp, stripped raw.
“I… owe you an apology.”

Obi-Wan looked up gently, not startled, simply open.

“For Satine,” Maul said, the name catching in his throat like broken glass. “Killing her was a cruelty beneath even me. It was… petty. Vindictive. I knew it would wound you. And I—” he pressed trembling hands to his knees—“I did it anyway. For revenge. For a hollow victory I never truly wanted.”

Silence. Clean, painful, honest.

Obi-Wan closed his eyes. The grief flickered across his face—old, familiar—but it softened, not sharpened.

“Maul,” he murmured, “I forgave you years ago.”

Maul jerked his head up, eyes burning. “Don’t lie to comfort me.”

“I’m not.” Obi-Wan met his gaze. “Satine would’ve wanted me to release that bitterness. And I did. Not for you. For her. And… perhaps for myself.”

The tea in Maul’s chest went molten.
“And Qui-Gon?” he asked, quieter.

Obi-Wan’s expression shifted. He didn’t look away.
“That was war. And the man you were then is not the one sitting before me.”

Maul’s breathing stuttered once, just once. He changed the subject before his voice broke.

“And you?” he said, lifting his chin. “What haunts your nights, Kenobi?”

Obi-Wan’s eyes darkened. His fingers tightened around his cup.
“Anakin,” he whispered, as if the name itself could summon a ghost.

Maul listened without interrupting—a strange reversal of the roles they’d always played.

Obi-Wan spoke quietly, each word like peeling open an old wound:
“I trained him. Loved him. Believed in him. And on Mustafar… when he fell, he dragged me into the fire with him.”

A shaky breath.
“I left him there. Thought he would die. Part of me thought he should die.”

“And now?” Maul asked.

Obi-Wan stared hollowly into the sand-bright light.
“Now he is Vader. And I… I am still trying to understand how I would change it, if I had a chance to redo it.”

The confession hung between them like a scar.

Maul set his cup aside and touched Obi-Wan’s hand—not gently, but firmly, like an oath hammered into iron.
“You did what you had to. For yourself, for him, for the Order he betrayed. Blame Sidious. Blame the Jedi Council. Blame the galaxy if you must. But do not take that guilt alone.”

Obi-Wan exhaled shakily—but nodded.

Then Maul asked the last question, the one that had been burning him alive from the moment he set foot on this accursed planet:
“Why here, Kenobi? Why Tatooine? Why this barren rock?”

Obi-Wan’s lips curved into something between sorrow and hope.
“You’ll see.”

He stood.

Maul followed him out into the bright morning, the wind brushing warm sand across their feet, the horizon glittering with heat haze.

They walked—far, farther still—across open dunes until they reached a rise overlooking a moisture farm. A humble homestead, smoke curling from a chimney, vaporators humming like sleepy giants.

Obi-Wan stopped.

“There,” he whispered.

A small figure ran from one shed to another—untidy blond hair, determined little stride, the unmistakable stubborn spark of destiny flickering around him like sunlight on water.

“That boy,” Obi-Wan said softly, “is Luke Skywalker.”

Maul’s breath caught.

Skywalker.
Anakin’s son.

Hope—dangerous, treacherous, intoxicating—surged up like a star burning through his ribs.

He didn’t speak.

He just reached over, took Obi-Wan’s hand, and squeezed once.
A promise.

I’ll help you protect him.

Obi-Wan leaned into him, eyes shining with something warmer than the desert sun.

And above them, the Force hummed—quiet, astonished, relieved—as if two broken halves had finally, impossibly, fit together.