Chapter Text
She had always loved rain.
Perhaps because it had been pattering on the durasteel windows the moment she was born. Rain, she often believed, was cleansing. It washed away the grime and ugliness of the world and left it a clean canvas.
In a place like Taris, rain allowed for a moment of stillness, a momentary respite.
It washed soot from fractured duracrete, turned old craters into shallow pools, and softened the sharp outlines of buildings that had stood longer than anyone living could remember but somehow remained unfinished. Yet no amount of rain could hide what Taris truly was.
A city forever under construction.
It wasn’t that Taris was abandoned or neglected, quite the contrary. The work continued because it had never really stopped.
The skyline stretched beyond the horizon in an endless forest of gleaming spires and elevated skyways. Cosmopolitan districts glittered beneath towering transparisteel facades where trade flowed through elegant plazas, rooftop gardens, luxury residences, and corporate towers. Construction cranes stood among them like permanent monuments rather than temporary inconveniences. Entire districts rose while others were quietly renovated around occupied buildings, as though the planet itself had accepted that completion was neither possible nor desirable.
On Taris, construction was simply part of existence.
One generation repaired what the last had inherited. The next improved upon it before leaving their own work unfinished for those who followed. No one spoke of when the city would finally be complete because that wasn’t the point of it. Taris was not Coruscant, content to envelop the planet and let its districts grow stagnant. Taris was alive. It grew, adapted, changed with the centuries. To continuously refresh and build was simply the nature of Taris, it was part of its mercurial charm.
Beneath those brilliant spires lay the true city.
Millions of skilled laborers and builders lived within an endless maze of residential sectors stitched together by transit rails, industrial corridors, shipyards, repair depots, and manufacturing districts. They toiled beneath the splendor crafting and designing every inch of it. Engineers, mechanics, architects, freight operators, even brick layers had their place. Every bit of infrastructure existed because someone had built it, and someone else would one day rebuild it again. But not all of Taris was bound to this hive of worker bees.
Beneath the well maintained shell of the ecumenopolis lay the undercity.
This was the forgotten foundation upon which every new generation continued to build. Here half buried beneath fragmented slabs of old construction, sunlight rarely reached this deep.
Here the bones of the ancient metropolis remained largely untouched beneath centuries of expansion. Entire streets had simply vanished beneath newer neighborhoods. Forgotten transit tunnels disappeared into darkness. Ancient plazas had become entombed with newer roads above them serving as their ceilings. Long abandoned skyscrapers protruded from the shadows like the weathered ribs of an ancient beast buried beneath steel and stone. Taris, after all, never truly cleared their ruins, preferring instead to pave over them.
The undercity belonged to a different subset of people.
Criminal syndicates carved territories through abandoned rail tunnels. Smugglers transformed forgotten maintenance corridors into hidden trade routes. Refugees disappeared into districts so old they no longer appeared on official maps. Every forgotten corner became another refuge for those with nowhere else to go or for those seeking to hide.
Taris was, in truth, two cities: One reaching up to the very stars, the other living within the foundations. Above, civilization endlessly refreshed and emerged renewed. Below, survival endured among the ruins it had quietly buried but never erased.
She preferred the place where both worlds met.
Her cybernetics shop occupied one of the sprawling industrial districts that bridged the civilized city and the forgotten depths below. Construction crews, dockworkers, freight companies, and transit engineers brought her new clients and injured workers with comforting regularity. The work was steady and predictable with a veneer of respectability. It kept her close enough to the upper districts that legitimate business never dwindled, while remaining near enough to the undercity that strangers arriving late at night attracted no attention.
A foreman might show up to change out the servos in their left arm in the morning. A Pyke bruiser might arrive close to midnight with a freshly shattered jaw asking for a new set of serrated teeth. Her reputation was that she would take both of their credits and deliver excellent work provided they followed her strict rules:
She did not work for free, but she did not take more than a fair payment.
She did not want to know more than what was necessary to treat the injury.
And she did not see clients after-hours without an appointment
To be honest, she preferred it that way. It kept the undercity from thinking she took sides, while at the same time providing an affordable alternative to the flashier cybernetics shops for the laborers that just wanted basic functionality.
She would have continued her blissfully mundane life were it not for a random construction detour.
She understood better than most that the undercity held more than just abandoned districts. Some places were old labs sealed away, their discoveries never allowed to see the light of day. Other spaces housed ancient technology older than humanity. Still more were vaults sealed off with tons upon tons of duracrete poured over their entrances as though that would protect the surface from the danger lurking within. As though time and the sheer weight of the planet above would never crack them open all over again. Around these vaults she often found ash, clawmarks, and something desolate, like the scars of an ancient annihilation.
Sooner or later, someone found these places, scraped out the valuables and laid them out on cloth mantles. She often enjoyed walking through these makeshift stalls and picking out the valuable or interesting parts from the junk. Today she had spent entirely too much time wandering the pockets of commerce in the undercity trading ration sticks and refurbished bits of tech for scrapper metal and interesting relics. The clouds had begun to gather long before she made the trek up to the higher levels.
Perhaps if she hadn’t delayed, she would have been able to make it home before the elevated walkway was closed for refurbishment. Perhaps if she had not dawdled and settled for a food stand closer to home instead of treating herself to spicy wontons, she would not have missed the repulsor lift by mere seconds.
Perhaps the Force had a twisted sense of humor.
It had already begun to rain when she went the long way around. The alley was somewhat secluded, cutting through several district blocks with now closed distribution depots. She thought little of it other than to wish she had brought a thicker cloak now that the rain collected on the exposed support beams overhead and fell in heavy drops.
She looked around, more concerned with the food in her satchel than her environment as she noted the fresh utility conduits bolted directly into walls blackened by fires older than memory. The walls were new duracrete and where they ended, they met weathered stone without transition. The alley itself, like everything else on Taris, existed between centuries, caught somewhere between what it had once been and what it was still trying to become.
It was only then that she noted the bodies.
Three of them to be exact.
A bounty hunter lay face down against a collapsed wall, armor still smoking from a lightsaber wound that had cut cleanly through his chestplate. Two more were sprawled farther down the alley, blasters discarded where they had fallen.
Professionals.
Or at least they had been, until someone had proven otherwise. She paused long enough to see if any of them were wearing her handiwork, but none of them seem to possess her brand of cybernetics. Good. That meant there would be no one asking uncomfortable questions. She left them without sparing them a word and making a note to inform the Duros enforcers some of their boys may have taken a tumble. They would have to clean it up before their corpses were found by someone less discreet.
She turned the corner and walked away without sparing them a second thought when something brushed up against her senses. The person who had killed those men was still here. Her eyes narrowed as she took a few more hesitant steps and saw him.
The Force whispered to her, bringing information like a hound attempting to please its mistress. Danger. Weakened. Broken.
There was another body up ahead slumped against a crook in the alley made by two disjointed buildings. He, unlike the others, was still breathing. She approached carefully but he remained concerningly still. She paused as a nearby rail car overhead momentarily illuminated the shadows revealing a zabrak. Now there was a rarity. She hadn’t seen a Zabrak on Taris in… well as long as she’d lived here. His skin was covered in ink-black tattoos that would be considered excessive even by his own kin yet the patterns were mostly lost beneath a layer of grime and blood.
His breathing came in shallow, uneven pulls, every inhale sounding as though broken glass shifted somewhere beneath his ribs. His robes had been reduced to little more than torn black fabric soaked through with blood and rainwater. One cybernetic leg had partially seized, locking awkwardly beneath him the other sparked each time water dripped on it making it twitch like a broken droid.
Her eyes narrowed in disapproval. Even at a glance she could tell the workmanship was subpar, far inferior than what she saw even on some of the refugees. She could identify at least four different styles of systems, each one repaired so many times that original components were almost lost under the salvaged replacements. The work was crude yet the weathering said he had managed to keep them functioning for some time.
The longer she observed him the more damage she could spot. Fresh burns crossed one shoulder, what looked like an old blaster wound had reopened along his ribs. A flicker of Force once more came unbidden, to show the extent of the damage. There were bruises beneath bruises, some days old, others only hours. Fever. Malnutrition. Exhaustion. Pain… so much pain…
She frowned and jerked her head away mentally berating the Force for meddling when she could have just as easily guessed what had happened: Someone had invested a tremendous amount of effort trying to kill this man, and failed spectacularly.
Someone spent an obscene amount of money on you. What a waste of credits.
As though summoned by her thoughts, yellow eyes snapped open. His gaze was blind and filled with anger. Instinct that had awakened before consciousness and he jerked away from her though she stood a good ten paces from where he lay. His hands pawed at the ground beside him searching for a weapon that was no longer there. He had lost it in the skirmish or well before then, but the realization transformed his anger into raw panic.
"No… no, no, no… Master…" he stammered in a fevered rasp.
She said nothing and stood there watching him like a cat watching a bird with a broken wing. He didn’t seem to see her, or even realize where he was. His gaze looked beyond her as though he were reliving memories, his yellow eyes glowing in the darkness and darting to ghosts only visible to him.
Fear bled into anger and solidified into hatred.
"Kenobi!" he snarled as he tried to rise and perhaps tear her apart with his bare hands. Yet with his damaged legs all he managed to do was collapse harder against the wall.
She stood there watching his strange display with the morbid curiosity one reserved for a speeder wreck on the side of the road. It wasn’t the ramblings what made him strange. No, the Force itself felt altered when it came in contact with him. It wasn’t the dark side. Darkness was easily understood and it did not behave or move with this sense of wrongness.
Against all common sense she approached him and felt how her presence seemed to jostle pieces out of place. It moved in jagged motions around him as though his entire being was fractured. Like an obsidian blade shattered into a thousand pieces and held together solely through rage and a stubborn refusal to die.
She crouched down to get a better look at his face. She had stood before many Sith in her day, even managed to kill a few of them. She knew the shape of the dark side and the imprint of power it left, but this… this was something else.
A soul held together by sheer willpower.
She had never seen anything quite like this and she would be lying if she said it didn’t pique her interest. As she reached toward the wound along his side, his hand closed around her wrist with startling speed. She froze, but the grip lacked strength and she understood the motion for what it was: desperation.
"Don't," he uttered the command and she tilted her head to one side.
A command.
How absurd of him to issue it as though he were in any position to make demands. He locked eyes with her and for the first time seemed to see her through the haze. The anger and violence of his delirium had bled away leaving only an exhaustion so profound it bordered upon surrender.
The Force surged around them.
Disjointed memories drifted through his feverish mind and echoed in her thoughts.
A command chamber.
The Mandalorian throne.
Raised voices.
Then, the fallout.
Trusted lieutenants who weighed loyalty against survival and one by one they chose themselves.
Some quietly withdrew their support and pretended not to hear his orders. Others sold information. Others still simply failed to arrive when he needed them most.
They failed him, and he could not abide failure.
A handful of loyalists survived the schemes… and then came the purge.
The Empire, the Stormtroopers, the mechanical nothingness swallowed up entire star systems that had once been filled with life and wonder.
There had been more.
The galaxy had held so much more, and now it died, a slow, painful death.
Vengeance kept complacency at bay.
There were scores to settle with blood. It drove him to Janix.
Then he lingered, he yearned, he was tempted… he lost his loyalists, exchanged their lives for an apprentice.
It was vanity. An indulgence he allowed himself believing it was warranted. He deceived himself and expected much from a child whose resolve had always wavered. An apprentice who couldn’t be Jedi, but was so unsuited to be Sith it bordered on a mockery.
She was lacking and when faced with joining a fickle rebellion or true vengeance she faltered. She was tainted from the very beginning. Jedi cannot change what they are…
Maul stood alone in the aftermath, amidst the wreckage, crimson blades carving through impossible odds while the last of those still willing to die beside him fell one after another until only he remained.
He had escaped.
If you could call it that. His losses had been so profound he was forced to wander the Outer Rim alone while every ambitious bounty hunter tried their luck at claiming his head.
He was no longer a predator. He was barely prey. In his current state he was little more than target practice.
Just then his grip loosened, eyes fluttering shut as the fever reclaimed him. His hand fell away from her wrist leaving her to parse through the shared memories alone. Her lips pressed into a thin line.
She felt resentment of all things. The Force was trying its damnest to show her things that an effort she found highly unnecessary. She was not a fool, everyone knew who this man was. The tattoos. The horns. The cybernetics…
The undercity taverns were full of whispers about how the Shadow Collective had fractured. Gang bosses who had joined up had breathed a little easier with their Overseer gone. They said the old master had been too fickle, temperamental, and ultimately too weak to hold the syndicates together. They turned on him, and he hadn’t been seen since. Others said the Empire had cornered him and broken his grip on the throne. Others still claimed he never existed. He was a fabrication of the allied syndicates. Nobody knew the truth or actually cared one way or another. Life went on, business as usual.
Still she couldn’t help but notice that there were precious few who actually spoke his name out loud and even they used hushed tones. He was weak enough to hunt, but not the sort of being you’d want to conjure from the shadows with an ill placed word.
Loyalty evaporated, but it seemed fear was more resilient.
Typical.
No one was eager to catch a glimpse of him save for the bounty hunters.
Of course, once the galaxy saw him bleed, it had wasted no time deciding he was worth considerably more dead than alive.
Darth Maul, the Shadow Lord, and (if her sources were correct) a former apprentice to one Darth Sidious…
Depending on who you asked the man was meant to be a crime lord, executioner, or monster. Looking down now he appeared to be none of those things. Here in the gutter under the rain, he looked like another of Taris’ ruins; something easier to just bury and forget.
She sighed, feeling ancient as though she had lived long enough to see the galaxy lose its vibrancy. There was no place for someone like him anymore. He was a creature from a bygone era, like a nightswan left to starve in an industrial sector that was once a lake. She agreed that it was a shame and a waste, yet she rose to her feet nonetheless.
This had nothing to do with her.
Maul was not so much a man as he was a walking cataclysm. His very presence was too loud, too obvious. If the Force had created the galaxy to serve as its main stage, then Maul was one of its star performers. He was not meant to live a quiet life, he would not have allies, friends, and family. He would play the role he was required and all around him would burn until he did what was needed of him. Such a man held the attention of too many people, and having managed to flee the spotlight she was not eager to return.
More would inevitably come, imperial soldiers, rival syndicates, mercenaries, bounty hunters. People who were more skilled than the three that died today. They would come because it was needed; because he was needed to fulfill his role in the narrative.
No thank you.
She turned to go.
"...Mother… wait…" His voice was a weakened whisper barely audible over the hum of the city but it was enough to give her pause.
He had no right to sound so small, so incredibly fragile. Her dark blue gaze narrowed imperceptively but his eyes remained closed and he spoke no more. She stared at him for an uncomfortably long time, before the spell was broken and she walked away.
It’s just a trick. More ramblings than substance.
Trouble followed him with remarkable consistency. She needed to put distance between them before it was too late. This was one of the few times where a problem would simply resolve itself, and only a fool would get involved. The rain pattered steadily against rooftops and scaffoldings alike as though in agreement.
She was being reasonable. Hell she was simply being sensible! There were a hundred valid reasons why getting involved was just a bad call.
He was dangerous. He was being hunted by half the galaxy. He would expose her. And he was a Sith! The man wouldn’t be grateful even if she did help.
Which I am not going to do!
“Helping him accomplishes nothing and ruins everything,” she muttered under her breath, staring across the street at the neon sign above her door.
She was almost home. It was almost over.
"...Mother… wait…"
His words echoed in her mind with a startling clarity that stopped her in her tracks.
The image of him alone calling for his mother made her wince. In that moment he hadn’t been Darth Maul, or the Shadow Lord, or some menacing figure. In his last moments he was just a broken man, stripped of every title by fever, reaching for the last place he ever remembered belonging.
She gave a heavy sigh and stared up at the clouds overhead.
Around her, Taris continued rebuilding itself beneath the rain. Welders threw showers of sparks from unfinished towers. Freight lifters crawled between skeletal frameworks. Somewhere below, in the forgotten depths of the undercity, smugglers and refugees carried on lives hidden beneath the foundations of a civilization that never quite finished replacing what came before.
She reluctantly thought back toward the alley where the remnants of another lifetime breathed its last.
She closed her eyes.
The Force grew still as though waiting.
"OH GODS KRIFFING DAMMIT IT!” she snapped in anger as she stomped her foot in frustration and turned to head back into the alley.
She would stabilize him and that was it.
She would see him through the fever, repair what could be repaired, and send him on his way before the parade of bounty hunters, imperials, and gangsters came beating down her door. AND THAT WAS IT!
The Force, however, seemed to be laughing at her.