Chapter Text
A man lays half-conscious, floating in the sea. Its vast waves bear him up against a sky on fire, a vault of yellow crossed with billowing clouds that fades to a blood red horizon. Massive creatures swim the peaks and valleys of this ocean, hungry mouths held agape to the current.
A pleasant place to die, if it weren’t for the truth.
An ocean of grease and metal, an undulating sea of garbage, miles deep, stretching from one hazy horizon to the other. Clouds of black chemical smoke rise from great fires to taint the atmosphere, their red glow the only sort of sunset those on the surface of this polluted world would ever see.
The man’s life gutters, holding on by a thread of power dark as the oily smoke rising above him. In a landscape of fire and rust, he clings to one clear thought— a memory of blue. Burning blue eyes and a burning blue blade and
Burning
Burning
Tiny pinpricks of searing pain. On his face, his arms, his
Legs?
Something is… wrong.
Legs. Something is wrong with his legs. He’s just seen them hasn’t he? There had been charred meat and rushing air and falling. Falling, that’s where he’d seen them, when he was falling— when they were falling beside him. No longer a part because…
Blue. Rage. Burning burning burning something is—!
Darth Maul snaps awake, sucks in a lungful of sour, polluted air and roars, clawing at his face and arms. Bright, itching pain crawls over his skin like a swarm of insects, creeping and biting. He twists and writhes against the ground, trying to scrub them off, crush them against the oily dirt, but his body doesn’t respond the way it should. Something is wrong. Something—
His hold on the dark side surges, instinctive, and it all comes back in an instant, a plunge into crystal clarity like being smashed through the ice of a frozen lake.
Naboo. The jedi, led by their pathetic noses exactly where he wanted them. His plan had been perfect, he had been perfect. Separated, the master had fallen to Maul’s blade in a dance of ataru and juyo, and then the apprentice…
The apprentice.
Their dance, a mirror. Maul had seen the fire of his own pure, beautiful rage in the padawan’s clear blue eyes. Pain and loss tempered into snarling power. Cutting down the apprentice would be his final test, the final step that would prove Maul truly worthy to stand beside his master. The first step in their revenge against the jedi.
The apprentice had taken Maul’s fury and flung it back at him, and he had learned what it was to see a jedi blaze. They had danced about the reactor room, about the fallen master’s body, their sabers crossing again and again and again, back and forth, spiraling around each other with all the lethal ferocity of twinned cyclones, winds shared and stolen.
And then it was over, and Maul was falling. The apprentice was gone and the reactor room was gone. He clung to his saber— only a part, it too was severed, the crystal within screaming a broken, disjointed melody that its twin could not hear— and plunged into darkness.
Peace is a lie
Gone, gone, gone. He had failed. He was broken. Sundered.
Master had come for him, once, when Maul had been broken on Hypori, but he did not come on Naboo. Second chances are not for him. Mercy is not for him. That is right. He did not deserve them. He is nothing.
Through passion, strength
A hulking barge had spilled him forth with the rest of the waste, and Maul fell, landing wet and half drowned on unforgiving metal. Everything was gone from him. Everything he had been and everything he was destined to become. Everything but the memory of blue eyes and rage. Of who had taken it from him.
Through strength, power
Maul had fallen to the scrapheaps awash in the dark side of the force, his hearts beating through passion alone. His connection to that power was the only thing he had left and he had drank of it deeper than ever before, drawing it to himself and feeding it with wrath, with rage, with will… and through his will it had taken of him, crawled into his marrow and flooded his lungs and nested behind his eyes. The dark side had come to him and locked its jaws around his throat. He had not sought healing, or even thought to. There was no reprieve in this place, no solace, no mercy. Instead, Maul would endure.
Through power, victory
The stinging itch burning across his skin subsides as he rages in the dirt. Not crawling, not insects— trickling, acid. From the water, the rain! He must get away from the rain.
Maul lurches, but only manages to roll over his shoulder, then he’s falling again. Clang, clang, clang as he rolls down into a pit. Useless, useless, worse than useless, he cannot move he cannot walk he needs to go he needs to flee he must—
“rrrRRAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!”
Dirt and flakes of rust rain around him as his anger shakes the mountains of trash. Metal begins rattling and sliding down, a landslide of garbage coming to bury what’s left of him but this is just one, more, test, among many and he will make it his. Maul screams defiance and reaches with the power eating through his very spirit. The oncoming wave of metal shudders and breaks, piling upon itself to create a vault over his head, filling in the dirty sky.
The cacophony of shifting debris grows fainter as it rises higher and higher above him. Maul holds the flood at bay until the slide stops. In the end he sits cocooned in darkness, safe from the trash and the acid rain.
The dark side roars in his ears, a pressure as if this place truly was an ocean, and he’d sunk himself to the very bottom. Its crushing weight presses down on him, on his mind, as he searches in vain for his bearings. Something behind him scuttles through the trash, then something else, to his right. Not just debris setting but living things moving about, darting, quick and busy, hungry, seeking, hunting. No! No, he is the hunter, the assassin in the shadows, that is his purpose.
Skittering in the darkness to his left and he turns toward it with a snarl, seeing the creature not with his eyes but in the force. A greedy, murderous little light. Catching it would mean barely a mouthful but that is better than starving and oh, does he hunger. He shudders, suddenly, at the emptiness. Another oceanic presence, one felt within instead of without, just as consuming and crushing but this one… holds purpose.
The little light flees. Maul drags his mangled form after it, ineffective in his broken state. As he does pieces of metal break off from the walls in his wake. The world around him bends to his will, tangles of wire and scrap drawing in, shaping together in the darkness. They come to him, surround him, sink into meat and marrow and become him.
Through victory my chains are broken
Maul bears himself up on new legs. Metal clutches the stump of his spine, twisting into the ragged remains of his innards, the power of the dark side weaving through it all. Six new limbs, to bear him through this world of shifting, black tunnels and skittering lights.
The apprentice had taken everything, reduced him to this. To something broken and irrelevant. A wretched thing. Creeping and hungry and small… but he would endure. He would survive, as he had always survived. Test after test after test that would never stop. It would never stop until he found that fire blazing in blue eyes again and took it back. Took back what was his. Until he took everything.
From the apprentice.
From Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Kenobi.
Kenobi.