Chapter Text
Obi-wan’s arm where it hooked under his shoulders was warm in comparison to the chill of the desert at night. The fiery pain where the lightsaber had carved deeply into his chest was fading as darkness circled the edges of his vision. Maul looked upwards past Obi-wan’s face, worn and aged past his years, towards the stars overhead. The Force was quiet and still, welcoming him. Even the eternal rage of the Dark, the striving fury, had settled.
“Tell me,” he said, struggling for breath with sundered ribs and sternum, “is it the Chosen One?” He could think of no other reason Kenobi would have exiled himself out here. No other reason the holocrons would have promised Maul that his revenge against Sidious lay on Tatooine.
“He is,” Obi-wan replied, still propping him up. It was odd. By rights the Jedi should have let his dying body fall to the sands to gasp his last, not offer this… this sympathy . Did he not care about everything Maul had taken from him? Was he too weak to know an enemy when he saw one?
No. Kenobi won their battle. He could not be weak. Perhaps it was just that for all Maul’s plots and designs, it was Darth Sidious who destroyed Kenobi’s world in the end.
“He will avenge us,” Maul said, a stuttering collection of words, and the last of his strength left him.
With a sigh, Maul let the Force take him. He sank into its depths, the darkness folding softly around him. There was no pain. There was nothing at all.
----
Maul’s eyes flickered open, coming awake so suddenly that he gasped for air. His hearts hammered in his chest, though with shock and surprise rather than fear. He was staring up at blank metal, not a sky full of stars. He didn’t hurt anywhere or… no. There was pain, but only a dull ache, so negligible that he hadn’t even noticed it at first. The ache of bruised muscles along his arms and ribs.
Where was he? What was this?
Maul started to sit up, his hands going to his chest still half-expecting to find a chasm of charred flesh, but his body didn’t move the way he expected it to. He was too small, muscles and bones and skin sitting oddly, unfamiliar. He kicked out; a flailing spasm of misfiring nerves and there was no metal, none of the not-quite-right proprioception and feedback he was used to dealing with from his prosthetics.
Maul fell out of the bed and hit the floor in a tangle of limbs. His breathing came faster and faster. He was dimly aware that this was panic, but he was too stunned and disbelieving to regain his usual control over his emotions. This did not make sense. He was not himself, and yet…
The hands splayed out against the floor were red and black and familiar, but thinner and smaller than they should have been. His thighs flexed as he tried to push himself up, and he almost laughed out loud at the strangeness of having legs, of feeling those muscles at work.
“Maul?” Someone said. There was another body crouching next to him; from the corner of his eye he saw a grey uniform, a knee and a proffered hand with deep blue-black skin and a paler palm. The proportions were child-sized but oddly large compared to himself - but then Maul was also no more than a child just now.
Maul ignored the offer of help. He might be as uncoordinated as a tooka kitten but he was not weak. He struggled into a sitting position, relishing the sensation of cold, hard ground underneath him, and found himself face to face with a nautolan, a child of perhaps twelve or thirteen. She was… oddly familiar. He knew her from somewhere, though he didn’t know how that could be. He had no idea where he was, how he had come to be here, or why he was in the body of a child.
He assumed it was his body as a child, but even that he was not yet sure of.
The nautolan blinked, and drew her hand back. She was still down on one knee. He could sense the shape of a question in her mind, the desire to ask why he was acting so strangely as well as an odd… care for his well being. She knew him, and the knowledge of her identity hovered on the edge of his awareness.
“Do you still want to train tonight?” she asked, instead of any of the other questions on the tip of her tongue.
Maul had no idea what she was talking about.
“Alright,” she said, her tone calm and accepting despite the regret that Maul could sense. She stood up. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
“Wait.” It might have been wiser to let her leave so he could have the space to figure this all out on his own, but he found he didn’t want her to go. He pushed himself slowly to his feet, flexing his toes with something akin to wonder. “I… had an odd dream.”
Curiosity flickered across her face. She rocked back and forth on her feet, waiting for him to continue. Maul studied her, hoping that perhaps her clothing would give him some clue. It looked like a uniform of some kind, or perhaps a jumpsuit. Glancing down, he saw he was wearing identical items. Certainly a uniform then.
When he didn’t say anything more, the nautolan asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”
He was unsure what it would be wise to say. If it helped him to understand what was going on that would be one thing, but he doubted this girl had any answers. She didn’t appear to be Force sensitive, or at least, not at all trained in the Force.
“It’s fine,” Maul said. “Tell me what you wanted to do tonight.”
“Stealth practise,” she replied promptly.
Maul had been shaped into a master of stealth by Darth Sidious. He had no need to practise - yet that was in a body he was familiar with. He wasn’t sure he was capable of stealth at all in his current state. He might not even be able to walk in a straight line until he got used to this frame. The girl was not suspicious of him yet despite his odd behaviour, but if she saw how physically awkward he was that would change.
“Go without me,” he said. “I am not feeling well.”
Her eyes widened, and she took a step forwards, one hand coming round to grasp his shoulder. Maul raised a hand to bat it away but missed, the movement an uncoordinated jerk. “I’ve seen you train with broken bones before and not say a word. Something must be really wrong. Do you want me to get Trezza?”
Abruptly Maul realised who she was and where they both were.
This was the Orsis Academy, an elite facility which trained bodyguards, mercenaries and assassins for the galaxy’s rich and corrupt, the place Maul had been sent to for just over six years as a child to be shaped into the creature his Master wanted. She was Kilindi Matako, another student at the school and…
And with the benefit of hindsight, one of the only people who had ever shown him friendship. Something he’d then returned by killing her - on his Master’s orders, and there had never been any choice or any other way that could have turned out, but that didn’t stop the memory flashing into his mind; her neck breaking under the twisting power of the Force.
It had been quick. Quicker than most of the deaths that night. He’d been able to give her that, at least.
“Maul?” She was pushing him backwards to sit on the bed. Maul went with her, nausea twisting in his stomach. “Don’t look so… Don’t look like that! I won’t get Trezza, that was only a joke, a bad one. We can fix this together, whatever it is.”
Everything about this situation was impossible. This was his past, before Mandalore, before Lotho Minor, before Naboo. Before he even earned the title of Darth Maul, never realising what a poisoned chalice his Master offered him. He was a scrawny child again. Was any of that real? His past, now his future? Had all of it been nothing more than a dream? Or perhaps this was the dream, reliving moments in time as he died and passed into the Force.
He pressed a hand to his forehead, feeling the stubby spikes of his horns above. He couldn’t tell Kilindi any of this. If this was real, then his actions had meaning. There would be consequences, and he remembered that anything to do with the Force was forbidden here. His Master…
Darth Sidious was here also. Not distracted with his great game of war, with his Empire, with his new Apprentice. Here.
Fear filled Maul’s belly with ice-cold lead.
Would Sidious sense this? Would he somehow know that Maul was no longer that naive, ignorant boy hanging on to his false promises of power? If he discovered that Maul knew the future, could reveal to him the outcome of the great plan, the revenge of the Sith…?
The instinct to run pulled at his limbs, but there was nowhere to go. He had no resources, he had no means of escape…
No. That was not true. Maul had himself and the power of the Dark Side, and that was all he had ever needed. He’d survived certain death, he’d survived his Master discarding him like a broken tool, he’d survived betrayal and capture and all the other dangers of the galaxy. However little he had, he could always build anew from it. He could escape from here, he merely needed to be careful about it.
Vague plans whirled inside his head. He needed time, to consider his options and to get used to a body both familiar and strange at the same time. If he acted without thinking his Master would certainly be able to track him down, and that was not something he could afford to happen.
“It’s fine Kilindi,” he told her. “I just need to rest. I’m sure I will be well again by tomorrow.”
The look she gave him was skeptical, but she didn’t press. He remembered that about her. Her overtures of companionship had always been offered with an open hand, easily withdrawn if he pushed it away. In Maul’s experience friendship was an unreliable thing and relationships were transactional more often than not. People allied themselves with those who could do something for them in return, although there was a wide range of goals and motives in the galaxy. Savage wanted to be trained by a Sith, the criminal gangs wanted money and personal gain, Death Watch wanted someone who could deliver their planet back to them and help them keep it…
Whatever it was that Kilindi saw in their potential friendship, she didn’t want it enough to push hard for it. It was strangely comforting. It left Maul feeling that he could reach back without fearing he was being manipulated, or that if it was necessary to break their alliance she would be slighted and angry in response.
“Okay then,” she said. “We can always train together another night, if you want.”
“Yes, of course.”
Kalindi slipped out of the door on bare, silent feet. Maul waited until she was long gone before he could relax.
Why was he here? Was this really the past? Such things should not be possible even through the Force. Maul had never heard of someone managing to travel through time, although there were many stories of Jedi or Sith or other traditions that he did not know. Perhaps he was not the first one to have been caught up in the currents of the Force and deposited at some random moment in their lives.
It could still be some manner of dream or illusion, but there was no point in acting as though it wasn’t real. He had to assume that it was.
What did he remember of the Orsis Academy? Maul had never been sure of his own age, and much of his childhood blurred into singular moments of pain and measured cruelty. It had all been designed to make him better and stronger than the Jedi, and for the most part it had. Even then he had fallen at the first true hurdle, when Kenobi struck him down…
If he regretted his upbringing it was not in its harshness, but that Sidious had still kept so much from him. The true secrets of the Sith were many, arcane arts devised and improved over millennia, yet Maul knew none of them. He did not know even so basic a trick as Force Lightning. All of his training had been aimed at honing his body into a weapon, but he was only ever meant to be a tool. Nothing more.
Once he’d imagined he might be able to make Darth Sidious proud of him. That idea now was laughable.
Maul rose from the bed, keeping his arms wide for balance. He began to stretch his arms and legs, small movements becoming larger ones as he concentrated on the feel of his body, the weight of his limbs, the stretch of his muscles, the smooth, dextrous clench and release of fingers and toes. He paced, adapting to the smaller stride. He rolled his head from side to side, testing his inner ear.
Gradually, his form began to make sense to him.
Maul had slept already this night and he did not feel at all tired. He had better things to do with his time than rest. As his control over his own body grew he tested it more, with leaps, jumps from the walls that at first frequently ended with him slamming to the floor. The pain and inevitable bruises were nothing to him. He began to use the pain to draw the Dark Side into him before hesitating.
He did not know if his Master was on the planet right now. He didn’t remember how often Sidious might have left - although looking back he was sure that he hadn’t been spending all of his time on Orsis, not when he had his other identity as a Senator to keep up. The fact remained that Sidious had been here often, continuing Maul’s training in the Force at least so far as it pertained to combat.
Maul had been forbidden to use the Force while he was at the Academy itself. His Master was very in tune to the currents of the Dark. Even miles distant, he might still feel that Maul was disobeying him.
This was going to be difficult if he couldn’t use the Force. He might be getting used to this child’s body, but it lacked the ingrained muscle memory that Maul was used to relying on in a fight. Its instincts, the paths laid down in its neural tissue, were beginning to come into being, but… it was still not quite right .
Maul realised he might have to stay here longer than he’d thought. The whole point of the Academy was to train him to fight, and it would be much quicker to pick it all up the second time around. He could go through the motions in his classes, and use his own time to work on the more advanced martial forms that were part of lightsaber combat.
It wasn’t ideal, but Maul knew he would have needed time to come up with an escape plan anyway. This wouldn’t be so bad - at least, not until the first time his Master summoned him.
He had to leave before that happened.
----
Maul wasn’t used to being around so many other people, much less children. The years before his death had been solitary ones as he turned to the Force to seek the means of his revenge, abandoning Crimson Dawn and the Shadow Collective to Qi’ra’s steady hand. There were almost five hundred students scattered through the Academy, ranging in ages from eight to sixteen and from all manner of species including several that had been wiped out entirely under Sidious’ Empire. There were naturally split up into more manageable groups for their classes, and a large proportion were away from the main buildings at any one time running drills or survival training in the wilds of the planet, but even so it left him feeling constantly on edge.
Maul had survived this place once already. It should not be a challenge to do so again. He focused on his lessons and did his best to pretend that nothing at all had changed.
Kilindi continued to hover on the periphery, always close by and ready to respond to any show of interest from Maul, but not overpowering in her presence. She was a familiar touchstone and he did not mind having her there. She demanded nothing from him, only offered up opportunities, whether those were to train together or to go down to the sea shore - though Maul was still not particularly fond of swimming - or to simply find other ways of spending their spare time.
Maul knew he ought to use every moment continuing to train, forcing the memory of the forms of Teras Kasi, Echani, and Bakuuni Hand into his muscles - though practising that last without using the Force was slightly pointless. He shouldn’t let Kilindi drag him along for mere recreation - and yet he was. It was strangely hard to say no.
In the back of his mind he continued to plan. There was only one way off Orsis, and that was to take a transport or supply ship up to the orbital station and travel on from there. There was enough business coming through the station - and all of it private and underhand in nature - that nobody bothered to ask unwelcome questions. The difficulty was getting there in the first place. Students were not allowed to visit the station without both supervision and a good reason, and Maul had neither.
There was also the matter of where he would go once he left. The galaxy was a vast and unkind place to those without resources, and even more so to unaccompanied children. Stealing a few credits here and there would be easy enough, but honest pilots would be reluctant to allow a child to book passage. Anyone who did agree to such a thing was automatically suspicious.
Maul had no doubt he could kill anyone who tried to enslave him or harm him for their own entertainment, but he could not afford to leave a trail of the dead for his Master to follow.
There was only so much time he had to plan. Sidious would summon him eventually, and then the choice of when to make his move would be taken from him. He found himself returning in his mind to the last time he’d escaped the Orsis Academy, although that had not been so much an escape as a botched rescue or perhaps just another of his Master’s plots. Maul still wondered how Mother Talzin had learned of his location. She sold him to Sidious easily enough as a child, and he did not mistake any of her actions later in his life for genuine care. She wanted things from him - but a shared goal was enough to make them allies.
Could he go to her now?
The idea curled his lip into a snarl in distaste. It all depended how useful he might be to his mother. If he appeared as nothing more than her child, she would pass him back to his Master in return for some future favour - and he was not keen to give her secrets from the future either. Even that might not be enough to buy his safety, if Sidious threatened Dathomir. Maul was only a male, after all. His life would never be worth as much as the least of the Nightsisters.
The only person he’d been able to trust from Dathomir was… his brother.
The memory of Savage carved into him like a knife. Maul had failed him, and he could not deny it. As the Sith master he should have been able to protect his apprentice, but for all the power he’d built, all the soldiers of Mandalore, all his own training to regain his strength after Lotho Minor, none of it had been enough to defeat Darth Sidious. Savage had died, and Sidious hadn’t even given Maul the mercy of killing him after that.
But here… here Savage was still alive.
Maul didn’t know why he hadn’t realised that before this moment. He could go to Dathomir, but not to seek help from Mother Talzin. To find Savage. To go back to the way that things had been for those short months before his death, when they had worked together. They made a good team. He would show his brother the power of the Force and the Dark again, and this time they would have so much longer to train and seek out holocrons and secrets and ready themselves to destroy Sidious and all his plans.
Yes. Maul smiled to himself. Yes, that was what he would do. He still had not found an answer to his destination after that, to the matter of survival in an uncaring galaxy, but this was a place to start.
----
“Where are you going?”
Maul whirled around from his position in the tall grass at the edge of the landing field and glared. Kilindi returned it with a level look, unbothered by his dismay at being spotted. He shouldn’t have been spotted, not unless she’d been following him since leaving the dormitory building.
“Why are you here?” he hissed.
“You’re acting strange Maul,” she said. She slipped into the grass to join him, crouching at his side so she could share his viewpoint. “Ever since that night you got hurt and wouldn’t talk about it.”
Maul hesitated over what to tell her. This was his chance to escape from this place, but Kilindi still had a life here. She had goals of her own. There was a reason she was at the Orsis Academy, so there must be something about the experience she wanted. Had she guessed that he was leaving? Did she want to stop him - but there were easier ways. There weren’t guards here, it was a school not a prison, but she could have alerted Master Trezza. Instead she followed him and confronted him.
Surely she didn’t want to come with him.
“You’ve been training harder than ever since then,” Kilindi said hesitantly, not looking at him directly, keeping her eyes on the landing field. “Trezza even mentioned it, although I’d already noticed. If someone here was the one who hurt you… Enough to make you want to leave… you could tell him about it.”
There was something strange about the way in which she was talking around the subject that Maul found confusing. Of course people here hurt him because that was part of the training, expected and normal. She didn’t mean the ordinary bruises, cuts, blaster burns or rarer broken bones all of the students picked up in the course of combat lessons. Did she imagine someone here held enough of a grudge to catch him outside of their classes and beat him because it pleased them? Did she think so little of his ability to handle anyone here? Did she think a little pain would be enough to drive him away.
He hadn’t even looked visibly injured that night. He’d only said he was ill. It could have been a stomach bug.
“Even if it was a teacher who did something, you could tell him,” Kilindi said, still glaring at the duracrete as though it had offended her. “Important people pay a lot of money to send us here to be trained, it would be bad for business if we were getting damaged.”
“I am not damaged ,” Maul said, offended.
Her mouth twisted briefly. “No, I’m sorry. That wasn't what I meant to say.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Maul still failed to understand. Clearly he was still physically able and capable, so what other harm could she be talking about? “I am leaving,” he told her. “I have no reason to stay here.”
Kilindi dropped the subject of these supposed injuries.“What about your Master? He’ll come after you won’t he? He’s already paid for the full eight years.”
“Yes.” She didn’t know his Master’s true identity, indeed she knew nothing more than what Trezza did. They saw only the rich, powerful but essentially harmless man he was pretending to be. “Still, I am going.”
Frustration creased Kilindi’s face. She visibly searched for something to say, an argument to keep him here. She might point out his lack of credits, of resources at all, the difficulty of travelling, of finding the kind of work they were trained for at the age of twelve. She must know he had considered all these things already.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”
Again Maul was deeply confused. “Why?”
“You can’t go out there alone. You need someone to watch your back.”
He would have someone to watch his back, as soon as he reached Dathomir. Although… Savage would be a child in truth, with none of the training of a Nightbrother or a Sith warrior. Maul would be the one looking after him. What if he failed just as badly this time around?
“Trezza won’t forgive you for leaving,” he said.
“Neither will your Master,” Kilindi replied. “I’m only here because there’s nowhere else to be.”
Maul frowned. He remembered that differently, but it had been so long. “You aren’t here preparing for revenge?”
“I killed my owners already, remember,” Kilindi said, with a little snort of amusement. “What would more revenge even look like? I wasn’t planning on travelling around starting slave uprisings after I graduate.” She paused, looking thoughtful. “I still owe Master Trezza for getting me off Orvax before any slavers could catch me. I imagined I would take contracts for bounties or assassinations until I paid him back and then… then I don’t know.”
“Coming with me won’t be easy,” Maul warned her.
Again, she smiled. “I didn’t imagine it would be. Nothing’s easy for people like us. Easier with two than one, though.”
Maul bit his lip. “We won’t stay two for long,” he said. “I’m… I have a brother.”
Her dark eyes went wide. “Is that what this is about then?” she asked. “You said you had a dream - was it about him? Is he in trouble?”
“Why would a dream be evidence of anything,” Maul asked her with suspicion. She wasn’t meant to know that he was Force sensitive, but Trezza knew. Had he said something to her? By the flush across her cheeks, perhaps he had.
“I overheard Trezza talking to your Master,” she said. “I know…”
“It’s not…” Maul said, turning away. “My brother is fine now. He won’t be forever.”
“We’ll attract more attention as a group,” Kilindi said, thinking. “But there’s safety in numbers too.”
Overhead the clouds parted as the supply ship came in towards the landing ground. There was no more time for discussion. “If you want to escape this place, I won’t stop you,” he said. “I still think it’s a poor choice.”
“I’m coming.”
They watched the shuttle land. Droids emerged to unload the hold, stacking the crates neatly. There would be plenty of space inside when they were done, but less cover than was ideal. Maul was not concerned. He was trained for this, as was Kilindi.
Carefully, silent as smoke, they slipped inside the shuttle and waited for it to lift off towards the orbital station.