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irenadel · 8 months

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Fear Leads the Way ch. 2

Darth Maul x Reader, Darth Maul and Savage Opress and Reader, eventual pseudo-threesome, this is a cuddling threesome for the time being, I promise we'll get some smut back next chapter, I just really like cuddling too, female reader btw.. because otherwise we wouldn't have them traumas to play with, thank you fucked up Dathomir!

Chapter 1

Chapter 3

So it had come to this, once he had decided you were a non-negotiable commodity, Maul had instructed your things to be moved to his quarters where you were confronted with one smugly pleased zabrak and the other balefully glaring at you, standing guard as he had been instructed to. Maul had neglected to inform you these were THEIR quarters and avoid him though you always did, you were still perfectly aware that if it were up to Lord Savage, you would have already been thrown out of the airlock.

And Maul couldn’t understand your trepidations, the thin line of your pursed lips or your utter refusal to lay a finger on him while his brother watched his back. You’d had nothing to complain about, he had informed a still disapproving Savage. He had been gracious to you, generous even. There had been no chains or restraints placed on you, the moment he had decided to allow you to touch him. There had been no silken black robes and artful application of red and black makeup in honor of Maul’s own tattoos. Certainly, Darth Sidious would have demanded all of that and more, charged you his due in blood as much as in humiliation.

He’d seen it happen and decided long ago, he did not find it appetizing.

He could do without carnal pleasure, without his master’s occasional taste for a woman’s horror, he’d decided back then. After that, the rest had been decided for him. To do without anything else: food and rest and relief from pain. Other things he had not even known the value of… Kilindi, Eogan, Lorn Pavan… even such a creatures as the padawan Eldra Kaitis. He was no longer his master’s pathetic apprentice, sniffling after wisdom, beholden to his missions and rules. He was a Sith, master to an apprentice of his very own, and though he could do without, he would no longer stoop to it.

But you’d laid your things on the floor and proceeded to sleep there in defiance of Maul’s explicit orders. You talked to him only for maintenance’s sake and ignored any veiled threats meant to disabuse you of the notion that you had any say in this arrangement. You did not touch his bare skin anymore and addressed him solely as “Lord Maul” as coldly and stiffly as you had that very first time you’d seen him, futilely trying to hide your terror from him. You weren’t that much more successful at hiding your resentment.

Maul should have taken you by the throat, dangled you over the speeder lanes of Sundari, taught you fear if you could not manage respect. Certainly Sidious would’ve etched the lesson somewhere permanently on your body… Maul had plenty of reminders himself. But he’d found the idea oddly repulsive. Larval. Pathetic.

After all, robbery just did not work with you. Forced greetings landed hollow. The furtive brush of his fingers through your hair felt like sandpaper and even the sweet scent of your skin stank of too little time in the communal showers and too much fear. You obeyed his barked orders to the letter, no more no less, and Maul found himself choking on the humiliation of further pleas, touch me, kiss me, come closer… He would not stoop to that either.

So it had come to this. This stalemate. This failure of strategy that Maul was loath to accept or accommodate. Because though, Darth Maul had known he could do without, had done so a thousand times, had survived death, had survived Sidious, gone without food and rest and relief from pain, he found himself, in this one way, as loath to stoop as to do without your eager willingness.

***

If Savage had breathed a sigh of relief at your rebellion then he had also fretted at his brother’s temper, shorter and more volatile than ever before. He did not know what strange manipulation you were attempting and he was sure your stony silences in the face of Maul’s cold fury were nothing more than a cheap ploy. It was so transparently obvious that Maul’s increasingly threatening anecdotes of what had happened to the disobedient slaves of past Sith were merely that, empty threats. So much that Savage was sure even you could sniff out his brother’s mounting desperation.

He’d seen it play out in Dathomir, whenever Nightbrothers stupid enough to believe they could court favor that way had eagerly participated in the games. He’d seen young brothers puff up, full of pride and painful confidence in their combat prowess. Full of the same purposeful, grimly determined fury that had always characterized Maul. Like that could elevate them, protect them against every Nightbrother’s eventual fate. It was a fool’s errand, an illusion of control, and he would be damned if he saw his brother fall for it.

He would be damned if he let you lead him there.

He thinks to dump you in the trash compactor. He carefully plans to gather you up in a spare bedsheet and throw you into the ion engine. He considers simple murder, beheading or one huge hand wrapped around your neck, a single tug of your thin little neck and your body crumpled on the floor to trouble him and Maul no more. But it is too much like his nightmares to go through with it. He doesn’t want to see your face when you die, because it reflects back Maul’s too much, hungry like the magic mirrors in the Nightsister stories he’d heard told sometimes… And Maul’s face still reminds him too much of Feral’s.

Savage waits until you are both asleep. He imagines it in detail, one hand to cover your mouth and hold your face away from his, metal arm to hold your struggling little body. Maul is right. You are no warrior and no Nightsister for all the power you seem to hold over his brother. It is alright to protect him from you. There are no rituals to bind you together, no magic to safeguard you, no tradition to uphold whatever cruelty you have in store for his brother. It will be nothing to kill you, to make you disappear, to keep him safe… at least from you.

He thinks of Maul’s face, it too reflecting yours when you aren’t looking, furiously refusing to acknowledge him even as he lets you tinker with the screws of his cybernetic legs. The two of you, not looking at each other but talking in a language incomprehensibly full of nuts and bolts and batteries and circuits. The language Maul speaks to Savage whenever he too adjusts the metal of his brother’s prosthetic arm, the one thing he does gently, because it’s done to Savage. Maul, ruthless when wrestling his own hydraulics into submission, always careful with his brother’s. Too often angry at his warrior’s body, divested, Savage had thought, of any vulnerability because a Nightsister could not use it.

Maul, who looks too much like Feral when his face softens, not in sleep because even asleep Savage has seen him keep on fighting. It isn’t asleep that he’s seen his face give up the set of his scowl.

He does gather you up in the spare bedsheet you’d dragged to their quarters. But it’s on Maul’s bed that he dumps you, with a shriek like a lothcat’s and your useless, weak little limbs flailing about. You are no warrior and no Nightsister and if you hurt his brother, Savage will look into your eyes as he kills you. He holds an impossible breath as he waits for you to hurt him (hopes you won’t) (fears you already have), staring impassively at Maul’s outraged face and your own bewildered one emerging from the sheets. There is a moment like a heartbeat, brief and pulsating, where you all stare at each other. Savage does not know what you yourself see, Maul’s fury, his own grim determination, or something else. But you gape at him for that single moment and then begin to laugh.

You must be mad as a Nightsister after all.

He has no time to reconsider his initial plan to dispose of you though, because, still laughing, you turn your back to Savage and make yourself as comfortable as you can in Lord Maul’s strangely comfortless bed. No silken bed sheets for this crime lord, you think with a pang, no exotic liquors or rare meats, no precious metals draped over perfumed bodies. Just you and his monstrously protective brother on a bare mattress. He had not ordered you to suck a cock he still refused to consider building for himself, as if that would be too much luxury for this life so bare of pleasures. He’d demanded you sleep in his quarters and been wroth when you would not do it besides him… but done nothing else but rage about it. Lord Maul of the Shadow Collective, who had asked you to touch his back and gone to pieces when you did.

So you did it again now, quick before you lost your nerve, your own back turned to Lord Savage who you still did not know for sure would not run you through with his lightsaber. You snaked your arms around Maul’s body and pressed your face against his clothed back, still in awe that he let you. He did not make the same strained noise he had your first time around, but you could feel his whole body tense under yours and his hands snap close around your own, like a trap, crushing them with an intensity and a strength that should have been terrifying but were somehow comforting.

“You are mine,” he hissed menacingly against the hands he held vice-like tight in his own, having brought them to his face in reverence. You are mine. An order. A warning. A prayer you heard and answered.

“I am yours,” you reassured him, not knowing why it was easy now, why the looming bulk of his brother behind you was an intimation of safety instead of danger now.

Perhaps because it had all been so different from your worst fears. So surreally unlike anything your overworked caution could have conjured up. Because Savage had never laid a hand on you except to dump you, unceremoniously, on his unsuspecting brother. Because Maul had done nothing but hiss threats he never carried out. Because you had nowhere to go if you were honest, no home to run to and the brothers’ room was bare and empty of luxury except each other. You may have had nothing, but in this, you could afford to be generous, even as you felt the bulk of Savage leave the bed.

“You can stay,” you said, quick again, before you lost your nerve, and you felt the tension like a live wire laid all across the room, like the moment before you realized you’d made a mistake when laying out the nerve arrays and were about to find out the hard way.

No one moved for a long time. You couldn’t know if you’d made a mistake and Savage hadn’t known how much he wanted this until he settled back in, not quite laying down, not quite relaxing, watching his brother’s body tense up as he sat down on the bed. There was that current still between the three of you, one brother on each side of you, each of them so horrifyingly powerful, so absolutely in control of what little remained of your life, that it would have been easy to ignore this tension even though it echoed all around you, like the all-encompassing groaning of a starship’s bridge about to collapse. Ignore it just like you had ignored every other uncontrollable danger in your life.

It would have been easier to try to sneak under this catastrophe in the making. Let them figure it out themselves. But it’s not in you to leave work half-done.

So you exchange places with Maul, as nonchalantly as you can, counting on surprise to forestall the weeks of black tempers and veiled violence, the months of fear and your remaining wariness for both brothers. You do it because it feels right and you can still afford to be generous.

The tension pops like a bubble.

You have no Nightsister magic, you do not feel the thrum of the Force through every living being in this ship. You know nothing of every Nightbrother’s fear or of the wild longing one small boy had to quench in himself a long time ago, in another lifetime. You just know that when you encounter a barrier when running a circuit you remove it and so you have. And you know you did right when Savage settles himself besides his brother’s body, when Maul lets out a breath he had not realized he was holding. The first time they’ve laid besides each other since they faced down death in a freezing escape pod. A luxury not theirs even when Maul had been mad with pain and so fragile all Savage could think of was holding him close, the way he had held Feral close whenever he had a fever or a belly ache when he was a boy. A luxury only death’s door could purchase.

Death’s door and now you.

They do not sleep, though Savage hears your breathing settle in, no witch still for all your magic, because a witch would not have slept so easily. They do not sleep because there is no rest in sleep for either of them, no rest where Sidious or Feral await them. There is rest here, in each other’s even, soft breathing, in the warmth of each other’s bodies.

There is rest for Savage in his brother’s body, in the certainty of his safety and the quiet of his acquiesce to kindness and comfort. He no longer had to fight Maul to love him, at least not alone.

Your body is so good and soft behind Maul it makes him grit his teeth and Savage’s before him, what he had never thought he could have or deserve, or let go once he’d possessed it, solid and protective, a bulwark against the world. He wants it all, would have hidden it away as wildly covetous as when he was eight and trying to survive, not yet knowing the price of touch and comfort, not yet knowing there’s no use in hiding anything because Sidious will always find it, hold it over him, make him pay for each moment of hope. Maul would have stolen you away, both of you, brother and girl he will not name concubine for fear of invoking their fate, except there is no need. His cup overflows. And he’s almost afraid that he will never know how to do with as much as he has known how to do without. Recklessly, shamelessly, no plan in place, with the thoughtless confidence of his life before Kenobi, he throws one arm around Savage, settles the other over yours, wrapped around his waist and lets himself luxuriate in this strange abundance of touch. There is rest here for Maul, in giving up the fight against desire, against greed, against the freedom of wanting it all and never again having to do without.

#darth maul x reader #darth maul x you #savage opress #darth maul fanfiction #savage opress x reader #if you squint #I'm fighting all that lovely trauma Talzin and Ventress left so be patient #we'll get there!#female reader #relevant on account of Nightsister-shaped trauma #fear leads the way

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