Mauls obsessive bf

The Death Watch med tents haven't emptied since Grievous attacked. Beyond the base camp, broken droid parts rise in heaps, and the dead lie in neat rows beneath white cloth.

The war returned in waves; every few hours, another patrol dragged the wounded from the perimeter, or another body was discovered beneath the wreckage, waiting for its cloth.

You had been awake for nearly thirty hours by then, but your hands were still steady, and your eyes remained focused. You wouldn't stop unless your fingers shook hard enough that you couldn't hold a scalpel straight.

“Hold still,” you murmur, drawing the suture taut.

The ripped flesh of a Mandalorian’s side pulls together. He sits upon an overturned crate, leaning away from the bite of the needle. You suppress the urge to seize him by the hair, to spit venomous words that would cow him.

“I said hold still.”

“Do you not have any more numbing spray?” he asks, wincing as you thread through him again.

“We are on rations.” You snip the thread and reach for the bacta gel, give the wound a thin coat of it, then layered gauze and plastitape down before wrapping him tight. He cursed something low in Mando'a as he slipped off the crate, helmet tucked under his arm. You ignore him.

The tent flap parts before the Mando even cleared it. A Field Commander ducks inside, rain beading off his visor, the painted beskar catching the last grey light of the dying afternoon.

“Lord Maul and the rest have returned. They have sustained injuries -”

You are already moving. Your field kit swings against your hip as you march toward the makeshift landing zone. The rain surges the moment you step beyond the canvas, but you pull your hood high and press on. Zanbar’s storms are relentless, churning the swampy earth into a thick, suffocating mire.

The landing siren ahead begins to wail a low ugly sound. It drags over the camp, pulling every face toward the bruised sky. Commandos scramble, kicking shattered droid limbs and splintered branches from the landing site. Lightning flashes white.

Then the vessel breaks through the clouds—too low, too fast, its underside blackened from weapon fire, one engine spitting blue sparks in ragged bursts into the deluge. It hits the field hard enough that you feel it vibrate your teeth.

You raise a hand against the backwash of the jets, water and muck kicking up in blinding sheets around you. The ramp begins to lower with a wet, metallic thud. For half a heartbeat, there is only smoke.

Then the wounded come down.

The first two were only walking because they were holding each other upright. One had lost his helmet and the other had blood streaming from somewhere beneath his chest plate.

Behind them, another commando drags a third by the straps of his jet pack, boots scraping down the ramp in uneven steps.

You break out into a run.

The man collapses at the foot of the ramp. You drop beside him, your knees sinking into the earth. His chest plate is violently cracked, the flesh beneath shredded by shrapnel. You press two fingers beneath his jaw and find a strong pulse.

"Pressure dressing," you bark to the medics arriving with stretchers. "Move him carefully."

More came after that. Death Watch commandos and a handful of Zabrak warriors, Dathomir clinging to them all. The smell of the dead planet seemed to ooze out of the ship's hull.

Maul appears last.

He walks unaided, though his gait is stiff and hobbled. His tunic is torn, the dark fabric wet and slicked black beneath his ribs where a fresh wound weeps. There is blood on his mouth, dried now, and more coating his hands. You were certain that not all of it was his.

He stops at the bottom of the ramp and stands in the downpour, perfectly still, as if reacquainting himself with safe, solid ground.

Then his gaze finds you.

It cuts straight through the chaos. Yellow and tired, but it is a weariness that goes deeper than the battle, settling in the bruised-looking skin beneath his eyes. His lip curls and he steps off the ramp.

“Lord Maul,” you move after him. He glances back without turning his body, just the angle of his jaw and the vivid flash of an eye.

“Tend to the others.”

There is no anger to push off from. No argument to spark. He sounds hollowed out.

You open your mouth to object, but Gar Saxon stumbles down from the ramp, catching himself heavily on a strut.

Blood streams from his hairline, down his cheek. You rummage for your penlight, stepping into his path.

He grunts as you touch the wound.

“It’s nothing.” He wipes his brow, smearing the crimson into a morbid mask.

“You have a head wound.”

“I am fine.”

He attempts to wave you away, but you’re already there, tipping his chin toward the light. You cradle his jaw, checking for dilation. He glares with that familiar, irritated defiance. His breath is sour. Beneath the blood, he carries the sickly pallor of a man running on fumes.

“Follow my finger,” you say, holding up your index.

As Saxon tracks it, his gaze catches yours for a second and you realize you've stopped moving your hand. Your eyes have drifted toward the tree line, to the place where Maul vanished.

You force your attention back.

"Again," you snap, sharper than necessary.

Saxon doesn't look where you're looking. He simply holds your gaze, knowing.

You test him once more. The tracking is sluggish. You sigh, pocketing the light and tearing into a pack of butterfly bandages. “You’ll need stitches and likely a scan to make sure you’re not concussed.” “One can only be so lucky,” he mutters, but lets you put the temporary bandages in place.

Medics surge around you, carrying stretchers, splashing filthy, brown water. You drop your voice. “Lord Maul?”

Lightning strikes closer. Saxon’s gaze darts to where Maul sulked off, a muscle leaping in his jaw. “He took a blade to the side. Wouldn’t let us tend to him.” Of course. “He should’ve gone to the med tent.”

Saxon scoffs, like you told a joke. “You know how he is.” Then lower, barely audible over the rain. “Go to him.”

He stepped past you, already barking orders at anyone within shouting distance. He spared one last glance at the trees where Maul had vanished, a look that held both devotion and grim obligation.

You snap your kit shut and follow the path Maul had cut into the tall grass.

The mud thickens, threatening to swallow you to the knee. You wonder, briefly, if he uses the Force to walk atop this mire, because you are currently sinking. Rage blooms as you stumble, your outstretched hand swallowed to the wrist in cold sludge as you catch yourself.

“This is ridiculous,” you mutter.

You didn’t know if the anger was for Maul, for yourself, or for the simple fact that your boots were now completely ruined.

A wounded man belongs in a med tent. A lord belongs under guard. But he slinks off like a beast seeking a private place to die.

He was, without question, the worst patient you ever had to treat. Some other emotion curls around your heart and you pointedly ignore it. You didn’t have time for this.

You kept walking until the trees break open to a black pool. A waterfall feeds it from the far side, over the side of a cliff, quiet against the rain. Maul stands at the edge of it, his back to you. His tunic is gone, the wound at his ribs washed clean, though it still bleeds slow into the water, spreading like a crimson stain around him.

You stop several paces behind, the med kit hanging from your hand, your breath a little harder than you wanted it to be. Lightning flashes above and for a moment the rain lights up around him, the red and black skin, the taut cords of muscle across his back. When the dark returns, he is looking at you.

“My lord.”

The words come out quieter than you mean them to and for a moment you think he doesn’t hear you at all.

“Do not call me that.”

You frown, cold rain slipping down your cheek.

“Call you what?”

“Lord.”

The word was low and flat, but there was something beneath it that made you stop. It wasn’t the anger he usually carried with his commands.

You had called him ‘Lord’ on landing fields, in med tents, in front of commandos who needed rank to hold the world together. You had said it with irritation, with respect, with exhaustion, with a needle between your teeth and blood up to your wrists. It had always been his title. A thing that belonged to him because he had taken it and there was respect in that.

But now, it sounds like it is something rotten in his mouth.

Your gaze moves past him, toward the water that his bare feet were in.

“Is that not what you are?”

His mouth curves into a humorless smile.

“A lord of ruin and rot.”

“Most lords are.”

His eyes spark with disbelief that you had dared to say such a thing to him.

You would take it, though. That disbelief of his. Anything was better than the awful distance he was trying to put between you, this quiet dismissal that had nothing to do with rank and everything to do with whatever horrors he had left behind on that ship

You had stitched this man back together more times than you could count. You knew the warmth of his skin beneath your fingers and the exact pitch of his breath when you pressed too hard into something that hurt. An intimacy was built that neither of you were aware of.

You supposed that was what had brought you here.

“You should return to the tents,” he says.

“After you.”

His jaw ticks and the look he gave would have scared someone sensible into listening. You were too tired to be sensible right now. You move to the shoreline, sitting upon a flat rock to wrestle off your mud-caked boots.

“I gave you an order.”

"I am aware."

The first boot comes free with a wet, sucking sound that is deeply undignified.

“And you dare to not listen?”

"My duty is to tend to the wounded." You set the boot aside. "You are very clearly still bleeding, in case you haven't noticed."

He watches you with a keen stillness that had cowed whole armies before him. Here, he only looks tired of himself.

You wash your feet and up to your shins until you were happy that most of the mud was gone and you turn to a flat rock, cracking open the med kit. The rain was still coming down, but the kit was built for worse. You took out an antibacterial spray and a piece of dry gauze.

“You can drown me after I disinfect that.” It was a shit compromise.

He regards you with a careful pause and then sighs, put-upon.

“If you must.”

He lowers himself beside you, the effort obviously pained. The wound at his side is in ragged edges, more torn than cut.

You kept a remark behind tight lips and lift the gauze.

His hand catches your wrist before you could press it down.

The heat of him bleeds through wet fabric of your sleeve. His grip isn’t hard, but it is absolute, and for one stupid moment you become very aware of the shape of his fingers around you. The exact pressure of each one.

“Careful,” he murmurs.

“Of course.”

His eyes hold yours as his thumb shifts over the pulse point inside of your wrist, his nail dragging a heated line. Rain slicks his face and drips from his jaw. It ran over the blood at his mouth until the dried edge of it softens and streaks against his already red skin, blending in.

He looks exhausted. A moment passes before he finally lets your hand go and immediately you miss the warmth.

You dab at his side with the dry gauze before you spray away what blood you could, pulling at the sides a moment to see how deep the wound was.

“You need stitches,” You say after a moment of inspection.

You work in silence for the first half of closing the wound. He sits still, as if absorbing the pain and letting it ground him.

After a while, Maul spoke first, his voice a low scrape.

“I can still feel her.”

You pause before you did another stitch, eyes flicking up towards Maul.

“Beneath my skin.” His mouth twists into something cruel, but his eyes shone with wetness that he couldn't blame on the rain.

“She was there. Then she was not.”

Thunder cracks somewhere far off and pulls the rain with it, making it nothing more than a sprinkle now. You kept your hands moving, pulling each suture through ruined flesh.

“Sidious has taken…everything from me.”

His voice is ruined. You catch the inside of your lip with your teeth as you feel your hands shake for the very first time that night.

“I am still here.” It was another gamble you took. Your voice wavering on the last syllable.

Maul went very still beneath your hands.

You didn’t look up. You just kept working, the needle pulling through, but your focus had fractured. You felt his heavy gaze on you, searching, but you kept your eyes on your work. You were almost done.

His hand finds yours again, but not your wrist this time. Instead, his fingers cover your knuckles, pressing down until you must stop and look at him. His eyes are softer now, filled with the terrifying uncertainty of a feral thing trying to trust.

His thumb traces the back of your hand with a touch that was barely there. Slow, a whisper of contact, but it made your breath catch still.

“You are…here,” he said, almost a question.

He turns your hand over in his, palm up.

“Maul, your stitches -”

But he doesn’t listen. The needle slips from your fingers and hangs at his side. His other hand comes to his side and snaps the thread clean.

“We need to tie -”

But he just lets it dangle, the thread brushing your wrist and instead of letting go, he keeps your palm pressed up between both of his hands. The heat of them was grounding.

“Maul?”

“Why?”

You both say it at the same time.

You know what he means. Why stay? Why offer this when he had just shown the weakness that would make any other Mandalorian sneer.

“Because you are worthy.”

You hold his eyes as they meet yours. You let him look as long as he needs to calm the demons in his mind.

Slowly, his hand lifts. He reaches for your face, then stops. His fingers hover near your jaw, close enough that you could feel the air shift. He didn't touch you. He waits, suspended, caught between wanting and not trusting that he could have it.

You lean into the space he can’t cross, just enough that your cheek brushes the edge of his knuckles.

He makes a low sound, and his hand finally settles against you, thumb resting at the corner of your mouth. He holds you there like you are something both precious and dangerous, his grip firm but his touch uncertain.

You tilt into his large palm and kept your eyes on his own.

His thumb shifts across your lower lip, pulling it enough to see the peek of teeth and you sigh, a fanning breath across his skin.

“You shouldn’t have come.” Maul murmurs the words. It was meant to chastise, to shame you of your choice, an old defense when he felt emotions that he thought he shouldn’t. So much self-denial in one creature.

“You never listen,” he rasps. “You never—”

“I do,” you cut him off, your lips catching the edge of his thumb.

“I do listen. That’s why I’m here. You think you are alone. You think you want to be alone but both you and I know you hate it. Hate not having family—”

His grip changes, turning sharp and pinching as he took hold of your chin. You choke on the audacity of your words. But once they had started, it was hard to stop them.

“Do not speak to me of things you do not know of,” Maul’s voice was predatory. You made a small sound as he pulls you close, his yellow eyes flicking across your face.

He held you so close your breaths mingled—his sharp, hot, and tasting faintly of copper.

“I know the look of longing,” you whisper.

A muscle jumps violently in his jaw. For a second, you thought he might actually throw you into the rocky pool, and let the dark of Zanbar’s waters swallow you whole.

His eyes burn down into yours, wide and blown-out. He was expecting mockery, but found none in your face, only a mirror of his own exhaustion.

The silence between you stretched until it became a physical pressure, louder than the waterfall behind you.

Then, the anger in his eyes dims. It doesn’t vanish. It just curdles into something desperate, an ancient, starved hunger that looks terrifyingly like panic.

"Fool," he growls, the word scraping broken from his throat.

His fingers slid back, burying themselves into the wet hair at the base of your skull, tilting your head back with a possessive force. His lips claim your own in a bruising kiss, one with desperate intensity.

His teeth bit at you, digging into soft flesh. A low, ragged sound caught in his chest as you open to him, your hands coming to grip the hard muscle of his shoulders. He tastes like rain and iron and an old, dark fury that instantly turns into pure friction between you.

Maul pulls you flush against him, his massive, dark hand moving from your hair down to the small of your back, lifting you off your feet as if you weigh nothing at all. The rough rocks of the shore scrape against your knees as he brought you down into his lap, your legs bending to come on either side of his hips. The smell of him, the heat, it all made you dizzy.

He broke the kiss for a fraction of a second, his chest heaving as he buries his face into the crook of your neck. His horns graze the soft skin beneath your ear, a sharp, dangerous reminder of exactly who he was, right before his teeth nip at your pulse point, making you gasp.

"Then you will stay." He demands against your skin, a ragged command wrapped in a plea. "You have made an oath to me.”

You nod but it wasn’t enough for him. His hands become impatient, his long fingers gripping the sodden fabric of your shirt.

“You will say it,” he insists. A demand forged from years of broken promises. He discards your shirt, fingers slicking up your sides, warming your rain-cold skin.

“I will stay,” you gasp beneath his touch, looking into those intense, unblinking eyes.

He didn’t give you room to think or regret the terms of the contract you just signed. He found the loose thread in your defenses, your loyalty, and he was pulling it tight until you had no choice but your wrap yourself around him entirely.

His mouth came down on yours again, but the desperation from before has turned into a vicious possession. He moves you both again, his chaotic thoughts bleeding out into chaotic movement.

Maul crowds you back against the stone. He uses his weight to anchor you, one of his heavy, cybernetic thighs moving between yours, forcing your legs farther apart so he could settle his hips firmly into the cradle of yours.

"You are mine," he growls against your lips, his hips giving a slow, deliberate tilt that made your head roll back.

He was mapping your reactions with a keen gaze, finding the exact spots that make your fingers dig into his shoulders.

"Every breath. You have bound yourself to ruin."

The word ruin dissolves in your mind as his hips roll again, and your thoughts scatter like ash behind your eyes. He was right. You had bound yourself to a wasteland, but beneath his hands, the destruction felt like the only place you wanted to burn.

Maul doesn't wait for your mind to catch up to the havoc of his movements. His hands scramble for the fastening of your pants, his fingers trembling with impatience.

He rips the damp fabric down over your hips, his palms immediately sliding back up to cup your bare thighs, lifting you slightly to meet his hips.

You were breathing him in with every ragged gasp. Everything else was forgotten. The rain, the waterfall, the war past this planet. It all pales in comparison to the monster of a man who held you so gently now.

"Look at me," he commands, his voice a low rumble that vibrates straight through your chest.

When you force your heavy eyelids open, his face was mere inches from yours. His eyes were dark and ravenous, pinning yours with a terrifying focus.

He wants you to see him. To witness.

He shifts you again, working your body in his hands, until he has both of your wrists pinned above your head, stretching you taut.

His free hand travels down the expanse of your stomach, his fingers sliding between your thighs to find your aching cunt, already slick. You gasped at the first touch of him. It is like the rest of him—demanding. His thumb found your clit, and he presses down, sending a violent shudder up your spine.

“Maul, please -” you whine, hips reflexively arching off the stone to try and chase the agonizing pleasure of his hand. Your thoughts are entirely gone, burned away by his touch.

“Quiet,” he growls against your mouth, leaning down to catch your lower lip between his teeth.

“You will take what I give you.”

He kept your wrists locked above your head, completely trapping you beneath him while his hand rocks back and forth, two fingers sliding inside. He watches your face, the desperate roll of your head, the way your skin aches for his touch.

He kept your legs splayed wide with his own, knees spread wide against your legs. He was forcing your body to surrender to him completely, stripping away all thoughts that weren’t him.

You sob into his kisses as his rhythm quickens, your fingers flexing helplessly within his iron grip. You couldn’t think. You could only ride the wave of sensation he was building within you.

“Maul - Maul -”

“Yes,” he hisses against your throat, his tongue licking a long stripe against your skin. “Submit to me.”

Everything collapses inward at once.

Your body seizes, your eyes shut tight as a blinding orgasm racks through your body. Waves of intense, pulsing heat crashes through you, so much that your chest heaves as you gasp for air.

Maul’s fingers continue their pace, pulling each wet pulse from you, coating his fingers and the rock below in your release. It is all too much, and you try to free your hands to stop him, but his grip tightens.

“You will take it,” he says again, eyes blazing as his fingers slow, now gently guiding you through the overstimulated aftershocks.

Your chest heaves, your skin trembling under the cool sprinkle of rain as the waves of your climax finally began to recede, leaving you completely hollowed out. Every nerve was raw, screaming from the intensity of what he had just driven from you.

Maul’s fingers finally slide free, a wet, sucking sound that makes you give a small, weak whine against his throat.

He drags his coated fingers slowly up the inside of your thigh, the crawl of his calloused skin against your hyper-sensitized flesh sending a sharp, almost painful jolt of electricity straight to your core.

Your hips twitched reflexively, trying to escape the agonizing sweetness of the touch, but he kept the hold of your wrists immovably above your head, trapping you.

He leans down further, his weight coming down until his bare chest was crushing yours, flattening you completely against the hard stone.

With his upper body pinning you down, you were suddenly acutely aware of the rigid length of him pressing hard against your inner thigh.

"Look at me," he murmurs again, his breath hot and ragged against your lips.

When you force your unfocused eyes to meet his, you find the dark, manipulative triumph is gone from his eyes, replaced by a raw, primal hunger.

He wants to make sure you were completely present. He wants to ensure that every fractured thought in your head was entirely consumed by him before he took the rest.

"You have nowhere to run from me," he hisses, his mouth brushing yours. You can feel him shift and you hear the unbuckling of his pants and feel the fabric shift.

He slowly let go of your wrists, but before you could even think to move your hands, his large palms slid down to pin them flat against the rock beside your head, his fingers locking between yours.

He spread his knees wider, his thighs forcing your legs out to their absolute limits, completely exposing you to him. He is hard enough that he doesn’t need help guiding the blunt head of his cock inside you. He pauses.

You let out a sharp, choking gasp into his mouth just from the feeling. He held himself there, letting you feel and anticipate him before he moves slowly in. He stretches you, deliberately drawing out the torment until you were practically begging for his cock to fill you.

He sank into you, unhurried. Your eyes squeezed shut as your body tried to accommodate the thick, unyielding stretch of him, your body pulling at him in helpless, involuntary pulses. How is it that he has so much patience?

"Open your eyes," he growls. "Watch me take you."

When your eyelids fluttered open, his face was entirely tight with tension, the cords of his neck straining as he fought his own roaring impulses to slam into you.

He was forcing himself to go slow, to feel every single ridge of his cock slide into you. His fingers locked tighter between yours, grinding your knuckles against the rock as he pushed another inch deeper.

A high, breathless sob broke from your throat, your hips lifting off the stone in a subconscious effort to pull him all the way in, to end the agonizing fullness of the stretch.

But Maul wouldn’t be rushed. He held you still with the pinning weight of his thighs, his breath coming in harsh, ragged hitching breaths against your cheek.

He was a massive, relentless, heavy force that left absolutely no room for anything else. Nothing but your body opening up to him.

With one final, heavy roll of his hips, he fills you completely, the thick base of him slapping hard against your soaking core.

The air left you in a sharp, punched exhale. Your legs hook higher around his waist, your ankles locking behind his back as you clamp around him.

Maul let out a low noise, his eyes widening as the sheer tightness of your body tore at his restraint. A shudder runs through him, and the calculated control he held all night cracks.

For a half a heartbeat, he just stayed entirely buried within you. He had not been held like this in a very long time.

You could feel the thudding of his hearts against your chest, the sound a hollow echo in his ribcage.

Then, his hips pulled back—only halfway, just enough to cause the ache of emptiness—before he drove back in with a sudden, heavy, thud that made you cry out.

The sound of your cry seems to break his restraint. He doesn't wait for you to settle, doesn't give your overstimulated cunt a single second to adjust to the blunt force of the impact.

He pulls back again—farther this time, sliding nearly all the way out, the cold air a shock against your opening before he plunges back into you with a ruthless depth.

A choked, rhythmic sobbing broke from your lips as he established his pace, each heavy thrust arriving with a bruising, carnal finality.

He is no longer the patient master strategist; he is a starving animal tearing into a long-awaited meal. His hips drive forward with an unyielding, mechanical power, slamming against you until the wet thud of your bodies rhythmically echoes against the roar of the waterfall.

"Maul—please—" you gasp, your vision blurring with tears.

The word ‘please’ kept tearing from your throat. You had lost the meaning of what you were asking for. Was it his mercy, or something else? Something darker that you both shared.

"You said... you would stay," he growls out between clenched teeth, his words fracturing as his hips strike yours again, driving so deep you feel it low in your belly.

His body crowds in, his chest crushing yours as if he was trying to meld you two together to become one.

"You swore it."

He seems to be gone somewhere, lost to some trick of his own mind. His hands let go of yours, hitching your thighs higher to drive deeper into you, eyes unfocused.

"I’m right here," you gasp, your hands, now free, coming to his face. You held him, trying to pull him from whatever darkness was trying to take him over.

“I’m right here, Maul,” you try again.

His mouth found yours in a chaotic kiss, stealing your breath as the heavy rolls of his hips began to drag you helplessly back toward another release. You tightened around him and it made him hiss against you, teeth finding the soft spot between your shoulder and neck.

“Don’t leave,” he pleads, and you feel the hot, wet trail of tears against your fingertips. Something tightens in your chest at how small he sounds, even as he continues to fuck into you.

“I’m not. I’m right here,” you soothe him, fingers sliding upwards to cradle the back of his head.

You held him tight, your fingers digging into his skin, trying to anchor him to the present. His hips moved with a relentless, questioning rhythm, each thrust harder than the last, as if demanding to feel you were still there.

"I have you," you sob, your legs tightening completely around his waist, pulling him as deep as he could possibly go. "Maul, I'm here."

The repetition of his name seems to bind him back to the moment. His unfocused eyes suddenly snap back to yours, bright and terrifyingly wide, pinned to your face as he came into his body.

He saw you. You feel your own body clench around him, slick and frantic, pulling him closer to the edge.

A low rumble started deep in his chest. A raw, guttural Zabrak purr that vibrates straight through you.

His pace fractures, turning frantic. He didn't pull back halfway anymore; he was throwing his entire weight into every single plunge, driving himself to the hilt over and over again.

It was almost too much, but you took it. Took him. Proved to him that you weren’t going to confirm his fears.

You held him as he came into you, your own second orgasm chasing right after as you felt his slick, hot seed claim you.

He collapses forward, only catching himself on his forearm so he doesn’t crush you. Your legs ache from how he held them, and you gingerly rest them down.

His face buries into the crook of your neck to hide the shame of his tears and how you had seen him give them.

You held him, letting your fingers trace the gentle slope of the back of his neck as his breathing gradually slows. The only sound left between you was the waterfall and the insects singing into Zanbar’s night.

Maul remains absolutely still, his entire body heavy with exhaustion. The raw, terrifying monster had completely retreated, leaving behind a man hollowed out by his own desperate need to be loved.

"Maul," you whisper into the dark.

He didn't move, but you felt the sudden, sharp hitch in his chest against your ribs. He was hiding from you now—hiding the vulnerability, hiding the fracture in his armor that had let you see his tears.

To a man who had been trained to view every emotion as a weakness to be exploited, the shame of showing any was a suffocating thing.

You gently shift your hands, your palms sliding down to rest flat against his damp upper back, your fingers tracing the complex, symmetrical lines of his tattoos.

You just lie with him, letting your body heat seep into his, proving without words that the ground hasn't swallowed him up and that you haven't vanished like another ghost to haunt his mind.

"The stitches held," you murmur, a tiny, tired smile tugging at the corner of your mouth as your medical brain flicks back on for a split second. "Mostly."

Maul breathes a humorless huff of air against your collarbone. The tension in his shoulders didn't completely melt away, but they did ease, as he lifts his head to look down at you.

His eyes were still dark, but the frantic, haunted look was gone. He studies your face with an intense, quiet gravity. You knew he was looking for regret or fear.

He didn't find any.

Slowly, his hand came up, his thumb brushing gently against your lower lip, tracing the slight bruise his teeth had left there.

His touch was more cautious now, almost tentative, as if he was still trying to understand why you hadn’t run off from him.

"You are a fool," he rasps.

"That's twice now you've said that," you breathe, laying your head back on the rock to look up at the stars.

He stares at you for a long moment, his chest expanding with a deep, shuddering breath, before he finally lets his forehead drop to rest heavily against yours.