1. be not afraid

When Darth Maul thinks back on his time in the cave he thinks that he can still feel mechanical legs creaking around him and a heavy body dragging on the floor. He rebuilt himself from black plates and used the bones and teeth of animals for his joints. He worked oil and fat into his engines  the same, with no particular thought for practicality or speed. He did not need to walk streets because he was here in this rusting red land and he would be here forever, every minute the future and all other futures unthought of, living and killing.

But when he is revived and resuscitated and his memory returned to him, he finds that the spidery legs he made were a cage. They frighten him with their messy unwillingness to move together, and thinking of them attached to the remnants of his body makes it all worse. He becomes, in quick moments that are not relevant to the future(s), afraid of himself.

But he always kept fear close to him, even closer than the steel set into his skin, and he knows how to make it a good companion.

2. my brother's keeper

Savage hesitated when he talked about Mother Talzin, so that Maul knew the two had been both more and less than tribe-kin before Maul had arrived to change them even more.

"You don't trust her," he said as he sat with his hands between his knees in their stolen starship, and his brother turned his back on him.

"No. She….changed me."

Maul snorted, raised one hand palm-up to indicate his metal limbs.

"Not in the same way as you." Savage's voice was gruff and his thick shoulders hunched. "Not quite. It is hard for me to remember but there was a third brother, and he…tried to protect me."

"You do not need protection."

"No, but…" Savage turned around, his orange eyes burning. They were waterier than Maul's, and wider; less suited to the acrid, dry air of Lotho Minor and far too willing to give away emotion in the regulated atmosphere of the ship. "He was my brother."

Maul cocked his head.

Savage gestured with a long-nailed hand. "Do you understand that? They say we are kin. But you…" he blinked. "Don't fight like a Zabrak."

Darth Maul shrugged, not sure what else he would fight like. Even spidery, even with his memories blurred, he could be only himself. Savage's questions were irrelevant to him.

"I was the older brother," Savage said. "He was my duty."

"Am I older still?" Maul asked.

"Do you not remember your childhood?"

"I remember Darth Sidious."

"Then I don't know," Savage said. "But you won't take the blame for protecting us all." He was, perhaps, trying to sound kind, but Maul had never known the youngest brother, and had very rarely had anyone he needed to protect.

"No," said Maul. "I will not."