Chapter Text
Mandalore had six core principles, The Resol’nare.
Ba’jur bal beskar’gam, ara’nov, alit, Mando’a bal Mand’alor- an vencuyan mhi.
Education and armour, self-defense, our tribe, our language, our leader- all help us survive.
It was one’s duty to fight when called upon and bear children.
It was the latter Maul hadn’t accounted for.
“Offworlder.”
Bo-Katan Kryze said it the way one would spit out the title of "coward" or "traitor" at another. She was a woman of many talents. Chief among them, in Maul’s considerable experience, was the ability to get completely under his skin.
“You hold the Darksaber,” She spoke as she stood in the war room of the Sundari palace with her helmet under her arm, eyes directly pointed at the Zabrak. “I’ll give you that. Pre Vizsla is dead and you killed him, and by our laws that must mean something.”
Her eyes narrowed, brows creasing in the center. “It means you are very good at killing. It does not make you Mand’alor.”
Around the table, Death Watch soldiers kept their eyes respectfully forward. Smart, no one would be foolish enough to interrupt her tirade once it had started.
“And yet,” Maul grumbled, “here I stand.”
“Here you stand,” Bo-Katan laughed as she mocked him. “You stand in a house you did not build on ground you do not understand among a people you have never once bled for. You do not speak our language. You have no claim, no house, no lineage on this world.” She leaned forward, both hands now flat on the table. “When my people look at you, they don’t see a Mand’alor. They see a conqueror,” she leaned in further to hiss at him. “And when it is a conqueror who is not one of our own? Well, they do not last.”
She, unfortunately, was not wrong. She was many things, but “wrong” usually wasn’t one of them. It was something in all his grand scheming he did not account for. He had just hoped the people would come to their senses, that they would reclaim their true nature as a mighty people when they saw him wield what was rightfully his, but it seems the Duchess Satine’s pacifist ways have poisoned the roots of this great planet much further down than he had anticipated.
Perhaps he could still come out on top, when has he failed to, after all?
“Noted,” he waved his hand haphazardly to dismiss her. “You’re dismissed.”
The rage that moved across her face was practically beautiful, it would almost put a smile on his tattooed mug. She left without another word, her Nite Owls falling into step behind her, and Maul watched them go, thinking about his next steps.
Taking was easy. He’d always been good at taking.
Holding onto this newfound power would be a different problem entirely.
The Duchess of Mandalore was not, as it turned out, diminished by imprisonment.
She had built this entire identity on the machinery of diplomacy, careful senates and councils, bloodless leverage of words. Strip that away, lock her in a cell below the palace she’d governed for the better part of a decade and what remained would be something smaller, something more manageable.
He’d been wrong about that. For a pacifist, she was surely a fighter.
She sat with her spine perfectly ramrod straight on a bench that wasn’t designed for any comfort, white-gold hair loosened from its usual elaborate architecture and falling across her shoulders, nothing but contempt behind her elegant scowl.
“Maul,” she refused to refer to him as my lord. Not even an inflection that acknowledged the word may apply.
“Duchess.”
“I’m told I’m no longer the Duchess of anything.”
“You’re told correctly.”
“Mm.” She hardly acknowledged him, declining to be impressed by it. “And yet you keep coming to visit. I’m flattered.”
***
“There’s something I want from you. Not yet.” His eyes moved over her face. “But there will be.”
She looked at him fully then, searching for a tell -- a quirk of the lip, the petulant smirk he couldn’t always contain. He kept his face frighteningly still.
“No,” she shook her head.
“That wasn’t a question, Duchess.”
She held his gaze and said nothing else, which was, he had to admit, a more effective response than any argument she could have made. He left her to it.
He had what he needed anyway. She didn't have to agree. That was rather the point.
Her first call was for Kenobi.
Bo-Katan broke her out shortly after, she’d sooner die than leave her sister to rot under the boot of someone she didn’t consider a real Mandalorian, and her feelings about Maul’s legitimacy had been made abundantly clear. He let them run. His soldiers had been given very specific instructions about how thoroughly not to catch them.
So when Obi-Wan arrived, Maul watched from an upper corridor.
Satine saw him across the platform and the diplomat dissolved on the spot. She beamed like she was a girl again, one who had forgotten, briefly, just how bad things were.
“My Jedi Knight in armour,” she cooed. “Here to rescue me again.”
His eyebrows met at the center at that. The expression of a man who had made a decision he stood behind and quietly hated himself for every day since. "I wouldn't quite-"
"Wouldn't you?" She took his hands, easy like muscle memory. Twenty years of not and they still moved like that.
This delighted something in Maul’s wretched soul as he peered at them from below.
And in a moment of desperation-
"Come with me." Her voice dropped. The brightness went out of it, left something quieter and more sorrowful underneath. "Obi-Wan. We could go. There's nothing keeping us here that someone else couldn't-"
"-Satine."
And with that, a curtain was drawn on any future they could’ve had.
She already knew. She had known before she'd even made the call, had known when she'd heard his voice crackle through the transmission, warm and careful, politically correct and so, so painfully him. She knew and she'd asked anyway, she was Satine Kryze for whatever God existed’s stake and she would try every door before she let it close forever, even if she hated herself a little for it.
"The Jedi way," she said, for him, because he was struggling to find it.
His jaw worked. Something in his shoulders that was not quite composed, like an angry boy. "We cannot simply abandon-"
"I know, Obi-Wan." Softer now. The supernova anger that had lived in her chest for twenty years burning itself out into a quiet dwarf. She squeezed his hands once, still holding them, still unwilling to be the one to let go first. "I know. Go and do what you came to do, my dear."
Nothing but pain, on those wonderfully aged features. He looked at her like a man being asked to walk away from a burning building he'd set himself.
She made it easy for him. She always made it easy for him to leave.
His hand came up to her face. That careful, doomed touch, the pads of his fingers at her cheek like she was something that might break, or something that had already broken and he was only now allowing himself to notice. She turned her face into it for exactly one second. Allowed herself that, just one second.
Then his hand dropped and he was Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jedi Master again, and she was the Duchess of a planet in crisis once more, and neither of them said anything else. What else was there to say that wouldn't destroy them both?
And like a predator sizing its prey, Maul continued to watch it all unravel.
He had his chin resting on his fist like a man at the theatre, yellow eyes tracking every movement below, every expression as they danced on their faces. The hand at his face, the way she turned into it, the way Kenobi looked when she pulled back, Maul catalogued all of it.
Beautiful, he thought. Absolutely pathetic. Give me more.
And he’d get more where that came from.
***
Kenobi fought like he did with everything, Gods he was still infuriatingly good and had that suave ataru looseness that had haunted Maul across fifteen years of very intentional rage. It still didn't matter. The outcome had been written before a single shot was fired, the calculation was always going to be the same.
Fight and risk her.
Stand down and lose her a different way.
He stood down.
And Maul had Satine recaptured, her arms pinned between two soldiers, chin up and expression murderous. She didn’t look at Kenobi when they walked her past him. Looking would have cost her something she refused to spend in front of Maul.
Maul appreciated that about her.
He descended the stairs from the upper level slowly, unhurried, letting Kenobi watch him approach.
The Jedi was held too, disarmed, two soldiers at his back. Not that Maul was afraid of him -- a cornered Jedi was a tedious problem and he was trying to enjoy himself.
He stopped in front of him and looked down at him for a long moment. Took in the controlled face. The eyes that cut very carefully to Satine and back.
"I'm going to keep her," Maul said pleasantly. "I thought you should know."
"Release her." Something had gone feral underneath the calm. Something older than Jedi training. "She has nothing to do with-”
"She has everything to do with it." Maul tilted his head, unhurried.
"Do you know what your Order's great love of duty has cost her, Kenobi? She’s been running this planet alone for a decade. No allies. No army. No-" He paused, mouth curling. "No company. Because you made a choice." He let the word sit. "Twice, as I understand it."
Teeth in the old Jedi’s mouth began to grind together.
"She'll make an excellent Mand'alor's wife." Maul watched as Kenobi comprehended the words with a sick delight. "Her people love her. They merely tolerate me. You understand politics, surely. The math is quite simple."
The man was cracking, unraveling before his very eyes. It was worth all of this. Worth the entire Shadow Collective, worth Savage, worth-
Well, perhaps not worth Savage. But close.
"You're welcome to leave," Maul said. "I'm sure the Council will want a full debrief." He glanced, just briefly, at Satine. "I'll take very good care of her in your absence."
He had Kenobi removed alive. He wanted him breathing, wanted him on a ship back to Republic space with that kind of wound that the Force couldn't touch.
The kind that didn't scar.
The kind that just stayed festering.
***
They dressed her in muted grays and purples for the wedding.
Her sister was notably absent, they might be at opposing ends at the best of times, but she could not bear to see his sister forced into this.
The ceremony itself was full of Mandalorian legal jargon, short and not sweet. Maul even spoke the vows in accented Mando’a he’d practiced just for her to flinch. She recited hers in perfect deadpan eyes fixed on the Darksaber at his belt, hoping that soon he’d end her misery and drive it into her throat. Her vow of pacifism extended to herself.
The priest declared them bound by the laws of Mandalore and the Resol’nare. A conqueror, well- they’d had plenty of those. A conqueror married to their once beloved Duchess? That was harder to dismiss.
He had won the long game.
That night, he had attempted to carry her over the threshold of her chambers, trying to adhere to as many customs as possible to drive her further into delirium. The moment the doors sealed behind them, she shoved him hard enough that his back hit the wall.
“Touch me and I’ll bite your tongue out.”
Maul laughed under his breath. “You say that like you are a threat to me.” He crowded her backward until her thighs hit the bed. “You know the code as well as I do, Duchess. One of the six actions is to bear children. Your people expect an heir, legitimacy, a future. We’re going to give them both.”
Her nose scrunched in a growl. “You think you can just-”
He pushed her back onto the bed.
“Take off the dress.” He spat. Tattoos pulled on his face as he scowled, eyes practically glowing citrine in the dark.
“I’ll do no such-”
“Take. Off. The dress.”
Satine lifted her chin as her lip curled. “Make me, you painted circus freak.”
Maul flashed his pearly yellows in a grin. He seized the high color of her mourning-gray gown and ripped it straight down the front and drank in her body while he stripped. Fabric fell from her pale skin that glowed like marble. Small, high breasts fell from shredded silk, narrow waist flaring into soft hips, a neat patch of gold curls already glistening against her will. Long athletic legs, calves sculpted from years of pacing in heeled boots.
And for the Zabrak, his black tunic had gone, along with his belt and boots kicked aside to reveal the truth of what Obi-Wan had left him. His body was broad, a tattooed chest still rippling with muscle, black and red ink swirled over pectorals and shoulders, but below the brutal scar band at his waist, the body became machine. Matte black durasteel legs, hydraulic pistons gleaming where organic thigh once was, the seam from flesh to metal was still raw and lifted even after all these years. Though, miraculously saved from the carnage, his cock still rose thick and veined, the head already flushed and beading. He fisted it once, slowly, to let her see.
“Turn over,” he ordered.
Before she could even think to be defiant, he grabbed her by the hip and fipped her himself. She made an outraged “huh” into the pillow, immediately trying to push herself back up on her hands, but was prevented by a palm of his pressing flat between her shoulder blades.
She turned her head to the side and barked a laugh. “You’ve been Mand’alor for what, five minutes? Does it feel like yours yet?”
He ignored her, pulled her back by the hips, dragging her closer to him to mount her properly, knees braced on either side of her thighs. His free hand lined up his cock and in a moment- shoved in.
No prep other than the slick betraying her.
She was tight, white-hot, it made the conqueror see stars for a moment.
The sound she made was wrenched out of her, her knuckles going white gripping the coverlet, her whole body jolting forward from the intrusion of it.
He bottomed out with a wet slap and a groan.
He looked down at where they were connected as he withdrew slowly, then drove back in.
Nothing.
“No virgin blood, Duchess? Your precious Jedi got there before me after all. But I’ll be the last. The only one who matters.”
He chortled low and started to pump deep strokes that made even the sturdy bed creak. Satine moaned into the sheets, hips absentmindedly rocking back to meet him.
She turned her face further into the pillow, breathing heavily and trying to go somewhere else, some other place, the one from her younger years that smelled like grass, rain, and-
“That’s it. Take it.” Maul growled, slamming in even harder, the slap of his metal hips loud against her ass, pistons whirring softly with every thrust. “Spread those pretty legs wider.”
Her fingers clawed the sheets. Whimpers spilled out of her with every brutal snap, her pale hair beginning to stick to sweat-dampened shoulders. His hand slid around her hip and found the slick heat of her, she made another sound she hadn’t given permission to take, jerking back against what he was giving her.
She turned her head to the side. “Harder, you half-machine- ah- fuck-”
He leaned over and bit her shoulder to coax another gasp from her.
With a flutter of her eyes, she was somewhere else again. The warmth of a fire somewhere on the Mandalorian steppes, twenty-three years old, and a boy with copper hair who looked at her like she was the best and most alarming thing in the entire galaxy.
His hands on her were careful. They were always so careful, like he was afraid of his own wanting-
“O-bi…”
Through the moans and the wet sounds and the slap of sikn, it slipped out.
The name died between her teeth.
But Maul still heard it.
He froze mid-thrust. Cock buried to the hilt, pistons locked, every muscle in his scarred upper body locking up.
He pulled out so fast she gasped at the sudden emptiness.
Satine’s head snapped up, but before she could spit another insult, he grabbed her hips, flipped her onto her back like she weighed nothing, and shoved her legs wide, knees to her chest.
She had braced herself for rage. Clean, readable rage she could endure. What she got was worse- his eyes were bright and downright feverish.
He shoved back inside her in the same heartbeat, face inches from hers.
“You say his name while I’m inside you?” His voice was pure spite and manic glee fighting each other. He started fucking her again, harder now, hips snapping with mechanical aid, the angle letting him grind right against that spot that made her back bow. “Look at me. Look at the man who’s going to overwrite him. This is how it happens, Duchess. Face to face. Eye to eye”
Satine’s nails raked down his tattooed chest, drawing red welts across black ink.
He hooked one of her lean legs over his metal forearm, spreading her wider, driving deeper. Sweat rolled down the scarred plane of his abdomen to the weld where flesh met durasteel. “It’ll be mine in your belly. No matter where he runs, no matter what he tells that council.”
Thrusts turned punishing, the wet squelch of her cunt loud amongst her wordless whining.
“Come on, wife,” he snarled. “Squeeze me. Milk me. Give me what he never could.”
He hauled her hips up, changed the angle, and set a pace that drove every coherent thought out of her head including the one she'd been trying to keep. Both hands fisted in the sheets above her head and she let herself be loud, finally, because what did it matter now, what did any of it matter, let the whole palace hear--
She came with a broken scream, walls clamping down so hard it dragged a whine from him. Maul buried himself to the hilt and spilled. Thick, hot pulses flooding her, hips jerking as he held her pinned and filled.
He stayed buried, unwilling to break the seal just yet. Sweat traced the lines of black ink down his abdomen. Satine lay beneath him, pale thighs still splayed wide around his metal hips, her chest falling and rising too fast.
He pulled out slowly, deliberately, watching it happen. The sight made something vicious and satisfied twist in his gut. Her cunt was swollen, flushed dark pink, glistening with their combined mess; a pale ribbon of fluid slid down the crease of her thigh toward the sheets. Without a word he reached down, two thick fingers scooping the escaping warmth and pushing it back inside her. He curled them once, twice, pressing deep until she hissed through her teeth and her inner walls fluttered weakly around the intrusion.
“You’re disgusting. Get your filthy fingers out of me.”
She shoved at his chest, arms still limp and useless from the aftershocks.
Maul smirked, withdrawing his hand only after one last deliberate press. He dragged his thumb across her lower lip, smearing the evidence there just to watch her flinch back from him.
“Tomorrow I’ll do it again. And the day after. Until your belly rounds and every Mandalorian on this planet knows exactly whose heir you’re carrying.”
Satine wiped a hand across her mouth, eyes narrowing at her husband. “Dream on, conqueror. I’ll moan his name every single time just to watch you lose your mind.”
“Good. I love a challenge.”