Chapter Text
Maul remembers a time when he had woken night after night to a twisted half-whine next to him. Back then, he would open his eyes and, without thinking, slip his fingers into Feral’s reaching ones. The whining would quiet, and Maul’s eyes would fall closed slowly alongside his brother.
Before Sidious, before Mother, before hours spent laying in darkness, Maul used to spend his time in the marsh, too. The light filtered in orange in the marsh. He would stand in the water, holding the hands of smaller children.
He carried them on his back and in his arms when they got tired; their soft, bulging bodies too big for him to carry the way Savage carried him.
He’d take them as far as he could back home, setting them down here and there to rest and freeing snatched dragonflies from their damp, clutched fingers.
He never minded watching the babies because when he got home, Savage would pick him up onto his own back and tell him that he’d be a good papa someday. He would fall asleep on the walk back up to the cave they called home, where their little brother would be waiting years later. Closer to Mother. Closer to Sidious.
Maul’s father is not Savage’s father.
Savage’s father comes to see him up in the cave. He wipes at his face and lifts his chin and tells him that he is loved and a good boy for looking after his brother. Savage’s father sometimes stops by Maul before he leaves the cave and holds his face in between the same hands. His brow is bent in every one of Maul’s memories. He would say things like ‘May kindness find you. May kindness come.’
It wouldn’t come. Maul shares half of his brothers’ genetic material, but his father never came to see him.
They saw each other around the marsh instead. Maul carrying the babies, his father watching him from his fishing spot, lips curled into a snarl.
Maul’s feet always knew to keep a wide berth. To keep his eyes down.
Submit.
Submit.
Savage’s father knew that Maul was born of a terrible, cruel man. And as such, the man taught Savage to say kind things to his little brothers. Even the one who was only half a brother. Maul’s father spoke to Maul only once and only to tell him that he was good only as breeding stock.
And the harsh truth of the matter is that Maul was made for breeding.
The terrible truth is that holding this tiny child in his arms—his apprentice who is not meant to be so tiny—is setting off every instinct in him that proves that. Arm under this little one’s rump. Raspy wailing interrupted by bouncing—cutting off the noises before they grow into themselves with the push of his cheek into the smaller one. A nuzzle of sorts.
Maul is careful of his ragged horns and careful to keep a hand on the child to support his wobbling center of gravity.
So careful that the noises die down into snuffling and then into sighs. So careful that soon, just like on the walk home from the marsh, his arms have grown heavy with their lax burden.
The apprentice sleeps for long enough that Maul is able to get both of them out of the valley, closer to where the Rebel group awaits. He does not intend to stick around. He does not wish for anyone, anywhere to see the truth that is painted into his very skin.
He lays the child down in the grass by the Rebel ship. It is soft and the moon is high. It is not so cold that the boy will suffer if his people do not find him before morning. It is only a few hours until sunrise anyways.
He will wait nearby just in case something happens.
He whispers a sleep suggestion over the boy’s eyelids to keep him calm and steps away to go plunge his hands into the river.
Cold, he needs something cold.
Something to forget the marsh.
Ezra wakes up before the dawn breaks and begins to squall uncomfortably. Maul’s nerves light up at the cry. They urge him forward—the child is crying. Go to the child.
But he is not only breeding stock. He will not bend to these base instincts.
Ezra cries and cries until he is red enough in the face that Maul can see it from his hiding place by the river, and still no one exits the craft. Surely the boy is loud enough that ears and auditory cones would register him. Maul pulls at the silver balls and pins in his own ears as he waits.
After some time, the boy quiets himself. The skin on Maul’s neck has transformed into waves of gooseflesh. His body shivers with his denial of instinctual satisfaction.
The dawn breaks. The sky grows lighter and lighter, until Ezra wakes again. His wailing renews. His helpless fists jerk, disturbing the grass that Maul set him in. From afar, the moving grass signals to predators that vermin are lurking in the brush. Maul surveys the field the craft is settled upon, scanning for anything that wants to try its luck. The babe is unattended, but it is not alone. Maul’s teeth are larger than anything which might come through here.
By the time Ezra settles himself for a second time, the sun is well-risen and the boy is exhausted. Quickly, his energy wanes. In the Force, his light flickers, sending out pulses of distress.
Hunger, mainly. Increasing coldness.
Maul digs through his pockets until he finds a device with a time tracker on it.
It is nearly mid-morning. The boy has been outside for hours now. Maul grows restless. The need to pace aches through his phantom joints. The marsh is long forgotten as a heated rage begins to overtake the tide of his blood.
It is irresponsible to leave so small a child unattended for this long.
If one hears a child crying, it is imperative to go to it or to search the Force in search of a distress signal—that is the most obvious a thing in the galaxy that Maul can imagine. The Force is loaded now with pangs of hollow hunger and a growing agoraphobia. Ezra’s eyes are open, and he fusses softly as he tries to look around him as much as his heavy head and weak neck will allow.
Maul vibrates at the soft, plaintive moan Ezra sighs out at the base of the ship.
Defeat begins to leak into the Force. A tiredness. The boy tucks a thumb into his mouth and, for the third time, begins to sooth himself to sleep.
Maul cannot wait any longer. He stands.
It is not a wise decision. The rebels will return to their ship if they are not inside, or they will exit; either way, they will know by now that Ezra is missing, and they will find nothing and no one where a body should be.
Maul should be more patient. A watched kettle never boils; perhaps a watched child is never retrieved.
But he can’t. He can’t.
He closes his eyes and breathes the rage out, then takes a step up from the river’s edge.
Ezra is desperate for any touch when Maul regathers him from the grass. He buries his small, soft face into the skin of Maul’s neck and tries to dig uncoordinated hands into it as well. Maul soothes him with thrumming hums and the chuffing sounds that his people make that denote a presence. I’m here. You’re safe. Ezra murmurs into them as if trying to replicate them.
Maul cups his head and strides back down to the river out of sight to see how he can fit the boy into his tunic in a manner that will impede neither of their movements.
Ezra is a human child with swirls of dark hair on his round skull. He needs more heat than one of Maul’s kind does. It is imperative to keep him close. Maul removes the sash from around his waist and wraps it around his shoulders to form a tight-fitting pouch of sorts to carry the boy in. It is not as secure as he would like, but he’s not working with as long of a sash as that would require. For now, it will do.
The baby buries its cold nose against his collarbone and makes wet smacking sounds.
Maul shrugs his shirt back on, on top of the pouch and strips a long, narrow willow branch of its leaves to cinch around his waist in the sash’s place. It will give the illusion from afar that nothing is amiss with this solemn traveler.
“Shall we, then?” he asks the boy.
Ezra’s fingers open and close rhythmically on his collar bone as if he is kneading.
Maul’s current mode of transport is not appropriate for a child, but he is no stranger to having to make do. On board the gunner, he creates a cradle out of clothing and sheets and lays Ezra in the dip in its center. The apprentice is deeply unhappy to be removed from his warm pouch and makes that known. Maul gives him the pouch as a blanket and soon, all is forgiven.
Maul sighs, kneeling at the side of the sleeping couch he never uses on this ship. Sure, sometimes, he must elevate his legs or else the pain will cease their proper functioning, but seldom does he sleep and even then, not in here. This room is as good as a storage place.
He leans his head on the side of the mattress. The gurgles and jerky motions of his charge rise and ebb in volume and intensity. Through the Force, Maul can feel the little one’s hunger returning to him, reminded of it by the lack of skin comfort.
He lifts his head and sets his chin on his hands to watch the baby maneuver himself into a good place to watch Maul back.
Dark eyes. So blue.
Maul offers him a finger and is rewarded with gusto. Ezra tries to shake it as though it is a hand, and they are about to play a match in some sort of sport.
“What do you eat?” Maul asks him, despairing.
He knows that the answer is milk, but what kind of milk is an oncoming headache. His kind nurse at their mothers’ breasts for the first year or so. Ezra does not appear to be older than a year, which complicates things.
There are replacement milks—formulas that replicate them. Maul has heard of them, but they were seldom used in his experience. In the case of a mother’s body’s failure to make milk, another mother was usually found and employed for the purpose.
Maul has no idea of if this is appropriate for humans, nor does he have the network required to recruit a nursing mother.
This feels like research.
He hates research.
“You stay there,” he tells Ezra.
Words are difficult. Not the spoken ones, the written ones. For whatever reason, letters slur together in Maul’s mind no matter how many times he reads them. It is only when he reads them outloud or when he hears them that clarity is achieved.
He has enabled settings on most of his devices so that they talk. They read to him, which is good for his condition, but which makes research slow.
The datapad he sets on the console talks to him now. It tells him that in times of need, human mothers have been known to do as Maul’s people do with their young. This does not, however, fix the situation at hand. He waits, bouncing a knee as an old impulse that does not bring the comfort it once did.
The datapad continues along its article as a cart chugs coal up a mine.
He loses patience and skips several stretches ahead in the reading, listening only for long enough to hear key words. Eventually ‘formula’ arrives and he backtracks his skipping a few times to listen.
Human-appropriate formula may be found in grocery and convenient outlets in major urban areas. They, currently in the Outer Rim, are likely too far out to find one such outlet reliably.
Maul looks back through the hallway to the sleeping room, where Ezra has begun pointing at the ceiling between his slow flailings.
They are too far from an urban center, yes, but there is always an in-space fueling station to be found, even in the Outer Rim.
He searches the area on the console and sets a course.
Ezra requires bathing by the time the ship’s console bleats to inform them of their arrival at the station. Maul makes do with the sonic sink in the refresher for now. He has sanitizer pads in boxes which he uses to clean the ports for the tubes that remove waste products from his blood and organs. They serve their purpose dutifully on Ezra’s skin, although something in how he squirms after he’s been wiped clean gives Maul the impression that the cleaning agents soaked into them are too caustic for his delicate skin.
Maul rubs at his forehead and adds another note to the growing list of supplies this boy is going to require for their time together.
“Never say I never did anything for you,” he tells the boy as he stands and adjusts the pressure on his prosthetics for exit.
Ezra whimpers at him and makes high-pitched distress calls at Maul’s removal. He accompanies these with outreached hands that grow increasingly frantic in their movements.
“Shh,” Maul says. “I am still here.”
He must divest Ezra of his temporary blanket. It must become a walking pouch once more.
There are...many types of human formula in this convenience station. Rows upon rows of them, set on shelves that reach even above Maul’s head.
He must have stood there staring for too long because a human woman clears her throat next to him and asks him how old his ‘little guy’ is.
Maul doesn’t know. Ezra offers no help here. He is preoccupied making unhappy snuffling sounds against Maul’s clavicle.
“I just met him,” Maul lies.
“Oh? An absent father no more? Glad you bit the bullet. Finally, a guy with a sense of decency around here,” the human scoffs.
Maul blinks.
He bit no bullet?
It must be an idiom? Probably Corellian. Humans love Corellian idioms.
“Can I see?” the human asks.
No. Maul has taken charge of this little grub and the last thing he is doing is letting someone else witness its defenselessness.
“Aww, what a cutie. Look at those cheeks. Mama must be quite a looker. He doesn’t take after you, after all.”
This human elbows Maul in the ribs and winks at him. He realizes now that she thinks that Maul has bred with a human female and produced Ezra this way.
Ma’am, he is just trying to pick formula. He did not come here to become an object of fantasy.
“His mother has abruptly removed herself from the situation,” he lies. “I have no supplies and am unfamiliar with human needs.”
This woman puts a hand over her mouth.
“She left you?” she asks.
Maul supposes that nodding is the best way forward here.
“What’d you do?”
“It wouldn’t have worked out. She deserves better,” Maul says.
“Oh dear. Oh, you poor thing. Probably didn’t expect her to leave the baby, did you? And who could have?”
Yes, this tone sounds like sympathy. Good. Now Maul can—
“How many do you have? I mean of the little ones with the horns? You got a couple, don’t you?”
Even humans can read ‘breeder’ on Maul’s skin apparently. Terrible.
“Only relatives until now,” he says. “Humans are much more...fragile.”
“That they are, hon. Here, he looks to me like he’s four or five months. You want the blue-top; it’s for up to six months. This one—not that one, no that one gave my youngest nothing but pure diarrhea for weeks. This one. It’s worth the extra credits, believe you me.”
Maul does. He will purchase the cannister, thank you. Now—
“You’ll be needing some diapers for him, too, won’t you? Aisle four, hon. Just behind this one. They’re labeled by year and month. Same with the clothes; but I’m afraid there isn’t much selection.”
Humans are at least methodical in their efficiency. Maul must give them this small piece of praise.
“Thank you for your assistance,” he says, still holding the cannister.
“Think nothing of it. You just got your little marshall there safe, warm, and fed. Bye-bye, boo-bear. Bye-bye.”
Ezra coos at being spoken to. He flexes a wet fist against Maul’s collarbone.
The child is outfitted.
The child is fed. There is a device that humans have made with a rubber false-teat for this purpose and for all its ridiculousness, it serves its function exceedingly well.
Ezra’s presence in the Force grows content and warm as he is fed. His noisemaking takes on new garbled pitches and shapes. Finally, with enough energy to explore, he discovers the pin in Maul’s ear.
This is a mistake.
There is no longer a pin in Maul’s ear. He can’t remember ever having removed it since it was placed there, but that way, only pain lays.
“No,” he tells Ezra.
His orders go unheeded. Ezra wants to rub noses with him.
It is...endearing. Maul sighs—
--and catches the hand going for his horns. He bites it gently, and watches Ezra’s eyes blow wide at the feeling. An apology lick should soothe him, but instead inspires a torrent of high-pitched noise making and maggot-squirming.
It appears that Maul has hit upon several euphoric baby-texture-buttons entirely by accident. He tries to soothe the boy back to tranquility to no avail. There are now two hands desperately reaching for his horns. When one is captured, the other takes up the cause.
Maul ends up trapping both of them in a hand.
“No,” he says.
The biting is only encouragement. He’s going to have to start with reason and end with removal.
Ezra hiccups and begins a long, drawling sound. Maul rolls his eyes and releases the hands. They have forgotten their mission. Distress is upon them all.
Woe is the babe.
Woe is the babe for protection from self-maiming.
Maul catches himself bouncing Ezra unconsciously, not unlike the way his knee still does. It is a gesture remembered from long, long ago. He stills his arm, which only makes the wailing grow in intensity.
This is familiar too, somehow.
“Little one,” he says to the side of Ezra’s delicate temple. “You are not dying.”
Ezra rejects this premise. He shoves his head against Maul’s chin and tries to kick his legs out; the latter he manages with a fantastic lack of coordination. The former, he succeeds in beautifully. It’s been a long time since Maul’s managed to knock his head into something solidly enough to nearly pierce his lip.
This boy’s skull is a weapon.
Maul has underestimated it.
“That’s enough,” he says over the crying.
It does not recede.
He is a fool for having expected it to.
“I think we are due for another sleep,” he determines. “Back to your cave with you.”
Ezra screams like Maul is digging nails into his flesh when he attempts to lay him down into the makeshift-cradle. His eyes are glossy and his face red in his distress. Maul is forced to rethink this tactic. He ends up applying the pouch to the situation once more.
Ezra is the most comfortable and quiet when he is in it and now is no exception. Maul keeps a hand on his back and twists his torso from side to side until the squalling trails off. The smacking sounds return as Ezra nuzzles into his bones and resumes his earlier thumb-sucking.
In only a few moments, the ship becomes blessedly quiet as if it is again inhabited by only Maul.
The boy wishes for skin contact, it seems. Maul cannot gauge if this is a want or a need. Ezra certainly feels warmer now than he did earlier, although whether that is from the feeding or the crying is anyone’s guess. Maul smooths a hand over his round, soft back as he watches him drift to sleep.
“You are turning me into a stereotype, padawan,” he says exhaustedly.
The boy snuffles in response.
“What am I to do with you?”
Still nothing.
Maul takes both of them to the pilot’s station in front of the console and arranges himself carefully into it. Slowly, he inches back until his spine rests against the seat’s cushioned back. Ezra gives no sign of noticing the change in posture. Maul lets his head fall back, too.
What now?
He has settled the child. He has obtained childcare supplies.
Good sense tells him to return to the Rebel crew’s ship to determine what has become of them, or to obliterate them for failing to properly look after Ezra in his time of vulnerability. But that would then leave him in the position of giving the boy to them, something which his body insists is the worst idea in the history of all ideas.
Instinctual hubris, it must be, that Maul deigns himself the superior caretaker in this moment. He’s sick just thinking about it.
Home, then. For this one. He must go back to the Rebels rr else whatever he’s doing to Maul now might stick.
The Force is hateful, which is why the Rebel ship is gone when Maul returns to the place of its former position. Ezra must sense Maul’s building rage because he yawns and tries to catch a fluttering moth that passes by his head with a total lack of success. Maul murmurs vitriol into his temple as he takes both of them in angry lines across the field until the heat overtaking the back of his head has more or less burned itself out.
He’s calm. He’s calm, he’s fine, he’s calm.
One cannot explode into sun-levels of radiant fury when one is carrying a body susceptible to sunburn.
“Your crew is dead to me,” he tells Ezra, who responds with inarticulate babble in an agreeable tone.
“I’m glad we at least are at an understanding,” Maul says.
Ezra nods sloppily and returns to peering over Maul’s shoulder at the crickets that leap out of the grass with his every movement. Maul follows his gaze down to them, then looks at the boy.
Ezra gurgles messily at the ground.
It reminds Maul of red grasses and warm water around flesh ankles.
“This is a bad idea,” he tells Ezra. “But unless you’ve got another one, we will have no choice. You cannot accompany me into the places where I have business.”
Ezra locates a corner of Maul’s tunic to chew on. He lifts big blue, heavily lashed eyes up towards Maul’s face.
Maul arches a brow.
Savage adores children. Whatever instincts Maul has towards them are nothing in the face of Savage’s. Savage’s are so strong that he blows past the fact that Ezra is a fragile human child to bury his face into the boy’s belly and blow sloppily against it until Ezra is shrieking.
Maul hasn’t asked Savage for much after everything that has happened. He is...grateful, perhaps, that his brother is not suffering as he once was.
He cannot risk him suffering like that again.
“Where is your earring?” Savage asks him when he remembers Maul exists.
“Choking hazard,” Maul says.
“Good thought.”
Maul is suddenly bone-weary. He wishes to sleep.
“What is wrong?”
Savage speaks to him only in their mother tongue these days. He hopes that doing so will trick Maul’s half-melted brain into reciprocating. It is as if he thinks that Maul is just not trying hard enough to remember it.
It is frustrating. Maul can understand some their language, but he can’t respond more complexly than a child. The words are jumbled on his tongue.
“I’m tired,” he says.
Savage cocks his head to the side in concern. Maul shrugs it off.
“When did you last—”
He says something that must be an idiom. Everyone uses idioms. Maul is tired. Why must he be subjected to this when he is already exhausted?
“Maul.”
He looks back sharply.
His brother stands there, alive with his warm yellow skin. Alive with Ezra’s tiny clutching hands bumping along his biceps.
“Go sleep,” Savage says, settling Ezra onto his hip. “I’ll keep track of him.”
Maul knows the pull of gratitude. It sinks into his flesh. Sidious tried to chase its memory from there while simultaneously telling him to kneel in its name.
The signals are always confused. Maul yearns for a straightforward emotion.
“I will,” he says.
And he does.
Savage’s bed actually feels like one.
Dathomir is a sticky, warm place. Especially at this time of year. Maul seldom comes back here. He doesn’t want to come back. His hindbrain whispers that doesn’t fit in the woods like he once did. His steps no longer melt into the grasses and the warm water like they are all one great lazy organism.
It is cloying, this air. The heavy blanket of comfort it lays down upon every limb, flesh and metal.
Maul sleeps so much on Dathomir.
It is foolish to feel safe anywhere in the galaxy. It is foolish to allow the body to think that it is secure in the mere presence of the brother.
Maul is stronger than Savage. They know this now to be irrevocably true. It was Maul’s energy only that kept his brother’s heart beating. And yet it is only here that he can sleep soundly and wake to the chirp of crickets.
Savage cannot return to the cave that he raised Maul and Feral in. He has built himself a new home further out, closer to the marsh as if he is trying to lure Maul home with it alone.
Feral still lives in the village, though. He is wary now of his brothers. Understandably so. Although they all know that it was not Savage who broke his neck those years ago, the fact remains that the being who did it wore Savage’s face.
Feral usually only tolerates Savage when Maul is present to stand between them. He must have felt Maul’s force signature from the village, however, because Maul wakes to the vibrations of his voice through the chirp of the crickets. Savage’s rumble answers now and then.
Maul sits up after several long beats without hearing Ezra. His legs are stiff when he tries to push them to move off the edge of Savage’s bed. They will not go.
Maul flings his consciousness out as a fisherman lets loose a net. Feeling, feeling for the glitter of Ezra. The feeling of water lapping at a shore; a shush that might grow one day into a hiss. He bumps into dappled green sunlight first.
Feral stops speaking. Maul hears him get to his feet quickly.
“Maul?” he asks.
Maul can’t answer him because he is searching for the child and his legs won’t move and the child is not—
“Brother, you’re awake. You look terrible.”
“Ezra?” Maul asks.
“Ezra?” Feral asks as he dips forward and sweeps a hand over the awkward jut of Maul’s mechanical hip.
“The boy,” Maul says.
“The what?”
Feral struggles to understand Basic. Maul struggles to speak in Dathomiran. Savage usually translates between them, and he arrives late for the job.
A ball of pale colors lays limp on his shoulder.
Maul’s shoulders relax.
“Maul?”
“Easy, Feral. He’s fine.”
“What’s happened to his legs?”
What happened? Maul sees now, is that he’s become disconnected. Slipped out of them. The nerves aren’t lined up properly. He must have twisted himself around in his sleep.
“He’s alright,” Savage soothes. “Hold this one.”
He gives Ezra’s floppy body to Feral and approaches Maul’s mangled pile of prosthetics.
They don’t talk about how he knows how to fix them; how he knows to gesture lightly for Maul to wrap his arms around his shoulders and allow himself to be lifted.
Savage is the eldest brother. Even when he acted as Maul’s apprentice, he could not resist the urge to take care of him. Maul snarled at him at first. But then, over time, the familiarity returned and he woke to Savage nuzzling his cheeks and scrubbing rough pads against his horns, trying to soften their shape so Maul looked less sickly.
It is all stupid, but Savage is a person who fixes things. Prosthetics. Brothers.
“He is the baby,” Maul tries in this slippery tongue.
“He’s there,” Savage tells him patiently. “Had a shit, had a feed. Very comfortable.”
Relief.
“Who is he, Maul?” Feral asks softly, offering a hand as Maul manages this time to bend a knee enough to land a foot on the floor.
The word ‘apprentice’ is not one that Maul has ever known in this language. He flounders.
“I am taking care of him,” he says.
“Why?”
“He is mine to take care of.”
“I don’t understand.”
Maul needs this damned word. What is it? What is it? He looks to Savage and spells it with his fingers. Savage tilts his head and then lifts his chin.
“He is Maul’s student,” he tells Feral.
Maul rolls this word around his mouth.
Stu-dent.
“He’s too small,” Feral says.
“Not always small,” Maul says.
Feral screws up his face. Maul curls a lip at him. He does not need to be reminded any further that he is an outsider even in the place they were born. He finger spells to Savage again, signing where it is faster.
“The boy is naturally older. He has been cursed,” Savage says.
Cursed.
Maul should know this word. It is familiar. It is one Mother used often when he was small.
“How old?” Feral asks.
“Fourteen,” Maul tells him.
“Oh, that’s quite young, still. He is your student?”
“Yes.”
“Do you need help breaking the curse?”
The brothers are both fixers of broken things. Feral less effective than Savage by virtue of being more timid in personality, but that does not mean that their hearts rest in distant fields. Maul wonders sometimes if they inherited their generosity from Savage’s father.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I did not see it.”
“He didn’t see who laid the curse,” Savage translates from Maul’s mangled mess of grammar. “Hard to break it, then. May just have to wait it out. It doesn’t feel like a long one.”
It doesn’t, no.
“Is it draining brother?” Feral asks Savage.
Maul is taken aback by the question.
“Mildly, it would seem,” Savage says. “He and the child are connected in the Force.”
It is a real apprenticeship, then? Maul has not spent this whole time merely willing it to be one?
Maul gestures at Feral to give him Ezra.
Feral obliges. Ezra wakes only for a few moments in the transfer. He is nearly hot to the touch as Maul situates him against his sternum. The press of their chests together as Ezra breathes in and out brings stillness to Maul’s previously sloshing awareness.
The apprentice is safe.
He is clean and fed.
Savage hums.
“He’s easy,” he says.
Maul respectfully disagrees.
“I love a happy baby,” Savage says.
Maul doesn’t know what that means. His apprentice is naught but a menace, incorrigible in every way.
“You should go back to sleep, brother. He’s not going anywhere.”
No, it is time to rise. Maul has slept enough for now. He hefts Ezra more closely and manages to get out of Savage’s bed with or less grace.
“He lives with a crew. I need to find them or break the curse,” he says.
“So we will break the curse,” Savage says.
Ezra’s hand flexes into a ball on Maul’s collarbone. He drops his eyes to the movement and lifts a thumb to press in the warm, damp space between those curling fingers.
Okay, yes.
They will break the curse.