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7-wonders · 11 months ago

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Between Wrath and Mercy

Sith!Ankain Skywalker x Rebel!reader (gender-neutral)

Summary: Finding yourself in a fight with Darth Maul, you quickly realize that you're way out of your depth. Unfortunately, no one's coming to save you. Aha, unless?

Word Count: 2.0k

A note from the author: Remember how I was like, "I'm having a lot of trouble writing the words aren't coming like they used to"? I think this helped to unclog a bit of the writer's block I've had. Maybe I just need to write for a different fandom for a bit. This takes place in my Rebel!reader fic-verse (gender-neutral reader!), but before What You Stand to Lose. As always, likes, comments, and reblogs make my world go round (especially the latter two), and I hope you enjoy!

How do I keep ending up in situations like this? you wonder as you dodge yet another Sith Lord’s lightsaber strike and immediately counter it with your own.

That’s a stupid question, because you know how. You decided to join the Rebel Alliance, to fight for a noble cause, and now your life is pretty consistently put in mortal danger. Still, when a mission to try and convince the head of Crimson Dawn that you were all fighting for the same goal was proposed, you were the first to volunteer. Maybe it’s a desperation to prove yourself as useful that made you do it, or maybe you need to remind yourself that you’re working for something good. Regardless, you had been stupid and self-assured, enough so that General Kessyk had given you a small team to command and sent you on your way to Corellia.

Said small team is now incapacitated, rendered useless almost the moment you had ambushed the Crimson Dawn leader who had turned out to be none other than Darth Maul—a surprise to you all, since Dryden Voss is the public face of the syndicate. This revelation completely turned your game plan on its head, as you’re now left to face his wrath alone.

And he has a lot of wrath.

“Look, if you would just listen for a moment,” you yell at him over the sound of electricity humming, “I think you would see that we all want the same thing!”

“And what thing is that?” Darth Maul snarls, raising his blade above his head and attempting to crash it down on top of you.

You meet it with your own, gritting your teeth under the strain as you attempt to hold him back. “The end of the Galactic Empire!”

He bears down harder in response, and your arms begin to shake. Knowing when to give up some yield is half the success in battle, so you adjust your strategy and drop to your knees, doing a quick roll to get some space in between you. He turns to face you once more, his yellow eyes so filled with hatred that it makes a frightened whimper get stuck in your throat.

“Please, we only came to talk. We can be allies!” you plead.

“What happens after the Empire is defeated? We part on good terms and go our separate ways?” Maul shakes his head, twirling his saber and stalking towards you. “No. At the end of the day, the Sith will always be an enemy. I will always be an enemy.”

“I’m sure that—woah!” He renews his attacks with vigor, clearly done talking. Unfortunately for him, you’re not done. “I’m sure that the Rebel Alliance would be happy to negotiate some sort of treaty.”

“I have had enough of arrogant little Force users thinking that they can change the galaxy with ‘the power of goodness,’” he mocks. “You are not the first to approach me with your misguided ideals.”

Maul kicks the center of your chest and sends you falling to the ground, a position you never want to find yourself in when fighting for your life. Attempting to scramble backward is made extra difficult with the lightsaber in your hand, and it’s only delaying the inevitable as Maul follows you slowly, a predator stalking his prey. With a firm smack, your saber goes flying out of your reach.

He holds his lightsaber to your chest and smirks down at you as it burns a hole through the fabric of your shirt. “But you will be the last.”

You raise both hands up in a last-ditch plea, though you know it’s for naught. This is it. You’ve lost. You’ll become just another name on the long list of lives lost as sacrifices for the fight for a better tomorrow.

Though you’d like to say that a sense of peace comes over you as you stare your impending death in the eyes, that’s not the case. You’re scared out of your mind, actually, and the only thing comforting you is the fact that it’ll be a quick death. With that in mind, you close your eyes and await the inevitable.

But the inevitable never comes. Where you were expecting pain and darkness, there’s simply darkness from screwing your eyes shut. After a couple of long moments, you hesitantly open your eyes. Darth Maul no longer looms over you. Instead, he’s a few feet away, engaged in battle with someone else.

“It was foolish of me to believe that Kenobi could actually finish the job and successfully kill somebody for once,” he spits, twirling his saber in his hand as another red saber clashes with his.

“You said it, not me!”

Belatedly, you realize that you know that cocky, annoying voice. Sure enough, Darth Vader is now Darth Maul’s opponent, and he’s faring much better than you had. His helmet is off, allowing you to see the arrogant grin he’s sporting, and his blond curls fly around his face as he swings his lightsaber through the air.

“Vader?” you call, still feeling like your eyes are deceiving you.

He looks over at you, his grin somehow getting bigger. “C’mon, get up and help me out!”

You stumble to your feet and call your lightsaber back to your hand using the Force, but remain back. Vader doesn’t need your help, because he’s very clearly winning. You would only be a hindrance if you were to join, so instead, you watch.

Even if you didn’t know that the two Sith lords had been trained for a very long time, their fighting styles would make it obvious. The way that they move, so fluidly and deadly, is an art form. It almost looks like a dance, if a dance could end in somebody’s death.

“Darth Sidious won’t be pleased when he finds out you’re helping out the Rebel Alliance,” Darth Maul taunts, bending over backward to avoid a swing.

Darth Vader curses at the near-miss. “Oh, but I’m not.”

“Then what do you call this?”

He looks over his shoulder and winks at you. “Helping the one particular Rebel that I have a vested interest in.”

“Pathetic!” Darth Maul spits.

Vader’s lightsaber makes contact with the palm of Maul’s hand, and he yells out in pain. He catches his saber with his other hand before it can fall to the ground, but he’s unable to grip it with both hands now. Though he could fight one-handed, against somebody as talented as Darth Vader, he wouldn’t be very successful. The light from his saber disappears as he extinguishes it, giving one curt nod before he backs off.

“This is not the end,” he promises.

“No, I don’t believe it is.”

Though Vader could very easily finish him, there are rules to a battle. When one willingly concedes, the fight is over, no matter how much the other wishes that it wasn’t. You and Vader both watch as Maul makes it to his ship and escapes, flying high above your heads and away from Corellia.

Vader turns his attention to you, wrapping his large hands around your upper arms and looking you up and down. “Are you alright?”

“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

“You were the one about to die.”

“I had it under control,” you claim, even though you very much did not have it under control. “And I didn’t need you to save me.”

“Oh, you didn’t? That’s not what it looked like to me.”

His fingers move to the open hole in your shirt left by Maul’s lightsaber above your heart. The skin there is shiny from a light burn—it’s nothing that will hinder you in the long run, but it does sting a bit, especially when Vader lightly touches this wound. You hiss through your teeth, but he doesn’t move.

“Your heart is beating so fast,” he notes, his voice soft from concentration.

Your cheeks burn at this because you know there are a couple of reasons for your racing heart, and only one of them is from the exertion of battle. Wiggling your hands up, you get enough of a space that you can lightly push yourself away from Vader.

“What are you—how did you know that I would be here?” you demand, having been under the assumption that everybody had done very well in making sure this was a top-secret mission.

“We received some intel that the Rebel Alliance would be making a rather stupid attempt at reaching out to Crimson Dawn. I was going to just let Maul have at it, but then I thought, ‘What are the odds that my Rebel would be involved in this?’”

“I am not your Rebel.” The way that he looks at you, like you mean something to him, makes your heart clench in a way that you don’t want to consider right now. Onto the next subject, then. “Why did you help me in the first place? You could have let him kill me. You should have let him kill me, actually. Would have saved you a lot of trouble.”

“I don’t want you dead.”

You roll your eyes. “Of course, you just want me to join you and go against every one of my morals.”

“I still have morals, Rebel. If you were willing to listen, to be open-minded, I think you’d find that the Dark Side is not evil. Where the Light Side wanted their Jedi to shirk all of their emotions and attachments, the Dark Side encourages those emotions. Anger, sadness, passion…love. Sith believe in a world where we’re all free to feel what we want, to allow that which scares us to be out in the open so that we may overpower it. You can’t tell me that this sounds evil.”

You remain silent, because you don’t know what to think. With how Vader puts it, the Dark Side doesn’t sound all evil. Actions speak louder than words, however, and you’ve seen the terror and devastation that the Empire and the Dark Side have unleashed on the galaxy. You’re not willing to dwell on it right now (or ever, really; just thinking about the possibility of Vader’s words having some validity makes you feel like you’re betraying the Rebel Alliance), so you force it to the back of your mind and refuse to think about it any longer.

“Well, I think my work here is done,” Vader declares with a sigh, clipping his saber back onto his belt.

You look at him in confusion. “Wait, you’re not…going to force me to be your apprentice? I mean, now’s kind of the perfect time.” You don’t want him to do so, but you were sure you knew what his end goal was, since he’s made it clear every other time you’ve encountered him.

“It is,” he agrees. “But I’ve decided that it does no good to have you join me against your will. When the time comes, you’ll give yourself to me—to the Dark Side willingly.”

He sounds so sure of this, like it’s a foregone conclusion. You’re about to argue, to insist once more that you’ll never join him, when you hear groaning behind you.

“Looks like your crew is starting to come to,” Vader notes. “I’ll see you soon.”

You don’t doubt that, but you won’t let him know that. “I sure hope not.”

He laughs, already walking to his own ship. “Make sure to get that burn checked out so that it doesn’t get infected!” he yells to you.

The groaning gets louder before you can tell him to not tell you what to do, and somebody calls your name sluggishly. Your pilot is trying to roll over onto his hands and knees, and the others aren’t far behind him in waking up. You get ready to help, as all good Rebels do—because that’s what you are, someone good and helpful and nothing at all like the Sith Lord that increasingly occupies your thoughts as of late.

You’re not like him, you tell yourself, and you’ll do everything in your power to ensure that you won’t ever be like him.

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