Purple Dreams

by Ide Cyan
This one wasn't written in the chat, but many thanks to the people whom I hassled there in the process of writing it.

Maul slept. His breath came in deep and regular intakes and exhalations. His mattress was thin and the night on Coruscant was warm. Billions of people sharing, abusing the same murdered ecosphere, on this world industrialised and wholly made mechanical. Here the Living Force bathed in corruption, even so close to the heart of the Jedi Order, which had grown lethargic in its safety. Here, the Sith watched and waited, preparing the fall of the Jedi.

Maul slept, his whole body completely relaxed, paralysed and languid, though beneath their lids his eyes moved frantically. His head, crowned with ten bony horns, rested on a carved semi-circle of wood, not a fragile pillow, not the lap of a lover. His arms lay peacefully on either side of his body. His legs stretched, his feet spread apart the width of his hips. From his feet to his chest, fine linen sheets covered him. Skin, black and red, two different shades of grey in the night, in the unlit room, veiled itself with musky perspiration. A chemical storm electrified his brain. Maul dreamed, immobile.

Training to acquire the skills of a Sith Lord had exacted long and painful years from his youth. It had consumed his mind and formed it into a tool and a weapon, much as his body had, but twisted it rather than exalted it. For all his intelligence, Maul had few dreams of his own. Tradition had chosen his dreams for him, and the sole perpetrator of the dark lore upon Maul's very essence was -- had always been -- Sidious. Independent thought arises from a detachment from safety, from an upset of desire, a tremor running in the foundations. Maul was a pure construct of fear. His fear of his master, his fear of abandonment, his fear of the worlds, of the universe from which every Sith has always been alienated, for the past thousand years. All his training had taken him to look within, to look into the face of terror and achieve an understanding of it. Then the only enemy who would remain to stand against him would be the Jedi, whose own training in the renouncement of fear made them utterly blind to the Dark Side; whose arts of war Maul had studied to make himself their better in combat.

With fear came indissociably desire, the attraction of kindred opposites. Above all else, Maul feared his master. It was this same man whom he desired most. The kind of man who would build a weapon such as Maul, who would fashion the galaxy to the cut of his condensed will with tools no one else would be daring enough, demonic enough, to put to use.

Lord Sidious, the Senator Palpatine of Naboo, the voice who spoke for 36 worlds in the Galactic Senate, the one who, unknown to all, bore within him seeds of vengeance, destruction and enslavement. He was one man, though he presented two identities.

Maul knew Sidious the Sith Lord intimately, but Sidious was a function of Palpatine, Palpatine's submerged, subconscious, suppressed aspect, held in rein but true. Sidious's exterior, superficial and charismatic aspect, the identity gouged out and left as an alluring, by all accounts benign -- if not entirely benevolent -- husk by the Dark Side, patiently and carefully worked his ascent to power.

Maul dreamed of his master. The sheets were pulled away. He could not move. A wet, human tongue teased the inside of his left ankle. A kiss was deposited in the sensitive hollow of his foot. He heard the breathing, the very soft sigh of the voice of so many worlds which then, lightly, said his name. He felt the breath warm his skin as the face of his master moved up over his leg, kissed the knee, the inside of the thigh and stopped at the groin, paused. Maul wanted this more than anything. He felt a frisson of sudden arousal. He wanted to see Sidious's face as his master fellated him. As he fought to open his eyes he felt the tongue licking his sex from its base to its tip; the mouth which swallowed him, the only part of him to matter at the moment of surrender, and then sunk sharp teeth into his sensitized flesh and bit down, jaws snapping shut, to mutilate.

Maul awoke, wailing, clutching both hands to his crotch. His moan died, turned into muffled sobs, but his heart still pounded in his ears. He blinked. He overcame his panic. Maul could not close his eyes again and he scanned the darkness for signs of danger. His hands released their grip from his intact sex. He uncurled from a foetal position. The nightmare had left him a rush of contradictory feelings: abject, primordial and instinctive terror, and satisfaction. He relished his own fear, but it left him with a need. He could not interiorise fear forever. Not even he was that strong. There was only one person who could, perhaps, grant him some small measure of release tonight.

Maul had been trained to never hesitate.

He rose from his bed and walked barefoot the distance to Palpatine's bedchamber. The apartments were silent, and very still. He encountered no one on the way. No servants. No droids. There were guards outside, of course, but Palpatine liked the isolation. They most often met at night, or near dusk. Usually, his Master sought him out, or he found him, awake, occupied, and shrank away, unwilling to become a distraction.

So, how queer it was for the apprentice to find his master asleep, helpless, in Palpatine's chastely styled bed. He had had few chances at intimacy with the older Sith Lord recently. Just as their relationship became more intense, their occupations had driven them apart. Palpatine's political career kept him occupied, as Maul was kept occupied by his trainers, until they had, one by one, expended all the science they could teach him, until he'd bested and slain them. It was another part of his apprenticeship that he should kill efficiently when the need arose. He must be prepared.

Sitting down quietly beside the sleeping body of Lord Sidious, Maul did not think of the ways in which, whenever they conferred, his master had instituted terror, rage and hatred within him. The sorcerer had kept arcane the secrets of his dark craft, had worked partly in a subliminal fashion. Maul knew the rational foundations for the fear at the basis of his respect for his master, but what he felt was the animal's gut reaction to something so much more powerful, so predatory, that it demands an immediate physical response. The fight-or-flight survival instinct, a tension barely held back by his conscious, self-aware, intelligent mind. And it had been the genial, cardinal feat of the Order of the Sith to shackle the pupil to his custodian by a complex synthesis of contradictory sentiments.

There were two principal keys to the control Sidious exercised over Maul.

The first key was Maul's alienation from the outside world. He had been taken at a young age and warped. While he could, on occasion, blend in -- could indeed, at a cost, work within society -- he was dysfunctional beyond repair and becoming worse. His only anchor in the galaxy was Darth Sidious. There was no one else and nothing else for him to hold onto. Sidious had made certain to keep the focus of Maul's aggression and destructiveness aimed outward and to alleviate any glimpse of guilt, lest Maul become suicidal and abrogate all the years invested in him as his heir. Maul would not survive without Sidious until he rose up to kill him himself, until he took his place as the master and took on an apprentice of his own. And when that time came Maul's objectives would be very different from the ones he had now.

He watched Sidious sleeping. He remembered him awake. The body language. The smell of his sweat. The small idiosyncrasies of speech and movement, the unbearable sweetness of his vilest smile. The calculated wantonness of his eyes; how he felt when Sidious laid that piercing gaze, ingenuous in its crudity, over him.

Maul cursorily replayed the sequence of his nightmare in his mind and contemplated the body resting now and so close to him, tangible but surreal, and so familiar.

Sidious was the ominous presence. The will. The ruthless dominator who held the title of Sith Lord. Palpatine was the same, but Palpatine was everything else. Palpatine was the mask, the hand that pulled all the strings to make the Senate into a puppet show after his designs. Palpatine was the kind, charming, charismatic and unassuming man. Palpatine was the flesh, without a soul.

Calmly, Maul contemplated killing the man in his sleep. He would have to do this without waking him, or perish in the attempt. But could he?

He could try and fail. He knew the risk, but he could not calculate it. He was afraid. He banished thoughts of murder from his mind.

He slid himself into bed, lying on his flank alongside Palpatine's body. The sheets separating them were softly embroidered in tribal designs, geometrical counterpoints to the figurative statues decorating the apartments. Maul's own sheets, in his bed, in his discreet bedroom, were unadorned, though the headrest was engraved with arabesques and had the patina of age.

Maul closed his eyes a few seconds, remembering. The first time, the first time...

The second key element in Sidious's control was Maul's desire for him. The blurred line between power and the individual who has power, which attracts so many conquests to those in authority. Darth Sidious's mastery of the Force had made him prodigiously alluring; furthermore, Maul was the only person upon whom he had ever so lavished the promises of that power. The young warrior had been intoxicated with it.

He laid a hand on his master's breast. Palpatine should sense the presence and wake up. Palpatine should have been awake when he came to find him. Maul had been as quiet as a cat, however, and his movements just as controlled. Palpatine stirred in his sleep as Maul's hand moved, slowly pulling away the sheets, gently tugging at the night-shirt. Maul found himself face to face with Palpatine.

The Senator's eyes opened and focused on his apprentice's face. Palpatine's expression hardened. Maul's hand reached Palpatine's lower abdomen and the young Sith's eyes searched his master's countenance for a sign of approval.

Palpatine's eyes shut. His breathing sounded more forced somehow, more awake. His right hand closed around Maul's elbow, guiding the movement downward. His left hand emerged from the sheets and encircled Maul's naked cock. Age made for a certain contrast of textures in these contacts.

Palpatine's eyes re-opened and plunged their decoloured gaze into Maul's burning, intense stare. Maul lowered his look submissively.

"You want this, don't you?" Palpatine said, tightening his hold on Maul's sex. The younger man shuddered and his organ engorged itself with blood to become erect again. Palpatine kneaded at the flesh while pinching the elbow in his other hand. "Or did you come here to slay me?"

"I had a nightmare, my Master."

"Did you?"

"Yes."

"And so," he said, his face twisting with pleasure as Maul reciprocated his touch, "you came running to me, like a boy runs to his mother and father." He gasped, a breath that ended in a chuckle. "Tell me about your nightmare."

He wrenched Maul's hand away from his own erection and drew him toward the center of the bed. The he straddled him, allowing their cocks to rub against each other. Maul's horns indented the pillows.

"I was paralysed in my bed. You were there, my Lord."

"I have been neglecting you, Lord Maul. But was it my presence you feared?" Palpatine leaned forward and suckled at Maul's throat.

"Your domination." Maul stared at the ceiling, where reflections from the mirror on the wall above the bed played. His hand, that of the arm which Palpatine controlled, was directed underneath the night-shift, up to Palpatine's breast. Maul found the right-side nipple and pressed it between his fingers. His free hand he lifted up to caress the nape of his master's neck, the greying hair. Palpatine's mouth moved more rapidly and he kissed Maul on the lips, on the neck; he let go of his arm and put a hand on his skull.

Palpatine left a trail of saliva from Maul's collarbone to his navel to his sex, which he took into his mouth, to the hilt, and sucked deeply. Maul began shivering. Palpatine continued working. He cupped Maul's balls in one hand. He parted his buttocks and teased the rim of the anus with his thumb. Maul felt pleasure running from his horns to his toes; he moaned, a growl of animal, carnal lust. Palpatine tormented him with the faintest pressure of teeth, then. Maul reacted with a jolt of terror. He immediately Force-pushed Palpatine away, forcing his jaw open.

The pain in his jaw muscles was expected. Palpatine had counted on it and Maul's brusque, defensive use of the Force was blocked before it could rip the bone from its socket. Yet, it hurt.

The first time he had taken Maul, his pupil had still been an adolescent. He had exacted complete surrender, fucked the boy raw and made him love every thrust. He'd abraded himself with his own brutality, but it had been valuable.

At its peak, the pleasure had attained heights he had only previously reached by inflicting torture upon prey. Pleasure from the pain of others.

Palpatine kneeled where the Force-push had sent him reeling, by the foot of the bed. He held himself somewhat upright, the knuckles of one of his hands digging into the crimson carpet as he pushed himself up, while with the other hand he felt the sides of his jaw where the tendons had been pulled. He heard Maul get up off the bed, a ripple of liquid silence through the room that he felt more as an acute awareness of his apprentice's mass than anything. A warm opacity moving swiftly through the darkness. Maul growled. Palpatine was hurled onto his stomach onto the bed, though not fully, as his legs dangled, as his body was bent at the waist, over the edge. He felt Maul's heft bearing down on his back, so much heavier than the last time. Maul ripped away Palpatine's night-shirt, clawed at his ass with combat-ready hands, then lowered them to separate the thighs. Palpatine gripped the bedsheets and smiled in intimate triumph at the assault. Maul's grasp hurt him, as only Maul could. No other was permitted. No other would come so near. Maul's cock felt slickened with pre-cum as it touched him.

Maul's entry violated him in one shoving throe. Maul cried out in pain at the friction, still raging at his master; jerked his cock out quickly, impaled it again. Palpatine moaned inarticulately before his whole body went limp, save for his sex, which Maul seized. The thrusts came more easily now and deeper and Maul arched over him, frantic, terrorised, prurient, remorseless. A sentiment of plenitude settled into the master Sith Lord. Pleasure liquefied him, unravelling through his nerves. His heart pounded. Maul's cock, hot, hard and well-hung, drove into him; Maul's hands milked his penis, or pulled him by the hips; Maul's forehead dug horn-marks into his shoulders through the torn fabric of the night-shirt.

The master let himself be fucked. Who ruled whom? One day Maul would rise up and kill him. He would be weak, then. He would succumb. He would die. It was the desire for the power that Sidious represented, much more than an attraction to the grotesque, beguiling being of flesh, which animated the young one. Power that must be won, taken, like innocence and youth are robbed from the pristine, but with an altogether different polarity. But now Maul took nothing from Palpatine and Sidious could no further corrupt his apprentice. A fearful symmetry held them in balance. They mirrored one another, at this perfect half-point, this now on the crux of probabilities.

Maul, the warrior, his self wholly profligated by his desire, did not realise this. Neither had a young Palpatine known, during his time of apprenticeship, when the apex had been reached. Now, however, lost, he found himself in the midst of venery. He saw.

Maul caterwauled, transpiercing Palpatine frenetically, and ejaculated. Palpatine felt the warm liquid gush and Maul's withdrawal. The apprentice walked away.

"Maul!"

Palpatine turned, raising one of his hips, almost to roll over and sit. A gesture of impatience. Maul stood with his back to him, facing the window and hugging himself. Pale red light filtered in.

"Come back here, Maul."

The young Sith bowed his head and returned to his lord. He kneeled before him and sucked him off. Palpatine caressed his horns. His hands fastened upon Maul's shoulders. The youth was relaxed now. His mouth was as hot as his cock and his tongue rasped against Palpatine's skin. The older man tensed, his pelvic muscles contracting. The pressure that had built up within him burst out; he croaked, a hoarse sound, his eyes shut; Maul swallowed his semen, sucked him slowly, lasciviously once more and let him go limp.

The aggressivity of their first couplings had softened with time. Presently they held onto each other, Maul's arms wrapped around Palpatine's legs. Palpatine put his fingertips on the sides of Maul's throat, raising his chin. Maul's eyes were closed. His lips were still parted. There was no sign of fear on his face.

It was too late, the Lord Sidious thought. He helped Maul into bed, disregarding the damage the horns would cause. His mouth twisted. The red and black body was a perfect weapon. Maul's mind was attuned to combat, to the hunt, to cruelty, but he still had too much to learn. If everything was to be unbalanced from this moment on, if the flame of revenge was to be handed over... This weapon would carry on the Order of the Sith like a son carried on his father's work. Yes, it would. But Sidious suddenly, anxiously wondered whether a weapon could ever forge another. Maul had not, yet, been tested as a smith. It was too late...

Maul was falling back asleep. Sidious watched him, inaudibly addressed him:

"I have made you, but you are not my son. Perhaps you see me as a father figure. There was a time when I was in awe over my master, long ago. But she is dead now. She killed herself to thwart my takeover. I loathed her for it and I loathe her memory more now that I feel how her decision has shaped me. The ogress knew exactly how to manipulate anyone." Sidious meant that she knew how to manipulate him. He seethed. The bitterness of his hatred filled his mouth, poisoned his bloodstream. He flinched, remembering her touch.

"I will rule the galaxy," he said to himself, matter-of-factly.

He wanted to be immortal. He did not want to sacrifice himself for the future. There would be others who would do for that.

Sidious freed himself from the scraps of cloth still clinging to him. Sweat was drying on his skin; and seed, between his legs. He went to wash and dress in his senatorial attire while Maul slept in his bed.

SPEB