⭐
Shiv nodded back at that, heart heavy, then asked something that had occurred to him when they were talking earlier. "Are you mad at him?"
Tally's mouth twisted into a frown, as he looked over the zabrak. "I was. Now I'm just worried sick about him." He shook his head, then. "It doesn't do any good to be mad at Maul. You don't get mad at meteors for burning themselves up in the atmosphere."
Shiv was about to ask what provoked that comparison, but after a few moments thought with his mouth hanging open on the edge of it, he realized how accurate that really was. It wasn't a condemnation. It was just the fact of living with and loving someone who had been raised to be a weapon and who hadn't yet learned, quite, how not to value themselves by that scale anymore.
"Can I stay here?" he asked, instead.
Tally looked over at that, something going soft in his eyes. "Yeah, of course."
I actually really liked writing this scene and the preceding ones. Specifically, that Tally did get angry with Maul, before realizing just how useless that anger was. Because Maul would be aware of it, but he’d be at a complete loss with how to answer for it. Tally was angry because he was worried and knew that Maul was actively harming himself by deciding to leave the medbay and go after Rabbit’s body, and that’s a sensible, legitimate way for a medical professional to feel about a patient they know is taking a dangerous road.
But I also liked showing that while Tally was angry, he was able to process the reasons and realize that it was pointless. That all it would do would be add another piece of damage to the already mounting, devastating damage that Maul and the squad had been dealt. Because Maul could no more have just sat quietly and patiently than he could have shaken off the years of abuse and conditioning and been a perfectly functional person. He acted because it was the only thing he could do, because no other option ever even occurred to him.
Hence the comparison to a meteor. Tally echoes me; I’ve said it before. Maul was designed -- by conditioning, by abuse -- to be relentless and self-sacrificing to a goal (be it Sidious’s goal or the objective to a mission he’d been given, or in this case, his desire to get Rabbit’s body and help Rancor), to completely not heed his own well-being or lack of when accomplishing it. His own health didn’t matter to him, and he paid for it. Further, he paid for it in part because of how heedless he was in his youth, and also for damage he didn’t ask for in the past being compounded in the present.
And all that would frustrate anyone who loved him, but Tally says it: You don’t get mad at meteors for burning themselves out. They don’t know any other way to be. And I liked putting that down in text and making it something people could instantly grasp.