Post TLJ. AU. Quick drabble. Bittersweet Reylo. Coincides with Dead Star.
It was an afterimage.
Barely a flicker, like the final pulse of twin lapsing suns or a drawn breath of what seemed to be forever from the dimensionless void of space. There was a faint dream in the beaten snow—a song unsung from hearsays of crimson and fire, in the carmine throne room, in the barren lands of red ochre and salt. He reminisced how the flame parted in two; the perfect duality of spark and shadow, light and dark.
Like the embers between them so many moons ago. However many nights he had spent in his seclusion, the eternity of a shared one haunted him still—next to the makeshift hearth, the distant promise of her caress. Her touch burned, branding the beast beneath his ribs, and how she ignited in him a potential and purpose to simply be.
For an interval of a flash-vision, they could have been so powerful. Astride in a plundered universe, where the ruins of the ancient were bent beneath the soles of their feet and upon their lips: the new, the great and divine. Together, they would have risen like a new-sprung star that came to existence.
Arrogance, she claimed in his ideals and razed with but a word. Ben, she whispered in the madness of their union, seeking for the phantom that dwelled from his shadow. And for a heartbeat, he became that ghost as he paled at the sight of her because she was what mattered more—and that they were more, they were complete, and whole, and one. If only she could see it.
But this is for you, he would have told her—and he had in her dreams. Everything, I could destroy it all for you.
And then from the culled roots of the cosmos, they could reshape it anew. Him and her, together.
"Please don't go this way."
The tremble in her sentiments was a glare, a lashing of the desert sun, with scorch-chars that run deep from his marrow. It made him feel half of a whole, and in this betrayal, he loathed her as much as he longed for her; after all, he was a hideous creature, and he damned her for being so beautiful and brilliant—that he could only adore her from afar, close his eyes briefly from the brightness of her presence.
Until he opened them again, meeting the pitch-black gaze of his throne. The onyx glistened however he knew it shared his sentiments when it could never be touched by that light, by a hand that once reached and reached for his soul. Beside him, he could still faintly sense the very essence of her, and in that instance, he reveled in the delusion of her a proud empress in ivory. Though he'd been wiser to not make the panorama last, laughing harshly at himself in his solitude—until the loathing was burnt over by the memory of that fateful night. He almost felt the stars beneath his feet.
Together, he thought absentmindedly. Maybe, with this fine line that melded them to each other across the far corners of the universe, they could still be together.
Disclaimer: I do not own Star Wars.