A.N. - Forgive me if this drabble does not sound plausible; I'm not very well-versed in this fandom. I just wanted to see some disillusioned Ahsoka finding some dark solace in Anakin post Clone Wars. 500 words exactly.
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Everything hurt after the trial. Everything. No memory surfaced that was not tainted with a tinge of doubt, no relationship remained without an underlying mistrust to it. The rawness nearly consumed you, until he finally got you alone, away from the hubbub of the outside world. Here, it was just you and him, and the refusal to acknowledge the past that shunted all reason aside and allowed what otherwise couldn't happen to come to pass.
"I want you, all of you…every. single. piece." He sheds his layers as if baring intentions instead of just expanses of taut skin. The tone leaves no brokerage for argument.
"I've no doubt," you respond, yet the action of sliding your clothing off betrays the inner turmoil at the step being taken, the future it portends. "But how can you truly mean what you say when you have no idea just how many pieces I have, let alone if I am missing any?" The glance to his mechanical right arm does not go unnoticed, nor did the twitching montrals in response.
There is no affection in the ways his eyes devour you inch by inch. There is no flaw — external or internal — not traced over by the cool, calculating gaze. You'd almost rather you weren't naked just to get rid of the pretense — the fallacy of intimacy shared, of boundaries crossed and lies too often believed.
Your stare does not waver as his perusal continues. Posture rigid in more ways than one, and you both outwardly pretend that that does not matter. You deceive one another into thinking that this game will continue to be just that — a child's pastime. And it may have started as such, in cramped cockpits on interminable flights, when both of you were too naïve to care about anything other than how much it hurt inside not to be around the other or be able to openly express it.
But what you are doing now is decidedly adult. A foot apart yet bonded by a simmering sense of something neither of you are willing to define. You let yourselves be swept up in a contact not physical yet more so, concrete yet pliant to the slightest whim.
You might call this love, if you believed in such a thing. You might one day believe in something again, if it weren't for him proving at every step that beliefs are only meant to be shattered to gain new perspectives and understandings. You might fathom all this if you just stepped back and let yourself process for a minute, if you could only forget that even a momentary lull would lead to everything falling apart.
"But that's what pieces are for," Anakin says, "Picking up and putting them back together. We're all just incomplete puzzles, after all."
"And the most fun that can be had," you reply, "is discovering how it all aligns."
And you both come together — violently, desperately, disparate cardboard shapes searching for a settling place that felt like home.