I need to take a little break from my novel and I've been stalking this ship for like a year so here we go. Masquerade ball AU; vaguely Victorian. Any quotes I've taken from the script are copyright of Lucasfilm.
(Un)Masked
The ballroom was a warzone of light and dark.
And amid this light, there was grey—a fragile line, the result of their convergence. She levitated between pillars of light and shadow while he stalked her from across the room, hidden in dark. But now and again, the light would break through: a hairline crack that he sneered against, but seeped beneath his skin, nonetheless.
She was light. She was beauty. And he was drawn to her magnetic force. He would give anything to touch her—even if it meant stepping from the dark.
She, that aura of light he'd practically begun to salivate at, reached a slender hand upward to adjust the mask she wore; the cloth, thin, almost glowing and diaphanous amid the candles and gasoliers, wrapped about her face like a gray hand. Twin catlike holes revealed her eyes. Those orbs of hazel shifted back and forth, warily, as another waltz took wing.
Instinctively, his own gloved fingers grazed his mask, a requisite of toilette to an affair he'd found himself entrapped in. The false face was a black, hulking thing—ribbed with silver, horizontal lines—that cut just above his mouth like some dark skull. It'd inspired a shiver or two from the ladies he'd brushed past—perhaps even a swoon—of whom were more accustomed to the delicate paper of their male counterparts.
But she wasn't of that ilk; she wouldn't swoon. Not unless he'd proposed it, that is.
It took only one hesitant step from gloom—just one—to catapult him across the floor. Perhaps his footsteps were gunfire amid the featherlight patter of dance shoes, for she turned sharply and addressed him, her eyes betraying a collision. Fear and murder. Curiosity and repugnance.
Monster, her glare spat. He turned up his lip. He was a shadow, certainly, and stalking toward her at an unfathomable and reeling speed—but a monster?
Her freckled shoulders disappeared behind a wall of chiffon and lace.
And the hunt began.
She gave up quite a fight, quite a chase. But legs weren't meant to run forever, even those that wanted to, so it was with ragged pants and a dim corner he'd pinned her. Found her. Trapped her. It was here that he found she could make even the most shadowy place burn bright. The revelation picked a shiver along his spine—but was it of fear? Or something more?
Voice low and taunting, his arms a cage she glowered within, he spoke first: "You still want to kill me."
"That's what happens when you're being hunted by a creature in a mask."
Ah, so that's what she coveted, then. An unmasked pursuit. Would that strip him of his monsterhood? His fingers hesitated only a beat before he drew the ceramic skull away from his of flesh and bone.
Softly, she gasped.
"Now," he murmured, "I suppose it's only polite that you do the same."
She stared.
"Come now." An impatience pricked through his plea. He curled his fists. "I haven't hastened all this way for nothing."
She blinked.
He shifted his weight toward a center, toward the heels of his palms, shoulders curling as a rage began to simmer. "I'm no monster."
She did nothing. Nothing at all.
So he relived her of the mask himself, tugging almost reverently at the pale ribbon that encircled her head in a halo—
And found that beneath, she was just as bright and blazing as he had hoped.
His knees quivered, and he would have sunken to them, had it not been for her look.
A look of recognition./astonishment.