Notes: On to Fantastical Fencing (a story of at least 100 words involving your couple in which something fantastical happen). I snagged the title from the song "War of Hearts" by Ruelle. There are two versions of this song, and they're both great; but the acoustic version is my favorite. (And I may have listened to that version a lot when I was writing In Dreams We Dwell, so there's that…)
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IV. "Come to Me in the Night Hours" | Fantastical Fencing
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He snaps his wrists up, tearing the lightsaber from her hands. Its hilt goes flying, and before she can duck away to retrieve it, he grabs her by the front of her tunic and pulls her close. Holds his saber at his side, ready to end this, to end her, to be free of her forever.
Her gray eyes are wide and terrified and right there, and he can't look away. He wants to kill her. He wants to kill her. He has to.
Another wave crashes against the rocks, showering them both in a cold mist; and the lightsaber slips from his grasp, tumbling to the sand far below. He reaches for her throat with his empty hand.
—just like you've always dreamed, it'll only take a few seconds, don't be weak—
His fingers brush against her skin, wrapping around the back of her neck, tangling in the copper hair that has pulled loose from her braid. Her fear laps at his senses, as forceful as the surf against these rocks; but she doesn't fight back. Why doesn't she fight back?
He pulls her closer, watches her lips part as she lets out a frightened gasp. This is what he wants. Her fear, her helplessness, her… he wants…
Wind whips up around them, herald of the storm approaching from offshore. It beats against them, trying to drag them from the rock. He releases her tunic and takes her by the waist, locking her against him; and his tongue finally loosens enough to speak.
"I hate you," he whispers, feeling her tremble in his arms, feeling her warmth, her softness.
"I know," she whispers back, breathless, afraid. Her hands pressed to his chest as if to push him away, and he can feel them through his shirt, and he hates her, of course he hates her. He's not wondering what those hands would feel like against his skin, or how his hands would feel against hers—
—stop it, what are you waiting for, do it, end this—
"You don't know," he says, the words half-strangled in his throat. "You have no idea."
Lips still parted as she breathes in and out, and doesn't that make him sick, watching her, wanting…
She swallows hard, and her hushed reply is nearly swept away by the wind: "Then tell me."
His chest is suddenly heavy, each breath a struggle. Tell her? Tell her what? That he hates how weak she makes him, that he can't stop thinking about her, that he wants to taste every pure and beautiful inch of her, and that he might hate himself for that most of all, because someone like him shouldn't ever dare to want someone like her.
Lightning arcs across the sky, white-hot and dazzling, illuminating her for an instant; and he brushes aside all the words he can't say as he surges forward to kiss her.
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Darth Festus wakes slowly, staring up at the ceiling, feeling the cold creep of reality around him. He sits up and leans forward, holding his head in his hands. It was just a dream. Not real. Of course it's not real. It's never real.
He laughs under his breath at his own idiocy, his weakness. As if she ever would have stood there and let him do that to her. As if she ever would have stopped fighting against him. She wouldn't. She shouldn't.
He lies back and rubs his hands over his eyes, and he wonders what it would feel like if it were real. He thinks he'd give anything to know.
Weak.
He closes his eyes and plays it back in his head, over and over and over; and he doesn't sleep for the rest of the night.
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In the Jedi Temple, Allana Djo startles awake, the memory of her dream so impossibly vivid, it feels more real than the bed or the pillows or the room around her. She lies there for several long seconds, breathing. In and out, quiet and slow. It's not real, just breathe, it's not real…
She sits up, pulling one of the pillows into her arms. It doesn't mean anything, she tells herself. It was just a dream, a bizarre dream cobbled together from unrelated fragments of thought in her waking life. It doesn't mean anything.
She hugs the pillow against her chest and takes another deep breath. As real as it might have seemed while she slept, it never could have happened that way. He wants her dead, end of story. He never would have held her like that. He never would have dropped his lightsaber in the first place.
She presses her fingers to her mouth without thinking; and even though it never happened – it won't ever happen, and it can't ever happen, and she never wants it to happen – she can still feel him there. A kiss, lightning-burned across her lips.
It doesn't mean anything.
It's not real.
Eventually she falls back to sleep, and she dreams of other things, and when she wakes in the morning, she doesn't think of him at all.