Work Text:
Twin moons have barely risen as you drink your tea, your sheets pooled in your lap, damp clinging to the mattress leaving everything cool beneath your skin. This is Dathomir, where the secrets belong to the dead, and they are so eager to share with the one living soul who will listen.
What do the dead want?
This is the question you’ve asked yourself since coming here. You think you have a few answers… to be known, to relive what they lost, to take revenge on those who wronged them, perhaps.
Others only want to be remembered. Memory confers a certain type of immortality, after all, but that is a lesson hard-earned when the distance between you and them is a gulf.
You’ve given them your ear, among other things. Your work has become transcription: spells, incantations, histories of the people, translated hieroglyphs, and little anecdotes of those who grew up with a bit of the ichor in them — from the soil, from the plants, from the rain. Restless spirits, and those who came back because Dathomir was always a part of them.
You think that maybe it has something to do with the Force in this place.
That is the working hypothesis. This is how you’re testing it:
They come to you in dreams. So you’ve been doing a lot of… sleeping.
Mostly.
But some things… some things you’re not recording in your holovids.
The spirits sit so near on this planet that the nightly visitations leave you going to bed earlier each evening just to see if maybe, this will be the night he returns.
He’s not like the other warrior spirits, though he wears the Nightbrother markings, and he moved with the ease of a shadow to pool at your feet atop the covers when you were deep in slumber. How something of such little substance could spill like smoke across your body and ease a sigh from you by barely touching made little sense at first, but you remember that those introductions were just a tease.
He wanted you to see him —
Whole and fearsome and watching for minutes before all that darkness fell away from a face carved from your second most insistent nightmare.
You don’t remember his features, though they were chiselled and handsome. You don’t remember how many horns crowned his head, though they were sharp enough to leave scars the next morning.
A phantasm.
A dream so real you believe there might be some magic in it —
He never offered his name. Maybe he doesn’t remember.
But you remember the bright eyes of the dead.
— What it felt like to burn beneath his stare as shadow became substance and he pinned your wrists, the raze of his teeth as you tried to scream, and his laughter —
Silk and shivering and satisfied that you could feel everything. Muscles moving. The heavy drape of his torso above yours. Claws pressing into flesh to edge your pleasure with the bite of pain.
Your nipples pebble at the memory, wanting to recall the feeling of his teeth clamped around them, but those details are misty.
You screw your eyes shut, frustrated.
You want to remember his cock.
Something trills in the night beyond your window. A ghast or a ghoul or one of those bird-like creatures that roosts in the cliffs.
Yes, Dathomir is haunted.
That’s what the archaeological datalog said, but you expected —
Well, maybe coming here for the first time back too many rotations to count, you expected something different: Monsters. Maybe Nightsister remnants. A record that stretches into the near-history before the war, something you could study and report.
That wasn’t how it went, not after you lost your tent to a wayward rancor and took shelter in the caves where it was safer from the elements but not the nexus’ influence: down in earth where the ichor is the strongest, and those who lived here used the waters to boil their roots and herbs and —
You just had to try the tea yourself once you found the recipe.
A little sip to welcome vivid dreams, but hardly enough to induce visions.
That’s right.
That’s all this is:
Scientific experiment.
Because research.
You look down at yourself, touched by the blush of the fading day, ready to surrender to one dream or another, to see where they lead because hope is a strange catalyst, even if the circumstances are just figments because you can’t stop remembering in bits and pieces, lucid and fraught with the memory of calloused palms pulling down the sheets.
That’s why your breath catches, and your palms leave damp marks on the bed. That’s why you’ve chosen to wear as little as possible —
A thin shift, no panties, bared from mid-thigh reveal plenty to the shadows. In the mid-dark, alone in your cave hut, you’re already a little wet.
You gulp back the last of the brew, setting down the cup with the dregs, and ease into a more comfortable position when the memories threaten. Those aren’t true — they are just after-images of a sensation that you’ve dissected and analyzed, the pressure and the heft of a man’s body not unlike a night terror from the data records, but while you remember the inability to move beneath him, you also remember… pleasure.
You shut your eyes, and when the weigh of your body shifts into nothing, you imagine a stirring somewhere in the place between where the living and the world between hold conference: the dead making promises they can’t keep when their demesne can only ever be observation.
“Let’s bend the rules, my dear,” you hear him whisper, but the shiver that chases in a trickle from your ear to your collar like the cold glide of a finely-edged blade is only the breath of the wind through a split in the ceiling.
There’s no one there when you slit your gaze across your room, checking one more time in case he’s come.
You’re alone.
There’s no one and nothing save for a flicker of disappointment.
Sleep takes you swift and sure, pulling you down into the meandering gloom of unconscious with little effort. There is only the tunnel of your vision and mussy dark, and then nothing but grey shadow.
Your sleep is not dreamless.
You are running through a forest — a gnarled tangle of overgrowth that catches and snags at your ankles, gravethorn branches tearing at your dress with insistent fingers and raking over your skin to nick and sliver and raise your blood.
This is a hunt.
And somewhere in the distance, you think you can hear over the snap of breaking branches that crack like little bones beneath your bare feet, you imagine the firelight gaze of a predator whose attention narrows to your body as you crash along.
So clumsy.
So desperately wanting to be caught.
To be put to the loamy floor face first, knees scraped raw, stuffed solidly with the thick weight of a cock stretching you open to your limits as he ruts. No quarter. No mercy. And you, held in place by the hand on the back of your neck, just a body, spasming helplessly around the ripple of ridges that light the dark behind your eyes with each slap of his hips.
That’s not how it happens.
Because what you dream is not what you get:
He’s far too big, a forearm bracing your wrists over your head one-handed, the body across yours so heavy that you can’t even squirm. But you feel him:
Every hot breath against the side of your face. Every dip and plane of his stomach muscles, pressing you deeper into the mattress with each exhalation. A rumble of appreciation when you try to shift, but find yourself trapped beneath a hard chest, your thighs opened around too-wide hips, the brush of flesh against your slicked cunt leaving you clenching, involuntary desperate, as your moan.
This close, you can taste his skin:
Hot and as hard as the rest of him, the tendons along his neck stark from straining.
Is he holding himself back from just taking what he wants?
Is this restraint?
“At last,” he says, and you feel the weight of sinking relief stiffen against your clit. He doesn’t move, but his cock grows as it stiffens, pushing hard against your centre with the sort of insistence that wakes your body beneath his.
Like heated metal.
Hard flesh dripping.
So intimate, to be held like a lover, to be spread so easily in sleep that you can’t resist a roll of your hips or how the feeling of him against you makes your sex throb from pressure absent stimulation.
His purr of contentment to find you writhing is all the assurance you need.
“We meet again, my sweet, sleeping plaything.”
You scent fire and woodrot against your tongue, cut with the bitter dark of his musk.
He nuzzles your pulsepoint, and you see a glimpse of a diamond marking on his nose. A little detail that isn’t at all endearing. The rest of his facial marks paint a skull from his eyes and mouth.
You shudder, a trickle of fear mingling with desire.
A murmur, “Did you miss me? Or were you yearning for something specific, in all your somnolent wandering? I felt your stirring — your searching. Your need. An interstice aspect of the Dathomir’s affinities, the Dark of this nexus welcomes malleable boundaries — the living, the dead, and those in-between. All of us bound together by tethers wrought through the ichor. Thank you for indulging me by drinking the waters. It makes these meetings so much easier for me.”
You can’t speak. You don’t have the ability.
“Ah, yes. The perils of dreaming: you find yourself at the mercy of one who does not possess the ability to grant it. Pity. Though I do appreciate your company — your welcome heat. I have been alone for so many years, and with no one to appreciate the body returned to me in so few pieces. I do love how responsive you are to my —” His cock brushes your slit, slicking through your folds with a deft roll of his hips that leaves you open-mouthed and gaping. “Ministrations.”
His lips brush your temple, and he pulls in a breath that terminates in a shudder so profound that you crumple beneath him.
“And I do enjoy the feeling when you strain against me. How you buckle so easily when I hurt you a little bit. I won’t stretch you open, but I can make it fit.”
He tastes you. A long lick from your jaw to your temple, and as you shudder away from the feeling of how much you want that mouth doing the very same thing to your weeping, empty cunt, he smiles at you —
A mouth full of sharp teeth.
And you catch a glimpse of triumph in that burning gaze.
He likes it when you squirm.
“You can try to scream, if you prefer.”
You try to open your legs further, trying to take the rub of his length as the first flicker of his weight starts to cut off your circulation. Unmoving, he makes it hard to breathe, and with your hands starting tingle from the pressure of his forearm across your wrists, discomfort becomes a steady, warning peal.
His lips brush across yours, mocking. “If you can manage it.”
You want to remember this.
You want to remember every inch of him pressing into your hole, stretching you out so you can feel the burn and sting of taking someone so much bigger than your own species without breaking. You want to show him how hard you can squeeze when he hilts himself deep —
As if he’s not the only one who can break things.
You can’t explain these things. You don’t have the ability to express your desperation by begging, so you do the one thing you can —
You catch his lips in a kiss, and you bite him.
Hard.
Hard enough that you can feel the pop of skin.
His snarl like music when he responds by snapping you down by the throat and sinking into your cunt in one deft, sure stroke that whites out the dark with brilliant light for all of one moment, and he groans like it’s the one comfort he’s forgotten.
He stutters a moan, and mouth open, you’d join him, but you —
Pant in your desperation, clawing at his wrist as he withdraws, and your pussy makes a sucking noise of protestation.
“Now now,” he grits out, licking his lip. “One must savour every moment when time is finite. Enjoy it, my dear — every last bit of it. I want you to remember come morning — remember me, remember this moment, remember this feeling, because none living will ever offer the same.”
It’s easier when he puts it back in, like you’re better fitted to the notch and heft of his girth, the press of his balls tight against your ass.
“Ah, yes. Let me feel you clench.”
Rooted again, he grinds his hips, stretching you in all directions to better take him. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s too dark to watch the ripple of his ridges when he pulls out, glistening with your slick, and buts the tip against your clit — rubbing it in little circles to make you squeeze on nothing.
He sinks back in, palm to your chest to hold you in place as he starts to move.
“That’s it,” he soothes. “That’s good.”
Fuck me, you mouth, but his rumble of laughter drowns out the movements of your gaping, open mouth as he fucks you with slow, long strokes stopping just shy of where you need him.
You mouth words.
You make promises without sound.
But his indifference to what you want is part of his entertainment.
“Open,” he commands, but he pushes past your teeth before you can take a breath.
Fingers trap your tongue — his hands taste like salt, and the press of his claws against the back of your mouth are nearly enough to make you gag, but you obey when he tells you to, “Suck,” while he fills you up. Moving them slowly in and out like he’s considering fucking your mouth but he wants to be certain of the performance.
Over and over until you’re pliant and splayed, lips wrapped around calloused fingers and your hips are dragged up his lap. Spit down your chin. Your nightgown split open down the centre from sharp claws. Breathing hard, and wanting anything he might offer if it could satisfy him.
It doesn’t.
He scoffs. “Maybe next time.”
Wet smears mark your thighs. He daubs your clit with your own spit. Rubs it slow and sure, your nightgown pushed up so he can watch the contractions of your stomach as his touch brings you closer to finishing.
But you don’t want it to end.
You don’t want him to ever stop.
“There are other more pressing matters at hand.”
You lift your arm, reaching for that stern, scowling face — to let him know with a gesture that he’s not so alone. That you are here.
With a jerk of his chin, he pulls away.
He watches you, hunger and determination mingled with an unhappy twist of his mouth. Maybe he knows that this won’t last. Maybe he knows that when morning comes, once again, all you’ll have are echoes of the experience — sweat on your sheets and an impossible account of a dream that might’ve been real in another life, at another time.
“This is Dathomir, my dear,” he tells you in a lower register. “Do not despair. If you do not remember me come morning, I will only remind you again the next evening. Over and over in the depths of unconsciousness when the veils between us are thinned.”
He presses a thumb to your clit, unmoving. Just holding it there so that the overwhelm of his thrusts and the intensity of his stare is enough to sear a mark into your skin —
Something to remember him by.
“I will not be forgotten,” he says.
What’s your name, you would ask him, if speaking was still your friend, and your body wasn’t shuddering at the slap of his hips, pushing you over into depths where the dark is darkest and the stars wink out overhead.
Then there’s just oblivion, and the burn of your pleasure when the torrent breaks, leaving you to unconsciousness and the trailing drift of a ghostly lover who seems to have lost everything. Even you to the morning, where nothing is certain about the encounter, save the weakness in your body and the feeling that something is missing.
Some part of a dream left to a spilled cup, overturned on the bedside table and the twist of sweat-soaked sheets.
A little dapple of blood on the pillow, but you’re uninjured.
Body aching.
Satiated.
The bed around you is cold in the pre-dawn gloom, and only wisps of your unconscious wanderings linger, drifting farther away the longer you try to hold onto them:
Dream or nightmare, you don’t remember.
But tonight you can try again.