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She knows she is dreaming by the gnawing burn of hunger in her belly. It has surely become a familiar sensation, as have the red film over her small, beady eyes, and the smoky taste of air on every inhale into tiny, heaving lungs.
She is creeping along in the shadows on four furry limbs. Every step she takes grows steadily less cautious and steadily more desperate, needing, needing, needing what?
Her own impulses war with those of the creature she possesses. One cries out, the other craves up. She claims victory every night only on account of the fact that out does not exist. Escape is paradoxical. Somewhere, she took a wrong turn and crawled right onto another plane of existence.
Outside—if it had ever occurred, if it was ever real—was hot and oppressive and loud. Here—whatever, wherever here is—is achingly cold. Silence rings in her ears, dizzying. She is as heavy as she is weightless.
A vacuum, perhaps. An abnormality. An impossibility.
Up is the only sensical thought in this new, irrational world. Up thrums enticingly with the promise of warmth and the warning of darkness.
In a split moment where her mind is more hers than the creature’s, she recalls the tumultuous rivers of Alderaan’s infamous mountain ranges. A nippy, spring afternoon and a call for adventure. The height of her daredevilry battling furiously with the persistent caution pounded into her over years of reproach.
Her audacity emerges triumphant now as it had then. A split second more, her mind merges back with the creature’s, and she cannot remember how that afternoon had ended.
Up she goes. Or continues. It’s hard to say.
She is closer now than she has ever been. The darkness hums and whispers to her, wraps around her like a silk cloak, welcoming. Her clawed feet climb the walls, obsidian striking stone, and her tiny heart pounds with the strength of a nerf’s against a brittle rib cage. It is the work of a miracle that it does not crack.
Closer, closer, the whispers get louder, clearer. Her world of filtered red grows darker, impossibly, as she crosses an invisible barrier and is hit by a wave of hate-rage-pain-carnage so strong it leaves traces on the back of her tongue. It’s only then that she pauses, good sense getting the better of her, and wonders if the creature hadn’t had the right of it, the wisdom to run far, far away as fast as its small legs could carry it.
But she has come so far. She has traveled an eternity of nights to reach this forbidden threshold, this singular moment in a place that exists outside of time. Beyond this level are the answers she seeks to questions she’d never thought to ask. Epiphanies that could shake the foundations of the galaxy.
She isn’t sure how she knows this, but something tells her it is true.
She wills the creature up, forward, and it is intelligent enough to be reluctant, but it can’t quite deny her.
Trepidation hangs in the air, stifling, as the creature moves onward. And then, like passing through a bubble, her ears pop and vision skews, and cold settles over her like a blanket of woven ice, rippling down her spine and freezing the breath in her lungs.
She is suddenly in a dark room, lit only by blinking red lights—fire crystals—
The creature’s volition swells, the surging ache of an empty belly usurping all other faculties. It scurries towards the closest red dot like a man thirsting after a mirage. Two sharp, pointed teeth sink into hard, tasteless nothingness, but the creature is too concerned with sating its yowling, empty stomach to recognize the illusion.
And then the familiar whoosh of a blast door sliding open piques Leia’s panic—something telling her to hide—and she overrides the creature’s craze, barely stifling an indignant squeak before sinking into a crack between hanging cables and durasteel.
The cold amplifies, and she can barely hear the clunk of heavy boots over the rattling of her pulse in her ears.
A towering, sinister shape in all black trudges into view. The sight of it is a confusing clash of associations as she and the creature try to identify it, an amalgamation of man-machine-beast. Its loud respiration cycles send chills down her spine.
It is the center of the abnormality, she realizes. The source of the cold.
The answer to her unasked questions.
It enters a chamber of transparisteel and settles heavily onto a bench. The chamber seals and something whirs, and she watches in fascinated horror as tubes and large, twin claws lower from the ceiling, systematically attaching to the beast and removing its outer shell.
Beneath all that black is, shockingly, a man. His horrendously scarred, snow white skin is revealed gradually, like peeling back a rind. The whorls of his flesh are like the petals of a white rose. The very air around him seems to eddie with relief-displeasure-resentment. He embodies the essence of brutality.
He is as captivating as he is repulsive, Leia thinks, and she wants to flee, but not half as much as she wants to get closer.
One foot involuntarily carries her forward before she can consciously decide to move, and she is sure the motion is silent, she is sure the shadows hide her from any human’s naked eye.
But the man’s head snaps up all the same, and his eyes—milky blue, then flashing yellow—catch hers unerringly. He shouldn’t be able to see her, and maybe he doesn’t. But she knows unquestionably that he senses her. He knows she is there.
She is frozen in place by his gaze as if it were a physical thing.
Then his face twists into puzzlement. As disfigured as it is, it is a startlingly human expression. She wishes she could reach out and touch. Smooth her own human fingers over his brow line. Trace the pockmarked skin under his eyes and watch them flash gold. She has never seen a man with golden eyes.
Leia doesn’t know how he reads this desire, if he senses it at all, but his face crumples into something much more cruel, and his metal hand raises, the long, clawed fingers curled menacingly.
An intangible force compresses her trachea and jerks her forward as if she were caught in a tractor beam. In seconds, blackness dots her red-tinged vision. She chokes, panic rising, and the last thing she sees is his yellow eyes filled with enmity, no trace of humanity left—
Leia wakes with a gasp, her hand flying to her throat. Her touches are frenzied and terrified, but there is nothing there. No invisible pressure. No damage at all.
She is fine, physically.
Still, it is days before she can fall into a deep enough sleep to dream again. But she is never sucked back into the vacuum.
It will be years before she meets the man at the center of it again.