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He dreams about the kiss almost as often as he dreams of the body.
When he’s awake, he desperately tries to forget both.
The body is both easier and not. After all, he had never actually seen her dead. He hadn’t heard the achingly familiar hum of her lightsaber as it was turned against her. (At least not first hand.)
He hadn’t seen the moment when the commando she refused to kill dragged the blue-bright blade across her flesh. (He had looked, desperate, praying, but the security cam had been facing the wrong way.)
He hadn’t even been on the comm channel when Ordo had finally retrieved her, when Ordo had retrieved the tarp-wrapped corpse that was left, though he’d seen the blurry footage after. (Niner was already down by then, already hurt, and besides, all he could hear was the screaming that had filled his helmet when she was struck, when a voice almost identical to his own on the Republic feed had confirmed a Jedi kill, confirmed General Tur-Mukan, special operations.)
Yet, somehow, that makes it worse.
Because he had heard her screaming over their joint comms, when she fell, when she refused to take up arms against his brother. And with nothing but the screaming to go by, his mind runs wild, imagining her body unspooling, cut to ribbons as she smiles at him, blood splashing and pooling over a helmet and gloves that look just like his.
When he wakes up in the night, choking with the need to scream, he reminds himself that it was a different Darman who had once loved that corpse. After all, he had seen nothing. It couldn’t have happened to him.
The kiss, though, the kiss is harder.
Because try as he might, in the dead the night, when he’s turning in his nightmares, his brain won’t let him forget that he lived it. That he had lived the kiss he hadn’t realized would be the last.
Unlike the body, his mind never dips into imagination. There is no blood or gore or impossibility. There’s no need. The dream is only memory, perfect and unaltered and dead.
He’d been half asleep, still, roused only by the gentle trace of her fingers across his face. She had smiled, half-shadowed, the only light from the speeder lanes and neon advertisements outside the apartment window that crept in through forgotten blinds. She had been beautiful in the darkness, and he had wanted to pull her back against him. Between the weight of the child sleeping on his chest and hers at his hip, he would have been content.
“Hey,” she had said instead, her fingertips ghosting against the edge of his lips, then caressing his cheek bone, “Hey, I have to go.”
He had mumbled something incoherent at that. But in the dreams he always sees the promise he had felt in her wide green eyes, the promise she hadn’t kept. She had to go, but she would be back. It was only for a little while.
“Zey commed,” she had continued, reaching out now to place a hand on their son’s back, stroking a thumb in soothing circles as if willing the baby to continue to sleep. “There’s some chatter at one of the listening stations, and he’s bogged down with the Council. It’s probably nothing, but apparently there’s no one else he can get on a shuttle to the opposite side of Corrie at zero dark thirty to check it out.”
Darman had started to grunt his sleep-blunted opinion of that, but stilled as he felt Kad’ika shift against his chest. They both all but held their breath, watching the tiny human between the two of them until finally he gave a little sigh. Etain’s smile had widened, and Darman had craned his neck up to look at her, at least as much as his current confinement would allow.
“Love you,” he had managed to mumble through the haze of sleep, “ B’safe.”
And she had smiled back at him, still full of that unkept promise, every night, every dream, and brushed her lips faintly, briefly against his.
“Always,” she had lied.
And that was always the moment he woke, in tears or screaming on the worst nights, shaking and biting hard against his fist as he tried not to wake Niner on others. With the ghost of her kiss barely touching his lips.
Some other Darman’s wife, some other Darman’s grief, except in those few moments when he was too exhausted and too shattered to pretend, when the dream was still too close.
They had talked after. They had married after, and joked, and promised each other grand, sleep-deprivation fueled fantasies over snatches of stolen comm signal. In small ten, fifteen breaks in the battle, they made plans for what they would do together, riduure, when they were no longer separated by half a planet and the Separatist invasion of Coruscant.
But the promises were broken. He couldn’t kiss her the way he had meant to. He never saw her alive again.
I should have kissed her back, the Darman who he isn’t insists from deep in his chest, I should have woken the baby, woken everyone. I should have kissed her until we couldn’t breathe. I shouldn’t have let her go. I should-
I should-
I should-