InsaneJournal

Who Allana Solo, Lucifer
What Lucifer gets back into the dream game, and has evidently become a Star Wars fan
Where Allana's head mostly, her apartment and outside Ava's house briefly
When Tonight, late
Warnings Some violence, lots of creepiness
Status Complete (may be continued in another thread if Erin is up for it)

Though she never realized the nightmare was familiar while she was caught in the throes of it, Allana had been having this dream, or a version of it, since she was a little girl. The details had changed over the years, shifting and accommodating to her age and her fears. When she was young, when nightmares were soothed away by silently padding into her grandparents’ room and climbing up onto their bed (sometimes they wouldn’t even wake up, just find her there the next morning curled up at the foot of the bed like an errant puppy), the dream had only been about hiding. She was always hiding and something was coming to find her, something so bad she could feel it all through her body, gnawing at her nerves and roiling in her stomach. It had stretched on interminably until she had almost wished it would just catch her, just do whatever horrible thing it had planned, so that at least it could be over. When she was been twelve or thirteen, old enough to be too embarrassed to admit to nightmares, the dream had morphed gradually into one where she was still hiding from some unknown threat, but now she could hear her family looking for her too. The torment in this phase of the nightmare had been in knowing that she couldn’t call out to them or go to them, that the thing hunting for her was closer, and that all she would do was alert it to her presence so that it would reach her before she could do anything. As the dream progressed she heard their voices moving further and further away, until she was alone. The nightmare had changed again when she was about fifteen, and it was that nightmare she was caught up in now.

It began as it always did: she was sitting, knees drawn into her chest and forehead resting atop them, in an alcove carved into the gilt-and-marble walls of her old nursery on the Hapan Throne World. The room had been designed to a child’s scale, but in the dream her teenaged form fit easily into the old hiding place she would have, by now, outgrown, and all of the proportions of the room had stretched so that the walls were as high, and the gold carvings of native animals inlaid onto almost every available surface were as impressive, as they had been to the little girl who had lived there. She sat very still and breathed slowly and deeply to make those breaths as quiet as possible, because there was something in the room with her, something wrong. She felt it in the Force, as dark as her father or Cade had ever been, but she couldn’t quite get a hold on it, couldn’t quite tell where it was coming from or who it was.

“Allana,” her aunt’s call echoed across the chamber and, suddenly, the way things occur to you in dreams, Allana knew that she was meant to be training, that she was late. She scrambled up out of her hiding place and towards where Jaina was standing, arms crossed and expression severe. “I’m sorry, I’m ready, I just-“ she started as she drew her lightsaber, meaning to explain about the darkness in the room, to warn her aunt, but Jaina cut her off. “Allana,” she said, and her sternness was mixed with pity now, “you know that doesn’t belong to you.” She was motioning to the lightsaber clutched in Allana’s right hand. “You need to stop playing with toys. You have things to do,” and now Allana could see that the weapon she held was actually a toy, a plastic hilt with a battery powered light, the kind you saw in shops. “I can’t fight with this,” she said, tone pleading, and held it out to her aunt as if expecting Jaina could fix it.

Instead, however, her aunt was holding something out to her and, reacting automatically, Allana reached for it before realizing what it was – a gold circlet inlaid with gems, a crown. She stared down at it, but where she expected to see her own reflection there was only a red glow, and that so puzzled her that for a moment she didn’t realize that her aunt had turned and was walking out of the room. “Aunt Jaina, wait!” she called, starting after her, afraid to be left with the darkness she could still feel in the room. Jaina turned, and the look on her face stopped Allana short. It wasn’t anger or repulsion, it was incomprehension. It was the puzzled look you would give a stranger who screamed your name on the street. Her aunt didn’t recognize her and, after looking at Allana curiously for a moment, she turned and left the chamber without a backward glance.

She was alone then, except for the darkness, cloying, whispering its threat from everywhere and nowhere, and she backed up slowly until she could press her back against the nearest wall. I have to find a new weapon, she realized, and dropped the toy lightsaber onto the table next to her. There was nothing in the chamber, just furniture and old toys, and for lack of anywhere else to turn her eyes glanced back down to the crown in her hand. The red glow was there again, but the edges of the gems were sharp and it was the only thing she had, so she hefted it and held it out warily in front of her.

The hiss of a lightsaber being activated was all the warning she had, and she threw herself to the left just in time to miss the arc of the blade, stumbling but managing to stay on her feet as she whirled to face…

“Ben?” her cousin stared back at her grimly and raised his blade again, “Ben, what are you doing? It’s me.”

“I know,” he answered, and his voice was sad and resigned in a way that made her skin crawl, that suggested someone who had already given himself absolution for an evil committed on behalf of the greater good. “We always knew this was going to happen,” he went on, “we could always see it. But we had to try. We thought you might have a chance.” He shook his head and gestured down, towards the floor, “We should have known.”

Allana followed his gesture and saw the crown, which she’d dropped on the floor in her scramble to avoid her cousin’s lightsaber. It was far enough away now that she could see a more complete reflection on its surface, her face, pale and frightened, gazed back up at her, but all she could process was the reflection of her eyes, glowing red. The glow in the crown and the darkness she felt in the room were suddenly explained. It was her. It had been her all along.

This time when Ben swung out with his lightsaber she didn’t try to dodge.

The dream should have ended here. Tonight, however, it didn’t.

Logically, Allana would have been cut in half. If Ben had landed his blow, two pieces of a little girl would flop onto the floor and bleed out until there was nothing left but flesh and bone. In a nightmare setting, that probably wasn’t such a terrible thing. Traumatizing, sure, but at least it wasn’t permanent. Of course, not all things that were formed in the unconscious mind were harmless. If a person laid down their cards in all the right places, they could very well set up the perfect timer on a bomb that would inevitably bring forth self-destruction to a person in unimaginable ways. Lucifer, personally, found that he was more than qualified to be that ‘right person’ needed for a task so delicate. And important. After he had cracked his way through Cade’s sanity and had sent him into a quick, downward spiral, Lucifer knew that he’d hit the jackpot with the Star Wars theme party that had fallen out of the seal’s mouth. There was so much potential among the entire lot of them, each carrying the weight of their own personal emotional struggles deep down on the inside. So much guilt. Anger. Fear. Sadness. Emotions that only he could see.

All of them were waiting to be broken. It was merely a matter of approaching them at the right time, when their hearts were vulnerable and ready to be ripped apart and stepped on.

Allana’s heart had called to him. It had screamed of fear and pain and Lucifer, being the opportunist that he was, found himself unable to ignore it. He had quietly slipped in through the backdoor of her mind, his arrival timely enough for him to witness the scenes that unfolded within Allana’s nightmare. It was a different world in comparison to the one that he had introduced himself to when he had taken hold of Cade's mind. The meaning behind each and every moment that played out before him was far more subtle, yet tweaked to tune into the dark, uncertain holes buried within Allana's very being so that it was all just as effectively scarring as watching an entire civilization burn to the ground. Lucifer found that he liked that. It spiced things up a bit.

Of course, a little more flavor never hurt anyone. As Ben raised his lightsaber over his head and hurled it down at Allana with determination, Lucifer stepped in and made him vanish without even trying. Instead of being sliced in two, Allana was instead left facing Lucifer himself, who had gladly taken Ben’s place in his absence. The lightsaber he’d been threatening her dream existence with had fallen into his own grip, the tip of the weapon only just barely hovering above Allana’s head.

“Oops,” Lucifer started, giving Allana an apologetic, half-assed sort of shrug, “that was a close one.” He swung the lightsaber back and gave it a twirl, a flicker of amusement dancing across his features as he felt the weapon out. “You know, I’m gonna have to give you humans just the tiniest smidge of credit here. This?” Lucifer smirked, then flipped the lightsaber over and caught it with his other hand. “Is neat.”

Allana had let her eyes close when she’d realized what was going to happen, what she was going to allow Ben to do. She had clenched her jaw and squeezed her eyes shut, too numb from the revelation to even feel very afraid as she heard the woosh of displaced air from the blade arcing down, felt it’s heat on her face...

But the blow never fell, and she stood there for a long moment, eyes closed, and waited. I just want it to be over she thought pleadingly, wanting, though she couldn’t articulate it since she was still unaware that she was in a dream, to wake up. This was when she always woke up.

Then she heard the voice, the cavalier oops and her eyes flew open, because that definitely wasn’t Ben. When she realized who the man playing with her cousin’s lightsaber actually was her face blanched to white, and the only reason she managed not to throw herself backwards or try to run in those first moments was that she was scared enough to be frozen where she stood. Then there was the sheer incongruity of Lucifer being here, enough to make her frown as she struggled to grasp something she knew was simple, fundamental even, but that slipped from her mind again and again, as if it could only exist in the corner of her eye, in the shadows of peripheral vision. There’s something wrong, not dark, just wrong just...I shouldn’t be on Hapes, not now... and he shouldn’t... and then it came to her, like finally fumbling upon a light switch after groping for it in the dark.

“I’m dreaming,” her voice was calm enough, lulled by that reassuring moment when you realize your nightmare isn’t real after all, but a moment later the full implications of that sunk in. She had been there when Cade had woken up from his version of this dream, and it had been like something had come and hollowed him out except for the darkness. He’ll do that to me, she thought, the fact that Cade had already been halfway down the road to Sith not really registering in that moment. She had no doubt that she could be broken too, that it might even be easier to break her than the average person given who she was, who her family was and what they had already done. She tried to wake up, willed herself back to her room, and to what she knew logically was reality (even if the dream felt far more real at the moment), but it was useless. For however long Lucifer wanted her here she was powerless to leave.

Her face had been mostly emotionless, if rather pale, but now she clenched her jaw and widened her eyes slightly, ceding the advantage she thought her complete composure would have won her, as even those small tells were too much from someone who had been trained to conceal her emotions from the time she was a child. If I’m scared this will be easier for him, she thought, and lifted her chin slightly, addressing him in a bid to distract herself, to try to buy some time. “Why are you here?” she asked, but the tone of her voice, the question on her face, was ”Why me?”

She’d wanted to make some kind of crack about the lightsaber, it was what she thought Jaina would have done, but at the moment she was mostly congratulating herself for not being back in her hiding place from the beginning of the dream.

He didn't even try to hide the flicker of a smirk twisting itself onto the edge of his lips. Allana was afraid of him. He could sense the fear building up inside her, begging every bit of power that she had access to for aid in dragging her out of the deep hole her dreamworld had been dropped into, but there was no use. Lucifer was stronger than her. He was stronger than twenty of her and, as she gaped across at him in surprise, Lucifer could tell that she knew it.There was something undeniably satisfying about standing before a human and soaking in their terror, he found. Particularly when that person happened to be one of the few who were openly trying to stop him from doing what needed to be done.

She wouldn't be a problem for very long.

"Of course you're dreaming," Lucifer confirmed dismissively, giving the lightsaber a downward stroke in a way that sort of resembled a golfing technique. "Well, sort of. I mean, we're in your head -" Lucifer brought a hand up to poke at the side of his skull. "- but everything that you're seeing now is very real." Allana was a smart girl. Lucifer was more than sure that she'd be able to put the pieces together. Lucifer had taken advantage of her when she had been in a very vulnerable place, all closed away from the world and lost to the inner depths of her very being. It was a cold, cruel thing to have done, breaking into her head the way that he had, really. There was that pesky invasion of privacy idea that people got offended about, then there was that whole mind raping thing, which was actually a shorter, sweeter way to describe what was happening here, but eh. Lucifer wasn't even a little sorry about it.

Why are you here?

Lucifer smiled. "It's obvious, isn't it?" He gave the lightsaber another turn over, flipping it through the air slowly, looking a little more balanced with the weapon now that he'd had the tiniest of moments to study it. "I wanted to chat. And now there's this surprising spike of curiosity that's come on about me having some sort of lightsaber war with you..." He considered the weapon in his hand once more, then waved Allana off with a sheepish sort of grin. "But we can save that for later. I take it you know that I was the one who set Cade off into his spiral of insanity, yes?" He wasn't going to sugarcoat what had happened. As noted before, Lucifer could tell that Allana was not an idiot. He had to play his cards a little differently than he had with Cade. Being up front about what had happened between himself and his former victim of all that pesky ‘mind rape’ seemed to be the right way to go.

The cavalier way Lucifer toyed with the lightsaber, his jokes and his smiles, were more chilling than an outright threat ever could have been. It was her mind he was strolling around like he owned it. The walls, the floor, the lightsaber in his hand, all of them were born from and composed of the fears and desires and hopes that she kept protected, even from the people she trusted, and to Lucifer they were just things to handle and then toss aside. Fragile little amusements he might not even notice breaking. Her eyes followed the motions of his hand as he swung the lightsaber like a golf club, and flicked rather hopelessly towards her own lightsaber, still a toy, sitting on the shelf when he made his comment about a duel.

Still, she tried to stay silent, to keep composed, as her mind scrabbled frantically, looking for a way out, for a bargaining chip. She knew she had to calm down, that fear would only make this easier for Lucifer, but she couldn’t help the thoughts chasing each other through her mind - I don’t want to be dark, I don’t want to kill anyone, I just want to wake up please... She was afraid she was going to lose control of herself after all, run and hide and spend her last moments before Lucifer did whatever he was planning as a complete coward. Then Lucifer all but put a name to her fear (“...you know that I was the one who set Cade off into his spiral of insanity, yes?”) and suddenly, as if that had drawn it all out into the light at last, it all seemed very simple. She couldn’t beat Lucifer. He could dig his fingers into her mind like you would mash an overripe peach in your palm, maybe he could even make her kill, but she didn’t have to help him do it.

“I know what you did to my cousin, yes,” Allana said quietly, and she straightened slightly as she said it, leveled her gaze and eased her hands, which had stiffened almost to fists by her sides. “I think though,” she added carefully, deliberately, “that you give yourself too much credit. Cade had his troubles, and they’d been exacerbated recently. You were just the last blow, not the most significant one. Besides, if anyone except me had been there when he woke up, his ‘spiral’ may have ended before it began. They would have held him off.” That hurt to admit, all of it. Despite everything that had happened a part of her had still looked up to Cade, and admitting that Lucifer hadn’t created the person who had killed those children, had merely inflamed what was already there, was uncomfortable, to say the least. Acknowledging that if she had been stronger she could have stopped him before any of it began was salt in an old wound. And all of that was compounded by the fact that he’d been sent home recently, and no one wanted to remember a departed relative as anything but good. Still, she could deal with that. She could be strong enough to admit the truth, because doing otherwise would make her more afraid, give more strength to Lucifer, and he didn’t need her help.

She picked the toy lightsaber up from the table and looked at for a moment, turning it over in her hands, before smiling in a way that was meant to be an imitation of Jaina’s smirk, but mostly came out a little sad. “If this ‘chat’ is supposed to end the same way for me, then I wouldn’t bother. They’ll stop me, even sooner than they stopped him.”

“Also,” she added suddenly, bold enough that she scared herself a bit, “you shouldn’t swing it like a golf club. It’s top-heavy, not bottom-heavy, so you won’t even be getting a real sense of its range of motion that way.”

To Allana's credit, she was trying to resist the inevitable result of his visit. Lucifer was more than confident that he would be the one to walk away victorious, but it was always incredibly interesting, watching how the tiny, little, disgusting lumps of people he chose to manipulate squirmed between his fingers when he had them held tight in his grasp. Anger was common. People would yell, they would demand that he leave, they would insult him until they went blue in the face and fell over breathless, exhausted, and emotionally drained beyond reason because it was only then, as they quivered on the spot, that they realized that they were going to lose. Denial was the second most popular category, which was often accompanied by sarcasm and attempts at snark and humor. That always backfired when Lucifer stood rooted to the spot, calm as ever, and pointed out something that made them melt into a mess of fear and anxiety. Then, finally, the intelligent humans, who often tried to outsmart and bargain with him to the very end of their souls and then some, would give Lucifer a strong, confident start before they began to stumble, trip over their own words, and eventually back themselves into such a deep, dark corner that Lucifer himself would have been left in the sort of position where he couldn't help but feel sorry for them.

But only a teeny bit. Honestly, Lucifer couldn't decide on which of the three categories he liked the most. It was amusing to watch the hairless baboons scream and shout, surely, just as Lucifer got his grins and giggles out of those who thought that they could try to talk him down with their insults and jeers. Of course, the undeniable wave of smug that hit him every time he managed to sucker punch a self-proclaimed genius when they attempted to outwit him was always incredibly satisfying as well.

Okay, so the intelligent and determined humans were the most fun. If for no other reason than for Lucifer to find yet another opportunity to prove just how much better he was than them.

He was about to prove his point yet again. As Allana stood there, bold and so foolishly determined, Lucifer found he could tell that she was bordering between categories two and three. Smart, but sarcastic. If he was lucky, he'd be able to whittle her into a weapon of mass destruction like he had managed to accomplish with Cade. If not? Allana would walk out of this with the knowledge that Lucifer had his eyes trained on her.. She would soon become the product of her own undoing, which was almost as well as her going out and causing a little chaos on his behalf.

Almost.

“You don't have troubles of your own? Really?” Lucifer inquired, feigning mock surprise. “I think that is, without a doubt, the most shocking thing that I have heard all week. And let me tell you – I have heard a lot of crazy things over the past few days. Why, only yesterday, I found out that Lindsay Lohan has actually been committing to her community service at the mortuary...” Lucifer's eyes widened and he put his hands out at his sides, the lightsaber swinging lightly to the right as he pulled off a half shrug. “Right? Who knew?”

There it was. Logic. Lucifer had some of his own, which – when combined with just a hint of casual intimidation – was generally quite effective, if he did say so himself. “You have no idea what kind of hell I'm capable of unleashing inside your head,” Lucifer pointed out, “I mean, I could always force you to wake up, play it like normal, and send you off to kill everyone that you care about, one by one, but only in private and while their backs are turned so that you can eliminate all the big players on the board before going on a wild, violent streak a la Cade, but that would take all the fun out of making you do it yourself, wouldn't it?” Lucifer paused. A hand went to his mouth and he tapped a finger to his lips, passing on a thoughtful hmm for a small moment before he gave Allana yet another shrug. “Of course, I could always pull that trick out of my sleeve anyway and just make it so that you're riding shotgun the entire time so that you don't miss the big show. Do you have any idea how easy something like that would be for someone like me to do?”

He wasn't going to be able to pass that off without pushing any doubts that Allana might have had about his statement off the cliff before she started questioning him. Lucifer wasn't going to give her the chance to do so, fortunately. “I'm a big fan of free will.” Another pause. “Well. To an extent. If you screw up royally? I want it to be on your head, not mine. Besides, I'd rather see you go at the world with your own vicious twist, because I think everyone in the world doesn't quite understand how truly monstrous you can be, now do they? You're no different than Cade, Allana. Yes, you haven't fallen off the deep end – yet – but you've got all the potential in the world to. You're just a lot better at keeping that side of yourself hidden.”

Lucifer looked down at the lightsaber, acknowledging the little pointer that Allana had handed out to him via proper usage. He lifted the weapon and pulled it back around to the side, pulling a baseball swing instead of the golfer’s stroke he’d replicated before. The feel of the lightsaber was still a little awkward in his grip, but he had to admit that the tip had been useful. The flow was certainly much more impressive than it had been before. “Like this?”

“Of course I have ‘troubles’ of my own,” Allana had gone very still now that the first rush of terror, of hope and then hopelessness, had faded. Maybe I’m trapped, she thought, but what was Hapes if not one giant trap? What was any of it, growing up, except one giant trap sprung by someone stronger than me? Her spine straightened into an easily correct posture that even her mother might have had difficulty correcting. Trapped isn’t beaten. “You may have misunderstood me. I said that you give yourself too much credit. You turned my cousin against himself with a trick. It was clever, in an opportunistic way, but it hinged on the element of surprise.” Her tone was soft, the (some would say) foolishly harsh words delivered in such a calm voice that they sounded almost neutral. It was the first trick her grandmother had ever taught her. “The element of surprise does not bear repetition well. Cade wouldn’t have let you fool him twice, and I’ve already been warned.” Allana could still feel the fear gathering, sour-sweet, in the back of her throat and dragging down heavy inside her ribcage, but the projection of calm, the motions she’d been taught, were laying down a foundation upon which she thought she might actually have a chance of making some kind of stand. She was about to answer his quip about Lindsey Lohan, to tell him she had better things to do than look up celebrity gossip, make a quip of her own… and then he smiled, and casually suggested that he could simply force her to kill.

“They would stop me, even if you did make me play it off at first they would –“ her voice hitched on that, almost imperceptibly, as a whisper of doubt threaded through her mind. She thought of her father, who had already shown he didn’t care what was right as long as the people he cared about were safe, her mother who had let him fall into it again when Allana had been taken by demons, her aunt who was scrambling so fast and so frantically away from becoming the person who killed a member of her family that she was alienating him, Anakin who had to died rather than let a family member die, her grandmother and great-uncle who weren’t trained… “they would be able to stop me,” she finished. Maybe. If they were the first ones you went after. She thought of walking into the library to meet Connor for tutoring, Rose or Ariel’s apartments to say hello, Arya’s apartment to bring the girl dinner. She thought of how often and how easily they all turned their backs towards her…

“You really think that I’ll snap and start killing people because you show up in my dreams and tell me I’m a monster?” she asked, buying time while she gathered herself. If she’d had a second to think, if she hadn’t already been rattled, she would have questioned the threat sooner. She would have wondered why, if that was so possible, Lucifer hadn’t just had them all tear each other apart a long time ago. But she was trapped inside her own nightmare by the devil, and so by the time any of that occurred to her Lucifer had waved the idea away casually in favor of free will and finding Allana’s own vicious twist. She swallowed around a suddenly dry throat, but her expression hadn’t yet shown her panic at the thought. She smoothed her features into a slightly skeptical shade of neutrality, biting back the protestations she wanted to make, that her cousin hadn’t been a monster, that whatever she might be she would never let herself be made into a weapon, but she was distracted, suddenly, by a tiny movement she could see from the corner of her eye. It was a fissure, a tiny fault line in the architecture, winding its way silently through the far wall. For a moment she was puzzled and then, with a sinking feeling, realized if we’re in my head…then this is where emotions I’m trying to hold back go. She thought of positive feedback loops, her own emotions going haywire as hard as she tried to repress them. If that’s what it is then I’m going to lose control no matter what. Another crack wound up the wall to her left.

Allana was trying to fight every word that came out of his mouth with logic. It was quite the contrast when compared to Cade, who had simply stood there and took what Lucifer gave him, but Lucifer found that he was able to respect Allana's choice to attempt resistance. It was going to be useless in the end, but part of what made the game that Lucifer chose to play so compelling was the choices that the players on the board he was conquering made. It was always satisfying when he took one down, but there was always that tiny bit of extra celebratory umph in it for those who fought back. An accomplishment was only worth as much as the challenge that preceded it, after all.

“No, Allana, I think you'll snap and start killing people because it's inevitable,” Lucifer confessed, acknowledging the sudden change in Allana's attention as she looked past his shoulder and to the surroundings that extended behind him. His cool gaze followed her own, raking in the sight of the world that she had created slowly, but surely, falling apart around them. Lucifer considered the visual aid and immediately found that it was one to be used to his advantage. She was trying to fight her way out of the dream ; Allana was emotionally battling for control, but Lucifer wouldn't let her. He would convince her that it was just the opposite before she found the opportunity to escape.“Look at you. You're falling apart at the seams. Everything that you have contained deep down on the inside – the dark side of yourself that you fear the most – it's here. It has always been here and it's eating it's way to the surface, begging to take control. Are you really going to deny yourself of your true nature? Why stifle yourself? Why hide it? You know what you are.”

Try as she might to hide it, Lucifer could sense the fear and uncertainty that had shaken Allana to her very core. If he accomplished nothing else tonight, Lucifer knew that he would at least take satisfaction in knowing that he had terrified the poor girl. And there would always be the seeds of doubt that he had planted in her. Allana might well not snap now, but what he had planted inside of her would grow. She would think on his visit often. Eventually, she would fall apart, whether it be through violence or self-destruction, Lucifer found he honestly didn't care.

Though violence was always just that little bit more entertaining. Watching the lesser creatures rip each other apart was, after all, another way to prove his point to Father. They were still barbarians.

“I'm going to leave you with a warning,” he decided with an air of finality. “If you don't start giving in to your better nature, I might come back. You won't see me coming. You won't know when I'm coming either, try as you might to reach out and find me with your power. You know this to be true, Allana, because I was able to slip into your mind so very easily tonight without you noticing me until it was too late.” Lucifer stepped to the side and began to circle Allana, moving like – a reference that the animal loving Allana might well appreciate – a lion closing in on it's prey. “I'll whisper a suggestion. Just one. And from that point onward, everyone and everything that you love will wither and die at your hand. You can try everything in your power to stop me. You can confide in your friends and family for advice on how to block me from your mind, you can put up every defense in your power, you can warn everyone in advance and pray that it will be enough, but it won't be. I'll take my time. I'll make sure that they're not ready. I'll slip in, real quiet, and whisper a word.”

Without a doubt, his words would bring on a sense of undeniable paranoia. He was their Devil. Allana couldn't ignore the severity of what he was threatening to do, could she? While there was no given guarantee that he was going to come back (hey, he said he might come back – it wasn't exactly a lie, was it?), she would still spend every waking moment waiting for the day that he would. One way or another, Lucifer would win. He knew he would. He had nothing but victories ahead of himself now.

“Your family and friends,” Lucifer added, “they trust you. They care about you. They can only lock you up for so long and I doubt they'll be able to find it in themselves to live every day in fear of you if you try to warn them against what I've said here. One day, they'll have their defenses down. One day, you'll have your defenses down. What will you do then? More importantly: what will I do?”

The last of her defenses (Hapan pride and Solo stubbornness, logic drilled into her by her grandmother, bravado gleaned from her grandfather’s example, training sessions when she’d let exhaustion overtake her and Jaina had pushed her onwards so that she saw she had reserves left after all) had proved as easy to crumble and sweep away as the sands she’d watched swirling through spaceship windows on a visit to Tattooine. Lucifer circled her and she stood still, gaze straight ahead. Her features were still composed, her hands steady as she clasped them in front of her, but for someone with Allana’s upbringing physical tells meant nothing. It was in her mind that his words were doing their work, nestling in and growing roots. ”I’ll whisper a suggestion...and everything and everyone you love will wither and die at your hand...they can only lock you up for so long.” She knew then why he had picked her.

At home she had been the baby of her family, protected, held slightly apart, in reserve for some grand destiny, a far off someday. She hadn’t had the run of the galaxy, she hadn’t even had her own name, but she’d had her family. Her mother who had kept her close and then let her go when each in turn was needed, her grandparents who had raised her and treated her as a gift rather than a burden, her aunt who had taught her and who had given her reason to believe that with her training she could do something good for the galaxy, Ben and Luke who had not always been there but had always helped her, even when she didn’t know it yet. Even the stories of her father centered around the fact that she had been loved. All of it had made her someone who believed in people, that they could be saved, that they were intrinsically good enough that they should be, and that doing right by them was the way to make herself a good person too. A way to be worthy of the protection she’d grown up with. So she helped Arya find a guardian, she was stubbornly loyal to Ava, she loved the time-displaced versions of her family easily and unreservedly, and people trusted her. ”I think I’m generally considered harmless” she’d said dryly when she volunteered to tell people about Lucifer invading their dreams months ago. She was the kind of person you felt comfortable turning your back to.

But it was more than that, it had to be. She thought of the lessons with her father, of the slow path of forgiveness that had led her to accepting them. She’d had the nightmare, the one that had started all this before Lucifer had ever appeared, for weeks since they had began. Maybe it was a sign that she should have been stronger, that she should have resisted the pulls of complacency and the desire to make Jaina and her mother happy. What would the Jaina from her own time have said? Would she have thought that Allana had made her sacrifice, her long years of grief after the killing, meaningless? Could Ben have forgiven her? She thought of her quiet anger after Kon’s the death, the calm certainty that she’d felt when she had considered what would happen if she had found his killer, or if he had been a demon or an alternate when he had come back.

There were so many people he could have picked. People with more power, who were even more trusted. Someone like Clark. Why choose me unless it would be easier to break me because I was already slipping? Everything she’d worked towards, everything she had tried to be, and everything her family had done for her was going to be Lucifer’s weapon, to work for him as perfectly as if he’d designed it all himself. Her head lowered and she felt the tears start, sliding from her eyes as she stayed silent and still. She had learned when she was very young to cry without making noise. Hopelessness made her unable to care that Lucifer could see it. She tried to shake her head no but everything was fading now, the dream was dissolving around her, only now she was fighting to stay in it, not to go back to the waking world where she would...

When she woke, for a moment there was only the fear. Her fingers were twined in the bedsheets, gripping so hard they’d gone white, and from the foot of her bed Daisy was barking, howling really, as she sensed her owner’s terror through their bond and looked for the source. The darkness was there too, lapping at the edges of her fear as it did at all fear, and she tried to pull back from it, but everything felt tainted with it now, and she could hear Lucifer’s voice echoing in her mind everything you love will wither and die at your hands…

And then there was nothing.

She had lost the Force before. Once when their powers had been swapped, a trick of the seal, and once when her father had ripped it from her, under the influence of Famine. The first time it hadn’t been traumatic, it had been as if she had never had it in the first place, as if it had all been a dream. The second time she had been under Famine’s influence as well, too far gone to care, and when that had worn off she’d only had a few moments without it before her father had restored it and thrown her into a healing trance.

Now she understood why her father had told her that it felt like dying, why Ben never talked about it. It was worse than losing a sense or a limb, because the Force was part of everything she had been, entangled in her senses, her balance, and her mind. To have it ripped away from her was too much to comprehend all at once, especially on top of the dream and for now she didn’t even have the presence to wonder how it had happened, if it had been Lucifer or if her father had sensed the darkness in her and done it preemptively.

I can’t hurt them now, the thought struggled into being against the backdrop of her shock-numbed mind. I can’t hurt anyone. But it wasn’t safe, not yet. If she didn’t know why the Force was gone, then she didn’t know if it would come back. If it had been her father he wouldn’t withhold it forever, even if that would be safer. ” I doubt they'll be able to find it in themselves to live every day in fear of you...one day they’ll have their defenses down.” She clutched convulsively at the bedspread, oblivious to Daisy, frantic after the deluge of fear and then the sudden severing of their bond, and to everything else around her. Then, slowly, her fingers relaxed their grip. Of course.

Twenty minutes later she was on Ava’s doorstep, only half-remembering how she’d gotten there, shivering in the cold she was suddenly unable to block out. She pounded on the door, two short, sharp knocks, and then let her legs fold up under her so that she was huddled in the doorway, arms wrapped around her torso. Okay, she told herself, it’s okay, Jen’s com-- no, no it’s only Ava now, I came to see Ava and Jen is gone and I have to... she shuddered again, then clenched her fists, steadied herself, and waited.

TL;DR ...because seriously this is like 13 pages. Lucifer dream. Lucifer is a shitty head-guest. Allana ripped herself out of the Force (though doesn't know she was the one who did it) which feels scarier to other Force users than someone hiding themselves. The super intense blast of fear right before then probably didn't help. Oops. End of thread has her showing up at Ava's.