My 3 Entries for Love-O-Rama Pyaar Ka Trope Fest 
(Scroll to post 3 for Geet & Vincenzo OneShot)
Entry 3
WINNING ENTRY
Trope: Forced Proximity
Setting: Time Travel or Historical
Pairing: Sehmat Khan x Original Character
Cover by - oh_nakhrewaali
A Love Beyond Time
The past has a way of pulling us back, not in memory alone, but in the echoes of footsteps once taken. Some destinies were meant to be rewritten. Some stories refused to be forgotten.
Sehmat Khan never believed in fate, yet here she was - trapped between time and war, between what was and what should have been.
The explosion should have killed her. She had seen it coming, the mission going sideways, her cover blown in a matter of seconds. The last thing she remembered was the blinding burst of fire, the deafening roar of destruction, the earth splitting beneath her feet. And then - SILENCE. A silence deeper than death, endless and absolute.
But when her eyes fluttered open, she was no longer in 1971.
The air was different. Heavier. Laden with the scent of damp earth, turmeric, and something metallic - BLOOD!
A deep voice cut through the haze of her mind.
“She’s awake.”
Sehmat’s pulse quickened. Training overruled panic as she willed her senses to sharpen. Her gaze flickered over her surroundings - a dimly lit chamber, flickering fire casting wavering shadows against stone walls. A charpoy beneath her, rough fabric covering her body, an ache blooming across her ribs. Her arm was bandaged with what looked like hand-woven cotton, crude yet effective.
And then, she saw HIM.
A man stood by the threshold, the dim glow of the fire accentuating sharp features carved from hardship and war. His eyes were storms, depths of battle and resilience. A turban was tied hastily around his head, dust and blood smudging his skin. He was no ordinary man. He was a warrior. A soldier. A relic of a time she should not have been in.
“Where am I?” she rasped, ignoring the sting in her throat. “What time? What year? Where the hell...”
The man hesitated, his eyes scanning her, as though she were something too strange to comprehend. Finally, he spoke, voice measured, cautious.
“You are in the year 1857.”
Sehmat’s breath stilled.
The year of the First War of Independence.
Impossible. It was impossible. And yet - the crude walls, the thick scent of war, the foreign-yet-familiar tension in the air, and the turbaned soldier before her, gripping a sword instead of a gun - this was no illusion.
She had traveled through time.
**
The man - Zorawar Singh, she later learned - was a rebel, a warrior resisting British rule, hiding within the ruins of an old Mughal fortress with his people. When they found her unconscious near the remnants of a collapsed structure, they had assumed her a British spy.
“Who sent you?” Zorawar’s grip on her wrist was firm as he guided her through the labyrinthine hideout.
“No one...” she replied, her mind whirring at an impossible speed. “I..I..” A pause. The truth was too absurd. “I was caught in a battle. And then, I woke up here.”
Zorawar’s eyes narrowed. “You are unlike any woman I have seen. Your clothes, your speech… You know nothing of this land, yet your eyes hold the weight of a hundred wars.”
Sehmat swallowed hard. How could she explain that she had seen the world through the lens of espionage, that she had killed and betrayed in the name of a nation yet unborn? That her war was over a century away, yet the blood on her hands felt just as fresh?
And yet, in this foreign past, she was suddenly… free. No expectations. No mission. Only survival.
They had no choice but to stay together - forced by time, by war, by fate itself. She was an enigma in his world. And he...he was a legend yet to be written in hers.
**
Days turned into weeks, and in the shadows of battle, she became his equal.
Sehmat, with her knowledge of unseen enemies, of war fought in whispers and shadows, soon found herself indispensable to their rebellion.
“You fight like you were born for war Sehmat Ji” Zorawar observed one evening, as they stood atop the fortress, watching the horizon burn with the fires of conflict.
She let out a breath. “I was never meant for war...” she murmured, gripping the cold stone. “War found me.”
Zorawar turned to her then, truly looking. And in his gaze, she saw something shift. A tether, fragile yet unbreakable, bound them in ways neither time nor war could sever.
Their moments were stolen in the dark corners of battle, in whispered exchanges over strategy, in fleeting glances across crowded rooms. A love that neither sought yet both found themselves drowning in.
**
But love was never meant to last in the corridors of history.
When the British attacked, the fortress trembled with the cries of war. Zorawar fought like a man with nothing to lose. And Sehmat - she fought as if she could rewrite fate itself.
The bullet was not meant for her.
Yet as the crack of gunfire echoed, as time folded and twisted around her, Sehmat felt herself being pulled away.
Back.
Forward.
To the moment she had left.
**
She gasped awake.
The explosion. The fire. The war she had left behind.
1971 wrapped around her like a cruel whisper. The ruins were no longer ancient; the gunfire no longer from muskets but from modern rifles.
She was back.
But something was missing.
Someone.
Her hands trembled as she reached for her arm, where his blood had once stained her skin. The wound was gone, the night unchanged, but her heart...her heart knew.
Somewhere in the pages of history, a man once loved a woman who did not belong to his time.
And though time had pulled them apart, she knew - wherever he was, beneath the sands of forgotten battles, beneath the ruins of a fortress that had long crumbled - Zorawar Singh had once held her heart.
And that would remain eternal.
**
Sehmat clutched her chest as if willing her heartbeat to steady, but the ache within her was unlike any wound she had known. The war around her was real, but she felt displaced, like a ghost in her own time. The weight of the past clung to her, the echoes of a battle fought centuries ago still ringing in her ears.
The air smelled of smoke and blood, but it was not the scent she longed for. It was not the damp earth of the ruins where Zorawar had stood beside her, where his voice had carried through the silence, steady and unyielding.
Her fingers curled into the dust at her feet, willing herself to accept reality, but the memory of him...of his gaze, of the way he had fought for a future that would never be his...seared through her soul. She had left him behind, not by choice, not by will, but by the cruelty of time itself.
Would he have searched for her? Would he have turned back in the chaos of war, calling her name into the dark?
And if he had, had history erased the moment she vanished? Had he thought her a phantom, a fever dream conjured by exhaustion and longing?
Her heart whispered otherwise.
Somewhere, beneath the sands of time, in a forgotten battlefield where fallen warriors had turned to dust, Zorawar Singh had once drawn breath, had once loved a woman who was never meant to be his. And though time had stolen him from her, it could not erase the truth.
She had loved him.
And in some lost page of history, in a time she could never return to, he had loved her too.
Eternally.
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