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maidenjediFANDOM: Star Wars
RATING: PG
SUMMARY: Leia, in mourning, and Amilyn, having fled, meet and grow up, and resist.
Written for the 2019 May the 4th Be With You exchange, for
On AO3 or below the cut.
We have no time for our sorrows, Commander.
It was the catchphrase of the entire Rebellion, from that moment forward. All must fight, and they would rail against the very stars if it meant justice for all they’d lost.
Leia was the Princess. The princess. Princess of Alderaan.
Of dust, and debris, and a people diminished and scattered.
Queen of it all.
She heard them whisper it in the halls, it haunted her dreams – her mother was gone, so who was she now if not queen – her mother was gone!
And everything stopped until she breathed again, gulping breaths of the drowning, nose-drawn sniffs of the proud and denying. Breathe, Leia.
-
Dantooine is too small for an effective demonstration, but don’t worry, we’ll deal with your rebel friends soon enough.
The Rebellion had a cell on Dantooine, at one point. But Governor Tarkin wasn’t wrong when he said it was remote, small, insignificant. The Rebellion had moved on, growing beyond the capacities of that small base, moving closer to the center of the galaxy, finding allies on worlds long declared neutral if not antagonistic. It was growing, their Rebellion. Leia’s heart ached to think how much ground they’d gained, and how much they may have lost.
There was no time to dwell on the lost.
“Excuse me, your Highness? We have completed the census you requested. The survivors – I mean, the Alderaanians, we’ve accounted for most everyone. Would you like to take a look now?”
Threepio’s programming did not include protocol for dealing with grieving, internally raging former princesses of space debris, but he did try. Leia gave him that.
She agreed to look over the list of known Alderaanians. She would have to think about a colony, somewhere they could regroup, begin again.
The Empire’s shells shook her from that task. The Rebel leaders – save Leia, who insisted on staying put awhile longer – had decamped, because this was no home either, this remote star system Leia couldn’t remember the name of. Dantooine too small, too remote, and this place, this crumbling place where Luke felt the Force shake and shimmer, too old.
They moved on. They ran. The Empire gave chase. Sooner or later, they would turn, and make a stand.
-
Alderaan is peaceful, we have no weapons, you can’t possibly!
No weapons. No weapons training.
Amilyn Holdo was Alderaanian. Leia knew it when they met, before Amilyn could say a word. It wasn’t her dress or her hair or her accent – those she’d taken pains to disguise – but there was something.
And she couldn’t hold a blaster to save her skin.
Leia noticed, while they took up residence on a desert planet so arid it made Tatooine seem a veritable paradise. Amilyn was new, a refugee like so many others, shaken from their lives to become rebels. She wouldn’t say where she came from, what she’d been doing. And Leia just…knew.
The rest of them had pity in their eyes, when they met Leia and it sunk in. You’re Bail’s daughter, said some, as they reached to pat her arm in what must have been a consoling gesture. You’re the princess.
Amilyn had steel and sorrow in her eyes, and when Leia told her, “I know. You aren’t alone,” all that steel melted, and the sorrow won out. They held each other, women who may never have met save for being two survivors of a handful, from a world of millions.
“You’re the princess,” said Amilyn, awe and disbelief in her voice. “How…?”
Leia promised to tell her. Some day. For now, she showed Amilyn how to hold the blaster, and it was arguable later who was the better shot.
-
The spark is that the Resistance must survive. That is our mission.
They’d survived a war, their planet’s destruction, and two terms apiece in the New Republic Senate.
Now tyranny regained ground and their carefully rebuilt Republic crumbled before their very eyes. And it was Amilyn, this time, who came to Leia with a proposition.
The Alderaanians who had survived had come together, once, and were the first to resist now. They had grown in number, a generation stood ready to fight and they’d never seen the lakes or the hills or the suns set on their obliterated home world.
Leia was mourning. Her child, her marriage. But Amilyn reminded her – with this before them, the very fabric of their existence once again at stake, there was no time for their sorrows.
“We have a mission now,” she said, holding a hand out to the princess-that-was, the senator-that-was, the general-who-would-be. “We must resist.”
Leia, for whom Alderaan was destroyed more times than she could count, whose sleep in Ben’s infant days was punctured with nightmares of her father come back to life, had to nod. Had to stand. She had to fight.
She accepted Amilyn’s hand. “And we will.”
-
There was a girl, on Alderaan, playing on a lake shore on a sunny, hot day. She was ten or eleven, and she loved the color purple.
And there was another girl, the same age, dressed in white with her hair swept up in elaborate braids too old for her, who played at the same lake shore on the same sunny, hot day.
They did not meet then and come together later, refugees flung far into deepest space. No, it is enough to know, they were children on a world that would end, and they were the daughters of rebels.
They would, when the time came, rebel. That one lost day, beneath a broad and blameless sky, they were girls.
-
And the day did come, when it was over, finally over, that they had time for their sorrows.
They mourned together, on a familiar lake shore, beneath a hot sun. The laughter of girls rang over the water; children were nearby and yet unseen. There was a whole world, over that horizon, all of it peaceful (no weapons, you can't) beneath a blameless blue sky.
It was over. The women, once girls, once rebels and resisters and senators and mothers and wives and friends, looked up together at the suns and took the same deep breath. Just breathe.
“To Alderaan,” whispered one.
The other, choked up, nodded.
“To Alderaan.”
