I have seen a supernova.
It was far, far out in dead space.
It saved me.
I was being chased by one of the Empire's Star Destroyers, and they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. An old star blew itself into a nebula just as they dropped out of hyperspace onto my tail.
The light was incredible. All the explosions, plasma bursts, fires, hyperspace tunnels, stars, and auroras I have ever seen, rekindled into life behind me. The radiation fried my ship's controls and burnt through the viewports to scorch the wall and burn my skin. I cowered under the seat, alone and in pain, drifting in and out of consciousness. How long I stayed there, I don't know. My entire universe shrunk down the stench of smouldering plastics, the white-hot burning of my skin, and the ragged whisper of my breath. The once-star must have been thousands of times brighter than all the lights on Coruscant, but all I saw was… nothing. Even when I had drifted far enough away for a beacon to activate and a scouting Rebel ship to find me, everything stayed black.
The brilliance of the star's death had blinded me, and burnt the pigment of my irises from a brown deep and full to purple-blue sharp and fragile. The doctors thought that the blindness could be permanent, but it wasn't. Bacta, time, and a planet's worth of luck later, I could see. Looking in the mirror was strange. My eyes weren't mine anymore.
According to the crew who found me, there was no trace of the Destroyer which had been chasing me. Not even a hunk of charred metal. I always found that… prophetic. The explosion had vaporized something of the Empire, one of the most ruinous unnatural things to exist. Until, as we all found out later, the First Order.
When I told Leia about it, many years later, she reckoned it was the will of the Force. When I asked,
'Why me?'
she shrugged.
'The Force moves in mysterious ways.'
she said, a smile crinkling the lines on her face and bringing a flicker of life back to her eyes. (They are brown like mine once were.)
'But that's Luke's area,'
Maybe that's why she lets me stay behind.
Maybe she knows why the Force saved me.
(From star-dust we came; to star-dust we go.)
(May the Force be with you.)
I am a supernova.
It is in a lonely system, in a forgotten part of space.
It destroys me.
A/N
I have conflicting thoughts about The Last Jedi, but I think Holdo should have been written better. Ahhhhm anyway. There is only one canon event (Holdo ramming the Supremacy), because I was messing around in an AU when I thought of this. To the best of my knowledge, Holdo was never chased by a SD, nor were her eyes brown, and she probably didn't see a star explode. Also this... doesn't fit the timeline(s) of the Leia novel, because I haven't found a copy yet, so haven't read it.