Almost Alderaan
by Aquarius
Disclaimer: Star Wars is the property of Disney/Lucasfilm. No infringement is intended. No money was spent, except on movie tickets to see The Force Awakens a bazillion times. You're welcome.
Feedback is always welcome.
She lowers herself into the tall, fragrant grass, watching the birds swooping against a backdrop of fluffy white clouds. Stretched out on her back, this is the closest she's ever gotten to home, though most everything is just one off. The grass is the wrong green and the sky is the wrong blue; the sun is almost warm enough, and the breeze almost tickles her skin just right. The birds above are the wrong shape but the right color, and if she closes her eyes just a little and looks at them through her lashes, they're almost cairokas, and she's almost on Alderaan.
She hasn't done this since she was a girl. She wants to say that she doesn't know why she's compelled to do it now, but that's a lie.
She needs to go back to a time before such sorrow and loss, before caring about something meant having it brutally snatched away every time. A time she wouldn't have to think about losing her children or losing her husband over and over again. A time before gaining a brother meant eventually losing him, too.
She needs to go back many more years, before realizing she'd been staring the love of her life in the face, only to lose him the first time because of circumstances compounded by his dubious life choices. More years still, before birth father destroys adoptive father and the place she called home. Years before that, when she thinks she can make a difference without everything she touches being sentenced to destruction.
Further back yet, to a time when she knows how to not hurt – a time when her aching soul knew peace.
She doesn't wipe away the hot sting of tears. Rather, she allows them to further soften her focus until there is nothing but the clouds and the objects dancing in the sky. She is here but she is elsewhere, another summer in another aromatic field, and she retreats into the only safe thought accessible to her at the moment:
Birds.