a/n: inspired by the tweet:
lancewho: 'lemme get a disney princess who loves space and studies constellations and all she wants is to go to the moon one day
then one day a mysterious girl shows up and she has this amazing outlook on life and she's so alluring
coincidentally, the moon has disappeared from the sky'
it's finally here; i will update this once a week on sundays. this is also available on ao3. enjoy!
Another day, another twelve hours of waiting for Amilyn Holdo, or to be exact, another thirteen hours, forty-eight minutes, and fifty-six seconds until sundown. She fully believed that the sun only existed to make the other stars look brighter in their dark canvas, logic be damned, and the only useful thing daytime provided her with was the natural light to see her astrology books by. In her island town, she had little to do but study advanced physics she had decided at age fourteen, and would often spend time devoting herself to her studies. Ironically, this irritated her teachers - those whose subjects she glossed over were exasperated at her lack of homework and obvious potential but little drive, and those whose subjects she thrived in didn't know what to do with her - being three years ahead of everyone else apparently resulted in 'a worrying lack of balance'. Though by age sixteen, Amilyn Holdo had found her own balance - it didn't quite align with everyone else's, however.
April was usually Amilyn's favourite time of year - the spring felt fresh in her mind and body, and she got to rise with the sun. Despite this, her preferred time of year had been disrupted - she felt that her chakras were misaligned due to the exam stress her classmates were whipped up in. Even Amilyn herself fell prey to occasional worry (something she had not indulged in since her mother failed to return from a 'shopping trip' five years previously). Her maturation over the past two years meant that she had made up for any distractions from essential (according to the school, anyway) subjects, thus she wasn't in any danger of failing. That didn't mean the zeitgeist of the school didn't poison her self-composure. Not to mention that it was cutting into her stargazing time.
Thirteen hours, forty minutes, and twenty-one seconds after sunrise on a misty day in April, Amilyn led back on her favourite rock in a field in the middle of nowhere. Well, she knew exactly where, right down to the GPS coordinates, but her friends had deemed it so after their interest in the universe wavered after their simple zodiac readings and Amilyn's sixty-third fact about the moon. In lieu of her usual meditation process, she pulled out her battered but precious phone, checking her emails. Her email notification from two weeks ago blinked back at her, solidifying her place at a prominent college on the mainland; their physics department was everything she dreamed of after spending her formative years in the uninspiring archive the island labelled a school. Not to mention their forward-thinking politics program she was to be enrolled in - the island barely had any change, leaving the local politics forever locked in arguments about transport timetables and the arrival of chain stores. That notification was a lifeline to something bigger - not quite as big as actual space of course, but Amilyn was nothing if not concentrated determination fuelling a human body.
The gentle breeze roused Amilyn from her ruminations - even she could not escape the cold clutches that spring could not hide from those exposed. As the solid sun melted beneath the horizon, Amilyn felt the last wisps of true daylight fall into the bottom half of the hourglass. She could not be classed as a mere observer, not when her belief that nature and all its beauty was made out of stardust inexplicably tied her to the world around her. Amilyn's head tilted to survey the figure that had emerged from the shadows of the opposite edge of the field with the wind. Their appearance was not necessarily important to Amilyn, but they had roused her curiosity. Her island residence was small, but no-one aside from Amilyn rarely ventured into the outlands - there were parks closer to home and further away from landfill sites to walk dogs. Yet this figure was not accompanied by a dog, just a backdrop of the twilight and the trail of a shooting star.
A shooting star! Amilyn's wonder replaced her science for a few seconds as she simply sat in awe of the meteor. It appeared as if the world around her stopped too, the rustle of the leaves was hushed and the birdsong quietened with the passing by of evidence of a larger universe. She wondered where it came from, and if it would survive the ablation of the earth's atmosphere. Suddenly her scientist was back, recording the time, the approximate bearings of the meteor's path (Polaris was out and shining brightly; always a vital extension of Amilyn), and the temperature in her notebook. The last note wasn't necessarily tied to the meteor, more that she just wanted to know what that moment looked like in numbers, and fancied knowing the temperature. The noises around her returned, painting her back into the world. One of those was the unmistakable sound of boots crushing grass, accompanied by the sense of another human presence close by. Stashing her equipment (which was really just her phone, notebook, and binoculars handed to her by the town's librarian from another age) into her ratty white schoolbag, Amilyn faced the figure. If she was the type to assume, Amilyn would assume that they were a woman. However she wasn't, and she wasn't the type to initiate conversation either, so she just stayed perched on her rock and contemplate the figure. Their hair was bound in intricate plaits twisted into buns of either side of their face, which Amilyn admired while being equal parts impressed and envious. Their dress fluttered around their boots, both pieces of fashion white in colour, and feminine in style (again, Amilyn didn't want to assume, but even she acknowledged that her society's conditioning was hard sometimes). This unknown was out of place in a field, with Amilyn - a girl of a similar age but attired in distressed jeans, tye dye top, and platinum blonde hair, they were out of place on the whole island. Amilyn hadn't seen anyone looking like them anywhere, least of all on her isolated island.
"Hello." Their voice was molten gold, enveloping Amilyn and threatening to drown her. "Are you ok?" Their face fell from neutrality to concern at Amilyn's failure not only to respond, but also to keep her face unflushed and her eyes blinking like a normal human being.
"Yes. Um, is there anything you require?" While a little flustered, Amilyn managed to convey her perplexion at, well, the entire situation. Angels like this did not turn up out of nowhere.
They laughed, and the sound danced in Amilyn's head like a wind chime in a hurricane.
"Well, aside from the other needs we all require, food, water, shelter… Do you need assistance? To get back to town maybe?"
"I do need somewhere to stay, yes." They answered after a pause, unafraid to take their time before speaking. "I didn't think you looked like you were one for assuming, though."
Amilyn shifted on her rock. She wished to know more about the mystery presented in front of her, wanted to invite them back to stay with her, but she couldn't take them back to her dilapidated house. With some regret she replied, "There are some B and Bs on the shoreline. The gold-plating on the cheap jewellery."
"B and Bs? What are those?" The mystery was more confused than Amilyn. Studying her, Amilyn wasn't surprised; she had noted that their accent was something she had never encountered before, not to mention her completely foreign fashion style.
"It stands for 'Bed and Breakfast'. You can stay overnight in one of their rooms, and they give you breakfast. For a fee, of course. The golden lands are that way." Amilyn nodded in the correct direction.
The confusion on their face cleared. "Ok. Well, thank you for your time." They made to stride off, however, Amilyn needed another moment with them like she needed oxygen, and lurched forward to grab their wrist. Immediately, they ripped it away from her like they had been burned, their dress aflame. Their eyebrows narrowed, eyes ablaze with anger.
"Sorry, I just," Amilyn snatched her own hand back, fingers curling into her chest for protection. "What is your name?"
Realising that Amilyn wasn't a danger, their shoulders relaxed a little, yet the harshness splayed across their face remained. A final pause sat between the pair. "Leia."
"So you are a woman?" Amilyn's question surprised her addressee, as most did.
"Mostly. You thought otherwise?"
"I am not one for assuming." That caused the woman, Leia, to form a smile that didn't reek of formality. "I'm Amilyn. Holdo, if you ever need to differentiate."
"Thank you, Amilyn. I hope that, should I not find my way home, I will find you again. You have been most kind." And all of a sudden, she had turned on her heel and was marching in the direction that Amilyn had earlier indicated, her figure shrinking with each step.
Unexpectedly, Amilyn found herself alone. She told herself that it was stupid that she somehow did not expect this, but the absence of Leia's presence had left her feeling that something was incredibly wrong in the spatial fabric of the world - or at least, Amilyn's world. Although, most people would say that Amilyn's world was altered in comparison to the real world, leaving the girl confused and a bit lost. Doubting herself, Amilyn unpacked her bag, needing to go over her data from the night to ensure that this was real, and the hard numbers could not escape the laws of logic like the rest of the evening had. The sight of her own looped handwriting, unerased and unfaded pencil scratching the lines of her notebook relieved her, until she looked for her second constant, Polaris. It was still there, bright as ever, yet something was missing. She glossed over her star maps, held them against the darkening sky, but everything was still there. Nothing was concealed in the clear night. Except… she couldn't find the moon! An incredible mass of rock close enough to earth to see with the naked eye that regularly reflected a burning star's light, and she couldn't find it! Amilyn refused to doubt herself as an astronomer at all, let alone to the point that she was so inept she couldn't find the moon, and immediately scribbled a note in her book. Before she could do anything else, a warmth grew in the fingertips of Amilyn's right hand, where she had touched Leia only a minute earlier. Electricity rumbled within her skin, humming until her entire body shook and she could hear nothing but the muted feeling of pressure change, heart racing, breath frequency increasing -
White. Nothing but white everywhere - in the girl's dress, in the gold of the jewellery that adorned her mother. An argument, shouting, screaming, the good, tension releasing kind, the ugly, insult-hurling kind. Love and pride featuring the girl-becoming-woman on her Day of Demand. Similar love as the different-familiar girl boarded a ship to - she had Amilyn's hands, she had Amilyn's hands, she had Amilyn's h-
A choking gasp seized Amilyn back to consciousness. The force of it drove her upwards from her flat back, relying on base instincts to keep her body alive. Her mind was too busy to bother with keeping herself warm, breathing, alive. What in the hell was that? A seizure? Panic attack? Whatever episode had overcome her, it was enough for to have fallen, presumably, from her rock and not relinquish it's hold on her some time - without the sun, twilight had bled into nighttime. Shakily, Amilyn rested herself against the rock, searching for her bag she hoped was still there. It was. A sigh of relief emanated through her, steadying herself. She needed to write what happened down - it was the only exciting (and scary) thing that happened on this sedated island. Once the urge to vomit had passed, she flipped it open to her previously used page, and, under 'CHECK THE TIDES' she scribbled down what she could from her flayed memory, hoping that the future Amilyn could read through the bad handwriting written only in the light of the waxing moon. At least the moon was back; Amilyn had a habit of trusting herself, and she was determined not to break it just because she couldn't find the moon and had a subsequent seizure. Everything she had experienced that night was real, and she was going to ensure that no one would convince her otherwise. Which meant not telling anyone about it, because they had tried to convince her out of much less. She didn't have a problem with her silence; she knew that the right people would believe her, or could be convinced to believe her, and she didn't even mind that the only right person to be trusted with this information was herself.
Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and eleven seconds after sunrise, Amilyn Holdo returned home, with much more information than she had expected to get out of the night. She had been proven wrong twice (a rarity). That figure on the opposite side of the field, Leia, was important, and for once since its formation, something electrifying had happened on the island. Maybe something as important as Leia.