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Her father had been very clear—you may learn astrology, Amilyn, but only if you take the time to learn astronomy, too. Learn so much you make all the rest look like utter novices, he had said, though after a few days, when it became clear that Amilyn wasn’t going to budge in her determination, he downgraded his requirements from Amilyn learning enough about astronomy to earn a doctorate to learning enough to earn a master’s degree. Even as a little girl, Amilyn Holdo was the very paragon of stubbornness when she wanted something. If you kept her from trying to learn something, you would soon learn how difficult it was to demolish a mountain with nothing more than the might of the wind.
(She had attempted to apply the same principle to the Empire. Made the attempt, and learned too late just who was the mountain, and who was the wind.)
Amilyn had attended dutifully to those lessons, just as she attended dutifully to everything else. Everything had been about duty in those wispy, stardust-crusted days (Though at the time Amilyn’s inexperienced, unsatisfied eyes had seen the stardust and thought it just dust). Duty to be serene, duty to dress in the plain white dresses and the plain scarlet cloaks that were nearly identical to the plain white dresses and plain scarlet cloaks her cousins wore. Duty to be conventional, duty to be a credit to her house. Duty to represent her people in the Imperial Apprentice Legislature, duty to represent them in the Senate when the time came for that, duty to somehow find a way to reconcile the ideals her people had imbued her with with the reality of the Empire. Duty to find a way to reconcile those two things without forsaking the pacifistic ideals of her people, nor their need for careful deliberation before action.
So many duties, and Amilyn had ultimately failed every last one of them, the last to most disastrous effect. Gatalenta was not Alderaan—Gatalenta, her ambivalent, provoking-ambivalence homeworld, still hung in the sky far off in the Core. Perhaps one day she would tread Gatalentan soil again, as Leia could never tread Alderaanian. But Amilyn really had underestimated the strength of the mountain she battered against—indeed, she had arrogantly thought herself the mountain, and the wind the forces that tried to replace morals and ideals with expediency and corruption. Time was, if nothing else, the greatest teacher of all to those in possession of open minds. She knew better now.
A child accustomed to doing things she didn’t care to in the name of duty, Amilyn had attended dutifully to astronomy lessons. It wasn’t that she hated them, not truly. Her hunger for knowledge forged very specific paths, but astronomy was not so far off the mark from astrology that she could find nothing to enjoy in the former. But it wasn’t astrology, and she never was able to approach the lessons without their context looming over her head.
(Your child is given to frivolous pursuits, was a whisper as familiar as wind chimes throughout Amilyn’s childhood. Your child has a gifted mind, but is given to frivolous pursuits. You must be careful to see to it that she does not waste her gifts on fruitless endeavors.)
Learning as much as she had about space had also had… effects, upon her.
Some of it was wondrous. Amilyn could still remember being five years old and learning for the first time about creatures that could survive in hard vacuum. Baby neebray, mynocks, purrgil… There were dozens, if not hundreds of legends surrounding purrgil, and imagine Amilyn’s delight when Sabine had told her at least some of those legends were true. If Amilyn had been born in a different time, grown into her own in a different political climate, she sometimes wondered if she wouldn’t have become a zoologist or an exobiologist. Even a career studying vacuum-habitating cryptids sounded appealing at time.
Some of it was wondrous. Some of it bore into her mind like mining lasers and took up residence in the dark like any demon that had ever been born from sapients’ most irrational fears. Amilyn was unwilling to dismiss them out of hand. She knew that she had many greater, more immediate things to worry about, being shot and killed by the Empire not least among them. In fact, Amilyn had made up a list of the things she had to worry about that were more immediate concerns than what was currently clinging to the back of her mind like some sort of malevolent remora. The list was at thirty-five and running, and included such things as the local star going supernova and Amilyn eating some bad veg-meat and going into toxic shock. (The list had been Leia’s idea. Not for dealing with this particular thing, but Leia had pointed out that if Amilyn had trouble with priorities in general, keeping a list would help her keep a sense of where her priorities should be.)
What a great deal of it led to was that, in this day and age, when nothing was certain and death was looming around every corner, Amilyn Holdo did not care for hyperspace.
And her sleep was sometimes disturbed.
This moment, in which she woke to the sight of a dark ceiling overhead, was one such moment. She couldn’t say that it was night. She couldn’t say that it was morning. In the deep of space and in hyperspace both, these terms had little meaning. It was morning on some planet somewhere far away, and it was the dead of night on some planet somewhere else far away. But here, there was the darkness of space interspersed with the incandescent light of a nearby star, the diffused, dusty glow of a nebula, the metallic glimmer of a space station, or the variegated mosaic of light from a nearby planet’s electrical grid. One slept when one had time to sleep, and did not call it night. This much was not new to Amilyn. She was a child of the spacefaring galaxy, and had learned long ago to find sleep on starships whenever she could.
It was not night, but somehow, even with light from the corridor spilling in from the door, space made for the deepest and darkest of nights.
Amilyn blinked and winced as she tried to stretch, trying not to unduly disturb the other occupant of the bed. One false move, and one or both could go tumbling to the floor. It’s not the worst way to wake up, Amilyn allowed. The sudden upset of one’s perspective can be beneficial. Still, it was less than considerate to do that to someone in a deep sleep, and without even consulting them beforehand.
Another shifting of weight and a soft groan made all of Amilyn’s good intentions as worthless as dust.
“Amilyn?” Sabine’s voice was heavy with sleep, but was fast growing more alert. “Are you awake?”
“…Yes. I woke you. I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be.” Fully alert now; it was a marvel, how quickly she could shake off sleep. “I’ve gotta go to my watch shift soon, anyways.”
“Not for another hour,” Amilyn pointed out.
“Soon,” Sabine insisted. “Hera’s got to get some sleep too, you know.” Amilyn could feel Sabine looking at her in the dark. Her voice petering out to softness, she asked, “Do you need to get out?”
That was their arrangement; whoever needed to get up first slept closer to the edge. It was the best way to ensure nobody wound up being rolled clean out of bed. They were all but blind in this kind of darkness, owing deftness more to familiarity than sight. Still, Amilyn was a reasoning person, not some creature shackled by instinctual responses to environmental inputs, so she smiled weakly. “No, I’m alright. Just…” Her smile faded. “…It’s just night thoughts.”
“Night thoughts,” Sabine echoed. She shifted her weight again, sliding up on the bed so her head and shoulders were supported by the pillow. In the dark, Amilyn perceived her turning her gaze away from her; she didn’t tense, not exactly, but sleep had left her and the relaxed state of mind it lent to sleepers had left her too. “Bad?” she asked at last, a little taut, like an archaic bowstring attached to an equally archaic bow.
All at once, Amilyn felt ridiculous. Not the kind of ‘ridiculous’ that had insisted on stalking her through the halls of the Apprentice Legislature, when someone’s eyes lingered too long on the tall feathers in her hat or the glittering sequins sown into her cape. Not the kind of ‘ridiculous’ that had marked (marred) her early days in the Rebel Alliance, when the consensus of everyone who knew her whose names were not ‘Leia Organa’ or ‘Mon Mothma’ was that she was perfectly useless. It wasn’t even the kind of ‘ridiculous’ that had festered in a child’s heart like the core of an infectious disease, when Amilyn was still young enough to believe uncritically in the rightness of her community’s ideals, even while she pressed desperately to find another mode of self-expression.
No, this came from within. It was self-imposed; no outside force had pressed it upon her. So even as embarrassment wormed its way inside, Amilyn found herself a little braver than five minutes previously. She waved a hand through the hair, grazing the chilly ceiling with her fingernails. “It’s not a priority. It shouldn’t a priority,” she amended. “Given everything else that’s happening, it’s not something I should dwell on.” Even if it’s more likely to befall me here than it is anywhere else, she added silently, her stomach starting that slow and well-recognized process of tying itself into knots.
Sabine huffed softly. “I know that feeling.” There was the muted, shuffling noise of a hand prodding the covers for whatever it might be looking for. Somehow, they could always prolong this game for several minutes, despite their cramped quarters on the bunk. Finally, Amilyn felt a hand light on her forearm, calluses rough against smooth skin. “Somehow, telling myself I don’t have time for it’s never worked for me.”
Which was an invitation, as clear a one as Amilyn had ever heard. “Alright,” she murmured, in a voice she scarcely recognized as her own.
She dislodged her arm from Sabine’s light grasp and curled her hand round Sabine’s wrist instead. Found her pulse point with her thumb. There was a slight but unmistakable flutter in the first moment of taking hold—there was always that flutter, with any pressure lighter than a blood pressure gauge.
Still sounding like a stranger, too remote, too brittle, too strange, Amilyn softly asked, “Sabine, do you ever think about what’s between galaxies?”
“No.” It was a small comfort that Sabine sounded a little like a stranger, too, but not much. “I haven’t.”
“You didn’t say ‘I think about things that actually matter.’” Amilyn drew her hand up, kissed the fingers. A twitch was Sabine’s response, but it was too dark to make out her face. “Thank you for that.”
That stiffening, however, was utterly unambiguous. “I wasn’t going to!” Sabine protested. “I’ve just never thought about it before!’
“I know that, Sabine; I just—“
Amilyn didn’t realize she’d raised her voice, not at first. They both held their breath, however, when a telltale noise filtered through them through the walls. It was quiet, so quiet; logically, they shouldn’t have been able to hear it at all. But training overcame both logic and the laws of reality. A thin, fussy wail. They heard it, and fell tensely silent.
A minute passed, then two. There came the equally telltale creak of that little wail being answered. The minutes stretched on like hours; they both knew how easily the quiet and relative peace could be shattered. When no follow-up wail sounded through the walls, they both let out a quiet breath.
“I know, Sabine,” Amilyn said more quietly. “It wasn’t meant as an accusation. But I have thought about it. There are times when I think about it whenever there’s nothing else to keep me occupied.”
In childhood, Amilyn had tried to hide it, just as she had tried to hide her first flirtation with cultural rebellion. But in childhood, there had been a period when fixation had passed dangerously close to obsession, then went screaming over the boundary line. She’d not been able to hide it, not then. Her mother blamed her father. Her father had been so frustrated that he wished he had never let her take up astrology as a hobby—if he vetoed the matter altogether, Amilyn would likely never have taken to astronomy on her own, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation, now would we, child? Ultimately, a counselor had done what her parents couldn’t or wouldn’t, and coaxed the obsession down to fixation, coaxed fixation down to nagging presence in the back of Amilyn’s mind. She’d never been able to finish the work, though. There seemed to be no extinguishing it entirely.
“Some say water is the root of all life; they’re wrong. There are creatures who survive without it. Other say atmosphere, oxygen or methane or whatever you like, is necessary for life, and yet there are creatures who live their whole lives in hard vacuum.” Amilyn stared up at the ceiling. Tried, and failed, to will her stomach to unknot itself.
“It’s the stars.” Sabine sounded so clear, so utterly herself that Amilyn could have withered a little. “Nothing can live without the stars. Planets don’t form without the gravity to bind them together, and life doesn’t evolve without the planet.”
“Exactly my opinion. So.” Like an inexperienced swimmer before she took the plunge, Amilyn swallowed hard. “What about the places where there are no stars? What about the dark places between galaxies?”
The movement of the galaxies was like a dance where everyone was hearing a different beat and following different steps. Great wheels of light churned and spun across the firmament, dipping and rising, dimming in entropic collapse and igniting in a stellar birthing chamber of hydrogen and helium and who knew what else (The formation of galaxies had never been Amilyn’s strong suit). Their clashes were the great clashes of giants of light—bursts of light terrible enough to blind the onlooker, a roar like the fabric of the universe being rent asunder, the collision crushing and combining and creating and destroying. It was beyond the ken of Amilyn Holdo or any of her people to have full knowledge of it, but she’d embraced that reality, nonetheless—that Gatalenta was in the Core and less likely to be destroyed if galactic dangers careened into one another helped.
So long as there were stars about her, Amilyn knew that there was life. It was beyond the capacity of the Empire to destroy it all; even if they were not vanquished before then, it would take thousands of millennia to extinguish all life, everywhere. But then were not stars everywhere, and they were not in the Core anymore.
“I’m no astronomer,” Sabine said slowly, as if testing each word privately. And perhaps she was; though proficient, Basic was not her cradle tongue, and Amilyn was never certain that anyone could speak in a tongue not originally theirs and not think about what they wanted to say, at least a little bit. “But I’ve read some journals. The space between galaxies is supposed to be filled with some kind of weak gas—less than an atom per cubic meter. Kerne and Li’atani have had this feud going about whether it’s hydrogen or helium for years.”
“I remember.” Amilyn nodded, grateful for even a momentary distraction. “I watched a conference they both attended over the HoloNet once; Li’atani threw a chair at Kerne’s head. Then the ISB turned off the broadcast after someone else there got into a fight with a colleague over the funding they had gotten that year from the Royal Astronomical Institute. But that’s not the point. There aren’t any stars between the galaxies. Just…” Amilyn’s knotted stomach lurched. “…Just empty space.”
And they were so far from the Core.
There was a long, pregnant pause between Amilyn’s last word and Sabine’s response. “I… was going to ask you if you’ve had some sort of existential crisis at some point, but I can’t decide if asking you that now sounds more cruel or more flippant. “I know that travel between galaxies is currently beyond our capabilities. One of my instructors in the Academy speculated that there would be gravitational disturbances that would make space travel at the edge of a galaxy difficult.” She visibly tossed her head. “Of course, their co-instructor in my astronomy class called her an idiot and told us we couldn’t expect to find any more gravitational anomalies at the edge of the galaxy as there were anywhere else. I don’t know; I’d have to track down the right textbook or journal.”
“And half of them conflict with the other half,” Amilyn muttered, rolling her eyes. “When astrological systems differ from one another from planet to planet, that’s only natural. Astrological systems are based on local cultures and the view of the night sky from that planet. Astrology is subjective; you can approach the truth from many different angles, and come to different answers that are, nonetheless, still true. Astronomy doesn’t have as much room for two different answers to the same question to be true. And… And I am getting off-track again, aren’t I?"
“I’m not really helping you stay on track,” Sabine said dryly.
Amilyn rolled her eyes again. “And I’m not really resisting your attempts to not help.” She pressed her free hand to her forehead, digging her fingertips into her hair. “I… You know I grew up on Gatalenta. It’s a Core world, close to Coruscant. When I looked up into the sky as a child, I looked up and saw a sky so bright with stars that even our winter nights were no darker than twilight on a world on the Inner Rim.” If she shut her eyes, she could imagine the night sky on Gatalenta. She could even correctly place some of the stars to be seen on a clear night, though it had been years since she last stood on that planet, years since she last look up and saw that sky. That was a mercy, she supposed. The memories were all she had; she’d not even had time to take a photo with her when she fled the Core, fled the home that had never expended much effort on making her feel welcome, but had been dear to her all the same. She’d never appreciated just how dear until after she was forced to leave it behind. “No matter where I was, I had the assurance that I was seated at the hub of life in the galaxy.”
Daylight was dimmer on the Outer Rim. Night was darker still, so dark that even when stars shone, Amilyn still felt at times as though she had been struck blind. It took entirely too long for Amilyn’s eyes to adjust; even once they had, she could proceed only clumsily, compared to natives of the Outer Rim. She was just… just fumbling in the dark. Looking for something, anything she could do to prevent the greater darkness she knew was coming.
“And out here, you’re less sure of that.” Now, these words were coming out awkwardly; there could be little doubt, from how very slowly and deliberately they were put to the air, that Sabine had tested every last one. Whether it was the language barrier or some other barrier was less certain.
“I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve journeyed over the edge of the map to evade the Empire.” Sabine’s pulse was picking up under Amilyn’s thumb. Rather against her will, Amilyn found her own heart keeping (fast, staccato) pace. “How many times we have confounded star charts and cartographers alike. Did you… Did you ever have daydreams about doing that, as a child?” she asked in a small voice.
A rueful laugh escaped Sabine’s mouth. “Yeah. Keep in mind, I had a lot of daydreams as a kid, and most of them were pretty egotistical, so I probably wasn’t daydreaming about it the same way you were.”
Amilyn bopped the side of her hand against Sabine’s. “As if I haven’t had a power fantasy before,” she chided. She sobered. “I did as well. Often. The very idea seemed wondrous.”
More than once, Amilyn wished she could go back to being a child, with a child’s understanding of the universe. Oh, rarely did this wish pass beyond the realm of vague, half-formed fantasy. Amilyn the child hadn’t been able to think critically about anything: why all Gatalentans in her community dressed alike, why her people preached caution and deliberation even in the face of things that demanded an immediate response, why the Empire was allowed even by the most enlightened to rule through violence and terror. She had no desire to go back to being the child who did not question these things. But Amilyn the child, the one who didn’t think critically about her culture of the Empire in which it operated, let alone how the former reconciled itself to the latter, was also the child who didn’t think critically about death. That was the adult’s fixation.
The further they went, the darker the skies. The darker the skies, the fewer the stars. Over the edge of the map, there were wonders beyond the dreams of the most fanciful mind. Already, Amilyn had seen plenty of wonders so great they made her wish she had Sabine’s talent with art; photos seemed poor and inadequate to explore what she had experienced. The places star charts left blank were also filled with dangers to freeze the blood. And once you reached a place where there was no stars, all you’d find was death.
Night thoughts, Amilyn told herself, shaking her head violently, that was all they were in the end. They were the specters that crept up on her undefended mind when her limbs were heavy with sleep. It could happen. She could certainly find herself there. She could also find herself on a planet where its star was going supernova, or eat some bad veg-meat in the mess hall and go into toxic shock. She did a little research before dismissing the former from her mind, and didn’t let the latter stop her from eating lunch.
I wish I thought to grab my tarot cards when I left Gatalenta. Or my flute. Or my gevalla set, or anything I could do that…
She frowned.
Or anything she could do that would remind her of home.
Instead of her stomach feeling knotted, now Amilyn simply felt a touch nauseated. She really had underestimated how much she would miss Gatalenta after she left it behind. Even the scarlet cloak she’d been gifted when she was appointed to the Apprentice Legislature wouldn’t have been so bad. It had smelled of her mother’s floral perfume. That wouldn’t have been so bad…
“I’ve never been to the Core.” Amilyn hadn’t forgotten that Sabine was there, not exactly. At her most abstracted, she could still feel Sabine’s pulse under her thumb, the one tenuous tether between reality and unreality, wakefulness and waking nightmares. But she’d been half-suffocated by her own thoughts, and that voice intruding on them made her start. “Mandalorian space is Outer Rim. Closest I’ve been to the Core is…” There came a slight movement that Amilyn thought might be Sabine shrugging. “…I don’t know. The Ghost’s activities have always been confined to the Rim; we might have done a food drop for some Mid Rim colony, but that’s pretty much it. I’ve never seen the night sky from a Core world.”
Later, it would be impossible for Amilyn to determine whether the wistfulness had originated from Sabine’s voice or her own mind. Her response didn’t help her any with the determination. “You’d love it,” she assured Sabine, her head bobbing unnecessarily. “We don’t have a great deal of air pollution on Gatalenta, so if you go out somewhere there isn’t a great deal of light pollution the sky’s just packed with stars. On the clearest nights, you can scarcely see the sky behind them.”
You could see Alderaan through a telescope, she did not add. No master of guessing how long light and images needed to travel from star system to star system, she caught herself wondering if the explosion had yet reached Gatalentan telescopes. Throat hardening, eyes burning, Amilyn wasn’t certain which answer would make her less happy.
“Sounds… bright.” Sabine’s own voice brightened as she went on to say, “And colorful. Maybe. Can you determine variations in color without a telescope?”
“For the closer stars, yes. A lot of yellow stars, mostly. Some blue and red; more the former than the latter.” She stared suggestively at Sabine, hoping—with perhaps the slightest touch of desperation—that the darkness wouldn’t obscure her meaning. “Many of our artists have made panoramas of the night sky.” Most of them romanticized, but Amilyn suspected—hoped—that wouldn’t be treated as a deterrent. “It’s practically its own genre.”
“And introducing one of the Mandalorian art styles into the mix wouldn’t shake things up too much?” Sabine asked wryly.
Amilyn shook her head. “They’d survive the shock.” She wrinkled her nose. “And some of them could use a thorough shaking-up.”
A soft laugh sounded beside her. “That sounds familiar.”
Amilyn paused, blinking hard. Sabine’s presence beside her was warm and solid. Had been warm and solid since nearly the beginning of it all. They were… Amilyn thought they were comfortable now, as comfortable as they were ever going to be sharing cramped quarters (when they were even stationed on the same base or traveling on the same ship) and fighting a war they could both be killed in at any time. It certainly wasn’t the sort of circumstances where Amilyn could ever truly call herself ‘relaxed,’ but perhaps it was different for Sabine. Sabine had been raised with a very different ethos, a very different set of standards. A different culture, world and galaxies apart from Gatalenta, and something incredibly formidable, to thrive in the Outer Rim as a conquering power rather than being carved up by the colonizing powers of the Core. Something harder and harsher than Gatalenta.
But sometimes, some stray comment would be bitten out, only to be swallowed back down before Amilyn could properly process what she had heard. She’d see some twitch, some cringe, some reflexive flinch, and Amilyn wondered if it was so different, after all.
“What was it like for you?”
“The sky? Krownest’s an Outer Rim world, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of air pollution, and there aren’t any planetary rings to block the view. The sky’s clear. Dark, too, unless the aurora makes an appearance. It’s good for moving around at night without being seen.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Amilyn said softly.
They didn’t speak of it often. Not Amilyn’s past, and not Sabine’s. Sabine… didn’t pry. She didn’t volunteer information, and she didn’t pry. They had always had other things to speak of, other things to do. Simulated night had robbed Amilyn of the discretion not to ask, as well as the presence of mind to think of some other topic to touch on. Too late, she realized what she had touched upon, but still, too late.
Beside her, Sabine stiffened. Amilyn feared she might pull her arm out of her grasp, but she didn’t go that far. Still, there was a certain way of shutting oneself off from others that ni light was needed to detect. Two people could be lying in the same narrow bunk and yet be lightyears away if one only knew how to withdraw. “It’s… it’s over,” she said in a strange, brittle voice. “It’s not over. It’s… It’s hard, Amilyn.” Slightly strangled was the voice, slightly choked. Slightly despairing, slightly loathing. It was ‘slightly’ a great many things.
And Sabine Wren was not a woman of easy confidences; Amilyn had discerned that much their first day in each other’s presence. They all had secrets, though, and Amilyn had taken a step too far—she could sense, rather than see, the spectral boundary line she had vaulted over. “It’s hard for me, too,” she admitted, and hoped that, as far as an apology went, it would be enough.”
They lied there in silence neither contented nor distraught for Amilyn couldn’t guess how long. Outside, time moved on, and the time for Sabine to get up and take over on watch duty was edging ever closer. Inside, Amilyn felt as though suspended in a bubble where time just didn’t matter, uncertain of whether to term it a blessing or a curse. She had encountered many such things in her life, more than she really thought proportionate. One day, she would have to find out if there was a word for something that could be both.
Not that ‘day’ held much meaning in space.
“You alright?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes. And you?”
“Sure. It’s just…”
“Night thoughts?”
They both laughed. Not brightly, but not falsely.
Wordlessly, they drew closer to one another, into an embrace that was as it ever was—a little clumsy, a little tentative. One with spindly limbs; one not used to contact without full body armor as a buffer. All of it too new to really engender immediate comfort; this new, and you were still waiting to get caught on a sharp edge, still wondering if you’d come up against something that might make you bleed.
It scarcely mattered. They were forever looking for something to keep the dark at bay, to transform empty spaces into places where they could live. Amilyn could think of no better way than this to scream defiance at the dark.