in your garden, forever (star wars | amilyn/leia)

[fiachairecht]

in your garden, forever. star wars sequels, amilyn/leia. a straightforward artefact retrieval mission gives amilyn and leia more than they'd bargained for. 972w, rated t. for gloss in the transformation flash exchange.

Corruption via exposure to alien artifact
Euphoric Transformation
Person transforming into plant(s)

The Governor's party is dying the slow death that befalls most diplomatic parties an hour or two past midnight when Amilyn finally breaks her way through the crowd and onto the terrace. The three moons that are out bathe the area in silver light, and Leia sees the new pendant gleaming in the centre of Amilyn's neck immediately.

Surely it's a trick of the moons that makes her raised hand look as green as the gem they'd been sent to retrieve, Leia thinks, and then she doesn't think at all as Amilyn sweeps her into her arms and kisses her thoroughly.

She's cold. The chill nips at Leia's fingertips as she cups Amilyn's cheeks, seeps into her open mouth when she swipes her tongue against Amilyn's.

"Let's leave," she says, and when Amilyn — always the first to suggest just five more minutes at a gathering — acquisces without a word, Leia's own heart grows cold, too.

They don't make it back to the shuttle. Leia wishes she were surprised.

*

Amilyn drifts. She can feel the silk under her with more definition than she can feel her own body. She has limbs, still: they move at her thought, dipping into the loam.

Above, she can hear Leia murmuring to her, snippets of affection that no longer resolve into words. She's starting to wonder if they ever had — if anything had existed before this moment in the jungle, before she started to reach into the dirt and coax something out with her hands.

She wishes she were stronger in the Force, that she could draw Leia into this web. Other voices are starting to join in at the edges of her awareness, and these ones she knows aren't words: they are every tree and flower and other living thing on Onderon.

Something inside her is breaking, lifting her up higher than skyfaring silks or X-Wing controls or even Leia's hands could take her. Her fingers are lengthening with only the slight creaking of bone like branches in a storm. Something is feathering out over her chest, sinking under her skin to seamlessly join the web of veins it finds there. Something is pressing against her left eye, making her vision tilt and blur.

Amilyn swallows against the knot against her throat and wonders if it will ever hurt. She thinks perhaps that would be impossible, as long as she rests in Leia's lap.

*

The green was no shade of moonlight, the vines growing from the artefact no stray decoration. They spread, weblike, over Amilyn's body, and Leia would wonder at the abscence of fear if not for the joy radiating from Amilyn. It flows from her into the Force, blanketing Leia as surely as new-formed leaves are blanketing Amilyn's body, and Leia can't help but smile.

She dips her fingers into the space between the leaves and finds Amilyn's skin still cool, now slightly damp. There's no defined edge where skin meets bark, and Amilyn squirms restlessly as Leia's fingers slip from one to the other.

"Tickles," she says breathlessly, one of the first words she's spoken since she collapsed, and so Leia does it again, intentionally, just to hear her laughter.

The artefact's work is slowing, now. Amilyn's form is still present under the ferns and ivy now drifting from her body, rendering her silhouette something billowing, torn and haunted. One eye is swallowed by an unfamiliar white blossom, one with petals long enough to cover nearly half her face. Her hair, where it is distinguishable from the plants, is the green of two summers ago.

Leia thinks she has never seen her more beautiful, or more happy.

As Amilyn struggles to sit, Leia becomes aware of the new sensations holding her brings: the prickling of leaf edges through her thin dress, the velvet-soft brush of petals against bare skin. Even the Force feels different around her, trembling like air after a lightning strike, like something even more uncontained than Amilyn alone could ever be.

Her voice, though, is the same, and her remaining eye crinkles at the corners like it always has when she says, "I think I know why we were sent to fetch this."

Pink flashes under green as her mouth lifts in a smile, and Leia can't disagree.

*

Everything is light. The strange, anxious desire that had caught at Amilyn's throat since she had attached the gem to the silver chain around her neck has dissipated now, replaced entirely by the returned awareness of her body.

Her body, and. She reaches out an arm to brace herself against the ground and cannot see where her hand ends and vegetation begins. She tilts her head back to meet Leia's gaze and her neck trembles under the weight of its newfound additions.

Her vision swims, stabilisies. Everything is limned with a blueish haze, and she watches as Leia's fingers move closer — move into the light — and Amilyn knows, then, with a certainty that could only have come from the new life crawling over her, that this must be what the meadows of her childhood felt when she laid back into them on blinding summer days.

She had always meant to bring Leia to Gatalenta to show her, but this, perhaps, is even better: now, Leia feels, now, Amilyn knows.

Leia's hand draws back holding a tiny sliver of wood. "Ch'hala bark," she says, and Amilyn sees, then, the rippling brown that fades over the bark as she speaks. "Oh, I can't wait to see you in the light."

Amilyn closes her eye, leans her new body in to Leia even as she lets herself sink more deeply into the riot of sound encompassing her awareness, the new bits and pieces of her stitching themselves together in the Force.

"Tell me everything, when you see it," she says, and knows Leia is smiling.