strangetrip | [EP] I am made of stars

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[EP] I am made of stars - OTA

It was night and everything smelled like the sea.

Snow White lay spread-eagle in middle of the parking lot, staring up at the stars. Her hair fanned around her head, inky black and, seeing as she hadn’t bothered to cut it since her arrival, growing almost absurdly long.

The sun had set over an hour ago and the sky was full into the black. The moon, not quite full but still nearly so, shone down silver and cool like a single huge, impassive eye. The sight of so much sky and so little horizon left her feeling dizzy, as though if she could forget the feeling of pavement under her back she might float upward and be lost in that eternity up there. It reminded her distantly of Mrs. H’s mirror and how it had caught the moon in its glass. But not enough to spoil the view. Not enough to make her afraid.

She’d had the nightmare again last night, the one where she was caught in the room full of fire. In the beginning it came every night. Then slowly but surely, it became less frequent. She hadn’t burned through the night in months. Logically, it would be months again before the fire, but she still couldn’t quite face going in, lying down, and closing her eyes.

She thought of Sansa and--because she had never asked--wondered if the stars in Westeros were different from the ones above her now. She wondered if that velvet black had a texture, and then if it was stupid to wonder that. She named all the constellations and stars she knew, some from her childhood observations, some from books she’d read in the library. Her gaze fixed for a time on Polaris.

She didn’t think anybody was around to hear her. “It’s so far away that no matter where we are, that’s still north.” It was a wild thought.

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Maya watched as Snow told the story, much as she would have one of Chief's or her father's. Much as she did with any stories that seemed to hold lessons or truth, which could be most of them, if you knew how to 'listen'.

"It's worse than hubris, trying to marry someone who doesn't want you, or thinking you can win them over by completing certain tasks or giving certain gifts. But the daughter showed wisdom, giving herself time to get away, if she could. That's how I see it anyway."

"She did get away," Snow murmured. Unlike Gun That Sings who had been bound up in that dress of stars and married off to a man she didn't want. "Found another king she actually loved, marred him instead. Even used those dresses her father had made for her to make that king fall for her."

Snow had always associated the Donkeyskin story with her mother, for obvious reasons. This was the first moment she ever thought to connect it to herself.

"Good."

Fisk hadn't wanted to marry Maya; it had never been like that. But it was only after that she realized how he'd been grooming her to take her father's place. He'd made her a weapon, and she turned it on him. On the way, falling for the man he wanted her to kill. Not that that had worked out for any of them in the end.

"What happened to the father? Other than not getting what he wanted."

"Story don't mention him again," Snow said with a shrug. "He was a small, stupid man. Though if I had to guess, went out of his mind obsessing over finding a woman who looked just like his dead wife." Which was what had brought him to his daughter in the first place. And shit, she really had been living some of Donkeyskin, even if her father had never looked at her that way.

Her father had told her many stories. Including stories of men (and others) who obsessed over women they wanted to marry, and the many tricks they tried to get, or to keep their women. But looking up at the stars reminded Maya of one in particular.

"My father told the best stories, ones he'd learned from his father, and his father's father, and all their peoples, since we weren't of any one tribe any more. I don't remember where this one came from, and it's not much like yours. The girl wasn't the man's daughter, but she and her sisters came from the stars.

"A great hunter came across a large circle in the grass. So he hid, to find out what made it. When night came, a giant willow basket came down from the stars, and in it were twelve sisters who sang and danced for the night sky. The hunter immediately fell in love with the youngest and most beautiful, but when he ran up wanting to steal her away for himself, the sisters became scared, jumped the basket and flew away to their home in the sky. Three more nights he tried, and failed. So then he came up with a plan." She paused there, although the story continued, if Snow was interested.

Interested she was. Snow's eyes left the stars and focused on Maya's face.

If there had been enough light to cast good shadows, Maya would have made shadow puppets as her father had, but it was too dark, so words would have to be enough. "The hunter placed a hollow tree trunk near the circle where the sisters had danced, and then turned himself into a mouse. A family of mice lived in the tree trunk, and he hid among them until the sisters returned. The mice ran around and through the dance, and the girls stomped on them, killing all of them but the hunter who turned back into a man, grabbed the youngest sister, and took her back to her village." The hunter was an asshole, Maya's tone said, echoing the expression on her face.

"In time, the girl learned to love him, and they had a son. They were happy at first, but she grew homesick for her family and her home in the sky-country. When she could not bear it any longer, she built a basket, filled it with gifts for her family, her son, and herself and flew up into the night for home."

Snow pulled a face. "Sounds kinda like selkies. I have no idea how the fuck a woman learns to love a man like that." Gun That Sings had never, certainly.

"I don't either." Which was possibly saying something, considering the men Maya did tend to fall for, but that was a different story, and this one had not reached its end.

"But she did love him, and their son, and as the son grew to manhood, he wanted to learn more about his father. So the sky-girl talked to her father, who was chief of their people. He told them to return to the Earth, but they had to bring back the hunter and something of each of the Earth animals' power.

"The hunter was overjoyed to be reunited with his family, and they quickly gathered tokens of the animals: bear's claw; eagle, hawk, and falcon's feather; deer's horn and hide; raccoon's teeth, and so on. The sky-chief was pleased with their gifts and distributed them among his people. The girl and the hunter chose the falcon feather, so the chief said they would always be free to travel between the Earth and the Sky, and they were transformed into falcons. To this day, their descendants still fly high over the lands.

"So they got a happy ending, but most starts like that should never get any further. I don't know how I feel about that."

"Nobody's that accepting of the children born between," Snow muttered. It was a nice story, though details niggled.

The lessons you got from hearing a story weren't always the lessons the teller wanted to teach, if they were wanting to teach rather than learning their own. So Maya didn't say that sometimes people were that accepting. That wasn't the story Snow knew or the lessons meant for her.

"Being between is always hard. It's always apart." Maya knew about being apart.

Snow nodded, but she didn't elaborate. There had been no place for her in her white father's house and, she knew in her bones, no place for her with her mother's people. There was nowhere at home she belonged, nowhere she was wanted. It hadn't been until Gotham that she'd been allowed to even think about that possibility.

"I think," Maya continued, unbothered by Snow's silence, "a lot of people here know what that feels like." And now they were here, between worlds, apart from time.

That was a thought that Snow honestly hadn't had before. But then, it had taken her until she was in her teens even to realize that other people cried. That others might feel as in between as she did... "Huh."

Everyone carried their own stories with them. Sometimes it took time to realize that, or that those stories could have similar themes. Maybe it was Snow's name that made the connection – once again Maya wondered at what could push someone to call an Indian girl Snow White, and not liking most of the answers she came up with – that made her say, "It's like with fairy tales. Did you know there are versions of Cinderella from who knows how many different cultures around the world? Because there are experiences that transcend place, things people all over can understand or need to learn, and those are the stories that get passed down from parent or teacher to child, through the generations."

"I knew about two of 'em," Snow murmured thoughtfully. She knew about the Grimm version of the tale and the Perrault version.

She supposed, though, that that made sense. Even in the fairy tales she knew, how many of them were about some nobody girl becoming a princess?

"My father and the Chief taught me through stories, and that stories could teach," she explained, wondering if she should spare Snow her thoughts on the medicine behind sharing tales. "If my life hadn't taken the turn it did," superheroing didn't leave much time for anything else, unfortunately, and Maya couldn't turn her back on fights that needed fighting if there was something she could do to help, "I was thinking about going back to school, studying folklore.

"That's a thing people can study?" Snow admittedly didn't really know much about school, let alone university, so she didn't think it meant anything that the thought hadn't crossed her mind, but the thought had certainly never crossed her mind.

"People study all kinds of things." And stories, unlike dancing or fighting or playing an instrument, weren't something Maya could learn simply by watching. Not and really understand how they worked and what they meant. Maybe that was why she liked them so much.

"I never got to go to school," Snow murmured, which was both an admission to her ignorance of academic institutions and that she did want to go. She had the library, and Percy was getting her caught up on math higher than basic arithmetic, but she knew it wasn't the same.

"I don't know where or when you're from," Maya said after a long quiet moment, "but that might not have been as bad as it seems. People who look like us don't have the best history when it comes to schools."

"I know," Snow murmured. Aside from the fact that an Indian was literally one of the worst thing to be in 19th century America, she'd had Bear to help her fill in those gaps in her knowledge of history. So she did know that most girls who looked like her ended up in institutions that made Charlotte Bronte's Lowood look like a cakewalk... but home had been worse than any of those stories. "But maybe I'd've learned something worth knowing." All she'd been trained for was how to make a grave for herself and die in that house, like her mother had. Because training her for anything else meant acknowledging her, giving her a dowry, marrying her off. Not that anyone in their right mind would have her.

Maya had been, she knew, lucky when it came to school. At least after they decided she wasn't retarded – which was stupid, since they already knew she was deaf, and she often wondered if the mislabeling had as much to do with the color of her skin as it did her deafness – and moved her from the special needs school to one for gifted students. And most of the residential schools for indians had been closed by then anyway.

"Maybe. I'm sorry you didn't get the chance to find out. Tutors aren't the same, I know." Sure, there were people here who could teach Snow the things she didn't learn in school, but the experience would be different. "On the other hand, the things I've most enjoyed learning, I didn't learn in school."

Snow nodded. And for a long time she didn't say anything at all.

Then, perhaps abruptly, but true, "Thanks. I think I can sleep now."

Maya nodded, and then stood in a smooth, easy motion. "Good night, Snow. Sleep well," she offered, and continued on the way she had been going before she stopped.

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[EP] I am made of stars - OTA

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