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34 ABY, The Resistance Navy star cruiser, The Echo of Hope,
orbits the Gordian Reach planet of Yuxl where a recent First Order
defector awaits extraction by the Resistance.
A delicate peace hangs between the two militias.
Knowing that the First Order have patrols in the region,
General Organa halts the extraction.
“General.”
“Poe.” Leia smiles as she turns, the Command room bathing her in green and dark shadow. Poe realises he always pictures her like this, sharpened by maps and statistics. “You know, I’m sure Shara called me Leia at least once.”
“Ma called you ma’am until the day she died, General.”
“And you are very much your mother’s son.” Her smile is one of her best, her eyes crumpling. “What have you come to tell me?”
Here, Poe hesitates, thumbs his nose as he thinks. “I gotta go down to that planet, General. I can't drive on by like this.” She’s difficult to read when he pulls his head up to look at her but Poe’s thought about this, he’s spent a frantic hour consumed by it and he trusts his gut, he doesn't know about right and wrong on a grand scale, that’s not for him to know, but he knows what his body’s telling him and it’s telling him he has to fight. “The First Order are gonna light Yuxl up. They know we got a reason for being here. They find that village undefended and sheltering a defector, ma’am, all those people are gonna die.”
“Poe,” She lays a hand on his arm and he wants to read the sympathy in it but he’s struggling to hold his ground and seeing it would make this so much harder. “I’m trusting you to be impartial here. You have to try.”
He knew she was gonna say that, doesn’t make it any easier to hear. Yuxl is small, a barely inhabited chunk of rock mostly scorched by its sun but it sits on the outer edge of the Gordian Reach and Poe knows the lives of the people down there, knows their traditions, their rest days, knows which dieties they see in the stars. “I know the settlement’s small, it’s out of the way-”
Leia finishes the sentiment for him. “An outer rim planet.” She’s gentle with him. “I know how close to home this is for you, Poe, but the moment we touch down in that settlement, we mark it as a target for the First Order. If they decide the information that defector carries is enough to break the peace, the chances of you saving those people are incredibly slim and you risk your own life and the lives of whoever goes with you. I can't allow it.”
“We had the same odds on Balosar, General.” He plays the only card he’s got, the knowledge that’s been eating at him since she gave the order that would see them leaving Yuxl to the mercy of the First Order. “And we fought tooth and nail for that settlement.”
She takes him in. He looks back, holds his ground. He can feel her reading the doubt in him, the implication of partiality, of something deeper, more toxic than that, of following the groves of old patterns of privilege. “Poe,” it’s quiet when she does finally speak. “Please believe me, what you think you see here is not what is happening. That settlement on Balosar had twice the population, was of far greater strategic importance. The likelihood of the First Order thinking to mount an attack on the people down there is incredibly low.”
“You gotta see how this looks.” Poe can’t hold back the emotion in it. “General, you gotta see. You grew up Inner Rim. You look down there, you see a planet that’s safe for getting passed over by the First Order. I look and half the people in this Resistance look and see a planet that’s in danger for getting passed over by us, the same way it’s been passed over since the First Concordance. You gonna risk their lives because you don’t see that settlement as significant? You’re sending a message, loud and clear - we don’t stand for anything but the Core.”
It looks like it hurts. He sees it in her, sees it because she lets him see it and that makes it worse, somehow. He doesn’t wanna be let in. He wants to be treated like she’d treat an emissary, like she’d treat another of the command staff on the bridge. Knowing he’s hurt her makes him wanna back down and he can’t, not with this, not when no one else will speak up. He needs his voice, needs to be able to use it.
“What would you have me do, Commander?”
“Let me take down anyone who’ll come with me. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m the only one who sees what I’m seeing and if I get no one, we’ll fly on by. But if I can assemble a squadron for this, let me take them down. You get intel from the trooper, we keep that village safe. If Yuxl’s just an Outer Rim hunk of rock, General, the First Order ain’t gonna risk firing on us over it.”
In the wide window of the Bridge, the planet hangs in black space. He watches her turn her head to look at it, feels the tension that has tightened every muscle in him. But he waits. Even after he’s said his piece, he’s poured in his soul, he waits. She’s meant everything to him since he can remember. He won't jump until she tells him to throw himself.
“This means that much to you?”
“This means that much to me.”
She nods, slowly. “Then get your squadron together. I can’t give you long but,” she comes to a conclusion, looks up at him and he feels relief rush through him. “I can keep us here a few hours at least.”
Karé packs up her equipment, head up, eyes on the people scurrying around the settlement. The sky overhead storms dark.
“An hour before that storm leaves us stuck here. If the First Order are coming, they ain’t in a hurry.” Iolo’s taken the trooper back to the Echo of Hope. The pilots, all Outer Rim kids but Karé, mill around their ships, talking in small knots. Everyone’s uneasy. No matter how official Poe’s worked to make this, they all know they’re running on borrowed time, bad odds and no backing. “I say we go now.”
This isn’t how it goes in his head and it’s written all over Poe’s face. “You know, you think when you put your ass on the line you’re gonna get sommat out of it.”
“You spoiling for a fight, Dameron? I’ll spar you when we get back up there.”
“I wanna prove we’re here for them.” Poe doesn’t want to say, I wish half a dozen ties’d drop out the sky about now, doesn’t say, give me sommat to light up, give me a few screaming balls of the best First Order tech and I’ll give this town a firework display that’s gonna write in the sky that the Resistance is here for them. He doesn’t want to say it, doesn’t want to wish it but a high moral stance isn’t gonna save him. He wants it bad. He can hear what had been said to him when they landed as clearly as if it was still being said.
We thought you were gonna pass over. Poe had looked at the woman who looks like his mother, thought, we almost did, thinks, how many other places like this have I watched slide past the viewport. Insignificant, peripheral, unimportant. He thinks of the makeup of the command staff. Runs a hand through his curls.
“You think I got lucky today?”
“Lucky?”
“Yeah.” He chews his lip, wonders, with a logic that bites down into him, whether he was granted a say that no one else who came from where he did, looked like he did, would have been granted. “You think I cashed a favour?”
Karé takes in the settlement. It’s too small to be worth the First Order’s time, too out the way, too poor. A spit of land no one’s going to break treaties over. And the people, the people look like Poe, they’ve got his warm brown skin, they’ve got his curls, dark eyes, sturdy set. She tugs her lips into a line, shrugs. “Whatever intel that trooper has is better be worth it. This is the least interesting place you’ve taken me to so far and we’ve been to some backwaters, Poe.”
Doubt crowds in, makes his stomach churn. What had they done here? Caused a half an hour ruckus in a settlement so small Poe hadn’t even got boots on the ground before the matriarch was stood nose to nose with his x-wing. General’s got a sweet spot for you, Dameron, Iolo had smirked in the mess hall with an elbow to his side. Poe had laughed back them, felt pride build warm under his ribs. He feels sick now, remembers the conversations he’s been party to, stood and listened, protestless in the face of the logic he’s heard so many times he’d begun to believe it. What can these small moons, obscure planets, barren rocks bring to a Resistance in dire need of funding, of fuel, of food and safe places to make base, allies, contacts? Nothing.
He blinks. No. Not nothing. Something. Him. “You’re the only pilot I got with me today who’s not from some backwater like this. You seen Yavin 4, Karé? You wanna talk to me about backwaters? Yeah sure, there’s no fuel here, we ain’t got a snowball’s chance on Mustafa of getting bankrolled. But a Resistance is built on people,” he can hear Leia as he says it, takes the words she’s given him and makes them his own. “And if one person on Yuxl believes in us because of what we did today, then we got one step closer to winning this thing.”
“You want to do a recruitment drive?”
“I do, General.”
Leia looks momentarily lost for words. It’s a look at odds with her usual self and that that isn’t enough to throw Poe off is a testament to how much he wants this to come through. “Captain, do you agree with the Commander?”
Poe looks to Karé. She doesn’t look back, keeps her eyes on the holo projection. “I agree with Dameron. You always say we can never have enough people, General.” Her shrug is compact. “Enough of the ships down here are two people craft.”
Poe wants to buy the rest of her drinks for the rest of their lives. He’d tell her but Karé’ll hold him to it and he doesn’t know if he has the money to bankroll her past more than a month. There’s a silence from the Echo of Hope and then Leia sighs and says,
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Commander.”
Poe doesn’t. Not really. But not knowing what he’s doing stands to nothing next to the deep, gut feeling that this is the right thing to do. “I’ve got a pretty good idea, General.”
“You’ve got nothing.” The holo projection blinks out. Karé evaluates him. “You got nothing, Dameron.”
“I haven’t had a well structured plan in my life, Karé. It ain't gone bad for me yet.”
“You tell me this now? I’ve been following you for seven years.”
“I’ll slip an official complaint form under your door when we land back on D’Qar, huh?” Poe grins at her, turns to the village, turns to the place he’s gonna preach.
“This Resistance is built on people.” Poe stands in the town hall, bright in his flight suit. He looks into a hall of faces that look back at him looking like he does and he feels hope run under his skin, and then something better than hope, something that feels like power. “We gotta have all the people we can get. We got ships up there running on reserve because we ain’t got the crew to populate them. We need everyone, mechs, programmers, ground crew, fighters, pilots, cooks. Come with us and yeah, sure we’ll train you up, you get to see the galaxy. Everything I signed up for when I was a kid. But it’s more than that,” he reverberates with how much he needs this to be something they feel with him, “We nearly flew over you today.” The hall murmurs, mutters, someone shouts from the back. “Yeah, we nearly left you to the First Order. Come with me, come make this Resistance into one that’s gonna stand for everyone, that’s never gonna pass another Outer Rim planet by for being insignificant, unimportant. We ain’t got much but we got us and that was enough last time we fought this fight. I know sure as hell, that’s gonna be enough now.”
He doesn’t know what he’s expecting when he stops speechifying. It ain’t silence, that’s for sure. It ain’t this silence that grows more overwhelming the longer they hang there. Then a woman at the back shifts to speak and Poe’s heart makes a running jump into his throat.
“Hey.” His smile opens the floor up for her, “You got a question?”
“I have, yes. What’s your life expectancy?”
A ripple runs around the room. Poe puts a hand to his hair, falters. “We’ve got no official statistics,” he says and before he can work on something smarter she’s already using it to damn him,
“Let’s assume it was the same as the last time you fought this fight. Three months for a starfighter pilot, wasn’t it?” She takes him in, “That’s not great.”
“The Resistance doesn’t engage the First Order, ma’am, we keep to the Concordance.”
“For now you do.” Another woman’s voice joins hers. “How long is that gonna last? Milenka’s right, when the fighting starts you’re all going to die.”
“The galaxy knows what becomes of people like you, Commander. You’re very brave and very bright and very quickly gone from the world. We don’t want that here.” Milenka’s open arms take in the people around her. “We are still tired from the first war and already you are making another one.”
“The war’s already begun. General Organa-”
“General Organa?” She laughs. “Yes, I’m sure the First Order are the threat to her. Why are they a threat to you? To any of you? They’ll cause a stir in the Inner Rim, maybe the Mid Rim. Nothing here will be different. Nothing here was different under the Empire. Under the Republic. You want to drag us into another war that has nothing to do with us so we can die for regimes that rise and fall in distant places.”
The apathy of it stings and he’s struggling to keep the passion in his voice when he says, “I came down here because I am done passing by the places that go ignored by the staff on the bridge of that cruiser because the people who live there don’t look like them. Don’t come from the places they come from.” He bites down on his lip, fights the hurt that’s bruising him and then stops fighting it, uses it instead. “You wanna tell me that you don’t care about their lives like they don’t care about yours? We need to be better than that.”
“Why, why should we care? Why should we die for them?” A man with his baby in a sling across his chest shouts and he’s joined by others, by a rumble of frustration that gets under the skin of the building. “The Senate’s never cared, will never care about us. Not their laws, not their people, not their policymakers. They barely remember we exist.”
“And that,” Milenka is fierce with it. “That is a gift. That keeps us out of their bloodbaths.”
“We should care.” Poe wants to come down off the stage, he wants to move through them, he wants see them better, be seen by them. “We gotta care.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what we gotta do, we gotta strive to see past ourselves cos if we don’t and they don’t, ain’t no one ever gonna.”
“Why does it have to be us?” All the familiarity, all the comfort of being back with people who look at him with eyes he knows has left him. “Why have we got to put our lives on the line?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do.”
“Nothing’s that black and white.”
“Sure it is.” Poe runs a hand over his mouth. He’s known this since he was so small he can’t remember learning it. He’s known since he was toddling through the gap in the fence with a shred of tarp, helping his parents fix the roof at Mx Asturias’ during the monsoon, since he was old enough to help make arepas at the Temple. You help people, you make their cause your cause, you give them what you can. Poe doesn’t have much but he can fight, he can give his sweat, his skill, his life. “Sure, the First Order might not hurt you. They might not come for you, but they are gonna spill blood in communities all over this Galaxy and I ain’t gotta know their names to know I gotta help them.”
There’s no one waiting outside the hall when Poe comes out, no one from the village, but Karé’s there, leaning against his x-wing.
“Bet you’re glad no one asked me to make a speech when I had to convince you and Iolo to come join the Resistance.”
“See the difference is,” She takes him in, the defeat written in the set of his shoulders. “We didn’t need convincing, Dameron. You know damn well the two of us would follow you into every kind of shit.” She places a hand on his shoulder and he reads the pity in it, tries his hardest to accept rather than resent it. “The storm’s coming in, we gotta go.”
It is coming in, rolling down the hillside and even as Poe tilts his head back to look, the first drops of rain are falling cold on his skin. He’s achieved nothing here. All he’s taking away with him is a knotted stomach and the beginnings of a headache and all he’s found is a hall of people marginalised into apathy. He thinks of the dream he came with, that he’d fly triumphantly back with the next Resistance general, someone with history like his, a childhood like his, who would know a different shape to the Galaxy, who would take that knowledge into the corridors of power. He pushes his hair back from his face.
“Sure,” he sighs, “Sure, let’s go home.”
“Captain Kun told me about what happened.”
Poe looks up and regrets it, looks back down again because man, he’s not sure he can see the General right now. He can hear her in his head as it is - ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Commander’. He hadn’t and was up himself enough to think that didn’t matter. He runs his tongue over his bottom lip, tastes the sharp metallic of the rain from down on Yuxl’s surface still damp on his skin. “Guess I’m better left on the posters, huh.” The General gestures to the chair opposite him. He looks at it, looks at her. “Sure.”
“Sure it’s free, or sure, you’d like me to sit in it?”
Poe doesn’t have an answer for that, so he stares down at the food he’s not eating instead. “I thought- man. I thought they’d feel the way I felt.” He shakes his head. “I grew up on stories of the Rebellion. War stories. Stories of you, ma’am. Fighting for other people always felt second nature.”
“Second nature,” She does sit, tired in a way she never was in the stories Shara used to tell him. “Is good, we know that. But first nature, people’s first instinct, will always be to protect themselves and protect their community.” She thinks for a moment and then says, “This will be a long fight. If any of the seeds you planted today grow, that’s still something.”
And how can he tell her he was hungering after more than that? How can he speak the conclusion he drew to her? How can he ask where everyone else is in a control room dominated by people who come from the Core? Who speak Basic as she does, the Basic you speak when you’ve gone to good, well funded Republic schools with enough food in your belly not just to get you through a day of lessons, but enough that you ain’t rumbling when you’re supposed to be listening. Who don’t know what it’s like to walk into a room and feel so disorientingly out of place you start to scrutinize yourself, you lose all sense for what is natural. Who pass planets by because their names ain’t familiar, their cultures, their faces don’t match with what they’ve been sold as important. How do you weigh something as valuable if it’s never had a place at the table? How do you see the beauty in something if it’s never been presented as having any kinda worth? Poe drags a hand through his hair, takes a breath, begins to say what he’s never said,
“When I was with the Republic, I was the only Outer Rim kid in my intake. I thought- I was naive enough to think - maybe it was just my year. I never got used to the way some people would look at me when I opened my mouth, when I, man, when I didn’t know sommat they thought was obvious, when I couldn’t go drinking with them cos I didn’t have the money they had. When I-” He shakes his head, stops himself. He ain’t going to sit here and get lost to self pity. “Anyway. A lot of things are different here from there. But that, that’s still a lot of the same.”
She takes him in and he holds his ground, though he doesn’t feel as though he’s said most of the ill formed things he wants to say. They crowd on his tongue and rush back up when he swallows them down. One of them won’t go down at all, one of them surges sickeningly up his oesophagus and wedges itself on his tongue, scrabbles at his teeth. Am I listened to despite where I come from? And then, Why do I get what no one else does? It would be disrespectful in the extreme to ask it but he thinks she reads it on his face.
“I can’t imagine how hard it must be to not to recognise yourself in the people around you.” She’s intense in her sympathy. “Tell me, Poe, if there is anything I can do.”
Poe runs a hand over his jaw. He’s longing for something that he’s never encountered, never seen the form it would take. They sit in an awkward silence, Poe radiating an uncomfortableness he doesn’t seem to be able to ease. The pressure to say something that will help is overwhelming. He wants to say more recruitment, he wants to say, we just need more people but what was said to him in that town hall is rattling around his head. This war is not the war of the people he wants to see on the bridge of the cruiser humming under his feet. If the First Order win, most of the people of the Outer Rim will swap one regime that doesn’t care about them for another. There will still be no trade agreements, no exchange of culture, no expansion of the economic area. They will remain dirt poor of credits, dirt poor of prospects.
“We gotta bring something to them.”
“Something more tangible than hope?”
Poe thinks back to being a kid, he thinks of the kids that he robbed food from the market with and ate with on the high steps of the temple, sticky with juice and sharing it out, always sharing it out so the littlest got the most. “I don’t think hope’s all that intangible, ma’am. I think hope looks like steady food and income and education. I thought,” he says it slowly, “If we were gonna win this, we needed to blow some First Order tech out the sky but that wouldn’t have changed much for the people I spoke to today. They can’t think about much else outside their communities cos they ain’t got the resources for that kinda luxury. If we wanna win this, we need to give them the luxury of being able to see the rest of the Galaxy. Of believing that they get a say in what happens to it.”
“Do you believe that’s a luxury, Poe?”
“I believe that when you’re living day to day, it feels like one, General. I believe if you go long enough without anyone asking for your opinion, you stop having one.” He glances down at his food, ill at ease with the notion that he’s speaking for people he’s never met, is never gonna meet. Feels the acute pressure of being the only voice welcomed in. “I don’t know anything tactical. I’m more of a blowing Ties from the sky kinda guy.”
“I’m going to think about what you’ve told me today. I hope I’m able to do something about it.” She’s serious with it. “Thank you for your opinion. You did well to hold onto it when no one was asking for it.”
“I got lucky, ma’am.” Poe looks up at her, Leia Organa, knows she’s listening to him, has never doubted that in a room full of people who sound like her, she’s listening to him. “Someone hears me. I just don’t see why I gotta be the only one who gets that lucky.”