Work Text:
"Some wounds never vanish.
Yet little by little
I learned to love my life.
Though sometimes I had to run hard –
especially from melancholy –
not to be held back."
— “Hum, Hum” by Mary Oliver
Some days twisted tight around Poe, choked his lungs so his breath came up too shallow and quick, and he was used to that, he could handle that. He just never knew how to explain it to Finn — Finn who noticed everything, Finn who looked at Poe with worry-dark eyes and said, “You doing okay?” with such care that sometimes Poe could barely stand it.
“Yeah,” he’d say. “Just didn’t sleep too much.”
Or, “Dunno, maybe I’m getting sick.”
But Finn was smart, was the thing, he caught on quick. Poe never asked him to stay the night, never asked anything at all. And still Finn would settle in for the evening, padding quietly around Poe’s kitchen in socked feet, cooking them both dinner with whatever he could find in the cabinets.
Poe was continually amazed by Finn’s ability to turn a can of beans and a package of frozen vegetables into restaurant-quality soup, and finally told him as much one evening, hovering at Finn’s shoulder as he stirred the pot on the stovetop.
Finn half-turned to look at Poe, eyebrows raised in quiet amusement. “It’s not restaurant-quality,” he said. “You’re just used to eating the same stuff all the time.”
This was probably true. Poe liked to cook, he just — he liked to cook the same five things, mostly. He liked to make one big pot of stew or chili and eat nothing else for the next week and a half.
“Still,” he insisted, and shuffled closer to rest his chin on Finn’s shoulder, clinging to his waist.
Finn let out a soft laugh, shifting his weight in a mock-attempt to shake Poe free. “What are you, a koala?”
“No,” Poe said, muffled into Finn’s shoulder as he clung tighter. “They eat bamboo.”
“Eucalyptus,” Finn corrected.
“That,” Poe agreed. He closed his eyes, breathing in soup-smell and Finn-smell and listening to BB’s collar jingle as he snuffled around hopefully for scraps. Outside were the usual evening traffic sounds, the voices of neighbors in the hall. But inside there was just Finn, just Poe, just BB-8. Just the soup on the stove bubbling quietly, steam rising up-up-up.
Finn’s hands came to cover Poe’s after a while, prying them gently away from his own hips, and Poe opened his eyes just as Finn turned around to kiss him. Slow and soft and sweet, which was almost too much for Poe’s raw nerves, too fragile to bear. He wanted — more, or he wanted less, or — he wanted, he just wanted, sometimes, and he never knew what for.
“It’s gonna be ready soon,” Finn said, breath soft on Poe’s neck, hand warm on Poe’s cheek. “Go sit down.”
“Don’t forget —”
“Extra chili powder. I know.”
“Chef Finn,” Poe said, stepping back to tip an imaginary hat, and he went to find his seat.
*
He was going to tell Finn. About everything. The POW thing. The torture thing. Muran. He was going to tell Finn, just as soon as the words stopped splintering somewhere on their way to his tongue, catching in his throat and keeping him quiet.
Of course it was a nightmare that dragged it out of him. One of the bad ones, the wake-up-shouting ones, which he hadn’t had in...well, in a long time now. Not since BB-8 was a baby, when he would wake up and howl with Poe and then Poe would need to comfort the both of them.
His hands had stopped shaking by the time Finn came over that morning, so that was good. But the dream pushed its way to the front of his mind no matter what he did, what he said, and Finn was eyeing him sort of funny and Poe, Poe couldn’t help it. He could hear his own voice come out weirdly calm and flat:
So I was a POW.
And of course Finn was perfect about it. Careful and quiet and kind about it, always so damn kind about everything he did.
He was going to tell Finn everything. Eventually. Piece by piece, if he had to. Because he wanted — he needed Finn to know.
*
“What does he know?” Jess asked. “Specifically.”
They were at the new coffee shop by her place, hiding out in this corner by the window, BB-8 lying at Poe’s feet and working diligently at a new bone they’d picked up on the way.
“Everything,” Poe said. “Almost.”
“Almost.”
“He doesn’t... I didn’t talk about Muran, because...” He shrugged helplessly. “Because I didn’t talk about Muran.”
“Yeah,” Jess said, and when he looked up she was staring into her coffee mug, frowning. Her eyes flicked up to meet his. “You should probably talk about Muran.”
“Yeah.” Poe shifted in his chair, looking out the window. It was raining outside. It had been raining all day.
“When you say ‘everything’ —”
“Prison camp vacation,” Poe said. “Torture. Everything.”
“Except Muran.”
Poe nodded, eyes still on the window, the light reflected in the raindrops there. “It’s not a good story,” he said after a moment, feeling oddly detached. Like he was talking about a movie plot.
“But the other stuff is?” Jess said, drawing his gaze back to her. She was frowning at him now, and also slowly tearing her straw wrapper to bits. She didn’t seem to notice she was doing it.
“No,” Poe said. “I just...I can’t. I keep trying and I can’t.”
“There isn’t, like, a deadline.”
“I know.”
“I just think it’s — it might be important.”
“That he knows how messed up I am?” Poe asked, before he could stop himself. It was supposed to be a joke, but Jess just — she just looked at him, all serious.
“I just think,” she said again, and sighed, pushing the scraps of straw wrapper into a messy pile beside her glass of water. “I just think he should know about Muran. I think everybody should know about Muran. Fuck, Poe, I don’t know. There’s no deadline. You don’t have to.”
“I know,” Poe said again. “They should, though. Know about him.”
*
There had been this strange, disconnected period of time, between his capture and his rescue, during which he’d convinced himself that maybe Muran had made it out of the wreck.
After all, Poe had survived, hadn’t he? So maybe Muran was out there somewhere, somehow. Or maybe he was already back with the squadron. Maybe they were coming to get Poe right now.
Or maybe they weren’t coming at all, maybe it was too risky, and he wouldn’t blame them for that, it was just that he had to —
He had to keep telling himself maybe, maybe, maybe, or he’d never make it through the night.
And then, after they really did come for him, after he’d tried to salute the General and passed out in the attempt, after he’d woken up to a bed with clean sheets and an overpoweringly sterile hospital smell and every pain in his body suspended behind a thick, heavy wall of painkillers...
After that, he’d still had that maybe thrumming along with his heartbeat.
He knew — he had to know, of course he knew — but he’d still asked.
“Did he make it?” Poe had said to the room at large, groggy and concentrating all his energy on getting his words out in the right order.
And Jess, who had been closest to the bed, had said, “Who?”
But he couldn’t get the name out. His tongue suddenly felt too thick in his mouth, his throat too dry. He couldn’t get out two simple syllables, and so instead he’d watched her realize. He’d watched her face fall. Watched the pain flare in her eyes, heard the swell of grief in her voice when she said, “Oh, Poe. No, he...no.”
Of course he’d known. Of course he had. It wasn’t a surprise.
“Yeah,” he’d said. “I...didn’t think...” And then his eyes had stung and the room had blurred and he couldn’t speak anymore.
“Poe,” Jess had said, strangely gentle, tracing her thumb carefully below a line of stitches on his arm. “Poe,” she’d said again, and nothing else. Like she was just — just trying to keep him there, trying to keep him with her.
*
Muran had been kind. That was the most important thing about him, Poe thought, the most important thing to tell anyone. Muran had been quiet but kind, had always shared his food and books and whatever he had with whoever needed it, and his smiles were soft and rare.
But he had his own sharpness. He didn’t join in with the sort of reckless ribbing the rest of them engaged in, instead injecting his own softer, cleverer comments, funnier than anything anyone else could possibly come up with. Snap called him “kid” a lot, and he never fought it, the way Poe would have.
He was the youngest. He was the kindest. If he saw someone in trouble, he always tried to help. His grandmother had taught him to fly when he was barely ten years old. He told Poe once about the fields behind her house, the tiny biplane, the helmet that was too big, his parents’ protestations later. They’d laughed about it.
What were you thinking? Snap would say later, after Poe’s failed rescue attempt and their own successful one.
And Poe would answer, Nothing.
Because it was true. There had been no plan; his brilliantly strategic mind, which had carried him so far up till then, had utterly failed him in that instant. He hadn’t been thinking.
He’d seen Muran in trouble, and he’d tried to help.
*
So, it took a long time. Before he was ready to talk about it, to tell Finn the rest of the story — and then, one day, he just was.
Finn was sitting in his usual homework spot at the table, surrounded by books, and Poe was brushing BB-8, and it had been one of a long string of quiet days, and it was like — like something in Poe’s head just slid into place, and he thought, now.
And maybe that was just how it happened sometimes. Maybe you didn’t do anything special. You just had to wait for these invisible things to slide into place.
“Finn?” Poe said. His voice sounded kind of funny already, but that was all right.
Finn gave him a curious look. “Yeah?”
“I wanna, um...” Poe cleared his throat, putting BB’s brush down. “I wanna tell you something.”
“Okay,” said Finn, closing his book. He turned in his chair to focus his attention on Poe, calm and patient.
So Poe took a deep breath, and began.