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Poe Dameron trudged up the stairs leading to the base’s roof, drained from a day packed with intense strategy meetings and intel analysis. It’d been a long couple of weeks since the Resistance had made the all but forgotten Rebel holdout on Dantooine their new base of operations, but if he was being completely honest, it’d been a long couple of months.
In the immediacy after the Battle of Crait, he’d been right in the thick of everything: leading missions for supplies, allies, information—anything that would help the Resistance rebuild. Leia had reinstated him as Commander, which quickly turned into to a promotion to Lieutenant Commander. It was a promotion that he wanted to protest given everything that had happened, but the Resistance was short on leadership and Poe had long since learned not to second guess the General.
Back when he’d spent months searching for Lor San Tekka, Leia had told Poe that she needed him to be more than just a pilot, but he hadn’t listened to her then—not truly. He knew that he was impulsive. He’d been taught at the academy that acting on instinct was what helps you become a great pilot—air combat maneuvering drilled into you until you could pull high g barrel rolls and kulpits on pure muscle memory leaving your mind clear and centered during a dogfight. It did not, however, make you a great leader. Not when your focus was only on what was immediately outside of your cockpit, completely missing the bigger picture. It was a lesson he had learned the hard way, the consequences of which still haunted him in his sleep all these months later.
So, Poe took his promotion with a silent, grateful nod and got to work. He was quick to find out, however, that this new rank meant he spent more time in conference rooms and the command center than in an X-wing. Something that he was still struggling to be fine with.
Rationally, he knew that his work strategizing with Leia and the rest of the Resistance leadership was important. His experience running some of the Resistance’s more precarious missions on his own or with Black Squadron was proving to be invaluable during intel debriefs and the strategizing of future equally risky undertakings. It was just harder than he’d anticipated to come to terms with the fact that he wouldn’t be the one executing them. Poe had spent his entire career in the line of fire—often literally—and listening to missions as they unfolded, or worse, sitting in command listening to radio silence, was not something he particularly enjoyed.
He belonged to the stars—he was not made for this. For waiting.
Poe could feel the anxious energy build inside him as the day progressed—the seventh day in a row where he hadn’t even run so much as a flight drill—which was how he found himself on the rooftop over the barracks. He hoped that simply seeing the stars would help him feel less frustrated about not being able to fly among them.
What he did not expect was company.
“Oh, sorry!” he sputtered upon seeing Rey sitting near the roof’s edge, staring up at the night sky. She’d looked so peaceful in the seconds it took for her to sense his presence, he felt genuine guilt for accidentally intruding. Poe knew all too well how hard it was to find quiet moments on the active base, “I didn’t realize…I can go if—“
Rey cut him off with a smile and simple pat on the ground next to her.
“Nonsense.” She replied in that blunt way of hers Poe found completely endearing, “Come sit. There’s plenty of room.”
After their initial introduction after Crait, the two had gotten to know each other relatively well. Poe knew that she was important to Finn as well as BB-8 which automatically meant that she was important to him, but as the weeks passed, the two of them became friends in their own right, often being paired together on special operations. He and the young Jedi made quite the formidable team running missions by themselves or alongside Finn and Rose. Rey had even joined a few of the particularly dangerous recon missions with Black Squadron if they had even the smallest amount of intel that Kylo Ren could make an appearance. Over the weeks, he’d gotten to know her better and quickly understood why his friends had been so taken with her.
Rey was a walking contradiction that Poe found fascinating.
She was smart and so incredibly clever despite having spent the majority of her life in a dessert junkyard with no formal education or training of any kind. She was funny and always quick to smile despite having experienced true horrors in her life. She was one of the only people on base who hadn’t tired of hearing his—admittedly many—stories, always listening with rapt attention as he recounted the countless missions he’d gone on for both the Resistance and during his tenure with the New Republic’s navy. At the same time, she would never shy away from calling him out if he ever started to act like a “hotshot flyboy” as she had put it one day in the mess hall when he had been particularly pleased with his flying combinations during the most recent airstrike against the one of the First Order’s star destroyers.
Teasing and sarcasm aside—and boy did Poe find out she had quite the sarcastic streak—Rey was the kindest person he had ever met despite how decidedly unkind the universe had been to her.
She had quickly gone from someone he knew about through mutual friends to one of the most important friendships he had in the Resistance. A lot of that, he knew, was circumstance—forced proximity and life or death situations would forge camaraderie with just about anyone—but the more time he spent with her, however, the more Poe realized that he felt something more.
Something that was harder to define and even more difficult to admit to. Especially when you were in the middle of a war and working to grow the Resistance’s footing in the galaxy was priority number one now that they had the means and steady influx of recruits to do so. It almost felt selfish to even entertain the idea that there could be something more between him and the young Jedi.
That being said, it took all of one day after his new duties had been assigned for Poe to realize how much he missed those lengthy conversations in the cockpit of the Falcon where they talked about everything and nothing as they traveled for hours through hyperspace. Maybe if they survived this, he would work up the courage to ask Rey on a proper date, but until then, he was content with spending time with her outside of their endless meetings in whatever way he could.
And so Poe sat next to her on the roof of the Resistance base, away from the hustle and bustle he knew was going on in the barracks beneath them—the two of them simply gazing up at the stars in silence. It was the happiest he'd been in days.
“I never get tired of it.” He said after what could have been five minutes or fifty. Time seemed to work differently whenever he was around her.
Rey turned to look at him, “Tired of what?”
He pointed upwards, “The stars.”
“Me either.” She grinned, shifting so that she no longer sat in her meditative pose. She moved to stretch her legs, her knees cracking in a way that made Poe briefly wonder just how long she had been up on the roof that night.
“Back on Jakku, I used to try to find things hidden in them.” She continued, “Connect the dots so that they formed a picture. A story.”
Much like with every detail Poe learned about her past, his heart broke a little at the loneliness her statement implied. Knowing that she did not need—or want—his pity, he gestured upwards and asked, “What stories are hidden up there?”
Rey considered his question for a moment, before raising her arm, pointing at directly in front of them, “You see that bright star there?”
He leaned in closer to see which star she was singling out, “Yeah?”
“Okay, now see the star above it?” she shifted her hand slightly, pointing at another, “The one that looks as though it’s flickering?”
“Yeah?”
Rey lowered her arm, “That’s her heart.”
She had said it so matter-of-factly, it took Poe a moment to register her words, “Whose heart?”
“Queen Or’la.” She shrugged.
“And how did Queen Or’la end up in the night sky?” he asked, playing along.
“Well…” Rey trailed off, clearly making up the story on the spot, “She was a very beautiful queen…but not very humble.”
“Oh?”
“She would brag to anyone who would listen, which was pretty much everyone considering she was the queen,” Rey explained, her smile growing, “that she was the most beautiful woman in the whole galaxy.”
Poe’s eyebrows shot up, “The whole galaxy, you say?”
“She bragged about her beauty so much, she started to claim that she was more beautiful than the gods.” Rey paused for dramatic effect before adding, “A claim that made Calixte pretty angry.”
“Calixte?”
“Goddess of love and beauty.” Rey responded.
“Ah, yes. Her.” Poe snapped his fingers as if she had reminded him of the name of a goddess that wasn’t almost certainly made up.
“Anyway,” Rey continued, rolling her eyes and giving him a good-natured shove with her shoulder, “you could imagine how well Or’la’s claim of being the most beautiful creature in the galaxy went over with Calixte.”
“I’m guessing not very well.”
“It was catastrophic. Calixte was so mad that she punished Or’la by placing her in the sky, doomed to live there for all eternity for us mere mortals to point and laugh at. All because of her vanity.”
“How humiliating.” Poe agreed, taking another look at the flickering star.
“Especially because she’s upside down.”
Poe threw his head back, barking with laughter at the unexpected twist.
“She’s upside down?” He asked incredulously, “Talk about adding insult to injury.”
“Yeah, see?” Once again, Poe leaned closer to Rey—his heartbeat picking up as he did—following where she was singling out the stars that made up her constellation, “Head, heart…torso, legs, feet.”
“Huh…strangely enough, I see it.” He said, shocked to find that he actually did see the poor arrogant queen, upside down in the Dantooine sky. He looked over at the young Jedi to find her grinning at him so winningly that he couldn’t stop a smile of his own from forming.
He felt his cheeks begin to burn ever so slightly and quickly looked away, searching the night sky once more, “Okay, what about that one?”
This time, Rey leaned in towards him and it took all of Poe’s strength to force his breathing to remain steady as she slowly crept into his personal space, trying to spot the star he was pointing to.
“Ah! Yes!” She exclaimed, settling back in her spot upon seeing it, “That one is a porg who flew too high. Too curious for his own good, poor little fellow.”
“What were the stars’ stories on Jakku?” he asked, eager to hear more.
“Let’s see…” Rey trailed off as she thought, her nose scrunching in the way that Poe had observed it did whenever she learned something new or was working through a particularly tricky problem.
“There was Davryn the Smuggler. He moved throughout the year to avoid detection.” Rey waved her hand across sky as if to illustrate her point, “There was Marlax, the Scavenger. He got lost in the sky trying to find the best parts. Has yet to find his way back down.”
Poe shook his head, chuckling at Rey’s words—the stress of the day long since forgotten.
“What about you?” she asked, “Did the stars have stories where you’re from?”
“No stories…” he answered, pausing as he glanced back up at the sky, “But my mother always said that the first star that shines in the night sky possesses a…special kind of magic. That if you see it before any other star appears in the sky, you can make a wish and it’ll come true.” He finished, nearly losing himself in the memories.
He rarely talked to anyone about his mother.
“What would you wish for?” Rey asked, her voice suddenly soft as though she recognized that they were talking about a sensitive subject.
Poe shrugged, wanting to keep the mood light after such a long day, “Regular kid stuff: extra koyo melon for dessert, to stay up past bedtime, to ride up in my mom’s old A-wing.”
“And did they always come true?”
Poe didn’t answer immediately. He sat there remembering how he had wished for his mother to get better when she had first fallen ill. How he made a silent promise to the heavens that he would never wish for anything else so long his mother would wake up when she had slipped into a coma a week later.
He thought about how much he had hated himself back then—as much as an eight-year-old could—for wasting his wishes on things like dessert and joyrides in his mother’s A-wing when he simply should have been wishing for his mother. He thought about how all of his wishes had come true except for the ones that mattered the most. It wasn’t until much later that he fully understood that no amount of wishing would have been able to cure his mother’s terminal illness.
But in that moment Rey was looking at him as though she needed confirmation that there was still hope left in the galaxy, which after their latest intel on the First Order’s next move, was something he didn’t blame her for. Right now, they needed to grab onto hope—perhaps even a little magic—wherever they could find it to get through these next few weeks.
So he said with a soft smile as his eyes met hers, “Always.”
Of all the places on Dantooine, the base’s rooftop was by far Rey’s favorite.
Deep down, she knew that a lot of that—okay, all of it—had to do with a certain pilot she spent most of her time with on said rooftop, but that didn’t stop her from telling herself that it was because of how clear the night sky appeared from up there. Stargazing was something she had done on Jakku after an especially trying day. It had given her comfort then and it was giving her comfort now—when the responsibilities and weight of being the Last Jedi became simply too much and she just wanted to be Rey again.
To be with someone who treated her like a friend and not the universe’s salvation.
By some unspoken agreement, she met Poe in their secluded corner of the rooftop every night since that first one where they had spent nearly the entire evening gazing up at the stars. They had become friends in the time they had spent together in the months after Crait, but something fundamental in their friendship seemed to shift after that first night they spent above the barracks. Their conversations were a little more meaningful, the two of them sharing stories that were more personal than the ones they had traded whenever they had downtime on their previous missions.
Every time she searched the Force for meaning, it told her the same frustratingly vague thing—that something was about to change.
Rey knew the war was far from over, but she couldn’t help but feel a prickle of significance every time she glanced at Poe—as though the Force was trying to tell her something she couldn’t quite understand yet. Something she still needed time to figure out.
So she sat there every night with him, talking. Sometimes they talked about their lives before the Resistance and sometimes they talked about nothing at all, simply content to sit next to each other in silence. Rey looked forward to that time they spent together, counting down the hours of the day until she could sneak away. She knew that Finn had caught on to her frequent disappearances, but for some reason he wasn’t calling her out on it. He would just pointedly look at Poe before meeting her gaze with a not-so-subtle wink and Rey would feel her cheeks grow warm from the implication. Finn had become fast friends with Poe during the time Rey had spent on Ahch-To and it only made sense that she try to become friends with the pilot too. Especially since some combination of the three of them were often tasked to run missions together.
And she had gotten on quite well with Poe ever since she had made that overly rational deduction. He was everything she had imagined a Resistance hero would be growing up on Jakku. He was an incredible pilot, his moniker as being the Resistance’s best was more than just bravado. He was confident, but never arrogant—at least, not that she saw. She had heard about the mutiny on the Raddus and while she had no reference for what he was like before Crait, she knew that it had profoundly changed him. He was the first to put himself on the line—a trait she was sure had developed as a result of said changes—never asking anything of his squadron that he wouldn’t do himself.
Impossible odds, it seemed, were his specialty.
But Rey found Poe to be more than just the pilot he so often dismissed himself as being. He was smart, practically giving Rey a run for her portions when it came to calculating lightspeed coordinates—a talent she had honed during those long sandstorms when she was trapped within her AT-AT-turned-home running through countless flight simulations. He was funny, never losing his sense of humor no matter what circumstance he found himself in—Rey had nearly fallen out of the pilot’s seat of the Falcon when he had told her he had called General Hux “Hugs” practically to his face before blowing up one of the fleet’s dreadnaughts as they evacuated D’Qar.
Most importantly, though, Poe was kind. He never treated her any differently than he did anyone else, immediately welcoming her into the fold when it took several days for some of the other Resistance members to stop staring at her with a reverence she felt like she didn’t deserve after Crait. He was free with his words, always happy to answer any question she had and never in a way that made her feel embarrassed when she learned something that was otherwise common knowledge. When she had begun to open up to him during their longer missions, he never looked at her with pity—something not even Finn could do whenever she casually mentioned a particularly awful detail of what it was like working for Unkar Plutt.
As the nights they spent on the rooftop passed, Rey found herself thinking that she had grown to like Poe Dameron so much, that she would actually let him fly the Falcon the next mission they were assigned together.
But as it turned out, however, the next mission was one that Black Squadron was to take on their own and Poe was given clearance to lead from his newly acquired Black One instead of the command center. While she couldn’t help but be happy for her friend knowing how much being kept on the sidelines these past few weeks had weighed on him, she couldn’t help but feel a little sting over being the one that was left behind. Again.
It made sense—Rey knew it did—to have the seasoned special ops team take the extremely dangerous and highly classified mission to gather intel from their newest lead. The potential information was too crucial—a new weapon that the First Order was rumored to be building in a remote Outer Rim System. Rey just hated that since it was a fact-finding mission only—assuming things went according to plan—it didn’t make sense to dispatch the Resistance’s young Jedi as well.
So instead, Rey took Poe’s place in the command center, analyzing the information that his squadron sent back. At night, she resolutely sat alone in their spot on the roof, feeling his absence not physically, but intrinsically—as if a part of herself that she couldn’t quite define was also missing.
The intensity of her feelings after he left took her by surprise. After all, she missed Finn and Rose when they would leave for missions, but it was nothing compared to what she felt when she sat above the barracks night after night, fervently searching the sky for the evening’s first star.
Wishing for Poe to return.
He had been gone for nearly two weeks when the distress call came in. That medics would be needed in the hangar upon their arrival.
Black Squadron had been caught during their reconnaissance and had escaped a dogfight with a fleet of TIEs and a dreadnaught—but just barely.
Rey anxiously watched them land, her heart threatening to leap out of her chest as she took in the condition of the squadron’s X-wings as they touched ground in the hanger one by one. Of how one pilot in particular practically needed to be lifted out of the cockpit of his new black and orange starfighter—the one that Rey had personally seen to during its pre-flight check in what seemed like a lifetime ago.
It was in that moment that Rey realized just what exactly it was she had been missing those two weeks.
Poe Dameron wasn’t just someone she liked. He was the person in this galaxy that she loved with what felt like her entire heart…
…and he almost didn’t make it back to her.
The force of the sudden realization caused her to turn on her heels and bolt, the stifling chaos of the hanger becoming too much. She escaped to the place that made her feel safe. The place where she knew Poe would find her once he was cleared to leave med bay.
If he was cleared to leave med bay.
She sat there for hours, gazing up at the sky, but she didn’t dare leave. She didn't know what would happen if she went inside and found out...
Her mind couldn't even finish that chain of thought.
It wasn’t until Dantooine’s sun started to peak over the horizon that she sensed his presence. It was weaker than she was used to it being, his Force signature not quite as radiant, but it was there. Behind her.
Next to her.
If Poe had seen that she had been crying, he kept the observation to himself, simply sitting next to Rey in silence as if he knew that she needed to be the first one to speak.
“I should have been more specific with my wish.” She said, wincing when her voice warbled—hoarse from the sobs she had been suppressing.
Rey turned to look at him, fresh tears threatening to fall as she took in the butterfly bandages that were keeping the gash above his right eye closed. The violently purple bruising that started at the base of his neck and no doubt grew in intensity the farther down it traveled. How his left arm hung limply in the sling that secured it.
“I should have wished for you to come back unharmed—not just that you would come back.”
She lowered her head unable to meet his gaze any longer.
Rey didn’t even realize that she had started to cry again until she felt Poe gingerly wipe them away—his touch so delicate that it almost didn’t feel real. He rested his hand underneath her chin, his fingers warm and steady as they slowly tilted her head so that she met his gaze once more.
That touch was definitely real.
Her eyes locked onto his and she was met with an expression that she had never seen on his face before—a strange combination of concern, yearning, and determination. His eyes were dark with an intensity that made her stomach flutter and in that moment, she instinctively knew that not only did he know what it was she had felt in the hangar, that he felt it too.
“It’s okay.” He whispered; his voice as urgent as she felt, “I’m okay. I’m here. With you.”
Relief coursed through her body as she closed her eyes, her tears falling freely once more.
He was here. He was safe. He was with her.
“For as long as you’ll have me.” He added before she felt his lips press against her forehead.
Rey couldn’t help the sob that escaped her lips at his words—at the promise that was threaded within them. She took Poe’s good hand in hers, gently running her thumb over his battered knuckles before giving them a kiss of her own.
“Good, because I don’t ever plan to let you go.” She said, returning the promise.
She rested her head on his good shoulder and Poe gave her another kiss, this one near her hairline and Rey couldn’t help but wonder what those lips would feel like pressed against her own.
But they had plenty of time ahead for that.
For now, after spending countless nights gazing at the stars, hand in hand, they finally watched the sun rise.
Together.