Chapter Text
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
-- "Starlings in Winter," Mary Oliver
So, he crashes a plane.
He crashes a plane, and it’s fine, because nobody’s with him. Nobody's hurt. Hell, the plane’s hardly hurt. There's no screech of crumpling metal, no stench of smoke — just the jolt of impact, snapping Poe's head back and then slamming him into the pilot's side door as the tilting Piper lurches its way to a full stop.
For one agonized moment, he’s scrambling toward the back seat for BB-8, trying to breathe around a sharp pain in his chest. And then he remembers that BB went to the garage with Finn today. A field trip to see his favorite Aunt Rey.
So that’s okay. So everything’s fine.
By the time Han Solo’s made it across the field, Poe’s already climbed out of the cockpit and checked the Piper over, is standing there with shaking hands and steady gaze and saying, “It was the engine, the engine was—”
“To hell with the engine,” Han says, grabs him by the shoulder and holds him there. “What about you? You hurt?”
“No,” Poe says, then realizes he hasn’t bothered to check. Too busy thinking about BB-8, about the Piper's landing gear, about why the hell a perfectly fine engine would cut out on him mid-air. He feels okay, though. His hands are still shaking, and he’s having a little trouble drawing breath, but that’s standard adrenaline stuff. He feels fine.
“The engine cut,” he says. “It just — it just cut.”
“Yeah,” Han says, and his hand loosens on Poe’s shoulder. “Listen, you get yourself to the office, all right? Sit down a minute. I’ll take care of this.”
“Yeah,” Poe echoes. “Okay.” He takes a step, and the ground drops out from under him.
“Dameron,” says Han, like an epithet. There are boots crunching somewhere near his head, then a hand at his arm, and Poe starts to speak and just can’t. He loses time somehow, blinks again and finds himself sitting up in the grass with his legs sprawled out, half-leaning on — on Han-goddamn-Solo, which is either incredibly embarrassing or kind of amazing. His eyes won’t focus on anything, though; a tilt of his head brings everything blurring into a sickening mess of color.
“Kid,” says Han. “You in there?”
“I,” says Poe, and then he lurches forward and vomits in the grass. He hears Han curse.
Yeah, so. He’s gonna have to go with embarrassing.
“Okay,” Han says, “All right. You’re not walking anywhere.”
“I can,” Poe insists, and tries to shove himself upward. But his legs won’t even consider supporting him, so he just winds up sort of tipping sideways again. There’s something warm trickling down his forehead, and for a second he thinks — dizzily, stupidly — that maybe it’s raining. He goes to wipe at it and his skull ignites with pain, his hand comes back slick and red, and Han mutters, “Damn it, kid.”
And that’s about when things really start to blur.
Later he remembers there were medics, and sirens. He remembers his own surprise at that development, somewhere behind the nausea. He remembers mumbling, “You didn’t have to call an ambulance,” with a spark of indignation, and Han telling him to shut up, Poe.
He has time to marvel at that for a few seconds — he hadn’t been entirely sure that Han Solo had known his first name — and then there’s an IV drip, and after that comes a haze he can’t see through anymore.
*
He wakes up in a hospital bed, because of course he does. He’s got to have, like, the world record of waking up in hospital beds. He’s practically a connoisseur of hospital beds.
This one is surprisingly comfortable, or possibly he’s just on a lot of drugs because he also feels a little bit like he’s going to float right out of his body.
He blinks at the ceiling, breathes and flexes his fingers against the familiar tug of an IV drip. His one leg feels funny but it always does, ever since he got shot down, it’s never really been the same, so he figures he can probably discount that.
But. He’s in a hospital bed. So there’s got to be a reason.
“Poe,” says a quiet, familiar voice. Poe tries to sit up and nearly vomits into his own lap this time from the resulting dizziness.
Leia presses a hand to his shoulder, keeping him down, and he stares up at her and says, “General.” His voice is thick.
“You need to stay still,” she tells him, calm and authoritative as ever. “You got a little banged up.”
Something about those words is familiar, somehow, in a way he can’t place. “Feel fine,” he mumbles, but he stays put.
“You should,” Leia answers. “Your Doctor Kalonia has you pretty well-medicated.”
So, yeah, that might explain the floating thing. Poe closes his eyes for a second and tries very hard to come back down. “I—my head was bleeding. Right?”
“Right. You have a concussion.”
“That’s it?”
“You also broke a couple of ribs.”
“I got a little banged up,” Poe murmurs. He remembers now. Why it’s familiar. Because he said that to her, last time this happened. After the last crash.
“They want to keep you overnight for observation,” Leia tells him. Her hand is still on his shoulder, which is the only reason he doesn’t try to sit up again at this information.
“BeeBee Ate,” Poe says, his heart lurching.
“I’m told he’s with Rey.”
Which is—okay, that’s fine, BB loves Rey, but— “Finn?”
“Out in the hallway,” Leia says, looking faintly amused.
Poe starts to nod, then stops. He knows concussions. He knows better than that. “The Piper,” he says.
“Wasn’t your fault.”
“Is it okay?”
Leia sits down on the edge of the bed, regarding him with that sharp, considering gaze he’s never quite been able to meet head-on. “Han says he can work with it,” she answers, then smiles faintly. “He also says you pulled off a hell of a landing for a guy with no engine.”
Poe sighs, leaning his head back against the pillow. It aches, but only in a distant sort of way. “Sorry,” he mumbles. It’s the wrong thing to say and he knows it; Leia Organa has never had much patience for pointless apologies.
But she doesn’t seem all that impatient with him this time. “What are you sorry for?” she asks, and it sounds like she actually wants to know.
“Second time I’ve crashed on you,” Poe answers, with a humorless smile. It’s exhausting, to try to meet her eyes. To keep his own eyes open. And sort of disorienting, because—he’s been here before, clinging to consciousness in a hospital bed, trying to apologize to General Organa before his energy runs out on him. He knows how this goes, how his sense of reality is about to start blurring, how hard it’ll be to get any words out after that.
“Poe,” says the General, “you’ve never crashed on me.”
“I was...”
“You were shot down,” she says. “And you had an engine cut out on you.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. He squints at the fluorescent lights above them. They’re not as flickery as he remembers. The last time this happened.
“That isn’t the same thing.”
And he shouldn’t argue with her. But it’s like he can’t help himself, like part of him wants to prove her wrong, wants to convince her. I let you down, he wants to say. Don’t pretend I didn’t.
“Almost,” is what he says, and closes his eyes.
“Not even close,” Leia replies sharply. He feels her weight leave the bed and struggles hard to open his eyes again. Leia is looking down at him with a particular tiredness that he recognizes, that brings a wave of guilt washing over him.
There are a lot of things he should say to her, probably. There are a lot of things he owes her, a lot of apologies she doesn’t want to hear. He should say thank you, for staying with him. He should ask if Han wants help repairing the Piper. He should ask who’s covering his shifts, should maybe recommend Pava.
He should tell her he knows it wasn’t technically a crash, but that it feels like one. That it never stops feeling like one.
He can’t, of course. Even if she’d let him, he can’t get the words all strung together in the right order.
“Overnight?” he manages, after what feels like far too long.
“Maybe longer,” Leia answers. “But probably not. You always bounce back fast.”
“I do,” Poe agrees, and sees her lips curve in what might be a smile.
“Your boyfriend is out there wringing his hands,” she tells him. “Should I send him in?”
“Finn,” Poe says. It comes out a sigh.
Now he’s sure she’s smiling. “Yes.”
“Yeah,” Poe says, blinking hard to try to keep his eyes open. “Please.”
“All right.” She reaches out to brush the curls away from his forehead, which should probably be embarrassing but just feels sort of nice. “But get some rest.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Poe says, and he’s drifting off again before she’s even out the door.
*
He wakes up again to Finn’s voice, which is great, because that’s one of his top three favorite ways to wake up in the world. Finn’s talking softly to him, holding his hand, and Poe takes a while to understand the actual words.
“Rey sent me a picture of BeeBee,” Finn says. His thumb brushes back and forth over Poe’s palm. “She has him all tucked in for bed — in my bed, by the way — and she took him out before to get a new toy and everything, it’s ridiculous, he’s getting all spoiled. So you don’t have to worry about that.”
“Thanks,” Poe murmurs without opening his eyes, and feels Finn freeze.
“Hey,” Finn says, breathless. “Hey, you’re awake.”
“Working on it,” Poe answers, and shifts his shoulders, curls his toes, tries to get some sense of what’s hurt and what isn’t. Ribs, he remembers. Concussion. Was that it? This time?
Finn lets out this heavy sigh, and then he kisses Poe’s forehead. “You don’t have to,” he says. “You can sleep. You’re supposed to sleep.”
“Wanna see you,” Poe answers, and manages to open his eyes right then, which is some damn good timing, so at least he’s gotten something right in the last twenty-four hours. Finn’s sitting by the bed and smiling at him, but his eyes are glassy, and Poe suddenly wants to lean up and kiss him more than anything in the world. He settles for squeezing Finn’s hand.
“Thanks for coming,” he says, like a moron. Like he’s hosting the world’s worst dinner party.
Finn gives a ragged laugh. “You have no idea,” he says. “You have no idea how fucking — fuck, man, you scared me.”
Poe frowns. He drags Finn’s hand toward his lips, presses a firm kiss to Finn’s knuckles and then just holds both their hands together against his chest, too dizzy to let go.
“Sorry,” he says, and then repeats it for some reason. It’s a weirdly easy word to say right now. It’s like he’s caught on it. “Sorry, sorry.”
But Finn doesn’t like pointless apologies either, and he shakes his head and touches Poe’s cheek with his free hand, lets his fingers trail down over the stubble on Poe’s jaw. He says, “You’re okay.”
Is he? Poe thinks back, tries to pick reality out from muddled memory. “Concussion,” he comes up with. “Broken ribs. Um. Couple of those. Right?”
“Yeah,” Finn says. “Yeah, that’s right.”
Poe gives him a tired grin. “S’nothing. You shoulda seen last time.”
He hears Finn’s breath catch, and then exhale in another shaky laugh. “I don’t know, man, I don’t think I could’ve handled that.”
“It wasn’t good,” Poe agrees.
“No. I know.”
“You stay here all night?” Poe asks, squinting, trying to find a clock somewhere in the room.
“It’s still night.”
“Oh.” And then realization hits him. “Wait, you — you have class.”
“Tomorrow, yeah.”
“You should go home,” Poe says, shifting up onto his elbows. It hurts, but it’s impossible to tell where the hurt is coming from anyway, so he ignores it. “Go home and sleep.”
Finn shakes his head again. “Poe — ”
“Buddy, I’m fine.”
Finn snorts. “You’re definitely not fine.”
Poe tips his head just slightly in acknowledgment. That hurts a lot. The drugs are probably wearing off — they’ve gotta be, since he’s speaking in mostly-complete sentences and everything. “I’m gonna be, though. I’m not goin’ anywhere.”
“Yeah,” Finn says. “Me either.”
Poe lets out a quiet, exasperated huff. But he hasn’t let go of Finn’s hand, so he’s not really sure who he thinks he’s fooling.
*
Kalonia releases him late the next afternoon with a bottle of pills, strict instructions as to how much he’s allowed to do (surprise: it’s approximately nothing), and a follow-up appointment scheduled for the end of the week. She gives him said instructions in front of Finn—in fact she mainly seems to be addressing Finn, which is sort of humiliating and sort of a relief, because Poe can’t seem to hold onto anything anybody’s telling him for very long. He doesn’t know if that’s the drugs or the concussion.
Snap comes and picks them up in the green soccer mom van, the one Poe and Jess had made fun of nonstop for like a full six months after Karé and Snap bought it. Poe’s kind of grateful for it now, though, because it’s got room for him to lie down semi-comfortably across the backseat, his head in Finn’s lap.
And Finn holds him steady, threading his fingers gently through Poe’s hair, which is almost nice enough to make up for the swell of nausea every time they hit a bump or take a tight turn.
“Everybody’s waiting for you, boss,” Snap tells him, after they’ve pulled out of the hospital parking lot. Poe tilts his head in time to see Snap’s anxious glance. His voice is steady, though, not a trace of nerves, because that’s Snap for you. “I just wanna warn you. I tried to tell ’em to hold off, but—well, you know how they get.”
Poe mulls this over for a moment. It’s not like it’s surprising; probably he’s just lucky they hadn’t mobbed his hospital room, but...
“Are they mad at me?” he asks.
“No,” Snap answers, too quickly. “It’s not your fault, man, we know that.”
“Jess is still gonna yell at me,” Poe mumbles, lifting his arm to hide his eyes.
“Jess isn’t gonna yell at you,” Snap says, but even he sounds sort of doubtful.
*
Jess doesn’t yell at him, and that’s worse, actually. As it turns out. Instead she just looks at him like—like he’s being dragged into the medbay on a stretcher again, like she thought he was dead, like she’s worried he still might be.
The others alternate between scolding and threatening. Iolo tells him he’s a lucky bastard and sounds deeply irritated about it, following behind as Snap and Finn walk Poe carefully to his bed. Karé brings him a glass of water and tells him that if he fucks up his doctor’s orders this time around she’s going to send him right back to the hospital, which just seems counterproductive.
But Jess is quiet, and Jess is never quiet, so Poe waits until the others are huddled out in the kitchen together before he reaches out and lightly punches her on the arm. “Pava, I’m fine.”
“I know that,” she says, frowning down at him. “You’re always fine. You get shot down and you get hit by cars and you drop out of the fucking sky and you’re fine. Every time.”
“Every time,” Poe agrees.
Jess grips his hand. Hard enough to hurt, maybe on purpose.
“Pava,” he says again, quieter. “I didn’t mean to...”
“I know,” Jess repeats. “I know. I can’t even get mad at you. I’m not mad at you, I just.” She lets go of him, clenches her hands into fists instead, resting just above her knees. “You don’t know what it was like,” she says. “You didn’t have to watch any of us come back like that.”
“I—”
“If you apologize to me, Dameron, I swear to god—”
“No, I just. I wish you didn’t have to. To watch that.”
Jess doesn’t say anything for a moment. And then she climbs onto the bed beside him, leaning back across the pillows and staring up at the ceiling. “I still dream about it,” she says, after a while.
And for some reason, Poe chokes on a laugh. “Me too,” he says.
Jess shifts onto her side to look at him, propped up on her elbow, her hair falling over her shoulder. “So you’re pretty concussed, huh?”
Poe makes a face at her. “Do I look concussed?”
Jess snorts. “Poe, you look like—I don’t know, you look like you crawled out of a wreck.”
“Didn’t crawl,” Poe says indignantly, and closes his eyes against a sudden wave of nausea. “Stood right up and walked out.”
“’Course you did,” Jess says. “Commander Dameron always rises to the challenge.”
Poe opens his mouth to say something to that, although he isn’t sure what, isn’t sure if he ever manages to get it out. Delayed exhaustion from the ride home is pouring over him now, thick and heavy.
He must say something, though, because Jess says, “Yeah, always. Don’t start with that shit again.”
*
The next time he wakes up it’s with BB-8 sleeping next to him, and Finn out cold next to BB, lying flat on his back with his mouth open. Poe strokes BB’s ears and watches Finn for a while, considers leaning over to kiss his cheek before he remembers his ribs. So instead he sits up cautiously, feeling a distinct lack of pain meds in his system, and pads toward the kitchen as quietly as he can.
Which, as it turns out, is a good move, because there are no less than five people sleeping in his living room.
Karé and Snap are sprawled out together with some pillows on the floor, Jess and Iolo are somehow managing to share the couch, and Rey — Rey is here, for some reason, sleeping curled up in the armchair, which cannot possibly be comfortable.
Poe stops cold, blinking at his unexpected house guests. He opens his mouth, then closes it, because. Well. Okay? Okay. Sure.
He inches along behind the couch, silent as he can be, and manages somehow to get an entire pot of coffee brewed without anybody getting up. But all it takes is the sound of BB-8 jumping off the bed and shaking his collar for everybody to start shifting.
Snap is the first one fully awake, and he sees Poe and sits up, disheveled but smiling. “Hey, bud,” he says.
“Snap,” Poe answers, standing there and looking around as Iolo and Jess disentangle themselves, and Karé brushes at her hair, and Rey stretches like a cat. He clears his throat. “You guys know I’m not dying, right?”
“Never can tell with you,” Karé answers, and stands up. “You made coffee?”
“Yeah,” Poe says, and watches as she goes over to start pouring out mugs. He turns back toward the ragtag gathering in his living room. “Yeah, so, for the record? For the room at large. Not dying.” He winces at a sharp flare of pain in his side as he goes to sit down at the kitchen table. “Broken ribs,” he says, half-reminding himself. “But no death in the forecast. Promise I’ll call if that changes.”
“You can’t kick us out,” Iolo says.
Poe fixes him with what he hopes is a stern look. “Did I say I was gonna kick you out?”
“I’m being proactive.”
“I could kick you out.”
Iolo arches one manicured brow. “But you’re not going to.”
Poe starts to rub at his forehead, feels the line of stitches there, and stops. “You know, I don’t know yet?” he says. “And Rey, don’t take this the wrong way, but — why are you here?”
“BeeBee,” Rey says simply, which she seems to feel is explanation enough. She’s trailing Jess and Iolo toward the coffee now.
“Right. Okay, I’m...”
“You’re s’posed to be resting, boss,” Snap says calmly. “Don’t worry about us.”
“You’re all in my apartment.”
“Yeah, and we can take care of ourselves.”
“Don’t you have jobs?” Poe tries.
“Don’t worry about us,” Snap repeats, and comes over to sit down with him at the table as Karé doles out coffee to the two of them. Poe hadn’t even realized he had that many mugs. In fact he’s pretty sure he doesn’t have that many mugs, but — there are more important things to focus on just now.
“My job is worrying about you,” Poe mutters, and gets a gentle shove at his shoulder from Karé.
“You’re retired, Commander Dumbass.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes I forget,” Poe retorts. “Under special circumstances. Like when my entire squadron shows up uninvited to my living room.”
“Rey came too,” Jess points out, and Rey beams sleepily at him.
“Yeah,” Poe says, and somehow he can’t help smiling back at her. “Yeah. Listen, thanks for taking care of BeeBee.”
“He’s the best,” Rey says, with a wave of her hand.
“Yeah,” Poe says, grinning. “I know.”
“You’re not s’posed to be up,” comes Finn’s voice from the bedroom, and Poe turns very, very carefully to see his boyfriend looking deeply dismayed and also wearing one of Poe’s hoodies. BB-8 isn’t far behind. He comes bounding past Finn, tail wagging wildly, apparently overjoyed to see the living room still full of people.
“Oh, BeeBee, you need to go out,” Poe murmurs. He starts to stand up and gets an immediate chorus of reprimands, ranging from “Don’t you dare,” (Finn) to “Poe fucking Dameron, you sit the fuck down” (Jess).
He sits back down.
“I’ll do it,” Rey says brightly, and goes over to clip BB’s leash on. She also appears to be wearing one of Poe’s hoodies, somehow? Poe decides not to question this.
“You’re not supposed to be up,” Finn repeats, less gravelly and sleep-deprived sounding this time. “Kalonia said—”
“I’m fine,” Poe protests. It comes out significantly more whiny than he’d meant, so he rolls with it, exaggerates it to his liking. “We have company over, Finn, don’t embarrass me.”
Jess snorts. “Go back to bed, Dameron,” she says. “We can take it from here.”
He wants to argue with her, he really, truly does, but he’s already starting to feel exhaustion creeping up again. “I don’t know,” he says, leaning back in the chair. “I think you m—” And then there’s a stab of pain to his ribs that jolts him forward again, knocks the air right out of him. His head pounds and his vision strobes, and he blinks himself back in time to see Jess and Snap exchanging glances.
“Okay, boss, you’re done,” Snap says firmly, and somehow Finn’s in front of Poe with the bottle of meds Kalonia had given them.
“You’re taking two of these,” Finn says, shaking the pills out into his palm, “and then you’re done.”
Poe wants to protest this frankly insulting treatment — he isn’t a kid, he’s done the hospital thing enough times to know how to take care of his own damn self — but Finn’s face is very close to his now and it’s distracting.
“You need to shave,” Poe tells him, and reaches out to touch Finn’s jawline, trailing fingertips over rough stubble. Finn blinks at him and then smiles, his expression softening.
“Yeah. And you need to take two of these.” He presses the pills into Poe’s hand and sets a glass of water on the table. Poe swallows them down with the practiced ease of the semi-professional patient. Things start to go fuzzy pretty quick after that.
“It’s another fade to black,” Poe informs Finn, as he’s escorted back toward his bed.
“A what?” Finn says, and Poe sighs.
“A fade,” he says mournfully. “To black. End scene. That’s my life now. Like, for the movie version.” He probably isn’t making complete sense, but Finn doesn’t seem to mind.
“Okay,” Finn says, and helps Poe sit down on the edge of the bed. Which is not a thing he should require help for, which makes him feel suddenly and disproportionately sad.
“The movie,” Poe repeats, shifting himself slowly, slowly toward lying down. Broken ribs. Why did it have to be ribs? Broken ribs are a pain in the — well. The ribs. He almost laughs aloud at that, but he doesn’t really feel like getting any more worried looks from Finn today.
“The movie,” he repeats instead, a third time. “It’s a, you know. Action thing. Dashing pilot—”
Finn’s lips quirk upward. “Dashing, huh?”
“—escapes wreck, gets all...” Poe waves a hand sort of around his face. He’s actually not one hundred percent certain what he’s trying to indicate; his thoughts are getting more and more slippery. “And then. Fades to black. And that’s me, now. Just like that. Over and over.”
“Oh, yeah,” says Finn, like he gets it now, and Poe thinks maybe he actually does, which is probably some kind of miracle.
He really likes that about Finn. The overall miraculousness of him. He tells Finn this, he’s pretty sure, except his words are slurring now.
“You like my miraculousness?” Finn says, and Poe starts to nod vehemently, then stops, pressing a hand to his forehead.
“I — yeah. Yes,” he mumbles.
“Okay,” Finn says, after a pause, and he leans down to kiss Poe very, very lightly, just below the cut on his brow. Poe closes his eyes and sighs.
And as the fade-to-black picks up speed, he hears Finn say, “I like yours too.”
*
*
*
He doesn’t dream about the crash. Either of them. He dreams about Muran, standing at the edge of the airfield, looking up at the stars.
And then he wakes up alone in the dark, head throbbing, ribs burning. He wakes up alone in the dark, and that’s not — not right, that shouldn’t — this can’t — he can’t he can’t —
“Hey, hey, you’re okay,” comes Snap’s voice, and Poe doesn’t realize he’s sitting up until he feels Snap’s hand gently pushing him back down. “Breathe,” Snap says.
So Poe does. It hurts like hell, like there’s a knife between his ribs, but he does. Somewhere between deep breaths three and four, Snap flicks on the bedside light, and Poe’s heart stops racing quite so fast.
“Can you leave that on,” he hears himself say hoarsely, and doesn’t know why he’s saying it. Knows Snap isn’t gonna shut it off and leave him in the dark, but just in case — just in case, he has to...
“Sure,” Snap says easily, like it’s not a weird request at all. “Got you some water here. Snacks, too, if you want ’em.”
“Thanks,” Poe says, too quiet. And he doesn’t want to say it, he doesn’t want Snap to know, doesn’t want anyone to know, but the words trip out of his mouth anyway: “I was...I mean, they...kept me in the dark.”
He feels Snap tense just from the hand on his arm. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, I mean, it’s not a big deal, it hasn’t been, like, an actual problem. I dunno why I thought of it. The meds, maybe, they’re...” He gestures vaguely at his head.
“Could be, sure.”
Poe nods, then lowers his head and swallows, waits until he knows his voice won’t crack before he asks. “Where’s BeeBee?”
“Finn’s out walking him,” Snap says, sitting on the edge of the bed now. His hand has moved to Poe’s shoulder, just resting there. “Asked me to keep an eye on you.”
“He worries too much,” Poe mutters.
Snap squeezes Poe’s shoulder. “I think he worries the right amount.”
Poe shakes his head a little. “Is everybody still –?”
“Just me and Finn. Figured you’d want some space.”
Poe snorts. “Little late for that.” It’s not very nice of him, he knows that, but he’s still on edge, nerves jolting at every noise from the apartment building hallway. Footsteps sounding too close, a door closing too loud, murmuring voices he can’t understand, and his dog isn’t here, and Finn isn’t here, and he woke up alone, he woke up alone in the dark.
“They needed to see you,” Snap says quietly. “They don’t...you scared everybody, back then, you know? So I told them you were okay, but they needed to see it. They wanted to make sure.”
“Didn’t do it on purpose.”
Snap frowns at him. “What?”
“You said — the way you said it. Like I wanted to scare you.” Poe reaches out for the water bottle on the bedside table. His hands aren’t shaking, so he takes a sip.
Snap’s hand drifts back down, away from Poe. “You know I didn’t mean it like that.”
Somebody slams a door somewhere in the hallway. Poe’s shoulders jump.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m...look, I’m sorry, Snap, I can’t...”
“It’s okay,” Snap says. Like he means it. Like it really is somehow.
"Yeah," Poe repeats. And isn't sure, suddenly, if he believes it.