Archive of Our Own

The first time Poe Dameron saw Ben Solo, the guy was sitting in the tree above his mother’s tombstone.

Seeing someone else in the tree made him irrationally angry, even though it wasn’t like he’d posted a KEEP OUT sign on the path through the hills. Still, he’d gotten used to thinking of it as his space. There hadn’t been a body to bury, so he and his father had planted a tree instead, in the nicest spot they could find: a bluff peeking out of the forest, just high enough that you could see the glint of the ocean in the distance. It wasn’t any ordinary tree either; Luke Skywalker had given it to them, and supposedly its silvery leaves could commune with the Force. Or something. Poe wouldn’t know. He’d hoped, of course, like just about every kid, but the ability to read minds and move objects with a wave of his hand had never materialized.

The intruder didn’t even have the decency to acknowledge Poe’s presence. He stared into the middle distance, idly picking at the seams of his jacket, which was black like everything else he wore. Even here, alone in this tranquil spot, his face was twisted into a petulant grimace.

Poe did the only thing he could think of: he threw a rock.

Panic shot through him as he watched the stone sail through the air. His aim was good, and he’d flung it straight at the stranger’s head. And after the day he’d had, he hadn’t exactly thrown it gently.

Then, at the last possible moment, the strange boy raised his head. The rock stopped in midair, and suddenly it was hurtling backward toward Poe, who ducked in the nick of time.

“What the hell?” Poe snapped, even though he knew the words were ridiculous as soon as they left his mouth.

“You started it,” the boy pointed out in a lazy drawl. His thin frame and long, lanky limbs gave him away as a teenager, perhaps a year or two younger than Poe, even though his voice sounded far too self-assured. He leapt out of the tree, and Poe caught his breath without meaning to. The distance from the ground seemed too great, and surely he was going to break his leg -- or worse, his head -- and that wasn’t something Poe wanted responsibility for.

But the boy landed elegantly on his feet, his jacket billowing dramatically behind him. He smirked at Poe’s open-mouthed stare, and Poe’s anger flared. Who was this smug bastard? The anger grew as his gaze traveled down the stranger’s body to the scuffed Rebel army combat boots -- the same kind that Poe liked to wear -- which were resting on his mother’s grave marker. The voice of reason in the back of Poe’s mind reminded him that the marker was small and flat, almost flush with the earth, and that perhaps the stranger would’ve noticed it if Poe hadn’t introduced himself by throwing a rock. But Poe rarely listened to the voice of reason; that was why he’d been rejected from the Flight Academy just an hour ago. Catching a stranger standing on his mother’s gravestone was as good a reason for a fight as any -- probably better than Poe’s usual reasons, honestly.

Before he could raise his fists, the stranger glanced down at his feet, his face going even paler than it already was.

“I’m sorry,” he stammered. He looked back at the tree, his face almost wistful. “I didn’t realize this was a -- I mean, your -- Anyway, I heard the tree and I came, but I’ll go now.”

He’d vanished down the path before Poe realized that he didn’t want to be alone at his mother’s grave with a rejection letter.

Poe flopped down on his bed hours later, holding a bag of ice against his knuckles. At least this time, he’d only hit a punching bag. Without proper protection, but still. A step closer to what Admiral Antilles had instructed in his rejection letter: Get straightened out, son. Quit the fighting and we’ll talk again. He scrubbed a hand through his hair and sighed. No use getting his hopes up; his mother had died under Antilles’ command, and the guy felt guilty. That was all. The Navy didn’t give second chances. Once they said no, they meant it.

The pad with the letter lay on his desk. It was not precisely whole anymore. Wires spilled out the sides, and the display screen was cracked, although Poe knew he could fix it tomorrow. Next to it was a flat silver comm chip, still shiny and new. A guy named Hux had passed it to him at the gym. What should the Navy care if you like to fight? You never let it interfere with your flying, do you? Where I work, we’d respect your skills. Give me a call if you’re curious.

Poe was sure he knew exactly where Hux worked. The guy was weird, appearing and disappearing at random, known for his collection of Imperial propaganda. Still, he hadn’t thrown the comm chip away -- not for lack of trying. But every time he held it over the trash compactor, he remembered how it felt to soar through space, surrounded by cold starlight, the hum of the engines filling his ears. He wasn’t ready to give up that dream. Not yet.

Not for the first time, his thoughts wandered back to the stranger in the tree. Who was he? Granted, he looked like an overlarge loth-cat -- the weird kind with big ears, no less -- but how could he jump like that? How did he make rocks float through the air? Not that Poe really cared, but he could use a diversion right about now, and a mysterious stranger who might be a Jedi would be a good one.

Awkward-looking, dressed in all black, imbued with supernatural powers...he couldn’t be that hard to find, right? Poe launched himself off the bed and headed for town, trying not to ask too many questions about his motives.

Poe did not find the stranger; the stranger found him.

He announced himself by hurling a rock at Poe’s face, which Poe caught in the nick of time. His reflexes were excellent, another reason the Flight Academy rejection stung, but he refused to think of that -- not right now, and not ever. It was past, and he was determined to leave it there.

“What the hell?” Poe snapped, holding up the rock.

“I thought it was the traditional greeting of your people.” There was the maddening smirk again. “Was I wrong?”

Poe ducked his head as shame flushed bright red across his cheeks. “That was fair,” he conceded, hauling himself to his feet. “I can do better, I swear. How about a real greeting? My name’s Poe, Poe Dameron. What’s yours?”

The stranger took his outstretched hand hesitantly. “Ben,” he said.

“Just Ben?” Poe asked, eyebrows raised.

The stranger -- Ben -- cleared his throat. “Ben Solo,” he muttered, the last few syllables trailing off so Poe could barely hear them.

Poe opened and closed his mouth silently, images flashing through his mind. The Millennium Falcon. The Kessel Run. Legendary smuggler turned rebel hero.

“Well, get on with it,” Ben said with an impatient gesture. “If you’re ready to heap praise on the hero you assume my father to be, get it over with.”

“So I take it he’s an asshole?” Poe asked. He did love a good family drama.

Ben’s face hardened. “That’s really none of your business. Why were you looking for me?”
Poe settled back down on the ground, hoping Ben would follow along. The clearing was one of his favorite spots - dappled by sun, surrounded by vast trees, and just far enough off the main hiking trails that tourists rarely stumbled across it.

“I was bored,” he said with a shrug. “You were interesting.”

Ben perched on a nearby rock, eyeing Poe with a mixture of skepticism and interest. “I suppose I make a decent diversion,” he allowed. Poe thought he was trying to hide a smile.

“Yeah, you do. How did you find me up here?” Poe had spent a few hours asking around for the black-clad stranger with superpowers, but he’d given up when he started to feel like an ass. He hadn’t imagined anyone -- much less an offworlder -- was going to find him all the way up here.

“I learned how to track on Kashyyyk,” he said, unable to hide his pride. Which was fair, Poe thought grudgingly. Learning how to track from Wookiees sounded almost disgustingly amazing.

“Wait a second, are you saying were following me?” he asked.

Ben shrugged, a faint blush creeping across his pale cheekbones. “I was bored,” he said, drawing out the words. “And you were interesting.”

Poe grinned. He knew he had a nice smile, all white teeth and dimples and just a hint of danger. “What brings you to a place like this, Ben? I hope it’s interesting.”

Ben snorted, and Poe decided he liked the way his bravado swung up and down -- one minute hurling rocks at virtual strangers, mocking himself the next.

“I was trying to make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. Pathetic, really, when you think about it.”

“Not if you made it,” Poe countered quickly. He’d thought about it, of course, but he’d never actually tried.

“Twelve point one parsecs,” Ben said wryly. “Even more pathetic. And the relays are shot. This was the closest place I could make repairs.”

“Burning out your engines in a blaze of glory. Risk, determination, danger...” Poe let his voice trail off before he added, “Some people would find that very attractive, you know.”

“They would?” Ben asked. He sounded genuinely puzzled, and an alarm bell pinged in Poe’s head.

“Look, man, I try to avoid felonies, so I gotta ask -- how old are you?”

Ben’s petulant smirk returned. “Eighteen, if you must know. Will you require identification?”

Poe never could suppress the urge to be an ass, so he said, “Yeah, that would be great, thanks.”

Ben didn’t miss a beat. “First you’ll have to be clear what you’re carding me for. How will I know it’s worth it?” He held Poe’s gaze, smirk intact, until finally his face flushed bright red and he blinked, as if to say did I really just say that?

Now it was Poe’s turn to smirk. Ben was new to the flirting game apparently -- and probably new to lots of other things too. Poe knew how easily he could seal the deal. A dazzling smile, a not-quite-accidental touch, maybe one more smart-ass comment, and they’d be rolling across the ground together. But something held him back. He didn’t want it to be over, he realized. He wanted it to last.

Instead of a lascivious grin, he got up and offered Ben a hand up. “How about you show me this ship of yours?”

“What a piece of junk,” Poe breathed when Ben’s ship came into view. It was docked in the very last berth of the spaceport, mostly in the dark -- and with good reason. Maybe once it had been an Imperial shuttle, but now the hull plates were mismatched scraps, mostly black, but with bits of red and gray and blue thrown in for good measure.

Poe hazarded a glance at Ben, who only shrugged.

“Yes, literally a piece of junk. I liberated it from a salvage yard.”

“And then you flew it somewhere and it didn’t kill you?” Poe asked, blinking at the blast marks on the hull.

“Surprisingly not,” Ben said with a faint hint of a smile. “It helps that I replaced the hyperdrive and the life support system.”

Poe looped an arm around Ben’s shoulders and said, “You’re a brave man, my friend.” Just then they rounded the corner and the cockpit came into view. Poe supposed it had once been enclosed like an ordinary cockpit, but every bulkhead had been replaced with transparisteel. When you sat in the pilot’s seat, you’d see nothing but stars. His grip tightened around Ben’s shoulder. “And now I understand why you’d risk your life to fly that thing around.”

Deep down, he was thinking you and I understand each other.

The inside of the ship was not much better than the outside, but the tiny bunk and the galley looked livable. Two would fit, Poe thought, although it would be tight. A wild idea was already percolating in the back of his mind.

He leaned against the computer readout in the cargo bay, tapping his fingers idly against the display.

“That is not the Kessel Run,” he said, squinting at the star chart.

“No, that’s the next mission,” Ben said. “I’m going to get a kyber crystal.”

Poe nodded. “Sounds like a good adventure.”

Ben frowned. “You have no idea what a kyber crystal is, do you?”

“Alright, you got me. But I’m sure it will sound like a good adventure once you tell me.”

“You have to have one to make a lightsaber.” Ben’s lips twisted. “My uncle says I’m not ready for one, but…”

“Screw him,” Poe finished. “Set your own destiny. I like it.”

And take me with you, he almost added. But no, that would just be pathetic. Ten minutes of banter was not enough to make Ben want to keep him; they’d been throwing rocks at each other less than a day ago. Hell, even he didn’t know why he wanted Ben to keep him, except that getting rejected from the Flight Academy made him want to burn his whole life to the ground. Well, that and Ben was interesting. Jedi powers. On the run from something. Somehow too old and too young for his age… Poe blinked, trying to clear his mind before his thoughts ran away from him.

Ben cleared his throat. “The thing is, it’s a long way. And it’s, ah… well, a bit lonely.” He looked up at Poe hesitantly.

Poe’s heart leaped. “Ben Solo, I would be honored to accompany you on your Jedi quest.”

When Poe returned with his duffle bag, Ben was perched atop the ship with a soldering iron, welding what Poe assumed were relays.

“You came back,” he said, sounding genuinely surprised.

Poe flung his duffle up the gangway and climbed up so he could sit next to Ben. “Yeah I did,” he said. “I said I would, didn’t I?”

Ben blinked. “You hardly even know…” His voice trailed off and he shook his head. “Oh, right. You were rejected from the Flight Academy. You need something to do.”

Poe clenched his jaw and fought the urge to leap off the top of the ship and vanish into the night. He lived in a small town on a small planet, but how could Ben have heard? And what kind of jackass was he, to trim a friend down to nothing but a reject?

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…” Ben swallowed. “I mean, I didn’t even submit my application. I had everything ready, but I was seventeen when the application was due, and my mother wouldn’t sign the papers. I should’ve fought harder.” Ben cleared his throat. “Anyway, I knew the decisions were supposed to be released today. That was how I guessed what happened to you. That was why I was up in the tree myself. Thinking about what could’ve been. And you must be a pilot. No one else would have any interest at all in this ship.”

Poe exhaled slowly. He wished he could summon a cocky grin and say you bet I am buddy, the best pilot in the whole galaxy, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead he watched Ben’s long fingers fiddle with the innards of the ship.

“Why wouldn’t your mom let you apply?” Poe asked. He didn’t care to talk about himself anymore.

Ben grimaced. The expression immediately transformed him from a brilliant mechanic to a sulky teenager. “She wanted to send me away to my uncle for training. Something about impulse control and anger management.”

“Hey, I’ve heard a thing or two about that. From the Flight Academy, actually. It was in my rejection letter and everything,” Poe said. Suddenly he found it easier to smile.

Ben smiled back. It was the first time he’d really smiled without trying to hide it, and Poe’s stomach flipped -- not because it was an exceptionally beautiful smile, but because it was hard-earned and it seemed like it was just for him.

“Maybe you and I really do belong together,” Ben said hesitantly. He cast a sidelong glance at Poe, as if he expected him to bolt.

Poe nodded and shifted around a bit, until he was close enough to feel the warmth of Ben’s body next to him. “You and me, buddy. Together against the galaxy.”

Poe had left his father a note saying he’d gone on vacation, which was not precisely a lie. It was a trip away from home for non-professional reasons; he just hadn’t mentioned that it was an interstellar voyage with a virtual stranger in a ship that might or might not be a deathtrap.

He slid into the copilot’s seat next to Ben. It had been ages since he’d been anyone’s copilot, but any trace of inferiority complex vanished as soon as they cleared atmo. An endless carpet of stars spread before them; if not for the fact that they could still breathe, he would’ve sworn that they were actually swimming in them.

He shot a sidelong glance at Ben, whose long fingers were dancing expertly over the nav console. Ben caught him looking, and Poe felt himself blushing, which was a whole new and novel sensation. In matters of seduction, he considered himself an expert; it was a dance, and he knew every step. Getting caught staring was an amateur mistake.

To regain his equilibrium, he said, “I’m not sure if this was the best or worst decision I’ve ever made.”

Ben’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline. “The worst? You think I’m the worst?”

Poe shrugged. “I dunno. You could be trouble.”

“Me? You’re the flight academy reject with an anger management problem and no discernable job.”

That was a low blow, but joking about the rejection was oddly relieving, like it was a bump in the road rather than the end of the world. “I’ll have you know I’m a damn good search and rescue pilot,” Poe says. “No landing zone too small or too rugged.”

Ben stared at him. “You save people’s lives. What do you need the Navy for?”

It occurred to Poe that he’d done this backward. He was supposed to seduce the weird kid with the weird powers and send him on his way, not join the kid on some obscure quest where they’d have to live in close quarters and address questions that Poe would frankly rather not answer.

“I dunno,” he said finally. “What’s the Navy to you?”

Ben snorted. “I like to go fast, and I like to be the best. And my parents were rebels, so it seemed like the thing to do.”

“My mom was a rebel pilot too,” Poe said quietly. “The Navy after that.”

“I know.” Ben waved a hand. “My uncle was...well, something with her. Friends, I think, but maybe more a long time ago. He misses her.”

“I do too.” More than anything, Poe hated the lump in his throat. Ten years she’d been gone, and everytime it started to get easier, he found a whole new reason to miss her. His first straight A report card, his first dance, his graduation from secondary school… Every time was like grieving for her all over again. He swallowed. “I thought if I got into the academy, if I did what she did, it would be like she was still alive.”

He hadn’t admitted that to anyone, not even his own father, and he wasn’t sure why a virtual stranger should be the first, but Ben didn’t feel like a stranger, even if he should. Then he held his breath. Everybody was always awkward, and if Ben fed him the I’m sorry for your loss line, Poe was going to scream..

Ben sucked in a breath. “It was a good idea,” he says finally. “I wish it had worked out better for both of us. I suppose that’s the trouble of having legendary parents. You’ll never be as good as them, but you always have to try.”

Poe reached for Ben’s hand without thinking. It was a squeeze, nothing sexual or seductive about it, and it still made Poe feel warm inside.

“Thanks,” he said, even though he couldn’t explain exactly what he was thanking Ben for.

“There’s only the one bunk.”

Ben was blushing furiously, leaning against the doorway in the little lounge. They’d put the ship on autopilot an hour ago, and Poe liked the way he could feel the steady thrum of the engines vibrating through the deckplates.

“I should have thought about… I mean, obviously, you should take…” Ben trailed off, and Poe realized that he was worried about being a bad host. On a rust bucket like this.

Poe knew how this scenario should end: one of them should propose sharing the bed, which was a natural segway to having sex all night. At no point in his entire life had Poe ever hesitated to pursue that kind of good time. Until tonight.

He shrugged. “You’re the captain, you get the bunk. I’ll take the couch in the lounge.”

“Are you sure?” Ben looked faintly alarmed. “The couch, ah…”

“Looks like something died on it?” Poe supplied. “Trust me, I’ve slept worse places than that.”

“Really?” Ben’s eyes lit up.

Poe knew Ben was tired -- both of them were, after spending the day welding relays and plotting their course -- but now he looked like a kid begging for a bedtime story. Poe plopped down on the couch, which wasn’t really all that terrible, in spite of Poe’s ribbing. It wasn’t any worse than the one in the SAR pilots’ lounge, anyway.

“I’m gonna need a drink for this one,” he said, propping his feet on the rickety coffee table. He’d brought booze, of course. Honestly, the bottles probably took up half his duffle bag, but he was curious whether Ben had any.

Ben held out a hand, and a bottle of Flameout sailed through the air. Poe whistled appreciatively.

“Too strong?” Ben asked, bottled poised over two shot glasses.

“Not on your life,” Poe shot back, even though really, it was a little too strong. Rumor had it the secret ingredient was spice. “Just out of curiosity, why do you have this? I thought it was illegal on the core.”

“My father’s a smuggler, remember? He never really went respectable, not like Uncle Lando.”

Poe managed not to choke on his drink, although it was a near thing. Just imagining calling Lando Calrissian “Uncle Lando” made his head spin, but he remembered how badly Ben had wanted to hide his family name. He wondered how many people talked to Ben about his family and his friends, without ever even asking a question about him.

He raised his glass and asked, “And you started drinking this at the tender age of…?”

“Twelve.”

“Liar,” Poe accused. He considered himself adventurous and resourceful, and even he hadn’t gotten hold of a bottle until his twentieth birthday, which was just over a year ago now.

“I think you know I’m not.” To make the point, Ben swallowed the rest of the drink as easily as a glass of water.

Poe leaned forward so their knees were touching. “That’s a story I’m going to need to hear.”

“There’s not much of one, I’m afraid,” Ben said. He leaned over to refill his glass, pressing his knee against Poe’s as he reached. “My father thinks experience is the best teacher, so he’d let me try almost anything. He probably thought I’d have one sip and never touch it again, but that backfired rather spectacularly.”

“You don’t think that’s a story?” Poe asked, eyes widening with incredulity. He’d felt daring for sneaking a bottle of Phibian beer out of the chiller; looking his dad straight in the eye while swallowing the most dangerous drink in the galaxy had never crossed his mind.

A smile flickered around the edges of Ben’s lips but faded just as quickly. “It wasn’t really worth the row it caused between my parents.” He cleared his throat and looked up at Poe. “And anyway, weren’t you supposed to be telling me about the most disgusting place you’ve ever slept?”

Poe leaned back on the couch, automatically calculating which story was most likely to get him into Ben’s bed before realizing that it wasn’t what he wanted - at least not immediately. He did want to get into Ben’s bed, but not as a caricature of himself, and not for a solitary night of pleasure. He watched the stars streak past the windows while he gathered the courage to tell the truth.

“I passed out in the gutter once,” he said, not quite able to bring himself to look at Ben. The truth was, it was the tenth anniversary of his mother’s death, but he wasn’t sure if that made the story better or worse. He shrugged, forcing a buoyancy he didn’t feel into his voice. “Anyway, a rainstorm must’ve come through while I was out. I woke up covered in mud and the Maker knows what else.”

Ben’s fingers trailed lightly along his wrist. “That’s not a good story, Poe,” he said softly.

Poe cleared his throat, finally making himself look at Ben. “Yeah, well, to tell the truth, I’ve been kinda kriffed up the last couple of years.”

“I know the feeling.” Ben’s voice was quiet, and he wasn’t pulling away. In fact, he was leaning closer.

He was eighteen, Poe reminded himself, old enough to make his own decisions about who he wanted on his ship or in his bed… but the bleakness in Ben’s face bothered him, and Poe caught his hand before he could lean any closer.

“Aren’t you a little young for that?” he asked, not able to stop himself from trailing his thumb along the thin bones of Ben’s wrist. He forced himself to let go. “And, um, this? I mean, running away from home on a flying deathtrap with a man of dubious moral character?”

Ben pulled his hands back into his lap abruptly. He clenched his jaw so hard Poe swore he could hear his teeth grinding.

“You know, nobody ever asks if you’re too young for terrible things to happen to you. They just happen, and you have to deal with them,” he said. “But every time you think you’re about to enjoy yourself, suddenly everyone’s worried about protecting your so-called innocence.”

And with that, he stalked back to his bunk.

The next two days passed in icy silence. Ben avoided him as best he could on the tiny ship, and when they had to speak, he confined their exchanges to the barest necessities.

“About the other night --” Poe tried, but Ben cut him off with a deliberate shrug.

“It meant nothing. You wanted passage off-planet, and you have it.” He passed Poe a spanner “The cargo hatch is loose. The rattling is becoming bothersome.”

Poe slumped in the copilot’s seat, refusing to take it. He didn’t mean to stare at Ben’s long fingers splayed over the controls, or his equally long legs stretched out in front of him, but it happened anyway.

“What?” Ben snapped.

Poe wanted to say that it had been years since he’d had a meaningful conversation with anyone, that he wanted more than a one night stand but he had no idea how to get it.

Instead he said, “Could you maybe be less of a dick?”

Ben froze, his face unreadable. Poe didn’t know him all that well, but he could still feel the anger simmering just below the surface. He wasn’t sure whether he’d started a shouting match or an actual fistfight, but he had a bad feeling he’d just poked a sleeping giant. And then a miracle happened: Ben laughed.

“No, honestly, probably not,” he said. He swallowed, and at long last he added, “If you’d like to be dropped at the nearest spaceport, I understand.”

“Would I like to be dropped at the ass end of nowhere with forty-eight credits to my name?” Poe asked. “I think I’ll pass.”

Ben snorted. “Forty-eight credits? You have a job. What’s wrong with you?”

“Everything,” Poe said. “Same as you.”

“Fair,” Ben said with one of his signature self-deprecating smirks.

They hadn’t talked about anything, not really, but the coolness between them suddenly thawed. He could see it in the slackening of Ben’s shoulders, and the way his long limbs suddenly angled toward Poe.

So naturally, he blew things up again. In his defense, it was an accident.

“Hey Ben,” he said, keeping his voice casual. “That thing you said happened to you --”

Ben rose abruptly and shook his head. “I can’t.”

He crossed the cockpit in one loping stride, leaving Poe alone once again.

Poe found Ben in the engine room, fiddling with bits of wire that probably weren’t broken.

“You know, you’re the most mercurial moof milker I’ve ever met,” he said, not even bothering to try and hold his tongue.

Ben barely spared him a glance. “Mercurial? Have you been waiting to use that word since the last literature class you managed to pass?” The imperious arch of his eyebrows suddenly made it obvious that he was Senator Organa’s son, never mind that he looked nothing like her.

“Actually, believe it or not, I haven’t been dying to meet mercurial assholes,” Poe snapped.

“Well, you were certainly eager to come with me.”

“Excuse me? You were the one desperate enough to pick up a stranger at the space port, buddy.”

Ben stood, his face flushing pink. Poe knew he’d hit the target at last: Ben couldn’t stand to admit that he’d ever needed anyone. He pulled himself up straight, waiting for the next strike. He knew how this kind of fight went: Ben was a wounded animal now, and he would want to inflict maximum damage.

“You think I’m the desperate one? As if you weren’t dying for someone to come along --”

Their relationship probably would’ve died right then and there, if it hadn’t started to rain. Rain is not, strictly speaking, the type of phenomenon that ought to occur on a spaceship.

“Freshwater pipe,” Ben said, voice tense, eyes flicking up to the ceiling.

“Where’s the shut off?” Poe switched into emergency mode instantly, their disagreement forgotten.

Ben’s eyes widened. “I never looked.”

Poe was already stripping off his flight jacket. “You find it, I’ll plug the leak.”

Ben sprinted down the corridor while Poe shimmied up a support beam, arms outstretched toward the ruptured pipe. He knew right away it was no good; even the thick padding on his jacket wouldn’t be enough to stem the flow.

“Hurry!” he shouted down the corridor, and Ben’s footfalls stopped abruptly.

“That’s the opposite of hurrying!” Poe yelled, but suddenly the water stopped.

Ben stared up at the pipe, his whole face tense with concentration. An undulating wall of water hovered just above the rupture, miraculously gliding over it without spilling.

“Main water tank is on starboard level two. The shut off ought to be there.” He didn’t take his eyes off the pipe. “I don’t know how long I can hold this.”

Poe let go of the pylon and managed to land on his feet. Then he raced down the corridor toward the ladder. He had just enough spare brain power to wish Ben could watch how he flew.

Poe had planned to make a grand entrance, possibly with a pithy comment about how fortunate Ben was to have stumbled across a wayward traveler with a taste for mercurial moof milkers and a talent for finding shut off valves. But, by the time he’d raced back up the ladder, Ben was even paler than usual and swaying on his feet.

“You okay, buddy?” Poe asked, easing him toward the driest patch of the deck he could find. He could demand an apology later.

Ben’s eyes fluttered. “I don’t know why that was so difficult. I thought I was stronger than that.”

“You held back a wall of water and you think you’re weak?” Poe asked, reaching automatically for the first aid kit on the wall. The bandages inside were crumbling, and the bacta looked questionable at best, but the glucose tabs looked alright. “Here, have one of these,” he said, and Ben took it with a shaky hand.

“Why?” he asked. He sounded annoyed, which meant he was probably alright.

“Because the highly trained search and rescue pilot knows a thing or two about first aid,” Poe said, shoving Ben’s hand toward his mouth.

Ben rolled his eyes, but he swallowed obediently enough.

“I’m gonna take you back to your bunk now. Try not to be a dick about it,” Poe said, looping Ben’s arm around his shoulders.

“I can walk,” he snapped. “I’m just tired.”

“And you sound like a toddler,” Poe said. He shot Ben a grin. “And come on, you know you wanna touch me.”

Ben smirked at that, but he didn’t let go. Together they climbed out of the engine room and through the lounge where Poe had been sleeping. Everything was soaked.

Poe was enjoying Ben’s weight against him until Ben said, “We’ll have to share my bunk.”

“No thanks, buddy,” Poe answered. He didn’t let go of Ben -- that would be unprofessional -- but he stopped leaning into the touch. Everything Ben had said, and every moment of his icy silence over the past two days, suddenly hurt, and Poe knew he couldn’t sleep next to him.

Ben stopped, anchoring himself against the wall with a shaky hand. “You really mean to sleep out here?”

Poe shrugged. “Yeah.”

“You’d rather sleep in this than with…” Ben’s voice trailed off, but he couldn’t hide the hurt in his eyes.

“I think my meaning is pretty clear,” Poe shot back. He seized the dryest-looking couch cushion and dragged it to a corner that had mostly escaped the deluge. Exhaustion crept over him, and it wasn’t just because of the frantic race toward the hidden shutoff valve; it was because every time he’d offended Ben had been an accident, and he didn’t feel like being punished for somebody else’s neuroses. Sleeping someplace cold and damp sounded better than getting kicked out of bed for some perceived slight.

He closed his eyes, expecting to hear Ben stomp away. Nothing happened. He counted till ten, twenty, a hundred, still pretending to be asleep. All he could hear was the sound of Ben’s ragged breathing.

Finally, Ben said, “Alright, if you insist on sleeping out here, then so do I.”

How does that even make sense? Poe wanted to yell, but he kept his eyes stubbornly shut. Ben hadn’t even thanked him for turning off the water or finding the glucose tabs. If he wanted to get pneumonia, so be it.

After half an hour, his bones started to ache from lying on the floor. Cold rose up from the metal decking. His wet clothes stuck to his skin, not that he could do anything about it - everything he owned was soaked. With a groan, he heaved himself up. At least he could sleep in the copilot’s chair; the cockpit was a level up and plenty dry.

He intended to walk straight past Ben. Then he heard his teeth chattering.

“You’re an idiot, and saying I’m sorry comes with way less risk of advanced respiratory infection.”

“Noted.” Ben snorted, or possibly coughed. It was hard to tell. “Is the overly dramatic apology accepted?”

“Yeah, alright. I might be a mercurial moof milker myself sometimes.” Poe found Ben’s hand in the dark and tugged him carefully to his feet. “Let’s both go to bed.”

Ben slept in a narrow room lit by pale golden light. Poe’s eyes flicked toward the night table, which was covered with real sheets of flimsy, and the shelf, which held both model spaceships and customized blasters. Now that his furor had cooled, he wanted to ask about everything, but Ben’s chattering teeth dragged him back to reality.

“I hate to sound like a porn vid, but we need to get you out of these wet clothes,” he said. Without waiting for permission, he started unbuttoning Ben’s shirt. Ben acquiesced without protest, and even in the dim light, Poe could see his adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed.

“This is not how I imagined you undressing me,” he murmured. He held Poe’s eyes, but the familiar did-I-really-just-say-that flush crept along his cheekbones.

“There’ll be time for that later,” Poe promised, reaching down to unbuckle Ben’s belt. He reminded himself sternly that he preferred his men without pneumonia, and tonight he ought to be in medic mode. “So after holding back a wall of water with the power of your mind, did you by chance eat anything?” he asked.

Ben rolled his eyes, but Poe ignored it and fished a ration bar from the case underneath the desk. He shoved Ben down on the bed and commanded, “Eat.”

“In bed?” Ben looked horrified.

“What? Are you a prince now?” Poe asked. Then it occurred to him that yeah, technically, Ben was a prince, if the Alderaanian diaspora were still into royalty.

“You’re shivering too,” Ben pointed out.

“Yeah, well, I’m not taking off these clothes till I see you eat something,” Poe said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Apparently, ‘I suffer if you suffer’ is how you do things.”

“Fine.” Ben took a defiant bite of the ration bar, and Poe slipped off his shirt a little more slowly and seductively than was strictly necessary. Then, before he could be tempted to do anything unwise, he grabbed a couple shirts and underpants out of a drawer. “We’re sharing clothes tonight, buddy.”

“And the bed,” Ben said, scooching over to make room for Poe.

Poe had vaguely intended to protest -- he really didn’t want to take advantage of Ben when he was sick with exhaustion -- but all resistance vanished when his hand brushed against the sheets. They had clearly been filched from the home of a former princess, and they were probably the softest thing Poe had ever touched. He couldn’t help but sigh as he slipped between the covers.

Poe had imagined Ben as the lanky, slender type, but the body lying next to him was solid and muscular. Sculpted biceps and a defined chest peaked out from the pile of blankets.

Ben saw him looking and raised his eyebrows. “Interested?”

Poe cleared his throat and forced himself to look away. “I’m definitely not saying no. Just, can we talk?”

He had never uttered words like that before, but lately he was starting to think that burying all his feelings beneath a drink, a fight, or a fuck was not a sustainable long-term plan.

“You want to know about…” Ben’s voice trailed off, and he cleared his throat. “The thing I mentioned earlier.”

“Yeah. I want to know you, and that seems pretty important.” In hindsight, the way he’d asked before had been a touch on the insensitive side, but in his defense, he was out of practice with feelings.

Ben sighed and rolled over so that he was staring up at the ceiling. Poe wasn’t sure how he managed to put space between them in the narrow bunk, but suddenly his skin felt cold where Ben had been lying next to them.

“My mother’s ship was hijacked when I was fifteen,” he said in a mechanical voice, as if he were reciting a report. “She didn’t crack when Vader tortured her, so they knew they couldn’t make her talk. Unless they had me.”

“Who were they?” Poe asked, reaching for Ben’s hand underneath the sheets. Ben flinched, but he didn’t pull away.

He shook his head. “Who knows? Pirates. Profiteers. They wanted defense codes, and she had them.”

“What happened?” Poe asked, his mouth dry.

Ben looked at him but didn’t hold his gaze. “I was no match for them. I spent all my time reading, in those days. I tried to hit one of them and broke my hand. She laughed.” He swallowed. “When they dragged me to my mother’s quarters, she was still fighting. There were four of them, and two were holding onto her. Blood was dripping down her face, but she was like a caged beast. They couldn’t keep hold of her, but as soon as she saw me, she stopped and put up her hands. When they hit her with the stun rod, she crumpled on the floor. I thought she was dead.”

Poe sucked in a breath. He’d imagined his mother’s death more times than he could count, always pretending that he could have saved her. If he’d seen it happening in front of him, and he hadn’t been able to stop it…

“There was nothing I could do, no way to get to her. All I remember is trying not to vomit. And then, while she was still lying facedown on the floor, I heard this crack. It was slow, like a piece of an iceberg splintering, and I heard her voice in my mind. She told me to get down.”

Poe realized he’d been holding his breath. “What was it?”

“The mirror,” Ben said, looking pleased. “Shards of glass flew across the room. She killed them all without even looking at them.”

“Well, that’s a happy ending,” Poe said. “Or a disturbing one, depending on your perspective. I’m not sure how to react, honestly.”

Judging from his smile, Ben clearly did not find it disturbing. “When she stood up, she leaned over the last gasping man and said ‘in retrospect, I think you’ll find your mistake was putting your hands on my child.’ Then she stepped over their bodies and we walked away.”

Poe propped himself up on his elbow. “So it was terrifying at first but it ended alright?”

Ben nodded, then shook his head. “Except for the nightmares. Afterward I kept asking myself why I couldn’t have done something like that. I’d been so powerless, so weak. The solution seemed obvious. I asked her to train me, but she said the Force didn’t work that way. That you had to meditate and find balance and go on quests. As if she ever did any of those things.”

“Your parents wouldn’t teach you to defend yourself?” Poe asked. His mom had taught him all her Navy hand-to-hand skills, although he had to concede, she might regret that now - if the dead could watch over the living, anyway.

Ben snorted. “It was all mixed in with some claptrap about balance and self-knowledge. So I started figuring things out on my own.”

Poe smiled. “You started a lot of brawls.”

“That sounds so indecorous,” Ben said, but he looked pleased. “But yes, I suppose it’s true. I got hurt a lot, at first. Then I started winning, so I got kicked out of school. Well, schools, actually.”

Poe couldn’t help but trace a finger along Ben’s wrist. His skin still felt cool, but he could warm it up. Ben shivered beneath the touch.

“And somehow you wound up here,” Poe prompted, not willing to surrender the chance to hear Ben’s story.

“She kept trying to ship me off to some wilderness training with Uncle Luke. My father didn’t want me to go, they were fighting all the time.” He rolled his eyes. “Which was nothing new, really, but more uncomfortable when I was the subject.”

“So you left?” Poe’s fingers crept higher along Ben’s arm, and Ben sucked in a breath.

“Not until I wrote the paper,” he said, keeping his eyes focused on the ceiling.

Poe’s eyebrows shot up. “A paper?”

“About how authoritarian regimes can yield better economic outcomes for impoverished planetary systems than democratic ones.” His face flushed when Poe’s thumbnail skated across his palm, and he swallowed before he pushed on. “That was right after she refused to sign my application to the Naval Academy. The whole thing probably would’ve blown over, except I got it published. In her favorite political science journal. The headlines were spectacular. Son of rebel hero repudiates democracy. That was when I left.”

“You went out with a bang, I see,” Poe said, exhaling appreciatively. He knew a thing or two about setting fire to your life.

“She wouldn’t have been so upset if I hadn’t been right,” Ben said, smirking.

“I like a man who pursues the truth at all costs.” Poe leaned over Ben and let his hand flutter down to rest on his ribs.

Ben’s face flushed and he pushed himself up into Poe’s touch. One word escaped between his gritted teeth: “Please.”

Poe awakened with his head tucked underneath Ben’s chin and his face resting on his chest. Embarrassment washed over him, even though nobody was there to see. He was older than Ben, a lieutenant commander in the SAR squad, not the kind of guy who was supposed to curl up on anyone’s chest. Ben was supposed to lean on him, not the other way around.

Of course, the instant he tried to disentangle himself, Ben’s eyes snapped open. “You’re leaving?” he asked. “Already?”

A half dozen glib replies died on Poe’s lips. Ben looked naked -- okay, well, because he was naked -- but now it was like he’d taken off a mask, and he wasn’t even trying to hide the hurt in his voice.

“No, no,” Poe muttered quickly. “It was just, my arm was asleep, and --” He cleared his throat. “Okay, that’s a lie. I’m just not used to, uh, leaning on people. So I was trying to move so that you were leaning on me.”

Ben looked down at him for a moment, jaw tensed. Poe sucked in a breath. He could feel the fight brewing; they both could. Is it really so bad to lean on me? Ben would ask, and then Poe would be forced to apologize or spring out of bed.

But then Ben’s shoulders went slack, and he looped one willowy arm around Poe’s shoulders, pulling him close again.

“You’ll just have to get used to it,” he said, his impossibly long fingers sliding through Poe’s hair.

Poe relaxed against Ben’s chest, listening to the heartbeat thudding beneath layers of muscle and skin. “I guess I could do that,” he allowed, drawing in a slow breath. Without quite meaning to, he fell back to sleep.

Poe woke up when he rolled over to fling an arm around Ben and discovered that he was alone in bed. The pillow beside him was cool.

“Weird,” he muttered just as the door slid open.

“What’s weird?” Ben asked. “That I don’t need thirteen hours of sleep?”

“No, the way you’re leaning against the wall like you’re trying to be some holovid star,” Poe said, narrowing his eyes at the way Ben was not very subtly checking himself out in the mirror.

Ben flushed. “Alright, fine, it was less sexy than I thought. But it’s not actually what you were calling weird when I walked in.”

Now it was Poe’s turn to flush. “Alright, fine. I was thinking it was weird how I was asleep, but I always knew you were there.” He cleared his throat. “Well, until you weren’t.”

Ben tilted his head. “Have you never slept with anyone before?”

“I really hope you’re not calling me inexperienced, because last night should really have made it clear that --”

Ben waved his hand impatiently. “Yes, obviously, you’ve slept with dozens of men. Hundreds, I’m sure.”

“Hundreds? Seriously? What kind of libertine do you take me for? That would require a different man every night for a year.”

“You’ll have to excuse my lack of expertise. Apparently complimenting your lover’s experience requires a finely honed equilibrium.” Ben rolled his eyes. “Allow me to clarify the question. Was last night the first night you slept next to someone?”

“Yeah,” Poe said quietly. The admission made him feel naked in a way that taking off all his clothes never did.

“Why?” Ben looked baffled. “You’re charming and attractive and an excellent pilot. Obviously you weren’t lacking the opportunity.”

“Yeah, well, if you leave first, nobody can ever leave you.”

“Who would leave you?” Now Ben looked completely bewildered, and Poe’s heart thudded harder in his chest. “I mean it,” he was saying. “Who would possibly leave you?”

My mom, Poe thought, but he didn’t let the words escape his lips. That was too much self-pity, even for him. Instead he leaned back on the bed, letting the sheet drop below his waist. “You did this morning. And whatever for?”

Ben swallowed. “We have a bit of a water crisis,” he said, wrenching his gaze back up to Poe’s face. “And as I’m the captain, I thought it was my responsibility to solve it.”

Poe sighed. “Which you’ve done, and now you can come back to bed?”

He knew it was a futile hope; he was already reaching for his pants.

“We should probably have a serious talk about how not to die,” Ben said, passing Poe an extra shirt. “It’s going to be a bit of a challenge.”

If the water tanks had been full when they left Yavin, everything might have been fine. But Ben was reckless and also light on credits, so he’d cut a few corners. Filling the backup tank had been one of them. The good news was, they weren’t going to die of thirst; their own need for hydration paled in comparison to the ship’s. The bad news was, there was no way they could keep the engines cool long enough to get back to Yavin, so an explosion or a catastrophic meltdown was coming in about three days.

“Let’s hope for the explosion. At least that’ll be fast,” Poe said, pressing his hands against his eyes. Poe wasn’t even sure what their original destination had been, just that these kyber crystals were hidden somewhere remote, and now they were so deep in the black they’d be lucky if a smuggling ship passed them by and took them for slaves.

“There is one option,” Ben said quietly. “I wouldn’t say it’s plan aurek, or even plan besh…”

“Just how far down the alphabet are we going here?” he asked, his heart lifting a little. He’d always had a thing for doomed plans.

“Osk?” Ben suggested.

“Better than xesh!” Poe exclaimed. “Now where exactly are we headed?”

Ben took in a long breath. “Mustafar. They say Vader’s palace was never disturbed.”

“Buddy, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not plan osk, and it’s not even plan xesh. That is definitely plan zerek.”

“No, plan zerek is begging my parents for help and hoping they arrive before the engines melt down and life support ceases to function,” Ben said implacably. “Plan yirt is prostituting ourselves to whatever smugglers might happen to pass by. That means Vader’s palace is, at worse, plan xesh.”

Poe blinked. “Calling your parents is worse than selling our bodies for safe passage? Your priorities are seriously kriffed.”

“I never claimed otherwise.” Ben crossed his arms over his chest. He obviously had no plans to budge, and if Poe was being honest with himself, that was exactly what he’d fallen into love, lust,, infatuation, and/or codependence with. He could sort out the exact verbiage after they solved the water crisis.

“Alright, plan xesh it is,” he said, flashing Ben his very best rakish grin. “Never let it be said that Poe Dameron is afraid of a little adventure.”

But Ben didn’t meet his eyes; he was staring off into the stars, his expression unreadable.

“Maybe it was meant to be this way,” he murmured. “Maybe I was always meant to go there.”

Poe couldn’t repress the shiver that ran down the length of his spine.

Poe’s sense of foreboding grew as the day went on. They checked and rechecked the course, and Ben made four different water-use graphs to prove they could make it -- just barely. Together they wormed through the maintenance crawlways, checking for any sign of instability in the pipes.

When they found none, Ben’s lips twitched upward into a small smile. “Plan xesh is go,” he said, looking satisfied.

They were back in the living area, which had dried out slightly with the help of a fleet of mouse droids Ben had pilfered from the salvage yard. Poe scrubbed a dingy towel across his forehead, trying to wipe away some of the sweat. The maintenance crawl ways were hot, but they’d agreed to give up showering until the water situation was under control.

Ben peered at him when he didn’t respond. “Aren’t you excited? You said you wanted an adventure.”

Ben’s brooding and muttering had vanished now that they were almost underway, but now Poe couldn’t dispel his own unease. What exactly were they hoping to find in Vader’s palace, anyway? If the palace really was untouched, and if the water tanks were full, they might well be contaminated by now. Being stranded in a Sith Lord’s castle sounded worse than being stranded in an empty sector of space.

“Do you think Vader’s palace might be untouched because of, I dunno, deadly boobytraps?” Poe asked.

Ben frowned. “Well, yes, of course but we’re clever enough to get around them, right? It would be an even better story than the Kessel Run. And who knows, we might find something of use to the Republic Navy.”

Poe’s heart leapt at the thought. If he found something they needed, something no one else had been able to obtain, they’d have to give him a second chance, right? And they’d have to take Ben too, never mind that he’d missed the application deadline.

“Let’s lock in the course,” he said quickly.

Poe awakened at 0200 hours because Ben was squeezing his hand with the strength of a Wookiee.

“Hey, buddy, I like you too, but…” his voice trailed off as he felt Ben shaking next to him. His eyes were squeezed shut, and they didn’t open when Poe flicked on the bedside lamp.

“Ben.” Poe grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him hard, but there was no response. He only kept shivering, whispering something that sounded like no, no, no.

Poe brushed the damp hair back from Ben’s forehead. “Hang on, buddy, I’m gonna fix this,” he said, even though he had absolutely no idea what was wrong. He launched himself across the tiny cabin and rifled through the drawers for medical supplies. Finding none, he poured a glass of cold water and flung it in Ben’s face.

Ben opened his eyes with a shuddering gasp and sat up, blinking. Poe crouched on the bed beside him, resisting the urge to check his vitals -- or call for a tox screen.

“You okay, buddy?” he asked, keeping his voice soft. “That was some dream.”

Ben shivered. “Not a dream. A vision.”

Poe tried to keep his tone light, the better to hide his own frazzled nerves. “I guess the whole Jedi thing is more than just flinging rocks and jumping from improbable heights, huh?”

Ben took a shaky breath. “I wouldn’t really know. There are so few of us left. It’s not so violent for everyone, or at least, that’s what my Uncle Luke said after he read some moth-eaten manuscript he found in a cave somewhere. My parents took me to doctors, got me medication, but they never stopped. You can’t stop the Force with pills.”

“What did you see?” Poe asked, hardly daring to breathe himself. He couldn’t take his eyes off Ben’s face.

“My father.” Ben swallowed. “I killed my father. He was walking out on a bridge, asking me to come home, and I thought I was going to follow him. But I didn’t. I stabbed him. Through the heart.”

Poe caught Ben’s hand and squeezed. “You know you can be mad at someone and still miss them, right? And you can be angry at them and love them too. Trust me, I’d know.” He was intimately familiar, after all the times he’d watched his mom’s fighter soar away into space, and all the many years when he didn’t get to watch her come home.

“You really think that’s all it is?” Ben asked. His whole body went slack, and Poe wondered how long he’d been carrying this particular burden without quite understanding it.

Poe nodded. “Yeah, I do. You’re one mercurial moof milker, but you’re not a homicidal maniac. Maybe send your dad a wave tomorrow morning, let him know you’re okay. Or, you know, that you’re flying around in a death trap with a strange man and we might explode soon, but you’re thinking of him.”

Ben managed a small snort at that, and he leaned against Poe’s chest. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Poe tucked Ben’s head under his chin, even though that meant stands of his unruly hair tickled his nose. “Me too, buddy, me too.” It would have been easy to wrap his arms around Ben and fall asleep, but doubt about Vader’s palace kept prickling his mind. Rejection from the flight academy notwithstanding, after three years with the SAR squad, he was no stranger to planning complicated missions. He knew a kriff-up coming when he saw one. “Hey Ben, when you said they say Vader’s palace is undisturbed, who did you mean?”

Ben stiffened in Poe’s arms, then pulled himself up to look him in the eye. “No one. It’s how I see it in my visions.”

“And that’s why we’re going.” Poe didn’t bother to make it a question.

“I have to.” Ben’s voice was resolute. Poe would’ve liked to protest, but Ben cut him off before he could do more than open his mouth. “I’d tell you I’m sorry I can’t offer to drop you off at the nearest spaceport, but that would be a lie. I’m glad you’re with me. But I know it was more than you asked for when you came aboard, and I am sorry I can’t be an easier person to be with.”

“I should seriously reexamine my taste in men,” Poe muttered, but with every second Ben stared into his eyes, more of his resolve melted. “Alright, you want the truth?” he asked.

Ben swallowed, but he nodded.

Poe cleared his throat. “You’re plan aurek. I don’t have a plan besh. It’s just you, so whatever it is you need, I’m in.”

Ben let out a ragged breath and pressed his forehead against Poe’s. “I promise, I’ll pay it back. A thousand times over.”

Poe stared at Mustafar through the scratched viewscreen in the cargo bay. When he toggled the infrared scan, nearly the whole planet glowed bright red, and arcs of thermal energy rose all the way through the stratosphere.

“No landing zone too small or rugged,” Ben murmured beside him. “Did you mean that?”

“I’m insulted you would ask.” Strictly speaking, Poe had never set a rustbucket of a ship down in a lava field, but there was a first time for everything, right? One more way to stick it to the Navy. “Wait a minute, you’re letting me do this landing?”

Ben shrugged. “You want to, don’t you? I owe you that much at least.”

Poe’s heart leaped. He knew how much this landing meant to Ben. “You bet I do. I’m gonna need a lot more detailed thermal scan than this though,” he said, tapping the cargo bay’s fuzzy readout. “Probably a particulate analysis of the air, figure out whether there’s anything floating around down there to gum up the engines.”

Ben shifted awkwardly and cleared his throat. Poe sighed.

“Let me guess, you sold the scanning array to upgrade the hyperdrive, and now all you’ve got is this poodoo model that you liberated from some other ship?”

“Well, how was I supposed to know I needed the scanners? The Millenium Falcon is all jury-rigged and rewired, vital components are always breaking…” He waved an airy hand. “I assumed all problems were surmountable.”

“I’ll surmount,” Poe said. “But next time…”

Ben summoned one of his rare, dazzling smiles. “Next time, I won’t be figuring things out on my own, and I’ll ask which parts are important before I sell them.”

Poe settled into the pilot’s seat, the warm certainty of next time curled in his belly, and his fingers humming with the adrenaline of a difficult landing. They bounced hard when they hit atmo, and the safety harness bit into his shoulders as it jerked him back into his seat.

“Engines need power,” Poe muttered to Ben, his arms straining to hold the throttle straight against the buffeting wind.

“Ground’s coming up quickly,” Ben replied tersely from the copilot seat.

“Which is why I asked for power,” Poe muttered through clenched teeth. From the corner of his eye, he could see Ben’s long fingers spread over the control panel, and he wrenched his gaze back to the viewscreen just as a sudden gust of wind nearly blew them into a column of ash. He slammed his foot down on the roll pedal, and the ship somersaulted. Something clattered across the cockpit behind them, but at least they were still flying in clear -- well, clearish -- air.

“Was that really necessary?” Ben asked.

“You wanna live, shut up and keep your eyes on the controls,” Poe snapped back. The ash in the air was too thick to avoid, and Poe cringed as he thought of it getting sucked into the engines. Sure enough, an amber alarm light began flashing on the console.

“Losing starboard engine,” Ben announced. A second amber light began to flash, and he added, “Port engine too.”

Plumes of smoke filled the viewscreen, and Poe’s gaze flickered to the fuzzy sensor readout piped in from the cargo bay. “Steering control still active. Gliding in by instrumentation only,” he said, as if there were a traffic control buoy somewhere to hear them. The ground loomed on the readout, fifty meters below, then forty, then thirty…

“Brace for impact,” Poe said, and the ship skidded across the lava plain with a screech. A dozen warning lights flashed on the console as the transparisteel screen split in front of them. Then the world went dark.

“Poe, are you alright? Poe, wake up. Wake up.”

Poe opened his eyes slowly, looking around for the source of the voice. It wasn’t just in his ears, he realized. It was in his head.

“Ben?” he asked. His tongue felt fuzzy, and the world tilted when he tried to move his head.

“I’m here.” Ben squeezed his hand, his presence still pressing against Poe’s mind. “Are you alright? You hit your head.”

Poe blinked and moved his head more slowly this time. “I’m alright, buddy,” he said. “Long as I don’t move too fast. Are you, uh…” He realized he wasn’t really sure what he wanted to ask. “Are you doing some kind of Jedi thing, or did I hit my head harder than I thought?”

The presence in Poe’s mind vanished, and he felt strangely cold.

“I’m sorry.” Ben was in front of him now. “Mother says that’s rude, but I was worried.” He offered Poe a wavering smile. “I’m afraid I’ve gotten us into rather a lot of trouble.”

“I knew you were trouble when I picked you up,” Poe muttered, brushing a hand across Ben’s forehead. His curls were plastered to his skin with sweat.

“I believe I’m the one who picked you up,” Ben said. His smile looked more solid for an instant before it was replaced by a look of concern. “Can you walk? We ought to get inside.”

Poe squinted through the cracked viewscreen. Two tall ebony towers jutted into the orange sky, and he managed a grin of his own. “Hey,” he said, “we made it.”

A blast of heat and the stench of sulfur struck Poe in the face as soon as they stepped outside. Now that his head was clearing, he turned to inspect the ground around them. What had looked like a smooth lava plain from the air was a jagged expanse of serrated rock. Nestled in crevices were a half-dozen ships even less fortunate than theirs. If any of the pilots had survived the landing, there was no sign of them now.

Poe knew he should be afraid, but he couldn’t suppress the frisson of excitement that shot through his limbs as they approached the twin spires of Vader’s palace. This was a piece of the secret, untouchable life his parents had lived during the war, a trace of the foe his mother had risked her life to vanquish. Now, at last, he could be a part of history too.

The palace’s black steps still gleamed in the dull orange light, their surface so slick that the ash slid right off them. Poe had expected to find a door at the top of the stairway, but there was only a wall so black it looked like liquid.

“I don’t suppose your visions told you how to get in,” he said. He tapped his fingers absently against the wall, then pulled his hand back quickly, just in case it was haunted, evil, or otherwise imbued with malevolent powers.

Ben cleared his throat, or at least, Poe thought he did. It was hard to tell, what with the howling wind and the bubbling magma lake behind them.

“The visions aren’t very practical,” Ben said, his lips twisting into his usual wry grimace. “Maybe there’s a hidden catch? Help me look.”

“Or maybe there's a booby trap. Is that a human femur I see in the corner?” Poe asked, transfixed by the pale white gleam in the corner of the stairs. One or two more steps to the right, and he’d probably find the remains of one of the pilots whose hulls had cracked open on the rocks.

But Ben wasn’t listening. Looking transfixed, he reached toward the wall. Poe tried to pull him back, but he was too late. Ben’s fingers grazed the gleaming black surface, and the steps rumbled below them.

This time, Poe seized Ben around the waist. Ben tried to push him aside, but Poe refused to let go. His head roiled and his vision spun. He wasn’t ready for this kind of physical confrontation, but that didn’t matter. They had to move, now.

Ben shoved him back harder, his face twisting into an ugly grimace “I have to do this. You don’t understand. This is my destiny.”

“You’re not meant to die here, Ben.” Poe pulled him closer, not trying to fight him any longer. “Just listen to me, buddy. We’ll figure this out, but we have to get away now.”

The rumble grew louder, but Ben was rooted to the spot. Poe knew he should flee, but he couldn’t bear to turn away and leave his only friend, his first real companion, behind.

“It’s opening.”

Ben’s voice was ragged, and Poe followed his gaze down to a gradually widening crack at the base of the wall. The smell of stale, recycled air drifted out, blessedly cool against Poe’s sweaty skin.

A computerized voice intoned, “DNA match recognized. Admission granted.”

Poe’s memories got pretty fragmented after that. He remembered how bad his head hurt, and he might have thrown up on the threshold of Vader’s polished black floor. Then Ben’s strong arms were around him, and he had the dim sensation of floating upward before the world went black.

Poe woke up in a bacta tank. Most people wouldn’t like to wake up floating in strange goo, but Poe was used to it. There’d been a bad rescue mission in an avalanche, and he’d spent a lot of time in bacta tanks after that. He was just fine until he realized he was floating in Vader’s bacta tank, at which point he started pounding frantically on the glass -- to no avail, of course. A mechanical voice informed him that the treatment cycle would finish in five minutes, and he really ought to remain calm in the meantime.

After the bacta drained, a pair of spindly mechanical arms draped him in a silky robe -- Vader’s robe, Poe’s brain added -- and he stumbled out into a bedchamber that looked eerily like Ben’s bunk. It was larger, of course, with picture windows that looked out across lava fields, but sheets of real flimsy cluttered the desk, and exotic weapons hung on the walls beside model spacecraft that looked handmade.

Ben stood against the far wall, looking out over the endless magma fields, his face bathed in eerie orange light. Poe caught his breath. He had absolutely no idea what to say. But then Ben stepped away from the window, and he looked totally ordinary. Just like Ben.

“Are you alright?” he asked, covering the distance between them quickly. “When you passed out again…” He swallowed hard, and Poe knew he’d been reliving that moment when his mom hit the floor, and he hadn’t known how to help.

“Yeah,” Poe said quickly. “Absolutely.”

As alright as anyone could be while standing in Darth Vader’s palace, wearing his clothes.

“You don’t hate me because --”

“No, I could never.” The answer was too fast, but Poe checked inside his heart, and sure enough, he didn’t hate Ben and didn’t even think he should. “Look, a lot of people have Imperial entanglements, you know? Yours is a little bigger than most, but it’s not like half the galaxy didn’t work for the Empire at some point.” Still, anger was bubbling up under his skin, and he clenched his fingers into the silky fabric of the robe. “You could’ve told me, you know?”

He’d been supportive, hung in there for the nightmare visions and emotional revelations and wild plans. Maybe he was an amateur when it came to relationships, but surely he’d bought some modicum of trust.

Ben’s eyes widened. “You thought I knew? That Vader is my --” He sighed. “I don’t even know what, but grandfather makes the most sense, wouldn’t you say?”

“Your mom didn’t tell you?” In Poe’s mental picture of the world, if both your parents were alive and married, your family might as well be a holovid, with all the heart wrenching emotional conversations and contrived hugs afterward. In retrospect, it might have been a touch simplistic.

Ben snorted. “My parents tell me nothing.” Poe could see the muscles working in his jaw. “I knew my mother was hiding something, but not this.” Ben turned back toward the window, bathing his face in orange light once again. “I could be so powerful. Do you think that’s why she didn’t want me to know?”

Poe swallowed and tried to block out the shiver that went down his spine. “I have no idea, buddy. I do know one thing though. I don’t want to spend another minute wearing Darth Vader’s clothes.”

“Fair.” Ben turned away from the window, the familiar wry grin on his face. “Let’s see what we can find.”

Their exploration turned up what had to be the galaxy’s biggest cache of bacta and nutrigel cubes -- probably all Vader could eat , Ben had murmured -- and the bones of a servant who had apparently committed ritual suicide upon discovering his master’s death.

The clothing options were slim.

In a laundry room beneath the palace, they found a neatly folded stack of the servant’s black robes. Ben held one against Poe’s body experimentally.

“I just threw up in my mouth a little,” Poe said.

Ben waved an airy hand. “They’re much too small anyway. I think the poor man lived on nutrigel cubes with Vader. Imagine having someone so obsessed with you they followed your exact diet.”

Poe shuddered. “I just threw up in my mouth a lot.”

“How about these?” Ben unfolded a set of blood red robes with a flourish. “You could skip the gauntlets,” he added, glancing at the pile of elbow-length gloves on a corner of the countertop.

Poe snatched the robe and tossed it on the floor. “You’ve got to be kidding. Weren’t these for the Emperor’s personal guards? How is this even practical for that kind of job? And also, I’d rather be naked than dress like one of them.”

Ben smirked. “I certainly don’t object.” This time, he held Poe’s gaze without flushing, though he spoiled the effect a second later by frowning. “On second thought, nudity may not be a wise choice in a house that has its own magma river.”

“Yeah, who does that?” Poe grabbed what looked to be a pilot’s uniform from the laundry pile. Wearing an enemy uniform while searching for a way into the Naval Academy was ironic at best, but it seemed better than his other options.

He glanced around the laundry room one last time. Truth be told, it wasn’t so different from the one at his house, though obviously it was bigger.

“Does it feel weird to you, how ordinary this is?” he asked, thinking back to the simple ‘fresher they’d found upstairs, and the pile of Vader’s dirty capes waiting next to the washing machine.

“I suppose, after everything else, he was just a man,” Ben said, his face unreadable.

“Darth Vader was a nerd,” Poe said five hours later, scrubbing at his eyes. They were back in Vader’s study, combing through mountains of personal data. He wasn’t sure what they were looking for exactly. Some kind of intel the Republic Navy might need, he supposed -- forgotten weapons caches, useful technology, maybe what happened to the high profile dissidents who’d disappeared under the Emperor’s reign.

Instead they’d found Vader’s personal research on early hyperspace travel, an attempt at a new machine language, and the beginnings of what might be an archaeology textbook. It wasn’t even about evil artifacts, at least not exclusively.

“He was like me,” Ben said softly.

“Except for how you don’t kill people.” Poe cocked an eyebrow and grinned. “Right?”

Ben didn’t smile back. “I would’ve done any of these things,” he said, waving a hand over the holographic readouts arranged around them. “I have done this one.”

Poe squinted at the esoteric equations hovering over the plush gray carpet. “So you both like math?”

“He was working on Napier-Stokes.”

Poe blinked questioningly, and Ben added, “An equation to determine if water could spontaneously explode.”

His tone suggested that any idiot ought to know this, and Poe rolled his eyes.

“Sorry, I only use math for astronavigation. You know, to rescue people and save their lives.”

“I do that too.”

Poe cocked an eyebrow.

“Well, I could,” Ben amended. He pulled a datapad out of his pocket and turned on the display. “But this, I was actually doing.”

Poe glanced back and forth between Ben’s pad and Vader’s equations. From what he could tell, they were almost identical.

“So you were working on the exploding water thing? And that’s what you decided to save from a ship that crashed on a lava field?”

“It was in my pocket. I didn’t go back for it.”

“You carry that on your person at all times? Yeah, you’re nerdy alright.” He nudged Ben with his elbow. “But it doesn’t make you him.”

He thought Ben might offer one of his small, wry grins, but instead he was staring at the holo displays and the model spaceships that ringed the office.

“I wish I could talk to him. I’ve never met someone who was interested in what I was interested in, understood the things I want to understand.” The words came out in a rush, but they cut off with a bitter chuckle. “Maybe that’s why my mother didn’t want me to know. Vader and I have too much in common.”

“That’s enough,” Poe said firmly. He switched off the glowing holo displays and planted himself in front of Ben. “Maybe you could’ve had a decent conversation or two, but last I checked, you don’t have an actual dungeon full of actual skeletons. Much less a stinking pile of flesh that might or might not have been a rathtar.”

Ben actually did smirk at that, and Poe felt some of the tension slide out of his shoulders. He leaned forward to grasp one of Ben’s hands, appreciating for the hundredth time how his fingers were long and elegant, but still calloused from the hard work of rebuilding a spaceship.

Their eyes locked, and Poe scooted forward until their knees were touching. “You’re not him, okay? You’re whoever you choose to be.”

Ben glanced toward the window, and suddenly a glowing orange-and-gold arc of lava shot toward them, only to crash back to the earth a millimeter before it shattered the glass.

“I have so much power,” he murmured.

“You did that?” Poe asked, still staring at the spot where the ribbon of lava had been.

Ben nodded slowly. “What if I choose wrong?”

Poe’s heart was still hammering, but he steadied himself with a breath. “You won’t.” He squeezed Ben’s hand. “I’ll be there. I’ll help.”

Sometimes, when Poe looked back on his life, he wondered if things might have turned out differently -- for himself and the whole galaxy -- if the bridge over Vader’s lava river hadn’t collapsed.

Truth was, it felt pretty rickety, but they weren’t really paying attention. They were coming back from the hangar bay, high on what they’d found: TIE fighters bristling with ridiculous armaments, and others stripped down to soar through hyperlanes at maximum velocity. There were racing pods and vintage cruisers and a few vessels that defied categorization and looked handmade. None of them were spaceworthy -- spacecraft weren’t meant to be kept idle for nineteen years, after all -- but they could easily repair one, or better yet, build something brand new. If they had to live on nutrigel cubes for a month to get it done, that was a price they were willing to pay.

Ben had just stepped off the bridge. Poe was a few paces away from the end when he said, “If you want somebody to do weird math with, I’ll learn.”

Ben spun around, a real grin lighting his face for once. “Really?”

Poe stopped and pulled himself up straight, momentarily forgetting the heat radiating from the lava below. “Believe me, buddy, if I wanna learn something, I can.”

The statement was completely true, and a source of deep frustration for his high school teachers. He could learn anything; he just hadn’t had much use for literature or biology or economics, so he hadn’t bothered, and he almost hadn’t graduated. Another reason the Naval Academy didn’t want you, a voice added in his head, but Poe was finding it easier and easier to ignore. A lifetime of adventure with Ben sounded better every day.

Ben was reaching toward him, about to take his hand, and suddenly the metal groaned. Before either of them could react, the bridge was collapsing beneath him. He plummeted toward the flowing magma. The heat from below seared his skin, and pieces of the metal bridge rained down from above.

His fall came to a bone-jarring halt, as if he were held aloft by an invisible force -- which Poe supposed he was. Like, the actual Force. He felt a split second of awe before terror rushed in. Shrapnel from the bridge still tumbled from above, dislodging pieces of sharp volcanic rock as it fell. There were far too many pieces for Ben to control, and Poe felt a rib snap at the same time searing pain shot through his leg.

Poe awakened hours or days later to the steady throb of a hyperspace drive. He cracked his eyes open, but the light felt blinding and the world was fuzzy -- so many painkillers -- and he decided to rely on his other senses instead.

“You’re leaving for training as soon as we drop your friend at the med ship. I’ve already told your uncle.”

The woman’s voice was steady and firm but laced with tension. Poe could easily imagine the speaker standing ramrod straight, braced for a challenge.

“Hey, your highness, you think we might need to discuss this?”

“I don’t. That’s why we haven’t.”

“You both seem to have forgotten that I’m eighteen. While I appreciate this little rescue mission, you have neither the right nor the ability to decide what I do with my life.”

Ben’s voice cut through the painkiller haze, and Poe realized where he was: aboard the Millennium Falcon, with Leia Organa and Han Solo. He fought back a smile as he felt the hyperdrive vibrate through the deckplates and up through the biobed where he was strapped in. Sure, the circumstances weren’t ideal, but still, it was the Millennium Falcon.

Scraps of conversation drifted past while Poe contemplated whether he was well enough to fly, even for five minutes. Then Ben’s voice brought him screaming back.

“Do you imagine you can force me?”

“If that’s how you want to play it, I'm certain I could.” Leia’s voice was so cold Poe was sure the ambient temperature had dropped at least ten degrees.

A tense silence rippled through the cabin, and then Ben said the last thing Poe expected.

“Dad, seriously, is this how we solve conflicts in this family now?”

“Dad? You haven’t called me that since you were eight.”

“There’s a reason for that.”

Poe felt a ripple of anger and wondered if Ben was connected to him again, or if he was just so angry he couldn’t help but broadcast it. He wondered if he ought to get up and try to stop the impending screaming match, but Han’s voice softened.

“You know what? You’re right. I did give you a reason. But you kriffed this one up pretty bad, kid. You need to think about what’s the right thing to do.”

Poe heard slow steps on the decking, and when he cracked open his eyes, he saw Han had laid a hand on Ben’s shoulder, and both of them were staring at the bed where he lay. Judging from the expressions on their faces, he must’ve looked pretty bad. A wave of Ben’s shame and sorrow flooded through him, and Poe tried to raise his hand and wave. See, he wanted to say, I’ve been hurt worse, and anyway, I chose this. I chose you.

Nothing more than a groan escaped from his lips, and blackness rushed in.

Poe woke up when the Falcon dropped out of hyperspace with a shudder that proved it was just as jury-rigged as Ben had claimed.

Ben was sitting beside him, a hand laid gently over Poe’s.

“Must be pretty bad if you activated plan zesk,” Poe murmured.

“If my mother weren’t skilled in the healing arts -- ” Ben’s voice cracked.

“But she is.” Poe tried to shrug and found his muscles weren’t obeying his commands. “You know what they say. Any crash you can walk away from, or crawl away from...” He paused to clear his throat; his voice was hoarser than he expected. “Anyway, it was a freak accident. Not your fault.”

Ben gripped his hand more tightly, and Poe refused to flinch. He had the sudden sinking sensation that this was the last time he’d feel that touch, and he wasn’t going to let a little pain get in the way.

“It was my fault. You were the first person who listened to me, who understood anything about me at all.” He took a shuddering breath. “I led you into a deathtrap, and it was because of pride and anger and lust for power.”

Poe’s stomach dropped. “You’re leaving for training. Like your mother said.”

They both knew it wasn’t a question, but Ben nodded anyway. “I’ll come back to you afterward.”

Poe launched himself off the bed with a groan. He wanted to put his arms around Ben and squeeze him tight, but he only managed to stumble into the solid wall of his body. No matter; Ben pulled him upright, supporting him with his weight. His head rested on Poe’s shoulder, and he murmured into his hair, “We’ll see each other again. I swear it.”

Poe managed to wrap his arms around Ben at last. “I know, buddy. I know.”

The truth was, he didn't know at all, but in that moment, he chose to believe it.