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“Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense. What I mean by that is: if it wasn't for race, X-Men doesn't sense. If it wasn't for the history of breeding human beings in the New World through chattel slavery, Dune doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the extermination of so many Indigenous First Nations, most of what we call science fiction’s contact stories doesn't make sense. Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understood that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We’re the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible, yeah. In the Green Lantern Corps, we are the oath. We are all of these things—erased, and yet without us—we are essential.”
― Junot Díaz
Tell me a Story, even if it's a Lie.
-- Caramello, Sandra Cisneros.
Abuelito’s house looked like an overgrown loth-cat sitting on its haunches, dusty purple and striped around the front windows. When he was a child, the only thing Poe loved more than his Abuelito’s house was his mother’s RZ-1 A-wing ship.
The A-wing was perfect in the way that all good things were: used and patched up and scarred with more than a million stories. It was fast, and it was his mother’s and it was where you could feel weightless, and taste the stars. But Abuelito’s house was perfect for other reasons — perfect because it smelled like Tía Delza’s perfume, and was painted in every color of a nebula orchid on the inside, and because Abuelito always had candies in his pocket if you behaved.
Every morning, Abuelito would make coffee the old way - never synth - bitter and black, and drink it on the front porch of the house while he watched the prisma storms light up the skies of Yavin 4.
When he was old enough, which was after his mother died - it made him a man early, Abuelito had said - Abuelito poured him a cup of his own to drink. Abuelito had explained that drinking it black would put hair on his chest, but it never did, or at least, it didn’t when Poe was eight. Poe drank it con leche, and hair grew on his chest eventually anyways, and by then Poe had taken to calling him Abuelo, because he'd grown up.
His parents’ ranch was home too- with the Jedi Tree in the backyard, branches spread wide like prayers being swept up to the sky. Poe’s mother had gotten it from Master Luke Skywalker, who’d said it was ‘force sensitive,’ even though it was only a tree. Poe had never been clear on that — if the Force was in everything, then how come this tree was different? Maybe it wasn’t different at all, except for when it glowed a soft blue and smelled like pan dulce in the spring. Maybe it was special because its leaves always kissed the top of his head when he walked under it, and hid him high up in its branches when he was in trouble.
Mostly, Poe decided, it was special because that was where they buried his mother. Every summer afterwards, if sat under the tree and listened very carefully, he could hear his mother singing like she did while in Abuelo’s kitchen, or in her A-wing. Nothing in the whole universe could compare to that.
Still, the Tree’s shade was for everyone, and everybody. It was for him in the summer when the tree’s flowers caught in his hair, and made him glow like an angel. Other wonderful things happened at the Tree, and as he got older, they became more important. Like when he snuck past his sleeping father to meet a young padawan boy who looked less like an angel and more like meteor-marble. A living statue who kissed like you could the taste stars, and that you could maybe, if you tried hard enough, hold onto without breaking him. Someone who made his blood run hot and skip from his heart to everywhere else you didn't want to talk about in polite company. A boy who didn’t hesitate to hold his hand under the tree which glowed better than moonlight, and smiled when Poe placed a blue-veined flower in his hair and declared with a laugh, muy mango. And then later, in a tangle of clothes and limbs and wet exhales and shivering bodies -- mi corazón.
When it wasn’t just them, it was sometimes borrowed by the other padawan students, who meditated for hours on end. On occasion, Poe would stop to watch, to see if they fidgeted like he did beneath the Tree. To see if they sang along to its' melody, or just sat and breathed.
The Tree was also for his cousins: Paz, Milo, little María, Lyzo, skinny Frax, Sela, güero Tiko, Ooronita, tall Kabil, Soona, blue-eyed Iktel, baby Latia, and him - gordo Poe - all lined up when Abuelo made them stand for a holovid under the tree the summer before Poe left for the New Republic’s Naval Academy. In the video, Poe held baby Latia, because Poe was the oldest, and the most responsible, and because babies loved him, Latia especially. Latia with her thick brown lashes, and browner skin like sweet earth - who was more like Poe’s baby sister than any of the other cousins.
Baby Latia was kissed by the tree’s soft branches every time Poe held her beneath it, and she couldn’t talk yet, but she held whole conversations with her Tía Shara and the Tree. Poe knew that was how these things worked, and that it was his mother who was watching from beyond.
Tía Tifa saw it too, and wiped her hands on her apron before she smiled like she’d heard an old song on a holovid, the kind that she danced with Tío Raxes to when they were young sweethearts.
- Mira, mijo - ¡Que Milagro! She talks with your mother.
- Because Mama knows Lala is smart enough to talk back, Tía.
Which everyone knew was true, because babies see all kinds of things the adults don’t, or won’t, or can’t. Poe was too old to see, but he felt it. Abuelo felt it too, but they never asked Poe’s father if he felt it like they did, the way it sat sweet on the air like freshly made flan lingers on your tongue. It didn't seem right to ask, maybe because he couldn’t feel it, and maybe because they all knew Kes Dameron did feel it, and flan never tasted as sweet without the one you love by your side.
It makes Poe think about his padawan with sad eyes and heavy smiles; how kissing him was better than Tía Yatzel’s canillitas de leche on his tongue, and how he already knows a little too much about losing someone you love and he hasn’t even left yet. When he does leave, he tries desperately to remember everything, to preserve the way it all tasted on warm summer evenings, and the way it all felt. If only memory worked that way.
Poe also thinks about the Force, and how it seemed to take as much as it gave to people. Baby Latia waved her hands and the tree branches began to waltz after her, like skinny men in blue suits.
- Look at that, Abuelo mused, - Lala might grow up to be a Jedi.
Poe is torn between pride and fear. He’s seen how heavy that mantle looks. But gravity is a funny thing, and being a pilot for the Republic is just as much of a burden in the skies as anything else.
- Force willing, Lala will be the best Jedi there is.
He said finally, before Tía Tifa huffed. Abuelo nodded — El destino es el destino, but Tía Tifa just shook her head.
- Ay, not this young she won’t. I don’t care how those Jedi do it. Latia is going to have a childhood with her family. Where she belongs.
- Good, that means I can keep Lala with me.
Poe jokes, but he means it, and can’t imagine coming home and being unable to see her playing with the other cousins. He doesn’t want her big caramello eyes to become heavy too soon. Baby Latia isn’t even a year old, and there’s no good reason to send her off to Master Luke Skywalker before she’s even five. It’s not like the Jedi master will potty train her.
Later, when Poe finds out about the Jedi school, and everything that happened there, he thinks first of the boy, and then of Lala. Lala, who won’t get taught in the Force because the padawans are all dead, and Luke Skywalker is gone. Lala who is now alone. Poe couldn’t save the boy, but Lala is safe. It is enough. It’s not everything, but it is something, and he knows he wouldn’t trade one for the other. It hurts that he has to even think such a thing.
— People have to make their own choices, his father said often. — And you can’t always stop them, mijo. Maybe you can be there when they need you, but you can’t stop them from pushing you away.
The night he finds out that Lala is fine, but the boy isn’t, he goes to his rooms and drinks distilled Yavin Oort Mezcal until he feels warm again. And he cries, like Abuelo cried when his mother died at first - heartbroken and sad and soft. But then he cries hard, like a monsoon, too wet and too much all at once. Poe tastes salt and rain, and copper. It hurts to cry this hard, but he can't stop it. The world had hurt before, been terrible and lonely before, but never like this. It tore him open, left his heart raw.
When his mother died, Poe thought he had learned how to mourn, how to grieve, but he’d only ever lost his mother. Truth was, you might know how to cry for mamá, but not know how to cry for someone different. So when he didn’t know how to weep over the boy any longer, he cried for his mother. Then for his father, and then the Republic. Love and familia and hope.
The New Republic starts out being just like family, except bigger, and different. It’s a thing Poe holds dear, but also one that he struggles with, because it’s a family who pretends everything is okay, even when it isn’t. This is always hard. And Poe is too stubborn to accept it.
It’s also a family who doesn’t understand that his name is Poe Varalas Dameron Bey, so he simplifies it to Poe Dameron. It’s a family with holo-paperwork, and character limits, but he still loves it, so these things seem small at first.
Baby Latia gets big, and then isn't a baby anymore. When she is eight, Abuelo shows her how to carve wood, slow and methodical. Anyone can use a laser to carve, but when you do it the old way with metal and sometimes blood, it’s different. It is complicated and simple. It’s more like life, that way. You might get hurt, but you get to feel everything.
And Lala is gifted. When Poe goes home that year, home to his father’s ranch, and home to Abuelo’s house, he smiles big just for her. He is still her favorite, and she still dances with the Tree in his backyard. Poe is surprised when she shows him her carvings - Mira, I made it for you — she tells him when he holds the small replica of the Tree on a cord. It is pale blue wood that smells like pan dulce and feels warm like the sun and Latia tells him it came from a branch the Tree gave her.
— You can wear it around your neck, or put it in your X-wing for good luck, she tells him, and Poe hugs her tight — Muchas gracias, Lala. I love it.
The Tree was more than good luck, Poe knew. It was everything he had ever loved or lost, and it made him alive. When the family had lunch, Poe rested in the shade of the Tree. In the sunlight the leaves reflected every color he could imagine, and all the ones he’d never thought of before. With his eyes closed, he saw even more.
Going back to the Republic got harder.
People insisted everything was fine. Poe had befriended his squadron, worked his way up the ladder of leadership, and still couldn’t pretend away the truth of things. The New Republic was pretending the First Order wasn’t a threat. It was a tactic that worked, if you never bothered to look at the skies where Star Destroyers loomed like great hurricanes ready to break upon the Republic’s shores. When Poe slept, he dreamed of floods and fires.
It became difficult to fall in and out of love the more he dreamed these things. Heartbreak had been one thing, he’d ached and struggled, but then it became part of him. He loved again, lost again. Pero, it was hard to have a relationship when there were more important things, when his heart was too big and his ideals too consuming. If Poe couldn’t prevent darkness, he could dedicate himself to being a glimmer of light. Hope was love too, and it was the kind that he’d always been best at.
Poe fell even more in hope when General Leia hired him to join the Resistance. The General marked him down as Poe Varalas Dameron Bey on his registration forms. And like that, he found familia again.
He was working with the same woman his mother had served, for the same reasons. For hope, and familia, and love. Because he it was the only thing to do, and because he wore Lala’s carving around his neck for good luck.
Poe was a pilot because the universe needed him to fly. Because, his mother once teased him in her A-wing — fue escrito en las estrellas, mijo.
The Resistance needed him to fly, so he soared. When General Organa told him she hoped to find Luke Skywalker, he took the mission. Risking your life wasn't so difficult when the only other option was simply giving your life to the First Order. You could be afraid, but you couldn’t give up.
On Yavin 4, Abuelo told had told him once that a man couldn’t choose when he died, pero a man could choose what sort of person he was when the time came. You made yourself, in the end, so you had better decide who you wanted to be.
In the First Order’s interrogation room, Poe reminded himself of this, and stared down the face of death. He stared down failure. If he died, then this was the man he was — The Resistance will not be intimidated — not by hate, not by despair, and not by loss. Even in places like the First Order, people still dreamed, still wished, still believed in something better. Like moths to a luminaria, belief in something better out there found him, and Poe survived. It was chance, or accident, or maybe luck, but he didn’t question it. He was alive, and safe.
As soon as he had medical clearance, the Resistance asked him to fly again. To do something reckless and dangerous and probably deadly, all because they had to believe it could still be done. Because the universe needed towering beacons of light and strength, but at this point, even matches and candles would do.
He was thirty-two and the only thing Poe loved more than flying was his family's hope.
So when the Resistance needed hope more than anything, Poe took to the skies.