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Poe doesn’t know if he could explain it; his addiction to how adrenaline settles in his body, or the way that he loves the lingering sensations of the engine, either roaring up or quieting down. It starts with the low thrum of his veins that he’s known ever since he climbed into his first A-wing and felt his mother’s hands wrapped around his own, tiny fingers flicking at the controls.
His hands are a little bigger, now. They amass scars and age silently. The war tends to do that to everyone, and Poe thinks: if only if there was no war to speak of, right from the beginning. There’d be no Lieutenant Shara Bey and no Sergeant Kes Dameron and no Black Leader and no X-wing, probably, speeding steadily at his hands.
But that’s a dangerous line of questioning. It’s easy to slip into this headspace where everything is different, like maybe things would have just been better because of it. Sometimes he gets too lost in fantasy But it’s inevitable, he thinks. Flesh isn’t the only thing that will get stripped away from the bone.
“It’s part of remembering,” he tells Finn, who’s recently started working as one of Leia’s tacticians. “That there are still things to be salvaged. Experiences you still want to go back to.”
Finn nods. “Alright,” he says, eyes wide, carefully trained on him. Poe is unashamedly in love.
“It’s also a part of me,” Poe adds, although he doesn’t know how true that really is.
He doesn’t like to admit it, but there’s a sort of innate fear that accompanies him everywhere, recently. He’s constantly off-balance at the edges of his mind. Like an unclean landing, or a faulty engine.
Poe tells himself that it doesn’t matter. That planes can always be repaired and put back up again. Some parts of your body could be malfunctioning at this moment, but it doesn’t mean forever, unless you want it to. Human bodies are made to be sturdy. Like a machine. Everything is, really, If you squint hard enough.
It’s this kind of thinking, he supposes, that makes people tell him that he’s really passionate about flying. You carry it with you, said Leia, once, you look so much more comfortable up there than on the ground. She’d looked at him with another pair of eyes, then,ike he was another person—like he was Lieutenant Bey’s son.
He’d felt so proud, at that point in time, so invested in what he was but never what he was trying to do, and now—
Poe just feels kind of bitter about this exchange. No particular reason why.
Then: Poe falls out of the sky, with liquid pooling in his brains as his ship crashes into the cliff. The site’s not too far away from base. There are splinters in his body and he’s not quite sure if it can hold it up after all of Jakku and Starkiller; he’s not a young adult anymore. He doesn’t have it in him to be as reckless as all the fresh recruits, but he sure as hell feels like one still, after Kylo Ren had leeched out what he needed and what he didn’t. But Poe understands. You can’t afford to disallow any casualty in law; you can’t offer to rebuild everything. It doesn’t matter if you lose people; what matters are the ones you save.
“I know you wouldn’t have crashed,” he whispers, but he’s not quite sure who it’s directed to. Antilles? Skywalker? Or was it for his dead mother? “I thought that I wouldn’t have crashed again, either, but...”
He doesn’t remember what he was thinking.
“Poe,” someone says, voice frantic, and it could, very likely, be Finn, whose voice is muddled up with the haze in his eyes growing stronger. He misses him frantically, wants to pull him into his arms and run away. Wants to take him everywhere else but that’s impossible, now, Poe would never abandon his station, that’s just not him. There are duties to fulfill. “Poe, please, stay awake for me, c’mon Poe—”
(Poe dreams of his mother, sometimes, her fingers pointing towards control settings, to levers, to the little scar he’d gotten from his first flight, right below his chin.
“War is never clean and easy,” she’d told him, satiating his immature curiosity, and he thought he’d understood. “But there are things to take out of it, too.”
“Like this ship,” Poe supplied.
His ma smiled at him. It could be wistful, but dreams are never truthful and always tinged by longing. “Like the both of you.”)
Poe wakes up, and Finn’s hand is wrapped tightly around his.
“You scared me,” he says, but there’s nothing hostile in those words. There’s nothing accusatory — no you’re supposed to be a commander, dameron, act like one, or, what were you thinking — and Poe is glad, because he truly doesn’t know.
“How is she?” Poe asks, because he crashed his girl. He doesn’t know if he could handle seeing her get replaced.
Finn’s lips press together. He looks overworked, like Leia had strung him up for too long—but she wouldn’t do that; she takes care of everyone under her wing. “She’s fine. Down for repairs.”
Poe takes a deep breath. “Good.”
Finn tightens his grip on him, and Poe winces, slightly, before Finn loosens his grasp. “Poe,” he says, voice tight, “are you okay?”
Poe considers lying. “Not really,” he says instead, glancing towards his bandaged limbs. “Got a big banged up, there.”
“Banged up, is right,” Finn mutters, and Poe throws his back and laughs, just for the sake of doing it. “You gotta be more careful.”
He shrugs. Looks towards the window. He doesn’t know how many days have passed since he was unconscious, but it could have been quite a while, since they’re already well into the next month, judging by the display. “Good weather today,” Poe mentions.
“Sunny,” Finn agrees, and quiets down. Poe likes this silence of his, usually—but now it’s scratchy, like a faulty recording.
Poe tries to rectify it. Wants it to be replaced with the softer, brighter kind of wordlessness that often accompanies the slight turn of the edges of Finn’s lips.
“Shame that I can’t fly for a few days,” he says, but Finn’s face dims down instead.
“Poe,” Leia says, when she comes to visit him, later that evening.
Poe sits up. “General,” he greets her, although he keeps the eye contact to a polite minimum. It’s more difficult to look at her, lately. It’s not easy knowing that you’ve let someone down.
There’s a pause that hangs in the air, for a bit, and she spends her time observing him, looking him over. Poe itches for his Black One. What they said was right, he knows, that he’s always restless when he knows that he doesn’t have his hands on his girl, ready to fly at all times. Unfit for duty, Poe thinks with a grimace.
“We were worried,” Leia says, gently, and Poe bites back from the words that would have probably come spilling out. He forgets, sometimes, that this may be Kylo Ren’s mother—but she is his, too.
Poe swallows. “I’m sorry,” he admits, feeling his lungs clamping down in his chest. “I don’t know what went wrong.”
He does, of course. Poe knows that Kylo Ren plucked away at his memories, desperately hunting for BB-8’s location, that as much as he’d tried blocking him off with the remainder of his childhood—it hadn’t worked. Nothing had. That he was to be left with something tarnished instead.
I don’t know if I still remember my mother, he wants to scream at somebody, because some days her face is missing and he can’t remember the pattern of her favourite blouse. Can’t remember the interior of that A-wing she’d taught him to fly in. He wants her back; it’s unfair to leave him flying in a ship that feels like his first.
He asks Finn to wheel him to see his ship. He can’t quite stand on his two legs yet, but he knows that he’ll recuperate, eventually, albeit slower. Poe is older, now, closer to his mother’s age than ever before.
She’s patched up alright. Poe knows that the rest of his crew will maintain it for him; he just misses the feeling of strapping himself down in the cockpit and feeling ready to go. He liked the turbulence, the frightening drop of weightlessness. Figures that he’d be scared of it now.
Finn, bless him, doesn’t comment on how Poe can’t bring himself to eat anything and leaves the food elsewhere instead, even though he’s probably the one person who hates wasting resources the most in the Resistance.
“I’ll be back,” Finn tells him, when the visiting hours are up. “Do you want me to bring anything? Anyone?”
Poe shakes his head, forces out a grin, the charming one he uses on people who doesn’t know him quite as well. “No need for that, buddy, thanks.”
“Okay,” Finn says, solemn. He’s too intelligent to be fooled by a perfunctory premise; Poe knew that he needed to do better than that to get past him. But he’s too tired, and only wants to fall back into a dreamless sleep.
He shuts his eyes and then there are images of his mother’s A-wing. But he doesn’t see the interior of it. Everything is general shapes and muddled outlines, and Shara Bey smoothing his hair back, muttering in a native language that Poe lost in his head, somewhere.
“I can’t understand you,” he tells her, voice shaking, as she presses her hands to his cheek, mumbling fast. Poe thinks that he’s leaving. “I forgot everything.”
His mother looks at him, then, and her voice subsides, before surfacing back up again, in Standard. “—not our duty to remember,” she smiles. Poe thinks of all the disappointment in the world and how she holds it in her hands. But how else would you go on, he wants to shout, where else would you spend all this hatred?
She shakes her head, “—it’s ours to rectify. You take off from this earth, but it’s the ground that you have to spend your life on.”
“But what then?” Poe argues, weak. He feels back at home in his seven-year-old body. Blink thrice and you’re thirty, he thinks. Shut your eyes for five seconds, and you’re dead. “We rid ourselves of the First Order, and congratulate ourselves? We pick up our dead friends and make shelter under bullet shells?”
“You’re fighting for the chance to rebuild,” his mother reminds him. “And the people you’re holding out for.”
“I always thought that the place was kind of ugly,” Poe mentions to Finn when he wakes, eyeing the heaviness under his eyes. “A massive junkyard, as you would say.”
“—Jakku?” Finn confirms.
“Yeah,” Poe shrugs, gingerly moving his back. Finn rushes forward to help him. “That. But Yavin 4 was. Is. Greener.”
“Rey would like it,” Finn mutters.
Poe smiles, “she would.”
Hours pass.
“Jakku wasn’t that bad,” Finn says, after a while. The kid looks less tired, and he seems more content to accompany him than anyone should be. “Maybe it was because I was a fugitive, then,” Finn cracks a smile, “but they weren’t. Everyone there still managed to fend for themselves. Out of all the parts they’d left behind.”
Poe hums. “From the previous wars?”
Finn nods, “I’d guess so. But people survive, even in places like those. Or at least you hold out hope until you learn how.”
Poe looks at him, now, properly, through all his exhaustion and his hurts and everything that he lumps together inside of himself, refusing to talk. It sounds like a pretty familiar case, he knows. “You’re really profound.”
Finn cracks a lopsided smile at him, and it warms Poe from the inside out, the heat spreading from his face down to his chest.
“Not bad for a kid, huh, buddy,” Finn nudges him by the shoulder, careful, and Poe rolls his eyes, reaching out for the press of Finn’s hand. He gets it.
Poe thinks about his mother more often, now, trying to recall her face. It’s been scratched out of his head ever since he woke up from that dream. But her words stick with him, and the feeling of being small again, the stretch of his fingers as he tries to reach a lever in her A-wing, and her seatbelt wrapping loosely around him. It’s okay. There are still things to salvage.
(But Finn is a constant. Kylo Ren is unable to reach for Poe’s memories of him inside his head, because all that came after. He was sliced open and strangled but it hadn’t meant that nothing good would ever follow on its tails. Finn came for him and lodged himself clearly in Poe’s mind and he doesn’t have any issues with remembering either his voice or his face or his hands. There are no lapses in memory, because he gets to create new ones all the time, when Finn tells an unfunny joke or when his eyes light up at the thought of getting to spend some time with the rest of Poe’s crew on their days off. Poe notices all of it. He lets this information burn brighter in his mind.)
“I crashed,” he admits out loud. Leia is sitting at Finn’s usual spot, while he’s gone on to attend to whatever needed his attention. “Of all people.”
Leia smiles at him, soft. He looks towards her face again and lets his gaze wander. He knows that she likes him enough to let this slide, and she lets him, doesn’t look away as he files new information into his brain. There’s a new scar on her arm, older wrinkles in her forehead, still beautiful. Another mother.
“Yes,” Leia says, laying a hand on his shoulder. “You have to come back down somehow.”
Poe recovers, a few weeks later.
He gets himself into that flight suit and looks towards his girl. He doesn’t quite run for her, but it’s close enough. Poe remembers her controls. He’s in an old body and everything will come smoothly back to him even if it doesn’t, at least at first.
“Poe,” Finn calls out, striding towards him, and he presses a kiss firmly onto his lips. Whispers a soft promise into his ear before he swings himself back down to the cockpit, offering Leia a happy salute, which she returns.
He takes off—and the previous clench of his heart is gone. The ship leaves the ground and he returns to the sensations, comes back to what he was before and turns towards where he’s going to now. Reaches easily towards the lever, and lets out a casual throwaway shout that no one can hear; he’s disabled his comms.
There’s the steady hum of the engine and no one else in sight, not when he’s so far above. He lets his ship hover, flicks down the same controls he’d learned in his first flight, and tries to remember Shara Bey.