more vivid than sunsets / brighter than stars

Never forgetting your first — that’s one of those things that people say, and it doesn’t seem quite right, or quite fair. Poe can’t remember the first person he kissed; there are a handful of likely candidates, other kids who grew up Resistance and stuck around, and maybe he’s flown with whoever the lucky one was since then. First kisses hadn’t seemed that important at the time. He’d had other things on his mind.

He remembers the first ship he ever wanted to fly, sitting in his mother’s lap in a stripped-down A-wing imagining what it would be like to do what she did. He doesn’t remember his first wreck, but he remembers his first engine fire; he remembers the first funeral for someone he’d flown with, when there was nothing to bury in the ground or put up in smoke but an empty jumpsuit and a banner.

Every single person who dropped out, went missing, went down. They’re all there in his memory, and he never forgets a face.

He remembers Ben, but only in increments, stretched out against the passage of time.

**

Yavin’s six-week summers are a gift to every scratch-kneed kid on the planet — not that Poe’s family needs the time out of classes, it’s a relic of some old system no one can explain in a way that satisfies, but it’s impossible to complain.

Ben’s uptight, but he’s all right. He’s thirteen this year, and Poe is fourteen, old enough for the difference to mean something and old enough to handle himself while the adults are debating the stuff kids their age aren’t supposed to repeat. As if there’s anyone their age who doesn’t know what happened in the war. They spend entire afternoons together scavenging Jedi artifacts, which mostly means clambering through rubble while Ben listens intently for vibrations in the Force and Poe looks for sharp sticks to chase away wildlife. Mostly they find fungi, and insects with thousands of legs.

He doesn’t know, at the time, that the last prince of Alderaan is scrambling around in the scummy dead leaves looking for stinging beetles. By the time that part slips into place, it’s the end of week one. Tripping through the trees and spitting orders all the while, Ben has his knit sleeves pulled down over his hands and his aproned-out tunic stuffed full of mushroom caps. They’re flammable when they dry out, and they burn blue, so the only sensible measure is to take them out on the permacrete and play stickball with fist-sized lumps of sparking blue hellfire. Poe hasn’t told him that part yet. He wants to see the look on his face.

This slumping boy is going to be a pest on his life. He can already feel it.

**

Poe doesn’t even have to say what comes next, after the words Leia Organa have left his mouth — the stiffness that creeps over Ben’s long face suggests he’s been asked the stuff that comes next before, and is trying to remember what to say. He’s hugging himself the way he often does, but it doesn’t make him look smaller, it just makes him look like those stick insects.

“You want to know what she’s really like.”

“I mean, you pretty much have to tell me—”

His thoughts are racing — stuff like, isn’t Ben a little tall to be Leia Organa’s kid, and does that mean she’s here right now, and does that mean she’s there upstairs with Dad in the same room where Poe does his math exercises. Of course not, that’s stupid, but she could be here—

Ben’s face looks even more goofy with a gracious smirk on it that skews crooked. “She’s everything people say she is.”

Rebel, maverick, ace diplomat, Hutt-slayer, hell of a temper — every story Poe has ever heard, every battle he’s ever dreamed about and tried to place his own mother in the midst of too, the two of them like sisters. Before he’d seen Leia Organa he pictured her like his own mom — sunny and dark — or like the holos of Queen Breha and Senator Bail, imposing and stately. Not like Ben, who’s so thin and faint, like a tracing in graphite.

It’s possible, Poe considers, that Ben is in serious need of a big brother.

“Then what are you stuck out on Yavin for? Shouldn’t you guys be with the Senate? Doing statecraft stuff?” The tip of Poe’s tongue pokes around insolently in his cheek for a maybe chipped tooth. “Or did they kick you out? Did they make you redundant?”

Ben’s eyes narrow to tiny triangles of dark in his pale freckled face. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you you talk too much?”

(Ben has not seen his mother for 18 months now, and he cries about it every night, like a kid. But Poe will not know that until later.)

**

Poe is fifteen now and he’s figured out having long hair will make him look dashing. Ben no longer talks so funny, and he’s starting to shape up into somebody Poe might actually want to be around, somebody who’s good at things. He’s all crooked scowls instead of crooked smiles and his voice is low now, his shoulders always hang hunched. Poe’s tuned in to his frequency — the unease that radiates off him whenever they’re in a mixed group, or on meetings and partings when Poe is doling out embraces. Ben likes to be held, but they are both old enough to know that it’s bound to get awkward before long and that if they’re caught there’ll be a riot of teasing to follow — all those long dry weeks of summer, gripping his hands in the dark.

Poe tells him everything — griping about his studies, about chores, about his dad. Ben listens.

When he’s old enough Poe’s going to skip out and train to be a pilot for real, not just souping up speeder bikes and talking tactics with the cool old broads down at Dazar Station. (Ben never says what he’ll be when he grows up — a Jedi, probably, that seems like a foregone conclusion.) He tells him about the history of Yavin 4 and its local claims to fame, the foliage, the water table, the tree in their backyard, how to tell if it’s going to storm, how to spot the wildlife before it crawls in your boots and nests there.

A couple times and in turn, Ben tries to explain the Jedi tenets, but it all comes out mashed together like mystic nonsense — he gets fed up trying to explain pretty quick, almost as quickly as Poe got tired of trying to break down in the simplest terms how engines fit together. Like he was talking to a kid — Ben never seemed to get it, no matter what, he never really cared, and Poe doesn’t get what could be so earth-shakingly significant about moving rocks around with your mind. When people talked about that stuff when they were talking Leia Organa — they meant it the same way you’d say someone had a knack. The way some people shine at what they do and other people don’t. That was something Poe could understand — and if that’s what the Force is, he’s alright with it. Like flying. Like fixing an engine and watching it spark to life. Some stuff works and some stuff doesn’t.

**

They only see each other so often at first, more when Skywalker and Poe’s dad have business together, maybe less when Ben did something wrong, which is pretty often. But for three summers they are inseparable — trampling through the ruins, hunting down bark rats or getting into scrapes. They’re a couple of real renegades.

Ben showing off doing handstands and climbing anything he can get his hands on, clambering up among the trees and nearly killing himself, Poe shredding the landscape behind the controls of anything that’s not tethered down, carving Rebel insignias into poisonous trees and getting grounded hard. Sometimes it’s Ben doing the property-defacing. He carries a lightsaber, but Poe’s never seen him use it. Poe has to ask him just what the Force is — what that means when it’s not the stuff that holds the universe together but the stuff that gets a junky landspeeder out of the gravel, or lets him keep his balance with his feet planted on crumbling stone.

Blah blah blah, stuff that holds the galaxy together. Is it in your head, or a gut feeling, or what?

“More like here,” Ben says, when he places a hand square in the center of Poe’s chest and spreads his fingers. “You’d know it if you felt it.”

Poe grins until his cheek dimples. Ben grins like a carnivorous animal, too many teeth.

“Well, all right.”

**

One summer season they camp out down by the gulch with Master Luke and Wedge. Master Luke is scruffy and easy-going despite his dignity, and his boyfriend isn’t so bad, even if he does project a forcefield of affable uncle-ness about a kilometer wide. Poe and Ben bury root vegetables in the ashes of their fire, wrapped in alumafoil, and split them open steaming and golden — they don’t even need any butter to taste good and Poe burns his tongue pretty bad without caring.

Poe wakes up to take a piss in the woods and Ben isn’t there — his boots are lined up against the tent flap, but his coat is gone and there’s long footprints in the leaf-mold pointing away into the dark.

So he heads out in his heavy boots and does his business and follows those long slimy footprints to the edge of a clearing in the brush. Kicking himself the whole time, because there’s snakes and centipedes out here and Ben’s a dumbass and the trailing vines are starting to spook even him — coming to the burnt-out edge of a clearing is almost a relief. Like maybe a generator blew out here, and the greenery smothered the fire.

There’s a strange shape in the dark at the very edge of what Poe can make out, something he does not recognize — rigidly upright and jagged like a broken tree.

Ben stands there at the edge of the dark, barefoot and back turned.

Poe presses the burnt tip of his tongue against his teeth. There’s a split second where he contemplates bawling for help, but he doesn’t.

There’s all kinds of stuff out in the forest — other locals, for one thing, ghosts, rogue self-repairing droids. But wake up a sleepwalker and they die — that’s just science. He crosses the clearing, not looking for danger, looking at Ben. Poe calls his name and he turns halfway, startled.

Ben’s face pinches, like he’s struggling to recognize Poe’s face.

“What are you doing out here? Something’s going to swoop down and pull your head off. Come on, man.” Poe reaches for his sleeve half-expecting Ben to pull away in embarrassment, but he doesn’t, he’s as docile as anything. Poe’s arm fits around his waist. “Quit messing around.”

“Right,” Ben says, milk-pale and relieved. “Alright.”

When he turns back there’s nothing in the dark, nothing behind them but their own prickling footprints.

**

Ben is fifteen and Poe is sixteen, just discovering stenciled graffiti and smoking and making girls swoon instead of laugh their heads off. Ben is afraid of girls, or at least the kind of girls on this planet who don’t all wear gray and play with lightsabers. Poe remembers the way he used to talk about his mother, full of admiration and at the same time faintly removed — he must have been afraid he’d never have her mettle. He can’t figure out why she let a delinquent like him hang around her son. Maybe she thought Poe might teach him something. Poe doesn’t know what that might be — a sense of humor, maybe, one that wasn’t pitch-black. If Poe gets good enough maybe Leia will notice him.

Ben doesn’t talk about her like that any more, admiringly. Ben doesn’t talk about his father at all, and that’s just fine.

Every time Ben comes back Poe’s way, he’s a little taller and a lot stronger. Poe can’t put a finger on when the essential quality of him made the switch — when exactly he went from slumpy and intent to flat-out intense, when his shoulders got so broad and his voice so deep or where he acquired the uneasy confidence he carried on him like a cloak. He’s going to be some diplomat, that’s for sure. Poe gets used to him watching like a hook hawk while Poe and the other Academy wannabes work on engines or comb over schematics. Ben likes taking things apart, which can be useful when it’s not just showing off, but he’s not so good at putting them back together again.

He’s always watching Poe, even when he’s not working — with his big hungry eyes glittering like beetle shells. Ben isn’t bad-looking, but he’s not good-looking either; he looks like somebody trapped in between. He has big ears (which he will not under any circumstances let Poe put an earring in, even though he’s probably asked a thousand times) and a punched-looking nose and a full crooked mouth that Poe still feels lingeringly weird about. Unprepossessing, that’s the word, probably. He knows more about history than any person really needs to — for Poe if it’s more than a decade or two before the Battle of Yavin, he’s out of luck — and he cheats like hell at any and all games of chance. He’s an arrogant jerkoff, any way you slice it, but even he deserves to have a good time during the one or two planetary cycles he gets to shake off monasticism and get busy.

One afternoon he outlines his plans to drain credits out of every bank that still uses the old Imperial encoding style, the next night after that he wants to know if Poe’s ever thought about running for office. Most nights he doesn’t seem to have any particular plans at all and he clings to Poe like a drowning man, completely cut loose from his moorings. Some nights he won’t go home again with Skywalker and sleeps on the floor, where Poe trips over his big flopping arms on the way to the head in the middle of the night. Some nights he cries and Poe pretends not to hear him. When Ben gets kicked off Poe’s work floor for throwing a punch at Squad Leader, Poe starts skipping his shifts to bum around Dazar Station or screw around down by the river. He’s learned everything he needs to know.

(Ben declares out of the blue one day, as if it’s some grand blessing, that he gravitates toward Poe because Poe’s is the one mind he can’t read. It wouldn’t have occurred to Poe if he hadn’t brought it up. Ben is a bad liar. The possibility that Ben’s been rummaging around in his thoughts without permission should faze him more than it does, but he never used his head much anyway.)

They both want to do something, to be something, and that’s pretty good, isn’t it? A lot of people around here just want to settle down and rebuild on top of what the Empire left behind, there’s still bad infrastructure to be fixed and childhood diseases and the kind of shit you can’t swashbuckle out of. None of that is bad, but it’s not what Poe is cut out for. There has to be more to look forward to than five years in the Galactic Youth Corps assembling vaporators for mistrustful townsfolk.

Ben’s visits come too far apart in the year for them to get up to real hijinks except in concentrated bursts — the next time they see each other they’re both off on something new, Ben is being snobbish over some new art form that’s elaborately useless and dispensing gems of ancient Jedi wisdom, Poe is taking apart some new kind of engine or obsessing over whatever up-and-coming band he got bootleg holovids of.

(Half his collection seems to be recorded over footage of long-dead senators; sometimes you can still see the shadows burned into the projections like ghosts, glitching in and out. It’s every good citizen’s duty to recycle.)

Ben starts out bringing him stuff when he stops by — more bootlegs, cool crystals, engine parts — and Poe just needs to find the one thing that’ll one-up him, the one thing that’ll seal the deal. None of Poe’s gifts, at least in Poe’s eyes, qualify as that much — you could keep them in a desk drawer or in the bottom of a backpack. He just needs something that Ben can’t say no to.

Ben always acts like he’s being punished for something, slinking around the place after dark with his arms crossed and his ill-gotten bounty under wraps. Whether it’s Skywalker doing the punishing or Ben himself, Poe doesn’t know. Poe’s bed sees a lot of action despite all the slinking and staring — Ben kicks back with his feet on the wall, picking at posters with the toe of his boot and idly levitating Poe’s model starships on their filaments. He teaches Poe to cheat at cards. Turns out that’s not a Jedi thing, it’s a my-dad’s-a-scoundrel thing, even if he’s not patient and Poe’s not really in it for sleight of hand. Once when Poe’s dad knocks on the door Ben jumps about a foot off the floor from the surprise and and Poe’s cutaway model Y-wing hits the floor hard. And they weren’t even doing anything wrong — they weren’t even doing anything, and Poe barely has time to flick his cigarette out the window grate before Ben leaps to the defensive and starts interrogating his dad, all sirs and weird fixed stares, about Master Luke this and Master Luke that. Maybe he’s not supposed to show people his powers. Maybe he’s just a king-size shithead.

The moment the door slides shut and his dad’s footsteps clear the hallway, Poe smacks Ben in the back of his shaggy head, and Ben gets right back to complaining.

**

Down in the hollow where they go to drink, there’s the midpoint between Poe’s house and the thicketed antennas of Dazar Station. It isn’t just Ben he takes here — he goes here with Lux and Henara and Kit to swap stories and suck face. But Ben gestures with his fingers and sends an empty container of StimFizz hurtling across the clearing into a tree. (It had been heavily laced with a fat glug of brandy out of one of the sticky bottles in Poe’s dad’s drinks locker. This might account for the fact that Ben’s outstretched fingers are wobbling a little.)

“Whoa. I thought all you Jedi were supposed to be austere.” Poe’s canvas jacket is spread out behind him on the ground, trailing its one sleeve under both their backs but carefully folded to preserve all his patches from the moss and dirt. Ben had to teach him all the stitches for sewing stuff on. Poe’s dad has forgotten how. Ben’s mouth is sticky with liquor and he still wears the soft gray he’s worn since he was ten years old, tugged apart so that the hollow well of his throat is visible, and his dark hair is braided back from his forehead. From his look of deliberate vagueness — staring, but not at anything in particular, neither smiling nor frowning — Poe can tell he’s stewing about something. He and his master will be out of here by morning, if conditions keep clear.

“You mean celibate.”

“No, I mean — no nothing. You get me. You guys are monks and peacekeepers. You shouldn’t be running around cheating at cards and chopping people’s arms off.”

Everything Poe knows about the Jedi comes secondhand, either from Ben or from wartime legends about guys who chop off arms in bar fights and bluff their way through Imperial security checkpoints. It doesn’t sound like it necessarily goes together all that essentially with vows of chastity. It sounds kind of sexy, really.

Ben’s ankle is crossed against his long thigh, and he fiddles with the wraps up by his calf where they tuck in. His voice is so low that it makes Poe drowsy. “People think that, don’t they? The Jedi were a peacekeeping force. They used to be — all of them, or they were unattached, anyway. Most of us still are. Worldly attachments a complication.” Catching the way Poe is looking at him — askance through his eyelashes, considerably less drowsy now — he primly adds, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

The old I want to do it, honest, my parents are just really strict, they’d tan my hide if they knew I was out here routine. That hadn’t been what Poe meant at all. Luke Skywalker isn’t some hard-line taskmaster, that much is obvious, so what the hell is his apprentice’s problem? Poe doesn’t know if he should be jealous of him for getting to see Ben all year round. Maybe Ben is only good in small doses.

Poe bites his lip and leans back against the starry leaves. They are side by side, hip by hip and leg by leg. Together they don’t quite make a matched set — Ben is too big and too ugly, Poe is too fast and too loud — but he has visions of squadrons and tag teams and co-pilots anyway.

Is that what they are? A complication, something he would rather not talk about. Ben’s face is a mask of indifference.

(Poe nabs their first kiss in that same spot, not long later — his lips are tingling from a stolen cigarra and Ben leans down to swipe the leaves out of his hair, long face full of scorn. Poe leans up on the toes of his boots and plants one on him, right there. It is not his own first kiss by a long shot, but it has to be Ben’s, because he doesn’t know where to put his lips or his nose or his tongue — Ben mouths a wordless exclamation, locked on the spot with Poe’s arms snaked around his neck, and his straightened-up surprise is so disarming that Poe has to do it again. Poe will remember that.)

**

Just when he’s starting to be scared he’s never going to get off Yavin 4, somebody gives him a big boost — one of his old instructors and that’s all he needs, just a boost to get out of the clinging atmosphere of this place, just enough to bust out.

“Take it, it’s yours. I want you to have it. It’s lucky.”

He’ll need the luck when Poe’s not around to watch his back. Poe is searching his face for the next thing to say — this time it’s Poe who’s leaving, him and one of the old-guard pilots escorting a senator on her circuit through the sacred sites of Yavin. When they make it back, Skywalker and company are going to be long-gone. It’s one or the other, trail after crack-pilot-turned-babysitter Luke Skywalker and his gaggle of younglings or do what he is going to be doing for the rest of his life. No, that’s cruel — that’s not fair, he wants to go with Ben and get out of Yavin 4 and see the distant temple Ben loves so much and if it’ll make Ben’s studies a little easier so much the better. But he has to choose.

Ben thinks it’s stupid, of course he does, because another pilot could do it — but sometimes you have to choose between two good things, and he never gets a chance to get out like this. It feels like being somebody important.

He’s got his gear on and everything, he’s itching to go, they don’t have time to disagree.

“I can’t,” Ben says, holding the bracelet looped in two fingers like Poe has just handed him the detonator for a bomb, “I can’t have it.” They both know this is ridiculous — that Ben loves things that look good, he loves Poe, doesn’t he, Poe with scaly bracelets and long hair and his air-patrol boots. It’s not even something expensive — he just wants him to have something.

“So?”

“Poe, this is broken. I’m just going to lose it.” The braided strap is detached from its metal finding, looped back on with knotted cord, but you can’t even tell. It still looks cool. It still looks good. It’ll fit him. Poe searches his face for — something.

His affronted look is not embarrassment, like Poe has hoped since he first cornered him here. It is disgust. Poe folds his hands shut around it, and Ben turns his head.

“Fine. Great. By all means. Don’t let me inconvenience you.”

When Ben freezes him out like that — turns cold and nasty, won’t look at him, won’t say his name — it’s worse than screaming and slamming doors, it’s so much worse. Poe returns it in kind and learns what to say that’ll hurt him — whole ancient archives of easy ways to hurt Ben’s feelings and to chop him back down to size.

**

In Poe’s dreams, zonked out in the hangar for three snatched hours of rest, Ben is excruciatingly sharp and he wants to hurt him, Poe can only stave him off with sex — not by force but like so: aha, here’s my enemy come to vanquish me at last, not if I conquer him first. It’s dream-sex, strung-together fantasies completely unanchored, not like real banging — which he can’t overlay Ben’s presence onto no matter how much he tries. When he tries to superimpose Ben on his own limited sexual experiences he only gets so far as his squinched-up engine-smoke-in-his-eyes face or his clownish grimaces or his exaggerated grin, everything exaggerated, everything double-quick or too slow and there goes Poe’s boner. That’s not how it is when Poe is sleeping, which undercuts any chance at getting actual rest pretty effectively. In his dreams it’s — quick, and dark, and sharp, and hard. It’s harsh and fast and disjointed and he’ll put it down to long-distance stress and the regular infusions of near-miss adrenaline behind the controls because he doesn’t know what else to call it, this derangement of memory that makes his old hometown buddy into a violent creep.

He doesn’t know why Ben wants to hurt him in his dreams, but he thinks he might like it. It’s better than being frozen out.

**

Next spring Ben still wears the bracelet around his freckled wrist, hidden under the fall of his sleeve.

Ben is sixteen and Poe is seventeen; the winter is long and impossibly messy, hell to fly in, good luck getting out of an atmosphere so torn up by solar storms and stellar debris that punching through is like diving into a pit of gravel. Poe’s lost his earring (no good under a helmet) and Ben’s got bruises all up and down his sides from sparring. He tosses his practice sabers around like a holovid bandit and stumbles like a kid. His shoulders get big and his waist gets narrow.

Ben gets brittle beneath his hands, hungry for reassurance and scared of showing it. Poe is breathing against the back of his neck in the dark and wondering if he couldn’t join him wherever it was Ben went when he wasn’t there. Give him the coordinates and Poe could navigate there, no problem, even then — there’d be hell to pay, but it might have been worth it.

He remembers pressing his teeth to the soft side of someone’s throat and leaving experimental little marks — a lot of fumbling in the dark with no real idea what it was they were doing, doing things there were no words for. Ben biting him raw in every hallway and sanitation corridor and empty storeroom on the base, tugging on his long hair, scabby palms from angry grinding against permacrete walls. Poe kissing Ben like a grand finale, Ben kissing Poe like he’s about to be dragged away to his death by a horde of faceless Imperials and not roped back by words like responsibility and be reasonable. Poe remembers that unseasonably wet winter and a week’s worth of nights wrapped in sleep around a restless warm body, unready and unwilling to relinquish him, or to let it be over.

(He does not remember, in the end, when it was that Ben no longer ran to greet him. Somehow he became ashamed. Poe doesn’t know when.)

**

Ben is sixteen and Poe is seventeen. The two of them do nothing but screw and fight. Poe is watching him drift further and further away, spooling away on a cable into the void, and pretty soon that cable will snap and Poe will be left holding on to nothing. They have plenty to fight about, even besides politics, and when there’s nothing left to disagree passionately over Ben will pick a fight over nothing at all. One day he says Poe is smothering him and the next he says Poe doesn’t care enough — because he smiled at someone else, because he spent one of their rationed days doing something other than play gracious host to someone as aloof and as hungry as Ben.

As compensation he spends more time in the cockpit than he should — tight corridors planetside, pushing his run time through the debris belts around Yavin and playing Spot The Wreckage with a bonus round of Dodge The Wreckage. It’d be a full time job in itself hauling Imperial junk out of orbit for salvage, but it feels indecent to profit off that, even building schoolrooms and hospitals out of the broken parts.

Poe crashes and burns more than once — nearly goes through the windscreen, mercifully manages to eject once he’s re-entered thick atmosphere and only has to worry about a bad spill. Ben is there when he wakes up with scrapes on both palms and a scar on the top of his head like a crescent moon.That part’s not so bad. Maybe in a year or so it’ll even look cool. Ben looks like hell warmed over, and he curses him out so loudly they’re hearing it two wards over. He’s been full on Jedi-meditating over him, he says, for three days and three nights, which is a ridiculous exaggeration but one Poe is willing to let pass because he’s thinner and uglier than ever and the dark circles under his eyes are next-level. He looks completely ravaged, and if that’s what using the Force does to you, Poe’s going to give it a pass.

**

Immutable fact: Ben will always want Poe around more than Poe wants Ben. Poe knows this; Ben doesn’t.

“You like having me around because it’s easy for you. I make you look better.” The side of his fist thumps against the hollow paneling. “Hero of the galaxy. You know, spending time with me isn’t like spending time with her. She won’t reward you. No one is going to thank you.”

“I like spending time with you,” Poe offers weakly.

“That’s what I am to you — I’m how you pass the time.”

Ben thinks that love should hurt. Skywalker hadn’t taught him that. In the bed behind him he leaves nothing but wrinkles on the sheets and one leather bracelet with a broken strap.

**

Poe is seventeen and in love with flying. Ben is sixteen and no longer comes to visit him, on holidays or any other day.

**

He didn’t know him, toward the end. Some of the men and women he grew up with are still with the Resistance today, and some of them are missing. Before Jakku, he will count Ben among the missing and be grateful for it.

(He does not wonder now if that would have stopped it all — if he could have reached him in a way the ones who did most of their growing up before the Rebellion couldn’t. Poe doesn’t flatter himself that he’s capable of saving anyone, not any more. Most people can save themselves.)

Poe’s not cut out to be a Jedi — he’s not made that way, and it’d have meant taking time out of the cockpit during the span of years when it most mattered, and when Poe was most in love with flying. He loves it now, of course, but it’s a longstanding marriage and not the hard clear flame of young love; he’s driven now, not obsessed. And he isn’t stupid.

Leia doesn’t say what happened to her son, only the gracious lie, and that he won’t be coming back. She doesn’t know how far apart they’ve grown in the interim. Poe figures, that’s another one he’s lost, but he doesn’t have time to grieve it just then. One of many awful slaughters and confused disasters during peacetime, the new-found normal with no Empire to fight.

There’s no universe where the two of them kept in touch — they were always bound to be separated, by death or by paths of divergence that took them far away from each other, on trajectories that’d never cross again. They’re parted permanently now, but they’d left each other long before.