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intergalacticwartimespace · 6 years

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Scorpio Rising Chapter 2

Author: @intergalacticwartimespace (somelikeithoth on a03!)

Title: Scorpio Rising

Pairings: Poe/Finn, Rey/Rose, minor Finn/Rose

Summary: Poe has a panic attack after an unpleasant conversation with Finn triggers a wave of emotion he hadn't realized he hadn't been feeling. Afterward, General Leia asks Poe to lead a memorial service for those killed by the Dreadnought and on Crait. Leia can see Poe is struggling but she struggles herself how to connect with him when she and her son are partly responsible for his pain.

TW: Panic Attacks, nightmares, memorial services/funerals.

A/N: I have a busy day tomorrow so I am posting chapter 2 early so that I don't forget. Ahhh more angst. I really need to write a fluffy fic for how angsty this is going to be. It's gonna get worse before it gets better, but I promise a happy ending. There is a nice dose of Damerey friendship solidarity. Enjoy & leave a comment if you have anything to say! I am looking for a beta for this fic, so if you or someone you know is interested, let me know.

The emotions came quicker than Poe could possibly feel them. Poe walked quickly through the halls of the base, each step becoming harder to calculate. The lights seemed too bright and everything in his vision field distorted like a fish eye lense. His feet felt out of step and his whole body tingled. Finally Poe made it to the cool outside night air. Poe staggered off base and sat beside a large durasteel supply crate in the grass. Poe’s heart raced and his veins flowed with ice. The tears just kept coming.

I’m dreaming, I must be dreaming. Poe pulled his knees to his chest and buried his head in his knees, squeezing his eyes shut. Kylo Ren was in his brain, right there. He remembered the moment Kylo got it out of him. He hadn’t been strong enough. Shame threatened to swallow him whole right then. It’s my fault, it was all my fault. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t given up the base.

“Fuck,” Poe sobbed. “ Fuck , it’s my fault.” His chest heaved. I shouldn’t even be feeling this way, he thought. I can handle rejection and this has nothing to do with Finn-

Finn. He remembered with a certain clarity the moment Finn removed his stormtrooper helmet. “ This is a rescue. ” He remembered Finn wearing his jacket, and the careful way that he had tucked the blanket under Rose’s chin. Finn was so good . But for a split second, Poe thought it might have been better if he had never been rescued at all. So many less people would have died at his hand. Rose’s sister would still be here.

Poe Dameron did not want to be Poe Dameron anymore. It turns out that being the best pilot in the galaxy weighed heavy on one’s shoulders. All he wanted was to sleep, to just sleep and forget and not wake up.

Distantly he heard BB-8’s trademark warble calling out for him. [ Poe, Master-Poe; where are you? Don’t make me alert the general. ]

Poe huffed and stood up. He quickly wiped snotty tears on his shirt and wrung out his hands. He couldn’t let BB-8 see him like this. Slowly he walked to his droid.

“I’m over here buddy,” Poe knelt down and hugged his droid.

[ Poe… ]

“I’m fine, buddy. Let’s go to bed.”

[ Poe does not seem ‘fine.’ ] His eyes were red and his hair was a mess. His hands trembled and his voice quaked. [ Was Master-Poe having a panic attack? ]

“I’ll postpone your matienience if you keep this you yourself,” Poe offered.

After some careful consideration, the droid beeped, [ Deal. ] BB-8 happily rolled back to base.

Poe fell asleep quickly once back in his quarters, exhausted from his crying fit. He slept peacefully for a few hours when he was awoken by the sound of his door sliding open.

He tried to lift his head and call out but no words came. A tall black figure stood in the doorway. For several minutes the figure stood, unmoving, and Poe could not break his stare. He tried to move, to do anything, but his body wasn’t responding. The black figure took several slow steps towards him. He was at his bedside now, but Poe still could not see his face. He heard a click. Kylo Ren’s lightsaber roared to life. Leia Organa's son raised his arm ready to strike.

Poe was awoken by his own tongue-tied shout. It took a few moments for his eyes to focus. He was facing the wall of his bunk but he could sense something standing beside him. He was afraid of what he might find if he turned his head.

[ General-Leia wants to see you right away, Master-Poe. ] BB-8 beeped helpfully. Poe groaned and flopped onto his back. He did not want to fight with Leia.

“General,” Poe stood at attention. “You wanted to see me?”

“At ease, Captain.” Leia smiled at him, and though Poe had relaxed, there was an uneasy tension. He could not meet her eyes more than a few seconds at a time. “Please sit. There is something I wanted to talk to you about.”

Poe obeyed, taking a seat at across from Leia at her desk. Poe looked past her at the Rebel flag hanging on the duracrete wall behind her.

“Now that we have settled into the new base, I was thinking it was time we honored our dead.” Poe nodded. “I was hoping you would say a few words.”

Poe didn’t respond.

“Poe?”

“I don’t want to.”

She sighed. “Poe, Crait happened. The Dreadnaught happened. It’s time to cut our losses and move on.” Leia said.

“All due respect,” Poe said bitterly, “But if I recall you criticized my choices, and now you want me to memorialize them?”

“Poe.” Leia said sternly. His jaw tightened. He did not want to fight with Princess Leia, his mothers oldest friend.

“Fine.” Poe said. “May I leave?”

Leia inhaled. There was still so much more to say. So much she still needed to apologize for. But this was so much bigger than one fight. War, was complicated and messy, and she needed to find words that were enough for that. “Poe. I,” she paused.

Poe would rather be anywhere else but here. Leia knew this. It was easy to talk through the most logical action when you weren’t holding up the roof and knee-deep in it, like Poe had done on her behalf so many times. It was easy to call off an attack from the safety of the bridge when your best friends weren’t dying in real time around you.

“You may.” As Poe got up to leave, Leia shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. Surrogate sons were no easier than biological sons, Leia had discovered.

Later in the day, Poe contemplated his new task while he repaired old equipment on the previously abandoned rebel base. He was laying on his back underneath inside a dusty durastele cabinet, rewiring colorful circuits. It was not unusual for the general to ask the impossible of him. It’s just that if you do the impossible once, he had found, they don’t stop asking. Poe was tired. Broken like a scratched holovid, replaying the same scenes over, and over, and over again, ad nauseum. His conversation with Leia skipped in his head, superimposed on images of that week.

Kylo Ren, her son, had tortured him; an abuse that had left him on his side. And she protected him. Of course, she had. It was a bitter reminder who was Leia’s true son. She had slapped him, humiliated him, and finally shot him. Maybe he half deserved it, he wondered.

He zapped himself on one of the wires. An expletive escaped his mouth. He couldn’t say he was surprised that had happened. It seemed the Force’s way of reminding him of his place. He hadn’t forgotten; it was so shameful to say that Leia had in any way been inadequate. War was a profound sacrifice. Parenthood was a profound sacrifice.

But goddamn his mother and his father, this life that they had set him up for. He half loathed them, and fully loved them for it. He wanted to so badly to be able to blame someone, blame his mother for leaving him behind, for leaving him looking for mothers in inappropriate, authoritative positions. But he couldn’t blame her. Whether she lived or died, Poe would have likely still found his way to the resistance; that’s just the kind of person he was. He probably would have loved Leia just as fiercely because that’s just the kind of woman she was.

Poe swore again, and this time not because the wires had shocked him. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, after all.

The next afternoon, Poe had tasked Rey with helping him search the basement of the old Rebel base for supplies for the memorial. Lights flickered in damp tunnels underneath the base. BB-8 quietly rolled alongside them, projecting a shining light. “So do you know where this supply closet is?” Rey asked. She idly kicked a pebble as Poe ducked his head into a room, he and BB-8 giving it a once over.

“Leia said it would be somewhere in one of these rooms,” Poe called from inside the room.

“Right. How is that, by the way, you and Leia? Finn told me what happened on the bridge.” Poe stepped out into the hallway again and gave her a dead-eye stare. “Oookay, forget I asked.”

Rey brushed her fingers over cobwebbed walls. These halls bore too much resemblance to the one she had found Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber in.

“Have you ever held a memorial before?” Rey changed the subject. Poe shook his head. “I spoke at my mothers funeral.”

Blast, she thought. “ Oh, Poe. I’m sorry. I didn’t know that you had…” It suddenly made sense, his relationship with Leia. She was clearly more to him than a commanding officer.

“S’okay Rey, you didn’t know.” He said with a weakly reassuring smile. He clapped her on the shoulder. “We’re at war. Everybody’s lost somebody.”

Rey pressed her lips together. “I know. I mean- My parents, they left me on Jakku.” Rey said.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Rey.” he said.

“Were you close with your mother?” Rey asked as she ducked her head into another room. Then, “Poe, I think this is it.” Her hands fumbled in the dark and found an exposed lightswitch. The fluorescent lights flickered over head. They were in a medium sized room with aluminum shelves lining the walls. On the largest shelf on the far wall, a stack of Rebel flags sat folded. On the shelf above them, several scraped up helmets left over from the Rebel Alliance sat covered in dust. Poe stepped forward and picked one up, dusting it off.

“I learned how to fly on my mother's knee.” He said, placing the helmet on Rey’s head. It was too large for her and fell to one side. Poe bopped her on the head, which only exaggerated the tilt. “There. Fits like a glove.” Poe grinned, and Rey grinned back. Rey didn’t know what a brother, or a friend, for that matter was supposed to feel like, but she thought that Poe must be pretty close to the real thing.

Rey and Poe had, with the help of BB-8, dragged crates of helmets and flags to the main hall of the base. At the front of the large room, Poe arranged the crates in a horizontal line, one for each of the transports and main fleets that had been taken out by the First Order. Traditionally, Poe had said, that a kind of battlefield cross would have been made for each fallen member of the resistance. However, it was glaringly obvious that they didn't have nearly enough resources for the kind of large-scale loss they had suffered. Rey was unsure of what to expect for a Resistance memorial service. But as she helped Poe set up for it the afternoon of, she couldn't shake the weighty feeling of tradition and ritual. Rey watched as with great reverence Poe draped the Rebel flag over each crate, the Rebel insignia hanging in front. Then, Poe took a helmet and placed one atop each draped crate.

With the stage set for the memorial, Poe left for his barracks to go over once more what he had planned to say. This was not to say that he something planned at all. What could he possibly say?

The thing about war in intergalactic space is that while there were often casualties, there were not often bodies. In his more halcyon, hopeful days, Poe liked to believe that if we were vaporized in war, then whatever weird, vague, nebulous shit we were made of would join with the Force or some Luke Skywalker shit like that.

Now, however, Poe questions what an “instant” death really means. He wonders about the nature of matter and if we really are greater than the sum of our parts. Nihilism never looked good on him, but he isn’t quite sure this whole Force thing means anything. Maybe we are all fighting for nothing, delaying nothing, he thinks. But he has to believe anyway because if it really is all for nothing, if Rose’s sister died for nothing, that might be worse than not knowing.

After setting up the display, Poe returned to his room on base to prepare for the service. When he entered the room Poe didn't bother flicking on the lights; he knew just what he would see. Bed sheets hung halfway off the bed in a tangled mess, a small pile of dirty clothes at the foot of the bed. Poe's usually fairly neat desk was strewn with loose papers, garbage, and spare parts for BB-8. The trash overflowed. Poe's holo-communicator blinked on the nightstand next to his bed. In the dim light of the early evening, Poe went to his closet and rifled through a basket of clothes. Poe picked up a grey button up shirt and sniffed it. Deciding that it met the bare minimum requirements, he swapped it with his other shirt. Poe quickly ducked into the bathroom, raking his fingers through his curly dark hair, but he couldn’t be bothered to do much more than that. It was good enough; appearances hardly mattered when everyone else feels like shit. Poe yanked on his jacket and went out the door.

Quietly the Resistance filed into the hall that evening. Rey and BB-8 had made quick work of setting up enough chairs for everyone in two columns. Poe paced about nervously greeting members of the Resistance. He played the part of ‘fearless leader,’ but inside he felt sheepish. Leia wore one of her glorious robes. She graciously walked from person to person, shaking the hands of low-level Resistance members, offering condolences, sharing memories. ‘ She truly is royalty,’ Poe thought. It occurred to Poe then that Leia had lost someone dear to her too.

The ceremony started on time, though Poe wished he could have delayed it just another moment. Quietly Leia took a seat behind the small tribute Rey and Poe had arranged. Rey sat in the first row, BB-8 seated next to her on the inner edge of the aisle. Beside her sat Finn. Rose cast her eyes downward as she walked into the room. She sat beside Finn. Finn gently placed an arm around her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. Finn placed his hands in his lap, fidgeting. There was a chasm between them.

Leia climbed to the podium to give an outline of the evening's plans. "We are gathered here to mourn our dead. After a few remarks from Captain Dameron, we will leave time for those who wish to spend a moment. Afterwards, there will be refreshments. We also invite anyone who is struggling at this time to visit the medbay for counseling." Someone in the audience scoffed. "Captain Dameron, the time is yours." Though Poe was a few steps from the podium, the journey seemed to take an eternity. Perhaps for those who did not know him well, Poe seemed to be coping, but the way he carried himself was louder than silence.

Grimly, Poe looked over the audience. Leia and Admiral Holdo were in the back of his mind. He is dangerous. He is volatile. And goddamn he has no right to be here. Finn looked to Rey. Rey merely shrugged. Poe had not told her what he had planned for the memorial, but something told her this was not it. In the silence, one could hear three things: BB-8 quietly whirring, a few idle coughs, and several sniffles and choked sobs. Rey silently communicated with Poe the best she could. She wasn't exactly sure how the Force worked in a lot of ways, especially regarding mind reading and such, but she hoped and prayed that her thoughts were loud enough for Poe to hear. 'You can do this.'

Finally, Poe lifted his head and cleared his throat.

'Reckless flyboy.'

“I know that this has been a hard few days, hell, it's been a hard few months... There has been more than enough to go around lately." then Poe laughed uncomfortably. Rose did not look up when Poe began speaking.

"There will be more to come. But listen to me,” Poe raised a finger, and nervously licked his lips. “I was aboard the ship of the First Order. These bastards don't care about anything. They will do what they must to get what they want. They are cynical and calculating. I know the odds are stacked against us…” Poe clasped his hands, he started and stopped again. Finally, he said, “This loss hurts. It hurts because it matters."

Rose finally raised her head, but Poe could not hold her gaze for more than a few seconds. He looked to Finn. Finn’s gaze held steady. "Don’t let the First Order take that away from you. If we are to have a fighting chance, you cannot become like them. You must refuse to join them. This hurt is the difference between us and them. On the memory of those taken from us, every night we survive, even if it is just one more day, it is total victory again and again. If you make it to midnight tonight, you can make it tomorrow.” Poe said the words with shaky confidence. He believed them, yeah, he had to believe his own words because the survival of the resistance depended on it, but even they could not fix the bottom line: He can’t look Rose in the eye because he got her sister killed and he’s in love with her boyfriend.

Poe returned to his seat at the front next to the general. Leia stood and dismissed the mourners. Poe sat hands clasped in his lap, head down low. He felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You did good, Poe,” Leia said. Poe said nothing. She seemed so much older than she had weeks ago. Poe looked past her and saw Rey smiling gently at him; Finn comforted Rose. Poe could hardly be mad at him, Finn was a good man. A tear missed his cheek and hit the floor.

Poe felt like a walking wound.

After the memorial service, the majority of the rebels shuffle to the mess hall for supper. Leia watched as Poe slunk away from the group and walked lonely down the hall to his quarters. Not even his faithful droid was with him.

The walls seemed to close around him as he walked. Leia felt an ocean of distance from where he needed her to be. From the back of his head, Poe looks so much like her, Leia thinks. She knows this is hardly the life Shara Bey would have chosen for her son, after all, she sacrificed for a better world for him.

But watching Poe walk down the back of the hall, his head of dark curls and the way he carried himself each gifts from his mother, Leia can’t help but feel that Poe is so himself that in past lives and future lives, it would always end the same: He would get himself killed fighting for a cause that he believed in.

Leia wondered now if her old friend could see her son now. Shara do you know you have a beautiful son? She wondered.

#fanfic #fanfiction #poe dameron #poe dameron fanfic #angst #star wars #star wars fanfiction #rey #finn #rose tico #reyrose #finnpoe #a writes #scorpio rising

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