“How was it?” Poe asked, eyes glued to the sky, a not unusual sight at this point. He often looked up these days, though that fact in and of itself wasn’t so different from before. It was just the pain in his gaze, the longing in the wistful, upward curl of his lips, the careful way he never spoke the words that mattered, that was new. Ben hated, too, the sick twist he heard in Poe’s voice whenever he found him out here, the hitching rise and fall of it, always there every time Ben came back from patrol.
It sounded, as time passed, more and more like giving up. Each and every time. And there was nothing Ben could do to change it. And no matter how often Ben told him not to do this to himself, told him not to come out to the hangar after the end of his shift to sit on a crate and watch the various nighttime arrivals and departures, Poe never listened. No matter what, he always found his way back home.
“Hey.” Poe leaned into him; Ben hadn’t even realized how close he’d been standing to Poe. “Why the long face?”
Ben’s lips compressed together. The easy, familiar taste of anger flooded the back of his throat, burning with an acidic tang that threatened to form into a venom that he could—and would, most likely—spit at Poe. If he could, he would shake some sense into Poe, rattle the man until he found himself again, push and push until he knocked Poe the right way around and Poe was, once again, irrepressibly Poe.
“It was terrible,” he said instead of doing any of that, and it wasn’t even a lie. Not entirely.
He was, by all accounts, even Poe’s, an amazing pilot. And he enjoyed it. But flying didn’t live in his blood. It didn’t clamp tight to every last cell in his body and refuse to let go. Not like how Poe and flying were one and the same thing deep down in their very cores.
Perhaps that was the worst part of it.
The Force, for whatever reason, remained with Ben.
It wasn’t—and maybe hadn’t ever been—with Poe, his accomplishments entirely his own despite the indifference of the universe to him. For all his luck and skill and daring, his generosity and courage, the universe had showed him no mercy in the end. In a fair, just universe, it would be Ben who’d contracted Bloodburn. For his crimes, for the lack of this particular calling. He would have gotten it and it would be Poe who traced the skimmed the arching edges of this world. Knowing he could have this when Poe could not took all the satisfaction he might have drawn from it.
So, yes. It was terrible. This whole situation was terrible. Knowing that they’d never fly together, that Ben would never get to see that particular shade of joy in Poe’s eyes again. It was terrible and far, far beyond it.
Poe seemed to understand all the things Ben didn’t dare vocalize and his features crumpled under the weight of it.
“Yeah,” he replied. Sighed, really. “Yeah, you’re right.”
That venom that Ben might have spit dried on the flat, useless expanse of his tongue. A hollow, fragile ache took up the space left behind by the anger he could no longer feel in the face of Poe’s spiritless response. As best he could, he released his fear to the Force, though that had never been his strong suit. Too much powerlessness in that, too much left to chance. Better to take the galaxy by its horns and demand it fit to your conception of it.
That’s not you, he thought. That’s the Dark Side talking.
Are they not one and the same?
If Poe knew what he was thinking, he’d have said something like, they’d better damned well not be after all the trouble we went through for you. But because he did not, he remained silent, ever watchful of the sky and unaware, for the moment, of the conflict that would always remain within Ben.
Despite everything, Ben was a man of words. Thousands of them could fall from his lips if he let them, some harsh and cruel, some not, some somewhere in between. Now, though, all words failed him.
Everything failed in the end, it seemed.
Sometimes, the only thing left was action.
Even that would do no good against this thing that poisoned Poe’s entire being. They both knew that much.
His hand, still cool from the hours spent skimming the upper atmospheres for signs of bogeys and bogeymen, caught Poe’s, their fingers tangling almost of their own accord. This solved nothing and it didn’t make Ben feel any better, but the tenseness that kept Poe’s spine rigid eased. The careful, blank upward quirk of Poe’s mouth slackened and softened into something more recognizable. When he looked at Ben now, there was something besides desolation in his gaze.
As far as such things went, it wasn’t much.
But Poe never asked for anything else, never suggested there was anything more that could be done.
And Ben had nothing else to give.
Until the day it could no longer be enough, he supposed what they had would have to do.