“You know,” Poe said, ponderous, keeping his voice light and even to better avoid losing his shit as he scuffed his boot over the unforgiving and utterly unimpressed floor beneath his feet. “It could be worse.”
Ben, doing his best to mimic the floor Poe was pacing on, scoffed, face red and growing redder by the minute. “How?” he asked, scathing, gesturing to the energy barrier that kept the pair of them confined to the half of the room that didn’t lead to the exit.
Don’t do that, he thought. That’ll just goad him on. “At least it wasn't your pompous jackass of a nemesis who caught you on a routine mission through the safest hyperspace lanes known to the Resistance.”
“By the way,” spoke said pompous jackass over comms that were wired into the walls for the singular purpose of driving Poe up them, “according to the fr—excuse me, Ben Solo’s psychological evaluations, he was hurt by a romantic entanglement in the past, which makes him—”
Metal screeched and pompous jackass’s voice was no more.
Poe would have breathed a sigh of relief, but then the door slid open, admitting pompous jackass along with his handheld comm. He grinned and wiggled the device between his fingers. “My, but you are very predictable, Ben. As I was saying…”
“Terex,” Poe said, a warning as he drifted to Ben’s side, raising his hand in a don’t do it, Ben Solo, I swear to… gesture. This could get very, very messy very, very fast and Poe didn’t want to be the one who had to explain to General Organa that Ben had been driven to backsliding by Terex. Of all the people in the galaxy to do it, it would be Terex.
“Oh, didn’t he tell you?” Terex tilted his head. “His powers are useless here. Now, if you would allow me to finish?”
Poe looked over at Ben. From the way Ben’s jaw clenched, he didn’t even need to ask if it was true. Kriff. How was that even possible? Scraping his hand across his chin, he sighed. “I would really rather you didn’t.”
Terex’s lips pursed together and he shook his head. “I’m disappointed. You’re normally so receptive to my particular brand of repartee. And here I’m even doing you a favor.” His gaze crossed to Ben for the barest, flickering moment. He sniffed. “Possibly.”
“Just—” Poe’s hand sketched circles in the air. “—what do you want?” He tried to pretend he hadn’t cased the room already and decided they had very little chance of escape. And that was before that nice little revelation Terex dropped in his lap. He tried, too, to pretend that Terex didn’t have the upper hand, that Terex couldn’t make demands of him even though Poe’s position was the far more precarious one.
“Your illustrious leader’s attention, safe passage through Resistance space,” Terex replied, cool and yet somehow obnoxiously pleased with himself. “And to have a little fun at you and your friend’s expense, of course. You should read the psych profile Hux gathered on him. It’s quite thorough. Illuminating, even. I think you’d like it.”
Poe didn’t let himself look at Ben again. It would only give Terex more ammunition. Luckily, Poe didn’t need his eyes to know that Ben was practically vibrating with repressed frustration. To his credit, he kept it together, but Terex knew how to prod people. It was only a matter of time.
Better for him to do the prodding, as it were.
“Yeah, yeah. Ben and I had a thing. It wasn’t exactly a secret.” Poe rolled his shoulder. They probably weren’t yet at a place where he should be talking so indelicately about it. Ben and he were still on shaky ground after all. Still, rattling their… relationship around a little more couldn’t hurt them. “But nice to know Hux is a creep, right?”
Terex’s smile grew, dawning like the sun at fifty-thousand feet with nothing but clear sky and the upper atmosphere to obscure it. Which was to say: Poe had misstepped and he wasn’t quite sure how he’d done it. Now all he could do was wait for the bomb to detonate.
The fallout was sure to be spectacular.
“Maybe so. But did you know he wanted to propose, too? That he was in love?”
Fuck.
Good going, Dameron, he thought, momentarily too numb to react. His feelings for Ben had turned to scar tissue a long time ago. They were gnarled and sometimes they pulled uncomfortably at the rest of him. But he was secure and whole regardless. For a few awful seconds, he was pulled right back into the worst of it: the uncertain days immediately after the massacre, then the rumors, the innuendo, and finally the knowledge that Ben was not Ben any longer, not the Ben that any of them knew at least.
“That’s bullshit,” Poe said, unsure why he was saying it. It might’ve been for Ben’s benefit, but it might equally have been for his own. “There’s no—”
“Proof? Try Han Solo’s hacked comm address. I checked it out myself. He really did ask his daddy for advice on how to court you.”
The only reaction Ben gave was a sharp, swift exhalation, yet still Poe couldn’t look at him. They hadn’t… he hadn’t… it had been serious, Poe could admit that, but neither of them had ever said anything about it. Call them young or naïve or just plain incompetent in matters of the heart. All three had been true. Might still be, all things considered. Well, maybe not the young bit. But the rest? It wasn’t like Poe had bothered. After Ben, what was the point?
Whatever Poe would have wanted to feel, all he could think of was how things stood now. Ben had done so many things, things Poe still wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to forgive Ben for. This information changed nothing and yet he still felt torn in half by it, manipulated and folded into a new shape. His worldview shifted, twisting into something new and brittle.
And something of that pain must have shown on his face, because Terex looked incandescent with glee; he’d won something here and he knew it.
“Well, that was fun. I believe I’ll leave you to it,” he said, bright, brushing at his shirt and slipping his comm into his pocket. “Sit tight. It shouldn’t be too long before we can put all this unpleasantness behind us.”
Poe barely acknowledged Terex’s exit.
Ben had loved him once—and somehow Poe had no doubt this was true, not now—and Poe hadn’t known. Would anything have been different if he had? Could he have changed anything of what had happened? Would they be worse off now? Or better?
“Ben?”
Ben didn’t say anything for a long, painful moment, long enough that Poe was certain he wouldn’t ever reply or otherwise acknowledge this… thing. And when Ben turned away, that merely confirmed it for Poe.
Whatever they might have had? Had had? Could have had?
It wasn’t for them any longer.
And though Poe had thought he’d mourned that fact already, years ago even, the truth was, he hadn’t. Not really.
Not at all.