Poe can barely remember a time before Ben.
In fact, he thinks, one of his earliest memories--maybe his earliest memory--is of his mother talking with Leia Organa, both bright-eyed and laughing, and of the tiny, black-haired child cradled in the princess' arms.
(What a legacy to be carried on the shoulders of an infant.)
-
Ben is four, and Poe is six, and both are stuck outdoors, thrumming feet on the dirt-packed ground, while their mothers both do important Alliance things.
"You wanna play?" Poe asks, trying to coax the four-year-old away from the window where he is glued watching the mothers work. "They're busy. We can do something fun until they're done."
Ben simply shakes his head, not even bothering to look at Poe. So the older boy plonks himself down in the dirt to examine the soles of his shoes. "Okay, then."
Already people say with affectionate certainty that Poe is really his mother's son, both born pilots with big hearts and a love for the skies. Nobody says the same thing about Ben. With Princess Leia, senator and rebel, for his mother, and Han Solo, smuggler and scoundrel, for his father, one would expect him to be like them--hard edges, loud words, fire and light, anger and laughter in rapid succession. After all, their arguments shake the whole base, and their smiles illuminate it just as quickly.
But instead, Ben is solemn, subdued, already hiding secrets in his four-year-old eyes. Perhaps it is because he is named for a dead Jedi; perhaps he is what the grownups call a biological sport. Whatever it is, Poe has yet to figure it out. He's the General's son, though, and that's more than good enough for Poe. He tries to strike up the conversation again.
"Hey, Ben, how about we--"
Just then, the door swings open, and Ben slips past, noiseless as a cat, and ducks behind his mother's skirt. With a sigh, Poe picks himself up. He greets his mother and the General, the latter with unbridled enthusiasm and hero-worship in his upturned face. But the grownups are busy, and brush past, still talking. Ben clings tightly to his mother's skirt, then looks back, and for the briefest instant he meets Poe's gaze.
(This is what Poe is thinking about, when Kylo Ren swaggers down the ramp, loose-limbed and dangerous as a feral animal--about the small boy with big sad eyes.)
-
Ben is six, and Poe is eight, and both are sitting in a circle with all the other children on the base, restless and impatient.
It's Ben's birthday, but the familiar games are starting to get a bit old. Finally the grownups start to trickle away, and the children follow, gathering in their own little groups of play and chatter. Poe notices a laughing cluster of them crouched around the base of a hill, and bounds towards the spot.
His curiosity is rewarded by about five or six hill-mice, small dusty brown creatures with shrill, distinctive squeaks. Grinning, Poe joins the other children in petting them and chasing them around the ups and downs in the grassy hill. He's just caught one, and is tickling its stomach, which it seems to enjoy, when a particularly piercing squeak startles him.
Poe looks up to see Takk, a thin, weedy boy, grasping one of the hill-mice far too tightly in his hands. The creature squirms and squeals, eyes rolling and tail thrashing, but Takk has a strong grip. "That's a cool sound," one of the other kids says, moving in closer. "Do it again!"
Takk does so, sending the group into convulsions of laughter, and suddenly they're all scrabbling over the hill, trying to capture their own hill-mice to see if they can elicit the same reaction. As the shrills of the beleaguered mice ring out over the hillside, Poe cradles the one he found close to his jacket. "Stop that," he says, and then, louder, "Stop that!"
No one pays him any attention, until Neena, an imposing girl of twelve with thick, whiplike boxer braids, notices the hill-mouse he's still holding. "Hey," she says, "I don't have one. Give me that."
"No!" Poe's heard so much about the cruelty, the irrational sadism of the Empire and its underlings--and yet he'd never thought he'd see it here, not on D'Qar, not in the heart of the Alliance. "I said stop." He tries to snatch the mouse out of Takk's hands, but fails, and the older boy collides heavily into him, making him stumble and drop the one he's already holding. Quickly, Neena grabs it up, leering. Poe's eyes flash with either anger or tears. The squeals go on and on and on, throbbing in his head, and finally he's about to dash away and get an adult, even if it makes him look cowardly, when Ben, newly six, pale and regal, drifts in among them.
He doesn't even have to say a word. Something fearsome and condemning in his glare makes the crazed children drop the mice and turn deadly silent.Watching his friend, Poe feels a proud burst of warmth. But then Ben looks straight at him, as the other children run away, and the warmth is replaced by a sudden chill, because there's something unreadable behind Ben's eyes.
"You were awesome," Poe manages.
Ben shakes his head slightly, as if trying to shake off a shadow. "They shouldn't do things like that."
"Definitely not," Poe begins, in agreement, but Ben isn't finished.
"Every time they do it, the darkness gets bigger." Profound words, yet Ben's lip trembles. He is still very much a child. "They shouldn't--I shouldn't--"
"Hey," Poe says, feeling odd about taking charge again. "Let's get these hill-mice back to their burrows."
So, two dark heads together, they guide the hill-mice back into their holes with surprisingly gentle hands, both avoiding the feeling they have: that the shadow remains, and it watches.
(This is what Poe is thinking about, hot in the fires of destruction and cold in the desert night, as he listens to the dying cries of the creatures Kylo Ren has slaughtered--about the boy who helped him save a hill-mouse from a childish bully.)
-
Ben is eight, and Poe is ten, and both are standing on the airstrip, the wind ruffling through their hair.
"I don't want to," Ben protests, with vehemence. "You can't really fly a fighter."
Poe is careful when with Ben. Less boisterous, less reckless, instinctively sensing the crushing difference that sets Ben apart from the other children. But this skepticism, coming from the General's son, severely wounds his pride.
"I can, too," Poe insists. "I learned when I was six." He clambers up the side of X-wing and steps, lightly, into the cockpit. "If you're not coming, you can stay on the ground. Just watch me."
Unsurprisingly, Ben falls silent. Surprisingly, he does stay, moving to the side of the airstrip as the fighter sputters noisily and starts up. There's a strange sort of trepidation and distaste in his eyes. Poe only catches it for an instant before he's up and away, his gleeful shouts accompanying the roar of the engine.
He's been doing this for four years, but Poe doesn't think he'll ever get tired of the feeling: rushing and dipping and soaring and flipping, free as air. When he thumps back down to earth, his back is wet with sweat and his hair hangs messily in his eyes, and yet he is, in that moment, supremely happy.
Then he sees Ben's face.
"What is it? What?" He drops his helmet, slides over to his friend, who is wrapping his arms around himself as if freezing, although the day is scorching. "Ben! Talk to me."
"Something's wrong," Ben gasps, his eyes wild, unfocused, and impossibly dark, staring not at Poe but through him. And Poe realises with an involuntary shudder that Ben is seeing something Poe can't see, something so terrible it causes the son of the galaxy's greatest heroes to cry like a child. "I don't like it," Ben bursts out, heartrending, and Poe is left to scare himself wondering what "it" could be.
"You don't like my flying? I can--" Poe hesitates, because he'd do almost anything to help the General, just not that, because asking him to stop flying is like asking him to stop breathing. He's about to offer not to fly when Ben's around, since Ben, what with his important Jedi training and stuff, isn't around a lot, but he's too late. Ben is running back towards the base, and the door clangs behind him, jarring and hollow in the wind.
(This is what Poe is thinking about, when the door closes irreversibly on him, a prisoner in Kylo Ren's ship--about the boy who could not bear to watch him fly.)
-
Ben is fourteen, and Poe is sixteen, and the two are more starkly aware of the differences between them than ever. Poe grew up well: still, to himself, unsatisfactorily short, but strong and ruddy and black-haired and white-toothed, the charmer of the entire base, the poster boy product of revolution. The kind of pilot who flies circles around everyone else, but finds such pure delight in the sport that no one can resent him for it. The kind of boy who attracts his peers' admiration and his elders' proud, indulgent smiles. There glows a youthful light around Poe no one else can quite seem to touch, but he willingly shares it, because he's...that kind.
And Ben? Ben, back with his family for a short week from training with his uncle, standing quietly by as the base welcomes the returning Jedi and celebrates the newly official pilot who follows in his late mother's footsteps? He's just at that awkward phase, all sharp angles of elbows and two left feet, too tall for his weight, too old for his age. Ben skulks around the base, eyeing his childhood haunts as if they are unfamiliar to him, pretending not to notice when adults whisper and children skitter out of his way.
Someone once told Poe, offhandedly, that he should be the General's son. The memory surfaces as Poe greets Ben for the first time in months, along with a pang of guilt. Perhaps Poe would have found by himself the right words to say to his boyhood acquaintance. Perhaps not. At any rate, the two are thrown together from necessity, to watch the multitudes of children running amok while the grownups discuss matters of consequence. Poe thinks himself already on the cusp of adulthood, but he doesn't really mind. Anything for the General.
Even sitting next to her gloomy teenage son, trying to find something to break the silence that exists nowhere on the base but in the space between them.
After half a dozen failed attempts at conversation, Poe sighs and gets up, leaving Ben still huddled in his own personal dark cloud. He gathers the children for a game, a variant on cops and robbers, mostly filled with a lot of running and screaming. "No hurting anyone," he cautions, "or you're out!"
Still, he lets a bunch of five madly giggling kids tie him up, sloppily and dump him in a hollow under a tree. Wriggling his fingers over the ropes, he wonders how long to wait before escaping. Would five minutes be too long? Would ten?
While he is still pondering this question, Ben suddenly appears in front of him, an expression on his face that is both disturbing and disturbed. "What is this?" he inquires sharply, and his manner is too charged for something so trifling.
"It's a game I'm playing with the kids," Poe says, his good-humoured laugh broken off as Ben ignites his lightsaber, the blue blade transforming the scene into a study in shadows. "Hey, Ben, wait, it's all for fun, I can get out by myself, easy--"
Swiftly, decisively, irrationally, Ben slices through the ropes, a flash of rage and light. As he turns off his lightsaber, shoulders heaving, a strand of dark hair drips sweat into his eyes. "Get up," he says, through his teeth.
Perplexed, Poe does so, his hand fumbling as he pushes himself off the ground, unable to fully meet the younger boy in the eye. "I don't understand, Ben. It was just a game."
"It wasn't funny," Ben says coldly, white-faced, his sensitive mouth set into a thin line. "Don't do that again." He offers no further explanation, and departs, standing straight as a snapped twig, leaving Poe free and inexplicably afraid. In the sloping evening sun, his shadow is far too big for his frame.
(This is what Poe is thinking about, as he struggles against his bonds, and as the white face he once knew looms over him with an artist's hubris--about the boy who did not understand a game.)
Then the force of the galaxy is pulling at him, wringing his brain for the information in needs, and he cannot think about anything for a long time.
-
Even when he is broken out of his cell by a breathless stormtrooper he has no time to think. Even when they escape the First Order on a hope and a prayer he has no time to think. Especially when they crash on a forsaken desert planet and he wanders the sands looking for his friend, he has no time to think.
But when Poe finally finds himself back on D'Qar, bone-tired and forever in the debt of a couple of random space merchants who pick up hitchhikers, he also finds himself with an overabundance of time to think. His comrades give him all the space he needs. The General--
Oh, the General.
She steps away from the control station to ask, "Did you see him?"
"Yes," Poe says. "I did."
"And he was..." She trails off, hoping against hope, waiting for an answer he cannot give.
He is different, he is evil, he is ruthless and cruel and completely given over to the dark, and Poe knows one thing, just one, for sure--he is Kylo Ren, and Kylo Ren is not the General's son. Now he has lost a mother, she a child, yet for the sake of the galaxy--everything, in the end, is about the galaxy--they cannot allow themselves anything more than a moment's grief. Poe coughs. "He is...changed," he says, slowly. And then, "General Organa, I need rest. May I be dismissed?"
It is the first time he has ever lied, no matter how indirectly, to his hero. Let her think he is too shaken by his capture and the loss of his fellow escapee to talk. Let her sit alone in the control station to mourn her son.
Poe walks, alone, back to his bunk. On the way he sees the sunset, the last shards of light slipping below the horizon. He stops and stands and watches and aches. And he buries Ben Solo forever, deep where he cannot be found.
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