maskormenacelogs | it's been a long week

It took him a while to actually get out of the building. He'd ported out before and come back with more memories, but the last time, that had just been a couple hours. Confusing to reconcile but not impossible.

Now?

Barely a week had passed at home, and yet he had to somehow reconfigure a year and a half worth of memories from Earth over top and around them, and it made his brain hurt. It made his brain hurt, and he was tired. He wasn't sure how long he was gone, but rather than call any of his friends or look at his comm, he just... asked a nurse.

A day. That was all.

A day that felt like a life time.

Finally he managed to drag himself out of the building, going through a mental checklist of what he had to do and how the hell this knew power in his file fit into anything. He was so consumed with his own thoughts that he almost missed her on the steps, just about walked by her, and--

He blinked, startled, as he caught sight of her face.

"-- Rey?"

He didn't get a chance to call until everyone was settled in. He left Finn and Rey to catch up and wandered outside, the smile slipping from his face the second he was alone.

He didn't even pull out his communicator, just activated the neural link to give him a voice connection, and dialed 622.

"... Hey. Sorry I missed last check in. Got ported out. But I'm back, now." If he sounded tired, it - well - was because he was really fucking tired.

Flying always helped Poe clear his head, so it was no surprise to anyone when he came back at nearly six o'clock in the morning after having flown around for a couple hours. His hair was windswept, though he still felt like he could pick little grains of red sand out of his hair, even a week later.

He wasn't all that surprised to see Finn out and doing his morning routine, either. The guy had been up early every day he'd been here. Turned out some habits were hard to break. But Poe flew his carpet down and landed next to him - hovering a couple feet above ground as he jumped off, then catching the carpet before it fell to the dirt.

"... Hey." Significantly less excited than the day before, but he forced a smile to his lips anyway. "Sorry about disappearing. Maybe one day the porter will stop yanking my chain but I doubt it'll be anytime soon."

They give her a file and a basic set of instructions, giving her a brief explanation of everything she'd find inside. Rey knows things are different, when she'd so recently opened herself up to the Force, the silence of it is deafening.

She still has access to it, but it's different now. Like her surroundings, the names of the cities. Everything is different.

One thing is palpable, though. The disappointment after her brief reunion with Finn and the others, she's been whisked away again to somewhere else, this time without even her own say in it --

Staring out at the streets before her, Poe's voice brings her back and she turns. "Poe? What's going on?" As far as she knows, they've been brought here together, that might mean Finn and General Organa are around, too. Right?

The flood of relief is instant, and he nearly grabs her to hug her, but instead settles for grasping her arm with a warm, firm, friendly grip.

"Force, am I glad to see you. If this is what I get for porting out again, hell, I'll take it. Are you alright? What's the last thing you remember? Shit--, I need to call Finn--" It all came out in a rush, and then he was fumbling around in his clothes to find his communicator.

"It's okay," Finn immediately greeted. Though, this port out was no easier than the last one, especially with all the stress going on lately. He'd kept himself busy with keeping half an eye on Bodhi, resolutely not thinking about it... again.

But Poe was here with Rey so everything was all right. Or, well, everything considered.

With a lot of energy (anger, hopelessness, loneliness, you name it) and nothing to spend it on, Finn had taken to running around the perimeter of Base One in the mornings. That's how Poe caught him.

He didn't miss the forced smile, not that he was very surprised. Finn didn't know if things were still shaky between them, if Poe would want to talk to him about Bodhi or Hux or porting out or any of it. "You-... You wanna grab some breakfast or something?"

Uh. "We were on board the Falcon, we'd just left Crait." It was kind of a Big Moment, so the question has Rey visibly thrown. "Wait. We were just together. Why wouldn't you be seeing me again, and didn't Finn get here with us?"

Glancing behind her and around as if expecting Finn to materialize and join the two of them.

The call hadn't connected. Gone again. Hopefully it would only be one day again, but you could never be sure. Treat it like another stay in the medbay and keep working. Do another check-in at the scheduled time tomorrow.

He got a call before then, let out a deep breath. "Welcome back." Just one day. That was good. "What's your status?" He knew Poe had issues with the Porter itself, so he couldn't be sure if that fatigue was just from anger with it, or something else.

There was a long pause on the other end, Poe’s breathing the only audible thing. Even the birds were quiet.

“Physically, or emotionally?” He finally asked. It didn’t sound like a joke. “I’m not hurt. And I’m not dead.” So, physically, fine.

He sighed, scrubbing his face. Finn and Rey? This wasn’t a story he had to tell. They knew. Everyone else...

“Time passed,” he eventually continued, his voice sounding muffled. “Not a lot. But enough.”

“I’m a few days past you, then,” mumbled more to himself than to her as he dialed Finn’s number.

“It’s a long story, but, to put it short? I’ve been here a year and a half, time makes no sense, and nothing here lines up with back home.” ... “I think I just made it more confusing rather than less. Bear with me.”

The comm started dialing, and then when he heard the connection go through:

“Finn? I’m back. But not just me.” He held the communicator out to Rey. “Say hi.”

Still had a life waiting for him back there, then. But maybe the war back there wasn't going as hoped.

"Rendezvous somewhere, or hold off?" They could talk about it here, but he'd only be able to understand so much at a distance.

It wasn’t a hard choice. He wanted to see 622. If the man had still been friends with Hux, he didn’t think he could, but. Neither of them were big fans of the general. And the Empire wasn’t the war he was fighting. He’d somehow managed to completely separate 622 from his own war. Akobi, though...

He had nothing against Akobi. Even sort of liked him. But he didn’t like him enough - or trust him enough - to want to see him right now.

“Rendezvous. Not your place, though. If that’s okay. I can meet you at the MF porter.”

He let a breath out through his nose, then shook his head, smile fading.

“Nah. Thanks, but. Not a lot of an appetite. Can we just take a walk, instead?”

He leaned the carpet up against the tree.

“I didn’t want to break up the celebratory mood yesterday, but... you should know, time did pass while I was home.”

Finn nodded at the idea of a walk, actually favoring it to come down from his run. But Poe kept talking and-

He scowled, knowing what Poe must have seen but unsure where it all stopped for him. The last time he ported out, there was no mention of time having passed. Finn didn't expect this. "How much time?"

"A week, maybe. Everything got a little... mushed." He wet his lips as he started walking, pushing his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket.

"Past Crait. I'm further than Rey. She only just remembers us finally meeting."

Then he was even further along than Finn now.

He looks away and frowns down at his feet as they walk, not sure which part to feel bad about. He never got to tell Poe what to expect and a lot of it had been his fault. Where to even begin with that? "I'm sorry."

"Don't." Firmly.

He paused, turned to Finn, and reached out to clasp his shoulder.

"Don't. Okay? First thing you did when you showed up was try to make everything your fault, and I know now that it wasn't. Okay? You have nothing to be sorry for. So stop apologizing to me."

Finn furrowed his brow, mostly in confusion but some with a tinge of anger. "But I-" No, he didn't want to play the blame game. He didn't want to start an argument. "It's not like you-" But even if Finn tried to make him not blame himself, Poe would argue that, too!

He closed his eyes and shook his head. "Don't blame yourself for what happened. It was more than any one person involved."

"I know what I'm responsible for." There was a firm edge to his voice that just hadn't existed before. This wasn't a thought experiment. He knew exactly how many of his friends deaths were on his head. But.

"I know what the First Order is responsible for, too. Everything that happened - we reacted. We reacted to an immeasurable threat, and we all did everything we could. Especially you. I thought --" He pulled in a breath and then let it out, hand falling to his side.

"You came back alive. That's the important part. Okay?"

He wasn't sure that was the important part. He wasn't sure that he did everything he could. But he also didn't want to dwell on it or argue with Poe.

Finn took his own breath and relented. "Rose said that we need to fight for what we love, so- No sense dwelling when we can move forward." He was saying that a lot these days. Sooner or later, it would bite him, he knew. "How've you holding up?"

"You did." If she wasn't confused by this before, she was now. How he'd managed to have been here for a year and a half when she'd seen him only a few hours ago, Rey isn't sure.

It doesn't make sense.

And before she can question it further, Poe's handing his communicator out. "Finn? Is that you?"

Poe had already said it was, said as much but she asks anyways, as if she's afraid that the voice on the other end won't be his.

It seems her fears about reaching the wrong person are well-founded.

Kylo Ren isn't there, and then, suddenly, in the space between thoughts, he is.

Stripped to the waist and flushed with recent exertion from splitting firewood, Kylo lowers the axe in his hands slowly. His gaze is utterly steady as he stares straight into the eyes of the one last torment this place could provide.

Rey. The scavenger. Here.
Suddenly, everything else is irrelevant.

On second, Poe is standing in front of Rey, holding his communicator out as she delicately questions the man on the other end of the line, the next there is suddenly a giant of a man with no shirt on right fucking there beside him.

He drops the communicator immediately and reflexively, the screen cracking on impact with the concrete below, and he jumps nearly half a foot out of the way.

"What the fuck?" He yells, eloquently.

"Black Squadron made it." That was the most important news. The rest - about how they still hadn't made contact with anyone willing to help, other than the city that Black Squadron was in - wasn't important. "We uh - we got a distress call from them, a couple days after--" He shrugged. Finn knew.

"They were in some pretty deep trouble. But we got them out. So you can add four to the list of survivors."

It wasn't exactly an answer to his question, but it also sort of was. There was a glimmer of hope in the darkness.

There's was just a shit ton of darkness, and now he was back here. He sighed.

"... For once in my life, being here, I'm kind of okay not being back there. I'm not going to begrudge a break."

No, that wasn't an answer, but Finn was willing to take it. He nodded and sighed. "Good. You could use a break anyway, Dameron."

Yet, Finn was starting to become more of the opposite. As much as he loved Earth, he felt more and more every day that his place was back home, not here. Rey's arrival helped that feeling but not enough to make it leave his mind.

"Maybe they'll show up here, too. Like the rest of us."

it's been a long week

Rey and Poe Meet-Cute

Calling the boyfriend

Morning chat with Finn

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: Calling the boyfriend

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

a wild kylo appears

no subject

no subject

no subject