![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Fic: Life Sentence
Chapter 7
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Pairing: Armitage Hux & Poe Dameron (kind of pre-slash, kind of just emotional entanglement)
Rating: PG
Follows on from my From the Ashes
In which a slightly suspicious decision is made
Obviously, Poe used the machine. He didn’t even need to calm down before he knew he would. He offered Kuat a one percent share of the profits from the commercial use of the device and they snapped it up like a corporate desperate to clean up their murky image by promoting their new instant depression cure.
“What d’you think?” he asked Rey, once the installers had plugged in the final lead and filled the vials of chemicals. The inside of the thing loomed like… like the cave Luke Skywalker had talked about where he faced his dark side. Like the cave Rey had. They’d both come out of that experience stronger, but would he? Surely it was possible to fail that kind of test, and then what? Madness? Suicide? The fundamental loss of his soul? “Do you have a bad feeling about this?”
And she’d given him that big bright grin of hers and said, “No, actually. My brain’s telling me it’s a terrible idea, but my instincts say yes, go for it.”
“That’s good enough for me,” he said, and sat. The cold metal of the chair struck through his back and kidneys, and he swallowed against a sudden rush of dread. “Listen. If I’m not myself after this, make sure Hux doesn’t get some other sap to try it. And… deal with me, okay? Put me out of the airlock on the Millenium Falcon. I’ve always wanted to go, touching the stars.”
She sharpened before his eyes – that strong jaw of hers setting, and her bright-dark eyes growing edged with light. She was in her own way as terrible as Hux, a creature formed from privation, who had learned that at times a swift knife could be the same as mercy. “I’ll see to it,” she vowed, without protest or visible regret.
And that was that. Poe closed the door, sealing himself into the egg-shaped room. It lit around him with a soft, milky glow, and the fans brought the temperature up until it was neither hot nor cold. Gravity slowly shifted around him, loosening until he would have floated up from the chair if it wasn’t for the safety webbing that had gently unfolded around him to hold him in place.
Get out! Get out before it’s too late! sang the voice of his doubt, of reason, of maturity… the voice that made him feel like dirt. He took a deep breath and fastened the IV pump around his arm. The screen was like a Mandalorian helmet. Like Vader’s helmet.
He lowered it over his head.
For three seconds nothing happened and then the universe opened up around him in an infinite series of regressions, the darkness echoing in his mind as it doubled and redoubled, and redoubled. Infinities nested within infinities. He fell into them, headfirst, gasping.
He was weightless and starless, alone in the dark, but there was barely time for fear before he sensed the Force come spiraling, nudging out of the abyss, curling around him like fluid sunlight. The darkness took on a warm, honey-dripping quality, replete with comfort. Still he saw nothing, but oh, he felt it.
It wound and curved about him, supporting him, caressing him. As though he were a felinx being stroked before a crackling fire, he felt the life-heat-gold of it penetrating his bones, all his tight-wound tension evaporating, draining. His breathing levelled and lengthened as without conscious thought his body surrendered to relief.
I don’t deserve— he thought, and the Force laughed wordlessly with the rush of sap that opened flowers and sent magma boiling into the sky. It was alive—magnificently alive—so much more alive than he had ever imagined. He could feel it looking at him and, although the examination flayed him to the soul, being seen by it was a comfort. It reached into the nooks of him and lit them with warmth.
Was this what the Jedi had felt all the time? Plugged in to this silent tide of glory? No wonder they had been serene to the end.
No! Even though he was here because he wanted healing, he fought it. It was too good for him. He fought it, out of a dumb, stubborn instinct that clung to pain as though it was life. No. I killed them all. I don’t deserve—
At once, he was back in that transport, by the viewport, watching the other vessels of the convoy be blown apart, one by one. Horror tried to close his throat, stop his heart. He squeezed his eyes shut but it made no difference—he wasn’t seeing this with his eyes.
See! Hatred for himself came searing out of every explosion. He threw it at the sinuous, unending Force like a weapon. I killed them all, I--
But in that light, to lie, even to himself, was intolerable. It was transparent, weak. It could not sustain itself.
He didn’t think the Force actually spoke, but the question was not his own. Did you?
Yes, he insisted, stubborn, while the truth surrounded him, pressed on him like the weight of the oceans at abyssal depths. It pressed, it pushed, it fractured…
Did you?
The Force did not accuse. It wound, it shone, and it pushed against him with the power of light, of life, of love. It pushed until he shattered.
Did you?
No, I didn’t. He found himself sobbing, his chest full of anguish and his throat closed with it. His eyes and nose streamed, and he let the grief out in a wail that felt like being born.
No, you didn’t, the Force agreed, still not in speech but in an all consuming understanding that he had to translate into words later. All those who followed you were their own people. Like you, every one of them had long ago decided they would be glad to give their lives for freedom. If you had been asked to give your life, would you have done it?
Of course, Poe agreed. It was obvious, and yet it was also a revelation.
Then you know they were glad. You know it is selfish of you to pretend their choices were your responsibility. Your own life is enough for you. And it is not over yet.
Since his barriers had shattered, the Force was within him—he was as huge as the universe and as saturated with sweet warmth as this dragon-like entity that was loving and yet impassive, dark as the darkness behind his eyes and yet aflame with glory.
It staggered him, how much more there was to existence than he had imagined, and somehow—unbelievably—it was looking at him with kindness, as though he was important, as though it wanted to know what he would do, now it had set him free. As though it trusted him to do the right thing.
I want to do good, he thought, and it was simultaneously the most ridiculously obvious thing, and a triumphant cutting through of all the chains and thorns in which he had been entangled. Freedom. Here it was, simple and complicated as love.
I am here. I am alive. And I want to do good.
When he stumbled out of the booth, centuries after he had gone in, the world reshaped around him and his soul torn apart so the darkness could be drained from it, he expected the city to have crumbled or the sun burned out. Everything had changed.
And yet Rey sat on the sofa with her caf half-drunk, flicking through the channels on the holonet. She had not yet chosen a program to view, and the chronometer in the corner of the screen told him that less than ten minutes had passed.
She looked up, startled, as though she too had not expected him to be done so soon. “Poe? How did it--?”
Poe grinned, targeting by instinct as if he was in his cockpit—and in a way he was. He was still fighting a war, but this time his opponents were poverty, and injustice, corruption, slavery and whatever the hell else it was that had allowed the First Order to find billions of homeless and starving children on the Republic’s streets to recruit. These were more complex things to destroy than starships, maybe, but he was the best pilot in the Resistance and he specialized in unwinnable odds.
It was all so obvious, when he came to think about it. “I’m gonna run for Chancellor.”
