going home
CHAPTER ONE: a bomb
“we all make mistakes and we all pay the price”
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a/n: this has been in my drafts for over a year but fuck it, here we go
“It feels like…”
There was a storm brewing in his chest. Violent, turbulent, rough and rugged. A white-water rapid smacking against the sharp and jagged shore that lined the inside of his ribs, tearing at his beating heart with each and every rapid beat, threatening to thump right out of his sore and worn chest.
But he couldn’t get the rest of his words out, the sour silence echoing out around the small room.
He didn’t even mind silence normally, not when he was with you. The two of you certainly had enough moments of it when the days stretched longer and the nights became almost nonexistent. It was a more than necessary reprieve from the day, just holding you in his arms as the two of you laid wrapped around each other beneath the scratchy, standard-issue sheets, delirious, and teetering on the edge of sleep. It was stolen minutes beside you in the refresher as the two of you slowed your rush, equally desperate for both a few more seconds together and to get out the door to begin the long day you each had ahead of you. It was silent meals slipped into your schedules just so you had a chance to see each other, even if all you did was stuff your faces and read the lengthy data files stacked in your laps.
Comfortable silences with you had a silent love to them, words left unspoken because they didn’t need to be said. His chest bloomed and blossomed with an incomparable heat, more than that of the deadly sands of Jakku, more than the bubbling lava pits of Mustafar. He loved those stolen moments of silence.
This wasn’t that. This was a heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, destructive silence, left in the open, plain and vulnerable as the words caught on his tongue.
And you noticed.
Your stare had lifted to his briefly as he stepped out of refresher, lingering for just a second on the droplets of water that trailed down his chest to the towel hung loose around his hips, then darting quickly back to the datapad resting in front of you where your back hunched over the desk. Even when he started talking, the first few words of his thought dripping from his lips, he didn’t catch your complete attention, not until the thought fizzled out on his tongue and the room fell silent again.
It felt like the first real attention he had gotten from you in days.
“Poe…?”
The pads of your fingertips tapped mindlessly along the metallic table top as you waited, the hesitance on your lips prompting him to continue but he still couldn’t find the breath he needed.
He could see the confusion laced into your disposition, he could see the hesitation holding in your shoulders, he could see your breath caught in your throat in much the same way that his was caught in his own. He didn’t know how to say what he needed to, and you had no clue what to expect, he just opened the refresher door and offered you three words and froze.
“It feels like what, Poe?”
Another two seconds and you just gave up, offering up an almost silent huff and turning back to your somewhat endless stream of medical files. The silence settled too easily back over the two of you, easily enough to send a shiver down his soaked spine, but he still didn’t have the breath or the words. Not yet.
He only had the first three words. “It feels like…”
Maybe it was because he didn’t want to say it. He knew exactly what he wanted to say and he knew it needed to be said, but something inside of him was still catching him up, holding him back as the weak voice quietly murmuring in his head argued otherwise. Maybe he just didn’t want to say it.
“It just feels like…”
“You know, it feels like you’re almost going to get there.” There wasn’t anywhere close to a hint of amusement in your voice, it was pure, unadulterated annoyance, and you didn’t even bother to bite back on it. It came out, full force, slicing him up where he stood with every dripping ounce of sarcasm you had to offer him.
He hated it. He hated your attitude, he hated the shift he had seen in you the past, long and exhausting week, and he absolutely hated what it sparked in him. Maybe if he had gotten more sleep the last few nights, maybe if he hadn’t been worked to the bone out in the pouring D’Qar rain for over nine hours that day alone and at least 10 the day before, maybe if he hadn’t been putting up with this attitude for nearly a week at this point… maybe, maybe he wouldn’t have snapped.
Maybe just wasn’t enough.
Any words, any half-finished thought or hesitation on his part faded away, and the words left on his tongue rushed out, flowing free like an unbridled river, directly out from his stormy chest.
“It feels like you’re a bomb,” he nearly choked around the words, like his brain knew better than to let them out but they kept flowing anyway. “It feels like you’re a bomb that hasn’t gone off yet.”
Whatever reaction he had naively expected from you, he didn’t get. There wasn’t a hint of surprise on your face, not a moment of shock or horror or anything close to a visceral response equatable to what he deserved. There wasn’t a hint of a single emotion at all.
He didn’t think he had more to say, that was the lone thought that had held on his tongue but your stare didn’t move, it didn’t even waiver, so he stepped out of the refresher doorway, still slicked from his shower and found himself unable to stop himself. Your stare just coaxed more and more out of him.
“I don’t know what’s been happening, I don’t know if it’s work or if it’s me or if it’s something else entirely… but it’s something. All I know is what it feels like and it feels like you’re holding your breath, like there is a detonation timer that is going to go off somewhere and we’re just waiting for it… I can’t stand waiting for it.” His throat was tight now, constricting around every syllable as he felt his cheeks heat up and eyes begin to burn, but he couldn’t stop. It wasn’t a flood, it was an avalanche, filling the room with an icy chill that shook him to his core, and it just kept coming. “I need you to talk to me, because I can’t-- I-- I don’t know what to do. Something’s wrong and… and I can’t take it anymore.”
He could feel the words trembling as they left his lips, quivering as they hung in the air between the two of you, but your words didn’t tremble. They didn’t shake, they didn’t shiver. Laced with a quiet, muted rage, they left your mouth in a firm tone, not wavering for a second.
It was a tone he had never heard you take before, not with him, not ever.
“You think I’m a bomb?”
He couldn’t recoil from it fast enough. “Maybe not the right choice of words--”
“You think I’m going to explode, knock out a few cities, maybe obliterate a population? A bomb, Poe?”
“That’s not--”
“I’m not a bomb.” There was the first hint of a break. Not a real break, but a crack, a sliver of real emotion peeking through your cold, emotionless exterior as you stared him down with more heat than even his burning shower could offer.
And it was so easy to think about what he needed to do, what he should have done.
He should have leveled himself out, taken a deep breath and recovered. He should have thought about his words, he should have silenced every emotion bubbling in his chest, and he should have responded back with a clear head, so that when the words came out of his mouth, they were words that he meant, words that he needed to say and not just words that came out first. He should have… He didn’t.
“Yeah, and you’re clearly not exploding on me--”
The sarcasm came out hot and fast, but your scoff came out even hotter and much, much faster.
It echoed around the room before he could even finish his thought, not that he had much more to contribute, but it was curt, and abrupt, stopping him right in his tracks. Then came the screech of the chair, kicked back as you stood up and turned your datapad off with an easy click.
He tried to reach out, he tried to stand in your way, to catch your attention back for even a second in hopes of you leveling out enough to talk to him but there was already a determined fury in your step, one he knew better than to stand in the way of even if he was the one who caused it. Especially given he was the one who caused it.
“Babe--” his choked voice tried out as you moved to step past him for the shared set of drawers on the back wall, but again, you cut him off before the last traces of the word even left his tongue.
“Don’t fucking ‘babe’ me, Poe.”
You grabbed the first thing you could get your hand on, opening up the top drawer and grabbing the first set without second thought. Maybe it was your shirt, maybe it was his, maybe those were his shorts, maybe they were actually yours, it didn’t matter. Blinded by the red that laced the edges of your vision, whatever you could grab was good enough.
And as he tried his luck again, you took the clothes you grabbed and pushed past him yet again.
“Please, babe-- Fuck, I mean, please--” The door to the refresher slid shut in his face before he could even come any closer, cold, hard steel two inches from his face instead of you and your angry stare. But even as he knocked, he got nothing in response. “Fuck…”
His forehead fell forward against the cool metal, his sopping curls still clinging to his skin, now stuck between him and the door now and over and over again as he hit his head a few times to knock again.
“That isn’t what I meant, it was a poor choice of words but…” he was in the thick of it now, why not dig the grave a little deeper. “But I’m not wrong, babe, please. Something is going on and you have to talk to me, if it’s something I did or if I can help… just… open the door babe, please.”
He waited a second with useless hope coursing through his veins, then the shower turned on and the last of any kind of hope fled his system in a hurry.
He wasn’t wrong though.
Day in and day out, he poured his heart and soul, every ounce of energy that he had to offer, into work. Whether he was in the pilot seat, putting his life on the line again and again, or behind a strategy desk, discussing the lives of the soldiers and civilians who entrusted him with everything they had to offer, it took it all out of him. And he still did it, day in and day out, because that was the job he signed up for and it was hell but he could do it. Or, he should have been able to do it.
But you weren’t sleeping. When your schedules aligned the way they had the past week, he was back in the room with you nearly every night after his shift, spare the occasional med bay emergency, and that meant he got to fall asleep with you beside him, or at least, it meant that hypothetically. He’d get cleaned up, steal a short kiss from you and dance through the daily rundown of questions and updates before climbing into bed, waiting for you to get ready and do the same and you just… wouldn’t. You’d sit at the lone desk in your small, shared room, scanning through page after page of your medical files and never finish.
He was able to go about three days like that, tossing and turning and barely catching as much sleep as he needed to function, but then he needed to bring it up. That got him a curt dismissal of the usual ‘I’m fine’ which no one who was actually fine ever needed to say as defensively as you did.
You came to bed every night after that, but you still didn’t sleep. Your eyes would close and you’d even cuddle into his side some after he switched the lights off, but you wouldn’t sleep. He had been sleeping in the same bed as you for a while, for a while longer than he ever had with anyone else before, he could tell when you were asleep, and you never were.
Something was wrong. Something had to be wrong.
He was wrong to phrase it the way that he did, but he wasn’t wrong.
And after he changed into a pair of sweats and pulled on a loose hoodie, he sat his back down to the refresher door and repeated the exact same sentiment to you again, whether you could hear him over the running water or not.
“I’m sorry… that wasn't how I wanted it to come out, I didn’t mean… it’s… fuck… something is wrong, and I don’t know what it is and I’m not sleeping because you’re not sleeping and I’m sorry but I can’t keep going like this, locked in this silence with you… I can’t.” The back of his head fell back against the door, a sigh more exhausted than anything he had ever released before managing it’s way out of his lips. “I want to help, and I can’t when you don’t talk to me, and then we both get like this and I’m tired… I’ve never been this tired…”
The water stopped running, but still, no word from you.
Not until one of the datapads on the table began to beep with an alert.
His knees ached and groaned as he pushed himself up from the cold, concrete floor of the room, and with just a few steps, he found himself at the desk, tapping the screens on both pads, his and yours, to see where the beep came from. It was yours, in the middle of the night, it almost always was.
“Is it mine?” You hummed, pulling his attention back to find you stood in the doorway of the refresher with your skin still damp and the casual amalgamation of clothes covering your form.
“Yeah,” he shrugged, “looks like an appointment for tomorrow got moved, nothing urgent.”
The silence was back. Deafening. Turbulent.
“There’s nothing wrong with me.” The heat of your words had washed away into something much softer, something much more vulnerable as your arms cradled around your body, holding yourself in a tight and defensive protection. Something you had never needed with him, not here, not in the bedroom the two of you shared.
His stare fell to the floor beneath his bare feet, his toes curling against the cold as his tongue darted out to lick hesitantly over his lower lip. “I didn’t say there was… or I didn’t mean that there was, I just… Something is wrong, something is going on and we have to talk about it, I can’t keep waiting…”
“Nothing is--”
His stare snapped back up in an instant. “Yeah, babe, something is. This isn’t something you can ‘I’m fine’ your way out of anymore. I need sleep and you do too…”
“I’m not a bomb.”
“I’m sorry.” He sighed, huffing out another breath as you still held yourself tight where you stood. “I’m tired, I just… I’m sorry.”
You nodded weakly, you knew that, of course you knew that… but that didn’t make it any easier. Because he wasn’t wrong, and you knew it, you just couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
“It’s the… it’s not… it’s not you.”
He didn’t think it was.
Collapsing back onto the edge of the bed, he couldn’t help but rub his hand over the bottom half of his face, scruffing his own hand with the roughness of the two day old growth settled there. If he looked anything like you did, it was pretty obvious he hadn’t slept well in far too long, bags under his eyes and a weakness in his stature. He could barely even hold himself up as he leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. Exhaustion had gone by days ago, there weren’t even words to describe just how sleep-deprived he was. He wanted to sleep, he wanted you to sleep. If he was suffering this much, you must have been feeling so much worse.
He just wanted to help.
“Is there anything I can do, I mean, do you want to talk about it—“
Your answer was quick. “I don’t want to talk.”
His hands lifted into a gentle surrender, “okay, we don’t have to talk about it… I just, stars babe, we can’t keep going like this.”
“I don’t mean to.”
He huffed another sigh as he watched your defenses slowly find their way back up. “I know you don’t, I know… I just don’t know what to do.”
“And you think I do?” You fought back with a shake of your head, scratching at your collarbone beneath the stretched-out collar of the shirt you wore. His shirt.
“I think you know what’s wrong.” It sounded like an accusation, he hadn’t meant for it to but it came out as one nonetheless. “I think you know what’s wrong and pretending like you don’t isn’t going to fix anything.”
The silence was back. Cold, painful silence. Stabbing him in the chest would have hurt less at this point.
“Okay… ” It was such a slow plunge, a knife thrust deep into his heart as the cut of your voice returned. “That’s it.”
It didn’t matter how badly his legs screamed, his tired muscles pleading to stay seated, he found his way back to his feet. Taking a step towards you was as if he were carefully finding his way out onto a frozen lake, unsteady and cracking as his weight shifted forward, freezing as he caught the icy chill of your stare. “Babe--”
Your hand extended to keep him where he stood. “I don’t want to talk to you right now. Just go to bed.”
“Just go to bed…” He couldn’t hold back his scoff, and it echoed with the furious heat yours had when he first started this conversation. There was no taking any of this back now. “You think I can go to bed? Are you serious? I haven’t slept in a week and you think I’m going to be able to now--”
“I’m not doing this, go to bed or get out, Poe.”
“Well I’m not doing either of those.” His hands settled on his hips, the sturdy stance of a commander as his inescapable stubborn head grappled for any last taste of control. He tried. Stars, he really tried. But he was tired. He had never been this tired. “You don’t want to talk about why, that’s fine, but I can’t do this silent treatment anymore. We’re either fucking talking or you can be the one to fucking leave.”
Nine hours. Nine hours in the endless downpour of hot jungle rain, running drill after drill after drill, soldering damp wires, managing the tempers of every single soul under his command… His hands were wrinkly and his grip was weak and as you grabbed your boots and datapad and did exactly as he told you to, he was far too tired to reach for you.
By the time he found feeling in his fingertips, the door had closed with a deafening hiss and it was too late. Far too late.
Something was wrong. Something was truly wrong and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do.
He collapsed back onto the bed and stayed awake until his alarm sounded for him in the morning.