And I'll use you as a warning sign

[volitaunt]

Who: Okay this turned into a Poe catchall + Various
Where: Various locations/listed in the headings
When: May 1st-31st
What: May Catchall - specific closed prompts, some open threads
Warnings: N/A yet
[Open and Closed]



May 10th - Open

Tequila Mockingbird has Cassian's liquor of choice in the name, which is why Poe picked it. He's not a big drinker, but between the memories, the conversation with Jyn, the... party. Well. He has a few reasons to drink.

The reason he picked for tonight was to pour one out for L'ulo, for Muran, for the pilots whose names and faces he hasn't yet remembered. Not for his mother--it doesn't seem right, to drink for her. She wouldn't want it, her son inebriated and alone at a bar, wallowing in her memory. Poe won't pretend that isn't what he's doing. Wallowing, letting himself feel the grief and pain he tries so hard to outpace.

Jyn is right. He has to stop sometime, and taking the opportunity now to brace himself for future losses is better than breaking under one too many.

His table is in the corner, in a quiet part of the restaurant. Not by any virtue of paranoia. Poe doesn't have the same hardwired need to keep his back to a wall and his eyes on the exits that some veterans do. It was just the most private space he could find while still being around people. Drinking at home where Rey might have seen him would have felt worse than this, but drinking somewhere entirely alone wouldn't have been right either. He might not have squadmates to share a glass with, but having some form of life circulating around him is better than being entirely alone. Plus, there's BB-8, sitting underneath the table, domed head tilted to rest against Poe's leg.

Maker, he's glad to have his droid.


May 12th - Open

Poe is beating up a freestanding punching bag thing. He's been going to Crossbones Boxing in the morning on the days he doesn't work. He'll go stir-crazy if he just hangs around the house, and being grounded for this long is driving him bonkers as it is. He's tried to keep his head down, tried to be good, but man (thump, kick, wham) he going to blow a sensor if he doesn't get some air time.

It doesn't help that beating up things is usually the time he spends talking to BB-8 about whatever's on his mind. Here, where it's public and monitored like everywhere else, they have to keep up the same act. So BB-8 sits, watching, grumbling to himself with a towel draped over his head dome, while Poe tries to kill an inanimate object.


May 13th - Open

Poe is in a tree.

It is a tall tree. A very tall tree, near the edge of town, just inside those woods they aren't technically supposed to enter.

He is very high in this very tall tree.

Fuck gravity to be honest.

Comments

May 6th - Closed to Caroline

[volitaunt]

BB-8 needs a polishing. He's picked up some oil streaks and, in the oil streaks, bits of dirt and hay.

He trundles along next to Poe, who looks very much the same. Engine grease, dirt, a coating of sweat tacking down his tank top and his hair. His jeans are filthy, he's got a plaid shirt knotted around his waist, and he feels--dangerously, maybe stupidly--happy. There's something about spending a day at work and seeing tangible results at the end of it. Fixing primitive farming machinery is both a puzzle and a pleasure. It's so simple that the simplicity itself starts to be complex.

More than a good day's work, though, Poe remembers. He remembers Kes Dameron. Kes the rancher, the tracker, the father, not the file he's had BB-8 recite to him a half-dozen times. He remembers his dad's face.

So there's a bounce in his step and an obliviousness in his attitude when he walks into Go Ask Alice to get a coffee. Until he catches sight of a familiar blonde head and freezes.

BB-8 rolls a few more feet before halting, looking back, and chirping a question.

Shit.

[coy]

Seeing Poe wasn't something she'd expected to do today. But she also knew this town was tiny and that they wouldn't be able to avoid each other for very long. It had only been a few days since their awkward reunion/meeting and she'd had some time to clear her head.

Kind of.

But that was a story for another time.

As I said, she didn't expect to see him exactly, so when he came into the coffee shop just as she'd grabbed her coffee (it was helping to curve certain cravings) and turned towards the door just in time to spot Poe freezing and looking a little... well, he didn't look like he wanted to see her.

And she can't really blame him. She isn't sure how she felt about seeing him and she takes in a breath to center herself, her eyes fluttering only a bit. Determined to keep her pride intact and to show him that she wasn't... well, she wasn't the insecure mess she'd been a few days ago, she squares her shoulders and lifts her chin. She's the better version of Caroline Forbes and she isn't that other girl anymore, the girl she was before she was turned.

"Hey," she says with a warm smile, activating her inner Cool Girl.

[volitaunt]

That smile pinches at his heart in places that it shouldn't. Places no one should be.

BB-8 beeps another question, this time asking if he can say hello. Poe nods, and the droid gives a happy whistle and rolls his way across room, tootling a greeting and leaving oil streaks all over the floor.

Poe's going to owe Cassian for those, probably, he thinks, and tries to think of something to say that isn't some variation of an apology. He can practically hear his father's voice telling him this is something he can't run away from and that he'd better not try.

He starts to run a hand through his hair, gets his fingers caught in a knot, and realizes he's been quiet for entirely too long.

"Hey," he finally says. His glance strays to Cassian behind the counter, not quite glaring at the man. So much for not telling his not-cousin about Caroline, specifically.

He has to extricate his hand from his hair before he can look her in the face again. "How're you doing?"

[coy]

Okay, so it's not exactly easy to see him even with days to process. But it's not as confusing, it's easier to separate the memories from reality, now that they aren't crashing into her at a sonic rate. They come to her more naturally even if they are anything but.

BB-8 rolls over to her and she smiles down at him. "Hi BB-8," she says with a curious smile curving her lips, her hand hovering just above the droid's head like she might pet him before she realizes he's not a dog. She laughs softly at herself and just waves at the droid.

At Poe's question, she shrugs a little. "I'm okay." She wants to tell him about Elena, she wants to explain how crazy the past two days have been, she wants confess every little thing to him. It's an urge she finds easier to ignore now.

"Looks like you guys got into..." She looks up at Poe questioningly before giving him a little longer to snap out of it. "Something? Mud-wrestling?"

may 8 - look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness

[realists]

Jyn doesn't know it, but she's always been something of a night owl. It's not just insomnia and nightmares that keep her from sleep, it's a natural inclination to stay up in front of a screen. It used to be her drawing pad, then a data pad, then an unfortunate cell mate keeping her too scared to sleep. It's for the best that she doesn't remember that.

It does make the nightmares of an oppressively humid beach and Cassian so hurt in her arms and then nothing before she wakes up panting and shaking, sheets soaked through with sweat, a little bit harder to handle.

Which is what finds her outside at 2 in the morning, running a circuit around the town to shake herself out of her nightmare and exhaust her to the point that she can fall back into a dreamless sleep when she's done. It's been working and she doesn't always run alone, but tonight she is alone and seemingly more wired than ever. Her run turns into pacing around the town's park, more of a town green really. Her fingers worry around the hem of Cassian's stolen tee shirt, trying to push out her excess energy when she spots a familiar bobble of orange and white.

"Morning BB-8."

[volitaunt]

Poe remembered the day he got the scar on his hand. It's a straight line, small, narrower on the back of his hand than it is on his palm. Some tidy perforation from, he figured, a blade.

Getting the injury itself wasn't the part of the memory that kept him awake. Coming out of the cave where he got it and seeing three out of four of his squadmates in the air. Knowing which ship was missing. Knowing he would be going home to a galaxy without L'ulo in it, without one of the people who raised him. That's what's been keeping him up. That he can't even risk telling BB-8 what he remembered makes him want to punch the cameras (and yeah, there are more of them now than there were before).

He's taken his motorcycle apart by the time midnight rolls around, and putting it back together would probably wake Rey. He's lucky he hasn't woken her already.

It's nice, it's great, having someone else in the house. Part of him wants to go sit outside of her bedroom door and just see if he can hear her breathing, but he doesn't want the questions that would raise if she caught him at it.

So he tells BB-8 he's going out and, unsurprisingly, the droid insists on going with. An hour and a half later, he's worked his way through most of the occupied streets and out into the park. He's considering heading for the woods, trying to find that wall of Cassian's, but then BB-8 makes a greeting noise and rolls away up the path.

Poe slows, following BB-8 at a walk to cool down. He recognized that voice. "Morning, Not Hungry."

[realists]

Jyn doesn't deal in apologies, but she crouches down to smooth her hand softly across the droid's dome when he is close enough, thumb brushing next to his projector gently. She is sorry for snapping at him, offering a small, fleeting smile before she straightens up.

The smile vanishes as she rolls her eyes immediately at Poe.

"I told you my name." She told him her name specifically so he wouldn't call her 'Not Hungry' and yet here they are. She should have asked Cassian if everyone in his family was impossible. Stubborn seems kind of obvious now.

"Isn't it a little late for you to be out?" Aren't you younger than him, Jyn, shouldn't he be asking you this? Jyn's the youth in comparison.

[volitaunt]

Poe puts on what one might call a 'shit-eating grin'. He's good at this pantomime, at being okay. At least most of the time, he is.

"Did you? I forgot. That's going around, I hear." BB-8 makes a worried noise and Poe's smile turns a little more real. "I'm kidding, Bee. Don't fuss."

He quirks an eyebrow at Jyn. "You're out."

May 20 - closed to Cassian and Jyn

[volitaunt]

He doesn't run. That's the concession he makes to discretion. He doesn't run out of the woods and straight to Cassian or Jyn's front door. He stops at his place first, gathers up some fruit, a blanket, the props for his lie. Then he decides to go to Cassian's first. From Jyn's dramatic entrance last night, Poe is going to go out on a limb and say the two won't be straying far from each other for a while.

He whistles his way to Cassian's house, blanket slung over his shoulder with the fruit bundled up in it, but he's tense. Wired. Ready to do something, possibly something stupid. All of that is evident in the sharp-edged smile on his face when he knocks on Cassian's door. Whichever one of them answers, Poe says, "Found a great picnic spot. We should go. Me and you two."

Now.

[realists]

Jyn opens the door in a towel.

She was on her way from the bathroom back to Cassian's room to get dressed when the knock came and she doesn't bother ducking in to grab a shirt just to answer the door. Luckily, it's just Poe and she's not making a terrible first impression on someone else.

"Can I put pants on first or is this time sensitive?" It's a valid question, she thinks, based on that look on his face, and the flippant tone disguises the way the simple mention of picnic makes her want to throw up a little bit, chest tightening.

[volitaunt]

Poe... blinks. Somehow, this was not the Jyn Erso he expected. Even if he did, y'know, have suspicions about her and Cassian--

Anyway. Focusing. "You need pants."

Then, as an afterthought, "It's just a picnic. Nothing time-sensitive about a picnic."

[realists]

Don't look at her like that, Poe. Jyn pushes the door further open and backs up so Poe can come inside, turning to pad down the hallway. "Weirdo."

Just putting that out there before her voice lifts. "Cassian, Poe wants to take us on a picnic. Come talk to him." Which is only a ruse to get him out of the bedroom so she can get dressed so they can actually go on this picnic.

May 28th, Evening

[volitaunt]

Poe's done the rounds. Checked in. Learned about the murders that happened while these people had him wherever they had him. A week, vanished, like smoke, and he wakes up to people dead at the hands of someone trapped here just like them. He needs to clear his head. The stars are starting to come out--he's learned their names by now, their constellations, the fact that supposedly there's no life orbiting any of them. That's hard enough for him to believe.

He settles the ladder against the side of the house, clambers up, starts making his way toward the peak, where he usually sits.

He doesn't get all the way there.

Vertigo hits him, so abrupt and powerful that he's not even aware he's falling. The world swoops, dips, grays around the edges-- and then he has a giddy freefall sensation and the vertigo is gone, and there's the edge of the roof, slipping past. The ladder tips over backwards, and Poe follows it fast toward the ground.

[coy]

Whether it's a stroke of luck, by design or kismet, Caroline won't ever know. All she knows that as she just so happens to be walking by Poe's house that evening. And by 'just so happens', I mean, walking by it because she's worried about him despite her best efforts not to be, she's angry that he was missing without a word, although not at him. It could have been worse, he could be dead right now, killed by a woman she met briefly before.

None of it matters when she spots him. Everything happens quickly. She spots him. Then the ladder falls backward and takes Poe with it. In the span of a breath, she reacts and he's suddenly in her arms, sort of. More like, he falls onto her and she catches him.

She's got the strength to pick him up but with the force of his body, it's more like she catches him (straight up bridal style) and she stumbles, almost dropping him as she tries to get her footing.

[volitaunt]

He hadn't even had the chance to get into a proper fall. Protect his head, all that. Instead there's the abrupt landing in someone's arms, the stagger, and he instinctively wraps an arm around his rescuer's shoulders.

If it's Cassian this is going to be really embarr--

It's Caroline. He is in Caroline's arms.

"Well. This is unexpected." A pause, and then, "Nice catch."

[coy]

"Yeah and nice fall," she lectures him, looking at him for a moment before she moves to set him down, hastily. "Why were you on a ladder, at night, by yourself, Poe? You could have broken your neck." She cares, Poe, it's why she's lecturing you.

She takes a step back, covering her mouth, realizing that... yeah, she just exposed herself pretty big time just now and she doesn't even know how to begin to explain it to him. Nor does she even want to lie. Maybe she just needs to compel him except that she promised Steve she would never do that and the idea of compelling Poe makes her a little sick.

May 28th, Day

[volitaunt]

There's an uncomfortable sense of deja vu when Poe walks out of the hospital a second time. As soon as he woke up, he was out of there. No permission, no forms to sign, no paying attention to the nurses who tried to stop him to get both.

It's like he can't quite breathe until he's in the open air again.

They were so close.

"We talk too much," he says under his breath, ironic.

He scrubs his face with both hands, trying to put his thoughts in order. He should have looked for Steve on his way out, Steve or the others who were with them. Now that he's out, though, his priorities are Cassian, Jyn, the General, Caroline, and BB-8. Steve will come later, once he's sure those who were peripherally involved are safe.

So to that end--he heads for Go Ask Alice, deciding he may as well start there.

He's catchable anywhere between the hospital and Main Street.

[oldladyleia]

Leia had been keeping an eye out for Poe to return from wherever they had taken him and Steve. It had made her nervous, and she had almost found him in her dreams several times, she'd thought but there was nothing when she woke. Now, something told her to go looking for him, and when she had that feeling, Leia listened to it. She didn't know it was the Force or what it was, but she trusted her own intuition, especially when it came to the people whom she cared deeply for.

So when she saw a familiar form moving down Main Street, Leia just let out a long sigh of relief and touched her chest quickly. He was alive, and he was back. Yes, being here was terrible, and they still didn't know everything that was going on, but he was back and he was breathing and hopefully he would remember her. Hopefully he would still be himself. He had to still be himself, she decided, otherwise she was going to get even more angry than she already was, and Leia Organa's anger could be a terrible thing to behold; all one needed to do was to ask the Empire about it.

Still, she pushed those thoughts away as she hurried towards him, just calling out his name with hope: "Poe!"

[volitaunt]

Poe turns immediately at the sound of Leia's voice, the reaction half instinct and half relief. She seems in one piece. What he did didn't get her in trouble--

That's a thought he dismisses immediately as ludicrous. She would probably swat him upside the head if she caught him thinking it. Things had happened fast after he got to Steve's place, and even if they hadn't gotten the information they wanted, it was still worth the effort. They learned something about the sheriff, and they learned something more about what the people who run this place are capable of.

"General. Is it just me, or does this feel familiar?"

[oldladyleia]

When he came close enough, Leia hugged him. No, it wasn't something that she would normally do but there was nothing on this planet that was normal about this situation including what her normal relationship to her pilot would be. Besides, she is just so damned relieved to have him here when she had been so worried that she lost him.

"You're right." Her voice was soft in his ear as she hugged him tightly. "It feels entirely too much like home only on a much smaller scale. It almost feels like it's some sort of prisoner colony where they want us to have the idea that we have free will."

Leia hated the idea, but when they had taken Poe and Steve, that's what it felt like and a terrible idea had come into her head and had been there for the week he had been gone. If they could program memories and emotions into people who knew what else they could do.

Speaking of, Leia pulled back and put her hands on his cheeks. "What happened to you? Are you alright, Poe?"

@ Go Ask Alice

[ouzel]

Cassian had left Jyn at home to become one with his couch, supplying her with snacks, several films and whatever else she could entertain herself with - considering the house is full of books from nearly every genre and at least a half-dozen recently purchased albums on vinyl, he's not too worried. Except he is, because he's Cassian and being worried about things is like a pastime. Or an OCD tick.

(She'd asked him how he does it, how he can do this, go to work and keep busy and act like things are okay and he didn't know how to say 'if I stop, if I pause, I'm not sure I could start again' so instead he'd said 'I don't know what else to do.')

He'd given himself the arbitrary date of the 5th of the following month before he would...what? Probably contact Natasha and General Organa under the presumption that Steve and Poe weren't coming back, but he's giving himself until at least the end of the month to start planning beyond that.

Right now, however, he's cleaning out the inside of the pastry case because at some point something with frosting touched the inner barrier and it's easier to take everything out while there's no one here and just clean the whole thing. So when the door opens there's a "Just a second!" and a hand waved out from the pastry case before Cassian takes a glance at who is actually waiting.

[volitaunt]

There's something incredibly reassuring about walking into Go Ask Alice to see Cassian looking like he's trying to make himself a home in the pastry case. It says on a visceral level what the General said on a logical one. Things are okay. People are okay. This isn't home, by any means, but seeing Cassian wrapped up in the mundane is a little like coming home anyway.

(A week, he thinks, still in shock. A week, gone like blinking.)

"You call this customer service?"

Because when in doubt, make a joke of things.

May 29th, Day - Closed to Jyn

[volitaunt]

Poe isn't sure how long he's been up in this tree, but he also isn't sure which way is down.

He's hanging on to the trunk. He knows that much. The roughness against his forearms, under his palms, tells him that much. It's the one solid thing in his world right now. He feels close to vomiting, his head is starting to pound. It's like being in a tailspin in high gravity.

But this isn't a passing thing. It's not going away, the way it did when he was on the roof. He needs to get out of this tree before he completely loses his balance and falls out of this tree. Poe kinda doubts Caroline will be there to catch him a second time.

[realists]

Jyn was out for a run when BB-8 rolls up to her and starts chittering and squawking like he used to be a mouse droid in a past incarnation and even though Jyn still doesn't understand binary -- she knows the beeps that signify her name and the ones that show he's feeling particularly huffy -- she can tell the little droid is in something of a panic.

What is it, Lassie? Did Timmy fall in a well?

Regardless, Jyn follows the droid, finding she has to continue running to keep up, mumbling under her breath about rude ass droids in her life. Eventually BB-8 brings her back to the picnic spot in the National Park. And Poe, up in a tree.

"Poe? What are you do-- stop yelling at me, BB-8!"

[volitaunt]

Poe turns his head, and immediately regrets every life choice and also maybe being born. "Jyn?"

He has to squint to see her, his vision hazy and white-rimmed. He can hear BB-8 though, as piercing as if someone were holding the droid up to yell droidly concern in his ear. "Damnit, Bee, I said I was fine."