@lieutenantbae

      his hands flutter nervously under his mother’s scrutiny, flitting between his hair and shirt and the back of his neck. his knees are scraped and torn, not the first time to happen this week and probably not the last by the time the month was through. he gnaws on his bottom lip, eyes wide as he peered up from a messy crop of curls. lying would be difficult, he’s never been able to do it with his mother, and she would always know in the end. 

          “ but — but i wanted to touch the skies. ” he wipes the back of his right hand over his forehead, spreading the dirt smudge already present there. “ climbed the tree. ” the tree — the giant force specimen that thrived just off the edge of their house, the branches of it stretched high. from his perspective at the ground, it looked as if it swallowed the skies. 

       there was never any intention to jump off it by any means, but just to see how high he could get. his feet have never been able to stay on the ground, and he just wanted to get closer, to touch the stars once more. some days he wondered if he could just stay there and never leave, but he always thought about his mama and his papa, and crawled back down in the end, except his foot had slipped off a lower branch, the moss growing around it making it slick, and had tumbled roughly to the grass below.

@lieutenantbae

he’s pouting, it’s obvious, but he still faces her when she talks to him, still listens when he’s being reprimanded. “i did!” doesn’t mean he has to agree though. “mama, i did, i swear it.” he wasn’t lying, not really, but it’s wasn’t the whole truth. he had listened he’d just sorta decided that he had a better way. turned out not be true in the end. his arms crossed over his chest and he leaned back against the wall behind him, like he was trying to pretend her words didn’t get into his head. 

Nooooooooo!!

As the writer of my OC, Shara Bey, I can confirm that this is true. He was a goddamn base baby BYE YALL

catch me liking this one thousand times cause WOW the latin lover/pool boy/gardener thing is so Ugly and that’s what this is !

WOW OKAY IM FINE! THIS DOESNT MAKE ME CRY AT ALL!!!! :) :) :)

This is how it goes: Poe is seven-and-a-half, has climbed the tree that is no longer a sapling in the yard of their ranch more times than he can count, has learned the controls of his mother’s A-Wing by heart, prides himself on his skills and feels unencumbered by the weight of his parents’ past. 

( His father’s stories still sound like fairy tales, adventures from a distant past — nevermind that he was alive for some of them — still preserved in all their silent, pristine glory. The bucketheads are little more than placeholders for an evil he can’t yet imagine; the fights have no blood in them. The dogfights look like fireworks against the red glow of the gas giant. ) 

This is how it is: his mother sits him down, after dinner, says eight words to him that sound heavier than they should. At first, Poe thinks she’s going to tell him that she’s going on one last mission, that it’s why his father was so quiet all day, that she’s going to go find more Jedi artifacts with Luke Skywalker and wants to tell him herself.  ( Later, two days after his ninth birthday, he will think of this and feel something nauseating. ) 

And then: he’s not sure he understands. Poe is old enough, bright enough, to know that there’s a difference between sick and sick. That passing sniffles is different from Corellian Mumps is different from Shadow Fever. That she means sick, even if he doesn’t know with what. Even if he doesn’t quite know what it means.

“But you’ll get better, right?” He remembers asking, hopeful, fervent in his belief that the galaxy is good — the belief she taught him — and that it means the galaxy will heal her. 

( Decades later, he will climb into the pilot’s seat of a TIE fighter with a helmetless Stormtrooper beside him, made reckless with hope, and he’ll fly for her. ) 

“You must understand,” paladin Iswen said, as levelly as if she spent every evening in her formal black robes of state, in on of the city’s many shadowed crypts, talking to rebels. “The rebellion has placed our planet in a delicate situation.”