Allegiance | Kylo Ren

LXXIX

A short while later, Ben departed to have a conference with his mother. They needed to be on the same page for everything—the Resistance, the First Order, and the nearly impossible mission of ending the war. It was clear that negotiating anything with the Order was going to be impossible, especially now that they had lost one of their leaders to the opposing side. The only way to end the war now was to eliminate the First Order, and to do that we had to get rid of Snoke.

While he was gone, I took the opportunity to wander around the base. Much of it was familiar from my time spent there before, but there were parts I hadn't seen yet, and it was easier to explore when I didn't have an armed escort.

There seemed to be an endless number of rooms around the base. Some of them were locked, but most of them weren't, and I found myself walking into someone's personal bedroom on multiple occasions. When that happened, I excused myself with a muttered apology and departed quickly.

I eventually made my way onto the tarmac, where rows of Resistance fighter planes stood in perfect jets. One of them was still painted black, and it stood in stark contrast to the others. I spotted Poe standing at its side, standing beside a pile of rags and holding a can of cleaner. I walked over to stand behind him, examining the tiny spot where the black paint had been successfully rubbed off.

"This is going to take forever." Poe muttered without looking at me. He frowned as he stared at the tiny patch where beige paint showed through.

"I'll help." I grabbed a rag from the ground and sprayed some cleaner onto it before gently rubbing it over the surface of the jet. Poe was right—this was going to take a while.

I pulled myself up on to the top of one of the wings and set to work. We worked in silence for a while, eventually scrubbing our way to an entirely clean wing.

"So you never told me exactly how you ended up in the loading docks of the First Order." I said after a while, flashing him a glance. "I'm curious."

Poe grinned as he scrubbed the crease where the wing met the body of the jet. "Oh, it's a great story." He paused for a moment to wipe the sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket before continuing. "Leia told me about a week ahead of time that we were going to need an extraction jet at the First Order Base, but she didn't know exactly when. We painted my ship black so it would fit in with the First Order ships, and I headed out later that same day, figuring that it was better to be closer in case I was needed sooner than expected. It turns out that I wasn't needed until three days after I left. But the thing is, I couldn't land anywhere, or else I would have turned up on the radar and I would have been shot out of the skies. So I essentially orbited the planet of the First Order base for three days, waiting for any kind of signal that it was time."

He paused so he could focus on a particularly tricky spot. "When I finally received the signal from Kylo—Ben, sorry—that he had disabled the radars long enough for me to land, I was on the opposite side of the planet that I needed to be on. So I had to fly faster than I ever had to get there before the radars turned back on. I think I made it with only a few seconds to spare. I landed inside the loading docks and parked my ship behind some other jets so it wouldn't be noticed. And then I had to wait. I couldn't get out, for obvious reasons, but I had no way of contacting you or Ben. I just had to stay put until one of you showed up. As it turns out, that meant staying in there overnight. I couldn't sleep, because I couldn't let my guard down, and I had run out of food earlier that day. That was a long night."

Poe gave a breathless laugh, and I joined in. "It was a relief when I saw Ben show up. But the thing is, you weren't with him, and in all honesty I was terrified of the guy. The only encounters we had shared before weren't exactly pleasant ones. So I," he chuckled. "I refused to get out of the ship, even though he told me to get out. I didn't trust him enough to be alone with him without some kind of barrier between us."

I rolled my eyes, but couldn't help the smile that spread across my face. "So when I showed up, you finally got out."

"Right." He flashed a grin in my direction. "I figured he wouldn't do anything to me while you were around."

"He wouldn't hurt you, even if I wasn't there." I murmured, using the edge of the rag to finish off a panel on the wing. "You were there to help us."

Poe shrugged. "Either way, I felt much better when you showed up. And the rest is history, as you know."

I sat back, taking a quick break from scrubbing. "Are you still afraid of him?"

"Well, I don't trust him." Poe swung his rag over his shoulder. "It's going to be a long time before I do."

"You aren't the only one." I murmured, my eyes sweeping over the many people milling about the Resistance base.

"But you trust him, and I trust you, so there's hope for him." Poe gave a crooked grin as he tried to comfort me.

I smiled at him, suddenly very glad that I had his friendship to rely on.