"Thinking about them, huh?"
Poe's voice didn't exactly startle Jess; it was too familiar for that. But it did surprise her after several hours of companionable silence, sitting in the cockpit together, lounging in their chairs in defiance of those old Republic behavior standards that got into a pilot's head down to how they polished their boots and bloused their trousers. Poe had caught her out, too. She'd just been assigning a name to each passing star, every pinprick of light a dead Resistance fighter.
"Yeah."
No point trying to put Poe off and besides, he'd asked because he was doing it himself. She didn't even have to know him as well as she did to know that.
"Yeah," he echoed, gazing out the viewscreen. "Eventually, we're going to run out of pilots. And heroes. All that heroism and we're barely hanging on."
Jess felt silence descend again, but this time it felt heavy. A snort of laughter came out of her a moment later, though:
"Do you remember how Ello could only fly if he'd touched those stupid lucky dice of his?"
"He always loved to stroke his face tendrils like some old wise man and tell us all such bullshit," Poe agreed, kicking back in his chair and studying space through the uppermost viewing panel. "I never get lost, I am one with the darkness, blah blah blah. You know, my ancestors were learning to fly when you were still eating food off the ground! When you were sleeping wherever your puny claws could scrape out a bed, we were building cathedrals!"
Jess laughed.
"L'ulo?" She prompted, mimicking Poe's posture.
"Damn, L'ulo. He always had some piece of advice to hand out. It always felt like whatever he said, my heart was like yeah, that's what I've been waiting to hear. I wouldn't even know I needed the lesson till he opened his mouth. That was a rough one. He went out how he would have wanted to, but it wasn't just losing someone close to me. It was like a piece of my mamma died with him. They were so close."
Jess watched Poe fiddle with the ring on a chain around his neck--Shara Bey's wedding ring -- and she raised her hand in a toast, only belatedly realizing she wasn't actually holding a drink. She'd had to make that funeral gesture too often over the past while.
"Fucking glad Snap is still with us or I woulda gone spare already," She muttered.
"Yeah. Him and Kare." A pause so long Jess wondered whether Poe wanted to end the conversation. But then he said, "Sometimes, I think old Oddy was the bravest one."
"A traitor?" Jess spluttered. Hard to feel sorry for Muva when pilots who had never betrayed them were just as dead as he was. Yeah he'd just been a tech and they'd maybe failed to protect him from First Order blackmail, but still.
"Maybe so. But the second he had the chance, he did the right thing. Over and over, he did the right thing. Shit, Jess. They had his wife. Easy to say we'd never do what he did when the people we love are out there free."
The ones who aren't space dust. Like L'ulo.
She bit down against the bitterness pushing against the backs of her teeth. Wouldn't do any good to speak on it, and Poe felt as shit as she did about that death, if not moreso.
"Maybe," she growled, picking at the stuffing sticking out from the arm of her chair. The ship barely held together, but her tired heart couldn't manufacture any anxiety about. Either they'd make it to their next destination before the thing fell apart around them, or they wouldn't.
"Me and Snap wouldn't even be here if it weren't for Oddy."
"Shit, your bantha-bacon wouldn't have been in the fire in the first place --"
