A/N: *crawls out form under rock* I'm alive! University hasn't killed me though it did come very close. I'm so sorry I've been gone for so long guys. University and job searching took over my life for a long time. I have conquered one (I did my final university exam ever this week!) but not the other (still don't have a job...). But I have been renewed with energy at the prospect of graduating and knowing that I will never need to know about the medieval conception of the afterlife again. To make it up to you guys, and since I have no excuse now because I have all the time in the world, you will be getting at least one chapter a week, if not more, from now on until something changes (hopefully by me getting a job). Thank you so much for your continued support and let's catch up with the Siri and Poe show! Hopefully you like it and let me know what you think!

Disclaimer: You know the drill.


Chapter 7

It was raining again. As it had the day before and the day before that when Siri and Poe had seemed to strike an accord. The rain had not bothered her before but now it seemed to only punctuate the melancholy of her situation. It relieved her from the heat but also weighed her uniform down. It made her usually polished to perfection boots stick in the mud and rub against her ankle. She could feel every time a blister burst and the puss seeped into the rest of her boot. It hurt but she would not let Poe know that. What she found more annoying was the increasingly awful state of her appearance. She didn't care if her hair got wet but she did care when it got in her face. The immaculate bun that she had in her hair was unrecognisable. The front fell in her face and she could feel the rest, which should have been perfectly in the middle of the back of her head, bounce at the nape of her neck as she walked. For Siri, who was used to looking no less than clean, polished and practical, her hair then was a constant annoyance. She had tried to fix it before but the cuffs did not allow her quite enough range of movement to retie her hair. She could have asked Poe to take the cuffs off while she put her hair back up but she refused to seem like she was struggling or uncomfortable in anyway. She would not give him any more leverage to tease her. Siri was not a woman to tease.

Siri had initially thought that the frustration she had with her hair she hid well until she tried to blow a portion of hair out of the front of her face. She froze as she heard Poe chuckle and whipped her head around to catch him smirking at her. Her eyes narrowed as she fixed him with a steely gaze. This only made him laugh more.

"What's a matter princess? Need a hot bath? A foot rub?" He teased.

Siri scoffed. She had been through much worse conditions but that did not mean that she had to like it. "I am perfectly accustomed to such conditions. Perhaps your training was lacking however." She retorted, pointedly looking at how he held his hands over his head to shield from the rain.

It didn't stop Poe from grinning. Siri only scoffed again before whipping her head back around and continuing to trudge through the jungle overgrowth. There was a merciful pause before Poe spoke again.

"What was it like?" He asked.

Siri sighed. "What was what like?" She already knew the answer. He had been prodding for days.

"Your training. At the academy."

If Siri did not know better she would have thought he was genuinely only curious. However, Siri did know better. She was not about to tell him about how the First Order trained their best operatives. There was a reason why few people, even in the First Order, knew what happened on Arkanis. Secrets were better kept the fewer people who knew the secret.

She sighed again, a bad habit that seemed to only be exacerbated by Poe. "You know I will not tell you so why do you ask?"

"Well if I don't even ask you're definitely not going to tell me, are you?" His tone was light but still with an air of curiosity.

That irritated her. He thought that he would be able to wear her down if he was persistent enough. If the Commandant had been unsuccessful what made him think that he, a lowly pilot, would succeed? He clearly had an inflated view of his own skills.

Siri flexed her fists and then spun around to stop Poe in his tracks. "Look, this will go much better for both of us if you stop asking questions you know that I will not answer. All you are doing is antagonising me and I can assure that you do not want to antagonise me in my current state." Her words held a sharp edge as they stood, noses almost touching and her hair dripping onto his face. She enjoyed watching the surprise in his eyes as she held her ground, every muscle in her body tightly bound.

He took a step back and avoided her gaze, instead staring at a spot over her shoulder. Siri smirked. She had succeeded in making him feel nervous and uncomfortable. She was almost disappointed. It had been too easy to beat him back into submission with just a few words.

"They teach you how to run at the Academy?" He suddenly asked, his voice steady and his body still except for his breathing. He still was not meeting her gaze.

Siri furrowed her brow. What a stupid question. "Of course they did. I can run a mile in five minutes and 21 seconds." She said proudly, imperiously tipping her chin up in arrogance.

Poe's eyes flicked back to her and then pointed to the spot he had previously been staring at behind her shoulder. "Good. Coz we might wanna start running."

Confused, she turned to look at where had been pointing and froze. A beast several times the size of any human emerged from the underbrush. Its green scales that matched the bushes it had emerged from, slowly transformed into a dully grey, starting at its feet and finishing at the very tip of its tail. It snapped its jaws at them and then roared, the hair on Siri's body raising as she gasped. She felt cold as its scales began to flare out from its body and the very tips turned a threatening red colour. Just as the beast began to move towards them, Poe yanked on Siri's arm, his warm hands burning through her uniform, causing her restraints to painfully pull against her wrists as he dragged her away. She yelped and pulled her arm out of his grasp and they ran.

Siri didn't need to look behind her to know that the beast was giving chase. She could hear its lumbering steps behind her and feel the vibrations on the jungle floor from its weight. The rain whipped against her face as she ran, frustratingly slower than Poe without the use of her arms to give her any momentum. Her leg burned, having not fully healed over the past few days but she pushed through. She would be damned if she died on some backwater planet with only a Resistance pilot to witness her death. She would not give him that privilege.

Poe was running ahead of her, leaping over logs and ducking under vines, occasionally glancing behind him to fire a shot at the beast. Siri was forced to duck as one blaster shot just skimmed past her head.

"Careful!" She yelled. She would also be damned if he was the one to kill her. At least before she had the opportunity to grant him the same courtesy.

They kept running, twisting and turning in attempts to lose the beast but it was too fast. A particularly nasty landing after jumping over a puddle had slowed Siri down, the pain in her leg reaching a new threshold. She could barely think, her breath coming wheezes as she tried to keep up with Poe. The noise from the beast only seemed to be getting louder though she dared not look behind her to see how close it was. She could vaguely hear Poe yelling something but couldn't make out his words. All she could hear was the rain and wind whipping past her face as she ran, the beast behind her, her own breathing and the blood pounding in her head. The distance between herself and Poe only seemed to be getting larger until she could barely make out where he was in all of the bushes and trees.

As she vaulted a particularly large fallen tree, she landed with a thump on muddy terrain. Recovering quickly, she tried to lift one foot to continue running but her foot didn't move. The force of her attempted movement threw her off balance and she choked on a gasp as she fell face first into the mud. Spitting out what had splashed into her open mouth, she twisted her body to see her boots stuck in the mud. The roar of the beast growing louder, she desperately twisted and turned to pull her feet out of her boots. She could feel her blisters rub against the leather but she didn't feel any pain. She became acutely aware of her breathing and felt almost dizzy from the adrenaline pumping through her blood which she could feel thumping in her ears. She had managed to get one foot loose when the beast leapt onto the fallen tree above her. All sound dropped out and the beast appeared to move in slow motion above her. She could feel the hair everywhere on her body stand upright and her eyes automatically shut tight in the face of her impending death. Such a cowardly reaction. She resolved that if she was going to die then she was going to look it straight in the eye. The beast crouched in preparation to leap forward and Siri winced as it flew into the air above her, though she refused to look away or even scream. The weight of the beast almost crushed her and she could not help the gasp that escaped her mouth. She waited for death. Yet it did not come. The beast on top of her was motionless.

Desperately clambering out from underneath it, her breathing heavy, she looked over the beast. Smoke was spiraling upwards from a blaster shot in its skull, right between the eyes. Slowly, she became aware of the sounds around her again and could hear someone else's heavy breathing in synch with her own. She glanced up and saw Poe, stood blaster in hand, his chest rising and falling with her own. He had saved her and that filled her with indescribable rage. How dare he? She was not some damsel in distress that needed rescuing. What did he gain from her survival? Nothing. There was no point to it. She didn't matter to him. It made little difference whether she lived or died. More angry thoughts swirled around her head before she was compelled to face him. She pulled herself back onto her feet, not caring about her limp, half caused by pain and half caused by only wearing one boot. Stalking over to him, she swung her fists, hoping to connect at least one with his face, but Poe grabbed her wrists before she could do any damage.

"Why did you do that?" Siri screamed into his face.

Poe did not supply her with a response, looking introspective and confused. Siri persisted.

"What was the point? By...helping me, you risked your own life!" She refused to say that he had saved her.

Her second outburst seemed to shake Poe out of his thoughts and he glared angrily. "What and just let you die? I don't do that." He said indignantly before visibly. "We don't do that."

Siri could not even pretend to understand his point of view. What he did was foolish. You never risked your own life for someone who was surely about to die. Better one corpse than two. It was a view that had been pressed upon her during the Academy and was an accepted rule for First Order officers. If attempting to save anyone, no matter who they were, put even just one other life at risk then you left them behind. Such risks were not worth taking and the emotional vulnerability they revealed made you weak. Poe was not the first person Siri had met that could not comprehend that. During an Academy exercise, Siri had been placed in charge of red team during what should have been a simple infiltration simulation. The fact that she had been chosen to lead a team, even in just a simple routine exercise, was reflective of her status among the students and one that she felt rightly proud of. Her team were winning when one fell behind. They had tripped and fell, stupidly injuring themselves in the process. She told everyone to leave him and they all nodded except one. The boy next door had argued back. He disagreed with First Order policy to leave him behind and had gone to rescue him. His choice had caused their team to lose. Siri had been indescribably enraged then too. He had undermined her leadership and cost them sure victory. Siri did not lose. She had ripped her helmet from her head and yelled at him and he had yelled back. He was too emotional. It clouded his judgment. His sympathy made him weak and he could not even follow the simplest of instructions. The Commandant had also been furious, stomping through the training grounds towards him and dragging him away. He was no doubt punished. Poe was similarly weak though if he wanted to get himself killed then he could be her guest. If that was what the Resistance taught them then there was no wonder they had failed in their mission to suppress the Order.

She had not replied to Poe's defence and did not intend to. Thankfully, Poe had not felt the need to push further. Instead of verbally rebutting, she instead stomped over to the beast and knelt in the mud to retrieve her boot from underneath the carcass. Poe only watched while she struggled to retrieve it. When she did, she simply yanked it back onto her foot and strode past him though her sure actions conflicted with her confusion. She still did not understand why he had saved her but because he had she was alive. She wasn't sure how she felt about that.