I've reached the point where I have to make a choice: either respond to reviews (eventually), or finish the story. I appreciate your feedback so much, especially with this crazy schedule, but if y'all can't review without a response that's okay. Thank you for sticking with the story.
They wouldn't proclaim the time of death, Finn told Rey later. They just jammed Poe with wires and machinery until he looked like a motorized corpse, forced to breathe when there was no pulse, no brain activity, no chance for survival.
"He was dead," Finn choked, shaken and shivering and so much more vulnerable than Rey had expressed when her friends were threatened. Now she felt cruel for her calmness when Finn had been injured. "I couldn't leave him that way, but … I just wanted them to leave him alone."
"You did everything you could." Rey patted his shoulder, trying to say the right things that Leia had said to her after Han was murdered. "It wasn't your fault."
"Don't say that – don't kriffing say that!" Finn's intensity startled her and she snatched her hand away. "I knew Kylo Ren wasn't trustworthy. I could have said anything and none of this would have happened!"
Rey thought they were fortunate that Luke had returned with her on this occasion. He said it was "a feeling" that prodded him to leave, which meant that the Force was somehow involved. She didn't really care. All that mattered was that Kylo Ren was in custody, Poe was unresponsive even after a second blood transfusion, and Luke was there to help.
He had shown her how to cup her hands around Poe's head, imagining the life force and coaxing it to thrive. She had been terrified, thinking of that wavering heartbeat forced by machines, and how much depended on her attentiveness. Luke had delved into the core of the wound, employing techniques that Rey couldn't hope to learn even if she trained for years. His face strained and sweat dripped from his chin. Rey imagined that her heartbeat fluttered as much as Poe's – flightless and frightened like a bird with a broken wing. When Finn had been injured, she had trusted the medics to heal him. Now she was the one responsible for life and it was Poe who depended on her.
"Concentrate, Rey." Luke had unlatched from his Force-stupor for two words. Two words that implied it would be her fault if Poe died. Her fault if she let go before he was healed.
Finn was erratic after he returned. Rey felt like she deserved comfort, too. She hadn't waited for news on whether or not Poe would die, accepting fate as it was determined. She had stood for hours, bent over a ghostlike face, pleading with him to stay long enough for Luke to fix everything. She was trembling, too. She wanted someone to hold her for a change.
Luke had gone to Leia afterwards. While Rey slouched beside Poe's bunk, listening to Finn mutter apologies and oaths of payback, she heard the siblings reunite after years of silence. Finn startled more than once, looking anxiously at the door. Rey wondered how long the general had been holding herself back.
A quiet wind, Luke calmed and coaxed in the same voice that soothed Rey whenever she was frustrated. Leia cursed and screamed, sobbing and ranting in turn. Finn jumped when something heavy clanged against the wall. They could hear everything. Accusations and regrets, and the constant charge of "Where were you?"
Luke placated, and Leia cut him down. "Force, Luke! You trained him, and I had to be the one to lock him away!"
Kylo Ren. Poe. The asteroid fields of the Republic. All of it was Luke's fault. When Leia ran out of strength she wept, screaming wordless reflections of grief. Rey couldn't bear to listen, and yet she couldn't leave. She gripped Poe's hand and whispered for him to wake up and make everything right. People listened to Poe. When Poe was present, everyone seemed a little brighter – a little more friendly.
Whenever Rey needed comfort, Poe was there. It wasn't fair that everyone else had a friend when Poe was injured, and she was left alone.
Metal rolled and tinkered, and a cylinder weighed heavily against Rey's thigh. Looking down, she smiled faintly and rubbed BB-8's dome.
"I suppose we're alone together?" she whispered.
BB-8 seemed to sigh, and wiggled in closer. Rey had the impression that she would have wrapped a blanket around the droid if she wasn't so cold herself. She continued stroking the polished dome, modified and cared for by a pilot who thought droids were as sentimental as humanoids, and silently promised Poe that she would look after his friend.
She didn't plead with the Force like Finn did. Death always stole someone precious before the end.