Poe's sleep had taken a hit, lately. Ever since the First Order informant had shown up, far too fond of his old masters for Poe's comfort, things had seemed to go off-kilter - like a listing deck and a grav system of the fritz. He never knew quite where his steps would land. This place had a way of upending alliances, of throwing things backward like a mirror, distorting them into shapes he didn't recognize, and it was possible that he was afraid - afraid that someday he would look up and see something crucial to him, stretched beyond recognition. That he would land wrong-footed and something he loved would break in the fall. There were people he was sure of, beyond the faintest doubt. Leia. Finn. Senator Organa. But none of them had any control, here. Something could happen, any moment of any day, and they could be - gone.
Much like Kylo Ren was just suddenly here. He was indelibly stained in Poe's mind with the color of agonizing pain, the laser-bright feeling of someone sinking their hand into what wasn't theirs. Of Hosnian Prime. Of Tuanul - the color he could see behind his eyelids when, finally, he'd been able to look away from that blaster bolt hanging in the air, meant for him, from the village burning on the periphery. It shouldn't have unsettled him this much. It shouldn't have sent him stumbling out on the offensive, all rage and fear and hurt. That sort of harm wouldn't come to him here. It wouldn't come to anyone. From that, it seemed, they were safe.
It wasn't as much comfort as he wanted it to be. He rolled out of bed shamefully late on Saturday morning (afternoon? afternoon), and trudged off to the cafeteria to sit by himself and suck down some much-needed coffee, BB-8 zig-zagging relatively quietly in his wake. His hair was a stiff mess, sticking out in a wing above one ear; he'd done less than normal to assuage his vain concerns that pink wasn't really his color. His heart was somewhere a few lightyears behind him, tangled in a frantic mess of worry, and his brain was nowhere to be found -
And a little flash of flame caught in the corner of his eye, drawing his gaze (which was operating on autopilot - but as a starfighter pilot who'd survived a decade on the job, he liked to think he had a pretty good one of those). Daenerys was there, feeding her dragon, her fingers bare centimeters away from fire and sharp teeth and animal impulse; her expression was almost tranquilly absent, profoundly unconcerned with the risks that sat upon her knee. It affected him more than he expected in that moment, that incredible bond of trust. He'd felt for a couple weeks like someone could scratch him with a fingernail and see right through, and this was that feeling - being shoved suddenly and unceremoniously into complete transparency, by something that ought to have been entirely quotidian. A woman feeding her pet.
He went to get his coffee. He stuffed a crust of bread in his mouth. And he went to sit by her, BB-8 stopping at his ankle and tilting to focus with a whirr on the dragon in her lap. "He likes those, huh?" He smiled at the dragon, managing at least somewhat to beat back the excess emotion threatening to heighten his expression. "Everyone seems to like those. I don't really see the appeal."