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"I just want someone to check it out," Leia had said when Poe finally called her back. She'd left seven messages. "You were one of the best. I know you can do —"
"One being the operative word there," he pointed out. "This isn't something I can do on my own."
"What, fly by an old facility and check it out?" she asked. Even through the glitches of his cheap holo-receiver, the slyness of her smile clear. "Don't see why not. Anyone could. Why not you?"
"Why not," he repeated. "Just go and look, huh?"
She nodded. "The Ministry will have my head and your balls if you break regulations on this."
"Haven't been using 'em, so no big loss there," he said, "but you do have a nice head. I'll try to keep it attached."
Poe had never been the scythe-wielder anyway; that was all Muran.
She and Poe had been so blithe! So confident about this!
Fools, the both of them.
Now he's got ectoplasmic tentacles invading every hole in his head as he's dragged down this passage that seems to go on and on and he wishes like hell that he (1) had a scythe (and knew how to use it) or (2) he wasn't alone. Grief got him like a meathook, right through the chest, and now it's hauling him away.
He runs through every single protocol there is for repelling ghostly contact, all while screaming his stupid head off, but nothing works. The cold, slimy dampness fills his skull. It pokes around, blind and implacable, a herd of ecto-slugs.
The hole in his chest spills eerie light. The cold touches him all over inside, probing at him.
He screams on.
*
The hyper-route that used to serve the installation collapsed several months back, so Poe threaded his small ship through a debris field at sub-luminal speeds. The necessary focus on navigation crowded out the noise of regret and second-guessing in his head, and for that, he was grateful. He was headed for Tuanul Station, an abandoned corporate facility.
The information in Leia's brief was, to put it kindly, patchy as hell, but some accounts claimed that the station had been used since abandonment not only as a waypoint for smugglers and freebooters, but as a gathering place for dark acolytes, necromancers, and wanna-be Sith.
Poe didn't believe any of that, but he understood why stories were already accumulating. Being the site of a massacre will do that to a place. The disgruntled freight specialist who killed more than forty sentients here made sure that no one would forget Tuanul.
At some point, someone had taken the time to weld the station closed. Shut up tight, none of the freight or personnel docks were in operation. Poe got in via a maintenance lock and some jury-rigging of code and bio-support in his ship. He wiggled into the tube and dropped down inside. Above him, his ship reversed the airlock and went into standby.
The station was running on auxiliary power; every system was at its lowest level, from lighting to air-circ. Poe took a few moments to settle into his nervousness. He bounced on his toes and windmilled his arms, working to "embrace the anxiety," like his old therapist had advised, "not fight it."
He didn't have to be nervous. He was just going to walk around this spooky old station where lots of people died. No big deal. He pushed off from the bulkhead and took it slowly. The grav generator was also on low, so while he wasn't exactly floating, he was hardly securely treading the corridor.
He's been on stations like this many times. Prefabricated in some Core world, they're shipped out across the galaxy to be snapped together and in service as soon as possible. Their layouts vary little; shaped like a hexagon, they consist of primary passages arrayed around the central hub situated just above the energy source and gravity generators.
The air was stale, even through the breather on his face. It had been recycled so many times that it was barely holding together. He swept his handlight in a standard pattern as he made way around the main passages.
Nothing stirred. The emergency lights are on their way out, so dim that they just confuse things. He flipped on his goggles and stowed his handlight.
Despite his best efforts to compartmentalize and focus, he couldn't help but think about what these missions used to be like. When Muran was his partner, energy scythe in his hand and teasing grin always, always, on his face. They'd dispatched so many lost souls together; Poe did the talking and feeling parts, Muran the violent and scythe-y ones.
His thoughts were headed nowhere good. Poe stopped in the gloom and took several deep breaths. Old, long-obsolete holo-notices faintly glowed on the walls. Here and there, a ghost slipped between and through them, every bit as insubstantial and meaningless.
As he crossed the admin hub, a few more ghosts approached. They flickered and floated just at the edges of his vision, frankly curious but also cautious.
These were old ghosts, he assumed, given their caution. Fresh ones surge right up to you, still terrified from their own deaths and desperate for a way back. The older ones are resigned. It's therefore that much harder to shake them out of their inertial despair and convince them to disperse. (Here, Poe resolutely did not see a single solitary parallel with his own current emotional situation.)
"Hey, buddies," he said gently as he moved forward. "Just passing through. Anyone want to come along?"
The brightest of the ghosts shuddered and vanished.
"Cool, fine, not taking that personally, not at all." He'd nearly crossed the admin area and a broad passage opened up before him. "This the way to the freight or what?"
A pale scrap of a ghost joined him. He got the impression of headtails, maybe a dolorous expression (they usually have dolorous expressions). Please go, it crooned. This is no place for you.
Another half-visible ghost, so blurry that all he can tell is that it's human(oid), skitted past, edging between Poe and the bulkhead. Go, it hisses as it passed, drawing out the O until he could no longer see it, but the echoes remained.
"Maybe I will," he said to the space where the ghost passed. "Nothing to write home about anyway."
Either they were following him, which wasn't unusual, or someone was playing tricks on him, but Poe could have sworn he'd seen the same few groups in several earlier passages. A group of three clutching each other; a single bearded man gazing sorrowfully at the wall; some Twi'leks dancing slowly. Poe approached the bearded man, calling quietly, sticking to regulations: "Hi, friend, are you looking for help?"
The figure did not respond.
Poe tried again, and a third time.
He turned, and the mournful clutch of three was right behind him. He waved and tried contacting them.
"Right, okay," he said under his breath when those attempts failed. He went to pat the bearded man's shoulder. He should have felt a clammy quiver, some resistance, before his hand fell through.
Instead, he got a slight electric shock from touching a holo projection.
When he backtracked toward the administrative hub, he was sweating. It was too still here, too quiet here. Those weren't ghosts, most of them, but holos.
Where the hell were the ghosts?
He stumbled toward the hub, but it had changed in his brief absence. Formerly a huge, vaulted space filled only shadows and dust, it was blindingly bright and frigid.
Something tripped him. He fell, his chest cracked open, and his screams let in the dead.
*
"And that is why you need a partner," a glowing thing that isn't Muran, but wears his face like a bad mask, is telling him as Poe shudders awake.
He's swaddled in ecto-tentacles, held fast and suspended over what used to be the hub space. It's open now, a spinning depth of cold ancient light with teeth and a pulsing gullet. He can't scream any longer.
A scythe splits the things cocooning him. Before Poe drops into the bright abyss, a strong arm catches him around the waist and drags him into one of the passages.
The figure is shouting at him. Poe sees his mouth working, feels himself shaken, but the dying ecto-threads still block his ears and mouth. He paws at his face, his skull, and eventually the man understands.
"-- fly?" he asks urgently as they claw the gunk off Poe.
He'd been so close to dying, and it had been as wonderful as it was terrifying. He'd be finished, finally, no longer able to miss Muran or carry around every regret and worry he'd ever accumulated. Things would be quiet, and cold. Peaceful.
The man shakes Poe by the shoulders. He's really intensely handsome, dark-skinned with hair standing up in little twists. He's dressed like one of those corporate dicks, though his uniform has seen much better days.
"You're so hot," Poe says, and means it literally. The man's touch is normal body-warmth, but hot against Poe, burning through the cold. "I mean. Also handsome. Shit."
"Do you have," the man says with the kind of strained patience Poe has heard directed at him his entire life, "a starship? Can it fly?"
"Yeah, man, I've got —" Poe shudders as something twists cold and thick inside of him. He coughs up a sorry mess of ectoplasm. Some of it spatters handsome man's shoes. "Sorry. A ship. Did you just cut through that whole thing? The thing wrapped around me?"
"Yeah," the man replies, helping Poe move down the corridor.
Startled, Poe looks over his shoulder even as he's hurried along. "That hole was fucked up, right? You saw it?"
"Saw it? Been living with it," the man says. He stops at a cross-passage. "Where's your ship? Think."
"Maintenance access," Poe tells him, "tube on the starboard side of cargo stage." He takes a breath. It's too warm and hurts going down.
They pass some actual ghosts on the way; the man takes a shortcut that dumps them just a corridor over from the cargo area. The ghosts are terrified, floating high and moaning.
"Come with us if you want," the man tells them as Poe makes for the tube. "But we're going now."
Poe stops short. "You're talking to them."
"We really don't have time for this."
"You're talking to them and you've got a scythe."
"A shitty handmade one, but, yes." He hefts the scythe which, Poe sees now, is indeed assembled from disparate parts: a length of plastisteel from a cleaning droid for the shaft, a hammered-out and poorly-sharpened half disc from a cart wheel for the blade. "Can we go now?"
"Can you explain things if we do?" Poe puts his hands on his hips and tips up his chin to show he's serious.
The guy sighs. He really is gorgeous, damn. Big bright eyes, sculptural cheekbones, a mouth of luscious curves. "Of course. Just go, will you?"
"All right, all right, you sound like one of them!" He lifts his hands in surrender and jumps for the ladder inside the tube.
By the time they're through the improvised airlock and jammed up against one another in his tiny ship, Poe is starting to warm back up. Handsome stranger's body heat no longer burns, but keeps Poe close, loath to move away. Seven ghosts cluster in the ship's gun turret and whisper-moan about the end, the finish, fin....
"This is why you have a partner," Poe murmurs as the ship nears the hyperlane for home.
"What's that?"
"Why you have a partner," he explains, throwing the hyperspace switch and leaning against the guy's bulk. "To keep things from getting boring, I always said."
"I don't have a partner," the man says, "never did."
"Got one now," Poe tells him.
He blinks at Poe, frowning in confusion. He looks very young for a moment. "What?"
"We need to go back there and close up the hole, right?" Poe shrugs and checks the flight reports. "Thought that was obvious."
"Uh-huh."
Poe glances over. "What were you doing there, anyway? I didn't just bring an eldritch terror onboard, did I?"
He grins for a second. "Little late to ask that, isn't it?"
Poe squares his shoulders. "I could take you. It."
"Yeah, sure," the guy says just as one of the ghosts sighs about finishing, "you were doing great back there."
"I got a few hits in," Poe insists.
The guy claps him on the shoulder. "Sure you did, man. Sure you did."
"So what were you doing on a locked-down haunted space station?"
He takes his time answering. Sags a little, looks down. "Dying, I guess."
*
"They left him there to die!" Poe shouts at Leia when he calls her the next day. "Fucking RenCorp's up to something up there and there's a hole in reality and it's got teeth —"
"So you're back on the job?" she asks mildly.
He rakes his hand through his hair. "No shit."
"Good," she replies. "I'll expect your report by end of day, then."
He presses the heels of his hands against his eye sockets. "Can I be back on the interesting part of the job but not the bureaucratic one?"
"No," Leia tells him, "but nice try."
He smiles, then sighs, weariness overtaking him. Everywhere the thing touched and entered him hurts like he's been bruised. "Understood."
He cuts the call and goes to see if Finn's awake.
He's calling handsome stranger Fin[ish], it's better than the corporate ID number the guy was sporting. Anything is, even a ghost's final lament.