Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Title image by GizSkyriser.

She feels drunk on happiness. It wasn't what she expected; not at all. She thought it would be, at best, at very best, like school choir, a big friendly sing-along. It was obviously her obligation to come; not to stand around silent while some vile machers entertained that white supremacist and claimed it was good for the Jews. Obligation is different from pleasure, though, and she expected to be at least a little miserable, backed behind police barriers in the freezing November evening. But there's an energy she can feel in the air, that seems to feed on them and feed them at the same time, a feedback loop of strength and defiance and pride, and yes, joy, joy in herself and in her comrades, and just as she thinks this, she hears a note sung through a megaphone. Without consultation or encouragement, they all pick it up at once, bursting into a familiar song: "Hinei ma tov uma na'im / Shevet achim gam yachad!" How sweet and pleasant it is, brothers and sisters sitting together!

She can't help it; her voice climbs and climbs, and at the end of the verse it breaks, falls into a sob. Finn hears her, and he grabs her hand, squeezing. He understands; he raises his voice louder, carrying her through the repetition. Oh, how sweet and pleasant it is, for brothers and sisters to sit together! She pulls Finn's hand up, his right in her left, hoists it into the air as if they'd won a victory. It feels right. They can't lose. These old men, their selfish, unjust plans, will not prevail. The balance of the universe will not allow it.

Finn grins, and grabs Rose's hand, and Rose grabs the hand of the person to her left, and Rey feels like the energy running though her doubles, triples. Brothers and sisters together. And they'd shouted before, hadn't they? Plain English: The people, united, will never be defeated!

She turns to the man on her right, smiling what must be an almost crazed smile. He isn't smiling, and he doesn't seem to be singing, either. Not everybody sings this song to the same tune, Rey knows. And not everybody even learns it to begin with. She doesn't want him to feel left out; she wants him to feel what she's feeling. She seizes his hand and he turns and stares at her. His eyes are dark; dark as wine, and serious as a heart attack. He doesn't move his gloved hand under hers. Her smile falters.

But she keeps her voice strong. She draws a breath and begins the last repetition, singing to him: Hinei ma tov.... And he hums. His voice is such a low rumble that she feels it more than she hears it. There's something happening, further down the line; she can feel, somehow, that the line is breaking. But she holds tight to Finn's hand, and to the stranger's. His hand turns under hers, slowly, and a shudder goes through her as he takes hold of her hand. His eyes are so dark, and they are searching her. There's shouting, now, she can hear it; Rose is shouting something, and there's a deafening, amplified robotic voice, but the stranger is still carrying the tune. He squeezes her hand, and she can't pay attention to anything else, can't turn from the deep hum of him.

And then his other hand goes slowly into his coat and slowly brings something out. He gives her hand another squeeze, flashes the metallic sunburst of an NYPD badge, and lets her go, vaulting over the barrier.

Rey can hear what Rose is shouting now. It's the number for the National Lawyer's Guild. She's shouting it as she tries to drag Finn away, but Finn won't leave Rey, and Rey is frozen on the pavement.

Polansky he knows; Polansky is at all of these things and now practically a fixture at the precinct. It's always him on the bullhorn, improvising new variations on the same old rhetoric and throwing himself into the street like he's dying to be arrested. Which he probably sort of is; one of these days someone is going to catch the perfect shot of Polansky, looking handsome and martyred, his curls shining like a halo under a streetlight, the yarmulke he's wearing all the time now somehow staying on as he's hauled off by an officer with an ugly mug, and that day will not be a good press day.

He wishes he didn't know who it was who was always bailing him out.

The other two he's never seen at one of these before. He doesn't know if they meant to get arrested or not. Hux, standing over them, glances up from his clipboard to give the black man a skeptical look. "You're not Jewish."

The girl inserts herself, aggressive, as if she could protect her friend from Hux's ignorance. "Oh, you think all Jews are white?" Her voice is British, and to his ears, arrogant. He hadn't noticed, when she'd sung to him. At the same time, her friend meets Hux's eyes and says, sounding exhausted and bored at once, "Shma Yisroel, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echod."

Hux ignores the girl, snorts. "Is that supposed to mean something?"

Polansky leaps in with his best educate-the-gentiles tone. "It means, 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One.' It's our declaration of faith."

"His ID," Hux points out, "says his name is Finn. Finn Sturm."

"That's my legal name, yeah. My Hebrew name is Efrayim."

Hux rolls his eyes and returns his attention to the clipboard. "Whatever you are," he says, barely moving his mouth, as though no one present could be worth the effort, "you're Kylo's problem now. Which one do you want?"

Usually he'd take Polansky first, but his attention is drawn to the girl. The room is cold, but her hair is damp with sweat. There's tension in Finn, too, but he's a black man in an NYPD station; that's to be expected. The girl is young and white and very, very pretty; what's she got to be sweating about? He narrows his eyes at her; she sees him do it, and she shivers. Ah. "I'll take the girl," he says.

"Woman," she corrects, but he can see her shaking a little as she stands. She puts one hand, still cuffed to her other with a plastic zip-tie, on Finn's shoulder, as if he needed comfort or reassurance, and she gives Hux a narrow look, to which Hux is oblivious.

"I called the NLG," Polansky assures her. He shifts closer to Finn himself. "And Rose is on her way."

In the interview room, he cuts the zip-tie off and pages through the file on the group. He holds out his hand without looking up at her. "Show me your ID."

"I already showed it to the other cop. Detective Huxley."

"Maybe I want to see it for myself."

"I'm taking the Fifth."

"Your ID isn't speech," he says, still looking through the file. They're larger than he would have thought. "Do you want me to frisk you and take it off you?" He taps the fingers of his outstretched hand together. He can hear her breathing. He looks up and meets her eyes. "I can do that, if you want."

She bares her teeth, then slaps the driver's license into his palm. He looks at the front. It's a bad picture of her, but it is her. "Rachel Niemand. 26 years old. Lives on Kingston Ave." He taps the ID on the table. "You know that when Hux runs this, he's going to find out it's fake."

"It's not fake!" she exclaims, forcing a laugh, but there's panic in her eyes.

"This address," he says evenly. "It's a yeshiva. You do not live in an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva."

He looks at her, waiting for her to fold. He thinks he sees her face start to crumple, but in less than a breath she shifts. The panic is buried, and her teeth are bared -- half snarl and half grin, and all naked impudence. "Sure I do," she says. "Just comb my hair into payot, wear glasses, dress like a boy. You wouldn't believe how easily they fall for it; you'd think no one had ever tried it before."

"Are you in this country legally, Ms. Niemand?" She doesn't answer. "Mmhm. Is Rachel Niemand even your real name?"

"People call me Rey."

"Okay, Rey. Want to tell me why you decided to spend tonight obstructing traffic and resisting arrest?"

"I didn't. I mean," she corrects herself, "I plead the Fifth."

"The Fifth Amendment applies to American citizens. Are you an American citizen?" Rey, or Rachel -- whatever her name is, the girl who sang to him -- stays silent. "Well, let's run you through the computer, shall we? And see if we need to call our friends at ICE?" She's stiff with terror; he can see her vibrate. He puts his hands under the desk so she won't see him clench his fists. His teeth hurt. "Or would you like to answer my question?"

"What was the question?" She sounds dazed. He straightens his files, smooths down the paper.

"Why did you come out tonight. To... the event."

"For fun."

"For fun, Ms. Niemand?" He catches her eyes and holds them. They're bright, her eyes, bright as silver. "You chose to disrupt the AZA's perfect legal and proper dinner, to use abusive language, to impede traffic, and, again, to resist arrest, for fun?"

She looks away. "No. I came because... I thought it was the right thing to do. Not to stay silent." Suddenly her eyes are back on his, and her cool hand has closed around his fingers. He stares at her; she doesn't seem to have even noticed what she's done. "They're endorsing him. When they host him like that. And they claim they speak for us, for Jews, and you know that man hates and fears anyone who isn't white and straight and Christian, and if he's allowed to sit at the president's right hand he will come for us; some of us or all of us, it doesn't matter. So I had to go; we can't let them get away with that! But it was fun; it was more than fun; didn't you feel it?"

Her eyes aren't just bright, they are burning, and her fingers are warming against his skin; he feels -- "Yes, I felt it," he blurts, because he couldn't keep silent and deny that mounting feeling of terror at the same time. She swallows; he watches her swallow. Why does he feel so cold and afraid? A moment ago her hand felt cool; why does it feel so hot?

He sees the red mark of the plastic cuffs on her wrist and it brings him back. "Let go of my hand, Ms. Niemand. Unless you want me to add assaulting an officer--"

She lets him go but she looks more confused than frightened. "Did that other guy call you Kyle O.?"

"We go in for nicknames around here. Huxley is Hux. Officer Frances Asmolean is Fasma. And I'm Kylo. Kyle O'Ryan." Why is he telling her this? "Your friend Mr. Polansky is in here so often he has one too. Did you hear about this... event, from him?"

"No."

"Did your boyfriend invite you?"

"He's not my boyfriend."

Kylo wishes very much that he could receive this information without a wash of relief. He wishes even more that he weren't so sure it showed on his face. But, thank God, she isn't looking. "Finn Sturm, then. Did he invite you?"

"There was a Facebook event."

"Did someone invite you? Or did you just see other people RSVPing?"

She's stiffened up again, and again his fists clench, but he's calmer, too; this is how it's supposed to be. She's supposed to be afraid of him. He leans forward a little, making her lean back. "You made a choice, Ms. Niemand. To come to this country illegally." She opens her mouth but he won't allow it. "To obtain and use a false ID. To obstruct traffic. To disturb the peace. To resist arrest." He lowers his voice, feels it growl in his chest. "And now you're going to have to make some more choices. Very. Hard. Choices."

Chapter Text

The cops have their phones, of course, and Finn has a blinding headache. For the first hour, Polansky had been hovering over him, which was… well-intentioned, for sure, and possibly helpful; who could say? Finn hasn’t been physically harmed (outside of the headache) and the seating is uncomfortable, but he has his own clothes on and laces in his shoes, so it could be worse; it could easily be worse. And in the second hour, a custodian had come by to empty the trashcans, and, as best he can tell with his rusty A-minus-in-Spanish-203 Spanish, Polansky had started by grilling the man about his union, found his way to an animated lecture on Sephardim, Spanish crypto-Jews, and the descendants of Ashkenazi refugees from the Holocaust in Latin America (complete with a tangent on Yiddish and Ladino), and has now cycled back to digging through his messenger bag for his pamphlets on grassroots labor organizing and Medicare for All. He only has the latter in English, but he’s volunteering to translate the major points – just as soon as he finds a pen –

“The man has a job to do,” Finn says patiently. For the second time. “And he’ll probably get in trouble if he doesn’t do it.”

“Perdón, perdón!” Polansky cries, with his beautifully rolled Rs, and finally lets the custodian, who looks mostly amused, be on his way. Twisting around, he frowns. “Where’d Hux go?”

“Hux?” says Finn blankly.

“The red-head. Huxley and O’Ryan, they can’t seem to bring themselves not to give me a cutesy-ass nickname whenever they talk to me, so I make free with their dumbass nicknames.”

Finn exhales. “I think I’ll stick to ‘Officer.’” Polansky nods soberly. In the silence, Finn’s anxiety grabs him by the throat (where is Rey; why isn’t Rose here yet; what are they doing to Rey that takes all this time; what are they going to do to me; is Rey going to get deported; how many years do you get for “resisting arrest”) and in desperation he asks, “So like what kind of a cutesy-ass nickname?”

Daniel Juan Polansky, MA, PhD (pending), 2016 Said-Oz Public Affairs Fellow, Jews of Color Caucus Vice-Chair, and Street Action Organizing Manager of the Chai Coalition, contorts his mouth into a grimace which may be a poorly suppressed smile and says, “Poe. For Po-lansky, not Edgar Allen.”

“I can see you with the raven and the cravat, though,” muses Finn. “But it’s nice you’re joining us in the monosyllable club.”

“If you wanted that kind of company, you know you could call me Dan.”

“But you’d rather I’d call you the nickname the cops gave you after you got arrested too many times, no?”

“If you want,” says Poe, with a devastating smile and a shrug which is the most flamboyant parody of casualness Finn’s ever seen, and then there’s a noise from the far end of corridor.

The heavy single door opens, and the plainclothes cop who’d been on their side of the barrier marches Rey out. Rey is white as a sheet, and it’s the cop who’s providing the forward momentum; his fingers are tight around her arm and her feet are stumbling. Finn doesn’t think; he just stands up.

But then, by the mercy of the Holy Name, at the other end of the corridor there is the muffled clunk of the outer door closing, and then the buzz of the inner door unlocking, and Rose bursts in, with Hux snarling at her heels.

Rose has been bluffing, Finn can tell; Rose is bluffing still, fluently and belligerently.

“They are my clients – ”

“Your paperwork is not – ”

“I’ll tell you what paperwork I have; I have – ”

A protein bar has appeared in Finn’s hand, as if by magic. Poe is already eating his. Finn feels the way he does when he chases his antidepressant with coffee: things are not actually better; things haven’t even really started to seem better, but there is hope; there is light; there is forward motion. Rose is here.

“If you would wait outside, Ms. Cohen – ”

“Thi-Cohen – ”

“You know, you can be censured – ”

“Oh, you think I’m going to be censured? I – ”

“They’re free to go!” Hux shouts. “All right? Free to go!”

“Thank you,” says Rose, as if he’s finally decided to be reasonable.

The cop holding Rey tightens his grip. “Not Ms. Niemand,” he says. Rose opens her mouth, but something in his tone manages to pre-empt her, rather than clash with her. “Soon. We’ll release her soon. But I need to ask her a few more questions, and I need my partner to join me. If you’ll wait for her outside.”

It could be mistaken for a polite request, but not by anyone present.

Rey is sure it’s only adrenaline keeping her alive, and the adrenaline is beginning to ebb. She feels bewildered and exhausted, and a distant part of her is standing horrified and open-mouthed at what she has agreed to, is continuing to agree to. She stares at the plastic bin Kylo is taking her belongings out of, at his hands laying them softly on the table. Winter coat (dingy white, princess-seamed, precious thrift-store find), winter hat and scarf (matching, her own cream and mocha crochet), gloves (black, dollar-store bin) purse (vinyl, curbside rescue). There’s an intimacy to the way he handles them, and it threads a different feeling through her terror and dismay. She can’t place the feeling, but she clings to it, watching how gently his fingers grasp her things. He lays her phone in front of her.

“Unlock your phone, please.”

“No,” she says, automatically, and Hux snorts.

“Do you hate America so much you actually want to be deported?”

“She’ll cooperate,” Kylo asserts. “I’m not going to download or copy any information. Please unlock your phone.”

She does. Her eyes water. She isn’t crying.

He takes the phone from her and begins examining it. “Do you use Signal, or WhatsApp? When you communicate about these things?”

“WhatsApp.”

“I’m downloading and installing Signal. I’m going to activate the disappearing-message function. I’ll be able to tell if you disable it.” His fingers are deft across her screen. He sends a message, and she hears his phone buzz in his pocket.

Rose can’t seem to stop cursing. Finn can tell she’s torn between crying over them all and telling Rey how much worse she would have had it if she weren’t white, so probably her fluent stream of invective on the subject of cops, free speech protections, immigration policy, racism, xenophobia, the electoral college, capitalism, the tragic lack of global solidarity, and cops (again) is a good compromise position.

“All their conniving with union-busting should bite them in the fucking ass; their fucking Fraternal Order should wither up and let them all be suspended indefinitely without pay. I hope all their guns misfire and shoot them in their flat fucking feet!”

Rose’s capacious messenger bag contains (besides the protein bars and a manilla envelope full of money orders made out to the New York DoC) heat-packs, a first aid kit, aspirin, vapo-rub, and Finn’s favorite kind of candy, those little caramel cubes that glue his mouth shut. As she curses, she offers each item around in turn. When Finn declines the candy, she furrows her brow and offers it again, her head cocked in concern.

That vigilant kind of love, which both Rose and Rey practice, warms Finn. They are the kind of people who break up subway brawls, who buy extra paper cups of cocoa to offer people in newspaper-stuffed coats, who bury cleverly-marked caches of water in the desert. They stand watch over drunk women in bars and shame under-tippers. When Finn is with them, he feels armed and armored by their care. But that’s the difference between him and Rey, and he knows that’s a large part of why Rose and Rey broke up; where Finn feels strengthened, Rey feels shamed. Rose used to carry Rey’s favorite candy back then, but every time she’d held one out, Rey would flush and turn away.

(“I don’t – I haven’t – you shouldn’t be so nice to me!” he’d heard Rey screaming once, in the other room, and then doors banged and Rose was crying on the fire escape and Rey was crying on the steps outside.)

Finn takes a caramel, just to see Rose smile.

They’re almost to Columbus Circle, about to part ways with Poe, when Rey stops dead. Poe, who doesn’t know any better, tries to slip a comforting arm around her, but she shakes him off. She stands under the streetlight, staring wildly at each of them in turn, and then, turning her face to the street, she whispers:

“I have to go. I’m so sorry. I’ve been such an idiot.”

Finn knows what she means when she says go in that tone; she doesn’t mean back to the apartment. “No. No no no no no. If they were going to deport you, they wouldn’t have released you. If they released you, the last thing you should do is skip town.”

She’s fighting not to cry. “You don’t understand. They say they’ll deport me if I don’t cooperate. They want me to spy.”

“Spy?” says Rose. “On who? On what?”

“On us! On Chai! I told them I would so they’d let me leave. I have to go. If I get back to L.A., Luke might hide me, but how can I get there? Oh shit, my courses; Rose can you go to the registrar for me tomorrow, get me leave of absence papers?”

“Yes, of course, but you shouldn’t have to leave; there has to be a way to fight this –”

“This is my fault,” says Finn. His feels like he’s going to throw up. He’d pulled her out to this protest to start with. He’d talked her into this, told her it would be a way to live their values, that it would be fun, build their spirits back up after the election, when really it was his spirit that had been most in need, and she would have been fine. "This is my fault; I have to fix this for you –"

"Hey, hey, woah!" Poe interposes himself, his hand on Finn’s shoulder, his warm smile aimed at Rey. "There's no problem here."

"What do you mean?" she asks. Her eyes are bewildered, full of oncoming tears. Her hair is escaping in wild curls at her neck and around her face; the wind catches them and the streetlight makes them shine. She’s so desperate for a solution that she lets Poe, with a parental hand, straighten her hat.

"Walk with me, bubbaleh," he says affectionately, and wraps an arm around her shoulders. And she allows it.

Kylo shouldn’t have taken the glove.

Thrown it in that joke of a “lost and found” box. Sealed it in a ziplock and filed it. Pitched it in the trash.

Not stuffed it in his own coat pocket and taken it away with him.

It doesn’t matter, he thinks, as his train rattles over the East River. It isn’t evidence. It’s a cheap glove, a little black knit bit of junk. It doesn’t matter. She’d been wearing it when she took his hand in the street. It doesn’t matter. They’ll have to meet soon, and he’ll give it to her then. It doesn’t matter.

He takes it out of his pocket and looks at it again, black knit against his black leather.

It doesn’t matter.

Chapter Text

Rey’s ID had also lied about her address, of course. (And probably her age, but it’s hard to be sure, so who’s to say?) She lives in Kingsbridge, in the Bronx, with Finn and Rose, in a six-story building built before WWII and last cleaned just after it. They had begun with Rose and Rey in one room and Finn in the other, and gone through a period in which Rey had insisted on sleeping on the couch. (Though she wasn’t so much sleeping, in truth, as staring at the rug in a trance of grief and guilt, because Rose was perfect, Rose was generous, Rose could forgive Rey anything, so why couldn’t Rey seem to forgive Rose for loving her?) Now Finn sleeps in Rose’s room, and Rey has his old room. It feels too big.

Her phone is on the other side of it. Just one buzz.

Signal
Message from Kylo

It’s too cold to snow, which Rey regards as the worst weather imaginable. The asshole had insisted on Manhattan, and Rey is not meeting this fucker anywhere her professors might see her, and why should she make life easy for him anyway? So she tells him to meet her one hundred and fifty blocks north of his precinct, at the Dyckman Farmhouse. It’s maybe the smallest museum in the whole city and admission is always free; it’s a cozy old family home, abandoned yet cared for, and something about its cramped rooms makes her feel safe. Somehow Kylo beats her there. She sees him facing away from her, stooped over a display of old tools as she crosses the porch. He straightens when she comes in, and his head seems to brush the beams of the low ceiling. His hair is dark, with a chilly, silken shine. She feels less safe than she had hoped.

“I don’t see why this needed to happen,” she begins.

“Hello to you too, Rachel.” She’d thought maybe her memory had exaggerated the depth of his voice, dark and bitter-sweet as the blackstrap molasses Maz fed her in tablespoons. But no. You upright-bass with legs, she thinks balefully, did you drag me out of bed on a Saturday morning in this brutal cold just to loom over me and intimidate me?

“Yeah, hello. I texted you everything I know. The next street action is on Central Park South. It’s a joint effort with Desis United for Service and Sueños Nuevos. Poe met their leaders at a Columbia symposium panel on grassroots organizing involving multiple languages.”

“What’s Chai Coalition’s other language? Hebrew? Do you do outreach to Israelis?”

“I think it was more about the symbolism of using other languages than practicalities; I dunno. I’m an engineer, not a social scientist or whatever.”

“Right. I notice you didn’t answer my question.”

“I notice you didn’t answer mine. And I notice you’re awfully good at pronouncing ‘chai.’” She’s very satisfied to see him flush.

“I can tell much faster in person when you’re lying,” he says curtly, turning away. “And it reassures us that you’ve kept your word and haven’t left town.” He has to bend deeply to make it through the doorway into the next room. She catches a glimpse of the docent behind her desk, possibly asleep.

“I always keep my word,” she says sharply as she follows after him. She has to duck through the doorway herself.

“That,” he says, without turning around, “is a lie.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.” He’s staring at the old map now, the one that shows what northern Manhattan looked like in the mid-19th Century. Just trees, Broadway, and a Magdalen House. She thinks about women locked up and forced to work without pay, punishment for acting like their bodies belonged to themselves. She thinks of the day after the election, Rose and she clinging to Finn for the protection of his maleness, Rose and Finn clinging to her for the protection of her whiteness. She stares bleakly at this cop, at his tense shoulders in his black peacoat. Thinks of guns drawn against scissors, women cuffed for carrying condoms.

There’s a space heater going full-blast in the corner, and the room is small, but the wind is high and the temperature outside is well past freezing. She pushes her bare hands inside her coat just as he turns around.

“You’re not wearing gloves,” he says, his brow furrowed. She can’t stand it. As if her gloves mattered.

“Why are you doing this?” she shouts.

“Now naturally I respect everyone’s right to choose their own name,” Poe said amiably, “so if he wants to be ‘Kylo,’ fine, let him be Kylo. But when I went to that putz’s bar mitzvah, he was called to the torah as Benyamin ben Chanan, and my mother – may she rest in peace – gave him a nice check for $36 made out to Ben Organa.”

”Organa?” Rey stopped dead. Poe kept walking, still acting as if all this were nothing at all.

“Yep. Son of your favorite lawyer and mine. Born and raised on the Upper West Side.”

She ran to catch up. “What happened?”

“Well, at first, you know, it just seemed like teenage rebellion. His mom always in court for leftist causes, and his father a genuine old-school LES Emma-Goldman-style anarchist; so if Ben decides he’s going to come over all law-and-order is it really so surprising?”

“But, there’s a ‘but;’ I can hear it in your voice.”

“But. Yes, but.” His handsome face grew more serious. “Then his father, as he did, got mixed up with some adventurous types. The kind of types who maybe don’t have a lot of regard for borders.” He pauses. “I’m sorry – I realize this has to be a sensitive issue for you. You understand, I’m not talking about undocumented people. And I’m not necessarily condemning. Or necessarily not condemning. I didn’t know them. They were coyotes.”

“Human smugglers?”

“They dealt in asylum-seekers, mostly. Or anyway that’s what Han said; like I say, I never met any of them. But Kylo did. And he came after them. Han got eight years for human trafficking; with good behavior he might be out in 2019.” Rey’s head was blank; she couldn’t find anything to say. After a moment, Poe continued. “Leah can’t attend the Close Rikers meetings. She has some line about how it’s a conflict of interest. But it’s because she can’t stand crying in public. They were never legally married; he didn’t believe in it. But she’ll love that smirking shkotz ‘til the day she passes, and her own son put him away. A tragedy.”

They walked in silence for a while.

“Doing what?” Kylo shouts back, and the docent is going to wake up and come shush them any minute.

Being a cop, she wants to say. Breaking the heart of the mother you have the undeserved fortune to have. “Keeping tabs on perfectly law-abiding social justice groups,” she grits. “Groups who already alert the fucking police before they fucking sneeze.”

“They alert us for street actions. And you start with street actions, but you move to organizing boycotts –”

“Boycotts are perfectly legal –”

“And from boycotts you go to ‘support actions,’ by which nine times out of ten you mean aiding-and-abetting and material-support, and those, those are –”

“Rose says material support is a bullshit charge they bring when you haven’t actually done anything but they don’t like your face and they want to shut you up –”

“Rose being I suppose the law student who busted in pretending she was your lawyer? Finn’s girlfriend, Poe’s girlfriend, maybe both?”

“Finn’s girlfriend,” she says, and almost adds my ex, but stops. The NYPD might work the Pride parade, but that doesn’t make them allies. “And she is an excellent law student.”

“No doubt,” he mutters.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I went to law school,” Kylo says, in the tone of someone recounting a bout of Legionnaire’s disease. “The best students were always the ones who could look you in the eye and tell you black was white. Which reminds me. You never answered. Is there any connection between Chai and any Israeli groups or individuals?”

“Not that I know of.”

“No key people in common with leftist Israeli groups?”

“Kylo, what I know about the Israeli left you could fit into a thimble.”

He rolls his eyes. She throws her hands out in desperation.

“What do you expect me to tell you? It’s a bunch of millennial students and starving artists, a couple gen-x-ers with non-traditional jobs, three lawyers, and a rabbi with a rainbow tallit. A couple of the younger kids come from money, but like, Connecticut money, not city money. We’re not a threat to anyone or anything. I mean, really, like, we wish.”

“You do wish,” he agrees. “How’s recruitment?” He starts down the stairs to the cellar. It will be harder for the docent to hear them down there; Rey doesn’t know how she feels about that, so she plants her feet and refuses to follow him.

“It’s all right. There were like four new people last time?”

He turns on the stair. He’s looking up at her now, and evidently he doesn’t care for that, because he climbs back up. “How young is your youngest member?”

“I dunno, eighteen?” He gives her a look. “So?”

“In the nineties,” he says, “a leftist group would have killed for that many recruits, that young. Even under Bush. Kids joined anarchist groups, they were squatters. They didn’t organize.”

God, he sounds pompous. She snorts. “You weren’t a cop under Bush. You can’t even be 30.”

He looks at her sideways. “I wasn’t a cop. I was studying criminal justice.”

“Anyway, so what. There are thousand leftist groups. Why track Chai?”

“Why Jews, you’re asking? You think I should be tracking the Latinos instead? Or maybe the Muslims?”

“I read the news, I know you’re tracking Muslims; I assume you’re tracking the Latinos. And the Asians.”

“And the Blacks?” His voice is slick with irony.

“And black people, yes.”

“So why not Jews? What makes you special?”

“You shouldn’t be spying on anybody!”

“But we have to. And we do. So why not you? You think Jews don’t do bad things?”

She scoffs. “Of course Jews do bad things –”

“But you think it’s just Bernie Madoff and Chassidic landlords in Brooklyn? Just financial crimes.”

She wishes his eyes didn’t look so fucking knowing. He raises an eyebrow and moves to examine a display on fruit preservation, and somehow it’s even worse that he should turn his eyes away than that he should keep them on her. Before she can stop herself, she shouts, “Oh, as if I could be as self-hating as you if I tried with both hands, Kyle O’Ryan!”

She expects him to shout back – he’s Leah Organa’s son, right? She’s not expecting him to turn deep red, clench his fists, and shove his way past her and out to the back porch, slamming the door behind him.

After a while, her silent horror at the disaster of Rabbi Luke’s New York relations gave place to her own anxieties. “But… the spying?” she asked hesitantly.

“Right, yeah, well,” said Poe, brightening, “there are a lot of possibilities here. We could feed them false info, of course. The thing is, Kylo there, being pretty well acquainted with our, uh, milieu, our m.o. – you know, our shtick – would probably catch on pretty fast. And we can’t have that, can we? Why didn’t you tell me you were undocumented, by the way?”

“Well, I’ve only known you about twelve hours, and for three of them you were on a bullhorn, and for two of them I was being questioned.”

“Understandable, but still, Rose should have told you to tell me. Or told you to tell her to tell me. Anyway.”

“The spying.”

“The spying. As you may have guessed, given all the nice barriers that were awaiting us, we do inform the cops of our actions in advance. And that, as you may also have guessed, is Rabbi Holdon’s policy.”

“She’s the executive director, isn’t she?”

“She is. But the thing is. And you have to understand, I don’t mean this in a bad way. Amilyn’s very equipped for a certain type of political reality. And I don’t think we’re living in that reality anymore. Her tactics are extremely… civil. They make us look nice, right? But there is a point where nice starts to look like ineffectual starts to look like uninvested, no?”

Rey, if she was honest, did not have a lot of informed opinions on activist tactics. Luke’s vision of pursuing justice had had more to do with shelters and sandwiches and fivers slipped into cups by sleight-of-hand than with bullhorns. But she followed Poe’s logic.

He continued, “so, this is my thought. We need our actions to be more genuinely disruptive. This evening was a good start; midtown types hate being disturbed. And the fact that we’re young, we’re diverse, it disturbs them, it presents an alternative vision of Jewish youth. Pretty different from the Kushners, right? You know, I heard he keeps his phone on on shabbat. Not that I object to that; I do all kinds of shit on Saturdays. It’s the hypocrisy.”

“But the –”

“Right, right. So.” He turned to face her under the beam a streetlight. His eyes were so intense, she thought; he could lead anyone anywhere. “What I need you to do is to tell our friend Kylo the truth. The complete truth. But I need you to gradually start to… ramp it up.”

“Ramp it up?”

“If they think we’re a threat, we’ll be a threat. It’s a good sign, that they want you to spy. It means they realize we have potential. There are actions for which it’s in our interest to have a lot of cops out, if we want to really cause some good trouble, really show what we can do.”

“What kind of actions?” His voice was a little… thrilling, she thought, remembering the rush that had gone through her at the protest. No wonder they gave him the bullhorn.

“Well,” Poe replied with a little smirk and a little shrug, “we’ll see what I can talk Amilyn into, I suppose.” He took her arm again. “Don’t worry. For now, just give him whatever info he wants. I’ll tell you when you need to start exaggerating. But now! Let’s talk about you, yeah?”

Kylo stumbles out onto the porch, down the stairs, and slams his fist into a pine tree, then turns around and kicks a stone wall. He regrets it as soon as he does it, of course. (True of so many, many things he does!) His foot hurts and his glove is sticky with sap. It’s freezing out in the yard behind the house, and either she’s going to come out after him when she’s not even wearing gloves, or she’s just going to leave. He can’t quite bring himself to go back inside after reacting like he has, but he really can’t let either of those things happen, can he? So he makes himself march back up the stairs and stand in the doorway.

“Listen,” he growls. Rey is standing right where he left her, staring at him. “Let’s stick to useful information. If you would.”

“Fine,” she says, lifting her chin. She’s shivering in the draft from the door, and when she raises her chin it shows him the sinuous line of her throat inside her scarf. Her hair is in a sleek little knot; she must have just washed it. Which would make her colder, of course. But he doesn’t come in.

“Is the action on Central Park South the only street action planned?”

“For now. The executive director wants us to join Sueños Nuevos at a Brooklyn City Councilman’s office on December 16th. Levin, I think. But anyway I can’t go; I have class then.”

“What class?” Her teeth are almost chattering. He already knows what he needs to know. But he stands there in the doorway looking at her, watching her shiver.

“C-calculus.” She shivered the night she was arrested, too, he remembers. When she lost her glove. She hasn’t replaced it? Maybe she knows he has it. Maybe she expects him to return it.

“All right,” he says quickly. “I’ll Signal you.” And he shuts the door between them, turning back into the yard.

He listens for Rachel’s – Rey’s – step on the wood floor. It takes a moment – maybe she’s rubbing her hands for warmth, pulling up her collar – but he hears it eventually, light tread getting fainter. He looks out at the yard. The stone wall he kicked before isn’t really a wall as such; it’s the edge of a well, and it’s got an explanatory sign, which he trudges over to read because when did a little extra information ever hurt – and then he kicks the well again, hurting his foot again, just to cut off that voice in his head.

The well, the sign explains, used to be a regular well for the farmhouse. But now it’s an art installation, too. He obediently cranks what would have been the bucket winch, and watches as a screen placed just inside the well’s lip crackles alive. A light trembles across it. The sign explains that the installation converts sound waves algorithmically into light. Speak a wish aloud, it says, and the well will record not your wish, but its reflection in light.

The little tremor of yellow light he can see is just the sound of upper Broadway traffic. “I wish,” he mutters to the well, and the image swells to a thick green curve. “I wish I hadn’t kept her glove.”

In his silence, the light draws back into its tremulous little line. “Odehnu m’daber imam,” he says, for no reason, just to make a noise, and the well flashes bright white light at him, and he jumps up and away as if he’s been hit.

At least our fucking building is mostly sealed all right, Rey reflects as she climbs up the fifth flight. Mostly. And five flights of stairs warms a person up a bit.

She opens their dumb, warped apartment door to an empty living room and no light under Finn and Rose’s door. She’s kind of grateful; she’s cold and she’s stressed and she doesn’t want to talk; she just wants to… she doesn’t even know what. But the vodka bottle on the counter in the galley kitchen looks like a reasonable option.

She has one mouthful, then another, because Rey tries not to drink too often but has managed to absorb a snobbishness peculiar to a particular kind of hardened alcoholic: everything is to be taken straight from the bottle if at all possible; glasses are for wimps. She knows it wasn’t Maz who taught her this, and it sure as hell wasn’t Luke. She shuts her eyes and takes another pull. It tastes like nothing and it burns her throat.

I like vodka she thinks; beer tastes like hops and whiskey tastes like peat but vodka tastes like what it is. Just this burn.

That’s her cue to screw the top back on, and she does. The liquor’s done its job anyway; she feels pleasantly warm and the tension is seeping out of her shoulders. That fucking cop. But it’s over for this week, anyway. She sets the bottle back on the counter and walks towards her room, unbuttoning her coat, when she hears Rose gasp.

Rose has a wide variety of expressive gasps, and Rey has come to know them all. She knows this one, breathed low through the chest and held tight at the end. Finn and Rose must have assumed she’d gone out for the day. Tactful of them, to wait until she was gone to start having a nooner. Not that it’s even noon yet. But she just put away three slugs of vodka so who was she to judge?

She lets herself into her room as quietly as she can. She’s not listening. She’s not. She gets her headphones in the minute she gets her door shut and sits down. And then later she can pretend to have had them in since she came home. But she swears she can hear Rose breathing, now, Rose shifting in the sheets. This is her own fault for living with her ex like a dumb cliché. But as Rey takes off her coat and lies down on the bed, she can feel Rose’s sweaty hands grasping her hair, hear Rose moaning uh uh uh uh through clenched teeth, and taste Rose slick and pink and salty. She opens her mouth like it’s a reflex, tongue arching eagerly at nothing, and her hips rock against the bed.

It’s the vodka. This is why she tries not to drink; it makes her do stupid things like this. But it wouldn’t be stupid to work off some of this tension; it’s just stupid to think about Rose while she does it. She puts some EDM in her ears and unzips her jeans. She could look for some porn, and she considers it. But her imagination is more readily available. She just needs to shift gears, to not think about Rose. Or anyone like her.

A man. That would be a change. She doesn’t care for any of the Chrises she’s seen in movies lately; would it be creepy to think about Poe? She just met him. Does that make it more or less creepy? Too late; she’s already touching herself and imagining fitting his mouth over hers on a shadowy street at night, fumbling his hat off as he kisses her neck and squeezes her ass. She imagines him shushing her softly as some innocent pedestrian makes quiet progress down the street and he slips a warm hand between her legs and rubs her just right, raking his nails through her curls and sliding the pads of his fingers between her lips to where she’s getting wet. His hair would tangle so nicely in her fingers; she’d bite his ear and make him hiss and hold her tighter. On her bed, she pushes her jeans down a little further, stroking her inner thigh with one hand as she rubs her clit with the other.

She imagines whispering, “Do I have to report this to the authorities too?” And Poe whispering back, a wicked laugh in his voice. “Of course. You have to tell them everything. Every single thing, you hear me?” And she imagines Kylo standing in a doorway with the wind stirring his hair as she tells him, “Then he put his fingers inside me and it felt so fucking good, Kylo; I was whimpering for it.” Kylo licks his lips, as she tells him in a passionate whisper, “I came on his hand while he kissed me, and he said yes, yes, yes into my mouth while I moaned for him.” Kylo leans in to hear her, his red lips parting with a sound like pain, and Rey comes, hard, alone in her bed.

Afterwards, she’s too tired to think about anything, and it’s Saturday, after all, so she lets herself fall asleep.

Chapter Text

He’s kind of a shitty excuse for a detective sometimes, Kylo knows. He spent more than a week in December wondering if he was going to get a Signal from Rey, wheres my glove & whatve u been doing with it??? (Nothing! It’s on his kitchen table! It just sits there! And sometimes he stares at it as he eats.) And then, of course, it comes to him on Christmas morning. (He’s working. If anyone asks why, it’s because it makes him look more dedicated than Hux. Which he is.) The accent had thrown him, but: she’s in the country illegally, she’s a student, and she’d asked to meet him at what is, in effect, a free museum.

She can’t afford another pair of dollar-store gloves. He’s a fucking idiot. And an asshole, too, of course:

Signal

Disappearing message time set to 1 Day.

Kylo
Next meeting same day same time, please.
We can go to a coffee shop. I’ll pay for the drinks.

R
ill buy my own drink this isn’t a fucking date
and i buy my own drinks on dates cuz its the 21st fucking century bro
and do u want to be seen talking to me anyway
kyle

So he stares into space for a while. Then:

Disappearing message time set to 1 Day.

Kylo
Meet me at the Met.
I can put a guest on my membership.

R
u realize thats a bus transfer for me

Kylo
With weekend construction it's three trains for me, and one is the 6.
Life is hard.
It'll be warmer than the Dyckman House.

R
ur a met member?

Kylo
I like the Met.

"R" is what he calls her in his reports, which are mostly short and dull. When he files them with the captain, he mostly gets "Thank you, Detective," in a bored tone he can hear over email. He doesn't like it; when he and Hux go in for their weekly debrief, Hux talks for what feels like a fucking hour about whatever halal-cart cooks he's bullied this time. Snoke has to know there's nothing in it, that Hux never brings any actual information, only reports of his own doings. Kylo may only be able to mumble for a minute or two, but he knows things. And Snoke knows that's what matters.

Kylo has lists of names, and he knows the relationships between them. Rey has sent him a screenshot of the "to:" field from several group emails; when he sees her on Saturday, he'll go over it to make sure all his connections are right. Finn and Rey know each other from LA, where they both know Luke, who connects them to Leah, who introduced them to Rose; Leah told Poe to look up Finn and Rose at Columbia. It's strangely like being a gossip, sometimes, and when he's obliged to ask Rey, Is Wexler with Pava? he also feels compelled to add, Couples are more likely to follow each other into criminal activity than friends. Because it's not like he cares who's dating who, who's broken up with who.

His own connections to Luke or Leah, he doesn’t mention. He sees, in every screenshot of an email Rey sends him, in the cc field: [email protected]. AOL. AOL. He doesn't point this out. He doesn't text LOL @ AOL MOM to a number that's still in his phone. He doesn't say anything. And neither does Rey, even though Poe has obviously run his mouth to her on the subject of Kylo.

He has already asked her if she is seeing Poe, which was, as previously noted, a legitimate professional inquiry.

But he wants to have more information when Snoke asks him. He doesn’t like Hux’s smirk.

Rabbi Holdon is on the phone. She looks very patient. Finn puts a poppy-seed bagel on a paper plate, then balances a muffin for Rey on top of his bagel. Rey is holding up her end of their usual bargain by pouring two extremely generous cups of coffee and carrying them towards the circle of chairs. This is a system they worked out years ago in Los Angeles; Rey has calculated that it saves them an average of 40 seconds in shuffling-around time for any given meeting.

Gil al-Akbar brings his own coffee, so he's already in his chair, but otherwise Finn and Rey have their pick of seats. They choose some chairs on the edge of the circle nearest the bookcase, neither neighboring the chair Rabbi Holdon always sits in nor facing her directly. The spot next to the rabbi is reserved for Leah, of course, in the unlikely event that she has time to come. Poe, who’s experimenting with facial hair, is rushing to claim the spot facing her, coffee sloshing. Everyone else distributes themselves as best they can. The phone call ends. Leah does not arrive.

The rabbi coughs gently, phone call ended, smiling around the circle. “Thank you for joining us, everyone. Did everyone get my email? Good. Good.” Everyone turns to their phones for the agenda. (Al-Akbar and Rabbi Holdon get paper copies, because they’re olds.) There’s a lot of tedious shit to get through. It’s a meeting, after all.

Items I-III go as fast as can be expected, which isn’t very. Finn glazes over a little. None of it concerns him much, and he has a meeting with his thesis advisor this afternoon. He stays more aware of Rey and Poe, though neither of them talks much. He doesn’t really know what Poe said to Rey; Poe assures him that it’s all taken care of, and Rey doesn’t want to talk about it (what else is new), but does that mean he’s going to relax about this? Please. Finn’s not as full of shpilkes as Poe, but life and history have not taught him to be laid-back.

But now they’re at Item IV: Action Proposals – ICE in NYC. Poe’s coffee cup is empty and crushed into a ball, and he’s bouncing his knee frantically, but he waits in silence as the rabbi lays out her plan. She’s been talking to some representatives of a non-profit which has worked with people held in the ICE detention center on Varick St; she has a list of their top ten most-frequently requested items, and she thinks, with proper logistical support, they could run a drive, maybe provide storage and transport. Poe’s jaw is drawn tight, but he manages to sit still until Rabbi Holdon turns her serene smile on the circle and requests their thoughts. Finn hopes to heaven that they don’t yell at each other. He likes a good argument as much as anybody, but he’s never enjoyed yelling.

“Well,” Poe says, and so far so good. “I agree, we definitely have the resources and the capability to make a drive like that work. We could definitely do that.”

“But you don’t think we should,” says Rabbi Holdon, still smiling. She tilts her head, and her purple hair spills over one shoulder. Finn has always found that lilac hair kind of fetching, and he half-suspects the same is true for Poe, but he keeps that to himself, obviously.

“I’m sure we could do a lot of good,” Poe replies, doggedly trying to pretend he’s even a little bit onboard. “I’m just not sure it’s… it’s…”

“It’s what, Daniel?” the rabbi asks. Finn knows that her studious refusal to use his nickname irritates Poe no end; he puts on the manner of someone who was really hoping they wouldn’t have to say this, but…

“Well, the thing is, Amilyn, that it’s a band-aid. It does address a problem. But it doesn’t address the problem. Which is that our friends and neighbors are being dragged away and imprisoned in our own city, despite DeBlasio’s best rhetoric about ‘sanctuary.’”

Rabbi Holdon nods slowly. “I see. Yes. And how do you propose we should address that problem?”

Poe is off, now. “Band-aids like this, they sustain the system." He leans forward in his chair, burning eyes fixed and hands sweeping, the best arguer in New York City. "We need to disrupt the system. They want to make their presence tolerable, and what they're doing is making us do the work of making their work, their essentially unjust and damaging work, just the littlest bit humane. And when we do that, when we let them make us do that, they're gonna point to the conditions that we've helped create, and they're gonna say, 'See? It's not so bad, is it?' We need to make it clear that we won’t tolerate it in our city. That we will not allow it to go forward.”

“And could you clarify for me how you plan to do that?” The rabbi’s voice is remote. Finn sneaks a look at Rey; she’s sitting very straight in her chair, with her hands clenched. With his thumb, he makes a little gesture: leave? But she shakes her head and tightens her fists.

Poe is focused like a laser. “My proposal is that we undertake an action that will both draw attention to their day-to-day operations and make those operations impossible. We need to interrupt their procedures, and we need to do it publicly, because we need people to see what those vans look like, know where they come from and what they do, and not just let them fade into the background. They're not part of the life of our city. They're the sickness of our city. When they drag away our friends and neighbors, they're poisoning us.”

Rabbi Holdon looks at him evenly. And her eyes, so fast Finn almost misses it, flick to Rey. She gentles her voice, and widens the scope of her address to include the whole group. “Of course, this is one of the longstanding problems of the struggle to do justice. Do we treat the symptoms, or the cause? We can read it as akin to Maimonides's –”

“Please,” Poe begs, “please, do not make this a teaching moment. There are people’s freedoms – people’s lives on the line.”

She sighs. “Well, then. Let’s start here: when a man on the subway asks for change, do we refuse him because his problems have systematic causes?”

“Of course not,” Poe snaps, “but –”

“We have it within our means to offer material help to people in need. You said so yourself. Are you going to refuse them that?” She looks at the handwritten notes on her agenda. “The most requested item is toothpaste.”

Poe takes a breath. Finn sees him, too, flick a glance at Rey, but his look feels different somehow. And then he turns back to the rabbi; a canny player making a choice, he folds with a nod.

“All right. We’ll keep the Starbucks windows intact for another week,” he says, and Finn doesn’t really know what he means, but he has a gloomy feeling that he needs to find out.

It is warmer in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So warm they can open their coats, and take off their hats and scarves. An indoor fountain is running nearby. “And then Poe made a crack about Starbucks windows,” Rey says, as they walk through an almost-deserted gallery. Poe had told her to be sure to mention that part, and it seems like he was on to something; Kylo stiffens and turns to her.

“What did he say? Tell me as exactly as you can.”

“Uh. I think, ‘I guess the Starbucks windows can stay intact for another week’?”

Kylo breathes hard through his nose, staring at the ceramic tiles in the case beside her. “Okay. All right. And that’s all he said?”

“Yes, I think so.” He stares at her searchingly. “Do you think I’m lying?”

“No,” he says, after a moment. “Not right now.”

“Not right now,” she echoes. “Great. Why are Starbucks windows so upsetting, anyway?”

“They’re not. The Starbucks window stands for property damage, and the ‘joke’ they claim they’re making is that law enforcement is more concerned with it than with human life. It’s code for escalating violence.”

Rey scoffs. “Poe’s not violent.”

“Yes, he is. Or he could be. Which is the same thing. The difference is only situational. And it sounds like he’s looking for the right situation.”

“You can’t arrest him for making a joke about a window.”

“No, I can’t.” He turns and walks to the next glass case, staring at the armor inside it. “But if I were to arrest him for something else, the DA would want to know about it. It's evidence.”

Rey is chilled. Poe had seemed so sure of himself and the wisdom of his plan. She wants to trust him, but it’s so easy to imagine him in court, when Kylo says it, and so easy to imagine him losing, even with Leah to help him. “But it would just be circumstantial, wouldn’t it?”

“Circumstantial doesn’t mean it doesn’t count,” he says absently. There’s a helmet in the case that he’s looking at attentively, following the lines of Arabic that run around its crown. “It could count with a prosecutor weighing charges, and it could count with a jury.”

She tries her hardest to trust Poe. This has to be part of his plan, or he wouldn’t have told her to emphasize that, would he? The sound of the fountain in the background, here in the dead of December, makes her feel displaced, adrift in time. It could be June, in here, or Los Angeles. She swallows, and tries to change the subject. “If you went to law school,” she says, “why aren’t you a lawyer?”

He snorts, eyes still on the helmet. “Do I look like a lawyer?”

“No,” she snaps, “you look like a jackbooted thug.”

He turns to face her. They’re close enough that he has to tilt his head to meet her eyes. She can’t bear the intensity of his gaze, and she lets her eyes flicker down. His mouth is so red. “Do you really think that’s what I am?”

There’s a family in the next gallery but she raises her voice a little anyway, heedless, chanting: ”Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”

"You," he says through his teeth. "I serve and protect you. And the stupid wannabe criminals you call friends."

"And that's how you do it, is it? By deciding we're criminals before we even do anything? By blackmailing me into spying? By locking up your own father?"

He snarls, "What did Polansky tell you, that I took Han in because he was helping poor asylum seekers over the border?"

Oh, she does not need to hear some bullshit about the potential criminality of asylum seekers right now. “Were they ‘wannabe criminals’ too?”

“They were under contract,” Kylo says. His eyes are hot black stones. “My father’s good friends, they took people into this country with conditions.” He steps even closer to her. “You know about conditions like that, don’t you, Rey.”

It’s not a question. Her feet stay planted, but her mind skitters away. How does he know? Did Luke tell him? He wouldn’t do that. Kylo can’t know. She casts around for anything to think about, anything else. She can smell him. He’s standing so close to her. The hollow of his throat is bare; he smells like juniper and salt and she knows just how he’d taste if she licked him. This isn’t better. This isn’t a better thing to think. Except that it is. Anything would be better.

“If you had a foreign passport and a New York utility bill, you could have an IDNYC, and you wouldn’t need to hand me a fake. But you don’t have a passport, do you? You don’t have any papers at all.” She doesn’t have to answer him. She could turn and leave right now.

“I lost it.”

“I remember a very dramatic story in the LA Times when I was a teenager, about my uncle and his work with troubled kids. No names, because you were all minors, but there was a girl – ” He’s just guessing.

“No, I know your uncle from school – he helped me – ”

“When you took my hand in the station, I saw, there was a mark; I thought it was from the cuffs – ”

He’s actually reaching for her hand. She cannot allow this. “When I took your hand in the police station, you called it assaulting an officer – ”

Kylo makes a noise of frustration. “Rachel, listen to me – ”

“No!” A little boy comes running in to look, with his mother close behind him, dragging him back. Rey does not lower her voice. “Why should I listen to you? You’re a fucking cop. And maybe your dad helped – bad people – but you help bad people every day of your life! Cops like you beat people, they extort people, they rape people, they imprison people, they strangle and shoot and kill people! What sin did your father commit that would outrank murder?”

She’s talked him into a rage; he’s shaking with it. Good. “You think I would do those things?” he hisses.

“You are a willing part of a system that is designed to do those things,” she says coldly. “So yes. I think you would. I think you do. I think you’re a fucking monster. Is there anything else you’d like to know, Detective?”

He stares at her for a moment, then whirls on his heel and stalks out. His footsteps are lost under the sound of the fountain before she feels like she can breathe again. She looks down to read about the helmet in the case, which was made for a king among kings.

No kingdom lasts forever, Luke had told her. No system endures. Darkness and light, void and world, life and death – those are eternal. Count on those, and on yourself, and the Name will be with you.

Kylo narrowly avoids punching a man who brushes against his elbow on the stairs, so trying to get on the fucking 6 is clearly not an option. He chooses to stalk at his full stride down Central Park East, as fast as he can without breaking into a run, dodging strollers and children and tiny dogs. He’s seventy blocks south at Union Square before he trusts himself to behave like a civilized commuter again. His brain judders with anger all the way home. Of course. Of course she’d think like that. They all do.

He all but kicks in his own front door, deliberately steps on the Times rather than bring it in, yanks off his boots, and storms blindly through the kitchen to throw his hat and coat on the bed.

It isn’t fair.

He’d been trying to help. Which he never should have done; she’s a confidential informant; he needs to maintain leverage, not give it away. But he’d felt bad for her, and then, after a bit of detective work, of putting ugly pieces together, sorry for her. And she was so fucking… especially with color in her cheeks; jackbooted thug had almost seemed flirtatious coming out of her mouth the way it had. But then all of a sudden he could just as easily have been talking to his mother or his father or his uncle or Amilyn or any of them.

She was looking at my mouth, though.

Shit. He knows what he needs to do. And he doesn’t know he feels about it, but he’s definitely going to do it.

He runs the shower and yanks his clothes off. It’s not that he needs to get clean, though his walk made him sweaty. It’s just ritual. The shower is where he does this.

He gets in and stretches himself under the warming water. He shuts his eyes and imagines her angry. He imagines her sneering and gorgeous and wrong, just exactly as she had been. And he imagines saying what he should have said.

(“You don’t understand,” he imagines telling her as he gathers her hair in his hand and pulls her face to his. “You like those words, don’t you?” He’d kiss her, then. Say against her mouth, “’System.’ ‘Design.’” She’d moan, try to kiss him again. He supposes he’d let her. Let her capture his mouth with her hot little one.)

He runs his right hand over his hip and rubs his hardening cock with his palm, as if she were rubbing herself against him.

(“There are no systems,” he’d tell her. “Do you understand?” He’d push her against the wall and kiss her again, get his hands inside her coat and on her narrow waist, push up her shirt. “Do you understand? No systems, no design. It’s fiction.” He’d keep her mouth busy with his while he got her bra out of his way and got her little tits into his hands. “If you knew anything, you’d know.”)

He’s properly hard now, imagining her soft nipples hardening between his fingers and her mouth sucking at his neck, her teeth in his shoulder. He wraps his hand around himself and starts to pump, slowly.

(He’d pull her off him by her hair, make her look him in the eye as he ground against her. “There’re only people. Making choices.” She’d wrap her leg around him so he could rub himself against her cunt through her jeans. “Good or bad choices. Take these off,” he’d tell her, and she would, she’d stare into his eyes and bite her lip as she undid the button and pushed them down. He’d put his hand on her and she’d be wet to touch; she’d grind and gasp against his hand.

“If I were a bad cop, I wouldn’t be this nice to you,” he’d tell her.)

Shit. He didn’t mean for – but fuck it feels so good. To think of her this way. His grip on his cock tightens.

(“If I were a bad cop, I’d cuff your hands behind your back. I’d bend you over a table and I’d hold you down and fuck you hard and I’d make you call me sir while I did it,” he’d say as he opens his pants and pushes his cock against her. “Would you have liked that?” She wouldn’t answer that, but she’d rub her wet slit against him. “But we’ll do this at your speed.” And fuck, she’d sink down on him so tight and slow. And he’d rock into her there against the wall, crush her soft little body against him while she moaned. Her head would loll back as he fucked her and kissed her neck and he’d say, “Do you understand?” None of them ever fucking do. But she would. He’d make her.)

He’s pumping himself hard and fast, bracing his free arm against the tiled wall of the shower. He’s going to come.

(“I’m gonna come,” she’d gasp, her lips against his skin, and then she’d dig her hands into his hair and drag his face to hers and make him look into her bright and burning eyes. “I’m gonna come, you monster. You fucking monster.”)

He comes with a groan in the shower. Fuck. Fuck. Feels so fucking good.

He stands under the water, much calmer now. That kind of... got away from him. That happens sometimes. There are tears on his cheeks. That happens sometimes too. Another good reason to do this in the shower.

Chapter Text

Rey sort of… dresses up for her next meeting with the cop. Ankle boots that put her height near 5’9”, and a black knee-length dress with an austere mandarin collar. Heavy-knit black thigh-high socks. She stares at herself in the bathroom mirror. I’m not afraid of you. You think you know my weak points, but you don’t. What weak points? I have no weak points. The effect, even before she puts her long white winter coat over it, is maybe a little bit more “fashion tznius” than she wants, so she undoes two buttons at the neck of the dress, takes a deep breath, and goes out to meet him at Bronx Museum.

Or anyway she opens the door to go out, and then she starts getting the texts.

Finn is on Randalls Island, watching Poe and his husky mutt enact their usual battle of wills. Both their phones blow up at once. “Holy shit!” Poe shouts, and runs for his bike, his dog at his heels.

Signal

Disappearing message time is set to 1 Day

R
sorry will not be making it
gotta go to JFK
prolly u do too i guess
see u @ the barricades

Rose had been inside the terminal with Leah for hours, but now Finn has her in his arms, holding her from behind as she holds her sign above her head and tears run down her cheeks. She hadn’t brought the sign with her; Jessica, who isn’t Jewish but works for HIAS and knows Rose’s family history, had brought one for her. It says “MY PEOPLE WERE REFUGEES TOO” and Rey can see her hands shaking as she holds it up. Finn is holding her tight and whispering in her ear and Rose is smiling through her tears.

Poe’s sign says “REMEMBER THE ST. LOUIS” on one side and “نحمي المسلمين” on the other and he holds it up with one hand and his phone with the other. “Amilyn’s getting off the train,” he tells them, shouting over the noise of the crowd. “They’re going to do Havdalah and then Leah’ll be out with Velazquez and Nadler to speak to press.”

It’s freezing, and Rey gave away her last heat-pack thirty minutes ago, but she doesn’t care. She can feel it again, the current in the air that she first felt at that protest in November. Lalo and Ella, the action leaders from Sueños Nuevos, start the chant: Let them in. Let them in. They all shout, and the cold air scrapes through Rey and makes her feel clean and light. The ground behind the police barrier is too full of people; new arrivals are filling in the floors of the vertical parking structure. Someone unfurls an American flag from the fourth floor. Rey swallows a lump in her throat.

The evening is falling fast. The cameras and press mics which have been dispersed through the crowd begin to circle together around the tall, slender figure of Rabbi Holdon. Rey takes Poe by the elbow and pulls him in; she wants to see the two of them together in this. Amilyn smiles at them, and Poe smiles back. They can’t hear the first prayers over the sound of the crowd, but they see members of Amilyn’s congregation passing the spice box. Al-Akbar stands behind Amilyn, wearing a taqiyah, and holding the wine cup.

The word is passing through the crowd that there’s a religious ritual underway, and the chanting dies down. In the silence, Amilyn lights the Havdalah candle and raises it high above her head, and her voice rings out.

“Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam,
ha-mavdil bein kodesh l’chol,
bein or-le’choshech,
bein yom ha-shevi’i l’sheshet y’mai ha-ma’aseh.
Baruch ata Adonai,
ha-mavdil bein kodesh l’chol.”

Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe,
who distinguishes between the sacred and the profane,
between light and darkness,
between the seventh day and the six days of the week.
Blessed art Thou, Lord our God,
who distinguishes between the sacred and the profane.

“Amen,” comes from the crowd in a scattered whisper. Al-Akbar passes the wine cup, and Amilyn keeps the candle raised for a moment more.

“The sabbath is sacred time,” she says. “But every sabbath ends. And the time for work begins. We celebrate the entrance of the sabbath. And I am here with you to celebrate the beginning of a time of work.”

She extinguishes the candle in the wine. Rey sees tears in Poe eyes. She tightens her grip on his arm, feels the current flowing through her, and lifts her voice.

”Let them in. Let them in.”

Disappearing message time is set to 1 Day

Kylo
Rey, if you get arrested again I might not be able to help you before they run your ID.
I know you're in that crowd; your actions are impeding traffic and you will be arrested if you continue.
It’s not like you’re in some database of informants, Rey. Hux and I are the only ones who know you’re cooperating.
You need to leave.
Do you understand?
Rachel
You need to leave

They’ve pushed their way back to Finn and Rose. Poe is waving his sign wildly with one hand, his eyes fixed on his phone; Rey has been pulling him most of the way as he shouts out updates and texts frantically. “Leah’s gone to Brooklyn!” he tells her. “They got a federal judge out of bed and they’re going to hear the case!”

Rose’s eyes are still wet and her nose is red, but she’s handed her sign off to Finn, who’s holding it up with grim determination as Rose rummages through her bag. She hands a heat pack to a stranger and reaches out to Rey. “Your knuckles are bleeding!”

Rey looks down. It’s true; the cold has cracked her skin and her hand has left a tiny smear of blood above her pocket. Rose does not say, what happened to the gloves I got you for Chanukah? but she's clearly thinking it. They're perfectly good gloves, very soft, and Rey... keeps leaving them at home. Somehow.

“Did you hear?” Poe asks Rose. “The cops were blocking the AirTrain exits but Cuomo ordered them to stand down!” Rose nods eagerly, looking at her own phone, and the word cop makes Rey shift uneasily. She’s been ignoring her phone since she got here, but she’s been peripherally aware of its buzzing. Maybe she should look. She doesn’t want to. She wants to keep breathing this electric air.

“The taxi drivers have gone on strike!” Poe shouts, thrusting his fist into the air. Everyone around him turns. “No cabs to or from JFK until they let in the people they’re detaining!” Rey hugs herself, feeling the excitement building even higher around her.

”Mic check,” says al-Akbar’s raspy voice over a megaphone. There’s a ragged response. The lawyer raises his voice. “An emergency stay of the refugee ban has been requested. The case is now being heard at Cadman Plaza. We are requesting a support presence there.” He pauses to the let the message disperse. ”We are also in need of interpreters inside the terminal. If you speak Arabic or Farsi, please come to our assistance.” Rey looks to Poe. He hesitates.

“I don’t know the Iraqi dialect,” he tells Rose, “but I can say, you know, wait and documents and we are trying to help.”

“Can you say unresolved legal dispute?” Rose asks.

“Uh… probably? Niza' dusturee lam yatima Haluh. I think.”

“Probably good enough,” she tells him. Poe swallows and nods. He turns to look for an opening in the barrier, and that’s when all of them see the police vans pulling in.

The riot police climb out quickly and begin to form a line in front of the doors. The visors on their helmets are down. They hear the squeal of the megaphone again.

It’s Amilyn this time, her voice loud and firm. ”Please do not attempt to enter the terminal at this time if you do not have a US passport with you,” she says. She pauses and then adds, speaking louder, ”It is possible that the police may begin arresting people shortly. If you do not wish to be arrested, please feel free to go. We strongly encourage any undocumented people in the crowd to protect themselves by leaving.”

Rey can feel her phone buzz. She doesn’t look at it.

Disappearing message time is set to 1 Day

Kylo
This is extremely stupid
where are you

When she gets off the AirTrain, he’s waiting beside a trio of uniformed officers, a looming shadow in a black overcoat. Despite the governor’s orders, the cops are holding back a crowd of protestors, who stand with their signs under their arms and their phones in their hands, trying to argue their way in. Rey pushes through the turnstile and past Kylo, ignoring him and his scowl and what might be a look of relief. “They want people at Cadman Plaza,” she tells a greying man in the front of the crowd. He turns to his wife, and they and a number of protesters begin to peel away and back towards the A train platform.

“They’re supposed to let us in,” says a belligerent young man in a puffer coat.

“I know,” says Rey, casting a black look at Kylo, “but they say they’re going to start arresting people.”

The remaining crowd shuffles. They draw back a little. A woman and her friend hold up their signs. “WE <3 OUR MUSLIM NEIGHBORS” says one. “NO BAN – NO WALL – SANCTUARY FOR ALL” says the other. They start to chant.

”Let them in. Let them in.”

The crowd picks it up and it’s Kylo’s turn to give her a nasty look. He closes his hand around her wrist and tugs. The young man in the puffer coat steps towards them. Kylo flashes his badge and the young man holds up his phone, swiping through to the camera. “Are you arresting this woman?” he asks loudly. The chant is still going, but the young man has several friends with him and they all step towards Rey and Kylo. Kylo makes a low, rumbling noise in his throat. Rey does not need this now.

“No,” she says quickly. “He’s my – cousin. He was just worried about me.” She turns to Kylo. “You shouldn’t use your badge when you’re off-duty, Kyle.” She turns her wrist in his leather grip and grabs his hand, pulling him towards the Manhattan-bound platform.

Finn has Poe’s phone.

Leah Organa
Daniel Juan Polansky, my precious, darling imbecile, what are you doing?

“Leah wants to know what you’re doing,” he shouts, over the heads of the six or seven people between them.

“Tell her I’m busy!” Poe shouts back.

Me
Finn here. Poe’s climbing a police barrier.
Leah Organa
WHY
Me
To get to the police, I think? So he can go in and interpret.
Leah Organa
WELL MAKE HIM STOP
IMMEDIATELY

Finn looks back at Poe. Rabbi Holdon has appeared beside him, her hand on his elbow and an extremely stern look on her face. He starts to weave his way towards them, Rose holding to his belt so she doesn’t lose him in the crowd.

Me
R. Holdon has him I think
Leah Organa
GOOD.
Don’t let him get her, or any of you delightful and utterly irreplaceable children, into trouble.
Me
Ill do my best
Leah Organa
PLEASE

Poe and the rabbi are nose-to-nose. Poe’s voice is so full of passion it shakes. “I have to do this. If I can help, I have to help. Are you going to tell me otherwise?”

“I’m telling you, if you want to help, go home, get your passport, and come back. I’m asking you to consider your own safety.”

“My safety?  Fuck my safety. We have to show them that we’re ready, that we won’t go quietly just because they brought out the enforcers. We have to show them that if they’re ready to use the tools of government to do things like this, we’re ready to become ungovernable.”

“Daniel,” Rabbi Holdon says sternly, “go home. Get your passport. And come. Back. Through the proper doors, not by trying to fight your way through a line of riot police.”

Finn takes a step forward. “Poe, Leah thinks you should get your passport and come back.”

“How did she even know…” Poe begins, and as if on cue, a new message arrives:

Leah Organa
Has he climbed his brave little toaster of a tuchus down yet? We're about to be heard; I don't have time for this shit.

Finn holds the phone out. Poe looks grim, but he takes the phone and steps away from the barrier.

This makes three times now she’s grabbed his hand. This is some kind of gambit, he decides, some sort of pretty-girl power-play to keep him disoriented, thinking about her touch. But his blood is up; he’s furious with her for making him worry, and it makes him sharp. As soon as they’re away from the crowd and on the platform, he pushes her coat sleeve back and examines her hand. She realizes what he’s doing and yanks it back, but it’s too late; he can see he was right. The mark on her wrist is old. It’s distorted; she’s grown since she got it. And there’s another mark he hadn’t noticed before, a suspiciously straight line down the webbing between her thumb and first finger. He feels smug, at being right, and also furious, at what he’s right about.

“How did you know where I’d be?” she asks suspiciously.

“If you were going to have the sense to leave, you’d take the exit for the A, not the E,” he tells her. “You obviously live uptown, despite what your ID says. And you were the girl in the story about Luke.”

“I live in the Bronx,” she says, turning her head away. The high black collar of her dress only makes her neck look more delicate. It wounds him, how beautiful she is, how hurt she’s been, how she won’t let him help; it’s a fucking attack. “Shouldn’t you be back there, looking for more activist to blackmail?

“Maybe I would be,” he counters, “if the informant I’ve got weren’t busy endangering an existing investigation. What the fuck were you thinking?” He doesn’t say, you ignored my texts.

“I was thinking,” she says sternly, “about refugees being turned away because of an obviously unjust order. Being sent back into danger because of racist, Islamophobic policies.”

He turns to her, ready to ask, and so you decided to disrupt the flow of other people’s lives about it?  As if your shouting could change a law? But the A pulls up, louder than he wants to try to shout over, and Rey hurries aboard and into a seat by the window. He crams himself into the one next to her, and as she settles, the skirt of her dress rides up and exposes an inch of thigh between the hem and the tops of her tall socks. Oh, this is aggression. That stripe of bare skin, just the width he could trace with two fingertips, in between her folded down sock and her rucked-up skirt and her fallen-back coat like a present in tissue paper – she’s trying to hurt him, rubbing his nose in what he can't have; it’s not fair.

She hears him breathing harshly through his nose and turns to see him looking at her with his mouth tight; she hates his bad temper and what he does and the fact that she can smell him again, here on the warm train, that smell that’s half gin-soaked midnight and half cold Atlantic sea, and so very – she licks her lips. At least the train is running express.

“Ah, I see,” he says, and she shivers. His voice is a dark well, each word a heavy stone dropped in. “Of course.”

“Of course what?”

“Power. You like power.” His black eyes search hers. “You're drunk on it; you chase it.” His voice drops, so low she can barely hear him. “You get off on it.”

“What – what power?”

“The power of the crowd. The mob. The power to stop traffic and break windows and overturn cars. You couldn’t do it yourself, but in the crowd you can. It’s why you took my hand, that first night. To make me feel it.”

She remembers the thrill that ran through her that night, that she felt again tonight. “That’s the power of the people.”

“Don’t make it sound patriotic. It’s destructive. It’s a tacit threat, you people in the street like that. You do it for power, to unsettle people. Like – that.” He gestures at her. She doesn’t understand.

“Like what?”

He curls his soft lip at her, and Rey stares back, bewildered. He hesitates, then slowly reaches out with one black-gloved hand and smooths her skirt down over the tops of her socks. Her stomach does something strange. “You like how uncomfortable it makes me, don’t you?”

She jumps from bewilderment to outrage like a gas stove catching flame, heat filling her. “What are you, the modesty police? If you don’t like it, don’t look."

"I didn't say I didn't like it," he says softly. "That's why it's power."

She doesn't say anything at first. The train is filling up as they head towards Manhattan, and when she doesn't reply he just waits. Her heart is going fast; she's filled with heat and confusion and yes, power, and someone nearby has their music turned up too loud in their ears; she can hear the song, faintly, a bleak falsetto spilling over: look what you've done...

She reaches down and slowly pulls her hem back up. He sucks in his breath.

Rey pitches her own voice low. "You like it?" Beside her, he exhales waveringly, and she can feel his eyes on her. "Yes?"

He doesn't answer, but he reaches out, and the leather of his glove hovers just over her skin. He freezes there, not quite touching, so she eases her thighs just a little further open. It brings her knee against his, too, and he makes a strangled sound and yanks his glove off, dropping his bare fingers down to squeeze her leg. "Yes," he whispers, and he rubs his thumb into her. "Yes. I like it."

She was hot before but now, fuck, oh fuck, she's wet. She'd wanted him to want her; she could admit that much, but that isn't all she wanted, and now that his hand is on her, warming her thigh, she has to admit that, too. A strange feeling is running through her, to do with wanting. To do with getting.

She doesn’t say anything, but she’s sure he can hear how she’s breathing. He moves his hand, by such small degrees, in such good time with the lurch of the train, that at first she thinks he’s trying to pass it off as accidental. But it isn’t that long before more of his hand is under her skirt than not, his whole hot hand on her bare skin, fingers moving just enough to stir the fabric of her dress a little.

She leans into him, pushing her breast against his arm, and murmurs, "Do you want to take me home?"

His grip tightens on her thigh, and his head nods, jerkily. But then he lurches up out of his seat and she shrinks with fear; has he changed his mind, seen something about her? She probably smells – the skin on her hands is dry – her hair is frizzing – but he's looking at her like he's waiting for something.

"Where are you going?" she asks.

He takes her by the elbow and pulls her up and against him. "I live on the Q," he tells her, "and I am not riding into Manhattan to make that transfer and come all the way back out. This is downtown Brooklyn; I'm going to hail a fucking cab."

A cab. The taxi driver's strike. She’s running away from a protest to go fuck a cop. Cold runs through her as they emerge from the train, but she doesn’t stop. She feels pushed by something she can’t name or resist. She feels marked by his fingers on her skin. She follows him up the stairs to Hoyt St, and she slips Finn a text.

Me
safe. out late. pls call if u need me

Poe looks stony, standing on the platform under the sodium lights. Rose is trying to console him. “There isn’t much to tell, at this stage, so probably there was only very limited use for interpreters. You couldn’t have done much.”

“I could have tried,” Poe says stubbornly. “Maybe I could have comforted someone. They have children in there, you know; they’re holding children.”

“I do know,” says Rose, quietly, “actually.”

They’re all quiet, for a moment. Finn remembers Rey as a child, layers and layers of wary ferocity plastered over the sweetness at the core of her. Afraid to cry and unable to altogether stop crying. He hopes she’s getting home safely. He hopes whatever Poe’s plan is, it hasn’t made her endanger herself tonight.

Poe’s phone beeps. He takes it out and his face brightens immediately. ”They’ve won an emergency stay of the order!” he shouts, for the whole platform to hear. There are cheers and scattered applause, and Rose sags against Finn’s chest. He gathers her to him, rocking.

“I knew Leah could do it,” she says. “Well, Leah and the ACLU and a bunch of other lawyers who ran to help. It’s only a temporary stay, but they have to let them in now.” There are so many ghosts for her here; Finn can only imagine. He kisses the top of her head.

“A temporary stay,” Poe echoes, darkness falling over his face again. “For temporary peace.”

Which reminds Finn: “Poe, what did you mean at that meeting last month, about Starbucks windows?”

Poe sighs. His expression doesn’t lighten. “It was just… something for Rey to pass along. A signal.”

Finn does not feel reassured. But Rose is crying now, very quietly; he unzips his jacket and tucks her inside, closer to his heart.

In the cab they find themselves seated a modest distance apart.

“You understand,” Kylo says, in a stony tone, “that this won’t change anything. I won’t treat you or your friends differently.”

“How upright of you,” she replies icily. “Not to bend the rules for the source you’re blackmailing.”

He shifts in his seat, agitated, blanching. “I’m not blackmailing you into this. I can take you back to the train right now if you want; it won’t effect anything; we can forget anything happened – or was – said.” He leans towards the driver, but she grabs his hand.

“No! All right?” she says, and then more softly, “No. I’m not doing this so you’ll let me go. Though you should let me go.”

He calms, lowering his voice again. “So why are you doing it?”

She turns away and looks out the window at the small Brooklyn shops with their lowered grates. After a moment she feels him peeling back her skirt, feels his warm grip on her leg again. She shivers. “I want to,” she whispers, not looking at him. He makes a little humming sound and pushes his hand further up. She looks back at him. His eyes are restless, moving over her. “Isn’t this… isn’t this indecent exposure or something? Isn’t this something you’d arrest someone for?”

“No,” he says, “this isn’t indecent exposure.” He pushes her dress up all the way to her hips and runs his fingers slowly over her white cotton underwear. “This might be indecent exposure.” She curses her hips for the desperate way they rock into his hand. She curses herself for her momentary wish that she had something silky, that she were shaved or waxed, that she might please him, do something to him.

She flicks her skirt back down. “The driver,” she says. “Be respectful. Of him.” Kylo’s mouth turns sulky, and he slides his hand down, but he doesn’t withdraw it; stubbornly, he hooks two fingers into the top of her sock, and they ride like that, in silence, to Flatbush.

Chapter Text

Rey keeps her face turned to the street. Kylo tries to decide how he’s going to feel about this. Other than how he’s feeling now, which is. (Rey moves her leg.) Which. (Look at her. Fuck.) Thinking is a little difficult. (Pulling her skirt up like that on the train; shit.) What was he trying to think about again? No. He’s a smart boy, he can do this. He has to be clear about what is happening here. She’s high on her street-theatre mishegoss and she wants to get fucked. And Kylo is very willing to accommodate her there. And if he can give her what she wants, she might not go looking to somebody else next time she wants it; she might come back to him instead. If he can do it right.

He tries to puzzle it through, but also he refuses to take his hand off her leg, which is very soft and warm. They’re not far from his apartment; he pictures her in his bed. Or up against his wall. Or on his kitchen table. Where her glove is. Shit. He’ll have to keep her from seeing, somehow.

She cranes her head, looking at some women who are loitering on a corner despite the cold, leaning against a windowless van. “Would you arrest them?” she asks. “If you were on duty?”

“If I were on duty I’d be doing something else,” he says. He’s not in vice, and it’s not like he just walks around by himself arresting people. “They’re not really my problem.”

“But they are a police problem.”

“Generally speaking,” he shrugs.

“They’re just trying to make money.”

“You could say that about anyone. Drug dealers are just trying to make money, too.”

“Maybe I don’t think you should arrest drug dealers, either.”

He tries to disguise his eye-rolling by looking out the window on his side. “Drug dealers aren’t really my beat either. Next block,” he tells the driver. “Corner’s fine. Thanks.”

When he looks back to her she’s frowning at him. He’s beginning to feel quite annoyed, which is an interesting mix with his desire to pull her into his lap. Since they’re about to get out of the cab anyway, maybe she’d allow it.

He takes out his wallet to pay and she slides right up next to him all on her own. “Suppose,” she says, fierce but very quiet, “that I asked you for money for this. Would you have to arrest me?”

He doesn’t want to answer that. With his credit card in his hand, he’s reminded of how poor she is. Has she ever – to make rent? He doesn’t want to think. “You wouldn’t,” he says, and gets out of the taxi.

She stays inside for a moment; she says something softly to the driver that he doesn’t catch. When she climbs out, her face is chilly in the way he remembers from the museum, and for a moment he wants to do what he did then and just run from her. Then she puts her hand inside his coat, flat against his chest. Her face doesn’t warm, but she slides her hand down his stomach to his belt. She draws a little half-moon with her thumb just over his hipbone. The wind picks up as the cab drives off. He pulls her close and lowers his face to kiss her, but she ducks him, pressing her nose against his shirt and inhaling deeply.

Like any civilized human being, Kylo lives above a bodega, and he draws her around the storefront to the door. She insists on talking as he fumbles with the keys. “If I did ask you for money, though. Would you arrest me right then, or would you fuck me first? Or would you just pay and forget it?”

There’s a desperation, and a provocation, in her tone. She hasn’t, he thinks. The thought scares her. She’s just trying to bait me. He is, unfortunately, extremely easy to bait. “You think every cop is corrupt? Is that it?” He starts up the stairs.

“Well,” she says, following, “you are about to fuck the source you’ve been blackmailing for information so I’m not seeing a lot of counter-evidence here.”

He stops on the landing. She might get high on stopping traffic and fucking with his head, but really, anger is his personal drug and she is proving to be an excellent supplier. He grinds his teeth, forces his jaw to unlock. “I thought the system was the problem.” She joins him on the landing, chin raised, looking belligerent. And wild-eyed and a little breathless. “So why are you so intent on whether or not I’m personally corrupt? Is that why you asked me to take you home? Because you want to fuck a dirty cop? If I was too ethical, you wouldn’t want me to fuck you; is that it?”

She doesn’t answer; her breath comes faster and he knows he’s hit something. He seizes her around the waist, and spins her around, facing away from him. With deliberation, he reaches down and takes hold of her wrists, and puts her hands up against the wall, spread out over her head, as if he’s about to frisk her. He holds her there, pressing the hard-on she’s given him against her lovely ass. She’s trembling and breathing hard, and he senses something in her, through his crimson high of anger and lust. Something familiar, that he knows how to feed.

“You don’t deserve any better than this, do you?” he asks, and she whimpers, and fuck there’s no blood left in his head, but he keeps talking, grinding himself against her. “Keep your hands there. Keep your hands right there. Don’t fucking move.” He wraps his left arm around her, reaches inside her coat to grab her breast through her dress. The dress is velvety and her bra must be thin; she feels so soft. His other hand trembles as he uses it to gather up her dress; he remembers her innocent white panties and he wants to see them on the floor right here.

“You don’t deserve to be kissed,” he tells her, as he finds them with his fingers, and she throws her head back against his shoulder, shaking it or just thrashing, he can’t even tell, but her hands stay on the wall. “You self-righteous little brat. You don’t deserve to be fucked, or even brought inside. You deserve to get fingered by a dirty cop in a dirty stairwell, like the dirty little nobody you are.” He pushes her panties down her thighs, and keeps pushing until he hears them pat to the dusty floor. He runs his hand back up the inside of her leg and finds coarse curls and a slickness that makes him swallow hard. Maybe he’s not the world’s leading expert on women, but he has found what she needs to hear; he’s figured it out, and he has her squirming for him, begging wordlessly for his touch.

For a moment he just enjoys it, holding her tightly, feeling her little tit in his hand and knowing that she’s writhing against his cock like that because she wants him to touch her, that she’s panting because he’s teasing her with soft little strokes of his fingers on her inner thigh, when she’s desperate for him to rub her where she’s warmest and wettest. Then he gives in, because how can he resist it? Sliding up among her curls and letting her show him where she needs it with the rocking of her hips.

He moves his left hand to her other breast. “You dressed up.” She groans and pushes herself down harder on his fingers. “You dressed up like such a nice, modest girl, and look at you. Who do you think you’re fooling, hmm?” Breathlessly, he chuckles in her ear. “Not me.” She doesn’t reply, just grunts from between clenched teeth, and still she clings to the wall where he put her hands. He’s dying to feel inside her, this soft, sweet girl, so he does; he crooks a finger and works his way inside her.

She wails. He can barely breathe. ”Fuck,” he chokes out against her hair, “so – fucking – tight – fuck – ” He thrusts against her, frantically, involuntarily. He gasps air, trying to keep his fingers moving and his mind and body from disintegrating against her. Fuck. Right. He was talking to her. Fuck.

“Do you think,” he grits out, “you deserve to come?” And for the first time she answers him.

“No,” she sobs. “No.”

He beckons with his finger inside her and her back arches; she moves her hips desperately. “But you’re going to, aren’t you? Gonna come for me anyway?” For a single, straining second she doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t let up, doesn’t stop, and then she nods and he crushes her against him as her cunt clenches down on his finger and she spasms against him.

He doesn’t notice when her hands come off the wall, but suddenly one is holding him by the hair just above his nape, and the other clamps down over his, keeping it between her legs. “What about you?” she hisses. “You vicious, corrupt, dirty bastard, you think you deserve to come?” She presses herself back against him; the roll of her hips is cruel and delicious. “You cowardly, self-loathing fraud, you think you deserve to get off?”

He can’t even answer; he just wants more of whatever she’s giving him. But her hand tightens demandingly in his hair, and he shakes his head. No. He doesn’t. He deserves nothing, and he feels everything – she’s still rubbing herself against his hand, so wet, so good, her ass so sweet against his cock, it feels so fucking good – and he comes, in his pants, like a teenager, nuzzling helplessly into her neck.

She smells like sweat, and sex, and sweet whole cloves and cardamom. There’s nothing left of him but the smell of her.

She doesn’t know what to do, after. With him or herself. She lets go of his hand and his hair, but he doesn’t really move, leaning his heavy body against her and making strange snuffling noises against her skin. The sound of it stabs into her, tiny shards of sadness. She stays still, straining under his weight. Her mind is a blank, wiped clean by orgasm and a deeper, more painful satisfaction. He did know. He saw. The truth about me.

She aches.

He keeps his left arm wrapped around the front of her, but he slowly slides his right away from where she’d held him between her thighs. It makes an obscene sound. She shuts her eyes.

At least he’s breathing more normally, now. She shifts a little, prompting him to stand on his own feet. He shakes himself and withdraws entirely, letting her skirt fall back to her knees. They’re both drenched in sweat, and when he leaves her standing alone, cold air rushes in. She looks down at her underwear; the floor is disgusting; she can’t possibly put them back on after they’ve been down there.

She steps out of them and bends down to pick them up. Kylo puts his hand out, like he wants to ask her for them, but oh no fucking way. He has enough to hold over her head. And anyway she only has eight pairs. She tucks them in her coat pocket.

He looks flushed and red-eyed, as if he’d run a mile through a blizzard, and she can’t imagine she looks much better.

“Do you want my badge number?” he asks. She stares at him. “You know. So you can report me to the Civilian Complaint Review Board.”

“I don’t know,” she asks, “are they deporting people somewhere nice these days? Bermuda, maybe?”

He shrugs, with a barely-detectible eye-roll. “I haven’t checked the news for two whole hours; there’s no knowing what immigration policy is now.”

His dry tone and the roll of his brown eyes like a reproach to heaven – he really is Leah Organa’s son, isn’t he. She almost – wants to –

“Speaking of frauds,” he says, not quite looking at her, “where did you get that accent?”

Oh no. This she does not need, this she will not put up with. “Which way to the Q?” She starts down the stairs. “Never mind, I’ll figure it out.”

She hears him start down after her. “But – ”

“I’ll see you next time you want me to inform on my friends,” she says, and gets herself out the door.

Outside there’s a freezing wind, and her bloodied knuckles sting. Rose, she think, Rose must be so upset, and I’m not there. She digs out her phone to look for the way to the train; she has a dozen texts, from Finn, from Poe, from Leah. Just one from Rose.

Rose
be safe

Rey can’t believe herself. She heads for the subway, trying not to think of where she’s coming from. She has Finn. They’ll comfort each other. They won’t need me.

They won’t miss me.

She shakes herself, and walks faster.

Finn wakes up because Rey falls down. He knows immediately, as if with the instincts of a parent, that she is crying. He eases himself out of Rose's arms and finds himself some pants. At least it's a Saturday, and none of them have to be anywhere tomorrow.

Not only has Rey fallen, she's dropped the vodka. She looks up at him miserably. "Don't come close. I think – I must smell awful."

"How much did you drink?" he asks her cautiously.

"Who cares." Her voice is desolate. He sits down on the floor by her, avoiding the puddle of alcohol. What a day it's been for all of them. Day, week, month, election cycle, decade, era. What a dumb fucking broken world it is. "Is Rose okay?"

"Yeah. She's asleep."

"I'm so sorry I wasn't there." She's wiping her tears with her wrists.

"Rey, you know we didn't want you to stay if it was going to be dangerous for you." He keeps his voice soft, neutral.

"I read all you guys's texts," she tells him. "I know I couldn't actually have helped anything, but I would have liked to be there."

He thinks he understands. He puts his hand out for hers, and she takes it, so at first he thinks this isn't going to be one of those nights, but then she won't take her eyes off her hand in his.

"Do you think people can tell?" she whispers. "Just by looking?"

Finn sighs. "Of course not, Rey." He hasn’t found that there’s much point asking, do you genuinely think anyone would think the worse of you for it?

"Rose gave me gloves," she says. "Why don't I ever wear them?"

Oh, it's one of those nights all right. He wonders again how much she drank before it spilled. "Because you freak out whenever someone's nice to you, Rey."

"But you're all always so nice to me. Nobody's ever been anything but nice to me since Maz got me."

"And this is the other problem," he says, patiently, "where you say 'nice' and you think it means 'overgenerous' and what you're actually referring to is, like, 'not inhumanely awful.'"

"No, but I mean like, I know, I deserve some things."

"Good first step, yes." He tries to keep the irony out of his voice. She really is trying, he knows.

"But there's, like, food and shelter and clean water and basic education, and then there's, like, extra tutoring and hair-brushing and torah study and candy -- "

He speaks as firmly as he can without worrying that he'll wake up Rose. "REY. You know we've had this conversation."

"Yes." She sounds almost sulky.

"And?"

Reluctantly: "And if I think about it in third-person it doesn't seem that unreasonable."

"If I could tell you your own story without you knowing it was you, you would demand all that for that little girl. All that and more. And you would not be wrong." She nods, but she still looks mutinous, ready to argue, and he’s fucking sick of it. If his mind is a book-lined room, there are several volumes marked Childhood he prefers to keep on a low shelf behind a chair, but he’s not Rey; he knows where they are and he chooses when to open them. He reckons up the cost, and chooses now. “Wouldn’t you have wanted that for me?”

She throws her arms around his neck, weeping instantly. “Of course. Of course. Finn. You know I would want you to have everything. The whole wide world. Oh Finn.”

It’s his nuclear option, a dirty trick to play on both of them. But it works. She won’t argue now. "We should get to bed. Let's clean up the vodka."

He gets up and gets the sponge and the paper towels. She doesn't move from her spot on the floor, though she reaches up her unscarred hand to take the sponge. "This is such a Guessing Game item. Because I spilled all the vodka."

Finn feels ill. He knows she both is and isn’t joking. They played the Guessing Game, when they were young, casually brutalizing each other and themselves. What it set out to guess was Why Your Parents Left You. Finn knew, more or less; his father was dead and his mother was too sad to be a mother and then pretty soon she was dead too. He had played because it felt better to imagine that his parents were just mad and they'd forgive him soon and come back. Come back, and save him. And so they'd sat on swings and lawns and park benches: Because I dropped a big stack of dishes, like twenty whole dishes. Because I let the cat escape. Because I bit the teacher. Because I stole the car and crashed it into a tree. Because I set the house on fire. Because I said I'd brushed my teeth but really I hadn't.

It was not the sort of game you won.

He doesn't reply, and Rey whispers, "I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it. Just let's get this cleaned up and go to bed."

There’s a lot of vodka on the floor. Finn hugs Rey, partly out of affection and partly to confirm what he had begun to suspect when she hugged him before: she does not smell much like alcohol at all. She doesn’t smell quite like herself, either.

She made it home safe, and that’s what matters. He returns to Rose’s arms, cold, and haunted by all the things he can’t know.

She still sends him reports on her group’s acitvity. Of course she does; she thinks he’ll turn her over to be deported if she doesn’t.

Signal

Disappearing message time set to 1 Day

R
poe’s calling for a special meeting
wants everyone there even casuals
the whole mailing list

After the way she left, it isn’t as though he was expecting her to text him, like, kisses or pictures or thx 4 the orgasm sorry i ran out on you like that it was mean of me wanna get a $ slice fri? He just… he doesn’t know what and it doesn’t matter, anyway. He could definitely get hard here in the office if he thought for a minute about her whimpering with helpless pleasure in his arms or lifting her skirt for him on the train, or even just about her hair stirring with his breath against her ear, but he isn’t going to think about that so it doesn’t matter.

Maybe next time she wants it she’ll go to Poe. Poe doesn’t understand her the way I do. It doesn’t matter.

Disappearing message time set to 1 Day

Kylo
Do you know why?

R
says he wants communal input on strategic directions

Kylo
Do you know what he means by that?

R
pretty sure it means he’s mad at amilyn

That does matter. He goes to debrief, where Hux is trying to make a big deal out of the fact that a mosque said a special prayer for refugees, and when his partner is done pretending that he even knows how many prayers there usually are on a given day, he says, “The group I’m tracking is experiencing division.”

“Oh?” asks Snoke. “The usual kind?”

“The faction in favor of escalating violence is challenging the more peaceful faction.”

“’Peaceful.’” Snoke adds derisive air quotes. “Is your source in a position of influence in the group?”

Is she? It doesn’t seem like it. But he bets she could talk Poe into something if she really wanted to. Maybe Amilyn, too, if she’s willing to play on her sympathy. “Potentially, yes.”

Snoke futzes with a pen. Kylo knows what he’s deciding – encourage division to keep them weak, or empower the troublemakers and use the trouble to wipe them off the map? Making a little moue, Snoke says, “Tell her to back the violent ones.”

Disappearing message time set to 1 Day

Kylo
Back Poe.

R
why? don’t u think hes the bad guy here?

Kylo
Just do it.

It looks ugly, that text. She doesn’t answer. Who can blame her.

He’d told her she didn’t have to come with him, that he wasn’t blackmailing her into that, that nothing would change if she told him no. She’d believed him, hadn’t she?

No Chai Coalition meeting has ever been this big. Rey thinks there are probably people here who just heard of them last weekend for the first time. Even Rose is here, when the law library usually comes first. It feels like Leah, who’s flying cross-country to help present an argument to the Ninth Circuit, is the only person they know who isn’t in attendance. Amilyn’s shul is packed.

If it didn’t make her feel so terrible, she might almost have enjoyed watching Poe and Amilyn argue. Poe is a master at his game, but he doesn’t always know his audience; his decision to meet on a Sunday and invite absolutely everyone means that there are a lot more older people in the crowd than usual, and they react better to Amilyn’s declaration that providing direct aid is a mitzvah than to his assertion that they need to leverage their relative privilege in order to interrupt systemic evils. But Amilyn simply doesn’t have answers to some of Poe’s points. In the face of life-threatening injustice, is their resistance really going to stop at permitted protest?

“I pray it never reaches that level of evil,” she says.

Grimly, Poe answers, “Can we say that it hasn’t already?”

It’s one thing to vow to hide your neighbors; what if your neighbors have already been found? Not for the first time, she imagines herself on a cot in a windowless room, without books or classes or friends or anything to do but sit in fear and await the next move of a bureaucracy she can’t comprehend or question.

“If we want to do good,” says Poe, “at a certain point, we are going to have to stop being nice.”

“They want to sow division,” Poe had told her, “but the disagreement is real; they can’t create or destroy it. What we need to do is stay as unified as we can. If the majority is against me, I won’t create a splinter group.”

“What if you win?”

“I’m prepared to make concessions, and I’m not actually advocating for violence here, so I don’t think Amilyn will split either. Don’t tell your cop that, though – that I’m not for violence.”

“He told me to side with you.”

Poe shrugged, laughing. “Follow your heart, bubbele!”

Tentatively, she raises her hand. They’re not technically to the public comment part of the agenda yet, but Rey has technically been elevated to a leadership position – Poe has listed her on the website as an “Administrative Advisor.” Rey has no idea what that means.

Amilyn looks surprised and concerned to see her raise her hand, but she doesn’t hesitate to call on her. Rey approaches the microphone in the aisle. Hesitantly, she says, “I had read… in Los Angeles… there was a group of rabbis who chained themselves to an ICE van?”

She pauses. Poe gives her an encouraging look. He’s so brave. He’s so sure.

She says, “Help doesn’t have to be material. Toothpaste and blankets are good and important. But knowing that someone who doesn’t know you is willing to put themselves on the line for you – I think that’s a kind of help, too.”

“Hear, hear,” says Poe. Amilyn nods, slowly.

The floor is opened for public comment and it’s chaos. Just the expected kind, though. After all, it’s only math – 100 Jews means 150 opinions.

Disappearing message time set to 1 Day

Kylo
Meet me again this Saturday.
The Met.

R
need to make sure im doing your bidding huh

Kylo
Should I trust you to do it unsupervised?
I don’t think you’d be flattered if I did.

R
im not asking to be flattered

Kylo
I think I know that.

She doesn’t reply. He starts to feel cold. Vicious, corrupt, dirty. He’d said what he’d said because he’d thought she was like him, thought it was something she needed, but he hadn’t meant it. Did she mean it? He goes to the bathroom and locks the door and bangs his head against the mirror. Cowardly, self-loathing fraud. Oh Rachel, Rachel, you have no idea.

When it’s all over, Poe agrees to amend his motion, which had initially declared that they should prioritize systemic disruption, to say that they will prioritize institutional change via grassroots action in concert with other methods. The motion carries with 63% percent of the vote. Amilyn promises to extend the opportunity to vote to those who may have been unable to attend, and Poe promises to regard that eventual total as a binding result, but they know who’s won.

Chai Coalition will begin planning direct action.

Rey’s washed her black dress in the tub, but she’s afraid it still somehow smells like… smells unclean. She borrows Finn’s bike and rides miles on snowy paths through Van Cortlandt Park, so she’ll be tired enough to fall asleep as soon as she lays herself down on her bed. But still she wakes up in the middle of the night, gasping, wet between her legs, with a dark chuckle in her ear. What’s worse, one morning she opens her eyes and the memory that clings isn’t his voice or his smell or his fingers inside her but the soft friction of his face against her neck and the sad, puppyish sound he’d made.

She goes to the park on foot. She needs advice and she doesn’t want a single soul in this fucking city to hear her ask for it. She dials the number.

He doesn’t pick up. Hello; you’ve reached Rav Luke Skywalker. Please leave your message after the tone.

“Hi Luke,” she says, shakily. “It’s Rey. I, uh, I’m sorry I haven’t called in a while. I’m afraid I haven’t seen Leah in a while, but if I had I’m sure she’d say hi. Anyway, I, um. I met your nephew?” And he blackmailed me with my immigration status into becoming a police spy and then I let him finger me in a stairwell and rubbed him off and now I don’t even know what my question is. “Anyway I could use some advice I guess. If you have time. So if you could call me back or send me a text or whatever; I know you hate the way I text but I promise to spell out ‘you’ with all three letters if you do text me… anyway, Finn would say hi, too, if he knew I was calling. Hope you’re doing well. Bye!”

She waits, but he never does call her back, and then it is Saturday, and it’s time to go meet Kylo again.

Chapter Text

This time she wears job-interview pants and a white blouse. Tries to make herself feel sterile and professional. As if she’d never even think of having sex, much less weird unhealthy sex where he reminds her that she’s worthless and she loves it. Dressed up like such a nice, modest girl, whispers his hot-tar voice. She shivers.

She takes her coat off in the entrance hall and puts it under her arm. It’s clear Kylo’s been watching the door, but he doesn’t come towards her; only his eyes move as she walks towards him. He looks like death warmed over. Like he had the last time she saw him, but worse; his eyes are still red, but now there are shadows under his eyes so dark it looks almost inhuman. Why this should conspire to make him look younger, she doesn’t know.

Admissions stickers on their clothes, they wander the halls. He hasn’t said a word to her. At first his steps seem determined, as if he knows where he means to go, but as they come face-to-face with an enormous cage of dark wood, he slows and looks around him as if he doesn’t know how they got there. He strikes off hurriedly for another gallery, but it seems clear that he’s just wandering now. Still he doesn’t speak to her.

They pass by saints and angels, scores of Madonnas. Gilded dishes and fragile furniture. Finally she gets sick of walking in silence; in a narrow gallery of statues, she comes to a halt. For a moment, Kylo stares at a white marble statue of a woman with a knife in her breast; then he wrenches his eyes away, face twisting, and manages to talk. “Do you want to tell me what happened at the meeting?”

“Amilyn said we should be making bad circumstances better, Poe said we should try to end bad circumstances by any means necessary.” Another phrase Poe recommended. Kylo’s head jerks. “They argued back and forth for a while. I said I had heard of drastic measures working sometimes. Poe said that was right. Then they opened the floor and a hundred Jews yelled at each other for an hour and a half; the old observant people were loud, and the old commies were louder. We quibbled about phrasing for another hour, and then Poe won.” Kylo doesn’t say anything. “I sent you the minutes.” He nods, but he’s still silent.

She waits. He’s looking at her searchingly again, but it feels less accusatory, somehow. As the look goes on and on, she feels her own face shift from defiance to puzzlement. He looks miserable.

At last he speaks. “You know,” he mumbles, “how important this is to me?” She blinks. “This investigation. I need you as a source.”

“I’m not lying,” she says, indignantly.

“I know that!” He sounds like he’s choking. “I mean. What I mean is – if I were to – exercise any power over you. That would endanger my investigation. So I would never do that. For my own – gratification.” He hasn’t taken off his overcoat, and sweat is glinting at his hairline.

It takes her a moment to even process what he’s talking about. “I told you that I wanted to.”

“You might have – felt you had to say that,” he counters.

“Are we having this meeting because you want to hear what happened at the Chai vote or because you wanted to ask me if you’d raped me?”

“Both,” he replies, with a frankness that takes her a little aback.

“Well,” she says, after a moment, “it’s a shitty power dynamic, but I didn’t feel… coerced.”

It hadn’t been obvious, how tensely he’d been drawn into himself, until he relaxes. That’s what had made him look younger, she realizes: he’d been terrified. And, she thinks, if he’d thought it had been his power as a cop that had forced her, he hadn’t been afraid she’d report him. He’d just been afraid he’d hurt her.

She remembers her own thought. Leah Organa’s son after all.

It ought not to soften her. It’s only… what had Finn said? Not inhumanely awful. But his eyes make him look like a frightened animal, like he’s been crying, is about to cry, and Rey is always too soft, with frightened animals and crying people. Oh, this stupid broken world. Oh, her stupid cracked heart.

“Do you have a favorite work?” she asks him. He blinks. “You said you like the Met; you must come here a lot. Do you have a favorite thing to come see?”

“It – it changes,” he says, after a moment. “What’s my favorite, and also what you can see. The thing that was my favorite when I was a kid isn’t on display anymore.”

“What was it?”

Kylo frowns, and sniffs a little. As if he really had been about to cry. “I don’t know it’s real name. I called it the star picture. It was mostly blue, with dark clouds at the bottom, and there was a woman, standing on a crescent moon, and a big dome of stars above her. The stars were all in nice neat lines. It looked like she was putting them in order.”

A little boy, admiring a picture of a woman who brings order to the stars. “You came here with your mother?”

“My father would never take me to such a palace of crummy gold-plated bourgeois excess, such a shameless display of the scumbag rich hoarding of what should be public property.”

She’s never met the man he’s impersonating, but she can’t help it; she smiles. “I’d nationalize the Met.”

“And let its budget be cannibalized? Let them sell off the Temple of Dendur in a budget crunch to a private collector who’d never let anyone see it all?” He starts to walk again. “Have you seen the Temple of Dendur? It’s in the Egyptian wing.”

She follows him. “Well, while I’m nationalizing it I’ll obviously segregate its budget. And how did the museum get an Egyptian temple, anyway?”

“It was a gift from the Egyptian government!” he says indignantly, as he heads down the hall.

He drags her down to the Temple of Dendur, away from the memory of his father following behind his mother, making up rude nicknames for all the rich people in the paintings. It’s a delightful half hour of watching her gape at the size of the thing, then admire all its details, washed in the winter sunlight from the great bank of windows that illuminate it, running from plaque to plaque to learn all about it. They stand in line to see the inside, and Rey stands so close to him he catches breaths of her smell again. It all feels quite strange. He almost smiles once.

He’s wondering if he can persuade her to go back upstairs and look at the illustrated Chinese scrolls when she turns to him. “Why did you change your name?”

This does not strike him as fair. “When I asked you a personal question, you ran away and left me.” To go upstairs in my humiliatingly sticky clothes and take your glove off the table and stuff it into a drawer and then throw a chair across the room.

She bites her lip, which, again, strikes him as vaguely unfair, but he can tell she isn’t flirting; he can see her swallow hard, and when she lets her lip go, it’s a little torn. “I’ll answer yours if you answer mine,” she says, quietly. “But let’s go somewhere with fewer – ” She jerks her head at the crowds of people surrounding them, families and tourists and couples arm-in-arm.

So he leads her to stairs to the rooftop garden, which has no exhibit, since it’s winter, and so has only a few curious tourists there for the view, who mostly take the elevator. He stands with her half-way up the stairs and tries to think what to say. He tells her what he usually tells himself: “I wanted a clean break.”

“Why? What did your family do to you?” She doesn’t quite sound accusatory. Not quite.

He holds himself still, wills himself to meet her eyes calmly and not with bitterness or tears. “For a long time I thought I was the disappointment, that I was the problem. They always told me they believed in justice, my family. My mother and my uncle. God is urgent about justice – ”

“For upon justice the world depends.”

“Yes, I guess he told you too. And nothing ever seemed fair to me, no matter how hard I tried to understand. I thought it was me; that I was too stupid or too cruel to understand justice. But when I saw – ” he clears his throat. “My father’s friend killed someone. And my uncle lied on the stand; he helped her walk, and she killed again, and that’s when it was clear to me that it was never really justice they cared about.”

Her eyes are wide and he waits for her to interrupt, but she doesn’t. A draft comes down the stairs ahead of some tourists, and Rey shivers; he steps a little closer to her. “All they cared about was protecting their own. And when I realized that, I decided I didn’t want to be one of their own anymore.”

He watches. All Rey says is, “I see,” in a voice he can’t read at all. She puts on her coat. Kylo thinks she’s going to leave the museum, leave him, but she turns her steps upwards, and he follows her.

It’s freezing in the garden on the roof. A few valiant visitors are taking photos of the frozen park and the Manhattan skyline, and a guard in a parka paces to keep warm. Rey walks to an empty corner and leans against the railing. “Not much to tell, really” she says. The wind sweeps her quiet voice to him. “He never spoke to me much. Just numbers. But the radio was always on. BBC World Service. I think I must have known a little English, before, but. Really I learned from the radio. Didn’t know what half the words meant, but I learned them.” She points to her throat. “I tried to lose it, later. But I only sounded stupid.” She looks out at city and the grey sky; he doesn’t think she’s seeing any of it. She’s forcing lightness into her voice as she says, “So yes, you’re right; it’s fake. Please don’t tell ICE that, though; I’m hoping to be deported somewhere I can speak the language.”

They both know that’s not how it works.

His voice is tight as piano wire. “Did you know his name?”

“Who?”

“The man who… you worked for. The man who never spoke to you.”

She shrugs, her face frozen. “It doesn’t matter.”

”IT DOES!” The shout echoes across the roof. Probably they heard him on Cathedral Parkway. The guard is approaching. “If you know his name, he could be prosecuted. And if you cooperate with the prosecution, you could get a T-visa – ”

“He’s dead,” she says. Her face is blank as a snowy meadow. “You can’t prosecute the dead.”

“You’re lying.” He stabs his finger towards her. He wishes it didn’t tremble.

The guard arrives, frowning. “No shouting.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Rey, and looks at Kylo.

“Sorry. About that,” he makes himself say, so the guard will leave. He is not sorry.

“He’s probably dead. Don’t you think it’s a little strange,” she says to him, as if they were discussing a plot hole in a movie, “that my freedom should ride on my willingness to send someone else to jail?”

He will not shout. If he shouts the guard will come back. “He ought to go to jail,” he says. His voice trembles with rage. He won’t shout, but he has to make himself heard. “To have gone. I remember that article. You were – enslaved.” His mother had clipped it out and put it on the fridge. One little girl in Rabbi Skywalker’s remarkable program had formerly been kept shackled by her wrist to an industrial sewing machine. When asked, she proudly reports having produced hundreds of garments per day. The shackle was not adjusted as she grew, and the resulting wound is still healing.

“I don’t know.” Her voice and her gaze are distant. Look at me, Rachel he thinks. Look at me and let me help you. “Who would it have helped, to make him suffer?”

“If he’d do it to you, he’d do it to someone else.”

“And if he had, Maz would have come and cut that person free, too.”

It’s freezing up here. He tears at his hair; the wind is picking up. “That’s glib, Rey; you can’t know – ”

“No,” she interrupts. “But I do know that if he’d gone to jail he would have suffered. Don’t you ever think about that? Doesn’t it ever trouble you? That you arrest people and they go to jail and they suffer?”

He wants to deny it. To claim he’s never imagined what follows after the bookings, the arraignments, the trials which are conducted with the facts he provides. He didn’t button up his overcoat when he came up the stairs and it’s blowing out behind him as the wind chews his bones. Dad being hit, Dad eating trash. Dad freezing in the winter, struggling to breathe in the thick summer heat. Dad in solitary for mouthing off, staring blankly at a blank wall.

He’s blind and frozen with his thoughts, and he almost jumps, to find Rey so close to him. Her face is soft with compassion, and he thinks she’ll embrace him. He aches for it. She reaches out. She buttons his coat closed.

The man who stands next to Rabbi Holdon is incredibly tall. Finn tutored members of the UCLA basketball team, and he thinks he’s never seen anyone that tall.

The rabbi, looking miniature beside her guest, is smiling her untroubled smile. “Please welcome Jesus Baccarin. Leah has asked him to join us today because in his work as an immigration lawyer, he advocates for many people detained by ICE, and he may be able to offer us insight.” The room claps. It’s more crowded than usual, which is (according to Poe, anyway) to the credit of the new strategic direction. “Welcome, Mr. Baccarin.”

The lawyer folds himself into a seat next to al-Akbar, and Poe springs up to present his plan, offering him a nod.

“Thanks for coming, Mr. Baccarin. So, as you all know, ICE has a facility here in Manhattan. There are detention cells, and there’s also a parking lot for their vans. I propose that we should form a cordon across the driveway of the parking lot, starting very early in the morning, to prevent the vans from leaving.”

“Won’t they just arrest us and keep on with business as usual?” Kaydel asks.

“There is some probability of arrest and some possibility of physical harm, but I think it’ll be worth it to interrupt their operations and draw attention to their presence. Because I think we can manage to draw substantial press, and probably social media attention.”

Finn sees his point, and he thinks he can guess what Poe’s envisioning; Poe promptly proves him right: “If we can get a minyan for the cordon, we can perform the morning prayer. Arresting us at prayer will look fucking awful.” His smile warms mischievously as he says, “Besides, those schmucks deserve that we should bring the fear of God to them, no?”

It takes a second for Finn to get it – the beginning of the morning prayer, which he almost never says, is “Reshit chakmah yirat Adonai.” The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Signal

Disappearing message time set to 1 Day

Kylo
You liked the Egyptian wing?

R
yeah

Kylo
We should try Ancient Near Eastern next time.

Rey looks at this message for a very, very long time. And then she puts the phone away, and then, after some time, of course, the message disappears.

“What concerns me,” says Mr. Baccarin, “is that those vans aren’t just used for picking people up. They use them to transfer detainees to the court for their hearings. I don’t want my clients to miss court dates. If they’re absent from court judges have the power to rule against them automatically.”

Poe nods. “I understand that. I acknowledge that this plan has the potential to harm people. Detainees and volunteers. It’s not a perfectly morally clean operation.”

Finn is a little startled. He had expected Poe to admit that, but only under duress, and not with that phrasing, not with that casual tone. "But you're confident in the outcome?" he asks.

“I think the potential for long-term impact is huge. It could get the wider Jewish community involved; it could change public attitudes; it could get the attention of elected officials. I know," and here Poe respectfully inclines his head at Rabbi Holdon, "that we're going to be taking a multi-pronged approach, and I think this opens great opportunities for us to try to work at the legislative level as well. It will open conversations we need to have. And I think we can moderate the potential for harm.”

“How do you intend to do that?” Mr. Baccarin sounds dubious.

“Isn’t it the case – and please correct me if I’m wrong here – but if we notify you in advance, can’t you file for continuance, change the court date?”

Mr. Baccarin nods reluctantly. “Yes. And I can help you get in contact with other detainee’s lawyers.”

“Thank you!”

“If you’re certain you want to do this, I can try to help you do it with as little damage as possible. But I have to say – I don’t recommend it.” He looks at Poe seriously. “You’re right. This plan does have the potential to harm people. The thing is, you never know how ICE is going to react. They have a lot of ways to strike back, if they want to.”

R. reports that Polansky advocated the use of “any means necessary,” Kylo writes in his report, and checks his phone again.

He gets a FWD:FWD:FWD email that's cc’d to all of his department. It’s a joke about a policeman and a prostitute, and it ends with a reprimand for the policeman from his captain: “First you cuff ‘em, then you stuff ‘em!!!” He deletes it as fast as he can.

He’s sweating. He take a printer paper box out back and tears it to shreds, not caring where the staples are. His hands bleed, and he leans against the cool, filthy metal of the dumpster.

Rey shifts anxiously as Mr. Baccarin leaves. She can feel that Finn notices it too – Poe’s eyes are trained on Amilyn, and there are storm clouds in his face. As soon as she closes the door after the guest, he springs to his feet. “So. Shall we discuss the logistics of our operation?”

“I thought perhaps we might want to reassess our plan in light of what we’ve heard.” There is a faint ironic stress on our that Rey has to acknowledge is deserved. After working patiently for half an hour over phrasing at the last meeting, she can understand why he might not be keen to run this through a committee, but Poe is getting a bit high-handed. The thing is, he keeps looking right at her, and she doesn’t think it’s to do with her personal charms. He knows she’s Kylo’s camera in all this; is he playing to the camera?

Poe nods, maybe a little too hard. “No, I agree; it was great to have Mr. Baccarin here, and his input can definitely help us make this safer and more effective.”

“I mean,” Amilyn says, “that we might want to reconsider the plan itself.”

“I’m not sure I see why that’s called for.” Poe purses his lips, tilting his head. Maybe just a degree more than he needs to. He’s so theatrical. Is he doing this for the crowd? For Amilyn? For Kylo by way of me? For a movie in his head he’s starring in? That’s unfair of her.

“Well, we’ve just heard that there’s risk – ”

“I respect the difficulties here; I really do. But the goal here is fewer detainees overall, and I think that’s a goal worth fighting for. We always knew there was going to be risk – ”

“But is it our risk, Daniel?” Rey wishes to high heaven that she wouldn’t do that, call him by his proper name; she must know it enrages him – is that why she does it –

“We can make it our risk!” he cries. “That is what I came here to do, take risks to repair the world!” Poe’s agitation is visible, and Rey is almost sure it’s unfeigned. Whatever his plan is, Amilyn is threatening it.

“And you’re entitled to do that,” the rabbi tells him firmly. “But I think that if someone who is on the front lines asks us to be cautious, not for our sake but for the sake of others, we would do well to listen to them.”

“Cautious, yes; complacent, no.” The assembled group is moving uneasily.

“Daniel, I just think if Leah saw fit – ” She sounds condescending, is the problem. There are undercurrents in this fight that are making people uncomfortable.

“Do not invoke Leah here,” Poe orders, jabbing a finger. ”She’s not here; you are the one making these assertions – ”

“Young man – ” Every head turns when al-Akbar speaks. “I understand your frustration, but Leah and Amilyn and Chuey Baccarin are all veterans of this fight.”

”It’s a new fight!” Poe’s on his feet. “I won that vote because it’s a new fight, and we need new weapons for new arenas, because the old ones are failing us – ”

Oh, the subtext is rapidly becoming text. But maybe she can stop it. Kylo said back Poe; she can do that, and she can calm this down, keep it from getting personal, or anybody saying something they’ll regret. She gets to her feet, too.

“Poe,” she says. “I think you’re right.” Face opening like a flower, he holds out his hand to her, pointing, as if Rey's agreement validates everything. “It is worth it, to take a risk. Everything is dangerous; there is no safe option.” Amilyn is looking at her warily, her lips pursed. "We voted to pursue direct action; this is direct action. We just have to find the best way to do it."

"Much as I believe in respecting the will of the community, Rachel, I – "

"Don't think we should in this case?" Poe says. "Think we should listen to you on this one?"

"I hope we all listen to each other," Amilyn says. The edge in her courteous voice could cut steel.

"I think we have listened. I think we have listened. And now maybe – "

"Isn’t this a street action?" ask Rey. "So isn’t it the business of the street action committee?” Which, of course, Poe heads. “They can figure out how to do this; I trust them to do what’s right.”

"All right," says Amilyn. She gets to her feet, not for emphasis but only reaching for her coat. The meeting begins to break itself up, tension and relief both still in the air. Rey is reaching for her backpack, keeping her eyes on Poe, to see who'll he'll run to, to help him plan or to celebrate his victory, when Amilyn, at the very last moment at which she can still be heard over the noise of departure, says, "I only ask that the final plans be brought back for review before they're enacted, so that we can ensure that they don’t violate the spirit of the group."

She's gone through the door before anyone can reply, which leaves Kaydel with the responsibility of locking up and Rey with the hope that a week's time will let everyone's better natures prevail.

Then, later that evening, comes the first of the emails. Every one she sees is reply-all. Poe does not respond to her one-to-one emails, or to her texts.

Signal

Disappearing message time set to 1 Day

R
so chai just kind of fell apart
so i guess you can have a cop party or whatever

Kylo
What? What do you mean?

R
i backed poe like you said
and he accused amilyn of trying to discredit his ideas because she doesn’t want to give up power
and he said she represented a generation of older white women who put faith in civility and norms that dont really exist and dont listen to young people of color
AND THAT FUCKING SUCKED
cuz shes not my fav but shes not really as shitty as that made her sound
an i just want them to get along
and then amilyn said maybe he was right and she fuckign RESIGNED
and leah didnt say anything
but a shitton of other ppl did!!
so evrything is fuckign chaos and it sucks
good work
A+ copping
bonus for you

Kylo
Come meet me. Anywhere. You pick.

Hello; you’ve reached Rav Luke Skywalker. Please leave your message after the tone.

“Hi Luke, it’s Rey again. A lot of – there’s a lot happening. And I was talking to Kylo – I mean, um, Ben, your nephew? And he said – I was just hoping to talk to you. That’s all. Probably you and Leah are sitting on the lawn in the sunshine having fruity drinks, but like… tell her to come back to us, okay? We need her. And I could really use a chat? If you have time. Bye!”

Disappearing message time set to 1 Day

R
when

Kylo
Whenever you want.

R
saturday then I guess

Kylo
That’s five days from now.

R
it’ll still suck then
trust me

Finn and Rose are fighting. That never happens. Never. It begins as an argument, ordinary enough: Rose says Poe is assuming he knows better than Amilyn because he has an academic background and is a man, and Finn says no, he’s not assuming; he’s making a reasonable assessment given the information that he has, and he actually is better equipped than Rabbi Holdon in some ways, and Rose says then they ought to collaborate, and Finn says but she was being condescending, and Rose says so was he. But then her voice climbs out of the pitch of engagement and into the pitch of distress: if they could both have just put up with the other’s dumb attitude for a fucking second they could have come up with a better fucking plan, and Finn says well if the rabbi is just going to shut down everything Poe proposes, and Rose says they don’t know that that’s what was happening, it was just one idea, they didn’t have to make it into such a thing, and they definitely shouldn’t have replied-all, and Finn says he fucking agrees that they should both have fucking known better and maybe the fact that they didn’t is a sign that neither one of them is competent, and Rose says oh, so are we just fucking doomed then, huh, and Finn says why are you acting like you care when you never even come to meetings, and Rose says at least as a lawyer she’ll be able to do something, and Finn says, oh, are you saying –

Rey doesn’t scream. She pours the last of the vodka into her water bottle. There’s going to be a blizzard soon. She drinks. She feels feverish, and dirty.

Disappearing message time set to 1 Day

R
do u still wanna fuck me
or do u just pity me or whtever
jsut tell me

Kylo
Are you drunk?

R
ya but if i take the rtain to bk ill be sober when i get there
if u dont want me anymorr jsut say

Kylo
I do want you.

R
good
i want u to hurt me ok

Kylo
I do want you.

R
send me yr address ok
im getting on the train
i need u to hurt me
pls

Chapter Text

For a while Kylo had stared at his phone. As if it were somehow responsible.

It’s a long way from the West Bronx to Flatbush. So he’s had time to gather his unopened mail and unopened New Yorkers into a single pile and call it tidy. To go downstairs and buy a pack of condoms, the one he has having expired, also unopened. To look around his apartment and know it’s just the same black-leather-and-Ikea bachelor pad that every straight man in New York lives in, only worse, and there’s nothing to be done about that now. To bolt half a beer and pour the rest down the sink with shaking hands and smash the bottle into shards. To take deep breaths and clean up the broken glass. To turn on the shower and confront the problem.

He does want her. Does he want this? No, not really; he feels sick to his stomach. And also yes, body and rotten soul; just rereading her messages makes him hard.

hurt me

What have I done, Rachel, to make you think that I would hurt you? As if he doesn’t know. Come here, Rachel; come here and let me hurt you, nice and hard until I come. Like she expects him to. And doesn’t it hurt him, to think that?

But hadn’t he been fantasizing about this? Obliquely, but still. If I were a bad cop, I wouldn’t be so nice to you. So she’s right. He’s a bad cop. (Monster. Willing part of a system.) He has no right to feel wounded. For that and many other reasons. But still it is a wound, and he presses his fingers into it. Again and again.

He thinks he knows what she means by hurt. He knows the thing in her that ate up what he gave her on the stairs.

She asked him to fuck her, not psychoanalyze the both of them. If he’s going give her what she wants and do it properly, he should jerk off now. And he does, but he finds himself confining his fantasies scrupulously to the most basic things about her. What her breasts will look like, how her nipples will feel. How tight she was around his fingers, what that’ll feel like on his cock.

It does the trick. He’s clean and out and dry and in fresh clothes, and the buzzer hasn’t rung yet.

And it continues to not ring. She sobered up and she changed her mind and of course she’s not going to tell you that; nobody sends a text when they remember they have too much self-respect to fuck you. Except Rey might. And she hasn’t. So he waits. The super’s turned the radiators high in anticipation of the blizzard; he tries not to sweat through the black t-shirt he’s put on, which is a little tight and just scrapes the top of his jeans. A guy in Prospect Park had told him it looked good on him.

When the buzzer does ring he goes down the stairs quietly, making himself not rush. He’s going to grab her around the waist, haul her inside, push her against the wall. The only problem with this plan is that of course the door opens inward and so Rey gets the jump on him, barging in and snarling in his face. “Think you can make it up the stairs this time, Kyle?”

That was not his fucking fault, and she’s acting like she didn’t fucking like it when he’s sure she came, and he wishes she wouldn’t call him that. He grabs her wrist, her marked right wrist, and twists it into a compliance hold; she sucks in her breath and pushes back on the hold just a little. So it hurts her more. Oh shit. Underneath her coat she’s wearing a knit top and a short skirt and those fucking socks, the ones that go over her knees. This isn’t how this is supposed to go and they both know it, but if she says no he’ll stop and he hopes she understands that and that’s about as far as he feels able to concede to what he ought to do. He drags her close to him and whispers hotly in her ear, “You want me to hurt you? Yeah?” She nods, and rubs her whole body against him, hard; she’s trying to provoke him and it works. “Of course you do. Come upstairs and fucking beg me,” he says, and drags her with him.

Oh fuck this is just exactly what she wanted. Inside his door he grabs her by the hair and drops her wrist so he can yank her coat off her. “Take your fucking filthy boots off in my house, you dirty little criminal” he spits, and pushes her head down until she does. And when they’re off he shoves her back against the wall and pins her there with his knee between her legs, and she can tell that she can push against him as much as she wants and he will never buckle, that he can feel her squirming here, pushing her hands against his chest, her hips twisting against him, and he loves it. He won’t pity her, and that’s what she wants most of all.

He holds her there and lazily thrusts himself against her, growling out sounds of pleasure. “Fuck, you want this, don’t you? You wore those socks again; any time I see those socks, I’m gonna know you want it.”

“I put them on for you,” she whispers. I put them on in case you changed your mind, in case you didn’t want me; I thought maybe they’d persuade you. To want me enough to hurt me like I need.

“Shit,” he grunts, and his hands drop to her legs. He pushes her skirt aside so he can grip her bare legs, grabbing at the soft flesh of her thighs like he’s greedy for it. Prying her legs apart so that she sinks down on his knee, jerking her forward to rub her back and forth on his thigh. “Tell me. Tell me again why you came here.”

She doesn’t answer him, stays silent so he’ll make her tell him. And he does; he grabs her by the arm and shoves her on his kitchen table, face down. “Why did you come here?” he asks her, as he pushes her skirt up to her waist. “To rub your sweet little ass against my cock and then leave, huh?” He bends over her, breathing hard, his jeans rough against her bare skin and her panties, pushing himself against her so she feels how big he is, how hard he is. She hears him drag his shirt off, hears it drop to the floor. She wriggles back against him. Touch me. His hands wander over her thighs again. “To flash some skin and keep your pretty tits away from me?” His lips are at her neck, so soft and then he bites her, yes, fuck, and he seizes her by the hair; he straightens up but he keeps her to the table with his heavy left hand on the small of her back, so she’s trapped, arching as he drags her back. And it’s just what she wanted; it rushes through her like a flood of light.

“Hurt me,” she whispers, “just like that; hurt me.”

“Yeah? Just like that?” He pulls a little harder. “Why are you here?”

He just wants her to repeat herself but it rushes out of her in a wail. “Because you made me be your little spy and ruin everything and I did it so hurt me; punish me. You fucking cop; I want you to fuck me and I want it to hurt.”

He shoves her down on the table and stands over her, panting. He’s silent for a long moment, and why did I say that; he won’t want me now; I like fighting too much; I’m too angry; he’d fuck me like I need if only I were quieter but now I’ve ruined everything; I’ll have to go back out in the cold alone and –

“Take off your shirt.” She doesn’t react at once; he twists his hips away from hers and brings his right hand down on her ass, hard, so she jolts and yelps, and it feels so good. “I’m a fucking officer of the law,” he snarls at her, “and you’ll do as I fucking say; do you understand?” She nods, once, and he hits her again, harder.

“Yes,” she whimpers, and he slaps her ass again. She lets her whole body feel it, move with it.

“And I’ll handle you like I want.” Another blow. Rey could never ask Rose for this, this spark of pain that moves so voluptuous through her. It would pain Rose, to hurt her, but Kylo wants it; he wants to do it to her.

“Yes,” she tells him, and after another blow she adds, unprompted, “thank you.” She feels rung like a bell.

He pauses, and steps in closer to her again. The hand on her back is so hot it makes her sweat, and his eyes, behind her, burn her imagination. “Now take off your shirt. And your bra.”

It’s not easy, with Kylo’s hand keeping her pressed to the table, but he helps her and she gets it off, reaches back to unhook her bra. Her fingers tremble, and he touches her, just a light stroke from her elbow to her wrist, and it makes her tremble harder. Once its off he strokes his right hand down her bare side, brushing the edge of her breast with his fingertips. She shivers. He digs his fingers in around her waist and yanks her up against him, the way he’d held her on the stairs. His soft hair brushes her face and she can feel his breath on her collar bone as he stares down at her breasts.

“Fuck,” he whispers, and his hands come up to cover them. He swallows audibly as he plays with her tits, watching his own fingers move roughly, pinching her pink nipples and rubbing his fingertips against the seam along her ribs. “You ruined everything, huh? I bet you fucking did. Bet you made everything fall to fucking pieces.”

Rey nods against his shoulder. This is what she came here for. To escape the gentle lies of the people who love her; to be told the harsh things she knows are true. To hurt like is right and proper.

“So what should I do with you?” There’s a tremor in Kylo’s hands as he wraps them around her waist, still brushing the underside of her breasts, but she doesn’t have to think about it because he digs his fingers in hard as he whispers harshly in her ear. “What do you think you deserve? For being my little spy?” He jerks her back against him just a little bit, just to remind her of the waiting hardness of him. “For ruining everything?”

“Punish me,” she whispers back. She clenches her eyes shut. “Please. I deserve to be punished.”

He breathes raggedly. There’s a choke in his voice as he asks her, “Yeah? How should I punish you? Huh?” She loves the way he yanks her to him again, how she knows she’ll remember where his fingers were when he did it. How she’ll remember the scrape of his belt buckle on the bare skin of her lower back, between her panties and her bunched-up skirt, the thick promise of his cock under the denim. But he wants her to say it; he won’t do it until she says it, so she shuts her eyes even tighter and gasps it out.

“Fuck me. Please. Fuck me hard and make it hurt.”

He pushes her back down on the table; she can hear him yanking at his belt, and it gives her a sick thrill, how eager he is, how much he wants to do this to her. His fingers are hot against her as he scrabbles her underwear down, dragging her foot out of it so he can spread her legs like he wants. You want this; do it to me like you want; be my monster; show me what I am.

She wants it right away; she’s shamefully ready for it, but he stands there, not touching her, and she squirms under his eyes. She can hear him breathing, hard, hear his undone belt buckle jingle. “Wait,” Kylo tells her softly. “You just lie there and wait for it.” She trembles. The packaging crinkles under his fingers; he seems to take forever before he rips it open and Rey, face down on the table, can only imagine what she looks like to him as he puts the condom on. Topless, skirt yanked up and panties pushed down, wet and begging.

He spreads her with his fingers, petting her little curls back, and then he’s pushing at her with his cock, cool lubricated latex heating rapidly. He pushes into her, and it’s slow and it does hurt, just the way she wants it to, just the way she knew it would. She moans. He’s not all the way in, she can tell, but he stops, panting, leaning over her, before he pushes again, brutally hard, deep as he can. She wails, high and thin; the sound he makes has no vowels in it.

He pulls back and does it again; her thighs hit the edge of the table and it slides forward. He seizes her hips in his hands and pulls her back onto him. Rey gasps. “You like that?” he asks her, breathless. “That what you wanted from a big, bad cop?” She nods, her face still against the table. “Tell me. Tell me I’m giving you what you need.”

“Yes. Yes. Just like that. Do it to me.” He does, fingers digging into her soft flesh, dragging her back onto him. She can barely breathe. She feels stuffed full when he shoves himself in and she feels scoured clean when he pulls himself out. “Hurt me. Hurt me with your cock. Just like – that.” He makes another dreadful choking sound, deep in his throat, and rams into her so hard it knocks the air out of her. This is real. This is true. This is what I need.

As if he can read her mind – or no, he can tell, he can see what she deserves, a filthy little girl like her – he asks her, “Is that all? Is this everything you need?”

“Pull my hair again,” she gasps, and his hand closes firmly on the tangled hair loose at the back of her head, another clean, raw burn of satisfaction.

“Knew it,” he says, as he fucks her, dragging at her head. “Knew you’d need more. You’re so bad. Rey. So bad. Serves you right. Being fucked. Like this.” He leaves her just enough slack to nod. “You’re my little spy, right? Say it.”

“I’m – your little spy,” she repeats, straining.

“And now you’re my little whore. Little police whore here on my table. Just for me. Right?” He must be right. Otherwise he wouldn’t do this to her, and she wouldn’t love it so much.

“Uh-huh,” she agrees. He breaks her words to pieces with the way he slams into her. “Uh. Huh.”

She can feel herself tightening around him, and she twists in his hold, roiled by pleasure, makes him fight to keep fucking her the way he has been, but he does it, he keeps giving it to her. “Nobody,” he gasps in her ear, as his cock pounds into her. She comes; she comes, writhing so hard he can hardly keep hold of her, her senses so scorched with pleasure that she barely registers it when he gets the rest out, driving himself desperately into her. “Nobody but me, Rachel; please.” She’s blind and deaf with the enjoyment he’s wrung out of her; his words go by like empty air.

She’s vaguely aware that he must have finished; he groans, and the tension leaves his body. He falls forward, wrapping his arms around her to protect her from hitting the table too hard. Another groan, soft, against her back, his sweaty hair pressed into her shoulder, and a stranger sound. A sigh, a sob. A cough, maybe. His breath is hot. Rey can feel his eyelashes flutter against her skin, and then – there’s wetness. But he can’t be crying. It must be sweat. She’s slick with it herself.

“Can – can I use your shower?” She halfway expects him to say no, to push her out on the stairs half naked, but – he had put his arms around her, before he dropped his weight to the table, had been that slightest bit gentle with her. He’s gentle now; he unwraps himself from around her and helps her up. She feels sick. He can’t be gentle with her. She can’t allow that. It’s the hormones, she tells herself. He is what he is and he knows what I am; it’s only the afterglow that makes him forget.

“Yes. Of course.” His voice is thick. She runs for the bathroom, clutching her clothes, refusing to look at him.

She doesn’t take long with the shower. Throwing the condom away, he has a brief fantasy that she’ll emerge wrapped in a towel and smiling shyly, ask him for a drink of water, accept an offer of tea or juice. Fall asleep on his couch in the towel, or just dress where he can see her, without hurry or shame. But he knows better. He puts his shirt back on, buckles his belt, and picks her coat off the floor and hangs it on the wall by the shoe rack, so she can get it on faster on her way out.

“See you Saturday,” is all she says before she leaves. After she’s gone, he stares around his apartment. It looks even worse to him now than it did before. Nobody but me, he’d begged her, and she hadn’t answered, hadn’t promised or even acknowledged him. Every time she’d winced or cried out it had slashed through him, the hot arousal and the cold shame heightening each other. I’m hurting her. But she had her own punishment, didn’t she, waiting for him at the end, that indifference. What else should he have expected? What was he thinking?

He doesn’t want to go to bed but he has to. He showers first, and it’s in the shower, picking up the bar soap that’s still wet from her hands, that he realizes that he really doesn’t know at all what’s happened to her group, and that he’ll have to find out, and soon.

If she’d gone into more detail, he thinks, I could have billed the past hour to the department as overtime.

Which would, he supposes, make him the police whore.

Poe finally responds to her texts, with apologies. The blizzard is due the next day, and Rey hates the thought of going out into the painful cold when she’s already gone outside today, to get to school, but City College won’t let Poe in, so she forces herself to go to the train and down to Columbia to meet him, because SIPA lets you just walk right in. Greyed-out sunlight streams through big glass panes, and Rey shivers.

“This wasn’t part of your plan, was it?” she asks, letting herself hope it was, and ruing the hope when he shakes his head grimly.

“No. And I regret that it happened. Like I said – unity is important. And obviously I’m not going to pretend that we haven’t lost a terrible amount.” He swallows. “Or that I didn’t make a mistake. I just – I didn’t want to spend a month in committee perfecting a plan and then have her shoot it down because she doesn’t want to try something new!”

“Do you really think that’s what she was afraid of?”

Poe sighs. He looks at the ground, frowning. “No.”

“You think what you said in the email.”

“Yeah.” Poe looks up, now, staring into the rows of flags that hang from ceiling. “I did. I mean – ” he sighs again – “not exactly like that. But it wasn’t about what she said it was about. It was about – who she is, who I am. It was personal. I think so, yeah.”

“And now half the older white ladies are pissed at you, and the other half are in fugue states of guilty self-examination.” She hoped it would make him smile, putting it like that, and it does – a rueful little smile that’s almost lost in the frankly impressive beard he’s grown.

“And with the older white ladies does go a certain body of institutional knowledge, I admit.”

“And funding. And volunteer time.”

“And funding and volunteer man-hours, yes.” He gives her a small, saucy smile. “This might be my chance to officially declare us for BDS, though.”

Rey snorts. “Dream on. This is still New York State. You can get them back, though, can’t you?”

“I think so.” She’s heartened by the way he sounds – optimistic but not cocksure. “And there’s a lot things that’re harder to get done without them, but: my plan? Not one of those things. And I think, if I can carry it off, I can win a lot of people back.” He hesitates. “Including Amilyn, I think.”

“Do you want her to come back?” She is less convinced that the people he’s lost will flock back if he succeeds, and she would be more confident in his success if they were back with him. Perhaps, if she can persuade him to apologize...

“Well, I’d rather have her in Chai, doing harm-alleviation as a part of our work, than starting a whole other group just devoted to that.”

“If you think she’d do that, maybe it’s best to – ”

“No, she’s going to sit tight for now; she’s going to wait for me to fail. But I’m not going to fail.”

“You think she’d be that… petty?”

Poe nods, slow and serious. “I mean, look at her letter of resignation. That was calculated from word one to make me look bad.”

Rey thinks it was more calculated to cut off argument, to prevent anyone from jumping in to attack Poe on her behalf, but that very fact does, perhaps, makes Poe look bad, whether that was the intent or not. Poe looks hot-headed and self-centered by comparison. Even though she knows his concern is not, in the end, with himself. If I hadn’t been there as a spy, he wouldn’t have played it so dramatic; it wouldn’t have turned out like this. How can this be fixed? “Do you know when Leah might be back from the west coast? She’s not actually going to argue the case herself, is she? Rose was sort of explaining what was happening, but...” Rey shrugs. Electronic circuits she understands. Judicial circuits, not so much.

“Soon, I hope. I haven’t – I haven’t heard much from her. She’s busy.” More than anything, Rey thinks, it’s Leah’s silence that scares Poe. If she’d called, or even just sent him a text with a question mark during the Night of the Reply-Alls, this all might have turned out quite differently.

“Does she know what – what you’re doing with – what we’re doing?” She gestures between the two of them. “With the police? And everything? I told Luke I’d met his nephew, but I didn’t really say anything more than that. I don’t know if he listened to the message, or if he would have told Leah, but – does she know already?”

Poe fidgets. “No,” he says, uneasily. “I should have told her, but – I was afraid she’d ask questions, and I – I don’t want to have to tell her her son is focusing on spying on Jewish groups.” He focuses his eyes on her, a slightly unnerving if not entirely unpleasant experience. “Maybe we should tell her, though. You’re in danger, and she should know that.”

“She already knows I haven’t got papers. It’s really all the same danger, isn’t it?”

“She couldn’t help you with that?”

“I have a forged social security card, and student IDs from high school and college, and that’s it in the way of papers. There isn’t much she can do.” Rey has long since grown fatalistic about her legal non-existence in the United States, but from his furiously furrowed brow, she can tell that Poe is not resigned. She knows by now that that frown is called out by every kind of injustice. Discriminatory laws or unequal enforcement or harmful public policy or assholes cutting the line in the deli; Poe will stand for none of it. He’s here to do justice and repair the world. So she’s not surprised that the woes of the undocumented trouble him.

She is surprised when his face is suddenly illuminated. He’s so pleased she thinks he must have been struck by some bolt of inspiration about Chai, and therefore she’s completely dumbstruck when, leaning forward, he beamingly asks her, “Why don’t you marry me?”

Her jaw moves but her larynx does not cooperate with her plan to speak. Poe continues, still all lit up, “You’ll have to live with me – I think they check on that – but I’m really never at home, basically, so – oh – you’re not allergic to Baby, are you? She sheds a lot, I know, but – ”

Rey looks around her incredulously. A handsome, brilliant man has proposed marriage to her in the dingy modernist lobby of the School of International and Public Affairs, and he’s concerned she might be allergic to his dog. Did I envision this, sitting at my machine with the radio on; was this a future I could have dreamt of? It was not. Not that she’s complaining.

She can’t help grinning at him. “I love Baby, but I can’t marry you!” A passing student whips her head around and then hurries on, sneaking incredulous looks back over her shoulder.

He looks offended. “Why not?”

“You still need some kind of government ID to be married,” she tells him patiently.

His face falls. “I suppose Finn would have married you by now if that would solve the problem.” He sighs. “Times like this, I miss Han.”

“Han?”

“Leah’s man. Remember I was telling you; the nogoodnik?” She nods. Kylo’s father. The trafficker. The friend to murderers. The prisoner. “If Han liked you – and he would have, believe me – he would have had a scheme to take care of this. He’d get you a fake passport from some tiny low-tech country with spotty records that are impossible to check, drive us to get married first thing in the morning at City Hall, and talk someone into assigning the laxest immigration officer in NYC to your case.” Poe smiles fondly. “Then he’d spray us with the cheapest sparkling wine he could find, congratulate us on putting one over on the fascist pigs of the state, order you to cheat on me as soon as possible, and stand around saying rude things about my anatomy until Leah dragged him away.”

The nostalgia and affection in his voice are contagious; Rey finds herself missing him, this man she never met. She imagines him, tall and rough-voiced, a cynical man of convictions, letting himself be lead by the arm by tiny Leah Organa. And then, without really meaning to, perhaps because it seems that Poe is imagining it too, she imagines an orange jumpsuit. A metal tray with a block of half-frozen, half-rotten processed meat. A cold cell that crawls with roaches and smells of sewage. Like Poe must, she feels sick at the idea of his misery. Unlike Poe, she’s begged one of the architects of that misery for his cock, and can remember the hot, aching satisfaction she felt under his hands. Police whore. Yes, that’s me.

She remembers, too, the naked pain in his face on the roof of the museum.

Uncle Luke was there for dinner, so Mom had moved all her papers to one end of the table. Usually they’d just have put their plates on top of them. Uncle Luke asked her about the case, and Mom told him, her face serious. The defendant, her terrible poverty, her child, her abusive husband. The restraining order which had been broken. The gun which had been fired. Uncle Luke did what he always did, which was nod.

Ben tried to puzzle it out. If her husband had beaten her, that was a crime, and he should go to jail. If she had killed him, that was also a crime, and she should go to jail. But Mom didn’t seem to think so. And she seemed to think it was so obvious that he was afraid to ask; he didn’t want her to think he was stupid.

Dad had his feet up on Mom’s papers. He fixed Ben with a bigger frown than usual. “You know I don’t hold with all this Jewish superiority shit, Ben; gentiles are schmucks, Jews are schmucks; give anybody a chance and he makes himself a schmuck. But I’ll say this for us: we don’t beat women. That’s goyim naches.”

Uncle Luke nodded. “Rabbinically speaking, that’s true. Throughout European and North African history, while gentile authorities permitted spousal violence, rape, and even murder, both the Ashkenazi and most Sephardi rabbinical authorities agreed – with admittedly the notable exception of Rambam – ”

“He’s eight,” Dad groaned.

“He can understand perfectly.”

“I understand,” Ben agreed.

“He can understand, all right, but you’ll make him insufferable – ”

“Han!” Mom snapped.

“Sorry, boychik.” Dad sounded a little bit sorry, anyway. Maybe more sorry for pissing her off than anything. But maybe for suggesting that Ben might be insufferable when he talks like Uncle Luke. Maybe that too.

“Rabbi Me’ir of Rothenburg,” Uncle Luke continued, “said that a husband who beat his wife more than once should have his hands cut off. And Rabbi Ze’ev of Arta, a famous if somewhat controversial Sephardic rabbi, said that a man who strikes his wife violates the law of the Torah with every blow, and must be forcibly divorced from her.”

“The rabbis said that, sure,” Mom said. “But did the husbands listen?”

Uncle Luke frowned. “We don’t have any reliable historical sources to tell us that.”

“Uh-huh.” Mom looked sad. “There weren’t any women on the bench in those rabbinical courts. I think I’m with Han here – or at least, with his original point. It doesn’t matter if they’re Jews or gentiles. When people have power, they abuse it.” She looked down at her lap. Uncle Luke leaned forward and put his hand over hers. Ben leaned forward, too, to try and read her face, and she smiled at him. “I think we’re all done with dinner. Clear the table, please, Benny?”

He jumped up and ran around for the plates, but when he got to his father’s plate, Dad said again, in a scornful undertone, “Goyim naches, hitting women.”

He takes Rey’s glove out of the drawer he put it in. He lays it in his outstretched palm. It looks tiny. It looks vulnerable. He closes his hand around it, as gently as he can. He puts it back in the drawer.

Kylo does not eat breakfast at his kitchen table that week. Or dinner. He eats walking to work, or on his couch. When he eats at all.

Trying to keep her voice casual, Rey asks Poe, “Did you know Kylo well? When you were a kid? You said you went to his bar mitzvah…” She realizes she doesn't really know how old Kylo is. Poe is going ever-so-slightly grey, and has two advanced degrees. Kylo has the face of a sulky teenager, but –

"He was four years younger than me. Which is probably for the good; I have a competitive streak in me – " you don't say – "and he was a bit of whiz kid; if we'd been the same age, I probably would have felt compelled to beat him on his own ground, and then where would my life be? Religious studies PhD, probably." Poe snorts. He looks a little sad, to Rey’s eyes.

"Religious studies?" Not law?

"Yeah, he was Luke's prize student. Not just the Talmud; he was into Kabbalah and all that – " he wiggles his fingers in the air. Finn had done the same, once, to Luke's face, and Rey remembers vividly their teacher's expression. "He did criminal justice and law school to please his mom and piss off his dad, I think, but the whole time he was always at late-night study sessions on Fridays. Couldn’t get the boy out to a party for love or money. No wonder he turned out a cop, I guess."

Rey nods, slowly. Her mental picture of Kylo is beginning to shift, and slowly, it seems to her, to make perhaps a bit more sense. Or else less. She tries to remember what she saw of his apartment – everything was black, and she thinks there was a weight bench, and a stereo surrounded by – cassette tapes? Really? Everything dusty, though, for sure. And no books. She would have noticed books. Surely a Kabbalist would have books? Unless, of course, he'd melodramatically thrown away everything associated with people he no longer respected.

He might have. It was the sort of thing people who stood on rooftops yelling in unbuttoned coats did.

But regardless, it didn’t seem like the room of a man who’d had a girlfriend live with him. Probably not the room of a man who’d had much in the way of girlfriends at all.

"Do you think," she asks slowly, "there's any chance he might – is he – is he a cop to the core, I guess I'm asking?"

Poe tilts his head at her. "Making your own plans, bubbele?"

"No.” Which is true. Rey has never made plans; plans are for people who can guess the future. Rey would never have guessed a damn thing about her life: Maz, Finn, Luke, Leah, Rose, any of it. Besides: der mentsh tracht un got lacht. So Rey doesn’t make plans.

“I’m seeing him Saturday,” she tells Poe. “What should I report?”

Rey does, however, sometimes have ideas.

Chapter Text

The blizzard has come, and most of NYC’s business is cancelled, including classes. There’s always something luxurious about being at home and warm while the snow piles up outside, but something about being in on a weekday feels extraordinarily plush to Finn. After 30 minutes bustling over the stove and the counter, Rey’s produced a hearty quantity of pasta in a spicy pumpkin sauce and a milky cocktail, and from the pride with which she views it all, Finn is willing to bet that she put it all together from $3 worth of purchases and an armful of scavenged give-aways. Is it occasionally mortifying to have a best friend who ducks into every Starbucks to fill her pockets with sugar packets and her empty travel mug with cream? Yes. Is he more than a little proud of Rey’s shameless resourcefulness? Absolutely. Also, however she did it, this shit is delicious. Rose must agree, because she’s stealing some from his plate. He protests, but she gives him a smile with a nose-scrunch. He loves the nose-scrunch. He takes a drink from her glass. Also delicious.

“These taste like an egg cream had a baby with a candy cane,” Rose tells Rey when she takes it back from him. Rey smiles, looking smug. She looks a little less smug when Rose climbs into his lap, and Finn is sorry about that, but he is also pretty drunk – what is in those things? – and pretty pleased by his lapful of warm, soft, lovely-smelling girlfriend, who is concentrating adorably hard on tilting the glass to his mouth to give him another sip. He doesn’t think Rey is actually hurt by his relationship with Rose, but he knows it makes her melancholy sometimes, to be the third wheel.

“How much of that was alcohol?” he asks, after Rose has poured the rest of the drink down his throat. Rey gives him her own nose-scrunch, which is also endearing, but doesn’t do him in quite like Rose’s.

“Let’s say… seventy-five percent? Eighty percent?”

“Eighty percent!” No wonder he feels so wasted after a water-glass’s worth.

“I want a nap,” declares Rose, though from the way she’s moving in his lap… she might want to go to bed, but she doesn’t want to sleep. Seems like a good plan to him. He stands up, holding her cradled in his arms. She shrieks, and it’s his turn to look smug.

“Stop showing off your sick gains,” Rey complains. “We get it; you go to the gym.”

“You put all this alcohol in me,” Finn retorts, which is not, like… an actual direct reply, but a good enough explanation for what he does next, which is to clutch Rose tighter and stagger directly into their bedroom. “Naptime, coming up.” Rose squeaks and waves over his shoulder at Rey.

Rey couldn’t carry her around like this, he thinks, as Rose shuts the door behind them. He tries not to do that too often, compare himself to Rey; it’s probably a symptom of both insecurity and some kind of latent homophobia on his part. But also, like: his girlfriend and his best friend used to fuck, and they used to do it in the same apartment with him. So can you blame him for wondering if Rose compares the two of them?

Rose kisses him. She tastes like some fantastic dessert, something you’d get at a hot downtown spot with a line around the block, and he bets she knows it, from the leisurely way she kisses him, lets him savor her mouth. She gives him a nose-scrunch again, and because they’re alone now, he kisses her nose, lets his hands wander up her sides. He’s going to eat her bit by bit, and save the best for last.

She just tastes so good all over, and she squeaks so nicely when he does it right. And she rolls over on him with such glee when he takes his mouth off her, to unzip him and return the favor. He’s flagging a little, with the alcohol, and the drowsy pleasure of nosing around in her cute little pussy, but she’s doing a lot to revive him, and he brushes his hands through her hair, against the grain, which she likes. She told him it feels like having her back scratched, and when he does it she gives him a happy little sigh that makes him twitch in her mouth.

Afterwards she climbs up him so she can give him a kiss. He settles her on his chest, so he can keep rubbing her head the way she likes, but he expects it’ll actually be naptime within moments; certainly he’s ready to doze. But his eyes open when she props her chin on him and says, softly, “Do you know who Rey is always texting?”

“I think that’s how she reports to that cop.” He doesn’t like thinking about Rey’s role as a coerced informer. She and Poe assure him its all right, that its under control, but Finn doesn’t see how it can be anything other than a slow-motion disaster. He doesn’t know what he can do but brace for impact.

"But... do you think it might be Poe?"

That would make sense. But her tone suggests something other than what he's thinking of. "Wait, you mean like... like flirting texting?"

"Or like 'can I come over to your place' texting."

He’s staring at her a little, he realizes, so he tilts his head back to stare at the ceiling instead. He likes to think that one of them would have told him, but… maybe they wouldn’t. “Okay,” he says slowly. “Okay. That could be.”

“But do you think that’s what it is?” She scratches him gently on the chest with her blunt little nails.

“I don’t know. Do you think so? Do you think that would be… good?”

She lays her head back down. “I dunno. He’s smart and he’s nice and I love him, sure, but… you’re not going to do that thing of his, are you, the minyan?”

He considers. He does sort of want to; Poe’s idea is a good one. If they can embarrass the city into giving up contracts… but also he’s not stupid, and he can feel his girlfriend glaring at him.

“I probably can’t find my tallit in time.”

“You better not find it,” she says firmly, snuggling down against him. “You better have a section to lead that day. And a doctor’s appointment you can’t move. And also the flu.”

He strokes her hair, in the dark, her lovely, lively hair.

Disappearing message time set to 1 Day

R
i can come to yr place Sat

Kylo
Really?

R
sure

Kylo
Isn’t it kind of a long way for you?

R
ill live

Kylo
You don’t have to.

R
look
maybe i dont want to be standing in the middle of a museum when I air all my friends dirt ok

Kylo
What time?

R
3pm?

Kylo
Okay.
See you then.

Kylo catches himself doing the thing again, where he stares at his phone. Police get hazard pay, not snow days, but it's so quiet he can hear the dispatcher down the hall. Nobody needs him to do anything, so it's safe to stare at the phone a little and wonder. It's plausible, that she wouldn't want to have this discussion in a public place, and that she'd prefer his place to hers. 3pm is an innocent time, a day-lit time. But it's also... well, it might be a not-innocent time. If he were being professional about this, he'd offer to escort her in and out of the station. But he has not been professional about this for... two weeks? Three months? Was he ever professional, at all, about anything ever? Cowardly, self-loathing fraud.

But what's the worst that can happen? She takes a better look at you and your sad apartment in daylight and decides you're beneath even the contempt she clearly already feels? Okay, but also she might be asking to meet at his place because she wants to fuck him again, right? The woman who has supplied him with enough potently obscene memories to obviate fantasy for a decade, she might be coming to his apartment because she wants him, or at least liked what he did to her.

Sure. Don't get your fucking hopes up, pal.

His hopes do flutter, though. He even puts fresh sheets on his bed, which last is nothing if not a sign of moronic optimism. When Rey arrives wearing jeans, Kylo forces himself back down to earth a little bit. But then she produces a half-empty half-liter of bottom-shelf vodka from her bag, and he doesn't know what to think.

“Look,” she says, as she holds it out challengingly, “I would like to drink some of this to get me through this story about how one of my primary social bonds collapsed. But I’m not drinking it alone. Do you have shot glasses or whatever?”

He blinks at her. “You want to… do shots while you give me info.”

“If you rephrase everything I say, it’ll be a slow process, won’t it?”

He wavers. He suspects she’s trying to soften him up, dull his ability to detect lies. But she can’t hope to outdrink him. And maybe she needs to give herself an excuse to finish her story in my lap. Am I going take away that excuse?

He walks briskly to the kitchen and returns with two tumblers and a bottle of orange juice. Rey stares at the bottle. “Is that… juice?”

“It’s fresh,” he says. “Have some Vitamin C with your poison.”

“You didn’t get that at the bodega.”

“There’s a Whole Foods nine blocks from my office.” He’s vaguely embarrassed. Cops live on doughnuts and black coffee and whiskey from the bottle; they don’t stand in line at Whole Foods. And also, a familiar voice in his head reminds him, Whole Foods is exploitative and he should be ashamed to support such a rapacious corporation, for what, for some fancy-schmancy juice? But Rey doesn’t say anything, just holds out the vodka bottle again, letting him pour.

He sloshes moderate amounts of liquor and juice into each glass. She raises hers to him, and says, with resignation and heavy irony, “L’chaim.”

“L’chaim,” he echoes, out of habit. He’d curse himself and the too-easy way the word slides off his tongue, but she gives him such a sweet sad smile that he can’t quite regret that he said it. “So.”

Poe bit his lip. “Well, we can’t let him know we’re weakened in any way.”

Rey grimaced. “I… may already have said something about it being chaos.” She bridled at his frown. “I’m sorry! He knew we’d had our meeting; I had to tell him something, and I was... upset.”

“It’s all right, it’s all right… tell him I’ve used the chaos to vilify pacifists and purge anyone who doesn’t agree with me?”

Rey considered. “I… but you haven’t done anything really like that. I can’t really lie to him.”

She meant more that she wasn’t much of liar, but his thought went past that. “Ah, right. If you lead him too far astray, he’ll realize when it’s over that you’re double-crossing him.” He mulled on it. “How about… the split has enabled me to ignore the objections of more moderate voices. I’ve leveraged the hostility of the dispute into support for my radical plans. By his definitions of moderate and radical, that's true.”

“I suppose...” Rey said gloomily. “I don’t know how to say that without sounding like you, though.”

“Good point. Well, let’s work together; we can de-jargon it.”

“What should I tell him about the actual plan?”

He leaned forward. “Everything about the blockage. Nothing about moving the court dates. You didn’t tell him Baccarin came, did you?”

“No.”

“Good. Focus on our goal of disrupting ICE’s workings. A spoke in the wheels. Stress that it’s me; that I’ve put myself in charge, that I make the plans, that I boss people around. Leave out that it’ll be the Shachrit, too, if you can. Say something vague about a prayer, but don’t linger on it. We need them to turn out for a riot.”

He’s gotten out an old-school little police notebook and a pen, and he’s taking notes, to compensate for anything the alcohol might do to his memory. She stares into her drink as she talks, and he tries not to resent how bold and almost fucking dashing Polansky sounds in her account of the group’s schism. He tracks Poe’s social media, of course, as an obvious surveillance measure. Rey is never in any of his Instagram photos, but there are enough pictures of the man himself to make Kylo wonder who’s taking them. And whether Rey likes that beard. Whether he should try to grow a beard too. She’s in your apartment, not his, he tries to tell himself.

“Does Poe have a date for his plan?”

“No. He needs to get enough people together first.”

“But you’ll tell me when he does.”

“Yeah.” She cranes her neck at his notebook. “Is that ktav?”

He gives her a look. “Am I writing right-to-left?”

“No. I guess not.”

“It’s shorthand.”

She gets up and leans over to look. He doesn’t know where her smell comes from – soap, cooking, perfume, or black magic – but in his warm apartment, it rises off her skin and does uncomfortably pleasant things to his nerves. He starts talking, to give himself a reason to inhale. “I probably could use ktav, or Arabic, since the vowels are so fast, but the available phonemes – ”

She turns her head, and God in heaven, she smiles at him. This is worse than the vodka. “You know Arabic?” she asks, sounding a little breathless. Sounding impressed, and smiling; this is so, so much worse than the vodka. He literally cannot prevent himself from puffing up a little.

“I’m a little rusty. I mean, very rusty. But I do remember the alphabet.”

She has not stopped smiling, and then she does it, then she does exactly what he’d hoped she would – she sits on his knee. “Can you show me some?”

He has enough sense left to flip to a fresh page in his notebook. He writes, رخل. “Rachel,” he says, using the Hebrew pronunciation. “For the American pronunciation, you’d have to use the Persian alphabet.”

“It’s so graceful,” she marvels. He feels like brown sugar under warm water. He’s proud of his Arabic handwriting. His Hebrew is good, given the right pen, and his English is neat, but his Arabic is beautiful, and he knows it, and he never gets to show it off. “Now do your name,” Rey says, wiggling a little on his knee, and without thinking, he writes, بنيامين.

Her smile turns a little knowing, and she tilts her head. “That says ‘Benjamin,’ doesn’t it.”

Benyamin, really, but… “Yes.” He goes to cross it out, but she turns in his lap so she’s straddling him, and he lets her take the pen out of his hand. And she’s still smiling at him; what fucking alcohol-enabled daydream is this?

“You know,” she says playfully, “I think there are some things I might want to do to you this afternoon.”

“Yeah?” It’s all he can manage.

“But I don’t know that I want to do them to Kyle O’Ryan, the Irish cop with a weirdly good chet; I think I want to do them to Ben Organa, who word on the Upper West Side street informs me was quite the scholar.”

Who told you that? he wants to ask, but then she leans in and brushes his hair back, and her breath caresses his ear and she very, very gently sucks the lobe into her warm mouth. He’s ashamed of the sound he makes but oh well; too late; who cares; please keep doing that.

Rey does keep doing it, and he shudders, and then he notices she's working on his belt buckle. She lets his ear go but she keeps her mouth there, and her free hand strokes his hair. "Say your prayers for me, Ben. Say the Shema. Bless something." This... is really not a kink he would have guessed, but sure, okay, and she laughs softly. "Is there a brucha for a blowjob, Ben?"

Based on everything he learned back when he was a studious teenaged mystic who rarely even spoke to girls? Almost definitely. But he can't remember it. He goes with the obvious. “Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu, melech ha-olam, shehecheyanu, v’kiyamanu, v’higianu la-azman hazeh.” Blessed are You, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has preserved us, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this time. By the time he’s got it out she’s on her knees, and he’s lifting his hips to help her slide his pants and boxers off. She cups his balls, very gently, and he’s prepared to bless the occasion in any language she’d like. She looks up at him expectantly, and he tries for a little humor with the blessings for the fruits of the vine, but though she snorts a little laugh her main reaction is to take the head of his cock into her mouth.

She doesn’t move her head, though, until he manages to declare that the Lord is blessed who created the fruit of the earth. When he pauses, she pauses, and runs her tongue over him in little tortuously teasing strokes, and when he manages to fluently bless the Shabbat candles, the Havdalah spices, the washing of hands, and the specific candles and rituals of every holiday he can remember, she hollows her cheeks and bobs her head with an industriousness that translates into an intense and climbing pleasure.

She takes a little break to breathe, and he gets in a coherent thought – he doesn’t think this is kink; she’s playing a game with him, and he doesn’t understand it but he’s going to get her back for it.

“You know this isn’t blasphemy, don’t you?” he manages to ask her, as she looks up at him with a luminous smile and his cock poised centimeters from her lips. “Because it’s inappropriate to bless things that aren’t here but – ”

“Oh, I know,” Rey tells him, serene. “I’m not doing this to trouble the Name.” She winks. Definitely a game, then. Though it’s its own kind of blessing, that she should be here, and touching him, and looking so happy. What he’d done to her on the table, before, that had been a pleasure like whiskey, bitter and burning, but her lovely eyes turn up to him, and this is apples and honey, a bright, pure, and undeserved sweetness.

He goes slowly through the prayer for putting on a prayer shawl, and for wrapping tefillin around his head and arms, and though he says it by rote, he comes at the end to realize what it is, exactly, that he’s saying. “V'erastich li l'olam, v'erastich li b'tzedek u'v'mishpat u'v'chesed u'v'rachamim. V'erastich li b'emuna v'yadat et Adonai.” Words of betrothal – in righteousness, in justice, in loving-kindness, in compassion. Does Rey know what he’s saying? He pauses, and so does she, but there’s only playfulness in her eyes.

Well. It’s God talking, really, in those lines; God to the people. But now he’s flat out of blessings. And his lips are prompting treacherously, ani l’dodi v’dodi li, but he won’t; she must know that line, that word, dodi, and he won’t ruin the fun, but his tongue wants it. Ani l’dodi v’dodi li. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.

He’s paused and so she’s teasing him, light little licks up the underside of his cock, and small, almost-open-mouthed kisses on the head, not quite taking him in though he pushes his hips for it. It all feels amazing, but he needs her; he needs her badly, to help him, to make him come.

Rey hears him take a shaky, desperate breath in, and then he launches into something she doesn’t recognize. She bends to suck him again. “Odehnu m’daber imam v’Rachel ra’ah im-hatzon asher l’abah ki roan hi.” Except – wasn’t that her name? “Vehi kasher Yakob et Rachel bat Laban ahi ima, v’et son Laban ahi ima, v’yigash Yacob v’yagel – ” Yakob and Rachel, daughter of Laban – is this his Torah portion?!? She wants to giggle, but also she’s… but his hand comes down to rest gently on her head. He must be getting close. “V’yishak Yakob l’Rachel v’yisa kolo – ” his grip tightens in her hair in warning, and she swallows him as far down as she can, as he chokes out, “ – v’yabek. Oh fuck. Oh – fuck.” She keeps swallowing, and feels warmth run down her throat, though she’s holding him too deep to taste him.

When she’s got it all down, she tries to get up, but his hand on her head is heavy. “Wait,” he says, with his voice in his lowest place. “Wait.” She tries to turn her face up, at least, because she wants to see it, the mess she can tell she’s made of him. But he holds her where she is, and he breathes hard.

“Ben,” she says softly, “you know – ”

And then very suddenly he bends over, grabs her under the arms and lifts her bodily onto the table. He lays her out like the morning paper, and starts undoing her jeans, his head bent low with his hair in his face. “That,” he says gruffly, “was an ambush.” He yanks her pants and her underwear down; her jeans are skinny so it takes him a little effort to get them off, and her socks go with them. “I think you deserve a taste of your own fucking medicine, don’t you?”

He’s moving very briskly to maneuver himself between her legs, but she thinks his hands might be shaking. She thinks she was right; Ben the Kabbalist, shy, studious Ben who never went to parties, did not become a Casanova when he became a cop. But she’s come both times he’s touched her, and no other man she’s fucked can say the same. So she isn’t sure quite what to expect.

He bites her. On the thigh. Ungently. She yelps. “That’s for bribing me into the yeshiva boy act,” he growls. He bites her again, higher on her thigh, much softer. “You think you’re so smart.” He presses a kiss over the bite. She feels again how soft his lips are, and remembers that she has never allowed him to kiss her on the mouth. She hasn’t wanted to kiss him, really, though, has she, so why does that make her feel so sad?

He shifts a little closer, so that both her legs are on his big warm shoulders, and very gently licks her inner lips. She did get a little turned on sucking on his cock, which, she will admit, is about as handsome as they come. And the salt of him had been strong and tangy. And there was the low whisper of his voice, familiar words overwritten by his ache and his desperation. But still she’s a little surprised when his thumbs spread her wider for him and there’s an audible sound of wetness.

He groans and presses his face to her. Inhales a gasping breath of her. Drinks from her like an animal from water. She shifts a little on the table. “Fuck, you’re wet,” he mumbles into her skin. “You’re so wet for me. Again.”

Yes. He remembers her, the girl who begged to be hurt, the little police whore. On the table again, just front-side-up this time.

“So we played your game,” he tells her, “and now we’re gonna play mine.” He licks her, firmly but not too hard, and stopping just short of her clit. “I know you’re not a good little Jewish girl. That’s obvious, right?” He smacks the outside of her thigh, lightly. “I know you’re bad.” Yes. Yes, he knows. Breathing isn’t quite as easy as it was a minute ago. “But you’re gonna tell me how you’re bad. I wanna hear about all the times you ate treyf shit.” He gives her another little lick. “All the times you worked on a Saturday. All the times you wore a skirt that showed these sexy bare legs.”

She squirms again. His hands come up and hold her hips, and he licks her again. She lifts her head a little to look at him. His dark eyes are fixed on her, roving over her as if she were something he were trying hard to memorize and analyze and know, and Rey is flooded with an unwillingness to deny anything to that studious frown. She begins.

“I – I don’t keep a kosher kitchen.” He licks her softly. “I work on Saturdays all the time. Pretty much every Saturday.” He leans in, licking her steadily. It does feel nice. “I do wear skirts and dresses. That aren’t modest.” He licks a little harder, and then one of his hands leaves her hips.

“And?” He says. He teases her with a finger, just tracing the edge of her entrance.

“I, um, used to shoplift sometimes,” she tells him, and he growls, and works two fingers into her. She gasps. He holds still, prompting her, not moving until she speak again. “Uh, I had coffee before I, before I came to Yom Kippur services this year.” He strokes his fingers inside her slowly. “I don’t remember most of the Hebrew I learned. I go to Chai, and I don’t tell them I’m reporting to you, and that’s false witness, isn’t it?” He finds the spot that makes her jump and stays there, curling his fingers gently. He drops his chin into his palm and begins to lick her gently in time with the motion of his hand. It feels good, what he’s doing; it feels really good. “I mean, I have false papers; everything about me is false witness. I don’t – I don’t always give people money when they ask for it, even if I can afford it then. I save my change for, for alcohol and take-out, not tzedakah. I’m selfish. I’m hard-hearted.” It feels so good, his mouth and his fingers; her hips are twisting against his face and her hands are gripping the edge of the table. It feels too good. “I don’t – I don’t honor my father and mother. Not like I should; not at all. I hate them. I curse them every time I drink, and I drink a lot. I hate them. It’s not fair of me; I don’t know where they came from; I don’t know what they left behind.” She clenches her left hand in his hair, to pull him away, to pull him close, just to hurt him – she doesn’t know – “I just know they drank and they left me and they never came back and they must have known, they must have known – ”

She’s crying. Her cheeks are wet and she starts to shake as he pulls himself away from her. She can’t bear to see him look at her. She shuts her eyes tight and shoves her wrist, her scarred right wrist, into her mouth, and bites, hard. Where it used to hurt. Where it’s meant to hurt. Because if they knew what would happen to her, her parents, and they left her to it, then they must have intended it, and she must have deserved it. And they must have known, because if they didn’t know – if they left a little girl behind with a man who traded in human beings – then they never loved her at all, not even a little, not even enough to be disappointed and leave her to be punished. If they didn’t know and they left her anyway, then she was nothing to them. Really nothing.

Ben picks her up from the table, an arm behind her shoulders and one behind her knees, and crushes her to his chest. She cannot stop crying. He rocks her, though it seems to her that he’s shaking himself. “Shaina maidel, shaina maidel,” he murmurs against her hair, “don’t cry, don’t cry.” Clutching her, he hurries to his couch, sits down, holding her in his lap. Gently, he pries her wrist out of her mouth and wraps it in his big hand. She sobs all the harder. “Rey, Rachel, Ruchele, don’t cry; I’ve got you; don’t cry!” But she can’t obey. She can barely hear him. She can barely remember who he is. She is a child chained to a machine that shakes her whole body.

He can’t do anything. It’s infuriating. He wants to smash something. But he can’t put her down. He gathers her to him even closer, murmurs more nonsense into her hair, against her wet cheek. “No, no, don’t. Shaina maidel, no.” No what? Don’t cry? Why shouldn’t she cry? Ben’s crying. He’s rubbing his thumb against her hand, against the straight scar that runs down beside her thumb, imagining the heavy industrial needle that must have made it, that must have sewed through a child’s soft flesh and juddered against a little bone. He shudders with rage and tears blur his eyes.

Her sobs turn to gasps; he’s holding her too tightly. He loosens his grip and she slumps across his lap. The front of his shirt is soaked. He rocks her, still, just a little. It’s silent, there, in his apartment. They listen to the street traffic outside. Someone with a Jamaican accent yelling amiably with someone with a Brooklyn accent. The jingle of the bell on the bodega’s door.

After a very long time, Rey turns her eyes to him. Her tears have lined her eyes with a dark, painful red. As soon as she meets his searching gaze she lowers her lids. She sniffs. “What’s shaina maidel?” she asks, in a very small voice.

His heart cracks a little more, for no particularly logical reason. He swallows. “No on ever called you shaina maidel?” Her fuzzy hair brushes his arm as she shakes her head. “Pretty girl. Yiddish. Shaina maidel. Pretty little girl.”

He isn’t thinking when he kisses on top of her head, but he regrets it; Rey turns away and slides off his lap to sit on the floor. “I’m sorry,” she says. She reaches out with a finger and brushes a line in the dust on the spines of his cassette collection. Koji Asano – Gravity in Space. Eels – Electro-Shock Blues. Eels – Daisies of the Galaxy. The Mountain Goats – Hot Garden Stomp. The Mountain Goats – The Hound Chronicles. WFMU Christmas Show 2002. John Vanderslice – Imperial Tears. Rachel Ware – Meditation Helmet. Kemi Wyckoff – Hazzard. She lingers, drawing her fingers back and forth, the tips turning gray. “I’m sorry,” she says again. Her voice sounds absent.

“What for?” What can she possibly think she’s done?

“Crying. Freaking out. Ruining everything.” The blank, rote tone of her voice hurts Ben. He goes to he knees beside her.

“Ruining – what? Come on. What d’you possibly think you’ve ruined?”

“Everything.” She says it like she’s saying her multiplication tables.

His voice scrapes in his throat. “Rey. Last time you came here, you told me you ‘ruined everything’ at Chai. Based on what you told me today? You didn’t ruin shit.”

“Of course I did.”

“No, you want to think that, because you want to think everything’s your fault, because you want to feel like you have some kind of power, but there’s nothing you could have done; your group ruined itself, because Poe’s an egomaniac with a savior complex and Amilyn’s an uptight rules-lawyer.”

Her head whips around and her eyes burn, but at least she’s here now. “Don’t say that. That’s not true.”

“It’s what leftist groups do,” he tells her. “It’s in their nature. They’re not effective; they’ll never be effective, and they cope by destroying themselves until only destructive people are left.”

“Poe is not destructive!” she insists. Of course insulting Polansky would bring her to life. “He wants to help people! People like me! We’re just trying to live our lives, and people like you drag us away for no reason.”

“I’m not ICE.”

“You might as well be. You do their work for them. Shore up the system. You have to see how unjust it is, Ben. You have to.”

He grinds his teeth. “I protect people.” But still this is better. This is an anger Kylo knows how to feel, an argument he knows how to argue. Not a rage at faceless, out-of-reach figures from another life. “Not systems, not agencies. I come between criminals and the people they would harm, and I protect people.”

”Poe is going to protect people,” she says, getting to her feet. He looks up at her. She looks ferocious in her righteous anger, and it tears at him that it’s in Poe’s defense, but he’d have her righteous and scornful a thousand times rather than have her in tears. “And you can try to stop it. But we can’t be stopped.” They’re a we, now, her and Poe? She marches over to the shoe rack and puts on her boots. “Not by all the cops in New York City.”

He expects her to use that as her exit line and slam the door, but she doesn’t. “Goodbye Ben,” she says. “I’m sorry. Keep the vodka.” And she shuts the door very quietly.

From: "Daniel J Polansky" ([email protected])
Date: Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 5:35PM
To: (concealed)
Subject: Minyan Against ICE in NYC

Hey all –

Thank you so much for contacting me about volunteering for the action. I continue to believe that we have the potential to effect real change in this city, to protect our friends and neighbors, and to remind our community of their moral obligations. I just wanted to be clear with everyone about this up front: the action we're proposing has the potential to be extremely dangerous. By participating, you would be risking real and serious consequences; thousands in fines, months to years of jail time, loss of employment, and serious physical injury are all possible consequences. IF YOU ARE NOT READY TO RISK THOSE THINGS, NO ONE WILL BLAME YOU. We want you safe and well and we are happy to have you cheering us on from the sidelines.

But if you are ready – if you are ready to put yourself on the line in a very real and serious way – then please reply to this email with your logisitical details as soon as possible. Every day on which action isn’t taken is a day on which the forces of injustice act with impunity.

Onward! L'chaim!
Poe

“Finn?” Rey asks him in an odd voice when he comes home, “Can we listen to your mom’s record?”

He sets down his bag. He usually only plays his mother’s album on holidays. It took him years to find a copy; her cousins had thrown all her work on the street with the furniture and dragged him to LA with nothing but a toothbrush and a change of clothes. The first time he’d listened to it, he’d cried uncontrollably from the first note of her voice, drowning in grief and bitterness. Thanks for leaving me alone, he’d thought, listening to his mother sing “Lecha Dodi.” Thanks for leaving me alone with your terrible fucking family; leaving me to carry your weird fucking religion that they hate; leaving me with an inheritance of trauma and depression. And he doesn’t want to think that; it isn’t fair. It wasn’t her fault, as he knows only too well. He wants to tie the sound of her voice to happiness. So he plays her music when there’s wine and food and candles and people who love him.

Well, Rey is here, and Rey loves him, anyway.

He gets out his computer and hunts it up. He supposes can understand why “lo-fi glitchy techno-inflected blues and Jewish traditional” didn’t make it big, even among weirdo-music collectors in the 90s.

He thinks it’s beautiful, of course.

His mother launches into “Twelve Gates,” backed by a distorted drum machine.

He turns to Rey. She sways a little, giving him a small smile. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Do we have any ice cream or anything?”

Oh-oh-oh, what a beautiful city! his mother sings, making her voice stutter on the loop. Rey goes over to the freezer and, after some digging, extracts some store-brand vanilla. “Want chocolate syrup?”

“You have to ask?”

She pours and pours syrup over his ice cream, drowning it, until the bottle makes gasping noises and Finn laughs. He digs in with a spoon Rey throws to him and makes a face of appreciation. There are fancy, boutique ice cream stores all over NYC, but… there’s an irreplaceable relish to something easy and sweet.

“Why did she go by Kemi Wyckoff?” Rey asks him as she eats the rest of the ice cream out of the container.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “My guess is that she lived on Wyckoff Ave once, or just liked it?

Rey nods. “Why’d you want to listen?” he asks her. Who’re those children all dressed in red? sings his mother, and then answers herself, Must be the children that Mo – Mo – Moses sent.

Rey doesn’t reply. Instead she throws her arms around him and hugs him tight. “I’m so glad you’re with me,” she says.

“I’m glad to be here with you,” he tells her. And he is. They make a good family, in his opinion.

Rich and the poor welcome to the city; young and the old welcome to the city; weak and the strong welcome to the city; there’s twelve – twelve – twelve gates to the city, his mother sings. Hallelujah!

Chapter Text

Signal

Disappearing message time set to 1 Day

R
poe set a date

Kylo
And?

R
next tues
first thing

Kylo
Headcount?

R
at least 10
probably more

Finn wakes up with a phantom pain in his scalp and a phantom voice in his ear. His mother, singing to him as she did his braids for kindergarten. Dona dona don dona dona-dai; dona dona don dai dai… sing along, Ef-Ef.

It’s his phone that woke him up.

Daniel Polansky
Can you do me a favor, Finn? I know Rey is gonna want to come watch and support our action, but that’s not a good idea. (Obviously I feel terrible about last time.) Can you keep her away for the morning? Come up with something important?

Me
Of course.

Well, that made things simple. Rose should be pleased. He has an idea, too, of what something important that he can make Rey do might be.

Rey is already awake. Last night she stayed up late because Linear Systems Analysis is tedious as fuck, and collapsed into bed without a thought. But she’d dreamt that Ben had his mouth on her again, and that he told her she tasted like wine, like apples, like salt. He told her he was going to kiss her. She woke up with her lips parted and her mouth full of a longing to taste him. And after that she couldn’t go back to sleep.

Her phone buzzes. She stares at it. Tries to read the lock screen notification without actually looking at it. Gives in and picks it up, as if it weighed twenty pounds. Oh, but it’s Poe.

Poe
Can you do me a favor, Rey? I know Finn is gonna want to come watch and support our action, but that’s not a good idea. (Obviously I feel terrible about last time.) Can you keep him away for the morning? Come up with something important?

Me
of course!!!

She suspects Finn had the native sense not to go anyway, but better safe than sorry. If she hadn’t frozen, he wouldn’t have been arrested last time. She can’t expose him to that kind of danger again.

Technically, the plans are entirely Snoke’s responsibility, but he calls Kylo and Hux in to consult. Kylo opts to pre-empt Hux’s inevitable suggestion (tear gas) by pointing out, “There’s a school playground across the street. We need to prioritize protecting potential targets; a lot of what I’ve heard points to property damage. I don’t think there’ll be firearms, but in the most extreme case they might try to damage the roadway. More likely something aimed at just halting the vehicles, wall tacks in tires, that sort of thing.”

Snoke frowns down at the building blueprint, and turns to examine the satellite view of West Houston St on his screen.

“I’d recommend a pre-emptive cordon,” Kylo says. “We cover the driveway, let the vehicles in and out. If they go in front of us, we’ll be pushing from within, instead of trying to pull them out.”

Hux says, “Are we going to stay there all day, managing traffic?” Hux, to Kylo’s jaundiced eye, is pissed that Kylo’s work uncovers real crises they can intervene in, when all his bullying, which as far as Kylo can tell is based on picking Arabic names out of the tax records, amounts to nothing. Hux once thought he’d found a plot; Kylo had listened to the conversation he’d recorded and told him it was a wedding. Hux hadn’t believed him. Kylo can’t believe Hux is still assigned to this division after that debacle, which involved a SWAT team, a terrified groom, and a very frightened horse. He can’t believe Hux still has a job. He tries not to think about it too much.

Snoke looks at Kylo, still not speaking.

“After one or two vehicles get through, Poe will do something stupid. Then we’ll remove them.”

Snoke hums. “Make sure his mugshot is available to pass around. No cordon. We’ll pull them out first thing.”

“Paige, no! Paige – why?”

Rey and Finn each have a worried eye on Rose as she paces. “You need to tell Leah,” Finn tells Rey firmly. “And honestly I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me, too.”

“You don’t know that,” Rose tells her sister on the phone. “Paige, you could get hurt. You could lose your job. You could go to jail.”

Rey fidgets on the couch. Sometimes Finn feels bad about how easy it is to make her feel guilty, but he can’t just let this go. Whatever she and Poe are doing, however they’re trying to play the cops, Leah should know. Because if Poe gets arrested today, and God forbid it should go to trial, the sooner Leah has all the facts, the better.

And he needs to know what kind of trouble Rey is getting herself into because he will need to help her get out of it.

“She has free time in the morning,” he tells her. “How often does that happen? And we haven’t seen her in forever.”

“Yeah,” says Rey, looking at the floor. “That’s true.”

“Paige,” Rose says. She sees the two of them looking at her and frowns harder.

“Okay?” Finn says, promptingly, to Rey.

“Okay,” Rey agrees, eyes fixed on Rose.

Hello; you’ve reached Rav Luke Skywalker. Please leave your message after the tone.

“Hi Luke. It’s Rey again. Just calling ‘cause Finn and I are gonna go see your sister tomorrow, so… if you have anything you want us to tell her or… Rabbi Luke are you ever going to pick up the phone? Or call me? Please.”

Rey had forgotten that apartments could have so many rooms. The hall and the living room are two completely separate areas, and the living room has a piano in it. A grand piano. Dusty, lid shut, stacked with legal briefs and legal journals and the Times and the Post and the Daily News and the NYRB, just like every other flat surface in the place. But still, a grand piano. Leah motions them to the dining room. (There's a dining room! New York apartments come with dining rooms?)

The table is made of lacquered oak, and as she sits she has a brief memory of the black-stained pine of Ben’s table against her face as he fucked her. She tries not to blush, and draws her mind back to the present, to the dusty surfaces of Leah's apartment. Maybe she needs someone to clean for her. Maybe I could do that, once a week, or something? Just dust everything? And she could give me $20? And maybe a hug?

A stack of file folders thumps onto the table. The dust rises like smoke from a magic trick and Leah is smiling at them, her half-grey hair regal in a crown of braids. "Darling children. How are you?"

“We’re okay,” Finn says.

“Can I use your internet?” Rose asks.

“Naturally,” Leah tells her. “You know the password?”

“Yes. Remind me to change it for you later, please?”

“Of course. Let me get just get the kettle on...”

Leah goes briskly into the kitchen (yet another room!), and Rose takes her laptop out and begins loading the livestream Kaydel’s running. “Do you know who all Danny got together for this mishegas?” Leah calls, over the sound of running water and a gas flame clicking alive. It’s so strange to hear her call Poe Danny; funny, too, how the diminutive feels less condescending than Amilyn’s Daniel.

“Uhh… Sam Wexler, Tallie Pinkstaff, Sara Brickman,” Finn counts off on his fingers. “Yan Pappas, Bastián Zoller, Eli Gillis...”

“My dumbass sister took the train in from Pittsburgh!” Rose shouts, scowling at her screen.

“...Ivy Gold, Carey Axelrod… that’s ten, right, counting Poe?.”

“Lola Seitz, Saralinda Marcovicci, and Raisele Sayles came too, though,” Rey adds.

Leah re-emerges, rolling her eyes. “Babies.”

“Most of them have parents who are willing and able to bail them out,” Rey says.

"Sure," says Leah with a wave of her hand. They all know she'll send Rose or Kaydel with another bundle of money orders for the rest. She starts shifting papers around the table so they’ll have places to put their tea. “You want cookies?” It’s not really a question; she’s already hurrying back to the kitchen; they hear a plastic clamshell cracking open, and then she’s back with a plate full of chocolate and raspberry rugelach. She thrusts them under Rey’s nose until she takes two.

Rose is looking pale. "The cops are arriving."

"Can you see the minyan?" Rey asks.

"No."

"Speaking of cops," Finn says, "Rey has something to tell you."

"One moment." Leah holds up a hand – the kettle is whistling. Rey stares at her shoes again as their hostess goes to make the tea. The way Leah makes it – a twice-poured dark red brew turned syrupy with heaping tablespoons of sugar and then pale with milk – four cups takes time. As they wait, they watch Rose's screen and try to keep calm. Rose has turned down Kaydel's narration, but she's providing her own, sotto voce. It's mostly to do with how her sister is unforgivably stupid. How can Rey tell them what she's done when Rose is sitting there, white-knuckled, with tears clearly gathering in her wide brown eyes as she watches Paige walk calmly into the frame at Poe's side?

Kylo tries futilely to radio Snoke, because when he observes that Poe and all the men with him are wearing yaramulkes, that the whole group is modestly and formally dressed, and that the items under the arms of most of the protesters are tallit bags, he knows that he did not have all the information he should have, and that things are going to go very badly today.

Rey clutches her milky tea and tries to get through her story as fast as she can without looking at Leah or Finn. She looks at Rose, who is only watching the screen. Until the first vehicle tries to leave, the line of young people currently unfolding and kissing their prayer shawls are just pedestrians, and the police have no excuse to remove them. There are so many police. Helmeted police, their belts bristling with batons and handcuffs and pepper spray canisters and tasers and guns. Rey shivers convulsively, and holds her hot mug to her breast.

She’d thought all night about what to tell. All she needs to tell Leah is that she got arrested and blackmailed into spying, and what Poe’s plan is and how they’ve carried it out. She could have shielded Leah even from the identity of her police liaison. But what if he appears on the screen today? So she doesn’t leave him out.

She doesn’t mention socks, or anything that happened in stairwells or on kitchen tables. She doesn’t mention staring up at the Temple of Dendur and marveling, or the fancy orange juice and the vodka. She wants to mention a wind-bitten conversation on a rooftop, to ask about murder and perjury. She can’t.

The praying voices from the livestream thread through her story, though Rose keeps the volume low. Poe is the best at projecting, making himself heard over the sound of the street, but there’s a piercing note to Paige’s clear voice, and Carey and Sam have deep voices that give the group a rich sound.

He feels the street cops they’ve brought tense when the protesters cover their faces with their shawls, and relax, confused, when they uncover them again. One riot officer asks his neighbor, “Are they Arabs? Shouldn’t they be praying on the ground?”

“They’re Jews,” Kylo tells them, not bothering to correct the underlying error. “They pray standing up.” He tries again to radio Snoke. Snoke does not copy. He sees Hux, on the far side of the area of operations from him. Hux looks untroubled. That fucking idiot.

“I don’t think they’ll be violent,” he tells the nearest officer. “We don’t have to go to hard on them.” The man just looks at him.

Kylo starts looking for the camera. They must have brought a camera.

No one says anything when Rey finishes talking. The first vehicle is trying to leave the lot. Paige looks directly at the camera as she settles her tallit neatly at her neck, the silver thread of the embroidery shining in the winter sun. Poe lifts his chin. He links arms with Paige and Bastián; all of them link arms.

”We are morally obligated to protest the behavior of ICE!” Poe shouts. “As it is written:” and twelve voices raise to join him.

“When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who abides with you in your land shall be to you as one of your citizens; you will love him as yourself.”

Rose points a trembling finger at the screen. “All those cops – Poe wants them there? That’s his plan?” Leah breathes out, hard.

Poe’s voice alone again. “We do not tear the people we love from their families! We do not detain our citizens indefinitely!”

Rey’s head pounds. She has trusted him. She has not allowed herself to think how very badly this could go wrong. Holy Name, she prays silently, let this work. Let Poe be right. And let them all walk away safe.

The driver of the van guns the engine, but does not move. They all look so small there, on the sidewalk in front of it.

“As it is written!” Poe calls again, and again everyone joins him: “My father was a fugitive Aramean!”

”The fathers of this city are Syrian refugees!” Poe shouts. “Our fathers are refugees from Guatemala! Our fathers are Haitian refugees!” They clasp their arms more closely, tighten themselves together, as the first policeman approaches. Kaydel’s camera does not capture what he says to them. Poe does not lower his voice or pause. “My father was a fugitive Aramean! A refugee from El Salvador! From Darfur! From Iraq!”

“My mother was a refugee from Vietnam!” cries Paige Thi-Cohen. Without even thinking Rey offers her hand to Rose, and Rose, perhaps without thinking either, takes it, and squeezes it so hard it hurts. Rey could not possibly care less.

Kylo can’t ask the police vehicles to block the view of the driveway; the point is to get the ICE vehicles out, after all. (Is it, though? What is the point, exactly?) But he has to find the camera. He scans the area. There’s a small blonde woman with a fierce expression holding up her phone at eye level. He stalks towards her; if he can’t make her leave or put the phone away, at the very least he can get in the way of the shot. They shouldn’t have picked someone so short.

He’s about to step into her line of sight when he sees the other. She isn’t one of them, didn’t mean to be here, he thinks; she’s holding a Starbucks cup and her feet are pointed towards Hudson St. But her phone is held up; she’s got a wide angle, and it probably includes him.

He stops himself short, trying to breathe calmly. If he can keep things dull, she might leave.

The shouting yanks at his nerves. His mind involuntarily shakes out information in response. Citations: Leviticus 19:33, Leviticus 19:34, Deuteronomy 26:5; NJPS translation. And then commentary: Ibn Ezra says: The stranger is mentioned in the Torah together with the elderly because both are comparatively powerless. It is an equal transgression to wrong either. And then simply a principle, which settles inside him like a stone: The stranger who abides with you in your land shall be to you as one of your citizens; you will love him as yourself.

He turns to watch the first street cop engage with Poe.

Finn points at a corner of the screen. “Look.” Rey follows his finger to the view counter. “Look how many people are watching.” 1.0k says the little white number. 1.1k it says, not long after, and continues to tick upward.

“Over a thousand,” Rey says for the benefit of Leah, who can’t read that small and far away. “How is that possible? I knew he’d try to get press, but – isn’t this just Kaydel’s feed?”

Finn looks up from his phone. “Gothamist picked it up.” He flashes them his screen.

Rey is starting to lose feeling in her fingers but she can feel Rose clamp down even harder. The sound of the mechanized police announcement – that they must disperse or face arrest – blares from the laptop. Cops gesture to the Chai members on the end of the line, encouraging them to peel away. Instead they step back, huddle even tighter. The ICE van driver sounds the horn, a long, frustrated blare. A helmeted policeman tries to get around Yan, but Yan draws back, so the line is now right up against the van.

“What’ll they do next?” asks Rose, shakily.

“Probably verbal persuasion, intimidation. Scare them about jail,” Leah says. “That sort of thing.” She stiffens, then, and Rey does too. There he is. In his black overcoat with the collar turned up against the February cold, Leah’s son strides impatiently up to Poe. Kaydel’s phone captures the snarl on his face as he speaks, but not his words. Whatever response Poe gives, he gives it with a blasé raise of his eyebrow that makes Kylo clench his fists. He points a finger in Poe’s face and gestures at the rest of the minyan. Poe’s face turns stony. Someone crosses the frame, and when they can see the two men again, Kylo whirls around and stomps away. The expression on Poe’s face is unyielding.

Two helmeted cops step forward to take his place. One takes hold of Poe’s arm, the other of Paige’s. They try to simply pry them apart. It doesn’t work. They dig their thumbs into the joints, and pain shows on Poe and Paige’s faces, but they don’t move. The policeman in front of Poe steps back and takes his taser off his belt. Rey gasps. Rose is rigid. “He’s only showing it to him,” Leah says in a tight voice. “Right now it’s just a threat.” The man brings the taser close to Poe and Poe shuts his eyes. Kaydel takes a step forward, bringing them closer.

But Leah’s right. The officer puts the taser up. And as he does, the camera captures the moment that the cop next to him very casually drops a hand onto Paige’s left breast and squeezes. Poe’s face distorts and his outraged scream comes very clearly over Rose’s tinny speakers. He tries to twist himself free, but Paige keeps hold of his arm; she won’t let him go. She closes her eyes. The cop does not remove his hand. The scene judders as Kaydel begins to rush towards them.

”This is assault!” Poe screams. “You get your fucking hands off her!”

An officer steps in front of Kaydel, blustering; rather than argue with him, she holds the phone up over his shoulder. Down in the bottom of the frame now, the cop with his hand on Paige pulls a canister off his belt with his other hand. Whatever he says, it makes Poe scream again, and Paige’s eyes open. She spits in the cop’s face. It splatters on his visor.

The other cop fires his taser at Paige and plants it on Poe’s chest.

Paige drops. Poe falls with a scream away from the point of contact with the continuous shock. The scene shakes in Kaydel’s hand as the other cops run towards their slumping bodies.

Rose is on her feet, letting go of Rey. She’s grabbing for her coat and her bag. Rey and Finn are out of their seats and beside her.

“Do you know where they’ll take them?” Finn asks. He’s putting on his coat too, and handing Rey hers.

“I’ll guess. And if I’m wrong I’ll be closer than I am now.” Kaydel is being driven back, and they can hear her shouting; in their involuntary convulsions and their fall, Poe and Paige have come apart, and the cops push into the weak spot in the line. The other protesters, seeing that the line is broken, go limp; the police drag them roughly out of the way of the van. Leah’s eyes are fixed on the screen, and Rey feels that she can hear her thoughts. Where is Ben. Why didn’t he prevent this.

“Wait,” Leah says. She’s struggling to rise. Finn gives her his hand. “They won’t drop charges quickly here, and they’re going to hit them with every felony they can think of. Bail won’t be set until tomorrow morning at the earliest.”

Rey spares a glance for the screen. Kaydel is running; it’s impossible to say what towards. The shot is mostly of the palm of her glove. 6.5k says the small white number in the corner.

“I don’t care,” says Rose. “I have to go. I have to try.” Finn closes her laptop and puts it in her bag.

“The best thing you can do for your sister,” Leah says sharply, “is to get to Kaydel’s phone before the police confiscate it, if you possibly can. If they’ve already confiscated it when you get there, do everything in your power to get it back.” She walks into the living room, and from the papers on the lid of the piano she extracts a thick envelope, and carries it back to Rose. “If their bail is set, it’ll be astronomical. Get as many out as you can, but your sister first. Go now.”

“Thank you.” Rose plants a hasty, shaking kiss on Leah’s cheek. She takes the envelopes and hurries to the door, where Finn is waiting. Rey starts to follow after her, but Leah calls her name.

“Rey. If Rose can spare you. I’d appreciate it if you stayed here with me.”

Kylo looks up. He’s surrounded by the shreds of the citation pad that used to belong to the patrol car he’s sitting in. He’ll have to apologize for that. Polansky is shouting again. His tone has changed. Kylo swallows hard. His hands are shaking. He can’t see what’s going on; he knows Hux will tell Snoke he was sulking in a car even though this is his assignment, and maybe he is sulking. He just – he warned Poe. He did warn him.

Someone screams. Not Poe. Kylo doesn’t want to know. He warned him.

He hears the running feet of all the officers they brought – the too-many, too-well-armed officers – and makes himself get out of the car in time to watch the ICE vehicle emerge onto the street, turning towards Varick, towards downtown, towards the city, going wherever its driver meant to go.

As Kylo stands watching it drive away, not wanting to turn and see what’s left in its wake, there’s a flash of dun coat and blonde hair, and he sees one of his officers in pursuit. It’s the girl they brought to film, and the man after her is obviously too slow, especially with all his gear on. Kylo takes off after them. As soon as he overtakes his helmeted colleague, the officer falls back. The girl skids into a sharp left and takes off south on Varick. Kylo gains on her.

She runs through a red, making Kylo drop back to avoid a car, and hangs a left on Spring, which tangles him in some scaffolding. He assumes she’s heading for the train, but maybe she realizes at the last minute what a bad bet that is; she weaves through a green space on 6th Ave and is dashing towards a plaza on Dominick when he corners her against a set of stained glass doors.

“Your phone,” he says, holding out his hand.

The girl raises her chin. “No,” she says.

Her eyes are red. She’s shaking, and her cheeks are wet. He stares at her. She’s a total stranger to him. He looks down at his own black-gloved hand, outstretched.

He heads for Hudson St, leaving her there, slumped over her phone against the bright glass.

Chapter Text

Uncle Luke leaned forward, his hands clasped on the table. “Well,” he said, and Ben understood that he was about to be asked to follow something complicated. He leaned in towards his uncle, who began, “Before Creation, the Holy Name wasn’t the Holy Name. Can you tell me why?”

Ben frowned with thought. “Because there wasn’t an alphabet yet?”

“Exactly,” said Uncle Luke, warmly, and Ben raised his chin a little with pride, brushing his hair out of his eyes. “But God was everywhere and everything, because there was no place and nothing else to be. We call this state Eyn Sof, the Endless. But in order to create, there had to be room for creation. So, in the act of creation, God changed God’s nature. God became not the single stuff of existence, but ten emanations. Do you know what an emanation is?”

“It’s something that, like – ” Ben wiggled his hand across the table towards Uncle Luke – “comes out of something else.”

“Yes. Like heat off a stove, or light off a lamp. And each emanation is of a different nature, a different aspect of the Holy Name. We call them sefirot.” Uncle Luke began to sketch, carefully. A very complicated diagram, full of overlapping lines. “Some are masculine, and some are feminine, and some are both, or neither, or one sometimes and another others. And they are all connected. But they are not together like the were before creation. And some are with us, close to us, and some are far. And this, Ben, is how the world comes to be broken.”

Ben frowned down at the diagram; it didn’t make any sense, just to look at. He was sure he could understand, though, if he studied it. Get more information, Mom and Uncle Luke always said. You make all kinds of mistakes if you don’t have enough information.

"Danny knew this might happen," Leah says evenly. "This is a risk he chose to take. Let's be honest; he courted it." Her voice gets shakier. "Did Paige know? If she didn’t... it’s going to be hard to forgive him."

Rey swallows. "I think so. There was an email he sent. About how it was risky, they could get fined or jailed or hurt or lose their jobs. It was a bcc but I don't think he would have let her come if she didn't know it was a risk. But..."

Leah looks away. "You have to understand, Rey, that I have a lot of practice forgiving stupid men." She sighs. "Probably too much. Probably it comes too easily now." She sits down again, picking up her cold tea. "Sometimes I even think I could forgive my son."

Rey has no answer to that. Every new thing she learns about Leah's family makes it harder for her to guess how Leah must feel.

The lawyer clears her throat, and stares at her cup. "Rey. I’m so sorry for what he’s done to you. The position he’s put you in.” Rey can’t say it’s okay because it isn’t, but she nods. She can see Leah swallow hard. “It’s terrible. What’s he’s doing with his life. What he’s done. But I can’t be one of those parents who sit shiva for living children. I just can’t.”

“No – of course not.” Rey feels a wash of warm relief, and a shiver of envy. Leah would never abandon her son. Did my parents ever mention that I was born at all?

“Can I ask you – how – how does he seem? I mean. Healthy, happy, sane, that sort of thing."

"He seems healthy."

“Not happy or sane, though, hmm?” Leah raises an eyebrow.

“He’s miserable,” Rey blurts. “He’s completely wretched and lonely and I know that part of him knows what he’s doing is wrong, but he’s too stubborn and resentful to admit it; I tried to – to remind him, who he really is, what he really cares about, but I fucked it up and it didn’t work. I let him make it about me, and then I got emotional.” She realizes she's wringing her hands. She makes them go still and focuses her gaze on the wall in front of her.

Leah's expression is blank, which is a suspicious state of affairs. Rey suspects that many witnesses have told this blank face things they didn't mean to. She tries not to become one of them.

“It just – it seemed to me that he was lonely, and Poe told me he hadn't been very outgoing as a teenager, and I thought maybe if I could be kind to him, show him that I cared about the person he really was, that he'd... come back to being that person."

Leah’s expression doesn’t change, but her head tilts. The brass-colored pins in her hair gleam. “Lonely?” is all she says.

“Well,” Rey says, and then carefully does not say he had the saddest apartment I’ve ever seen. “We talked about things sometimes. Besides Chai.”

“Oh?”

“He knew about – me. He said – you’d had a clipping on the fridge. About Luke and the program I was in. And he saw my – wrist – and he made the connection.” Leah’s expression is no longer neutral, but Rey can’t read it. “And I asked him why he changed his name.”

“And?” It’s short but it’s too fast. She can see that Leah knows she’s given it away, how badly she wants to know. Do you think you have to hide that from me, Rey thinks, that you love him and you want to know why he left you? Do you think I’d judge you?

But this is her chance to ask. She meets Leah’s eyes. “He told me Luke had perjured himself to keep a friend of his father’s out of jail. And that she’d killed someone after that. And that that told him that you didn’t care about justice, even though you always said you did; you only cared about protecting your own. And so he didn’t want to be one of your own.”

Leah’s eyes are impossibly wide. As she stares at Rey, they begin to fill with tears. She turns away with her arm across her face, and she makes a sound that Rey knows she’s heard Kylo make. Though she can’t quite think when.

The downtown 2 express came almost as soon as Finn and Rose were in the station. He’s glad he made the right call on that. The train is packed with Bronxites late for work, but that’s okay; Finn holds the bar and Rose holds tight to him.

“We’ll get there soon,” he whispers to her.

“It’s just a taser,” Rose says, dully. “It just hurts. He didn’t hit her in the head with it. It’s only pain.”

Finn pulls her face to his chest before her first tear can fall. She wraps her arms around him.

“No,” she says into his chest. “Don’t hug me. Text Kaydel. Her battery might run out.”

It’s a long time before Leah turns back to Rey. Her hands are trembling a little. "I wish... well, just now I wish I still smoked." She makes the gesture of bringing a cigarette to her lips. "Ah well.” She sighs. “I didn't like Quira, Rey. Among other things, she was my partner's ex. Ben's father, I mean; Han. I didn't like her life choices or her affected way of talking or her habit of acting like I wasn't in the room. But I recognized that... when women grow up thinking the only resource they've got is their ability to get attention from men, they don't tend to be good at making friends with women. She was doing what she could to survive. I understood that. I still didn't like her, of course, but I understood."

Rey nods. She remembers Bozena Neytal back in LA, how frustrated and angry she'd been when Luke treated her just like all the other students. How she'd tried to get Finn's attention by being mean to Rey. It hadn't worked, but that hadn't made Rey like her any better.

“And she’d been important to Han; he didn’t exactly grow up in a bed of roses himself. So I didn’t like her, but when Han asked me to help her, I did my best.” Leah looks down at her hands. “Terrible men, she had. One petty little sadist after another. And she did dirty work for all of them. And every time she did, Han would drag her over and tell her he could get her out – Canada, witness protection, new ID, whatever she needed.” Her eyes are fixed on a chair in the living room. From the way she looks at, Rey thinks she’s seeing a man in it, as he used to sit when he had a guest. “And every time she’d brush him off, because – ” Leah waved, rolling her eyes – “one more job and she’d be rich. Which of course Han could never argue with, because he was an idiot for that sort of thing, too.”

Rey increasingly wants to meet this Han character, but that’s not really the point, so she stays quiet.

“Anyway,” Leah continues, “Ben hated her. Whenever she came he’d scowl like a gargoyle and run to his room. If she stayed too long he’d start destroying things.”

“Destroying things?” Rey is alarmed. Leah looks at her oddly.

“He tends to… tear things up. He gets his temper from me and his self-control from Han. It’s a bad combination. Poor boychik. Maybe your meetings with him have been too short. Or maybe he’s changed.” Rey remembers Ben charging out the back door of the Dyckman House and slamming it behind him.

“I’ve seen him… shout, sometimes,” she says, and Leah nods.

There is nothing for him to tear, or kick, or smash as he walks up Hudson. There is no one to shout at, and it’s frightening. It means he has to listen to himself think. Probably should have done some more thinking before this. This is your fault. You didn’t get enough information. This is her fault. She mislead you. This is Poe’s fault. He mislead her. This is your fault for not knowing that they would lie to you. But she didn’t lie to you; you’ve seen her trying to lie; it didn’t look like that. Poe must have lied to her. She will never forgive you. How did you think this was going to go? You were going to arrest all her friends and she was going to, what, thank you? There is nothing you can say or do that will ever make her forgive you.

And below that, an icy repetition: The stranger who abides with you in your land shall be to you as one of your citizens; you will love him as yourself.

There is nothing I can say or do.

My father was a fugitive Aramean.

I have already done unforgivable things.

"I can't pretend to have followed Quira's career, such as it was, very closely. From my point of view, things were more or less static, except that she got harder to take as she got older, and Ben got old enough to leave the apartment instead of throwing tantrums in his room."

It's disconcerting to Rey, the way Ben seems to shift with every account she hears of him. She imagines Luke would have something philosophical to say about that.

"Have some more rugelach," Leah says, pushing the plate towards her. Rey obediently begins to crunch through a chocolate one. "Anyway. She got arrested a few times, but nothing ever really stuck. Until one summer, her latest little would-be ganglord had a rival turn up dead on Grand St, by the park. The boyfriend had a gun that matched the bullet, but he also had an alibi. Quira didn't." She pauses. "At first."

Ah.

Leah draws another long breath. “Luke was visiting from LA. I wasn’t keeping track of him; you know how he is; he wanders around and gets his nose in things.” Rey does know. He’d gotten his nose into Maz’s household in Los Angeles, after all. “And so I didn’t know for sure that he was lying. I made it my business not to know, at the time.”

She’s silent for a very long time. Rey is inclined to leave her to her thoughts, but after a while she begins to wonder if Leah will ever come back to her. “Were you her lawyer?” she asks.

“No.” Leah shakes herself. “Chuey was. He was always Han’s lawyer too. You met Chuey, I think.” Rey fumbles for a moment before she remembers the imposing attorney who visited Chai. She nods.

“Ben wasn’t living with us anymore by then. I hoped he’d go to NYU, maybe Cardozo like me, but no, it had to be Yale.” She rolls her eyes, just a little, the same way Rey had seen her son do. Rey almost laughs at the pride Leah still transparently takes in her son’s achievements, even as she pretends to kvetch: “Honestly. Who goes to Yale and does criminal law. I ask you.”

“What do you mean, she got away?”

Kylo slams the soft side of his fist against the window of the police van, because it’s that or his knuckles against Hux's nose. “It doesn’t fucking matter!” he shouts. “There was someone else filming! Probably someone was capturing the stream anyway!” Maybe Hux is gearing up to ask him why he didn’t know about the camera, or why he thought they’d be more violent; he doesn’t want to hear it. "Snoke's gonna be fucking furious," is all he says. He is trying not to think anymore. Thinking will crush him. Probably should have done some more thinking before this. Chess is Danny Polansky’s game; not mine. I’m real good at crossword puzzles. Rey will never forgive me. But she never expected better of me. This is her fault. No, it’s mine. No. It’s Poe’s. Probably should have done some more thinking before this. He walks around the back and throws open the door.

There are six men in the back, cuffed and safely belted according to procedure. That's a mercy, anyway. Kylo steps up to stand on the van's bumper. They all turn to look at him, but it's Poe who speaks. He's soaked with sweat and his tallit is filthy, barely clinging to his shoulders. They must have had him on the ground. "Paige," he says. His voice is strained. "Ben – Kylo – get her a female medic. To take the cartridges out. At least do that."

Poe's look is full of fury and contempt, and without meaning to Kylo lowers his eyes in the face of it. "What happened?" he finds himself asking. He barely recognizes his own voice, it’s so drained of life.

"You walked away and your colleague sexually assaulted her," Poe tells him coldly. "And when he threatened to pepper spray her, he said something I’m not gonna repeat, because it was a fucking hat-trick of racism, misogyny, and antisemitism. So fuck you."

Kylo can feel himself turning red, feel his eyes watering. He can't handle this; he doesn’t know how. He pulls his coat collar further up. "What happened?" he asks again.

"She spit in his fucking face," Poe says, and a small, grim smile shows white in his beard. It vanishes. "His friend shot her with the taser."

"And then he held it on Poe's chest," snarls a sandy-haired man next to him.

Poe waves gently with the fingers of his cuffed hands. "I'm fine. Paige is the one with the... things in her."

Kylo swallows. "She shouldn't require a medic to remove them. But I'll see if I can get one."

"A female medic," Poe repeats, his eyes burning into Kylo.

"A female medic," Kylo says, feeling ill, and shuts the van door again.

One of the street cops is climbing out of the van with the women in it as he steps up. "The one who was hit with the EMD projectile?" he asks, and she gestures with her chin at the Asian woman who’d been standing next to Poe. She looks at him grimly, her jaw set. The women seem to have come up with a way of getting their prayer shawls off; several of them are holding then in their laps. "You're Paige? Daniel Polansky asked me to find you a female medic."

"I don't need a medic," she tells him. "Saralinda took them out for me. I just need some disinfectant and some privacy."

"A lawyer," puts in the girl to her right, who has dark curling hair and olive skin. "We would like to speak with our lawyers, please."

"Is Poe okay?" Paige asks. "He doesn't have – "

"Excited delirium?" finishes the girl on the other side of her, who has dark curling hair and paper-white skin.

"No," he tells her. "He's fine. Mostly worried about you."

Paige gives a small, sharp nod. "I'm going to remember that you said that," she says, "and I want to see with my own eyes what condition he's in when he gets out of that van."

"Lawyer," says the girl to her right, again.

"I'll ride with him myself," Kylo says, and climbs down. There is nothing I can say or do.

“I’m not sure that Ben knows for sure whether Luke was really with Quira or not, either. But he said he was. He affirmed it in a court of law. And if it isn’t true, then yes. He committed perjury.” Leah stares at the empty chair in the living room again, and Rey realizes that it actually is empty – that alone among the flat surfaces of the living room, it has no pile of books or papers. “He would have done anything for me,” Leah says, very softly. “And I think I would have done anything for Han. And Han would have done anything for Quira. And none of us ever asked, but somehow it happened anyway. Because we knew.”

Luke had never mentioned his sister to Rey, not once, until she told him that Finn was moving back to New York for grad school and that she reckoned she’d go with him and try to go to college there. Then all he’d said was, You should look up my sister. I’ll tell her to expect you.

"And I understand why Ben would see hypocrisy in that. But it's so hard. When it's the person you love. To look them in the eye and hurt them for a principle."

Rey understands what Leah means, but it doesn’t entirely fit together for her. She remembers Ben kneeling beside her on the floor of his apartment. I protect people. Not systems. Not agencies. People. "I would have thought he'd understand that, though," she says, slowly. "Even if he thinks it's hypocritical."

Leah looks sadder than Rey has ever seen her. "I’m sure he does. He left out part of the story.”

”Look at the diagram,” Uncle Luke urged him. “You see how it’s symmetrical? Judgement on one side, mercy on the other. And everything is connected. But if we don’t maintain the balance ourselves, here on earth, we damage the greater, cosmic balance.”

“How do we mess it up?”

“Well, for example, if our idea of justice is too harsh, we draw judgement towards ourselves and push mercy away. We drive the sefirot away from one another. Like forcing lovers apart.”

“And that breaks the world?” Ben was a bit skeptical. Surely you couldn’t damage God.

“Right now, some of the sefirot, like judgement and power, are very close to us, and others, like mercy and beauty are very far.”

“But that’s not broken; that’s just… ”

“When Han has to go away for a long time, how does your mother feel?”

“She – she says she gets more work done.”

Uncle Luke laughed, the way he did when he was pretending not to be sad. “I’m sure she does. But is she happy? Are you?”

“No.”

“Imagine I sent Han so far away that you and your mother didn’t even know where he was or when he would be back. Or even if he would be back.” Ben imagined it. Imagined how Mom would panic, would call everyone, and pace, and snap, and how she wouldn’t be able to help the people she was always trying to help, and then she’d shut herself in her room so he couldn’t see her crying. He imagined himself outside her door; he wouldn’t be able to call for her because she’d already be too sad and calling for her would only make her sadder; he’d be alone, with nobody to help him or take care of him or protect him. He’d have to go to school alone and come home alone and make himself dinner and it would be like the worst it’d ever been, but it might never stop, if Dad were gone so far away. Real terror took hold of him; he could feel it, he could feel what it would be like. Tears ran into his eyes.

“So – so separation’s what breaks the world?” he asked. “Or loneliness?” But he couldn’t swallow the tears down; they overwhelmed him, and Uncle Luke rushed around the table to drag him into his arms and hold him tight.

The gallery isn’t open yet, but Kaydel has begged them to let her in, and Finn and Rose find her seated on the floor, tethered to the wall by her phone’s charger. She doesn’t look up as they approach.

“You okay?” Finn asks.

“I’m fine,” she says. “Did you guys see the fucking view counts on this?”

“Yeah, it was at like six thousand when we left.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s like eight and a half now.” Kaydel turns her face up then. Her red-rimmed eyes and cheerful smile make a strange contrast. “Poe’s going to be thrilled.”

With a jolt, Finn remembers that that was Poe’s goal; he’d wanted too many cops, a disproportionate response, something upsetting. A good story with blood to bait the press.

“There are like a thousand people in our mentions,” Kaydel says, turning back to her phone. “Most of them are at-ing the mayor’s office, too.” Her head jerks back up and she looks at Rose with earnest blue eyes, her expression gone somber. “Fuck those cops, though. Don’t worry about your sister. She got up okay.”

Rose exhales and looks away. “Paige is tougher than everyone on that street put together.”

To Finn’s eyes, it’s very obvious that she is not reassured. “Do you know where they took them?” he asks, and Kaydel shakes her head. She looks back at her phone.

“Oh shit, Channel 7 wants to use our footage.”

“Quira was acquitted, but nothing in that process was easy on her. She was in desperate circumstances more or less her whole life, and frequently abusive ones, I think. And she was tough as nails; everyone from Han’s old neighborhood was. But there’s a limit to everyone's resilience."

Rey shivers. She has felt the edges of her own resilience, pushed the limit outward. She does not like to think what might lie beyond it.

"She was free but she wasn't well. She was convinced that we hadn't done everything we could for her, that we could do more, that she deserved more. And if we wouldn't give it to her, she was going to force us." Leah looks down. “Ben was visiting. I’d told him he could stay in his old room while he studied for the bar.” Her hands in her lap hold each other fast, so tight that Rey can see the strain in the tendons. “I wasn’t home. Han let Quira in and she – she put a gun to Ben’s head.”

She makes such a small gesture that Rey almost misses it, the little nudge of her fingers towards one of the dining room chairs. It happened here, Rey realizes. He was at his own table, right here, and someone put a gun to his head.

“Han told her he didn’t have what she wanted and she dragged Ben down into the street. When she got to the corner she panicked and ran.” Leah’s breath is a battle. “He went down to the police station and filed a report. She was arrested again. And then… Han begged and pleaded and he walked Ben back to the station to tell them he wouldn’t testify. And the cop who took his statement kept telling him how much danger he’d been in, how he could have died, how bad it would be if they let her walk. But he knew his father wanted to protect her, and so I wanted to, and so his uncle wanted to; we all wanted to protect her, and so Ben said he wouldn’t testify. So they dropped the charges, let her go. And then... she shot a bus driver downtown. About a week later.” She raises her eyes to meet Rey’s again at last. “And Ben never showed up for the bar exam and now he’s a cop under the captain who told him he should have pressed charges.”

Rey’s head spins. Ben must have been 25 or 26. Not a child. But how would she feel if someone her parents had fought for put a gun to her head? Could she forgive something like that, if her parents asked her?

“So when he says he doesn’t want to be one of our own… I think what he means, what he feels, is more like…” Leah sighs. “You can’t fire me, I quit.” She turns away from Rey. “He thinks we cared more about Quira than we did about him. That we didn’t love him enough to want to protect him.” Her voice is low, but she holds it steady, and it sounds almost clinical: “He could have died. I know that. She panicked and ran. She could just as easily have panicked and shot my son dead in the street.”

But Rey’s parents would never ask her to forgive something like that, or anything else, because unlike Ben’s parents they really didn’t love her enough to want to protect her. She doesn’t know what she feels most strongly towards Leah’s son in that moment, sympathy or jealous rage.

She stares at her hands, and does something she almost never does – splays her fingers so she can see the scar from her machine. She remembers Ben in the stairwell of the Met: I thought I was too stupid or too cruel to understand justice. And on the roof, in the freezing wind, tearing at his hair: He ought to go to jail. If he’d do it to you, he’d do it to someone else.

And she thinks of Oscar Platt – because she does know his name; if he is alive, she could name him, could tell some authority what he did – and how she has never been able to say what, exactly, justice would look like for him. For her.

Leah’s voice is still quiet, but it startles her all the same. “I’m sorry, Rey. I realize I must sound like I’m trying to justify my son. I know it’s not an excuse for what he’s doing, what I’m telling you.”

“Oh no,” says Rey. “I wasn’t thinking that at all. I was just thinking – ” What? That your son tried to demand judgement from me the way you tried to demand mercy from him? That maybe neither demand was fair but maybe neither demand was wrong? That I don’t know why the law should demand that someone pay for the misery of my childhood, but not for Finn’s or Quira’s? That I don’t know what currency can pay for pain? That –

“Can I get you more tea?” Leah asks, looking anxious.

“Please,” Rey says, with a smile, and makes sure that Leah sees her take some more rugelach.

That your son loves both justice and people, just like you, and knows in his heart that they ought to be the same, just like you, and he is trying to make his loves fit together, just like you. Just like me.

Her phone buzzes. Leah clicks the stove back on as she fishes it out of her pocket.

“Finn says they have Kaydel and her phone!” she calls, and is surprised when Leah, rather than calling back or coming to sit down while the water heats, walks straight out to the hall and begins putting on her coat.

“Excellent,” she says, raising her voice so Rey can hear her. “Then, if you’ll excuse me, I have a little errand to run. I’m sorry I can’t stay to make the tea, but please, help yourself.”

Uncle Luke’s beard scratched at the side of his neck. Ben tried to push his uncle away. Mom didn’t cry in front of people; he wouldn’t either. He wouldn’t. But Uncle Luke held him tight. “I’m sorry, Benny. I shouldn’t have said that. It was a bad example.”

“I just wanted to know,” Ben choked out, “why everything is never okay.”

Chapter Text

"But one of them was Asian," Hux says. "What was she, adopted?"

"Maybe," says Kylo, without particular patience. "Maybe she converted. Maybe she was just Jewish." He is preparing to report and his head is on fucking fire because yes, he made a mistake, but he could have fixed it if Snoke had just answered him – if he’d just – the stranger who abides with you in your land shall be to you as one of your citizens; you will love him as yourself – if he hadn’t –

"There aren't Jews in Asia," Hux says, as if Kylo is making some transparent effort to clown him.

"There are Jews everywhere," Kylo tells him wearily.

"Yeah, that's what my boyfriend says," Fasma calls, and laughs.

This is a joke. It is a joke because Fasma is undercover on the white nationalist scene. Her "boyfriend" is a beady-eyed tumor in an ill-fitted waistcoat, who calls Fasma his Valkyrie, and rarely sees her in person. It is a joke because Fasma's undercover identity retweets the tumor's conspiracy theories a lot.

It is a joke because although Fasma reports in like the rest of them, somehow nothing ever happens. No one has ever been hit with a taser at one of her boyfriend's assemblies. No one has ever been cuffed. No one has been given so much as a summons.

So it is a joke, and Fasma laughs, and Hux laughs too, after he takes a second or so to process it. And Kylo laughs too. The laugh resonates in his head, and he wonders if it sounds like confusion and anger and panic. But why should it? Kyle O’Ryan can object to that joke, if he wants to, if he has time for that argument, but he has nothing to fear from it.

It’s just a joke. And Kylo’s day will continue as usual.

Except that it doesn’t, because he hears, from the front desk, a very familiar voice say in a very familiar deceptively sweet-and-reasonable tone, “I need to speak with Captain Noakes, please. I’m afraid it’s urgent.”

And now there is reason to panic, because what the actual fuck is his mother doing here?

“Organa,” his mother says, “Oh ar jee ay en ay. Leah. El ee ay aich. Esquire.”

Then Hux dashes a long-standing hope of his, that maybe one of his colleagues, maybe at least the most flagrantly ignorant of his colleagues, has not heard of his mother (who, for God’s sake, surely made her name mostly in litigation?) by saying, “Organa? Speaking of Jews everywhere.” And Kylo can’t remain in this conversation anymore.

“Need more coffee,” he snarls, just a little too loud, and dashes to the break room at an embarrassingly break-neck speed.

He stares at the weird little machine drooling coffee into his paper cup and listens to the footsteps passing in the hall. His mother’s are brisk, close together. His heart races, hearing them. He knows it’s her money orders behind the bailouts Poe always gets, but she doesn’t usually come herself, and they’re not even done booking them.

They’re not done booking them.

What is his mother trying to do?

He abandons his coffee. He stalks to Snoke’s office and very quietly takes the chair outside the door, letting his face sink into sullen storminess. If anyone passes, he’s sure that he’ll look like what he is, a disgraced detective humiliated by being made to wait for his reprimand. His temper’s reputation will keep the station personnel away. He listens as hard as he possibly can.

“You’re asking me to ignore blatantly criminal behavior, Ms. Organa.” The voices are faint, but the perpetual hissing note in Snoke’s voice makes his words travel.

“They obstructed traffic. Give them citations.” Leah Organa’s voice, of course, is a clarinet tuned to the key of the Upper West Side; even if she pitches it low, it’s in its nature to carry.

“The NYPD depends on it’s relationships with the community. Including the law-enforcement community.” Kylo swallows. The law-enforcement community. Meaning ICE, meaning CBP. People like me; we’re just trying to live our lives, and people like you drag us away for no reason.

“You’re concerned with damaging your relationship with ICE? There are relationships you should be more concerned about.”

“Is that so.”

"There’s video of what your officer did to Paige Thi-Cohen. And that’s bad enough.” There’s a squeak; she must have leaned forward in her chair. “But from what I saw, I’m guessing he said something you’d rather not have repeated in an open court, and if you make me bring a lawsuit, I can assure you it will be. If you think the press and the public will overlook something with the potential to enrage the two most organized voting blocks in Manhattan, you’re stupider than I’ve ever dreamed.” He knew his mother hated Snoke, but the naked contempt of her voice unnerves him a little. “It hasn’t even been a year since there were rallies around Peter Liang; do you think the DA will appreciate your alienating even more voters?”

“If that was a real threat, you would have gone straight to him with it, not to me. He’s the one who decides whether to bring charges.”

“Oh, but it goes beyond him, doesn’t it? Daniel Polansky in a prayer shawl with one of your officers holding a taser to his chest? You have some protectors on City Council who have Brooklyn constituencies; I’m not sure how keen they’ll be to maintain your special relationship if that becomes widely seen in those neighborhoods.”

“I believe it already has been quite widely seen; you can’t threaten to accomplish something that’s already happened.” A pair of street cops are coming down the hall; Kylo gives them a thousand-yard stare and they scurry. Snoke is going to murder him. Maybe he’ll get fired.

“It’s been seen by people who visit certain kinds of websites, follow certain accounts on Twitter. There are other people who could see it. Who might see shorter versions, even less to their liking than the full stream.”

“Are you a propagandist, now?” There’s a snarl in Snoke’s voice now. Leah Organa just hums. It’s a peaceful sound, edged with satisfaction; his mother can tell and so can he: Snoke is going to fold. He’s going to stop the charges from going through.

Maybe he’ll get fired. The union would probably back him, but –

“This conversation could have happened over the phone,” Snoke says.

“But I wanted to say it straight to that condescending sneer you’ve always got pasted to your punum, Captain.”

Maybe he could ask the union not to bother with him.

“So it’s personal.”

“All politics is, to someone. How unfortunate for you that in this case it was personal to me.”

She is ferocious, his mother. She is ferocious in the protection of her own. God is urgent about justice, for on justice the world depends. Kylo gets up. He isn’t going to be sitting here like a schoolboy, like a spy, when she gets out. His head is a furnace. Am I going to do this now? Well, why not now? He heads for the door.

Kaydel stays glued to her phone as they wait for the train, her thumbs a blur.

"It'll be okay," Finn tells Rose, squeezing her hand. "I hear the continuous shock is worse than the projectile shock. They hit you with the projectiles and it hurts, but just once, and then it’s over." Rose looks uncertain. "And she knows her rights. She's probably giving them hell as we speak."

That works. The corners of Rose's mouth lift a little at the thought of the shit her sister is giving the cops.

"You guys, they are getting so much sympathetic engagement," Kaydel puts in. "Basically everyone is on our side. Like, there's a little bit of blue-lives-matter bullshit and I mean it’s Twitter; there are Nazis; but in terms of just numbers? Everyone's on our side. People are using our hashtag, even. And," she adds gleefully, "a lot of them think the cops are ICE."

"Didn’t their jackets say 'NYPD' on the back?" asks Finn.

"Yeah," says Kaydel with a wry smile. "But Poe yelled 'ICE' a lot."

Finn shakes his head. It seems wrong to rejoice in other people's ignorance, and worse to hope it goes uncorrected. But if it helps? If it turns the tide?

He feels Rose's phone buzz between them. She snatches it out of her pocket. "It's Leah."

"Yeah?"

"She found them. She says Kaydel should go to one of the small library branches and make sure there’s nothing online to connect her to the camera, and we should come to the West 51st St police station. That's where you got arrested," she says, looking up with a frown.

"Yeah. We were protesting in Midtown, though; shouldn't it be a different precinct down here?"

"Didn’t... the plainclothes cop, in the black coat," says Rose slowly, "didn’t he – wasn’t he the same guy that had his hands on Rey that time?" She doesn't name him, or say Leah's son.

"Oh," says Finn. "Of course."

"They must be a specialized unit."

Kaydel looks up again, frowning this time. "The big guy in the black coat? With the dark hair and the schnoz?"

"Yeah."

"He came after me when I ran. He caught me and I thought we were screwed, but he was just like, 'Give me your phone,' and I was like, 'No,' and he made this face like… like, 'Ugh, I can't even,' and walked away."

There is a small silence. Rose, a frown wrinkling her brow, says, "He didn't say anything else?"

"No. Like, maybe he actually said less than that. He chased me for like six blocks, he cornered me, and then he just gave up."

"We should... mention that to Leah," Rose says cautiously. She takes her phone out and looks at it again.

"Leah said Kaydel should go to the library, but we should come to 51st St. She’s going to be there too?"

The 1 arrives, with a huff of a recorded announcement and a squeal of breaks, and they hurry aboard.

He wants to go around the block, into the back alley, hide in a doorway. All his frustration and grief transmute so easily into rage. He makes himself wait, on the sidewalk, in stillness, and meets her eyes when she emerges with her head held high.

“Hello,” she says, and the pause is just barely perceptible before she says, “Detective.” The break in the word is even harder to hear than the pause.

He can’t say Hello, Ms. Organa, and he will not be able to cover his tracks as well as she does, if he says Hi, Mom; he has learned, after too many failures, that he will never match her emotional control. So he doesn’t try. He leaps straight into the heart of his anger. “So what was that I heard back there, huh? Because it sounded a lot like you blackmailing a police officer into obstruction of justice, which I know you fucking know is a Class-A misdemeanor in the state of New York, and also a federal crime. But you don’t care about that, do you? You only care about protecting your, your – ”

“Friends?” she volunteers. “Children?” The word is made of delicate ice; if he touches it, it will shatter.

“Pets.” She only looks at him, and she looks so sad. She’s so much greyer than the last time he saw her. Is he really talking to his mother, for the first time in nearly a decade, so he can reproach her? Yes. He is. Because it’s important. “Isn’t special treatment for people who know the right people exactly what you’ve always claimed to hate?”

“It’s one of many things I hate,” she says, quietly. And still she looks so sad.

“So why, Mom?” Something happens to her face, when he says that, something complicated and hurt, and not to do with what they’re talking about. He doesn’t like it. It puts something sharp in his heart.

“Because I think the solution is to grant the rights of the privileged to everyone, not to subtract from the rights of those lucky enough to have friends. Leaving everyone to the mercy of men like your captain is not the equal justice I want. If I had the tools to blackmail him into leniency on other cases, I’d use them every time.”

“If you really think you could use that video to bring down a DA and a couple corrupt Brooklyn councilmen, shouldn’t you do that? Isn’t that the greater good, the thing your – your – these kids should be sacrificed for?”

“Danny’s a kid to you now?” She’s smiling, at least. “If Shara, may she rest in peace, could see the two of you, all grown up...” Her voice trails off and her smile dies. “I made a play. There are many injustices at work here, and I think you can see them, can’t you? You don’t need me to name them.”

Her big brown eyes search his, and he thinks she must be able to see everything that troubles him in his soul, when a stranger abides with you in your land you shall not wrong him and we’re just trying to live our lives and people like you drag us away for no reason and my father was a fugitive Aramean and yeah, that’s what my boyfriend says and doesn’t it ever trouble you, that you arrest people and they go to jail and they suffer? He’s a well of bitter water and she can see clear to the bottom of him. I have already done unforgivable things.

He shoves his hands into his coat pockets and turns his eyes away, looking up at the unreadable windows of the building opposite. The February sun they reflect has no warmth. His mother says, gently, “It’s a gamble. If he agrees to let them go, the NYPD-ICE relationship is damaged, and, in this political climate, in this city? Those councilmembers may lose their seats regardless. If he lets the process go forward… yes, I feel confident that I can make good on at least some of my threats.” Her mouth crinkles upwards again. “And take your department for at least a million in damages.”

“Gambling,” he repeats. “And all your money’s on Danny, now, is that it?” He means it to sound light and scornful, but it doesn’t.

“No, Benny,” she says. “No.” Her eyes are damp, and he is 35 years old and over six feet tall, but if his mother cries, here on the street, where anyone could see her, it will be the end of the world. He fights it the best way he knows, the only way he knows.

“It’s pretty fucking high-handed of you to promise that Paige won’t bring a lawsuit,” he rages. “Did you bother to fucking ask her?”

“You swear too much,” she snaps. “It’s vulgar.”

“Vulgar,” he says, and rolls his eyes.

But a smile ghosts across her face again, and he’s relieved, though he’s still angry, especially when she says airily, “Oh, I didn’t promise Paige wouldn’t bring one. I just said I wouldn’t help her. There are a few civil attorneys in this city besides me, though I can see how you would forget.” Her eyes focus on something past him. She hesitates. “I have to go now. But – thank you for speaking with me, Benny. Kyle.”

He doesn’t want to tell her to call him Benny, and he doesn’t want to tell her to call him him anything else. He just nods. She smiles again, like she knows. “Bye, boychik,” she says. “And if you have any other opportunities for me to blackmail your captain, do call me, please. My number’s what it always was.”

He moves aside to let her pass; Finn Sturm and his girlfriend, who’s name he abruptly remembers and who he belatedly realizes must of course be Paige’s sister, are hurrying down the street towards her, picking their way around heaps of slush and garbage bags. His mother starts to walk away, but he puts his hand out, just brushing her arm, and she freezes.

“Mom,” he says, and clears his throat, “Mom, do you think Dad would ever – if there’s anything – from me.”

It’s all he can say. He means it as a question but it comes out as a meaningless string of sounds. All the color has gone out of her face and something painful and hollow has come into it. But she seems to understand what he means. “Okay,” she says, very softly. “Okay.”

“My number is what it always was,” he says, and they both turn silently and rush apart, as fast as they can move on the icy pavement.

When he gets back inside, Snoke’s door is closed, and he’s sent Kylo an email saying that they’ll meet later. The date and time of later are not specified.

Poe checks with everyone at the party to make sure they're not allergic or afraid of big dogs before he opens his bedroom door and lets Baby emerge in a whirlwind of soft fur and funny little "roo-roo-roo!" noises. (If anyone had been allergic, it would have already been too late; Poe can’t deny Baby any napping spot she wants, and every surface in the place is coated in orange and white dog hair.) Rey kneels down and lets the delighted animal lick her all over the face and neck.

"Nice to see you too, Baby," she says, seriously, and Baby rolls over on her back and whines and writhes, begging to be scratched. Rey does not refuse, and she can see Poe smiling at her from the corner of her eye.

Rose, who is a respectable 40% of the way towards forgiving Poe now that Paige is safely back in Pittsburgh, commandeers the computer with the playlist, and from the way she’s gesturing and the confused face Saralinda is making, Rey suspects she’s outlining her theory of Rock Queers (Rey), Pop Queers (Rose and Poe), and the necessary balance to be struck. Rey doesn’t believe the theory and can recite the spiel from memory but she still sort of wishes she were close enough to hear it; it makes Rose happy when people listen to her theory. She can see Rose’s adorable expressions from here, though. Baby makes pitiful noises; Rey is slacking off on scratching. She redoubles her efforts and is rewarded with the soft thump of a tail.

There’s a buzz from the intercom. “Hit the key button, Finn?” Poe calls, and Finn obliges, as Poe ducks, tipsy, into his kitchen to grab a beer for the newcomer. Rey gets up, much to Baby’s distress and walks over to Finn. Finn is wearing the amused, slightly lost look he always has at parties, like he wants to have a good time but he’s not sure he’s allowed. She wants to let him know it’s okay, give him permission. She hugs him, so he’ll smile.

“Do you know if Leah’ll be in town for a while?” he asks her, and she shrugs. Leah goes where the crisis is, and the crisis is everywhere. The Sleater-Kinney song she knew Rose must be queuing up comes on, and she pumps her fist in the air so Rose can see she appreciates it, though actually she would have been fine with E•MO•TION for the rest of the night. It’s been surreal to spend the week watching councilmembers and state representatives stumble over themselves to suggest that, well, they never supported parking ICE vans in Manhattan, and yes, it is ironic to have a detention center for immigrants within sight of the Statue of Liberty. (You can see the former from the latter, Rey thinks, but not the other way around. The cells on Varick are windowless, she hears, so people don’t jump out, or use the glass to slit their wrists.) A little bit of “Run Away With Me” might be nice right now; my dearest nightmare, my conscience, the end sounds a bit more… emo than she might like.

There’s a knock on the door and Poe rushes to answer, drunk and smiling, Baby pushing through the crowd after him. He unbolts the locks and yanks the door open, and then Rey sees the smile run from his mouth. He takes two steps backwards. Kylo steps into the doorway.

“Kill the music; it’s the cops!” Poe yells. His tone is mocking but his face tells a grimmer story. Rose does kill the music; everyone turns and stares in silence at Kylo; in his black coat, they all recognize him from the street. Baby barks and shoves her head under Poe’s hand, like a reassurance that she’s there. Kylo’s face is immobile, but his eyes rove the party until they find Rey’s. When their eyes do meet, he flinches, and she does too; can people tell, looking at them, what they’ve done? Can they tell how hard he’s fucked her, how much she liked it? That she cried while he held her? She wonders if he’s wondering the same thing. He breathes and turns his gaze back to Poe, looking stern and threatening again, though his nose and cheeks are red from the cold outside.

“Of course you’d be having a party,” he says, disdainfully. “Let me guess: you’ve got crushed ice for the drinks in the kitchen.”

Poe blushes, because it’s true. “I’m proud of you, man,” he says. “You’ve figured out what a party looks like. Now that you can identify human joy, maybe we can work on teaching you basic ethics.”

Kylo blushes, too, perhaps at Poe’s jibe about parties. Couldn’t get the boy out to a party for love or money, she remembers Poe saying, and he must have tried to bring him out to one or two. Poor shy Ben who remembers all his blessings, whose Torah portion comes easily to his lips.

Ben, who stands more than six inches taller than Poe, poised in the doorway with all the authority of the police behind him, sneering now. Oh yes, poor Ben.

He keeps his eyes on Danny, on Poe. He tilts his head. “Tell me. What’s your end-game here? The city drops its ICE contracts?”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Poe says. “It’s not my favorite line-item in the city budget.” If he’s learned nothing else in his years at the NYPD, Kylo has learned to tell when a person is drunk. He could put the inordinate volume of Poe’s voice down to theatrics, but there’s a little too much belligerence in the way he leans forward and the lean is a little too unsteady.

“Yeah, okay, sure,” says Kylo. “So no ICE facilities in the city anymore. Do you think they stop hunting here?”

"I think it gets harder for them to hunt here."

"So you think they do, what? Roll around the streets of Kearny, New Jersey, until every Latino in town is carrying their passport every day and ICE comes back in the evening with empty vans and cries? Or you think they come back here and do what they've always done, except now they get overtime for the transit to and from Jersey?"

"Great," says Poe, belligerence undiminished. "Let 'em charge overtime. Make it expensive. Pit the labor against the bosses."

"And the people they take?” Kylo presses. “You think they all make their court dates when they're stuck in tunnel traffic with drivers who're pissed off because they had to get up an hour earlier to get to work? Think their families have an easy time making it out to Jersey to visit?”

Poe snarls, “Don’t act like you care about them!” And Kylo knows he says it because he doesn’t have an answer. His blush is long gone; above his beard his cheeks are blanched.

“And how about representation? I know you met with Chuey Baccarin, but they don’t all have lawyers who’ll drive an hour to meet with them. If that center moves, some of them won’t have any lawyers at all anymore.”

“Oh, I see; you had the detainee’s best interests at heart when you tased us in the streets.”

“I didn’t do enough thinking before I brought that force out to meet you.” Kylo swallows. He thinks he can feel Rey’s eyes on him. Everyone at this stupid self-congratulatory party of Poe’s is staring at him, but her gaze is the one he can feel. “I regret it.” He makes himself search the crowd for Paige; he doesn’t find her, but her sister is staring daggers at him from behind a laptop. “I’m – I regret what happened to your sister. I’ll try to have the officer disciplined.” Easily said. He’s an inch away from probation himself. Snoke never spoke to him, all week; later never came. Rose’s expression does not change. His heart hurts. I have already done unforgivable things. He tries to focus. “I’ve been doing some thinking since Tuesday.”

“And the conclusion you’ve come to is that we were the ones who were wrong, after all, and you were just defending the most humane way of doing things, which looks so suspiciously like the status quo?” Poe narrows his eyes; they’re bright with fear and distrust but he’s also maybe having some trouble focusing them properly. “And you, what, got my address out of your records to come tell me about it at 10PM on a Friday?”

Kylo has to laugh, though it leaves his lips as nothing but a brief huff. “I don’t need to get your address from anyone, Polansky; you’ve been living here my entire life. You’d be an idiot to give up a rent controlled place like this.”

He knows everything he’s admitting when he says that in front of all these people; he sees Poe’s eyes widen, and then narrow again. He tilts his head. “That’s pretty interesting to hear you say, Kylo.” Kylo doesn’t answer; he just watches Poe process information. “And how did you know we met with Baccarin?”

“Amilyn’s Twitter.”

“Amilyn’s on Twitter?”

Poe sounds as shocked as if Kylo’d told him the rabbi was a cam girl. It makes Kylo feel a little better about not having thought to match her tweets against Rey’s reports until the night after the protest, and lets him sound superior as he informs Poe: “Amilyn has thirty-five thousand followers.” Poe’s jaw actually drops; it’s so satisfying; Ben has been waiting over twenty years to tell Danny Polansky something he doesn’t know. “She posted a pic of him outside her shul along with a little encomium to his work with detainees. Seven hundred and sixty likes.”

Poe laughs, a tipsy release of tension. “Holy shit. Who knew? For a sec I thought maybe Rey told you; she wasn’t supposed to let – ”

His voice dies.

Kylo feels like he’s been slapped. His head jerks to face Rey; her face is a mix of defiance and panic. There’s maybe fifteen feet of hardwood floor between them. It feels as if he’s looking at her across a chasm. He can’t tolerate this. He turns back to Poe, and sees in his eyes the cold and fearful recognition of what he’s done, his helpless knowledge that it’s already too late to talk himself out of this.

Poe’s dog whimpers, and races to stand in front of Rey, hackles rising and teeth bared.

Kylo heads for the stairs, for the night, for the snow, pulling his gloves on as he goes.

Finn knows the mistake as soon as Poe makes it, and sees it hit the other partygoers at different depths of awareness. He and Rose know the worst of it; the terrible leverage that Leah’s son has over Rey, and how Poe has removed any reason not to use it. Baby knows only that Rey is suddenly frightened, and must be defended. But fear washes through all of them like a wave as Kylo turns and goes off – to do what? – and they all stand as silent as if they were drowned.

The radiator breaks into the quiet with a sudden hiss and he reaches out for Rey, his mind spinning with what needs to be done – they’ll go to Port Authority; they’ll buy her a ticket in cash; if Rabbi Luke won’t answer his phone then maybe she can go to Pittsburgh, to Paige – but she slips from his grasp and runs, grabbing her coat off the rack and stuffing her feet into her boots. “Wait,” she calls, “wait!” and he realizes that she’s running after the cop, and surely that’s not a good idea? Finn has some experience of the range of Rey’s ideas. He starts to go after her, when he feels a determined grip on his arm.

“Wait,” says Rose, to him. She’s stone-cold sober, and her eyes are moving as if she’s solving a math problem in her head. She turns her gaze on Poe, and he sinks to his knees on the floor with his head in his hands. Rose’s eyes add this to the sum she is calculating. “Let her go.”

He gives her a questioning look. The other guests are beginning to whisper among themselves.

Rose leans into him, her voice low. “Did you see how he looked at her?” He blinks and she adds, “And the way she blushed when he did? There’s… something going on there.”

The meaning she is laying on the words is clear, but not quite clear enough. Either something terrible has been being done to Rey while he has done nothing, has not even suspected, or else Rey has been doing something much more… complicated than she has admitted to them. He remembers her on the floor, the pool of spilled vodka; the memory is a phrase he doesn’t understand in a language he thought he could speak.

It is not his habit to just sit there idly not understanding things.

He goes to the door for his coat and shoes. “Let’s talk about this in the hall.”

Baby is nosing Poe in concern. He looks up. “I’ll come with you. Okay? If that’s okay. I’d like to come with you.”

“I think everyone should just stay here for a little bit,” Rose says, loud and just a little too high-pitched, as she puts on her own shoes. “Just… you know… have another drink. Talk about the weather. I think it’s snowing!”

“More beer in the fridge!” Poe says. His voice is raw.

It’s freezing outside. Kylo hears Rey’s voice but he won’t stop, won’t turn. She was in it with Poe the whole time. Doing what he said. To manipulate you. It was her fault. Their fault. I have already done unforgivable things. The snow’s only been falling for an hour; the sidewalks of West End Ave haven’t been salted. Perhaps his caution on that thin layer of wet snow is the reason she’s able to catch up with him, despite his head start and longer stride. She pushes ahead of him and gets in his way; he goes to walk around her, but the expression on her face stops him. Something about her voice, when she called him – she’d sounded frightened, and he’d thought she’d be wanting to explain, make excuses. But she looks – ferocious. She wants to fight? Fine.

“You lied to me,” he snarls. He feels kinship with Poe’s dog; he’s an angry animal, flashing his teeth. His head is spinning; his brain is flooded with the chemicals of panic. If she bent the truth about this, what else did she hide? You asked her if she was dating Poe; she said no, but that was in what, December? And you didn’t ask her if she was fucking Poe; what if every time she ran away after you touched her, after you did all the hot, dirty, cruel things she wanted from you, she was running back to Poe, petting his dog and running her hands through his curls and sleeping in his bed and kissing him awake? He shakes with cold and rage and fear. “You used me.”

“I did.” Her chin is raised. She does want to fight. He forgets how angry she makes him. “You were using me.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“It’s my job; I was doing my job.” It’s like his body recognizes the argument; his breathing doesn’t slow but it loses the ragged edge it had. “I was trying to keep people safe. If you hadn’t lied to me, no one would have been hurt on that street.”

He knew that would hit her, but it seems to hit her harder than he expected. Her chest heaves. She’s not wearing a scarf; her throat is bare to the cold air and a thin line of light cuts across it, between the shadow of her jaw and the line of her coat, down to her collar bone. He wants to put his hand right where it marks her.

“No one would have been helped, either,” she says at last.

"No one was helped; I'm right, what I told Poe right now; you know I'm right." She won't admit it but he's sure she knows it, from the way her lips set and her eyes move to the side. He presses. "So because you lied to me, everyone detained is screwed over, he and Paige got tased for no reason, and I could lose my job."

"Good." She darts her eyes up at him and her lower lip sulks forward. "I hate your job."

"Do you?" he asks her, in a low voice. Because it seems to him that she likes it. At least when he fucks her, she likes it a lot. He takes a step towards her. Because she can omit the truth and bend it at Poe's bidding, but the way she thrashed under him, the way she writhed and panted in his arms – she can't omit or finesse that. Maybe it’s only because she sees him as some figure from sinister fantasy, and maybe she does come back to Poe's bed after he's made her come, but the fact remains that he has made her come, and she’s come back for more. And he can do it again. And again, and again, as much as she needs, until – until what? She stares at him, her eyes in shadow.

Until she admits she wants to come back. Until she wants to come back and stay.

In the silence, he reaches back behind him, under his coat, and takes out what he’s nauseously sure is a winning card. The regulation handcuffs are a new model, freshly issued, and they shine under the street light in the palm of his glove. She stares at them. Snowflakes land on her bare neck and melt away. They cling in her hair. “I could cuff you,” he whispers, taking another step towards her so she can hear him. He knew she’d like them; they’re part of what she wants him to be, aren’t they? Discipline and punishment, so she can be liberation. He leans in close. “I could cuff you and take you that way; do you want that? I could – ”

She seizes the cuffs from his hand and strikes him across the face with them. It shouldn’t hurt as much as it does. His head jerks back and his foot slips on the snow-wet pavement; he has to catch himself on a postal box.

“Are you going to do it?” she shouts, and throws the cuffs at him. “If you’re going to do it, you should fucking do it; don’t stand there trying to make me afraid!”

He stares at her. Afraid? She has asked him a question, and he can tell by the too-high tilt of her chin and the too-bright light of her eyes that she’s afraid of the answer, but he doesn’t understand it.

“Are you going to do it?” she asks again. Her voice is quieter, and full of agony. His face is wet; he must have knocked snow off the postal box. But it feels warm.

“Do what?” he asks, bewildered.

“Turn me in,” she says, and his head jerks back. “Take me downtown and hand me over to ICE.”

He had forgotten.

He had actually forgotten. In his own mind, he has come to see himself vulnerable in front of her, possibly even pathetic, fighting for her attention, her understanding. But that’s what began this, that’s the only reason she’s ever talked to him, met with him, to start with – he’s held her immigration status like a knife against her throat. That’s why she’d sounded so frightened, when she called to him – not because she’d been caught out in her deception, but because she thinks he’s going to call down the power of the state on her, the very power her friends have been hurt defying. And when he’d said, I could cuff you, she’d heard –

“No,” he says. He pushes himself to his feet. Is that blood, on his face? Regulation cuffs aren’t supposed to have any sharp edges; something must have broken; he should have inspected them. He shoves them in his pocket. “No, of course not.”

“What do you mean, of course not?”

He can’t look at her face, so brave in the glow of snow-reflected streetlight. Grief and fear claw at him, and he calls on the alchemy that got him through his conversation with his mother, that gets him through his stupid, painful life, to transmute them into anger. The sting in his face helps. He clenches his teeth. “I mean I won’t. I said I won’t, and I won’t.” It is blood; he can taste it. She’s slashed him open. That makes sense.

She’s staring at him, at the cut she’s given him. “Why not?” she whispers. She’s suddenly shivering hard, her teeth almost chattering.

He grabs her by the lapels of her coat and hauls her against him. He wants her to be warm and safe. He wants her to come back to the Met so they can look at the lions of Babylon and The Meeting of Laila and Majnun. He wants to write her name in every alphabet he knows. Her mouth is inches from his and she has never let him kiss her, not once. V’yishak Yakob l’Rachel v’yisa kolo v’yabek. “Because I don’t fucking want to. Because why should I. Because if I have no good information Snoke is going to take me off your group and make me help Hux spy on mosques and I hate it but it won’t fucking help anything to turn you in. Because my father was a fugitive Aramean and I have done enough unforgivable things in my life.”

“Oh Ben.” There are tears in her eyes. She’d thought he was threatening her and for herself she has only dry-eyed courage, but for him she has tears? “Ben. You’re bleeding. I didn’t think it would cut you. Come back to Poe’s – we’ll put disinfectant on your face.”

But he can’t bear that we. That warm collective we, her and his mother’s chosen son. He lets go of her.

“No,” he says. “I’ll take care of it myself. You go back. Tell him and your friends you’re safe from me. They probably think I’ve killed you.”

He can see him, in fact, Poe, coming around the corner, looking guilty but not nearly guilty enough for his taste. He chooses not to spare him a glance, and turns to go. He doesn’t hear her footsteps in the snow, but his heart and his breath are too loud in his ears for him to hear much.

The snow stops falling as he heads for the train, and he wonders when it was, exactly, that he forgot that she had reason to be afraid of him. He remembers his own voice, hoarse with pleasure and shame, pleading, nobody; nobody but me, Rachel; please, and her silence. He walks slowly down the stairs to the platform, careful not to slip. She never expected better of me. But I never gave her any reason to. A pair of young women by the turnstiles stare at him, wide-eyed and anxious, and he realizes that his face is running with blood.

Chapter Text

Poe hustles her back towards his apartment, glancing over his shoulder over and over again, as if he expects Kylo to reappear. Rey is trying to think, and he’s making it difficult. “Rey, God; Rey,” he repeats in despairing tones, and Finn and Rose come running from the south and the west. “He grabbed her,” Poe tells them, his voice drawn thin enough to snap. “His face was bleeding – Rey, did you do that?”

“Yes,” she says. “He was trying to scare me. So I cut his face. And he said he’d let me go.” She can’t help it, she laughs; it’s absurd. Everything is absurd. Her laugh is short and sharp. My father was a fugitive Aramean, he said. He’s not gone from himself, she thinks. It’s like the radio always said: Please stay tuned. This story is still developing.

“Rey, he grabbed you. I saw him,” Poe insists. “Shit. I’ve locked myself out.” He ushers them through the outer door and rings his own buzzer.

“Text them,” Rose advises. She reaches hesitantly out to Rey. They haven’t done a lot of touching since they broke up, and even less since Rose has had Finn for all her cuddling needs. But the instant Rose’s warm hand brushes hers, going to her arms seems like the easiest choice Rey has had to make in months. Rose holds her; she is warm and safe. “Do you want to talk about it?” Rose asks gently. “We might need you to whether you want to or not, but we can get you a beer and a blanket first.” Rey needs to have the fierce energy with which Poe is working at his phone, the concentration with which Finn is looking at them all, his stubborn dark eyes absorbing everything. Someone buzzes them in, and she tries to draw herself up. “Beer and a blanket,” says Rose firmly, and draws her gently up the stairs.

The instant she reappears, Baby comes running to lick her hand, and the quiet party goes silent. She wonders what they’ve been saying about her. If they know what she’s been doing these past months, and why. “I couldn’t help it,” she says, half-snarling, miserable. Everyone stares at her as if she were speaking an incomprehensible language. Rose rubs her arm. It feels like pity. If she shakes Rose off she will be hurt.

“Gut shabbos, everyone,” Poe says. “Thanks for coming. And thank you all again for your efforts on the street. I’ll be sure to send you an email about the next Chai meeting.”

Rey steps out of the way to let them at the coatrack, and Rose steps back with her. Baby leans against her leg and slowly sinks to floor. She gives Rey a look, and a soft imploring growl, and settles herself firmly on Rey’s feet, determined to keep her in place. Looking at the dog gives her an excuse not to look at the people as they file out. If you hadn’t lied to me, he’d said, no one would have been hurt on that street.

Finn is in and out of the kitchen almost before she can notice, returning with an open beer. He stands by with it, waiting. He hasn’t spoken, all this time, but he moves his eyes carefully between her and Rose. The instant the last guest is out the door, Poe lunges for a closet and emerges with an afghan. He looks away as he holds it out to her.

She accepts it, but she doesn’t know what to do with it. Rose takes it from her and spreads it over her shoulders, steering her to the couch, over Baby’s protesting noises. It is warmer, this way; she had been cold. Still, she’s not a child. Finn holds the beer out, eyebrow raised in a question. When she shakes her head he puts it down on a side table.

“Men are dismissed from this conversation,” Rose says. “Temporarily.”

Rey can feel Finn’s eyes, his intent concern, even as he leaves the room. Rose perches on the arm of the couch, and a canine nose settles on Rey’s thigh.

“So,” Rose says. “This cop. This thing with the cop.”

“Yeah,” says Rey cautiously. Rose’s eyes are grim.

“I can see, either way, why you wouldn’t want to talk about it in front of his mom,” she says, and her voice turns fierce. “But, Rey, if he coerced you, it’s rape and I don’t fucking care whose son he is.”

So they could tell what she’d done with him. Just by looking. She’d been afraid of that. “No.” Rey shakes her head. Rose may hate her for fucking a cop, a cop who walked away and let her sister be assaulted, insulted, and tased. Rose probably should. But she’s an adult. She can take the consequences of her actions. “No, he didn’t coerce me. He – he was worried about it. I consented.” I asked for it. Literally. I begged. She waits for Rose’s face to harden. But Rose only sags like she’s relieved.

Rose has always cared about her too much, more than she deserves.

“Okay,” says Rose. “Okay. So was this just a physical thing?”

“...kind of? I guess to start with? Maybe? I don’t know; it’s really complicated.”

“To start with, so maybe it isn’t now?”

Rey buries her head in her hands. “Poe told me – and he was, he seemed – you can call the guys back, I think; this is embarrassing but I’m not traumatized and I’m sure they can probably hear anyway.”

When Poe and Finn emerge, Rey lays it out as best she can. They all listen, though Poe is clearly using all his willpower to stop himself from interrupting, and the look he gives her when she tells them about what she did after she heard from him about Ben – not that she goes into too much detail – is downright comical.

“Rey,” Rose says sternly, “you cannot fuck men into being better people.”

“I know,” Rey protests. The sternness isn’t close to what she deserves for what she’s done but it’s closer. “I just… I think he was kind of doing it for himself, and I… you know, positive reinforcement.” She turns to Poe, who is giving her the weirdest look, and tells him, “Really, I think you did as much as I did. He said he wouldn’t turn me in, and I, you know, didn’t really believe him, because he’d just been talking about cuffing me – that’s why I cut his face; I didn’t mean to, but he was being an asshole so I hit him with the cuffs and it cut him – so I asked him why he wasn’t going to turn me in, and he cited Deuteronomy 26, just like you did on the street.”

Poe looks at his feet. She waits for him to say something, but he doesn’t. Which is worrying.

“You genuinely think he won’t turn you in, Rey?” Finn asks. “I mean, not to be like… but you did just cut his face open, apparently? Not that I blame you.”

Rey tries to consider it coldly, but that seems like a patently ridiculous way of doing things, since Ben is clearly not considering anything coldly, not with all of his bleeding and grabbing and shouting. So she just says what she thinks. “I genuinely think he doesn’t want to turn me in.”

“Doesn’t want to, but…?”

Rey concentrates for a moment on scratching Baby’s ears. “I really don’t think he will. Definitely not tomorrow. But he said if he didn’t have good info on our group someone would make him work on spying on mosques, and he doesn’t want to. Maybe we can figure something out, where I can give him just a little more info than we make public…?” She trails off. Poe is the planner, here. But Poe is brushing the rug back and forth with his foot and not looking at her. “Let me talk to him again,” she repeats. “Then we’ll see.” She yawns. She can’t help it. That, somehow, gets Poe’s attention.

“You guys should stay here tonight,” he says, clearing his throat. “If you want. It’s a long way to the Bronx and I have plenty of room and spare blankets. We can try the new bagel place in the morning; I doubt it’s H&H come again, but – ” he breaks himself off. Rey is beginning to worry about him. “Please stay,” he finishes.

Finn is clearly seeing what Rey is seeing when he looks at Poe, because he doesn’t put up even token resistance to the idea. “Okay. Yeah. I’m pretty tired. Thanks.”

“Great,” says Poe, and his face is still strained, but he seems to breathe a little easier. “I’ll get some more blankets.”

“And tomorrow we’ll pack Rey a bag, just in case,” Rose says.

“What kind of Jew do you take me for?” Rey snorts. “My bags are always packed.”

It’s around midnight; Kylo is examining himself grimly in his bathroom mirror when Rey messages him.

Signal

Disappearing message time set to 1 Day

R
can u meet me this weekend again?

He has usually felt, he realizes, some kind of rise in his spirits when she’s messaged him. Some kind of hope. That she wanted to talk, that she wanted to see him. Now he feels like his blood is full of lead; his heart and brain and body all weighed down.

Kylo
Anywhere you want.

R
dyckman house again?

Kylo
Okay. When?

R
sunday @11?

Kylo
Okay.

 

He wants to know what she wants to talk about. But his face hurts and his heart hurts and he’s afraid to ask. Everything is never okay.

Poe sets Finn and Rose up in his bedroom, and offers Rey a choice between the couch and a Japanese futon he unrolls on the living room floor. Rey opts for the couch. “Don’t want you to have to climb over me.”

Poe smiles wanly. “I think I’ll be up for a bit yet. I’ll be in my office if you need me.”

Settling under the blankets and watching him retreat with Baby at his heels, Rey remembers what Ben said about how he’d lived in this apartment his whole life. His bedroom must have been his parents’, once, and his office, a little room crammed with bookshelves and a cluttered desk, must have been his childhood bedroom. She wonders how old he was when he inherited the lease.

She balls her right hand into a fist and shoves it under the pillow.

She wakes up to find Poe sitting in the kitchen, staring vacantly into space. The window over the sink looks out on an airshaft; it looks black as pitch. Her phone tells her it’s 4:47AM. She gets up.

“Poe?” she asks softly, laying her feet down quietly. He looks up. There’s a beer bottle between his knees. The cap is still on.

“Rey.” He says. His voice is dry and rough as sand. He coughs, and says her name again. “Rey. I’m sorry. Hope I didn’t wake you up. On top of Paige and everything else.” She shakes her head. “On top of everything else I’ve done. Oh, fuck.”

He doubles over, resting his head on the edge of his little kitchen table. Is he crying? Rey puts out her hand, hesitantly, and touches his curly head. His shoulders shake. She strokes his hair, as gently as she can. He sits up and pulls away.

“I’m sorry, Rey. I fucked it up for you. Fucked you over.”

“No – no, Poe; it’s not your fault, and anyway – I told you, I don’t think he’ll turn me in.”

“And what if he’s right?” His tone is desolate. She doesn’t understand, and he waves his hand helplessly. “The detainees. What if I’ve screwed them all over? Like, really, really fucked them over?” He shudders, scraping harshly at the ridges of the bottle cap with his bare fingers. His voice drops to a whisper as he slumps forward in his chair. “Amilyn told me to listen to Baccarin.”

“You did listen,” Rey reminds him. “He agreed to help you.”

“But he warned me. That they could hurt the people they have in custody. That things could go badly.”

“You did something good,” Rey insists. “You went out in public and you condemned them. You pointed to where the evil was. And you made it clear that you were willing to fight it.” She kneels down, putting her head on level with his lowered one. “To me – that was meaningful. That you were willing to risk that.”

“I’m glad,” he whispers. “I’m glad it meant something to you. But it wouldn’t have saved you from my fuck-up tonight. It didn’t leave you any less vulnerable.”

“But that’s the thing,” she presses. “I told you. He repeated the line you quoted. My father was a fugitive Aramean. You made him think about what he was doing. Who knows who else was watching, who heard that and stopped to think?”

“I was looking at Amilyn’s twitter. She didn’t retweet the livestream. She posted another link to the wish list, what detainees were asking for. And I thought, yeah, okay, she wishes we’d done it her way and she’s just gonna ignore what we did. But then she retweeted that Forward blog post about us.”

Rey smiles a little. “The one that called you a Maccabee?”

“Called us Maccabees, yeah, that one.”

“So? That sounds good; it sounds like she agrees you did something valuable.”

He fixes his earnest eyes on hers. “I hope I did. I want to think I did. But it’s hard for me not to – ” he swallows. “Even if I did some good, Rey. If what Ben said – Kylo, sorry – if he’s right, then I’ll have done something wrong, too. Really wrong. And like some part of me feels like… weird about Amilyn.”

“You could talk to her, you know.”

Poe makes a face. “Not after… ”

“You could, though.” He doesn’t look convinced. “I mean, she is a rabbi. She probably talks to people about uncomfortable things all the time.”

“What am I supposed to say, ‘So, I have this friend who’s in this Jewish group and he maybe sorta made the rabbi in charge of it resign and now he’s kind of wondering if he maybe didn’t steamroll some legitimate concerns she had and just fuck literally everything up like a huge schmuck’?”

Rey tries not too laugh too loud – it’s not a big apartment, and Rose and Finn are sleeping. “You’re not a schmuck, Poe, and you didn’t make her do anything. She’d probably be angrier at you for thinking you could make her do something she didn’t want to than for anything else.”

“You’re right. I need to allow her agency in this.” His crooked smile is very welcome. Rey stands up and pats his tousled curls.

“Get some sleep.”

“I don’t sleep, bubbele; they make coffee for that.”

“Yeah, whatever,” she says, and climbs back under the afghan on his couch. She likes coffee as much as any engineering student; coffee won’t help after the night she’s had.

“Sorry I woke you,” she hears him say softly, as she closes her eyes. “Sleep well.”

The temperature spikes the next day; the snow is long gone by the time the four of them stumble out for bagels and coffee. By noon they’re shedding coats and scarves, and the heated train back to the Bronx is unbearable. And by the time Rey wakes up to meet Ben on Sunday, she doesn’t need more than a light jacket and crocuses are blooming from the confused ground like hysterical giggles.

Signal

Disappearing message time set to 1 day.

Kylo
I’m sorry; I can’t make it.
My face is still bleeding; I’ve gone to Urgent Care but I don’t think they’ll see me any time soon.

R
OY GEVAULT IM SO SORRY
i swear i didnt know itd cut u like that

Kylo
Blame the stupid fucking handcuffs.
Was it urgent, what you wanted to talk about?

R
not exactly
i mean partly i just wanted to ask if u were serious about what u said

Kylo
That I won’t turn you in? Yes. I swear.
On my grandfather’s grave.

R
but did u love ur grandfather tho

Kylo
I didn’t know him. But I’m being serious.

R
im sorry
thank you.
let me know if theres anything i can do to help

 

She doesn’t know what to say after that. He doesn’t say anything. She has something she wants to ask but the phone doesn’t seem the right way, so she walks down to the thrift store by the train and texts Poe:

 

me
what do u think about what i was talking about?
ur my plans guy

Poe
Bubbele, if we’ve learned anything this week, surely it’s that maybe I’m not the best plans guy?

 

And that sucks, because Poe is smart, and if anyone is going to make plans, surely it would be him? But it does make a certain kind of sense. Plans are for people who can guess the future. And who imagines they can guess the future, in times when tulips bloom on a February Sunday?

In the end he only needs three stitches, near his jaw. The thin end of the cut that scores through his eyebrow is a hard scab when he returns to work on Monday. He deposits the handcuffs at the Requisitions desk with a snarl and a nasty note.

Talking hurts a little, the motion of his jaw pulling at the wound, so naturally Snoke decides that the later of their meeting should be now. Kylo’s tried to think, all weekend, of what he should say. He has no clever plans. He is not an accomplished liar. He settles for the obvious, simple, and true thing.

“I fucked up,” he mumbles to Snoke.

“I can see that,” his captain replies. He looks contemptuously at Kylo.

“I told them on-site to take it easy, but I don’t have authority for that. I radio’d you.”

Snoke sighs. “Thought you might do something like that. As if I had nothing better to do. You’re really not ready to be an adult, are you?” His eyes are sunken. He could be higher than a captain now, he’s reminded them. Reminded Kylo in particular. He chooses to stay so he can look after them. His unit. His specials. His children.

“The chain of command – ” Kylo tries to protest, but the contempt on Snoke’s face deepens, and his face hurts, and talking more can only get him into more trouble. He retreats into the only thing he feels he can say. “I fucked up. It won’t happen again.”

“No,” Snoke says slowly. “It won’t.” He pulls his rolling chair a little closer to his desk. “Your informant. She’s still active within the group?”

“So far,” Kylo answers, warily.

“Connected to it? Socially?”

“Yes.” Poe’s dog loves her. “Closely.”

“Good.” Snoke takes a sticky note off a pad and begins to write. Kylo is surprised. He’d have thought Snoke would regard his investigation as a poisoned drink, something they never should have tried and certainly shouldn’t continue. “I don’t think you’ve been making the best use of her that you could, Kylo.”

Kylo turns red and looks at his lap, trying not to call to mind alternate definitions of the word use and all their deeply unethical implications in this scenario.

“Maybe not.”

Finn is mildly astonished when Poe asks him to come with him to a meeting with Rabbi Holdon. As they climb up the stairs from the train, Poe tries to explain. “It’s not that I can’t – I’m not afraid to meet with her alone; if anything, right, it would be more anxiety-inducing to have an audience, I just – you’re an even-tempered guy, right?”

“Uh, mostly?”

“I just feel like, maybe you’ll be a calming influence.” He blows out a long breath. “I guess what I’m saying is, if she keeps calling me Daniel in that tone, step on my foot, okay? So I remember why I’m here, and I don’t run screaming from the room and into the street?”

“Sure,” Finn says. “I can manage that.”

“Daniel,” says Rabbi Holdon, lavender hair bright and smile calm as she lets them into her office. “Finn. How nice to see you both; I’ve been wondering how you’ve been.”

Finn looks at Poe to see if he needs to start immediately with the foot-stepping. “Amilyn,” Poe says, with a glazed grim look. Finn recognizes it from the video stream of the street action, from the evening on Friday when they’d run to the street to find Rey and Kylo. It’s Poe’s hell-or-high-water look. He is going to do this. “I’ve been well. Relatively speaking. But I’ve been talking to – to some people with some different perspectives.” And then, to Finn’s surprise, he lays out all the unpleasant possibilities for detainees Kylo’d thrown in his face at the party – the missed court dates, the loss of visitors and representation – almost as if they were certainties. “Is that – are those things you were thinking of. When you asked me not to pursue that action.”

Amilyn frowns, and gestures them into two of the chairs, pulling hers around the desk. “Well,” she says slowly. “Not exactly. To be honest, I was not expecting you to have quite as much success as you had. I was anxious about the possibility of… negative repercussions of some kind.”

“And that’s why you wanted to stick with harm-alleviation?”

“Yes. Perhaps you don’t remember this, Poe, but there was a time when threatening to leave Manhattan was ICE’s favorite tool in disputes.”

Poe’s eyes go wide and he swallows. Finn feels unsteady himself. Rabbi Holdon sees their shock and nods. “In 2009, we were protesting the conditions there – ” she breaks off when she sees Poe’s face. “Oh, Daniel. Gil and I were arrested there that year for blocking traffic. You didn’t know?”

“No,” Poe says, his voice very high. “No, I didn’t know.”

“The conditions were substandard. We protested. They threatened to simply shut it down and move everything to Kearny. Schumer had to come and beg them to keep it open.”

Finn thinks Poe needs him less to step on his foot than to hold him up; he looks like he might be sick. Rabbi Holdon looks like she wants to reach for his hand, and then decides better. “It’s different, Daniel. Things are different now. We had more assurances then, that federal departments would meet their responsibilities. And there was also less willingness, I think, on the part of… everyday people, to take each other’s side when federal agents came to the door.” She leans forward, her eyes intent on Poe’s. “You are part of that, I think. You are the voice of that willingness. The will to care for the stranger as for the citizen. That means something.”

Poe swipes at his eyes. “I – yes, Re– I was talking to an undocumented person, and they – they said something similar.”

“So.” The rabbi smiles again. “I hope between me and… them, you feel reassured?”

“But what about the detainees?” Finn asks. “Is there a way we can help them, if they do move them to Jersey?”

Rabbi Holdon nods. “I think there are. I’ve been reaching out to some people. I think a fund, for travel costs for visitors – ”

“And for lawyers; oh, yes, yes, that’s great; we can – ”

“I’ve taken some steps – ”

“Oh, amazing, what’ve we got – you’re not doing crowd-funding, I hope – ”

“I’d heard – ”

“No, no – ”

Rey strolls through another thrift store, downtown, clicking two AA batteries in her coat pocket, her phone between her ear and her shoulder.

Hello; you’ve reached Rav Luke Skywalker. Please leave your message after the tone.

“Hi Luke, it’s Rey again. Remember how I said I’d met your nephew? I assume you knew he was a cop, right? And there was this whole thing where he – but did you see the video of Chai Coalition protesting ICE in New York? The guy leading the shouting is Poe – Daniel Polansky, but he likes it when we call him Poe. You should watch it if you haven’t. Get someone with a smartphone to show you if your computer is broken again. But guess what verse he quoted? And guess what verse your nephew quoted back to me?”

She stops, looking through a shelf of dead electronics, chipped ceramics, and mismatched juice glasses at the window to the street. Nothing very extraordinary is happening; a green outer-borough taxi is passing a yellow cab, a woman is texting as she walks, two men are trying to hand people postcards for a comedy show. They are all swept with a wind that sharpens in the canyons the high buildings create, and washed with the thin sunlight that filters down, reflected from glass panes and polished stone.

“Do you ever miss New York? I guess it’s changing all the time. You might not even recognize it. But we miss you. Finn and me. Leah too, I think. Finn sends his love to you, and Maz if you see her. I do too. Please call me sometime.”

Thirty minutes of excited dialogue and cooperative overlap later, Poe, Finn, and Rabbi Holdon have a plan ready for presentation at the next Chai meeting. Finn saw Rabbi Holdon’s sly smile flit across her face at Poe’s blithe assumption that she’d be attending. It has not escaped Finn’s attention that no one has called for elections following her resignation. He wonders how many people thought it would be futile, in the face of Poe’s ambition, and how many people simply knew Rabbi Holdon would be back?

Not that she’s reclaiming her position. She frames everything carefully as a proposal, for consideration by the committees and their heads.

“This makes me think – remind me to tell you about this revision of resilience theory I heard from this guy I met who’s doing one of those made-up NYU degrees; it was wild,” says Poe with relish, looking up from the notes he’s making on his phone. “I wish I could do more to help, with this, Amilyn, but I guess the Street Action committee has done our part and done our damage, huh?”

Rabbi Holdon’s face grows unexpectedly serious. “That may be somewhat true with regard to our relationship to ICE in this city,” she says. “But I’m afraid, times being what they are, that there are other things we have to be aware of when we consider the safety of our neighbors.”

Rey climbs the stairs to the Dyckman House the next Saturday, between raspberry bushes withered by the whiplash return of the cold. Her little wardrobe is thrown into disorder by the chaos of the weather. Is that why she’s wearing what she wore the day of the airport protests, the soft black dress and the black socks that go over her knees? Because there wasn’t anything else warm and clean to wear? The memory of his voice scalds her: Any time I see those socks, I’m gonna know you want it.

But this is a public place; it’s different.

He doesn’t seem to take her clothes as any kind of invitation. Possibly he doesn’t even notice. He sits on the edge of the porch, watching her without heat, almost with pain. The line down his face is livid in the cold.

Inside there are two families, children chasing each other among the displays and parents briskly mingling Spanish and English in a conversation that might be mistaken for a shouting match. Ben takes a step towards the cellar, and then a child dashes, screaming, down the stairs ahead of him.

“Out back?” he says, helplessly. “It’s cold, but it’s quiet.”

“Sure,” she says, winding her scarf tighter and stuffing her hands in her pockets. He holds the door for her.

Outside, she perches on a bench. He seems to consider sitting next to her, and then leans awkwardly against the little white-washed well beneath the pine tree. Rey reckons it’s on her to start.

“You said, the other night – you said if you don’t have good information about Chai that they’d make you spy on mosques, and you know I don’t want that any more than you do, Ben, so – I was thinking – I don’t know, I don’t really have a plan but I was thinking – ”

“That’s not the problem,” he says. “Not now.”

She isn’t sure if she should be relieved, but she’s glad she doesn’t have to explicate in painful detail just how bad at plans she is. “What’s the problem, then?”

“There’s going to be a… thing. A demonstration. A pray-in by Muslims at City Hall.”

“Yes, I’ve heard.”

“You’ve heard. And so have these white supremacist groups my colleague is monitoring. They’re planning a… counter-protest.”

She gapes at him. “They’re going to attack the people praying?”

“They’re probably going to try to, yes.” He’s clenching and unclenching his fists. “I mean, they don’t just run up and hit them, usually; that’s not how these things work. They stand there and they… harass people, bother them, provoke them into getting close, and then they assault them. Cry self-defense when we break it up.” Clench, unclench. “So ideally. In my opinion. We’d barricade the prayer in, and kettle the ‘counter-protestors’ as far away as possible.”

“But you’re not going to do that? Is that what you’re saying? That the NYPD isn’t going to protect people at prayer? They have a permit; I know they must; Gil al-Akbar was helping.” I protect people, Ben had said. That’s his reason, for everything he does, for being a cop; it’s all he wants, his vision of justice, and here the cops are going to sit back and leave people unprotected?

He runs his gloved hands over his face. His eyes are bleak. “Snoke… wants me to feed you the idea that Chai could come between the two groups.”

“We have to be there for them,” Poe says. “Amilyn, if there are fucking Nazis on the street, we can’t let them attack Muslims at prayer.”

“I thought you might feel that way,” Rabbi Holdon says. “I don’t disagree. I just want to encourage you – ” Poe’s jaw works; for a moment Finn sees distrust rise in his face – “to collaborate entirely with Gil and the leaders of the prayer in this. To make sure that you are doing what they say they want and need.”

“Yes,” says Poe, and the fire is lit again in his eyes. “Yes, of course. I promise.” He doesn’t raise his voice, but it rings out all the same, in the rabbi’s book-lined office, with an electric tone like the hum of a live wire, and Finn feels it, under his ribs, in his blood. “I swear. And you’ll support us, won’t you?”

“Absolutely,” the rabbi says, smiling. “I’d like to volunteer for the action.”

“But we have to,” says Rey. “We have to come between them, we have to protect – they’ll be praying, Ben.”

“I know,” he says. She understands now why he looked so dire, sitting on the steps. His fists have not stopped their convulsive opening and shutting. It’s not a gentle motion; she can see by the creasing of the leather of his gloves and the working of the tendons at his wrist that he is throwing muscle behind his grip. “But if Snoke wants it to happen, you don’t want to do it.”

“What does he want out of it? What does he think’ll happen?”

“I don’t know!” he shouts, throwing out his hands as if he’s throwing something to the ground.

“Well, when you figure it out, tell me, and then we’ll decide what to do, but until then, don’t ask me to try to keep us on the sidelines when we should be in the streets!”

“In the streets; in the streets; why does everything always have to happen in the streets? Haven’t you people ever heard of fucking voting?”

“Maybe it does some people we voted for a little good,” she says, “to see what it looks like when their constituencies get a little cranky. Maybe it reminds them what we elected them for.”

“It’s disruptive,” he says, but she can hear that his heart isn’t in it. “Fucks up people’s days. Gets them in trouble with their bosses.”

“Then their bosses are assholes, and they should unionize and demand better contracts,” Rey says, but she smiles at him as she says it. He looks at her with despair in his eyes and her smile fades.

“I don’t know what he’s doing,” he says quietly. “I just know it’s going to be ugly and I don’t want you mixed up in it.”

He looks so sad that she goes to him. “Ben,” she says gently. “You know as well as anybody I’m already all mixed up in all kinds of shit.” He’s so warm; she’s not even touching him, just perching next to him on the edge of the well, and she feels warmer.

“That’s the thing,” he mumbles, kicking the heel of his heavy shoe against the ground. “It could be so much worse for you than for any of them. Your friends. They’re citizens. They have rights. You… ” He ducks his head. His hair looks greasy. Maybe it’s hard to wash, with the cut on his face. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says quietly. “On the street. With the cuffs. That… wasn’t what I was trying to do.”

“Then what were you doing?”

“You, uh… you seemed to like… ” He sighs. “I was asking you to come back to my place. Basically.” She doesn’t understand. She tries to remember exactly what he’d said; for her it’s a blur of terror, her heart in her throat and the handcuffs a cold threat in his hand. “I’d actually… I was mostly just focused on how you’d lied to me.” He still sounds bitter, and he won’t meet her eyes. He puffs air out of his mouth, blowing an errant strand of hair out of his face. “I didn’t mean to scare you and I’m sorry, okay?”

It’s almost a snarl. His hair falls in his face again and he lets it be; it blocks his eyes from her. She tries to process what he’s told her. “You were… propositioning me?”

“Yeah.” The twist of his shoe in the dirt is schoolboyish. “It seemed like… ” and he raises his eyes to hers. They are not schoolboyish. They are dark and hot, and dangerous as the third rail. His voice lowers. “It seemed like the kind of thing you might like. Had liked.” Those perilous eyes sweep over her; he has not missed what she’s wearing. Not at all.

We could cross the street, Rey thinks, wildly; we could go into the forest in Inwood Hill Park and he could push me up against a tree and pull my dress up; it’s cold but he’d warm me right up; he could keep his gloves on. She imagines warm leather on her cheek, between her teeth. His hot breath at her neck. She shivers. “It – it wasn’t really the time,” she says.

“No,” he agrees, and his eyes are a bit gentler. “Maybe not.”

“There was something else I wanted to ask you,” she says. God knows she could use a change of subject. And she didn’t come here to – what? Be his little police whore again. No wonder he propositioned me with handcuffs. He knows what I am.

“Yes?” he asks.

“Your tape collection.” He looks dumbfounded. “At your apartment; I saw your tape collection, and one of them, Kemi Wyckoff?”

“Yeah,” he says, still looking confused. “That’s a weird one; I picked it up as a bonus at a show. What about it?”

“She’s Finn’s mom. She was. She killed herself when he was six, after his father died. Her cousins got custody of Finn and they were some sort of terrifying hellfire brand of Christian; they thought she’d been possessed by the devil; they threw out all her things, all her music, everything, and Finn spent his whole childhood with them telling him his parents were satanic, telling him he was satanic.” Her eyes sting; she remembers the haunted, hurt look Finn’s eyes used to have when he’d hide under Maz’s table – still have, on some bad days. She hurries on. “He looked for her album for years and he’s got a digital copy he got from some guy on a message board but he’s never held a physical copy; it would mean so much to him; please Ben… ” He’s staring at her. She pleads, “If I could even just borrow it for him, even for just a few days… ”

He swallows. “Of course,” he says. “Take it. He should have it.”

“I knew it!” she cries. “Oh, Ben. I knew you would.” And she leans forward and kisses him.

She means it to be just a peck, and he doesn’t really react, but the softness of his mouth, the sweet give of his lip, captures her, and she hesitates before she pulls back, resting her hand on his shoulder for balance. His hand brushes across hers, such a light touch she feels the warmth more than the pressure, and she leans into him. His lips part and he breathes her in as much as he kisses her, at first, as his other hand comes to rest hesitantly on her waist. And then he gathers her to him so fiercely all the air goes out of her, but still his mouth is tender, one soft press at the corner of her mouth and then at the other, before he seals his lips on hers and holds her there for a long, long moment.

His chest heaves. She lifts her hands to touch his beautiful, dark, unwashed hair, but she’s only brushed it with her fingertips when he lets her go suddenly and she falls back against the edge of the well. He turns away from her, his arm across his face and a strange little half-gasp on his lips, and the sound and the gesture are such a perfect echo of his mother that Rey can do nothing but stare.

“You kissed me,” he says, in a strangled whisper that’s almost lost under the sound of cars on Broadway. “I’m sorry. You kissed me. I’m sorry.”

She can’t think what he’s apologizing for, though, she supposes, Ben Organa’s life to date presents a lot of valid possibilities.

He turns back to her. His eyes are red and wet and wild. “Let them do it, if they have to,” he says. “Let Poe go out there and brawl with the fucking Nazis, if he wants to. But you stay out of it, okay? Stay home. Go to the zoo. Do anything else.”

“Ben,” she says, frowning, and reaches for his face, but he pulls away from her. He gives her a small, labored smile.

“V’yishak Yakob l’Rachel v’yisa kolo v’yabek,” he says. “At a well and everything. Let me know where I should bring the tape for your friend.”

Chapter Text

“You don’t know why? He couldn’t even guess? Is he going by Ben again these days?” asks Poe.

“No, he said he had no idea,” Rey says. She looks out the window in Amilyn’s office at the low gray sky. A blizzard is due soon. “And he answers to Ben, anyway.”

“Well, I admit it gives me pause, but I’m not going to call this off just because there might be some oblique police agenda under it.”

“It may be,” Amilyn says consideringly, “that we’re going along with the police’s agenda if we work to protect the group at prayer. But if we don’t protect them, I would say that we’re unquestionably going along with the agenda of the white supremacists.”

“Case fucking closed, then,” says Poe. “If there are no further objections, I’m sending the email to the full Chai list right now.”

Signal

Disappearing message time is set to 1 day

R
tell ur captain weve done exactly what he wanted
not everybody came to the meeting but we voted 55-12
poes on a conference call w alakbar and the nyumma ppl now
hes saying yes a lot

Ben can’t help but check the time – it’s after 10PM and she’s still with Poe? But maybe the meeting went late. And Rey is excited about this and wants to be involved.

And she did kiss him.

She wouldn’t kiss him if she were involved with Poe. Except maybe she just meant to peck you on the cheek and she missed and then you made a big fucking thing about it and – No. She kissed him. On purpose. So she is not involved with Poe, not romantically.

Probably. He doesn’t know how she looks at these things, and he’s afraid to ask. All his fantasies about her start with another kiss, now, and end with her voice, full of pleasure, saying things like best and favorite and only, and he feels suffocatingly terrible as soon as they’re over. He does not want to be secondary or non-primary or however she chooses to spell not good enough. He tells himself she can do what she wants; he doesn’t own her.

Kylo
Okay.
Let me know when you have specific plans.

She still hasn’t told him where or when to meet her to give her the tape. He listened to it himself, which he hasn’t done since he got it, more or less; he didn’t care for the mixture of electronica into the eight-track vibe. But she has a nice voice, and he catches himself singing “Shalom Aleichem” on his way down the stairs, stammering to replicate the stutter effect.

Kylo tells Snoke, “They’re putting thirty volunteers on the street, with an additional four from a smaller Jewish group, ten from a South Asian activist alliance, and three clergymembers from an LGBT Christian group.”

“Do you have names for the thirty?”

“Mostly.”

“What’s the overlap with their previous escapade in the street?”

“Ten out of thirteen.”

“The Chinese girl?”

“Vietnamese. She’s not local. She hasn’t volunteered.”

“And our friend Poe?”

“He’s in the lead. Front and center. Of course.”

“Of course.” Snoke’s screen is turned so Kylo can’t see it. Kylo doesn’t know if he’s genuinely reading something off it or just making Kylo wait for the hell of it. “Refresh Poe’s dossier. All the dossiers from the group.” Kylo nods and starts to get up. “I trust your informant isn’t volunteering?” Snoke asks mildly.

“I... assume not,” Kylo says.

“Good. Keep an eye on her, and take good care of her. We’re going to need her.”

He tries not to let his unease show on his face.

The New York United Muslim Metropolitan Alliance thanks Chai, and JIJ, and the Calvary Rainbow, and the Hindu and Sikh members of DUS, for their support. They request that volunteers provide a cordon and engage with a goal of de-escalation with any members of the loose alliance of white nationalists who will reportedly be turning out. Poe sends some emails and makes some calls; de-escalation training is scheduled for next Wednesday, two days before the Friday prayer event.

Finn signs up.

“It’s good training to have,” he protests to Rose, before she can start. She narrows her eyes.

Rose signs up too.

So does Rey.

“I’m not going,” she says. “I mean, odds are good the Nazis aren’t either. It’ll probably snow, and they’ll get lost and freeze their Aryan asses off on the wrong street corner.”

Disappearing message time is set to 1 day

Kylo
You know you can’t go to the demonstration, right?

R
im not volunteering

Kylo
Good. Stay home. Your friend Finn isn’t going, is he?
He’ll be the *immediate* target if he’s anywhere near the scene.

Rey had been feeling annoyed – who is he to say where she can and can’t go? But she’s touched that he’s thinking of Finn’s safety.

R
were not stupid hes not going on the st with nazis AND cops
can i get the tape from you on sat?

Kylo
Sure.
Where?

R
i can come to you.

That’s polite, right, to go to him? That’s the best way not to inconvenience him. And he’s doing her a favor, so she shouldn’t inconvenience him.

She keeps remembering his mouth at odd moments.

She is just being polite.

“Leaving aside the stress pattern, which is completely wrong,” says Kylo coldly, as leans over Hux’s desk and takes off the headphones, “‘ji’ is a particle indicating respect. If you combine it with the verb to be, you get ‘ji-haan,’ with a nasalized n, which is a polite way to say ‘yes.’ Diwali is a major Hindu festival, as is Holi. Your person of interest isn’t saying jihadi; his caller asked if he caters for Hindu festivals, and he said, ‘Yes, sir; Diwali, Holi, whatever.’” He tries not to actually throw the headphones in Hux’s face. “This isn’t hard, Hux; you could learn it from a Bollywood movie.”

“I don’t watch Bollywood movies,” Hux says incredulously.

“If you’re going to monitor an Urdu-speaking population, maybe you should.” Kylo straightens up. “Don’t you have plans to be making for next Friday, anyway?”

The look Hux gives him is inscrutable. “I have my plans made, thank you.”

When Kylo returns to his own desk, Snoke has sent him a request for pictures of Poe’s closest associates.

He repeats the request the next day, and the day after that he walks to Kylo’s desk and stands over his shoulder, watching Kylo pull the files. His file structure for this investigation is a mess; it takes him a while. He manages to exclude Rey, and Finn. He knows Snoke can see the sweat on him.

Finn is letting himself through the door when he hears Rey’s voice from her room. Her tone is cheerful and wistful at the same time.

“Hi Luke; it’s Rey. I’m always trying to remember things you told me about living in New York. The only thing I remember is you talking about the time you got mugged in Riverside Park when you were having a bad day so you got mad and threw your wallet in the Hudson and punched the mugger?”

Finn had forgotten about that story. There are weird clicking and hissing noises underneath Rey’s speech, which has a distracted quality.

“I don’t remember what the moral of that story was supposed to be, but I’ve never gotten mugged or thrown my wallet in a river so… anyway, if you have any stories about facing off with fascists in the streets, please do share. Real-world applications and all that. Anyway. Chag Purim Sameach; love from me and Finn.”

He stands outside Rey’s door and gives it a second. “Seems pretty presumptuous to give my love without consulting me first.”

Rey shrieks. Something clatters, and then there is a general racket, and then Rey yanks open her door. “I assumed you’d send your love; I’m sorry I was so presumptuous; how did you come in so quietly? I thought you and Rose were helping Poe set up for Sam’s Purimspiel.”

“Yeah. Rose got into a thing with Sam; she sent me home to see what kind of pasta we had in the kitchen.”

“I thought the idea was we’d all bring pasta boxes to use as graggers and then Rose would take them to the BJCC?”

“Yeah, but Sam says it’ll be too awkward and corny, so Rose was like, fine, we’ll make little ones with empty containers and loose pasta, and ask people to buy them at the door for the cost of a box of pasta, and Sam was like, no, buy the ratchet-style graggers and then ask for the cost of that plus...” He rolls his eyes and waves his hand. Sam Wexler is well-intentioned and not stupid, and he’s occasionally even kind of fond of him, but Sam can’t budget for shit because he’s never had to, which, fine, sure, but then he forgets that other people do have to. “Anyway. I’m here to paw through the penne and the recycling bin. I thought Rose said you had some sort of supply run to make today?”

“I do,” Rey says. She looks shifty. “I was just about to go.”

He looks at her. She looks even shiftier. “Is this about… that guy. Kyle. Ben.”

She scrunches up her nose. He is unmoved. He has been monitoring the cost of same-day bus tickets to Pittsburgh, and keeps an amount of cash equal to the highest price he’s seen in the pocket of his coat.

“Yes. But also no.”

“What does that mean, Rey?”

She smiles. It surprises him – not a sly I’m-getting-laid smile or a too-bright don’t-ask-questions smile, but a small, warm smile, full of love and care. “You’ll see,” she says. And ducks back into her room, before she leaves, bag in hand.

She half-expects he’ll just greet her at the outside door with the tape in his hand and send her on her way. And that would be fine, of course. But he invites her up. He’s wearing a button-down shirt, not a dress shirt like he wears with his work suits; something black and thick, with a nap to it. It looks warm. The new blizzard is due Wednesday, a bomb cyclone, they say. “Can I get you something to eat?” he asks as she takes off her boots. “Juice? Tea? Water?”

She wonders if he makes his tea like Leah does. “Could I have some water, please?” He brings her a glass. “Gotta get hydrated for tonight,” she jokes.

“Tonight?”

”Purim, Ben.”

He looks away. “Oh. Yeah.” He crosses to his stereo and takes the tape out of the player, puts it in its case. “Do you need some insulating material for this?”

“No, I brought a foam envelope.” The label on the tape case looks handmade. But she’ll wait; she’ll look at it together with Finn. She tucks it in the envelope, and puts the envelope in her bag next to the player she’d just finished refurbishing this morning. “Are you really not doing anything for Purim?”

“What would I do for Purim? Walk over to Crown Heights and wait from some drunk Chabad kid to invite me in?”

“Poe’s having a party. You should come.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No. Come. You can be my plus-one. You have to bring a box of pasta, though.”

He ignores this. “Rey, I’d be about as welcome as Haman himself. And about as appropriate.” He looks down, busying himself with rolling up his sleeves. His forearms are pale, the muscles in them tense. His hands tremble, open and clench. “You realize I could be overseeing the arrest of everyone at that party in under a week?”

“Arrest? Why would you arrest them?”

“Why do you think Snoke wants Chai out there? And he asks me about Poe, asks for everything I’ve got on him.”

“Which is a lot?”

“Yes.” He looks at her, his eyes caught between annoyance and entreaty. “You see why I think you shouldn’t go out there?”

“Yeah. I do. And I’ll tell Poe. But we’re still going, Ben.”

His expression is so hopeless that she goes to him, puts her hand to his face. He lets her; he turns his face a little into her palm, so the rough skin of his jaw scratches her and her thumb lies along the tender red of his scar. She strokes the cheek beside it. “Stupid defective cuffs,” he grumbles. His voice is faint and dry. She sees him swallow.

She shifts her hand. Her fingers lie along his long jaw and she presses her thumb gently into his lower lip. It’s thick and soft; she thinks of women she’s loved, and of the word luscious. She thinks of how he kissed her. “Did you get a new pair?” she asks. She keeps her voice mild. Mild enough.

“Yes.” His eyes flicker over her face, searching for her intention.

“And they can fit anyone, right?”

His pulse jumps. “Yes.” What does she want? He’s misunderstood before.

“Show me how they work?” Such a polite request. He fetches them from his work belt by the door and shows her the mechanism, how they adjust. “Are they uncomfortable?”

Maybe she really is just wondering. Trying to empathize with the people he’s cuffed in the past, will cuff next week. “They can be. If you tighten them too far, or the person in them fights against them.”

She takes them out of his hands and examines them. He tries to breathe normally. She walks to his table and pulls out a chair. She meets his eyes.

He sits.

“Hands behind your back,” she says. His shiver is half for the instruction and half for her voice, which is soft as a whisper and entirely implacable. He keeps his eyes on her as he obeys. Slowly.

She walks behind him and the steel is cold on one wrist, then the other, as she threads his cuffs through the back of the chair..

“Is that all right?” says her voice in his ear, still soft, still pitiless.

“Tighter,” he says.

“Are you sure?” She’s wary; she of all people knows how a dull metal edge can bite.

“Just one click tighter.” He doesn’t even breathe, listening to her do it. The cuffs cinch down, holding him. Well-soldered; he’d tested this pair. No getting out. No fighting free.

“I could do a lot of things to you, couldn’t I?” she says, gently moving his knees apart so she can step close to him. He nods mutely. She could. She could do anything. His eyes are close to level with her breasts like this; he can see the low dip of her bra cup through her thin top. She starts unbuttoning his shirt, it brings her arms together, pressing her breasts. He tries to drop his face to her chest, kiss her there, but she grabs him by the hair and drags his head back. His breath hisses in his teeth. She holds him there, head back, throat exposed, shirt half-open, and examines him. One cool little finger comes to rest against his chin. “Stay.”

She takes her time with the remaining buttons, and then pushes his shirt off his shoulders. Her fingertips slide down his chest like a trickle of water. He’s burning up. “Oh, Ben,” she sighs. “You belong in the Met. There in that big hall with all the white marble statues.” She leans forward, her mouth against his ear. Her breath and his blush both warm it. “All those admiring eyes on you.” She grazes his nipple with her hand, changes direction, grazes it again. Her lips close around his ear at the same time that her fingers trace his navel, and he jackknifes forward as if she’d punched him in the stomach. But she told him to stay. He catches his breath and leans back again, the way she left him.

She steps a little back, and strips her shirt off. He watches her as best he can with his head back. The bra is white; the flush that’s climbing her breastbone shows pink and stark against it. The cups only just hide her nipples; he can see the brown edge of one areola. The edge of the handcuffs against his wrists is nothing compared to the discomfort of the way his cock is trapped in his pants. He tries to keep still and stay calm. It’ll be worth it. It’s worth it already, not to have to be the bad guy, the brute; worth it to be told she thinks he’s beautiful, to know that she thinks he can still give her what she wants even when he’s tied to a chair. Yes. Please. Have faith in me, Rachel.

Rey peels off her bra and straddles him. Her breasts press against him as she takes hold of his hair again and kisses him, her mouth hot and open. His hips jerk, just a little, his body asking for what it wants, and she grinds down against him, sucking at his exposed throat. The rasp of her denim against his waist, the grip of the cuffs, the burn of her hold in his hair; she’s merciless; he can’t help the moan that spills out of him. She kisses him again, rubbing her bare skin against his, and then drops two quick kisses on each cheek, just beneath his eyes.

“No tears this time,” she tells him, and he’d think she was making fun of him, but her gaze on his is earnest, even a little shy, and the way she rubs against him is urgent. “Okay?”

“Yes, Rachel,” he says, and she kisses him again, hard and slow. Her hair is coming lose and brushing lightly against his face; she tastes like the first time he was allowed to drink wine – sweet and stinging and something more than he can understand. He chases her mouth as she pulls it away from him.

Her hands slip down between them – he thinks she’ll help him, free him, stroke him, but she’s working the button on her own jeans, and she slides off him for a moment before she’s on him again, entirely naked, her legs wrapped around the chair so he can feel her calloused foot against his arm and her wet, wet center against his bare stomach. He wants to protest – she can’t do this to him; it isn’t fair – but she’s kissing him again, clinging to him. Like his first glass of wine, her kisses mean something, signify something. Like his first glass of wine, which is he drank too fast, they leave him too dazed to read the meanings in the sign.

She twists around him, keeping her mouth on his, so she has one foot against the floor and she’s rubbing not against the flat of his stomach but against his side, grinding down on his hipbone where it juts above his belt. She’s so wet. He wants to tell her that his cock will be better, wants to promise her he’ll fill her up so good and full if she’ll just let him. But his head is in her hands; her sweet, gasping mouth is on his; he can’t stop kissing her.

“Do you want me?” she asks him. He groans. As if every part of his body that isn’t literally tied down isn’t already answering that question. “Tell me,” she insists.

“Yes.” His voice is hoarse; his throat is tight with tension and the angle she’s got his head at.

“Tell me.”

“Yes, I want you. Want you on my cock.” Her hands are still on his head; he needs them at his belt buckle. He’s making the cuffs cut into him with the way he’s straining. He forces himself still. He has almost no breath left for words. “Please.”

And that does it; she’s undoing his belt, she’s pulling his pants and underwear down as he does everything he can to help her. Just the temperature change makes his breath stutter; when she climbs back on him and he can feel her slick pussy against the head of his naked cock, he has to close his eyes and try to imagine dull and disgusting things, anything but the woman who’s panting against the side of his face as she sinks slowly down on him, taking him into her body. “Ben,” she grunts into his ear, and he tips his head back again, as if he might howl like a wolf.

She has both her feet on the floor now; he turns his face for a moment so he can see her strong calves flexing, her feet arching as she goes up on her toes. She leans back and braces herself on his knees; less rocking than a slow grind. That’s okay; that’s fine. That’s agonizing, actually, but it’s not going to make him come immediately so he’ll take it. He can do this, watching her little breasts rise and fall while she arches backwards, squeezing down on him while giving him almost no friction where he needs it. He can do this. He has to do it; he’s cuffed to the fucking chair. She can do whatever she wants with him.

She can do whatever she wants with me; she’s doing what she wants with me. She wants me inside her.

That thought puts him in danger again, and it gets worse when she straightens up, riding him again. Her arms go around his neck, bracing herself on his shoulders. She feels so good around him. Tight and wet and riding him hard. And then harder, her head lolling back, her breasts bouncing. Oh shit. He can’t; she hasn’t gotten off, hasn’t gotten what she came for. He tries closing his eyes but it’s no good; she’s dragging him ruthlessly onward, her coarse curls tickling his stomach. “Oh fuck – oh fuck, I’m gonna come,” he gasps. Her eyes widen and she slides off him; for an instant he thinks she’s just going to leave him there, just walk away and leave him. But she sinks down between his legs, kneeling on his pulled-down clothes, and takes him in her mouth, one hand cupping his balls and her tongue caressing him. It’s the hottest thing he’s ever seen, her lips around his cock, wet with the slickness she left on him. He comes, with a groan that feels like it opens his chest, and she swallows him down. She wants me.

“Sorry,” she says, wiping her mouth. “I should have thought to ask you about a condom.”

Oh. He’d thought she was making a choice, like kissing him, taking his cock without a condom. But she’d just forgotten. His wrists ache. She’s grabbed her clothes; from the rustling noises, she’s dressing even as she grabs the handcuffs key. “I’m clean,” he says, dazedly, as he feels her fumbling with the lock.

“I’m glad,” she says, “but I don’t have an IUD.”

“Oh,” he says, like the idiot he is, and his hands come free. Her hands are at his wrists, rubbing.

“I made them too tight,” and he’d been trying to think about how he should make her stop getting dressed so he can make her come, so she doesn’t think he’s a total failure, but he hears the edge of tears in her voice. He pulls her around, into his lap.

“No,” he says, “no, no; remember? I told you, people can hurt themselves in cuffs, if they fight. I did it to myself. They weren’t too tight.” She already has everything but her pants back on. Fuck. She’s giving up on him already. He kisses her, running a now-free hand over her naked thigh. He’s trying to gather the energy to make it up to her, but he feels like jelly.

“Did you… like that?” she asks, shyly.

“Fuck.” He leans his head against her shoulder. “‘Like’ isn’t the word. You tasting yourself on my cock… fuck.” He scrapes his fingers over the crotch of her panties and she squirms. Good. He lowers his voice. “Did you like that? Taste of pussy on your tongue?”

“It’s not like it was the first time,” she says tartly.

He stops still. So does she. “You mean, uh.” He doesn’t know quite how to ask. “Or… um.”

She climbs off his lap, going for her pants. She doesn’t look at him as she puts them on. “I, uh. Well. I’m bi. Rose is my ex-girlfriend, actually. So yeah. I’m bi. If that’s what you’re asking.”

He swallows. He should – no, he shouldn’t; he definitely shouldn’t – but he has no impulse control and he just blurts it out:

“Me too.”

Her head jerks up. “Really? No – I’m sorry – I shouldn’t say that – I – ”

“Yes. Really.” He turns his own attention to dressing. (His first glass of wine was given to him at 13, at his bar mitzvah, as he stared at a crowd of peers who all seemed so beautiful, and he gulped it down and clung desperately to the hope that whatever it was that was ripping him up inside would fade away now that he was a man.) “I don’t do much about it. Either way. So to speak.” His chest is tight.

When he looks up again, she’s smiling at him. “Well,” she says, “if you’re queer, you’re family, and you should definitely come to the Purimspiel at Poe’s.”

”I can’t; you have to know that, Rey.” He’s exhausted; she’s cuffed him, teased him, fucked him, swallowed his come, gotten him to admit something he’s never said aloud to anyone but a doctor, and now she wants to give him shit about a fucking Purim party? And he knows – he tells himself he knows – that she doesn’t mean it like that, but he’s a policeman and he was born in 1981; queer is a cruel word to him. It whispers ugly things about her opinion of him, his body, his performance. You didn’t get her off, after all, did you?

“You should, though,” she says, stubbornly. “You’re giving Finn this tape, and you’re an old friend of Poe’s – ”

“I am not an old friend of Poe’s,” he snaps. “I spent my whole fucking childhood with him because our moms worked together, which means I spent my whole fucking childhood being compared to someone who was four years older than me and did everything first and better. And I know that sounds like basic sibling shit, like oh poor me I had a big brother but it wasn’t like that; if he’d been my brother he would have been there – all the time.” And Ben wouldn’t have had to be alone, during the bad times. There would have been someone who was abandoned with him, and maybe he could have asked for help. “But he was only ever there when everyone could watch him being perfect.” And he’d had to listen for twenty-five years with agonized attention to the nuance in his mother’s tone as she said, Oh, no, Danny is Shara’s son; Ben is mine.

“Ben,” Rey says gently. “Poe’s not perfect.”

“I know that,” he says. “Trust me, I know that.”

“And I mean, he told me you were so smart he was glad he was older than you, so he didn’t have to compete. And he was up at four in the morning the other day, talking about how maybe you – ”

“Four in the morning? What were you doing with him at four in the morning?” Is she seriously trying to tell him he shouldn’t worry about competing with Danny Polansky while telling him he’s competing with Danny Polansky?

“I was sleeping over,” she says, as if it were nothing. “I just woke up because he was up – ”

He kicks over the chair.

“Go,” he says. “Go to his fucking party. Do whatever you want with him.” She looks distraught. He’s scared her. Again. He rights the chair. He’s ready to collapse. “You don’t need to spend any more time here consoling me or whatever you think you’re doing.”

He leans against the table for support as she stalks over to the door and starts putting her boots on. He imagines her drunkenly leaning against Poe’s arm, and then it comes coldly to him that in six days, he will likely be standing on the street watching Poe get arrested for standing between Nazis and people at prayer.

He pushes himself over to her and pulls the door open, harder than he means to. What am I doing; kicking over chairs and throwing open doors; I’m a bundle of red flags. Holy Name, just let her leave. He slumps, his head leaned against the thin edge of the door like the classic excuse for a black eye. “If you care about him, tell him not to go out in the street on Friday.”

“You know I can’t do that, Ben,” she says, wearily, “and I wish you didn’t want me to.” And she goes down the stairs without looking back.

When she’s gone, he tries to call back the feeling of being told he belonged in the Met, the feeling of being clutched at and eagerly swallowed and wanted. It won’t stay. He just imagines her in Poe’s bed, reaching for him in the middle of the night. Two beautiful, virtuous people, brave and balanced and complete. And him, alone, on the other side of the river, with nothing to offer but handcuffs and please.

Rey is exhausted too; climbing a tall man like a pole is not an easy feat, even when he’s seated, and she didn’t even get an orgasm out of it this time. She knows she fucked up; it was obvious coming out was new to him; she shouldn’t have treated it so lightly. How would I have liked it, when I was coming out, if Finn had made a crack about a party, when I was so scared and uncertain? But her emotions had been running so high – he’s gorgeous, he wants me, he feels so good inside me, I could kiss him forever, he lets me do this to him – that she’d just made one mistake after the other. How could she have forgotten a condom? And how could she, of all people, have put his handcuffs on too tight? The red stripe around his wrist was so familiar it suffocated her. He said it was his own fault but it can’t have been; he was just trying to make me feel better. For a moment the thundering of the train as it emerges onto the Manhattan Bridge is the thundering of her sewing machine beside her bent head.

Then, with the restored reception of the open air, her phone lights up with the group chat.

Rose
are you ok rey? finn said you were doing something mysterious but its almost sunset

Finn
I’m grabbing an extra box of pasta for you in case you don’t have time

Rose
also im going to murder sam just fyi

Poe
lol get in line
have you seen the text he wrote for this thing? My g-d

Finn
Hope you got what you wanted to get Rey

She blushes. She hadn’t gone there meaning to fuck him. Not exactly with that intention. But she does have what she really went for: Finn’s tape. It’s going to burn a hole in her bag all night; she has to find the right time to give it to him. She hopes it won’t make him sad, but it might, so she’ll have to see if the party gets intimate enough to give him a good emotional space, where he can feel comfortable. By which she means, in no small part, if they can convince Sam Wexler to get his dumb ass out of Poe’s place in a timely way.

(Sam did volunteer for Poe’s minyan, and for the action next week, and Rey is glad and proud of him but that does not mean she has to forgive him for all the times he flirted with Rose even though he knew they were dating.)

Finn has seen Poe drunk before, but he’s never been drunk with Poe before. It’s much better. Poe is hilarious. Poe is amazing.

Poe steals the last poppyseed hamentash out of Sam’s hands and deposits it with Rose, who baked them and hasn’t gotten one all night. “Baked goods in my territory are granted protection of droit d’auteur!” he shouts.

Finn has no idea what that means but it makes Rose giggle, so Finn likes it.

Poe is great.

“What is that and why does it mean I can’t have a cookie?” Sam asks. Poe, on top of his real mustache, has a Manischewitz mustache. Rose has wine on her face too. Finn licks his lips. So did he.

“Creator’s rights, as guaranteed by the Berne Convention, an international agreement governing copyright and intellectual property,” says Poe, extremely rapidly, “to which many nations have been signatories since 1888, and which has been in force in this apartment since 1977.”

“The cookie was copyrighted?”

“Yes,” says Poe. “Registered with the New York Office of Jewish Diaspora Affairs, Delicious Baked Goods Department. Isn’t that so, Rose.”

“It’s an eligible work,” says Rose, around a mouthful of cookie. “Passes the threshold of originality. I was definitely awake in that class, which was definitely relevant to environmental law.”

“Right, Wexler,” Karé Kohn says. “Time for the Outer Boroughs to say goodnight before the F goes caput.” Karé’s the only other black Jew in Chai, but she lives in fucking Queens so this is like the third time Finn’s seen her in his life. She’s great too. “Polansky, you’re gonna email us about Friday, yeah?”

Poe frowns. “Karé, you’re welcome to join us, but I do want to prioritize your – ”

“Yeah, my safety, whatever. Email me, Polansky. Wexler, are you coming or what?”

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” grumbles Sam, as he struggles with his coat.

“That’s what he said!” Reys shouts.

Rey is also hilarious and great, of course. He gives her a hug. She holds on tight, and he pats her hair. Rey is so great.

As soon as the door shuts Rose lunges for her phone. “Oh my God I have to text Karé and thank her for hauling him away. I can’t believe he took my last cookie!”

“They were really good cookies, baby,” he tells her, walking over to hug her, too. Baby the dog hears her name and howls mournfully from Poe’s bedroom. Rose kisses him as Poe frees his favorite furball. Rose is more than great. Rose is special.

When he looks up from kissing Rose, Rey is standing in front of him, her bag in her hand, tears welling in her eyes and a smile on her face. “What is it?” he asks her, concerned.

“I got you something,” she says, and puts a cassette tape into his hand.

Kemi Wyckoff it says in black ink, and then, in blue, Hazzard.

He looks back up at Rey. She’s holding out a tape player, a little flat one with a strap like he vaguely remembers seeing in school libraries back in L.A. She pushes a button and the cassette-holder pops up.

“What is it?” asks Poe, coming over. “Holy shit, a tape deck.”

Finn swallows. “My mom,” he says. “It’s my mom’s tape. Her album. I’ve never had a real copy before. I’ve never even seen a picture. Where did you get it?”

“Ben Organa had a copy,” she says. “He gave it to me to give to you.”

“A loan?”

“To keep. He said you should have it. I went to Brooklyn today to get it from him. I fixed the player and tested it on another cassette,” Rey says. “Just before you scared the shit out of me this morning. Do you want to play it now?”

Finn’s hands are shaking too much to put the tape in the slot. Rose reaches out and does it for him, and he slumps backwards, staring at the tape case. On the inside, there’s a little photocopied picture of his mother, standing among stacks of equipment he can’t identify, looking down at something with a serious expression, a guitar slung over her shoulder. On the back, there’s a track listing. It looks like it was done with a typewriter.

There’s a faint, faint hiss as the tape starts. He has always known this as a feature of the songs. He had forgotten that it’s an artifact of the medium, the magnetic tape running between turning mechanical heads. Rey hands him the player and he sets it on the end-table beside the sofa and leans his head in. His mother sings: Twelve gates in the ea-ea-east...

Ben does drink that night. Not wine, and not with any book, or party. He walks out and buys whiskey, and pours himself a very, very generous glass. He climbs with it out onto the fire escape. The street traffic ignores him. If the people across the way see him, they don’t give any sign. He sits on the cold iron in his coat, glass in hand, and drinks and drinks.

Disappearing message time set to 1 day.

Kylo
Does he know youre fucking me?

His fingers are unsteady with whiskey and cold wind. He types: was fucking me part of the plan you two had and deletes it. He types: i was always better at hebrew than he was and deletes it. He types do you like his beard and deletes it, and types do you tell him everything is he going to make you come twice tonight to make up for my failures and deletes it, and types you realize hes probably going to jail next week right and deletes it, and stumbles back through his window and into the bathroom to throw up.

I have done enough unforgivable things.

Rey is explaining softly to Poe, who is looking at him with wet eyes, petting Baby. Finn’s own eyes are overflowing; Rose holds out her hand, and he grasps it tight, wiping at his cheeks with his other hand.

“This is amazing,” Poe says softly, after the first track. “This is, like, brilliant.”

“I know,” he says proudly, glad that Poe can hear what he hears. They listen and listen and listen. “Lecha Dodi” and “Go Down, Moses” and “Shalom Aleichem” and “Dodi Li.” The tape stops. He knows there are more songs; he has them, and they’re listed on the back. “Did the player break? There are five more songs.”

Poe laughs, though he may be covering a bit of a sniffle. “You damn kids,” he says, “you young whippersnappers. You don’t remember tape decks? You have to turn it over.”

As the second side plays, Poe brings them all glasses of water, and then offers the wine bottle around again. Finn lets him pour him another glass, and leans into Rose’s shoulder. His mother closes it out strong, belting “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho” over a stark, musique concrète arrangement. He doesn’t want it to be over. He leans his head over the player further, to hear the tape hiss down to the final click. Like seeing her out the door he thinks.

The hiss goes on longer than he would have thought, and then the machine gives a laugh. He jumps a mile. Rose and Rey gasp. “You didn’t know there was a hidden – ?” Poe asks. Rey claps her hand over his mouth.

Sing along, Ef-Ef, says his mother’s voice. And on the tape, he does. In a toddler’s tuneless huff: Josh-wa fit the battle of Jer-i-cho! His mother’s voice comes back, warm and undoctored. Jericho, Jericho, Jericho! Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls came a-tumbling down! Someone, presumably him, his younger self, is banging arrhythmically, metal against plastic by the sound of it. He struggles to remember a high chair, a child-safe cup or bowl, what, when, where this could have been.

She’s strumming a guitar lightly, but her voice is strong, triumphant, carrying the wandering toddler noises along with it. Up to the walls of Jericho, his sword drawn in his hand: ”Go blow that horn,” cried Joshua, “’cause the battle is in my hand!”

Her tone in this version is so different, layered with amusement and love instead of electronic distortions. “Joshua was his father’s name,” Rey whispers to Poe. You may boast about your men of Gideon; you may brag about your men of Saul, but give me good old Joshua at the battle of Jericho; hallelujah!

He feels like he’s never wished for anything as much as he wishes he could remember this. Was his dad there? Maybe holding Finn while Mommy recorded, keeping him from unplugging machines, or just winking at her as she sang –

And the walls – came – a-tumbling – down! Is his father there? He’ll never know. He has no way to find out. The song is over. Quietly, his mother’s voice says: Good job, Ef-Ef. Good work. Well done. Her tone is loving and bright.

And the tape clicks off.

Ben is unsurprisingly hung over on Sunday morning. He has a message from Rey, a single question mark. He throws his phone across the room, and takes the train to Queens, where he waits for a bus. The first one is too crowded; the next one comes only five minutes later, and it’s packed too, but he manages to cram himself on. The passengers are mostly women; there are a few other men.

He gets off the bus with everyone else and walks in the crowd to stand in a bank of long lines. He fills out his paperwork and shows his ID. He considers showing his badge, pulling rank, pretending he has an official reason to be there. He keeps his head down and fills out his forms. He presses the pen down so hard it rips the paper and he has to go back and ask for another copy.

At length they check his coat and lead him down a hall and he sits down at a cafeteria-style table.

“Not to be too cliché, kid,” says Han Solo, “but: you never call, you never write.”

“Happy Purim, Dad,” Ben says.

Chapter Text

Finn took a deep breath, looked around to make sure there wasn’t anyone around who might tell on him, and then he just went up and knocked. Nice and firm, like he wasn’t afraid, like he knocked on strangers’ doors all the time, like he was a grown-up.

The woman who came to the door had her hair wrapped up tight and big round glasses. “Hello, child,” she said, which made him wary, because the ladies at the church called him child too. But she had a funny accent so maybe it was okay.

“Are you Miss Maz?” he asked.

“I am.”

He crowded in a little closer just in case anybody on the street was listening. “The kids say you’re black and Jewish. Like me.”

She looked at him through her enormous glasses. “Like you, hmmm?” He looked around again, to make sure no one was watching, and nodded. “Say me a prayer, child.”

Finn only knew one prayer, that Mommy had taught him for Chanukah. He kept his voice low and sang, “Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu melech ha-olam...” but she shook her head before he was even done. Oh no. Oh no.

“You are black and Jewish,” she said, “and I am black and Jewish, too.” He felt like slumping against the door in relief. “But we are not black and Jewish in the same way.”

“Like… how?”

”I am Beta Israel. Ethiopian Jews. Like the Queen of Sheba, you know.” Finn didn’t know, but he nodded like he did, and resolved to find out as soon as he could. “You look Yoruba to me. Nigeria?”

“I’m from New York.”

Maz smiled at him. “Ah-ha. I see. And I can tell, little child, by how you sing, you aren’t Jewish like me. You’re Jewish like her.” And she pointed inside the house. Finn looked around her legs and saw a scrawny white girl sitting on a flowery sofa, taking bottles and cans out of a big bag, her hands moving so fast she looked like a movie on fast-forward.

The March blizzard hardly touches NYC. There’s a little slush on Friday, but the NYUMMA brings an enormous tarp to cover the ground. The space in front of City Hall is more or less laid out to discourage large gatherings – a park full of angled, asymetrical paths, with green spaces bordered by chains (now reinforced with police barriers) and a tall, spiked fence facing the streets. But winter strips the park’s trees of obscuring foliage, and shuts off the fountain that faces the building, leaving the scene bare and forboding.

More police barriers keep the prayer from the steps of City Hall itself. The tarp is spread in the sidewalk area in front, where a restricted-access road separates the hall from the park. The volunteer guards are arranging themselves at the three accessible edges of the protest area, the two ends of the road, and the one remaining entrance from the park.

If Kylo were in charge of the day’s preparations, the park would be completely cut off from the prayer’s area of permitted protest. Hux, or more likely, Hux under Snoke’s direction, has chosen to reduce the number of access points to the park from six to two, cutting off side paths and creating a nearly-straight channel that runs the length of the park.

Kylo watches as the “counter-protest” crowd forms around the fountain. He and Hux are in uniform, which is a blessing; their role here is clear. And he can pull his hat down over his eyes and his collar up to his chin as he stares at the crowd of white men gathering in front of him and his blood pounds in his ears. About a dozen of them wear helmets, mostly black tin-pot chin-strap contraptions. Others have caps, some black, some red. In the state of New York, even the possession of metal knuckles or blackjacks is illegal, but Kylo is quite sure that a significant portion of them are carrying, if not those things exactly, then their closest possible approximations.

For the moment, they’re mostly taking photos of one another. One crosses in front of him, waving a Confederate flag. He gives no sign that he regards Kylo as any kind of threat or opponent. Kylo takes hold of the barrier, willing it to warp or break under his grip, to absorb the thermal shock of anger moving through him and keep him from doing something stupid. He feels like there is molten metal in his veins, like he’s going to die of rage.

He tries to pour cold observation on his feelings. He notes that none of the South Asian members of the volunteer guard are facing the park. They must be stationed on the street. If Finn or Rey is here, they must be there, at the edges less likely to be attacked, though if Heaven has any mercy – never, never, since when – they stayed at home, or at least in the fucking Starbucks across the street.

He does see Poe, of course. And Amilyn. Wexler, who he saw on Varick St.

Kylo checks his watch. The sun is low; the ornate cast iron lamps in the park are coming on. Gil al-Akbar lays down a crate and helps the muezzin up.

The sound of the call to prayer has an immediate effect on the white supremacists. They put their phones away, and start up a chant. It’s disgusting and ignorant and Kylo’s fingers dig painfully into his palms as he holds to the barrier. He tries to be stealthy about the deep breaths he’s taking, tries to will himself calmer.

He’s done his own research, trying to piece together Snoke’s plan. He’s looking for, if not Fasma’s tumor-in-a-waistcoat, one of their close associates. He’s seen one, in a homemade riot helmet. He saw another wearing khakis and a tan sport-coat, but the coat was too light for the weather, and he thinks the man must have retired to a warmer spot. He is beginning to have some trouble distinguishing one pasty, hysterical, hate-squished face from another.

A man in faux-fatigues breaks from the Nazi crowd. A designated troublemaker. Kylo discreetly drops his hand to the latch that holds the barriers together and removes the pin.

The troublemaker has some trouble settling on a target. Wexler’s bigger than he is, and Amilyn’s smile clearly unnerves him. Poe is the obvious mark; he’s not tall, and it may not be immediately obvious to these morons that he’s Latino, but his skin is still the brownest among the volunteer guards facing the park, and his eye is visibly twitching already. But the man continues to pace, trying to pick out a target.

The worshippers are in place now, and the imam has replaced the muezzin on the crate. God is great. There is no god but God. The fascists’ chant continues, monotonous and revolting, jarring his thoughts.

The troublemaker picks a target. He’s chosen well – a young woman, on the far end of the line, short, in a soft hat. Far from the pen where they’ve corralled most of the press. She may not react violently to him, but one of the men beside her might. Kylo remembers the footage of Poe on Varick, screaming, almost breaking the line in his outrage over Paige’s treatment. She’s also sufficiently far from the police that they can’t hear quite what he’s saying; Hux may try to stop it, but Kylo is more than prepared to order an arrest as soon as he witnesses anything criminal.

Whatever the man is saying, the girl is bearing it stoically. Kylo looks closer, and tries not to curse aloud. It’s Rose Thi-Cohen.

Rose, whose picture he hadn’t been able to keep from Snoke.

Finn half-listens to the prayer. He, Karé, and a man and a woman from DUS (Amar and Preeti, they’d said, as they all quickly shook hands) are standing at the corners of the tarp, holding it down. They serve a practical purpose, and if someone slips past the lines of the volunteer guards, they’re in position to intercept them before they get to the prayer.

He rarely wears a yarmulke, except for synagogue and ceremonies, but this morning he put one on – a small circle of white velvet, held to his hair with a triangle clip. There had been debate at the de-escalation training; the instructor told them it would be best to remove all religious or political signifiers that might be read as provocation. Poe had objected to calling religious headcovering “provocation,” and Amilyn had reminded him that they were out there to protect their neighbors, and that that should be their first priority. Poe agreed, and was quiet for a while, but a few minutes later he was pointing out that the white supremacists almost certainly knew they were Jews, and that leaving off religious signifiers wasn’t likely to calm them. In the end, they had decided that those who typically wore them should wear them, since it was no good to let Nazis bully you out of your yarmulke, but that those who typically didn’t wear them should leave them off, because why ask for trouble?

But since he’s standing with a crowd of men wearing taqiyahs, he figures he’ll blend in better with a head covering than without. And it gives him strength, and a fierce kind of amusement, to advertise himself as the worst nightmare of the pack of monsters howling in the dim evening light. And that’s what he’d told Rose, what’d made her understand why he was going, and go herself: They’re afraid of me. I won’t be afraid of them.

Kylo can’t jump on the guy without probable cause, but is he going to stand here and let another Thi-Cohen sister get harassed on his watch? He tries to breathe, tells himself she must have been ready for this; she must have known what she could be in for. She’s a volunteer. And he can’t tie himself up trying to handle a dubious arrest; he has to be alert for what he’s increasingly sure Snoke has planned for Poe, and he has to time it right, to stop it while he can still pretend he doesn’t realize that his captain wants it to happen.

But also he hears Rey’s voice, chanting at him in a gallery full of works by Muslim artists: Who do you protect? Who do you serve?

The people on the tarps are prostrate in the first rakat of three. Kylo drags back the barrier he’s unlatched.

A murmur (As-salaam aleikum wa rahmatu’llah) goes through the crowd twice as everyone rises to their knees. Finn turns towards the park, and sees the man in camo getting in Rose’s face. He steps forward involuntarily, and then feels the wind start to whip the tarp under his other foot, and steps back to hold it down. He can’t defend her; he can’t leave the people they came here to defend. She’s a defender herself.

I love you, Rose, he thinks as hard as he can, watching her straight back and high head, hoping she can hear him, feel him. He remembers the song she’d sung him, very quietly, on the train. Mir veln zey iberlebn. We will outlive them. Promise me, she’d said. And he had promised, and made her promise, too. He stares at her, and reminds her, silently. They’re afraid of us. They’re afraid of us, and they want to see us dead, but we will outlive them; we will survive to be everything they fear and more.

Rey had laughed at herself. It was partly just nerves, and partly an entirely reasonable reaction to what she’s doing. She’s hiding in a tree. The sycamores are naked, but there are a few evergreen trees, huge and bushy, and she’s nestled into the boughs of one.

She had lied to Finn and Rose, pretended to see them off in the west Bronx, and then taken a cross-town bus to the 6, and emerged on the opposite side of the park. She’d hidden herself among the deep, dense foliage at the base of the tree, where she has a clean view of Rose and Poe and Amilyn and Sam Wexler. She can’t see Finn, but she can tell where he is by where Rose keeps looking; the statue of Nathan Hale is hiding him from her.

She climbs onto one of the low boughs, just a foot or so off the ground, for a better view. She has to be here. Because, in the best-case scenario, she’ll just be a little cold and a little bored, and if the best case isn’t what happens… she wants to be, at the least, a witness.

At the least.

The imam begins to pray the second rakat.

“What are you doing?” Hux asks him sharply.

“10-50 out there,” Kylo says. Vague. Radio code for disorderly conduct.

“Not loud enough,” says Hux. “Still under 1A. Get back here; you know we’re holding.”

Kylo isn’t able to conceal what he thinks of Hux’s tone and doesn’t bother trying. He looks at Rose. She’s paler than she should be, but her expression is calm. She seems to occasionally be trying to nod, or speak, to calm the man. It’s not working. A press photographer has made his way over to edge in beside Kylo and is leaning forward over the barrier, reaching for a good angle on her face. Kylo shoos him away brusquely.

He looks back towards the chanting band of white supremacists, and spots the tumor-in-a-waistcoat, who’s swapped the waistcoat for a kevlar vest. As if anyone in the groups opposing him might be carrying. He’s talking to his little friend in the tan coat, whose chattering teeth make him look frightened. Probably he is. They all are; the chanting and the kevlar and the contraband brass knuckles; they whip themselves into a frenzy of terror.

Not that he’s a profile in courage himself. (Cowardly, self-loathing fraud.) He’s spent a decade hiding behind a false name, and snarling at the ghost of a woman with a gun. But still. Whatever he is. (Monster. Willing part of a system.) However driven by fear. He’s better than this. He will be better than this.

He steps forward again. “Just because your plan was a failure...” Hux begins, and that’s when Wexler breaks.

Kylo doesn’t know what the man said that was so much worse, or if the accumulation just became too much, but the big man steps towards Rose and tries to insert himself between her and the white nationalist. Immediately, three other men break out of the herd of racists and come to back their scout up. Wexler reverts to de-escalation tactics, but they’re on the scent now, trying to surround him. Rose tries to pull him back into line, so he can’t be isolated. She only manages to isolate herself with him.

He glances back at Hux. If he’s right, Hux should be about ready to go, and Hux nods stiffly. “Hold inside the barrier,” he says to Kylo, and gestures three street cops in with them. None of them are wearing riot gear.

Wexler and Rose are trapped together now, cut off from their friends, surrounded by four of the white supremacists. The scene is getting confusing, which is always the goal in these scenarios – break the line of the defenders, muddy the picture, keep potential witnesses preoccupied and cops’ attention divided, then do maximum damage and call it self-defense or a mutual scuffle. But here, Kylo thinks, they’re going for something slightly more specific – they’ve been prompted by Snoke, by way of Fasma and her little friend, to try to isolate Poe and lure him into an act which can be read – will be read, by a compliant DA – as assault. And Poe is noble and hot-headed enough to fall for it, in someone else’s defense. And all of Leah Organa’s direst threats will not be enough to save him. Leaving everyone to the mercy of men like your captain is not the equal justice I want, she’d said. And Snoke means to say: There is no other justice.

It isn’t Poe who breaks from the line next, though. Amilyn strides smoothly to the men surrounding Rose and Wexler. At first her face is solemn, but they ignore her, and she begins to smile as she speaks. If you didn’t know Amilyn from your childhood, you might think that that serene smile was meant to be calming. Kylo, however, has many years of experience, and he sees, with a sick feeling, that she is provoking them. Not jabbing them, but working her way under their skin. Which she would never, ever do if she didn’t believe that Rose and Wexler were in serious and immediate danger. Which she wouldn’t believe if she trusted that the approaching police presence represented real safety, real justice. He walks a little faster.

Whatever she’s said to them, it’s had its effect. All four of them are pivoted towards her, with one red-hatted, red-faced man leaning into her face, shouting. Amilyn’s smile deepens; she does not back down. Kylo is just close enough to hear her voice, dry and cutting. “Oh, please. As if we’d want to.”

The scene explodes.

The red-faced fascist punches Amilyn full in the face. Amilyn does not go down; she staggers a pace back, but she doesn’t even lose her smile, and it only enrages her attacker more. The rest of the line breaks, shouting, running for help or for safety; Rose and Wexler scream Amilyn’s name, and try to push past the other Nazis to get to her; the men turn and hold them; they struggle, grappling and shouting, as the man in the red hat pursues the rabbi and strikes out again. She blocks his blow, holding his fist at an awkward angle and still, still smiling at him. He lashes out, kicking and grabbing at her clothes, and she goes off balance; he shoves her and she goes down, falling almost flat on the uneven slate paving stones. He draws his foot back and kicks her in the stomach.

The third rakat is beginning when Rose screams. Wexler screams too, of course, but it’s Rose’s that yanks Finn’s heart, already beating much too fast, up into his throat. And then one of them has his hands on her and Rabbi Holdon falls on the pavement and Finn can’t just stand here; he can’t; he has a post and he can’t leave it but he can’t just stand here, and a solidly-built, bearded white man on his left says, “Go, kid; I’ll hold down this spot,” and Finn takes one step and does a double-take and Rabbi Luke Skywalker, much grayer now than the last time Finn saw him, says again, “Go, kid; run; go help.” And Finn goes.

Rey sees everything Finn sees, and she tumbles down from her bough, because fuck witnessing, no fucking fascist is laying hands on Rose in front of her, and then she sees Finn come racing down the lane the police barriers make and bodily snatch Rose up and out of reach of the men who had been wrestling with her. And that of course is when a police whistle sounds and a harsh voice calls, ”Stop! Police!” even though Amilyn has already been kicked twice. Rey takes off running across the lawn. Sam Wexler tries to fight free, to put himself between the cops and Finn, and he goes down with two assailants on him.

She had not recognized Kylo until that moment, a tall uniformed cop among tall uniformed cops, without the black overcoat that turns him into a walking shadow. The sunburst of his detective’s badge is bright on his jacket; he has his hair tucked up under his stiff policeman’s hat, and his ears stick out absurdly under its edge. He stands between Finn and three armed street cops.

His voice is instantly recognizable, though, and so is the violence of his gesture as he throws out his hand – “Guns away; no guns!”

And the man in the red hat is kicking Amilyn again, as she tries to get up, and then Poe is there, grabbing her by the shoulders and dragging her back.

Someone is chasing Rey; she hears running feet on the ground behind her and she flinches and dodges. A press photographer speeds past her and runs against the police barrier with a clang and a furious barrage of clicks.

Kylo’s brain is overheating; panic is flooding him; he whips his head around; he can’t be in enough places at once. ”Guns down!” he shouts again; the fascists are trying to countermand his order, trying to convince his officers to shoot, hurling epithets and screaming, even as they’re fighting to keep Wexler pinned to the ground. Rose has wrestled herself out of Finn’s grip; she stands with her back pressed against his front, arms outstretched, stiff and braced and gray as ash. Finn’s hands are in the air. Kylo’s ears briefly focus; the screaming white men on Wexler have unquestionably met the legal criteria he’s been waiting for. “Arrest them,” he barks to the street cops. “240.30.”

“Might have been self-defense,” snaps Hux.

“Break it the fuck up,” he roars, and this is Hux’s job but the street cops do as he says, pulling all three men in different directions. Finn and Rose stay frozen in place. The barrier to his right is thick with flashing press cameras in the deepening dusk, and he thinks he sees Rey’s face among them, tear-wet and horrified, but he is hopefully hallucinating and he has no time to look as he turns and searches for Poe.

He’s bent down on the ground, curled protectively over Amilyn and trying to shout. But every cry of “Medic!” is interrupted by a blow from the Nazi in the red hat or the one in faux-fatigues. Kylo sees him start to hold his arm up to block a hit and then change his mind, curling even more tightly over Amilyn. And Hux is only standing and watching, appraisingly, as Danny Polansky is unresistingly beaten in a public park.

Rey can’t fight through the photographers, who are already fighting among themselves; even if she could, she’s not tall enough to just vault the barrier the way she’d seen Kylo do on a night in November that seems like it was years ago. She runs back along the line of the barriers towards the prayer; the third rakat is over and the imam is speaking, loud and urgent, but the people on the edges of the tarp are turning to watch the fighting, and some of them are beginning to step towards the near edge, to reach for their shoes, to come and help. As she searches for the edge of a barrier she can unhook, she sees Karé Kohn running around the edge, gesturing at them to stay, to wait, to let her handle it.

But a bearded man with his shoes on at the near corner has simply taken off running, and with great efficiency he gathers up the man in camouflage and drags him off of Poe.

Rey can’t manage the latch on the barrier; she doesn’t know how it works and her hands are stiff with cold. She shoves her foot in sideways in the narrow gap above it and steps painfully up and over, landing heavily on her knees on the path behind the bearded man, just as she recognizes who he is.

She struggles to her feet, and sees Kylo pull the man in the red hat backwards and cuff him in a single efficient motion, at the exact time that Hux grabs Poe by the scruff of his neck and pulls him off Amilyn. There’s red blood in Amilyn’s lilac hair.

Kylo fixes his eyes on Poe and wills him to go quietly. This is a bitter, violent parody of justice. All things considered, if Poe does cooperate, it’s also as close to ideal as Kylo could have hoped. There are half a dozen witnesses, all of whom have been shooting fucking pictures of the scene. They can try to charge Poe or Wexler with assault, but both of them have bruises and lacerations that won’t fade any time soon and there isn’t a fucking scratch on any of these assholes. He turns to see if he knows the man who ran up and dragged off the –

It’s his fucking uncle.

It’s too much. Kylo can’t think. Too much noise, too many people, too many thoughts; too much anger and shock and fear. He needs air. “Move away,” he howls, his voice jagged. It makes the crowd of Nazis, who’ve been pressing closer, fall back, and the other defenders, who’ve been hurrying up and who he mostly doesn’t recognize, halt where they are. “Move along now. Move the fuck along.”

His uncle lets the Nazi in camo go and rushes to Amilyn. He lifts her into his arms – God, oh God, she’s bleeding; her eyes are closed; is she conscious? – and, staggering a little with the weight of a tall, thin woman, turns to the people behind him: a black woman, a thin white man in a stole, two South Asian women, and a South Asian man. “Re-form the line,” he says. His voice is rasping and stern; hearing it scrapes some of the air out of Kylo’s lungs. Silently, the people with him obey, pushing Rose and Finn behind them. Luke steps into place among them. And Rey, glowing like the moon in her white coat under the lamps, falls in beside him.

It isn’t like that first night in November; they don’t hold hands and Rey feels no joy, only fear and confusion. And yet, as she takes her place next to Luke, re-forming the line, the sense of power returns, expanding through her chest like oxygen. All her senses feel heightened; she thinks she can hear Finn and Rose breathing – frightened, too, much worse than her, but alive, unhurt. She wants to sing, chant, bring their voices together – Hinei ma tov uma na’im or The people, united, will never be defeated or Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho – but the imam is talking, calling on a vision of justice and equality; the best solidarity is their silence. And even the silence seems to hum with power.

Luke must have come to visit Leah, and heard from her about the action. Part of her wants to yell at him, cry, demand to know why he has been ignoring her so long. But in this moment, he stands warm and tall beside her, the immovable pillar of safety she remembers from the years after the shackle and the machine, and she can’t do anything but be glad of him. Because he came. He was needed and he came. She looks at his profile, with the familiar square beard and the black silk yarmulke beginning to fray at the spot where he always puts the bobby pin. His chin is high; Amilyn’s elegant face, bruised and bleeding, rests against his shoulder, and he carries her as if she were a torah scroll, as if she honored him by resting in his arms.

And Ben told her not to come, not to let Finn come, not to put themselves in danger, but how could they not? When he told her himself that the power he represents, the power of the state, is unwilling to stand in the way of unquestionable evil, is even willing to collaborate – how could they not? When this power is available to them, the very old, very simple, very strong power of the people to stand together – how could they not come?

We are strong. They are afraid of us. And they are right to be.

If Kylo looks at Rey he’ll only draw attention to her, and Hux will recognize her if he looks. He can’t bear to look anyway; her bright, fierce face feels like it burns him. Ayuma ka-nidgalot. Terrible as an army with banners. He turns away.

Poe is slumped in front of Hux, trying to stand up straight. He’s clearly in enormous pain. Kylo wonders if he doesn’t have a broken rib. Was I wrong? Was that Snoke’s plan, after all? Withhold police help, let them see how they’d come to harm without law enforcement? And does that mean he’s played into it by waiting, by standing back and holding off to wait for an event that was never planned? Hux seems to be taking his time with the handcuffs, he notices.

And that’s when the man in the tan coat comes bolting out of the crowd to stand in front of Hux and Poe, and Hux turns Poe so that he is exactly between them, facing the Nazis and not the press, and the frightened racist in his stupid coat lands an uppercut on Poe’s jaw that makes his head snap back against Hux’s. Hux screams. The white supremacist turns to run, and Kylo drops the fascist he has to start after him, but Hux pushes Poe onto the ground, face-down, directly in his way, and slams the cuffs onto Poe. Poe twitches and grunts in pain.

Hux looks up at Kylo with a hideous, snarling smile on his face. “Assault of a police officer in pursuit of his duties,” he says. “Headbutt while I was arresting him. I think my nose could be broken. Good thing I got him before he could get away, isn’t it?” And he cinches Poe’s handcuffs tighter.

Kylo’s radio crackles. “10-83,” says Snoke’s voice. Report.

“10-92 C,” says Hux, with great satisfaction. “Felony. One.”

Robotically, Kylo repeats this to his radio. Criminal arrest. Felony. One perpetrator.

Hux turns to the three street cops. “They can go.” Hesitantly, they unhand Wexler and the two men who’d knocked him down. “You can take the cuffs off that one,” Hux tells Kylo, nodding at the man in the red hat.

Finn can’t hear anything over the sound of his own heart. He can barely feel Rose, though he knows she’s holding him tight. He has seen the guns come out, and waver, and drop at a shouted command. And he has seen Poe go down on the pavement. Face against rough stone. Has seen Rabbi Holdon’s blood on Rabbi Luke’s coat. And now he sees the cops release Sam Wexler, yes, but also the two men who attacked him. He hears the order to release the man who hit Rabbi Holdon.

Poe’s face comes up, and it’s bloody, too.

“No,” Finn says, “no, no, no.”

He tries to step forward.

Rose trips him. A leg-sweep and a push, both, so he actually falls. He stares up at her and she drops to her knees beside him, holding his shoulders.

“You promised me,” she says urgently. “You promised me we’d outlive them.”

“No,” says Kylo, “no. That was assault in the second degree.”

“Oh, leave him,” says Hux. “He won’t offend again. Will you?”

“No,” gasps the fascist in the red hat. “It was just self-defense.”

Kylo clenches his jaw so hard he thinks he might crack a tooth, because he wants to strangle the man; he wants to take him by the throat and shake him until he’s limp.

“There, you see?” says Hux.

Kylo just drops him. Lets him stumble, off-balance, full of a vicious, insuppressible hope he’ll fall. He doesn’t. Kylo sees Finn start forward and fall, from the corner of his eye as he turns to Hux.

“You’d think,” he says, “after my failure, you might be careful about the pictures you’re showing to the cameras.” He turns and stalks directly to the line, to where Luke is holding Amilyn, her blood staining his lapel like a grotesque flower. And he stops where his body interrupts Hux’s line of sight to Rey. Because he knows what he needs to ask of Rey, for Poe’s sake.

For his own sake. In order to have done one less unforgivable thing.

“Is she conscious?” he asks. His voice is distant.

Amilyn nods, eyes still closed.

“She needs medical attention,” Luke says. He makes no acknowledgement of their relationship. Though there’s an odd, sad look in his eyes.

“I’ll get it for her,” he says. “But I need Rey to leave her phone with you, and turn and walk away at a normal pace. I need her to spend time in a location she doesn’t usually frequent, and then I need her to meet me on the Brooklyn-bound NQR platform at 34th Street at 8:30PM tonight. Okay?” He doesn’t look at Rey, but he can feel her bright, incisive eyes. “She needs to put her phone in your pocket and walk away. Right now. Alone. If – if anyone follows you. Run.” He swallows. “It’s for Poe’s sake. I’ll explain. I swear. But it’s for Poe.”

“Do it, Rey,” his uncle says gently. And she does. He leans in and takes Amilyn from Luke’s arms at the same time that she leans in to put her phone in Luke’s pocket, and just for an instant, she closes her hand around his wrist. A warm, soft little cuff. She binds him to something. Then she lets go, and he doesn’t watch her leave. He turns away, Amilyn in his arms, as his radio crackles again.

“10-1,” says Snoke, as he knew he would. Call your command.

And he does. He hurries Amilyn to an emergency vehicle, and he takes out his phone, and he calls his commanding officer.

“Take your informant into custody,” says Snoke. “We’re going to need her for the trial.”

“Yes sir,” says Ben. “I’ll get her right now.”

“That’s Rachel,” Miss Maz told him. The name had the funny, throat-tickling sound in it, the sound that was only in Hebrew. Then she said it differently, like a normal name. “Rachel, maybe you would rather say.”

Finn thought that was up to the girl, right? But he didn’t say so. “She’s Jewish?”

“Show him your necklace, Rachel,” Miss Maz called.

“But it’s only seventy-six,” the girl said. She had a weird accent too, and her hands kept flying. “Seventy nine. Not yet one hundred. Eighty two.”

“It can be one hundred in a little while,” Miss Maz said gently. “You won’t be in trouble. Go on; show him.”

The girl paused. Then she hooked her thumb under a little chain, tight around her neck, and lifted her chin. Finn, walking towards her, saw a little metal pendant, discolored and green, in a funny shape, before the girl went back to counting bottles.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s a chai,” Miss Maz said. “You don’t know chai?”

He shook his head, looking at his shoes. It had the Hebrew sound in it too. If he were still in New York, he’d know. If he were with his mom.

“It means ‘living.’ Jews like you, like her, use it as an amulet.” He didn’t know that word, either, and she saw. “That means a charm. For good luck. Or protection. To keep you alive.”

The platform at 34th Street-Herald Square is warm. Rey, crashing from stress and fear and anger, longs to go home, hug Finn and Rose, and sleep. But he’s prompt, anyway.

“Is everyone okay?” she asks. “Everyone else? No one else was hurt?”

He nods. He’s back in his suit and black overcoat, his hair covering his ears again; his eyes are red-lined and haunted, and she almost wants to step close and hold him in mutual weariness. But she feels like that metal sunburst tucked in his inner pocket might burn her. So she only looks at him. He gestures her to a bench, and they sit. He keeps his voice low.

“Listen. Did you see what happened with Poe?”

“Your partner arrested him, and then the Nazi punched him, and your partner threw Poe on the ground. And this is all because your captain is mad that Poe made him look bad?”

“Poe, and... my mother. But it matters that the Nazi punched Poe into Hux. Hux was actually hurt, even if it’s superficial; there’ll be medical records. It means that the DA can hit Poe with assaulting an officer in pursuit of his duties. Poe could go to jail for up to seven years.” His eyes are fixed on hers.

”Seven years?” Seven years from now is 2024. Even 2020 seems unimaginably far. “But everyone saw – ”

“Juries believe cops,” he says. His voice is hoarse. She’s been silent all day; he’s been screaming. “Especially white cops. With medical records of injury. And the thing is, Rey.” He swallows and his eyes slip off hers. “You’ve been laying damning testimony against him for months.” She stares at him blankly. She can’t think. “Everything you said to me, to make me think the ICE protest would be violent, all of that paints him as exactly the kind of person who would assault an officer, and it paints your group as exactly the kind of people who would lie about it.”

The DA would want to know about it. It’s evidence. He’d told her, that day in the museum. It would count with a jury. All the icy fear she’d felt that day comes back to her, doubled and re-doubled. What has she done? She tries to swallow; it’s a struggle. “But I can just tell them right, that it was made up, that I exaggerated – ”

He shakes his head. “That doesn’t actually sound better. If anything, it’s worse.” His eyes are bleak, but he puts out a hand, as if to comfort her. He stops before he touches her. “But we can make it inadmissible. All of it. Unusable.”

“How?” She won’t cry. Not when there’s something she can do.

“The thing is...” His eyes move around the platform, like he’s looking out for something. Maybe he is. “You’re a CI. A confidential informant. I know who you are, and I have records of what you’ve told me that I’ve submitted to Snoke. But unless they can put you on the stand, they’ve only got my word that you said it, and that’s not good enough. It’s hearsay.”

“But I sent you things – ”

He takes out his phone and shows her the Signal app. A blank screen. Disappearing message time set to 1 day.

“I set that up to cover up that I was – coercing you. But there’s nothing without your word. Snoke told me to arrest you. So we’d know where you were. But,” he clears his throat, “none of your known connections has seen you since before he gave that order. Your phone is in someone else’s possession and can’t be used to trace your movements. And if you can’t be found, you can’t testify.” He pauses. “You understand?”

A train arrives, an R with orange seats and a mumbling human announcer declaring that this is 34th Street-Herald Square and that the next stop is 28th Street.

“How long?” she asks. “How long do I have to disappear?”

He doesn’t answer until the train has closed its doors and pulled away. “Discovery should last thirty days,” he says softly. “That’s when they’ll search the hardest.”

Thirty days? She’ll fail all her classes – where will she go – Finn and Rose said Pittsburgh, that Paige would take her – but a month? She can’t rely on someone else’s charity for a month – after everything else today, it takes all she has not to start crying. This is nothing – Finn and Rose could have died; Amilyn and Poe were beaten; Poe could go to jail for years; I’m going to cry over what, an involuntary vacation? I have no right. She stands frozen, holding it back.

His eyes are on her again. Only for a moment. Then they rove again, moving from stairway to stairway. “You can stay with me. For tonight. You can use my computer to work things out with your friends. I’ll take the couch,” he adds, as if that might somehow be an issue of concern to her.

It’s too hard, thinking and not crying at the same time. She sees him see the tears in her eyes. His eyes look damp, too. “He’ll be all right,” he says. His voice sounds impeded, as if he were speaking an unfamiliar language, as if he were trying to say two things at the same time. “I’ll – I’ll do everything I can. Please – ”

Another train arrives, the long, high keen of the breaks covering whatever word came next. His hand is on her arm, so gentle she barely feels it. “Here’s the Q. Just for tonight, Rey. At least for tonight.”

She goes.

Miss Maz peered down at him. She looked kind. Not loving, like his mom, but gentle, like she wanted him to be happy. “You are finding that a little difficult sometimes, no? Living?”

He couldn’t speak. He could never have said that. How often he thought about lying down and never getting back up. It hid in the cold place in his head where words wouldn’t go. How could she say it so easily?

“You may come to my house,” she said, “when you find it hard.”

There were steps on the porch stairs. Adult steps. Finn’s heart jumped. Someone followed him. Someone saw him. What was he going to do? They’d kill him.

He was being pulled him by the hand. It was the skinny white girl; she was dragging him. He looked back at Maz; she nodded, and he went with the girl, as she ran and hid underneath a kitchen table with a vinyl cloth on it. The doorbell rang.

In the shadows under the table, it was a little easier to breathe, but not much. If they found him hiding it would be even worse. There wasn’t any reason. There wasn’t any reason for any of it. It was stupid and mean and awful for no reason. He could hear the voices at the door. He just wanted to lie down.

The girl poked him, frowning. He started. “Of course it’s difficult to stay alive,” she said in a stern whisper. “Of course. But you must.”

“Why?” What for, when his parents were dead and they’d thrown everything away and he could never –

The girl reached under her chin again and gave a ruthless yank. The necklace broke away from her throat and she held it out to him. He couldn’t take it – they’d find it – they’d – but she was smiling, suddenly, as if they were playing the most exciting game. “You must,” she said, in her funny accent. “Because otherwise they win.”

He took the necklace.

Chapter Text

On the way to Brooklyn, he offers her his phone to email Finn and Rose and explain the situation. Rey types dutifully, but after a paragraph, she looks up, frowning. “Am I explaining this right?”

“Tell them to go to my mother,” he says. He’s closed his eyes, partly to give her privacy and partly to give himself a respite from the overwhelming assault the world has become today. Anger and adrenaline keep spiking through his exhaustion. “She’ll understand.”

Her nails are too short to click on the screen of his phone; with his eyes closed and the train rumbling and hissing and shrieking, the only way he has of knowing that she’s still there beside him is the gentle, continuous pressure of her leg against his. He has a ludicrous impulse to tip himself sideways and rest his head on hers. He tilts his face a little back, instead, and lets the subway lights flicker over his eyelids. Lets his pulse stabilize, syncing to the ten-block stop-start heartbeat of the city.

He rouses himself in time for his stop. They walk in silence, but when he unlocks his outer door, she asks him, in a quiet voice, “If we’d stayed home, like you told us we should, what would have happened?”

“Snoke would probably have found another way to get him,” he admits. “It might not have been as bad as this, though.”

“No, I mean – would you have let them attack the people while they prayed?”

Two months ago he would have said Of course not. That’s what we do; that’s what we’re for. But now – and after today – he swallows. “I hope not. I think – I hope we might have prevented actual bloodshed. I don’t think we would have done anything other than what we did – cuff and release.”

“But before people were hurt. Not after.”

“I hope so.”

He hates the shiver that goes through him as he walks with her up the stairs, how he can’t help remembering her hands against the wall and the way she soaked the hand he got between her legs, the way her voice cut him to shreds. She has always known what I am. He has a sick wish to push her up against the wall and do it all over again. It doesn’t heat his blood; it washes over him in a wave of despair. I’m not the one she wants. Her face is drawn and sad; he wonders if she’s thinking of what he’s thinking of, if she’s regretting it. What do I prefer? That she regretted it, or thought it too meaningless to regret?

It’s only been five days since she was last here. “Did Finn like the tape?” has asks, and is gratified when her face, tired as it is, lights up as she takes off her shoes.

“Yes! I mean, more than like. It means the world to him. His digital copy didn’t have the last bit, with him singing. It was the first time he’d ever heard it.”

“I’m glad,” he says, and he is. He can only imagine the ache, for Finn, not just the loss but the insult and the injury. The tape wasn’t doing anything but collecting dust, waiting for Rey to come and find it. She’s probably hungry, thirsty, he should offer her something –

“I’m sorry,” she tells him, and he turns to her, perplexed. She’s staring at her shoes. “I meant to say. The last time I was here. You told me something personal, and important, and I was kind of shitty about it. And I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

Oh. The apology uncovers the hurt even as he’s grateful to hear it. “It’s okay. I don’t – talk about it much.”

“So it’s even worse that I was flippant or whatever,” she maintains.

“No; it’s just… ” He trails off.

Softly, she says, “If you want to talk, I’ll listen.”

He shouldn’t want to talk about it. But – she just looks so… open, he supposes. So much like she really wants to listen to him. He might not be the one she wants, but it still seems like she cares about him – one sad case among many, he’s sure, another person who needs her help. But also, wouldn’t it be something if she might talk about him one day as she talks about Finn now? As someone who implicitly deserves attention and care? He takes a breath. “I bought whiskey the other day. You want some?”

She nods, hesitantly, and he takes a moment to be privately impressed by his own calm as he pours two glasses.

But when she takes her glass and settles on the couch a few feet away from him, he doesn’t know what to tell her. He takes a long drink. “I don’t know why I said anything.”

“I told you.”

“Yeah. But I think we – we don’t talk about it in the same way. Just because.” He makes a meaningless gesture with his glass, trying to say time, geography, gender; clears his throat. “When I was a kid. The people marching in the streets.” He makes his voice a thin, soft chant. “We’re here; we’re queer – you’ve heard that. It makes history. You didn’t hear the people on the sidewalk screaming back. Stop AIDS, shoot queers. Most of the people who shouted that are still alive. And most of the people they were shouting at died.” Her eyes are big, horrified. “But I was just a kid, then,” he finishes, shrugging a little.

“But it was in the air.”

“And it gets… it shows up on the playground. Distorted, or refracted, I guess. But at the time – it was scary, but I didn’t feel like any of it applied to me. Just later, I guess. I would look at someone, and as much as I might feel anything else, I’d also feel like… I’ll get beaten up, I’ll get sick, I’ll make someone else sick, something terrible will happen.”

“You were afraid.”

He takes another drink. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry, Ben.”

“Don’t be sorry.” The grimace he makes when he drinks whiskey, he realizes, is the grimace his father made when he drank it. “Anyway, now I’m a cop, and cops aren’t queer.”

“More and more reasons not to be a cop.”

“Yeah, but what else would I be? You said yourself.” He takes another drink, not looking at her. “I look like a jackbooted thug.” He snorts, and taps his fingers against the point where the scar crosses his cheekbone. “Would you trust a lawyer with this face? I look like the villain in a cartoon.”

“Ben,” she says, and she’s much closer to him on the couch, and her face looks crushed and it’s strangely hard to take. “I’m so sorry; I’m so, so sorry; is there any way it can be fixed? I don’t – I don’t have a lot of money, but – ”

“No! No; I like it,” he blurts. He kind of does. “It’s a professional asset. Makes me look tough.” That’s not why he likes it, though. “And ‘my CI cut my face open’ is a good police bar story. Almost as good as getting shot. No one in my division’s been shot.”

She looks even sadder. “You could have been, though. Your mother told me.”

He almost doesn’t understand what she means at first. “That’s how she tells it? That I almost got shot?” He would not have thought his mother would mention it at all. Let alone emphasize the risk, when she could focus on how he’d freaked out, run to punative authority for help, tried to harm the woman under their protection.

“How would you tell it?”

“I – there was – my father’s – ” He pauses. Swallows. Sips whiskey. Sighs.

“I mean, legally, you were…. kidnapped, right?” she asks.

“I got – I was threatened. That’s all it was. Just a threat.” He stares at his drink. “It was a long time ago. I should be over it.”

“No!” He looks up. “Ben, that’s terrible – traumatic – ”

“Cops don’t get traumatized. Cops just drink whiskey.” He tries to smile wryly. Shit. His lips are trembling.

She puts down her glass and leans towards him. Her face is so fierce. An angel with a flaming sword. “Ben. Listen to me. Fuck being a cop.” He should say no, my job is important, say I protect people. But he can’t, can he? He closes his eyes. Sees Amilyn’s blood on Uncle Luke’s coat. Sees Poe’s blood on the paving stones. Sees Hux smile. “If cops aren’t queer and cops don’t cry and cops fucking collaborate with white supremacists, then fucking fuck being a cop.” He keeps his eyes shut. Her voice warms, though there’s an edge in it still. “I don’t really think you are a cop, Ben.”

“I am, though. I’ve done – ” He can’t finish.

“I know,” she says. “But still.” And when he opens his eyes she’s even closer to him, looking at his face. In the air just above his skin, not touching him, her finger traces out the length of his scar. “I would trust a lawyer with your face.”

“Would you?” he whispers.

“Yes.” Her voice is a whisper, too. He can feel her breath against his face, warm and whiskied. “You don’t look like a cartoon villain. It’s just a little – crack. Like the marble statues have. In the Met.”

He thinks maybe she’ll kiss him, now. But he can’t. He wants it so terribly badly, and that’s exactly why he can’t. It will kill him, Ben thinks, wanting her the way he does, to kiss her and know she’d rather have someone else. He gets to his feet. She looks up at him, her eyes hazy. “I should make up the bed for you.”

He hasn’t cleaned at all, he realizes, belatedly, and winces when she trails him into the mess of his bedroom. He almost doesn’t want to turn on the light, but when he does, she squeals with delight, and leans drunkenly against his arm, smiling hugely.

“So you do have books!”

”I thought, if you ever came, it would be with your mother,” Han said.

Ben looked at the edge of the plastic table, rubbing with his fingers at a metal rivet that thousands of other hands must have anxiously rubbed at. “Yeah. I just. I thought I should come. Myself. So you’d know she wasn’t making me apologize.”

“Apologize?”

“For. For helping to put you here.”

“Pssh. An enemy of the state like myself, I should be more ashamed if I didn’t go to prison. It’s a necessary life step. Bris, bar mitzvah, wedding, arraignment, sentencing… ”

His father’s tone was light, swaggering. The same half-dry snarl he always had. But his cheeks were hollow, and the circles beneath his eyes were dark.

“Dad, you were never married.”

“Don’t pick nits; I’m making a point here.”

Ben swallowed hard. “It kinda sounds more like you’re trying to make excuses for me, Dad.”

“What, a father can’t make excuses for his son?”

“It’s not fair, Dad; if I weren’t your son you’d never even think of excusing what I did – ”

“If you weren’t my son, Ben, I’d probably never think of you at all. I would think of the system, because the system is what put me here.”

Ben put his head in his hands. “You know I hate that word.”

“Find me a better one and I’ll use that instead.”

“But it doesn’t come down to systems; it comes down to people, to their choices. I made a choice, and that put you here.”

“And I made choices too, boychik. And maybe I made them because I was afraid that the system – would you rather I said the capitalist state? – would hurt people. And maybe people were hurt anyway. And I hope your mother and I raised you to know that ‘I did what I thought was right’ doesn’t excuse you when you’ve added to the sum total of human suffering in this lousy world.” Han looked a him. A long, steady look. “Most of us do things in this life for which we should maybe never be forgiven. But sometimes we are. And if someone offers you forgiveness, Benny, you take it, and you say thank you. Same as any other gift. You understand me?”

“Yes, Dad.” Tears stung his eyes, but he made himself meet his father’s gaze. “Thank you, Dad.”

Finn considers buying the paper in hard copy on the way to Leah’s. But his guess that she’s already seen it is proved right; she’s not alone, and her two guests have a pile of newsprint spread out on the table in front of them. “You’re very photogenic,” she tells him with him a dry little smile. “Not quite how you hoped to make it into the Times, I imagine.”

“I was thinking more the Sunday Book Review, maybe,” he agrees. The Post’s main headline is about a presidential twitter fight, but the inset has a little snap of Rabbi Luke, sorrowfully cradling Rabbi Holdron in his arms. Finn and Rose are huddled in the background. But on the front page of the Times (albeit below the fold) he and Rose are the focus, captured from the side, his hands up, hers outstretched. He’s surprised how stoic, even stony, he looks, the light of the street lamp reflecting warmly on his face. His yarmulke and Rose’s terror-bleached face glow white, but his eyes shine, black and hard.

He really, really would have preferred a review of the popular history book he imagines he’ll write someday.

“Thank God, though, at least you and Rose are well. A blessing. Come with me to the kitchen; talk to me while I make the tea.” She leads him through the dining room to the kitchen; one of the guests is Mr. al-Akbar, and the other is a black man with greying hair and an extremely sharp suit. “Finn, this is Landon Calrissian; he’s looking into taking Danny’s case. Lando, this is Finn Sturm; you’ve seen his picture.”

The new lawyer puts out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Finn. Can I make you a deal?”

“A deal?”

“I won’t say ‘I never met a black Jew before,’ if you don’t say ‘I never met a black Armenian before.” Mr. Calrissian smiles. Finn isn’t quite in the mood to smile back, but he turns up his mouth to acknowledge the joke, the offered fellowship. “Leah, if you’re making more tea…?” Maybe-Poe’s-lawyer offers up his cup and Leah sweeps it out of his hand. “Thank you, Princess.” Something flickers across Leah’s face; not offense, Finn thinks, but grief. The lawyer’s face turns serious. “Sorry, Leah.”

“He’s an old friend,” Leah says apologetically once they’re in the kitchen.

“How’s Rabbi Holdon?”

“Much better. Luke is with her now. He says that Ben told Rey to leave her phone with him and run?”

“Yeah. She sent me an email last night – apparently it’s so the cops can’t make her testify?”

“Would you be comfortable showing me the email?” He holds out his phone and Leah wipes her hands and reads. “Hmm. Yes. Don’t talk to Lando about this, please; he shouldn’t know too much, if he’s going to be Danny’s attorney.” She raises her voice. “Lando? Gil? Can you hear me?”

“We can – ” Mr. Al-Akbar’s smoker’s voice is cut off by a smoker’s cough.

“The state has a potential negative character witness, but she’s missing. They’re left with a ton of very negative, well-documented heresay.”

“Got it. And Finn is an eyewitness, isn’t he?”

Leah raises an eyebrow at him. He goes to stand in the doorway; he doesn’t like shouting, and the kettle is getting noisy.

“I’m not sure I saw everything. I was kind of distracted. There were, uh. Some guns. Cops. Nazis. My girlfriend was upset. There was a lot going on.”

“Well, this isn’t a formal deposition. Just give me your honest opinion. You know, casually. What do you think happened?”

Rey is anxious when she wakes up, but as she blinks and stretches in the early light, there’s pleasure, too. She knew he had to have books somewhere. And here they are, horizontal stacks of them in front of vertical shelving, paperbacks crammed into the empty spaces, organizational principles clearly honored in the breach as much as the observance. There are whole shelves with spines in Hebrew, and at least one stack in Arabic; she sees Wheelock’s Latin and An Introduction to Attic Greek sitting together with a few yellow-and-white Teach Yourself... books showing varying degrees of stress. But poetry is mixed in with plays, art history with law textbooks, and a thick grey hardback with a shiny gold prize stamped on its cover sits, pristine, on top of stack of paperbacks, their corners worn down to white curves.

And it all smells like him, of course. For a moment she misses waking up in Rose’s bed, with the warm, petal-soft scent of her. How can Ben even contrive to smell melancholy?

But she finds she dips her head to the pillow again to inhale.

Ben is just coming through the front door when she comes out of his room, Thank-You-for-Shopping bodega bags in his hands. “I got cereal,” he says, awkwardly, hoisting them. “And milk. I don’t know what you usually have.”

“What do you usually have?”

“Egg on a roll from a halal cart on 57th.”

He fetches her a bowl from the cupboard where it sits beside two plates and one other bowl. She’s glad he mustered the optimism to buy the second set. “Do you have a measuring cup?”

He frowns, opening drawers. “What for?”

“For the cereal.” He stops and looks at her, confused. “So we don’t accidentally eat too much and leave you with nothing on Friday.”

He closes his eyes like a man with a headache. “Please eat as much fucking cereal as you want, Rey.”

She eyeballs it, shaking the box gently; she’s going to be a good guest, though the colorful rings make her salivate. Right – whiskey for dinner last night.

“I have to go into work,” he says regretfully, as she gets the other bowl for him. She can see his suit-coat slung over the back of a chair. “I’m supposed to be scouring the streets for you.”

“Can’t you just… not?”

He shakes his head. “A lot of my resources for finding you are at my precinct. It’s not plausible I wouldn’t go in. And Snoke’ll be there.”

“Do you want cereal?” He’s eyeing it hungrily. He had whiskey for dinner too.

He pours himself a little. She frowns at him, imagining the daily caloric expenditure of just being him, until he pours himself a little more. As they eat, she questions him about disclosure, and he explains the rules of evidence. She thinks, and scoops up the spoonfuls of sweet milk left in the bowl.

“If you want,” he says as he washes the dishes, “I can ‘search’ your apartment and bring you anything you need from there. I might not find out where you live until Monday, though.”

It chills her a little, that he’s so confident he can find her home without her help. “Finn and Rose know where my travel bag is.” She hesitates. “I’ve got some cash on me, though. I can be out of your hair by tonight.”

He nods, looking at the dishes. “Where were you planning to go?”

“Rose and Finn think I should go to Pittsburgh, to Paige.” She can’t, though; she knows that. Not for a whole month. But she’ll take care of herself.

“Will you?”

“I’ll… figure something out.”

He narrows his eyes at her. “That doesn’t sound like a plan.”

Plans are for people who can guess the future. “I can make things work out,” she assures him. “Trust me.”

“Trust isn’t really the question. But if you’re not sure where to go, you can stay here.”

“Oh, no. I couldn’t.”

He frowns, looking hurt. “Why not?”

“It’s not – I mean, it’s not about you; I really appreciate that you let me spend the night here.” She’ll have to find something to give him in return – maybe something to go on his walls? If he likes the Met so much, he should have a print or a poster or something.

“What’s it about, then?” He’s put his interrogation voice on and his hands are clenched on the edge of the sink. She sits back in her chair, defensive.

“It’s not you; I can’t take anybody’s charity like that, Ben.”

His eyebrows are knitted. “What will you do instead? If you don’t take ‘charity?’” He lets go of the sink for a moment to pinch quotation marks in the air.

“I’ll… make things work out.”

“Do you have the cash for thirty days of hotels? I know you don’t have a real bank account; you share with Finn, right?”

“How did you know?” she gapes. He rolls his eyes as if their carefully-developed, laboriously-maintained scheme of accounting were somehow obvious.

“But you don’t have the bank card. And even if you did, you just don’t have that much money. Will you let Finn pay for it?”

“No!” she cries, insulted. “I’ll make it work.” He looks at her without speaking. His eyes are hot and grim. “I don’t have to stay in hotels. If you get on the A at 207 you can sleep all the way to Howard Beach; it’s like three hours at night, when it’s running local. So six hours of sleep, both ways. And I fed myself fine on collected cans in LA. And if I need a shower… what, do you think someone’s going to be watching my apartment?”

Ben’s fingers, on the edge of the sink, are white as the enamel. “Have you noticed a law enforcement shortage in the Bronx? You think there won’t be orders to patrols to look out for you in your precinct? And you can’t feed yourself on collected cans and sleep on the fucking A, Rey. You just can’t.”

“But I can,” she barks, annoyed. “And I will.” People like him, they thought things were impossible just because they were unpleasant, just because nobody like them had ever had to do them. And it’s not that unpleasant, necessarily; she’s slept on buses in LA. The MTA is a step up. It all beats the sidewalk.

“But why? You can stay here; I don’t care – ”

“You can’t pity me,” she cries, her voice cracking. “You’ve never pitied me; that’s why I – you shouldn’t be so nice to me – ”

His face twists. And then in three strides he’s in front of her chair, dropping into a crouch in front of her, his eyes burning and his red lip curled. “Rey. Do you know how many people are homeless in New York? And how many discarded cans are there in this city, do you think? Enough to feed all those people? Don’t fucking kid yourself, Rey. Whatever you think you’re going to do – cans, begging, working a fucking corner – you will be stepping on someone’s turf, Rey; you’ll be taking money away from someone who genuinely has no other option. You have other options. So don’t fucking do it.”

She opens her mouth to answer him angrily, but he keeps his eyes steady on hers. And she can see it, she can, the person making their daily rounds and discovering nothing because Rey has been there first and picked it clean. And it’s one thing when it’s that or have Maz eat dog food on saltines to feed them both, but – she swallows.

“It’s not pity,” he tells her, a little more gently. “It’s just good sense.”

It’s hard to argue with sense. And she has things she needs to do.

“All right,” she says. “Until I find something I can do.”

“Fine,” he says, and leaves.

“So, in essence,” Mr. Calrissian says, sipping his tea delicately, “this is a white supremacist-police collaboration to punish your friend?”

“Exactly,” says Leah.

Mr. Calrissian makes a face. “That’s… unfortunate. It’s a difficult sell, convincing juries that police are lying, let alone conspiring.”

“There are a lot of witnesses, though,” Finn says.

“But all from your group, right?”

“Yeah, mostly.”

Mr. Calrissian winces. “Yeah… nobody believes black people about Nazis, and most people don’t believe Jews, either. Our best bet is probably ‘of course we’re sure the officer hates racists as much as the rest of us; he probably just got confused, didn’t see the white supremacist, blamed the defendant.’”

Finn sits back in his chair. “Seriously?”

“We’ll get witnesses that it was crowded, that it was chaotic, that his medical condition was too poor to have done what they say he did. We’ll get some mixed stories from cops on how many Nazis there were where, what they were wearing, what they were doing.” He cocks a brow at Finn, sipping more tea. “I know you don’t like it. But my job as your friend’s attorney – if I choose to accept it – ”

“Oh, come on, Landon,” growls Mr. al-Akbar, “stop playing coy; we all know you’re taking the case.”

”If I choose to accept it,” the other lawyer continues smoothly, “my job isn’t to convince the jury of the truth. It’s to get them to acquit. And a reasonable doubt can serve us very well.”

Finn looks at his own tea. That may be so, he thinks, but it sounds an awful lot like the case a guilty person would make.

His dubiousness must show on his face. Leah leans forward. “Lando has a truly impressive record as a defense attorney, Finn. I’m glad he’s looking at this case.”

Finn nods, and tries to look and feel reassured. But it seems to him that, for all that she praises her friend, Leah looks troubled, too.

Ben’s head is a mess after that argument, and he’s later than he should be getting into the office. “Sorry, Sir,” he says, when Snoke calls him into his office. “I was following a tip at Port Authority.”

“You think she skipped town?” Snoke asks. His voice is scornful, though Ben can’t say quite who it’s for. There’s another man with him in his office, looking so hung-over that at first Ben thinks he might have interrupted an informal interrogation. But Snoke gestures for him to speak freely.

“It’s possible. She evidently has some connection to Paige Thi-Cohen through an old romantic attachment. But no one remembered selling her a ticket to Pittsburgh, or Philly.”

“Who are we discussing?” asks the other man, in a mumble that does nothing to dispel the impression of a hangover.

“An informant. The source for all the reports I was showing you,” Snoke says. “This is Detective Kyle O’Ryan.” Is it Ben’s imagination, or does Snoke linger on the name a little too long? “Kylo, this is ADA Diego Juarez. He’ll be bringing the state’s case against Poe.”

“Ah, yes, Poe,” says the ADA. “Our good friend Poe. Call me DJ, Kylo.” His lids are heavy as he looks at Ben, and he has a slight speech impediment, which surprises Ben a little in an ADA. But he sees how his world-weary manner, and the slight difficulty of his speech, combine to give the impression of a man without illusions. Which is, Ben notes, not the same as an honest man. But maybe close enough for a jury. “I hear you were present at this little… fracas, Kylo.”

“Yes,” he says cautiously.

“Might want you to tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury about it,” says DJ.

“I… prefer not to appear in court,” Ben says stiffly. “I have a bad temper. I don’t always handle myself well.” Which is true. It’s also true that he has always drawn the line at lying under oath, and Snoke knows it. Snoke knows, too, that he doesn’t care to tell the court – and his listening fellow officers – what his legal name is.

“I see, I see,” says DJ, with a calm little smile, which is not quite a smirk. “Well, you track down your informant for us, and we’ll try not to call on your aid, then. Kyle.”

Ben knows they’re watching him as he leaves Snoke’s office for his own desk.

“I’m sorry,” Ben said, “I’m sorry I never liked her.” They both knew who he meant. “But I – Dad, I don’t understand. I never understood.” He stared down at the rivet. Maybe there had once been writing on it. Now it was smooth and shining. “And I’ve been thinking about it. A lot. Lately.” He looked back up at his father, saw concern and care in his face. “Did you love her, Dad? The way you loved Mom?”

Han sighed, and looked in his turn at the table. “Not the way I loved your mother, no; of course not. And I think – honestly, I think that that was pretty obvious to Quira, and I think it – I don’t want to say it made her crazy, but – ”

“No,” Ben interrupted. “I – I can see why that might. Make a person kind of crazy. To look at someone who was already luckier than you. And know that they were – more – that they were loved in a way you weren’t.”

There was surprise now, in Han’s look at his son, but also something else, something that Ben had not realized he was hungry for until he saw it and felt fed. “Not everyone can see a thing like that, Ben. Especially in someone who did what she did to you.”

Ben didn’t want to think about what she did, didn’t want to see the frozen, confused look on his father’s face that went with the memory of gun muzzle against skull bone. He had wanted his father to be angry, to be frightened for him. He shoved the thought away, and caught the look on his father’s face now, sorrow and a kind of horror. Where was that then? he wanted to ask, but couldn’t, and wouldn’t, and in his heart, as much as the question was real for him, he knew it wasn’t fair.

He pushed on.

“But you did love her, didn’t you? Even if it wasn’t the same way?”

“Yes. I did. I knew her when she was a kid, Ben, and I think she was always a kid to me, you know? I loved her the way you love… someone who needs your help. But your mother… ” Han opened his mouth, and closed it again, and tilted his head to the side. “You remember your dvar torah, boychik, at your bar mitzvah?”

Ben tried not to look too startled. “Yeah, Dad, of course. Jacob and Rachel at the well.”

Rey insists on taking the couch that night, since, if they’re doing this out of good sense, he’s obviously too tall for it anyway. She discovers to her horror that he doesn’t have a spare blanket; not only had he spent the night awkwardly folded, he’d slept under his overcoat. He offers to take the blanket off the bed for her, and she gives him her best scornful look; is he planning to sleep on the bed with his coat? So she sleeps on the couch with his coat. It covers more of her than it does of him. She wakes up, wool gabardine scratching at her throat, warm and drowsy and full of an unfocused longing for the greater warmth of his body. Every time she comes near him, though, he ducks away.

She wants to ask why, but it’s not a fair question. He could be tired. He could be unhappy. He could think of her differently now that he’s come out to her. His reasons are his business, and they’re not hers to question.

Maybe he just doesn’t want her anymore. He is the one person who has never seemed to pity her, and he says he still doesn’t, but – and if she loses that, she’ll –

Anyway, she has things to do. She arranges by email to meet Finn and collect her bag and her computer, rather than have Ben do it. Finn hugs her fiercely, and she looks at his bloodshot, clearly sleepless eyes as he tells her about Poe’s lawyer and the strategy for the trial. It’s clear he doesn’t like it, and neither does she, although he’s trying to place his faith where Leah’s placing hers.

And Rey does not make plans, but Rey does have ideas.

“Have you gone against Calrissian before?” Snoke asks DJ.

“Nah,” DJ says with a nonchalant wave. “But I don’t do a lot of losing myself; I’m not concerned. So who are his potential witnesses here?”

Snoke turns to Ben, who clears his throat. “One Chai member, Karé Kohn. Three members of Desis United for Service, Amar Gupta, Preeti Singh, and Arrick Arora. One member of Calvary Rainbow, Wes Antilles. Possibly Samuel Wexler, Finn Sturm, and Rose Thi-Cohen, though they were all occupied at the time. Uh, Rabbi Amilyn Holdron, who was also injured. And Rabbi Luke Skywalker.” Snoke looks at him sharply.

“Right, right. So all people likely to be, uh, emotionally compromised, let’s say, on the subject of white nationalists. Not very objective. Though the rabbis may have some moral authority. Well. Not the woman, so much.”

“She’s a lesbian,” Snoke puts in, with half a smile. “Purple hair.”

“Riiiight,” sighs DJ. “Which leaves us with Rabbi… ”

“Skywalker,” says Ben.

“He’s the one from the photos? Square gent, square beard, kinda blond?”

“Yeah.”

“We got anything on him? Anything that might make him a little less than entirely credible?”

Snoke raises an eyebrow. Ben swallows, takes a breath. “No,” he says. “Skywalker’s based in LA. I don’t have a lot of info.”

The day of Poe’s arraignment, Rey checks with Ben to make sure it’s safe to file her leave of absence papers at City College. He gives her his keys, so she can let herself out and in. But when she comes back, his apartment suddenly becomes an intolerable place to do the work she’s assigned herself.

From: “Rachel Niemand” ([email protected])
Date: Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 3:10PM
To: “Kyle O’Ryan” ([email protected])
Subject: gonna die if i stay inside more today

i need to go out but i dont wanna lock you out can i meet you somewhere? i have a monthly metrocard i can go whereever.

From: “Kyle O’Ryan” ([email protected])
Date: Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 3:20PM
To: “Rachel Niemand” ([email protected])
Subject: gonna die if i stay inside more today

Sure. I’ll probably be working late. Meet you at the BAM opera house at 7 if that works?

Rey looks up the opera house – almost three miles away on the other side of Prospect Park – and agrees.

She makes a circuit of the park, a little bleak in winter but still beautiful, and then walks through Park Slope, peering into the windows of boutique sock shops and vegan candle stores and stroller-friendly yoga parlors. She walks for thirty minutes, forty minutes. She never sees a cop.

It’s dark when she gets to the opera house. She asks a passerby for the time, and is gratified that she’s timed it so well she’s only early by seven minutes. At first, she doesn’t realize how enormous and how beautiful the building is, though she admires the big brass-plated doors and the rippling glass overhang. It’s only when she gets bored and restless (fifteen minutes later? Twenty?) that she crosses the narrow, part-cobblestone street, just for something to do, and looks back. Then she sees how massive it is, how the white bricks glow in the warm light of its high, arched windows, and how, at the apex of those arches, brilliant white LED light shimmers and twists, furls and unfurls, moving like a firework, then like water, then like snow.

She occupies herself just staring for a while, speculating about the programming and the mechanics. Then, the chill beginning to set in, she asks another person for the time. It’s 7:35. She has no phone to text with, no way to check her email. (She hopes, briefly, that Luke hasn’t lost her phone, or returned to LA with it still in his pocket.) People flow out of the building as the 5:30 movies end, and flow in as the 8:00 movies begin to sell out. She sees a man who looks like Ben; she almost runs to him, but his coat is olive, there’s a blonde woman on his arm, and when he turns, his face is unscarred. She falls back, shivering, and the light from the tall windows begins to seem colder, more elusive.

She paces, trying to remind herself to breathe. The bag Finn brought her included the soft gloves Rose gave her; Rey hasn’t worn them, and she rubs her icy hands together. How can he be so late? Did something terrible happen? Did he forget he was meeting me? She doesn’t altogether notice when she absently brings her right wrist to her mouth. He forgot. He forgot me. He was tired after a long day and he forgot. But I have his keys. And it’s only two stops on the Q. Her teeth go into the scarred skin. He did it on purpose. He’s trying to tell me something. He doesn’t want me around. I need to go. I need to go; he doesn’t want me.

She drops her hands to her sides. She’ll go back to his apartment and get her bag. She’ll go to Port Authority – she’ll – and then Ben comes around the corner, walking fast with his head down. He felt bad for me; he came back because he pitied me but he doesn’t –

“I’m sorry,” he says heavily.

“It’s fine,” she says, and her voice is high and she can hear the radio in it. “It’s fine; I have your keys. I’ll just get my bag and I can go; don’t worry about it.”

“What?”

“You don’t like me.”

“What are you talking about?” He sounds angry and panicked.

“You don’t want me; you don’t want me around; I understand; I’m eating your food and you have to – ”

”What?” Ben looks horrified. Or disgusted; probably disgusted. “No; what? Rey. What the actual fuck are you talking about? If I didn’t want you eating my food I wouldn’t offer it to you; what are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” she says stiffly. “Nothing. Never mind. Let’s go.”

She’s silent on the platform. Ben doesn’t try to speak to her until the train comes; this must be some kind of anxiety over Poe, and she isn’t going to like his news, but he has to tell her. “Poe was refused bail. The DA painted him as a flight risk. It’s absurd – he’s got an inherited lease; he’s got a fellowship; he’s got a pet; he’s got – ” – you – “ – but that judge is a moron.” She blanches, and he reassures her, “He’s just the arraignment judge. The trial’ll be somebody totally different. And he’s got a good lawyer; Landon Calrissian.” Rey only nods.

When they’re back in his apartment, and she still hasn’t spoken, has barely looked at him, he finally ventures, mumbling almost timidly, “Are you mad at me?”

She looks sidelong at him. “Can – can I have some more whiskey? I’ll pay you back for it.”

“Please,” he gestures, not bothering to engage with her nonsensical offer of repayment. She pours substantial glasses for both of them, and then knocks an alarming portion of hers back in one drink. She walks to the couch and sits, facing away from him.

“Waiting,” she says, and pauses. “For people. Not like, in lines or offices or whatever. It makes me – I can’t. Not anymore.” He sees her left hand band her right wrist, and tighten. He throws his overcoat and suit coat over the back of the couch and hurries to sit down beside her. Her voice is so quiet he has to lean in to hear it. “I waited so long. Expecting them to come back. My parents. Before I realized they never would. They didn’t want me and they weren’t coming back.” She drinks again, just a little sip, still holding her own wrist. “And I felt so stupid. For waiting. So stupid and – and – worthless.”

He forces himself to stay calm. To overturn no furniture and smash no glasses and scream nothing. His hands shake as he lifts his glass to his lips.

“So now,” she continues, “if I end up waiting for someone, it’s hard for me not to – do it all over again. Wait, and hope, and then realize – you know my last name? What I say is my last name?”

“Niemand?” He hadn’t thought about it – he’d assumed it was random, pilfered, like her address –

“It was the label that I sewed into the clothes I made. Neiman Marcus knockoffs. Niemand Marcus. I couldn’t read or write when Maz found me, but I knew those letters. So I wrote it down for people. And that was my name. But you know what it means?” Her eyes are wet. Ben feels pinned in place, his gaze fixed on her, his heart grinding itself to dust. “Nobody. It’s German for nobody; I’m nobody; I’m no one; I’m nothing.”

He all but drops his glass, whiskey sloshing over his fingers as the tears begin to streak down her cheeks. “No, no.” He’s babbling again, he thinks. “No. You’re not. Not to me, not to – not to anyone who knows you at all. How can you say that; how can you think that?” Shaina maidel, you are priceless. You are beautiful, you are fierce, you are so, so good. So much more beautiful and just and kind than I deserve. And yet here you are. “I mean I feel – I feel guilty keeping you here with me in Brooklyn; your friends must hate me, that you’re staying with me and I’ll see you every night – don’t you understand how much they must miss you? You’re so good to them, to all of them; you defend them, you care for them – I would – there are people who would die to have someone care about them the way you care about any one of them, Rey; you think they don’t appreciate it?”

Hearing his own voice, he sounds halfway furious, and she’s staring at him; he’s lost control again, scared her again. He makes a conscious effort to smooth his voice. “I know you’re upset about Poe – ”

But that just makes her weeping turn from silent tears to an actual sob. “Poe – I wasn’t even thinking about him; they’re going to keep him locked up; I’m so selfish – ”

“Rey, do you think for a minute he would blame you? Do you seriously believe he’d think, How selfish of Rey, getting upset over her childhood as a trafficking victim?”

She sniffles. “But just because you were late, it shouldn’t make me – I can’t believe I forgot about him like this – ”

Ben wishes to God he’d picked a later, more realistic time to meet; the dreadful, embarrassing truth is that he’d thought that maybe, if he could meet her early in the evening, she might have let him get them movie tickets on his membership card. “If you want, Rey, I can – I could take Poe a message for you.” Is he seriously proposing to do this? To go and look Poe in his bloodshot, heroic eyes and say, Rey says stay strong; she loves you and she’s proud of you? Yes, apparently, he is. He braces himself.

She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “Thank you, Ben. I really appreciate it. Just tell him – I guess just tell him we’re all worried about him and we all support him and if he needs anything he should let us know. Oh, and Finn and Rose are feeding Baby and taking her for her walks, so he shouldn’t worry.”

He clears his throat, and takes a small, steadying sip of the whiskey. “If you have something… more personal, you could write it down; I won’t read it.” Except I’m weak and I will. Read it, and memorize it, and recite it to myself over and over in the middle of the night.

“I don’t… I can’t think of anything else, I guess? I mean, I’m proud of him and Amilyn and Rose and everyone, but I hope he already knows that.”

That’s it? Not even I miss you? He sloshes his drink again, and his words stumble, suddenly tangled. “Aren’t – you’re – is it not a serious thing, between you two?”

She looks puzzled, and fuck, hope is already spreading through him like a contaminant. “What ‘thing;’ what are you talking about?”

“You said – you said you slept with him – ”

“No, I didn’t. I slept at his place. On his couch. He was mad at himself after you showed up at his party – ”

“You really don’t – at all?”

“What, sleep with him? Ben, he calls me bubbele.” Her eyes, dry now but still red from tears, narrow. “Is this why you kicked the chair? Some kind of stupid sexual jealousy thing?”

He really needs the rest of his drink, and he downs it, trying not to choke on the hysterical laughter that’s welling in his throat. Sexual jealousy. Yeah. Emotional jealousy, moral jealousy, spiritual jealousy, fucking existential jealousy, you fucking name it. Fuck. He feels vertiginous. “I’m sorry about the chair. I just – I just – ”

“What?” Her face can be so ferocious, and so gentle.

“I just felt so lonely.” It’s almost a cry. Too much whiskey. Too much emotional whiplash. “You always said we, for you and Poe; you say it all the time; you’re a we and an us, and I don’t have that; never; there’s no we or us for me; there’s nothing. I’m alone.” Is it loneliness that breaks the world?

Her hand, light and cool, whispers into his. The first time they’ve touched since she came here. What’s happening to his heart? “You’re not alone.”

His hand closes convulsively around hers, and he thinks of her waiting, a child in a metal shackle, a woman in the Brooklyn cold, not believing that anyone will come. “Neither are you.” He presses her fingers to his lips. “Not ever, Rachel. I promise. I swear.” The tears stand in his eyes, but do not fall.

“Ben,” she says, and they sit for just a moment, staring at their clasped hands. Then he kisses her fingers again, and her other hand strokes his cheek, brushes down his neck. He wraps his arm around her waist, pulls her to him, and kisses her sweet, liquor-bitter lips.

“Please,” he says, and closes his eyes, and puts his face in her shoulder. “Please. I want to be the only one you do this with. The only one. If – if you don’t want that, then – then don’t do this.”

She kisses his neck. “What’s this?” she murmurs. “Kissing you? Sitting in your lap?”

“All of it,” he breathes. “Everything we’ve done.”

“Oh,” she says, and runs her fingers just inside his collar. “I see.” Slowly, she begins loosening his tie. “You mean kissing you. Sitting in your lap. Taking off your clothes. Coming on your fingers. Is that what you mean?” She pulls the tie over his head.

“Yes. That.” It’s barely been more than a week since she last kissed him, but somehow he’s missed it so much.

“You mean sucking you off. You mean letting you lick me. Lying on your table and begging you to fuck me. Coming on your cock. That’s what you mean?”

He tightens his grip on her. “Yes. Just me. I want to be the only one who does that for you, Rachel. Every time you want it, I want to be the one who gives it to you.”

Rey’s fingers slip into his hair and he lets her tilt his head and press her lips to the hollow of his throat. “Every time?” she says against his skin. “That’s a lot of times. I might want it a lot.”

He takes her by the hips and holds her still as he presses himself up against her, let her feel what she’s doing to him. “Any time. Every time. Just tell me what you want.”

“I want you,” she sighs into his ear, and he trembles; he doesn’t believe it, he can’t believe it. What will become of me? he thinks, wildly, and kisses her.

She twists in his lap, tugging on his arms, and he follows where she leads, flipping her on her back as she slips his buttons undone. He reaches under her shirt, behind her back, and unfastens her bra, needing two hands to do it, and pulls her shirt and bra off together, making her fight free of entangling straps around her hands as he kisses her breasts, nuzzles the sweat-slick hollow between them. He traces the seam of her jeans between her legs until she squirms, and scratches entreatingly at his chest and shoulders, trying to claw him out of his undershirt.

He leans back to strip to the waist, and when he emerges from the hem of his shirt she rises lithely to put her arms around his neck and pull him down to her again, kissing him so hard he almost does believe her when her voice buzzes against his lips. “Want you. Ben.” Her hand slips along his waist, searching blindly for his belt buckle.

“No,” he says, “wait,” and peels her out of her jeans and underwear. He moves himself to the floor, and when he kisses the inside of her thigh, she wraps her leg around his shoulders and sighs. What will become of me; what will become of me?

There’s pleasure in the ordinary spicy-sweet smell of her, but the smell of her between her legs, wet and all but dripping down his chin, makes him feel drunk. “Fuck,” he swears, unsteadily, “fuck. You got so wet for me.” She answers him with a desperate little whimper so delicious he could eat it.

He laps at her her thirstily, and her leg tightens, drawing him in. The moan she gives when he teases at her clit makes his cock twitch, and he slips his fingers into her, trying to get another sound like it. He gets one, tickling at the soft spot inside her, and when he stops teasing and licks her clit in earnest, steady motion, she rewards him with her hands raking frantically at his head and her hips rocking against his face, until she squeezes down on his fingers and squeaks and shrieks and convulses.

They both need a moment to breathe, and he needs a moment, too, to look at her, naked and mussed, panting. He meets her eyes and licks his lips. She shivers. He thinks he will die before he ever forgets this. She holds out her hands to him.

“What?” he asks her softly, and kisses her stomach. “Tell me what you want.”

“You,” she says. “I want you inside me; I want you to fuck me.” And as he opens his pants and pushes them down his legs she gives him a long, hungry look, but when he takes her hips in his hands she bolts upright. “Shit,” she says. “Shit. A condom.”

Fuck. Why can’t he be one of those men who always have a condom in their back pocket? (He knows why.) But he does have some, in the bathroom. He starts to pull his pants back up when she says, with an unexpected and bewitching blush, “Or you could come in my mouth again. Or on me. If you want to.”

His answer is to yank her towards him and push himself into her; she’s so wet around him, and so tight; she arches her back and moans again. He seizes her hands and pins them by her head; she writhes against him and he fucks her hard, watching her body move with his thrusts. He’s drunk; he’s high. She wants him. He bows his head and sucks at her neck. “Tell me,” he groans in her ear. “Tell me I’m giving you what you want.”

“You give it to me,” Rey gasps. “You give me everything I want.”

“Where do you want me to come?” He’s not there yet, but he wants to know.

“Wherever you want,” she says, shaking her head, but she doesn’t understand yet.

“No. Where do you want it? You’re fucking beautiful and I love your mouth and I want to come where you want it.” She looks away and doesn’t answer, and he presses harder on her hands. “Tell me,” he hisses, and her back arches, and he thinks he understands. “Tell me where you want it; you fucking want this; you fucking begged me for it and I’m going to give it to you and you’re going to tell me where, you understand me?”

“Yes,” she cries, but she still doesn’t answer him. He drives into her harder, and harder, grunting, until she says it for him. “My mouth. I want you to come in my mouth.”

“I will,” he tells her. “Fuck. I’ll come in your pretty little mouth. You want that?” And she doesn’t answer him, not in words, but she comes, just for him, nobody but him, there with his hands on her hands and his cock inside her body.

It feels so good. He can barely pull out in time, barely get to his feet, and then her mouth is on him again, sucking, and her eyes are turned earnestly up to his and what will become of him? What on earth will become of him?

He all but crushes her to the sofa, but he can’t manage standing upright anymore. He should move himself, move her, but he hasn’t got much conscious mind left. He is fuzzily aware of her manhandling his unresisting body into a more comfortable position, and pulling his coat down from the back of the couch to cover him. To cover them both, because she stays with him, and in the morning when he wakes up, naked and stiff and itching from the rough fabric of the couch, she’s still there, sleeping, her feet cold against his ankles and her breath warm against his arm.

“Yeah,” Han said, “Jacob and Rachel. And he kisses her, and he cries, and the question is, obviously, what’s he crying about?”

“Rashi said God gave him a vision, when he kissed her, that they wouldn’t be buried together.”

“Right, and you made this big symbolic, mumbo-jumbo thing or whatever… ”

“It wasn’t mumbo-jumbo, Dad,” Ben said, wounded, suddenly a very serious and very touchy 13-year-old all over again. “It’s mysticism, kabbalah. Rachel represents the feminine sefirot, power and justice and so on, and Jacob represents the masculine ones, mercy and kindness, and the fact that he’s buried far from her represents the world in need of repair because of the division of – ”

“Yeah, yeah,” his father interrupted with a wave of his hand. “It was a nice speech. But it’s not that complicated, boychik. He had that vision, and he cried because – ” He looked away, and when he spoke again his voice was very low. “Because, Benny, sometimes you love someone so much that it hurts you to think about being apart like that. Even when you’re dead, and you shouldn’t care anymore. You want to be with them.”

Ben wanted to ask, so why did you go away so often? And he thought, Majnun wandered in the desert, but he came to Leyla’s grave to die. And he thought, I’ve put him here, apart from her for so long; such a long time, and what if he dies in here?

As if he could read his son’s thoughts, Han smiled. “Don’t worry about me, boychik. I’m a stubborn alter kacker; I’m gonna walk out of this place alive if it kills me. And you should tell that princess of mine I said so.”

Chapter Text

Rey kept her whole body stiff. The less she moved the easier it was not to cry. “But I don’t know where I’m from. Maybe my parents could tell me but I don’t know – I don’t even know their names.”

Rabbi Luke knelt down beside her on the blacktop, so they were eye-to-eye. Maybe her father had a beard like that. She didn’t remember. But she couldn’t cry. She made herself hold even more still.

“Rey,” said Rabbi Luke. “Is it important to you to know where you come from? Who your parents are?”

“Yes,” Rey whispered. A tear ran from her eye and she tried even harder to hold still. If she held her breath it helped.

“Why?” The rabbi’s voice was gentle. “I didn’t know, either, when I was your age. Who my parents were or where I was from. I found out. In some ways I was glad to know. In others... not so much. But it matters why you want to know.”

“I want to know who I am.” It came out of her in a whisper, in a mumble. It seemed obvious, but it also made no sense. You are Rachel. You are the only person who can decide what that means, Maz said, and that made sense. But – Finn knew his parents were called Kemi and Joshua and he was from New York City, where it snowed and all the schools were called PS. Rey knew who was President in America, and Prime Minister in the UK and in Australia and in Israel and in India and in Pakistan; she knew that there was war in the Congo and flooding on the Yangzte River, but she didn’t know anything like that.

Rabbi Luke nodded. He got up and offered her his hand. She was afraid to take it, and he understood; he put his hands in his pockets and led her into the temple. He took out a big heavy blue book and laid it open on the table.

“Pay attention, now, Rachel; this is about you.” Rey was eight years old, probably, the dentist said, and all the other eight-year-olds could read, but she was still learning her letters. The book had so many words on the page it was a little frightening, but in her experience frightening things were very likely to be true. Rabbi Luke read them to her, showing her with his finger where he was reading. “Now, I’m going to read it another two times, very slowly, and then we’re going to say them together, okay?”

“Okay.” Rey was good at repeating; it was like learning from the radio. It was a lot of words; twice wasn’t really enough. And she didn’t know all of them, but Rabbi Luke explained.

“‘Meager numbers’ means a tiny group of people,” and “‘soujourn’ means travel” and “‘populous nation’ means a big group of people,” and “an Aramean is someone from a particular part of the Middle East, around where Syria is now.” She’d heard of Syria. And she didn’t need to be told what a fugitive or a plight was; the radio used those words all the time.

The Q stalls on the Manhattan Bridge the next morning, and Ben fumes. Isn’t it bad enough that he has to go to fucking work? As Rey groggily, carefully shook cereal from the box, he had seriously considered cashing in a sick day. I’m sorry; I can’t come in; I think I might have a girlfriend. I need to stay home to watch her brush her hair and fuck her and put my head in her lap and feel not-lonely. Not that Rey had said she was his girlfriend. She might still be thinking of him as some manner of… hook-up. But even if she is, he’s her only hook-up, and she told him she wants him, so he’s something like an advanced-stage hook-up, and that strikes him as position with the potential for advancement. A good position to be in. He tries to settle his temper accordingly, even though the crowd is tight and the conductor’s recurring monotone announcement that they’re being held for traffic ahead of them is maddening. I left her to come and do this?

It’s both a pleasure and a curse that his job, when he gets to it, centers for the moment entirely around Rey. Sitting at his desk and scouring her meagre social media presence, now that he’s not seeing Poe’s shadow in every corner, gives him a lot of satisfaction. Rey retweets strangers’ healthcare fundraisers. Of course she does. The idea that he’s supposed to be hunting her down and taking her into custody is a lot less pleasant. But, not really having any excuse not to, he dutifully goes uptown, and dutifully scares an ignorant college clerk into revealing her address purely on the strength of his badge, and dutifully returns to midtown to lay the address at Snoke’s feet, so he can issue a bulletin to the Kingsbridge patrols to be on the lookout.

“You really don’t have anything that would undermine Skywalker?” Snoke asks him. Snoke knows Luke is his uncle, knows that Ben has regarded his family as criminal sympathizers, if not actual criminals. He knows he has implied, more than once, in Snoke’s hearing, that his uncle has been an accessory to a crime. But unlike his father’s exploits at the border, which left trails of traffic-camera license plate recordings and findable witnesses, Uncle Luke’s perjury had never seemed easily provable; Ben knew where he’d really been, and was sure to his bones Quira hadn’t been there, but had no way to prove it. Perhaps there had been some part of him still childishly attached to his family and their secrets. But he hadn’t been about to report to Snoke a crime he might not be able to prove; he was too eager for Snoke’s approval, then, too unwilling to fail in front of him.

Now he wants nothing more than to fail. To fail quietly and completely, and disappear. But that is not an option, not now. “I’ll look,” he says, and leaves his captain’s office as quickly as possible.

On the way to the hospital, Finn tries to explain Rabbi Luke to Rose. Rose knows Leah, of course, so she has some idea; both twins have about them the steadfast and slightly ironic air of people who are aware that the path of righteousness isn’t easy to discern and are stubbornly determined to walk it anyway. And in a lot of ways it should be easy to say who Rabbi Luke is to him: mentor, teacher, rabbi – the words are right there.

But essentially it means explaining the feeling of the childhood that he had with Rey – half-covert on his side, half-legal on hers, miserable and playful at once – and that just seems to leave Rose staring at him sadly. So he gives up.

When they get to Rabbi Holdon’s hospital room, though, Rabbi Luke isn’t there; Kaydel sits by the bed thumbing rapid notes into her phone.

“Okay,” Kaydel says, waving to them as they enter, “so we’re saying that we continue to stand in full solidarity with NYC-UMMA and their goals, and that we cannot offer anything but condemnation to anyone who chooses to pursue violence in the name of hate. Plus like the usual stuff. Do you want to say anything about Poe?”

“Hello, Finn; hello, Rose,” the rabbi says as Rose nudges Finn into the remaining visitor’s chair. “Thank you so much for coming. Kaydel, I think we might say that we’ve always known Daniel as a committed advocate for non-violent activism. Do you think that works?”

“Committed… advocate… for non-violent… activism,” Kaydel says, typing diligently. “Got it. And what do we say about you?”

“If anyone asks, say I’m on the mend. Leave it there.” Part of her fine purple hair has been shaved away, and a square bandage covers her bare scalp. She is propped upright in the bed, but she holds her arms stiffly, away from her sides.

Kaydel looks up. “I was hoping we could say something about the people who attacked you.”

“We already did,” the rabbi reminds her. “We condemned them.”

“But they didn’t get arrested. Even though Poe did.”

“Let’s stick to our main points,” Rabbi Holdon says, calmly.

Finn frowns. “Shouldn’t the unequal treatment be a main point?”

Rabbi Holdon hesitates. “I would prefer,” she says slowly, “not to seem to be encouraging the NYPD to imprison more people than they already do. Or to seem to be suggesting that I think my… harms require some kind of vengeance.”

“It’s unjust,” Finn says. “What matters is, they did things to us and they didn’t do them to them, and there wasn’t any reason except – ” He breaks off. What’s the point in arguing about it? It all already happened, and everyone will do as they will do.

“They pulled a fucking gun on Finn,” Rose says acidly.

She puts her hand on Finn’s back. It doesn’t warm him as much as it should. He wasn’t hurt, and Rose wasn’t hurt. That’s what matters. It just makes him tired, to hear Rose mention it. Rabbi Holdon fingers the rough hospital blanket slowly. He’s alive; he will just repeat that to himself. He’s alive, so what does it –

“Kaydel,” Rabbi Holdon says, “let’s revise. From the beginning.”

Ben clocks out precisely at five, choosing to ignore Hux’s frown. He’s never had someone to go home to before.

When he does let himself in, she shrieks and almost knocks her computer off the table.

”Fuck!” she cries. “Don’t fucking do that!”

“Do what? Open the door?”

“Scare me like – ” She stops abruptly. Her voice stiffens. “I’m sorry. I’m just. Just... paranoid.”

The last word is a hoarse whisper. He watches her carefully as he removes his shoes. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“If you’re worried someone might come looking for you here, you can stay in the bedroom; it’d be easier to hide.” But no one will suspect him of harboring his missing CI. Right? He feels some anxiety creep into his own spine.

“No, it’s not… and anyway if I went into your room I’d just read your books.” She tries to smile. “I just… so, I had an idea. I mean, I’ve been a Jewish woman on the internet; I’ve heard from some Nazis, obviously, and so, like, what do we know about Nazis?” She’s speaking quickly; she obviously doesn’t want him to interrupt, as she counts on her fingers. “They’re noisy. They like to posture. And they’re dumb as shit. So I know – I know – that there’s some white-power shitbag out on the internet boasting to his shitbag bros about what he did to Poe.” Her hands are shaking. “I just have to find it. Thirty days. You said I have thirty days.”

Ben crosses to her, hesitantly. She shoves the computer towards him, and he glances down. Frogs and red hats and green flags. A black-and-white photo he doesn’t care to examine. He looks back up at her. She swallows nervously. “It just… it just makes me edgy,” she says.

Ben abruptly remembers childhood games he played by himself, hide-and-go-seek through an ugly mirror: Where will you hide when they come to the door? Had he heard some old speech of his grandfather’s, that had made him so sure that they would come? We will never be safe. Or did it write itself into his genes somehow, that fear; is it passed down in the blood? He turns back to her computer, making himself ignore the photos, the slogans. He pulls up the Twitter account Fasma runs, full of her retweets of her “boyfriend.”

“Start there,” he says, and closes the computer. “But not tonight.”

He wants to offer to hold her, and doesn’t know if she’d appreciate it. He twitches his hands, just slightly, and she, in turn, takes a cautious half-step towards him, so he holds his hands out a little further, and she marches into his arms with her head high. She holds him tightly, with her back straight, as if he were the one who had been startled. He strokes the soft, fuzzy hair beside her ear and wonders if she can hear his heart.

“Yes,” Poe’s lawyer says, patiently. “That would be great. If you can do it, and if you can tie the people making the little posts on the internet to real people who were maybe provably on the scene of the crime, and if I can find a way to present all this that doesn’t make me look like wingnut with thumbtacks and red string, sure. That would be great.”

“I can,” Rey says, and backtracks. “I’m pretty sure I can.”

“If Rey can get the evidence,” Rose says, “I can help with a presentation strategy. I explain internet things to older people all the time.”

Lando gives her a martyred look. “You think I don’t know what Twitter is?”

“Well, Rey also mentioned Gab and a Discord server, but really I meant the jury.”

“I see.” He clasps his hands between his knees and stares at them for a moment. “Have you got to the part in law school where they explain to you that most juries are deeply stupid? That generally eleven, if not twelve of them, think they were convened expressly to give a guilty verdict?”

Rose sets her chin. “If you really thought that, you’d have made him plead out.”

He sighs. “Nobody here should count their chickens, is all I’m saying. Now get out of here and come back when you have actual evidence.” His words are harsh, but his tone and his gesture are courtly, and as they’re leaving, he calls, “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Rey, Miss Rose.”

In the elevator down from his office, Rey expects that Rose will talk strategy. She’s slightly surprised when Rose’s forehead crinkles, and she asks, nervously, “Have you talked to Finn recently?”

“Not too recently. Why?”

“Nothing. I’m just being. I mean I’m just worried, is all. I feel like he’s… sleeping? A lot?”

Rey’s throat tightens. “But he gets up in the morning?”

Rose nods eagerly, “Yeah, and he showers and brushes his teeth and everything. He just...” She deflates a little. “He comes home and he just sleeps.”

“I’ll email him to meet me for a walk,” Rey offers. “Maybe he’d like some exercise? And we can talk.”

Rose nods, looking relieved. “He hasn’t been going to the gym, really. I think – he misses you. He’s been talking about you a lot. Your childhood and everything.”

Rey jolts. Finn never, never talks about their childhood, not unless Rey makes him. “Has Rabbi Luke been around much?” Maybe it’s just practical, the talking.

“Sort of?” The lobby of Lando’s building is full of mirrors and quartz; Rey can see Rose’s tense face, her own tight shoulders, echoed and re-echoed everywhere. “We hear about him; we don’t see him. It always seems like wherever we go, he just left. I’m not even sure I could pick him up out of a line-up of bearded white men.”

“He isn’t going to leave town, is he?”

“Mr. Calrissian must have subpoenaed him. He has to have.” Rose pushes the wrong way on the revolving door, and almost crashes into the glass. Rey catches her arm.

“Rose,” she says, “how are you sleeping?”

Rose’s face crumples a little. “Like shit,” she whispers. “It’s clerkships. And Poe. And Finn. And you.”

Rey pulls her into a hug, and goes on her toes so she can rest her chin on Rose’s head. “Remember,” she says softly, “Poe’s got Lando and Leah looking out for him, and Finn’s got me looking out for him, and I’ve got Ben looking out for me. So it doesn’t all have to be on you. You’re allowed to sleep and read Vapid Fluff. Okay?”

“Okay,” says Rose, into the front of Rey’s coat. “I don’t trust that cop. But you do I guess. So okay.”

The next morning, Rey gets up very early, and climbs into a planter in Morningside Park. She waits outside Columbia Law School, and when Rose stumbles across Amsterdam, travel mug of coffee dangerously tilting, Rey steps beside her to right the mug before it spills, and give Rose one unseasonably early tulip, before she goes to meet Finn for their promised walk.

Finn is glad to see Rey, of course, and for the twenty minutes when she forces his to match her outta-my-way-I’m-walking-here pace through West Harlem, the world almost seems all right again. Then a mobile NYPD surveillance tower looms up over 125th Street as they turn the corner, and Rey scowls and doubles back, and Finn is reminded that nobody is allowed to just fucking live.

“Let’s get cookies,” Rey says. “We can split one and get an extra for Rose.”

It’s not a bad idea, but he doesn’t feel welcome in the bakery, though in the past he hasn’t minded their twee vibe so much, and he’s not really interested in eating his half of the cookie right now. He puts it in the bag for later, as Rey says something about his psychiatrist or a therapist or something. But then he forgets he did that and leaves it there, so when Rose opens the bag later he has to explain why there’s a cookie and a half, and Rose’s smile fades, just a little, and does Finn ever do anything but make her worried and unhappy?

He lies down on the couch, so he’s out of the way, anyway. He sleeps for a few hours, which is nice, but then he wakes up, which is less nice. He picks his mother’s cassette up off the big plastic bin they use as a coffee table, and turns it over and over in his hands. He opens it, to look at the picture of her on the inside. He wonders whether his father took the photo, and takes out the liner to see if there’s any note. Which is when he discovers something else he’d forgotten about cassettes, if he ever knew it – the lining folds out.

The whole inside of the lining is taken up by a drawing of a branch. It’s dense with neat, oval leaves which lie close along it. Here and there, among the leaves, Hebrew letters are scattered. If Rabbi Luke ever comes, he’ll have to ask him what it means. He runs his fingers over the drawing, as if he could feel the glossy green life through the cheap ink. He can’t.

Ben is now almost positive he has a girlfriend, and it’s a very strange experience. He sleeps less, though that’s his own fault; he’s really not used to sharing a bed, and Rey is always having to elbow him awake before he accidentally pushes her over the edge. He’s copied his keys for her. She’s set up a bargain with the bodega guys to help them stock their shelves in exchange for small bills and groceries with the previous day’s date on them, so his fridge is full of home-condensed milk and hard-boiled eggs. There’s a box of tampons in his medicine cabinet, which he regards, wide-eyed, with secret pride. A woman lives here. In my apartment. With me.

And they have a lot of sex.

He doesn’t totally know how he feels about it.

Rey spends hours every day on the internet, matching Gab accounts to faces from press photos, and scrolling back through timelines full of garbage. And then, to get invited to to the Discord server, she has to make one herself, and fill it with the right kind of trash. It makes her furious, sick and edgy, and though sometimes she takes the edge off with liquor, she tells him she prefers to take it off with sex. They go through packs of condoms faster than they do through packs of toilet paper. And they don’t even use a condom every time; he comes in her mouth and she swallows; he comes on her skin and he licks her clean. She sends him emails telling him what she wants him to do to her, and the language she uses makes his ears burn and his cock ache and his head hurt.

“You know,” he says once, breathing hard, during the second week, looking at her as she lies beside him with her skin red from his hands and mouth, “you know I don’t mean it, right? When I call you those things, I don’t mean it; I just say them because you – ”

“I know,” she says, and he thinks the hand she puts on his mouth is meant to be consoling, but it feels a little bit to him as if it might be meant to shut him up. Or keep him from asking how much of what she says to him she means.

The next day she jimmies a pay phone, calls him at work, and says terrible, dirty things to him until he does something in a patrol car that’s undoubtedly a fireable offense and also definitely a misuse of public property.

But afterwards she says, wistfully, “I miss you,” and when Ben comes home, she asks him if he wants to go for a walk in the park. She takes his arm, in the park, and he falls asleep that night with her light fingers running through his hair.

So most days he walks through the world a little dazed, nursing his secret happiness. He’s really almost certain he has a girlfriend.

And then one evening, a week before Poe’s trial, they’re having omelets for dinner and arguing about Whole Foods versus the 24-hour market that’s two subway stops deeper into Brooklyn and which he points out does not have a transparent supply chain or labor policy, and someone knocks on the apartment door.

And no one ever knocks on the apartment door.

They both freeze. Then she’s up like a shot, dashing into the bedroom, taking her plate with her. Which is good, because he never would have thought to hide her plate. But they’ve been talking; it was probably audible on the stairwell. Of course there wasn’t a buzz; buzzing him would have given too much warning; they must have buzzed the upstairs neighbors instead – did someone see her with him while they were out in the park? How could he have been so stupid; how could he have thought they could act like a couple, like a normal couple?

He opens the door.

There’s a bored-looking young white man in a sport coat. “Are you Benjamin Organa?”

“Yes.” What? Where’re the street cops; where’s fucking Hux?

“Great. You’ve been served with a subpoena.” The young man hands him an envelope, marked Personal and Confidential, and makes a note. “It’s Wednesday, April 12th; the time is 8:35PM. Have a good night.” He turns and walks carelessly down the stairs.

Ben stares at the subpoena, trying to take in what it represents. “Rey,” he says, absently, “you can come out. It was just a process server.”

She’s shaking; he can’t blame her. He offers her tea, reflexively, and she accepts. As he struggles to remember where the tea and the strainer are, exactly – they must be here somewhere – she looks at the envelope like it’s a snake.

“That means you have to testify?”

“No,” he says. “It means they want to remind me that they could make me testify.” He fishes out the plastic box of tea leaves. It’s probably stale. “What it actually means is that Snoke doesn’t think I’m doing a good enough job of looking for you. It’s… in the nature of a threat.”

“How so?”

“I don’t want to testify. Snoke knows that. I never do. If I testify my colleagues find out my real name, that I’m related to my mother.”

“Couldn’t he just threaten to just tell them? And if you testify, isn’t that bad for him? You saw what happened.”

He focuses on measuring out the tea. “There would be an expectation that I would back Hux’s story.”

“But that would be perjury. You were so angry at Luke; you – ”

“I’ve never perjured myself,” he says. “Never.”

“But they would want you to.”

The electric kettle purrs. Rey jumps up and stands close to him, challenging. Ben says, “Yes.”

“So tell the truth and let them to go to hell.”

“They won’t actually call me, Rey; it’s just a threat. I’ve been leaving at five too often, that’s all; Snoke thinks I’m not sufficiently dedicated.” He fiddles with the strainer over the cup, trying not to mind the way she’s looking at him. There’s a long silence. The kettle clicks off and he picks it up, and as he begins to pour, he talks. “I don’t like perjury. Snoke knows that. He’s always known it.” He pours slowly, damping down the little flakes of the leaves. “If he ever made me lie under oath, I would quit. The next day.”

“But you’d do it.” Rey’s voice is quiet. “You’d quit, but you’d lie.”

He swallows, and shifts the strainer for the second pour, spooning in the sugar. “There’s a… loyalty. To the department. If you break that, if you don’t show that loyalty – bad things happen to people, Rey.” The only sound is the slow trickle of tea through leaves. “People get hit by cars.” The tea fills the cup, ruby red, then darker. “People get shot.” The tea is dark enough he can’t see the bottom of the cup anymore. “I’m supposed to be showing my loyalty. By finding you.”

“And if you don’t find me, they’ll make you testify, and if you don’t lie, they’ll kill you? What is this, the mob?”

“It’s not the mob.” He stirs the cup with the handle of the strainer, making sure the sugar is dissolved.

“It is. It is. Why don’t you just quit now?”

“Because if I quit now, someone else will look for you. And they might find you.” He hands her the tea. “I won’t. But I’ll ‘look harder.’” He wipes his hands. “They won’t call me on the stand.”

Through a light veil of steam, Rey looks at him. She lowers her tea, untouched. “You think he’ll be convicted,” she says, her voice dull with shock.

“Juries believe cops.” The linoleum of his kitchen is getting scuffed, and he’s told her this before, in the train station. “Unless you come up with something really damning, and even then – they won’t call me. Because they won’t need to.”

She drinks the tea and goes to bed without a word, and although it’s still his bed that she goes to, and although she allows him, when he comes to bed, to gather her into his arms and kiss her neck and shoulder, it comes to him with icy clarity that he does not, after all, have a girlfriend, because whatever else Rey may want in a partner, she does not want a cop.

“Please stay until it’s over,” he whispers against her skin. “At least until the trial is over. You’re safe here; let me keep you safe.”

She brushes her fingers over his arm, but she still doesn’t say anything, and in the morning, he is not really surprised to wake up alone. He wills his lead-heavy body out of bed. He orders it to resume its habits, its natural, solitary habits, and walk out into the world as it has always done. It’s hard; it’s so hard, but it’s only what he deserves so he makes himself do it.

And then he almost has a heart attack, because she’s sitting on his couch, scowling at her computer.

“I will find something damning,” she says. Her voice is stern. She has not left him alone. “I’ll find something so damning no fucking lie will save them. You’ll see.” She bares her teeth; she is fearsome and dauntless, and she has not left him alone, not yet, and he loves her so much he feels physically sick.

She’s still working on it days later, wading through hundreds of thousands of lines of Nazi shit, trying to remember their smug little slang terms and which crusader icon signifies which pathetic little braggart. She’s stressed and angry and nauseous, as she always is, and maybe that’s what saves her; maybe that furious anxiety is what sharpens her ears to the sound of too many footsteps on the stairs. She slams her computer closed, and there’s no time, no time to put on shoes or grab her bag; they’ll know that a woman was here, but she can’t fix that now. She yanks open the window and clambers out onto the fire escape and closes the window as quietly as she can, hearing a key turn awkwardly in the lock. She takes one step and winces; the iron rings with her step, and if they look out of the window now, they’ll see her. Once they’ve searched the closet and looked under the bed, they’ll look out here anyway. Up or down; it doesn’t matter which way she goes; she’ll be visible.

Except.

Just to the right, over the edge of the railing, there’s the deep window sill of the building beside it, the people on the other side of Ben’s wall. If the sill is deep enough; if they’re not home –

She slides her bare feet, to avoid the sound of impact, the peeling paint on the rusting metal scratching at her until she’s at the edge of the fire escape. She prays she doesn’t get tetanus, and swings her leg over the rail. Holding tight, she brings the other leg quietly over, and steps out over empty air onto the window ledge, pushing off the fire escape railing to give herself momentum. She catches herself on the window’s edge by her fingertips. Gasping, she braces herself against the edges of the sill. She turns her feet out like a ballet dancer and smushes herself against the closed window as tightly as she can. She doesn’t know if she looks more terrifying or more comical from a perspective inside the neighboring apartment, all her flesh white with cold and pressed against glass. And she doesn’t know if it’s enough. The light is failing and the sill is deep, but she doesn’t know how deep her body is. I swear, if I get caught out here and fucking arrested because my fucking ass sticks out too far…

She has to smother her hysterical giggle, because Ben’s window slides open. She can’t see, of course, but to her left, she hears fabric brush against the sash. Fuck. If one of them actually climbs out here, she’s done for. Hell, if he leans out too far, she’s caught. And then they will make her hurt Poe, and Ben – Ben has been keeping her away from them –

A voice, muffled, inside, not belonging to whoever’s leaning out the window, says, “You don’t think he has an actual girlfriend, do you?”

“Fuck no,” says a voice, so close she almost screams. It’s the red-head. Huxley. Hux. She remembers him, his bored-sounding drawl. “Have you fucking met Kylo? Tall only gets you so far with women.”

“You would know,” snarks the voice inside, and Rey hears Hux’s jacket scrape on the window sash again. “But these are women’s shoes.”

“Maybe he has a fetish,” says Hux. “But I think it’s her; I think he’s harboring – ” The window slams closed.

He didn’t see her. She’s safe.

Well. Kind of. She’s stuck on a window ledge. With no particular handhold. She can wait until the residents get home and throw herself on their mercy, but they’re just as likely to call the cops as to let her in. And Hux might turn around on his way out and see her, wedged in like an oversized air conditioner.

She slides back left across the sill towards the fire escape. She reaches out with her foot, feeling for the railing. Her toes brush it. It’s not enough.

The grooves between the bricks are shallow, and the bricks are old and weathered. She doesn’t know if they’ll hold her weight, if she can hold her weight with just her fingers and toes.

It only has to be for a second, she thinks. The empty air behind her, beneath her, frightens her. It’s only one tall story, but it’s concrete below, and if she falls backwards, through the void that surrounds her… but she has to do this. She gathers herself. If I fall, then I fall. But Luke always said: trust in yourself, and the Eternal, and the Holy Name will be with you.

Luke, if I fall, I’m going to be so mad at you.

She digs the fingers of her left hand into the deepest groove she can see, and feels with her left foot for something like a toe-hold. Despite how cold it is, she’s glad her feet are bare. She clings as tightly as she can, and then she pushes off the ledge, swinging clumsily through the air. She swears she can feel the brick crumbling under her weight, but her right hand, reaching blindly, clasps the railing of the fire escape, and she yanks herself towards it, scrabbling with her feet until one of them catches on an iron slat, and she can pull her whole body against the rail.

She holds her breath, waiting for the sound of her impact to bring a cop to the window again. But it doesn’t. Slowly, dizzily, she pulls herself back onto the relatively solid ground of the fire escape’s landing, and sits, mind racing. She's locked out of Ben’s apartment, barefoot in the April cold, without her computer or her bag or her metrocard. She doesn’t know when Hux will come back, or even if he’s really left. Poe’s trial is set to begin in three days. She thinks, hard, and climbs, as quietly as she can, down the iron stairs.

Finn is awakened by a knock on the door. The rent is paid, Rose is spending the morning studying at Columbia, and he isn’t making any noise for anyone to complain about, so he assumes it’s a scammer and rolls over. He should get up. Eat. Grade papers. But he doesn’t, and the knocking comes again, hard. He opens his eyes.

“Please open the door,” says a hoarse, deep voice, and hesitates. “It’s the police.”

He should bolt upright, should think what to do or say. But he only mechanically rises, and plods heavily to the door. He wishes doors still had chains on them, like in movies.

It’s Rey’s cop. When Finn opens the door, he moves quickly to the side, showing him that there’s a young street cop standing behind him, looking tense and mildly confused. “We know Rachel Niemand lives here. We have an order to take her into protective custody.” He’s looking at Finn in a shifty way Finn doesn’t understand.

“She’s not here,” he says. “I haven’t seen her in… weeks.” Rey warned him this might happen, he thinks vaguely, that he might come and pretend to search for her.

“I’d like to come in and look for myself.”

“Do you have a warrant?” Finn doesn’t want to do this. He just wants to go back to bed.

Rey’s cop checks his phone, and turns around. “Mintaka. Go watch the corner.”

“But… ” The other cop looks more intensely confused.

“Mintaka. Go. Watch. The fucking corner.”

When the street cop is gone, Rey’s cop turns to him, and Finn is startled – his look isn’t shifty; it’s lost and desperate. “You really haven’t seen her?”

“She was supposed to be with you. She was supposed to be safe with you.” His anger is beginning to mount; he holds it down until it drowns under a wave of exhaustion. The cop closes his eyes. Finn notes, distantly, that he looks like he hasn’t slept.

“Someone from my unit got suspicious. They raided my apartment. Warrantless bullshit.” The cop swallows. “But she wasn’t there. She vanished. She left her computer, her keys, her wallet, her shoes, everything.” He slumps against the doorframe, and Finn, out of an instinctual, conflicted pity, steps back in a wordless invitation to enter. The cop stumbles in and all but falls onto the couch. His exhaustion is uncomfortably familiar to Finn. But his anger resurfaces again, too.

Rey’s out there without shoes? He was supposed to be keeping her safe. He shoves the anger down again, wishes he could just lie down. “When did this happen?”

“Last night. Yesterday. The clerk at the bodega downstairs is the last person I could find who saw her. She came in through the side door and he lent her five dollars sometime between five o’clock and six.” His jaw clenches, and his voice rises. “I was on my way home! She couldn’t just have waited there? I would have been home any minute!”

Finn doesn’t answer. This cop seems to think he deserves a great deal of Rey’s trust. How was Rey supposed to know he hadn’t sent the raid himself? Maybe his skepticism is visible; the cop looks at him pleadingly, and mumbles, “I would have taken care of her.” Then, after a moment, he kicks his foot backwards violently against the couch, jolting Finn. “I would have tried! But then I tried to keep you safe, too, so maybe she doesn’t trust my fucking record.”

“Keep me safe?” He remembers big ears under a policeman’s hat, and the cold of City Hall Park fills his lungs. “What, just by shouting ‘no guns?’ And don’t kick our fucking furniture!”

“I know! I’m sorry! But I fucking told her to keep you away!”

“I was supposed to stay home?”

“Yes! You and Rey both!”

“But I couldn’t; they were trying to scare us; I couldn’t let them scare – ” But they did. I was afraid. They grabbed Rose and they beat Rabbi Holdon and Poe and there were guns –

The cop slumps, and all of Finn’s rage abruptly boils over. “I wouldn’t have been afraid if it weren’t for you; if it weren’t for the fucking cops backing them up and doing their fucking work for them! How many of you are them; how many of your guys have fucking Nazi tattoos under their uniforms? How many of you spend your lunch breaks giggling at KKK memes? They beat the fucking shit out of Poe; Rabbi Holdon was in the fucking hospital, and I, I was the one you pointed the fucking guns at!” The man has his head in his hands; he’s leaning away, almost cowering, and Finn is not interested in stopping. “I know you’re Leah’s son; you’re one of us and you stand out there with them! I can’t believe Rey stayed with you all that time, you fucking – you fucking collaborator!”

If the cop had been looking at him, he would have spit in his face. The blood is loud in his ears. What am I doing? Am I trying to get myself – ? For a moment all his attention turns inward; he has always thought it might come, the day when the wish to lie down became something sharper and more active, and he searches himself – is this how it feels to try to die?

But no. He doesn’t want to die. He is so angry, so angry. He wants to rage, to strike, to scream, and to live. And he doesn’t believe this man will kill him, this cop sitting on his couch with his head in his hands.

The cop is crying.

Finn gets up and scoops some coffee into the coffee-maker. He doesn’t really know what else to do, but he really should grade some papers today, he supposes, and he’ll want coffee to do it.

Rey’s eyes ache. She’s been awake all night, retracing all the steps she’s taken on her own computer on a work station at Columbia Law School, burning with anger and shame every time a student walks by and glances at her filthy bare feet, or worse, at what she’s looking at. It’s for Poe. It’s for Poe. So Poe will go free and Ben will not have to lie. And she’s almost there; she’s got almost all the links in the chain. She barely notices when Rose comes up beside her.

“Rey! Rey, I got your email; you were here at four in the morning? What’s going on?”

“One second,” Rey says. She knows the search terms she needs, and where to use them. She’s sure of it. Rose looks over her shoulder and hisses between her teeth. “I know. I know. One second. Wait.”

And there it is. A picture of Rose. She clicks through to the conversation. A picture of Sam Wexler. A picture of Poe. Talking. So much talking. Not just their boasting – their planning. The whole thing; the whole crude plan all laid out.

“What drive should I save to?” she asks Rose, as she reaches to take a screenshot, but Rose is already calling Lando.

After a moment or two the cop manages to pull himself together.

“You’re right,” he says. “I thought she’d leave before now. I thought she had.” He gets up. “I’m sorry,” he says to Finn, rather formally. “I’m sorry.”

Finn has no courteous answer, not for this man who has failed to keep anyone safe, but the formality itself reminds him of something he can say. “Thank you for the tape,” he says, brusquely. “It means a lot to me.”

Rey’s cop looks dazed. “Oh. Of course. You should have it. I didn’t even pay for it.”

Did you pick it up off the street? Out of the gutter where they threw it? “Where did you get it?”

“I was at a show. I was just poking around the merch table, and I bought the band’s cassette, and there were some others lying around; the guy said they were leftovers from other bands he’d toured with. The title caught my eye; I was – more observant then, I guess, so the pun… ”

His voice trails away. Finn stares at him. “What pun?”

“Or not pun I guess, but Hazzard with two ‘z’s, like chazzan.”

“Chazzan?” Finn hates this, hates feeling ignorant, but he is starving for any scrap of information, and he will take it from anyone, any way.

“Oh, uh – like a cantor, you know?” The cop looks awkward. On the counter, the coffee machine clicks off. “Maybe you didn’t use that word in your shul.”

“I went to Rabbi Luke’s temple,” Finn says. “When – when I could.”

“I think it might be more common in Conservative temples,” the cop says. His voice is rushed, almost embarrassed. “Anyway, but yeah, I, uh, I used to study a lot of, uh, anyway so the title caught my eye and I picked it up and the guy was starting to box up and he told me just to take it, so I did. Rey saw it on my shelf and asked for it for you.”

Finn turns and casts around for the tape. He pulls out the insert and unfolds it. “Do you know – ?” he asks, half hopelessly. “I don’t understand what this is meant to mean.”

The cop – didn’t Rey say his name was Ben? – takes the paper from him. “Oh,” he says, sounding surprised. “I think this is myrtle. Hadass, you know? One of the four species for Sukkot.” He gives a little laugh. “Oh – I get it. Myrtle.”

Finn stares. “Get what?”

“Her name.” Leah’s son shifts the insert to one hand and takes out his phone. He calls up the subway map and points out a stop with his thumb, where the L meets the M. “Myrtle-Wyckoff. The BMT stop in Bushwick.” He looks at Finn, and hands back the insert. His voice sounds almost kind. “Were you – did you live in Bushwick? Or was Wyckoff her maiden name?”

“No – no, we lived in Harlem.” Finn sits down heavily on the couch, staring at the picture. “And Wyckoff wasn’t her real name. She was Kemi Cavalier.”

“Maybe it’s the other way around, then,” Ben says. He sits down again, beside Finn. “Was Hadassah her Hebrew name? May I see?”

“I don’t know,” says Finn, in the misery of everything he never learned and maybe never will. He holds the insert out, so the other man can see, and Ben’s finger finds a bit of Hebrew here, then there.

“I bet it was; I bet that’s it.” Ben’s voice is rapid, absorbed. “Hadassah is Queen Esther’s real name, right; Esther was her Persian pseudonym, because myrtle is sacred to Ishtar, so Ishtar, Esther, and look, this says v’kaser abadti, and this says abadti again; that’s what Esther says before she risks her life. And if I perish, I perish. Fourth chapter, I think. And here – ”

Finn feels numb all over. If I perish, I perish. And you did, you did die, and you left me all alone. He is vaguely aware that Ben isn’t talking anymore, and then that he’s alone on the couch. Did you always mean to do it? Was it only Dad who was stopping you, and then when he was gone I wasn’t enough? But that’s the Guessing Game all over again; he can’t know; he can never, ever know. But did you know, Mom, if you wrote that; were you always going to do it? He looks up to see that Ben is holding out a mug off coffee.

“I don’t know how you like it,” he says, “I can put some milk or sugar in it – ”

“Sugar,” says Finn, hoarsely. “Three spoons. The big cupboard.”

Ben bangs around and returns with the coffee properly sweet, and not too cold; Finn gulps some down, and Ben says, again in that hurried voice, “There’s no agreement, you know, about what she means; Ibn Ezra read it as, If I am lost, then I am lost, and he said it was an allegory for knowledge of the Torah, which, if it’s lost, can always be recovered with further reading. And that would fit with the Sukkot reading of myrtle, where it represents people who don’t know the Torah but do good works. But even just in terms of the story, his second commentary says it’s a testament to her intellect and will, and Rashi reads it as, And as I am bereft, so I shall be bereft, meaning she wasn’t thinking of herself, she was thinking of the people who would die if she failed, and I mean that’s the thing, right; she doesn’t fail.”

Finn looks at him. Several things are clear. One, Ben is kind of babbling, and he knows it. Two, he’s anxious about Finn; his forehead is creased and his eyes are searching him. And three, Leah’s son, whatever else he may be, is a hopeless nerd. He is trying to speak to Finn, trying to tell him something, but he is saying it in a garbled language of esoteric facts, obscure context, and minute analysis.

But Finn, despite his exhaustion and anger and confusion and grief, knows that language. And so he knows that Ben is trying to say, It’s not a prophecy. It’s not a wish for death. It’s about courage.

Finn takes another drink of coffee. “Rey told you about my mom.”

Ben looks down. “Yes.” His hands play with the insert. He runs one finger along the drawing of the branch, just as Finn had done, searching for the life under the ink. At the edge of the drawing, his fingers stop again. “I don’t know that word,” he says, “but that says Joshua.”

“Joshua was my dad. It doesn’t say… husband or… ?”

Ben puts the paper back in his hand. “I don’t think so. But it might be Modern Hebrew. I’m not good at Modern. You should ask my – ask Rabbi Skywalker.”

“Right.” Finn drinks more coffee. This morning has been… a lot. “If I ever see him again.”

Ben stands, awkwardly, straightening the collar of his coat. “He’ll be in Riverside Park. Around 113th. Right at the water.”

Finn looks up at him. “How do you know?”

“It’s where he always goes. It’s where he met my mother.”

“Met – aren’t they twins?”

“Yes. He met her when they were twenty-one. She was being mugged. She threw her wallet in the river out of spite, and the mugger went for her with the knife. Uncle Luke hit him.”

Finn stares. “That’s… not how he tells that story. At all.”

“Yeah.” Ben sounds bitter. Bitter, and sad. “That’s them all over.” He walks to the door, putting on his gloves. “Us all over, I guess. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

Finn goes to the door. “Thank you for, uh. Reading that.”

Ben waves a hand. “It’s nothing.” He digs in his pocket. “You’ll probably see Rey before I do, I guess. Would you tell her – ”

He sighs. Finn waits.

“Would you give her this? And tell her… I’m sorry.” He pushes a black knit glove into Finn’s hand and hurries down the hall before Finn can say anything else.

Finn shuts the door. He puts the glove on the counter, retrieves his coffee mug, and begins to look for his red pen. He can grade at least two papers and still meet Rose for lunch, he thinks. And from there, it’s only a ten-minute walk to the river at 113th.

Poor, dumb Mintaka is of course standing obediently on the corner, looking cold and confused. “Haven’t seen anything, sir.”

Ben just nods. I might still see her again. After the trial. Poe will be in jail, but I can quit, just quietly hand in my fucking notice and – and what? What should he do then? Sit for the bar? Clerk for some Republican judge who hates his mom?

Maybe he can just be a paralegal. Work for a tax attorney. Or just take himself out of the whole above-the-law-under-the-table game. Be a plumber. Drive a bus. That’s a respectable job.

Rey might like that.

Who is he kidding? He’d probably hit a pedestrian the first day.

He does something, compulsively, hopelessly, that he’s been doing for about seventeen hours now, and checks his email.

From: “Rachel Niemand” ([email protected])
Date: Wed, April 19, 2017 at 11:10AM
To: “Kyle O’Ryan” ([email protected])
Subject: told u

“Sir? You okay?”

“Yes,” he snarls. ”told u”? Yes, she did, she did tell him he was a monster, a willing participant in an evil system, a cowardly, self-loathing fraud, but does she have to rub it in now? Like he’s not devastated enough, having come home to an empty apartment, having frantically questioned his neighbors, having only the knowledge that Hux would have stayed to gloat to tell him she wasn’t in custody? Having spent a sleepless night in the knowledge that he’d said he’d keep her safe and he hadn’t? That he is an utter failure at the only thing he ever wanted to do?

said id find something damning & i did. sorry i didnt email earlier but i had to go out the window & it took me forever to get to a computer & then i figured youd probably track down the ip address & try to haul me away somewhere “safe” & i was BUSY. im just gonna leave landos office now he gave me spare tennis shoes theyre so white im afraid to take them outside but im ok. but i cant go back to ur place in BK cuz its 100 cops are watching. but the trial is in like two days so ill be fine & ugh im so stressed i really want you but first things first gotta get poe out DONT WORRY STAY SAFE BE GOOD

love rey

The junior officer runs up behind him, steps into his path. “Sir? Where are you going? The patrol car’s that way.”

He stops. “Listen, Mintaka. I know Snoke told you to make sure I wasn’t secretly meeting with my CI. And I’m just gonna tell you now: I’m not. I don’t know where the fuck she is. But I have shit to do, so get out of my fucking way.”

Rabbi Luke was very patient, and he smiled the whole time. His eyes were very bright blue, Rey thought. After a while he asked her if she thought she could say it, and she said she thought she could, and they said it together, with Luke prompting her when she forgot.

“You shall then recite as follows before your Eternal God: ‘My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us. We cried to the Eternal, the God of our ancestors, and the Eternal heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. The Eternal freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents, bringing us to this place and giving us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.’”

“Do you understand what that means, Rey?”

When Oscar Platt had asked her Do you understand? the answer was always supposed to be Yes, sir, but Rey had been going to Rabbi Luke for two weeks now, and so she knew that he was actually saying Tell me what you think this means.

“It means… I’m a fugitive Aramean?”

“Close, Rey, but not quite. Say it again.”

Rey said it again. Luke gave her a questioning look, so she ventured, “I’m from Eygpt?”

“Very close. What it means, Rachel, is that you were a fugitive Aramean. You were in Egypt. But now, Rey, now you are free.”

------------------------------------------------------
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
v.
DANIEL JUAN POLANSKY
------------------------------------------------------

Before
HON. MONA MOTHMAN
and a Jury.

Appearances.

For the People,
ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY DIEGO JUAREZ.

For the Defendant,
MR. LANDON CALRISSIAN.

Lana D’Arcy, Official Stenographer.

FROM THE TESTIMONY OF DET. ARNOLD PAGE HUXLEY, SPECIAL UNIT 22, WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION

State. What would you say the defendant's manner was like, before you tried to arrest him? How was he acting?

A. Belligerent. He seemed like he was looking for a fight. He was pushing the counter-protestors. Getting in their faces.

FROM THE TESTIMONY OF DET. ARNOLD PAGE HUXLEY, SPECIAL UNIT 22, WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION, CROSS-EXAMINATION

Defense. Now, Detective Huxley, according to your testimony, you sustained significant harm from this event, is that correct?

Huxley. Yes, and my medical records support that.

Q. Uh-huh. So would it be fair to say, then, that you were traumatized?

A. I wouldn't say that.

Q. That you sustained trauma to the head?

A. No.

Q. But your head was injured, correct?

A. Yes.

FROM THE TESTIMONY OF DANIEL JUAN POLANSKY, WITNESS FOR THE DEFENSE

Defense. What would you say your physical condition was, by that time?

A. It was pretty awful. My chest hurt, my head hurt, my back hurt, my stomach... pretty much everything hurt.

Q. Dr. Kalonia has testified that when she examined you the next day, you had several cracked ribs and severe contusions on your back, and were unable to move your torso without intense pain; is that correct?

A. Yes.

Q. And therefore might have had a difficult time whipping your head into Detective Huxley's face.

A. I couldn't have, even if I wanted to. And I was in too much pain even to want to.

Q. Mr. Polansky.

A. Sorry. I’m trying. No. I didn’t, and I couldn’t have. It would have hurt too much.

FROM THE TESTIMONY OF DANIEL JUAN POLANSKY, WITNESS FOR THE DEFENSE, CROSS-EXAMINATION

State. What would you say is your attitude towards the police, Mr. Polanksy?

A. I support a fully-funded job-training program to place police officers in productive careers.

Q. So you don't believe police officers are productive citizens?

A. I think they could be more productive in other jobs.

Q. Please answer the question, Mr. Polansky.

A. No, not as such. I think the institution of the police is productive mostly of misery.

Q. I’m going to hand around a series of exhibits. These are print-outs from Mr. Polanksy’s Twitter account. And I’m going to ask Mr. Polansky to explain them to us.

FROM THE TESTIMONY OF RABBI AMILYN LUNA CRYSTAL HOLDON, WITNESS FOR THE DEFENSE

Defense. Did you, at any point that evening, witness any belligerent behavior from Mr. Polansky?

A. No. He was extremely restrained and tolerant.

Q. And he had participated with you and Ms. Thi-Cohen in training specifically oriented towards the de-escalation of conflict, is that correct?

A. Yes.

Q. And when you were hurt, what did he do?

A. He pulled me out of harm’s way. And then, when we were pursued, he sheltered me with his body. I would have been much more severely injured without his help.

State. Objection. Speculation.

Judge Mothman. Sustained.

A. He bent over me. He was hurt, doing that.

FROM THE TESTIMONY OF RABBI AMILYN LUNA CRYSTAL HOLDON, WITNESS FOR THE DEFENSE, CROSS-EXAMINATION

State. Now, Miss – sorry, Ms. –

A. Rabbi.

Q. Right, yes, Rabbi Holdon, earlier you said, and I quote, “Daniel has always been a very active and eager participant in all our non-violent actions.” Correct?

A. Yes.

Q. That’s very specific. Have there been actions that weren’t non-violent?

A. Chai is committed to non-violent principles.

Q. Has Mr. Polansky always been in agreement with you on what the principles of your group should be?

A. I never knew him to advocate for violence.

Q. Please answer the question, Rabbi.

A. Not entirely in agreement, no.

In the gallery, Finn fidgets, and Leah puts her hand on his arm. Rose was a witness, so she can’t watch, but Mr. Calrissian decided not to call Finn, so he’s left his section with a fellow TA and come down to the Manhattan courthouse to watch. He’s been grading papers in the slow moments, of which there are many. But Mr. Calrissian’s made Rabbi Luke his last witness, both because he is one of the people on the scene who was least distracted, and because, as he’d explained, their best shot for countering a white cop was an old white man.

But he’s using Luke’s testimony to bring in what Rey found online. And it’s taking fucking forever.

It had taken long enough to go through all the anti-cop tweets the ADA had found in Poe’s likes. Even just the explanation that Poe hadn’t said those things himself had taken ages, let alone Poe’s attempt to define “Weird Left Twitter.”

But this – this was an eternity. First they were explaining what Discord was. Then they were linking handles to people using Twitter and Gab and IP addresses. Then they were reading the transcripts and explaining the slang. Then they were passing around print-outs. And then, finally, finally they were confirming with Rabbi Luke that what the transcripts described agreed with what he’d said he’d seen, and it did, indeed, seem pretty damning to Finn.

“Your witness,” said Mr. Calrissian, and the ADA rose. Was he sweating? Finn thought he was sweating. Leah’s hand tightened on his arm.

FROM THE TESTIMONY OF RABBI LUKE OWENS SKYWALKER, WITNESS FOR THE DEFENSE, CROSS-EXAMINATION

State. Rabbi Skywalker, are you the son of Amichai Skywalker? Did I say that right? Amichai?

Mr. Calrissian. Objection. Rabbi Skywalker’s family history is irrelevant.

State. Your Honor, I believe Rabbi Skywalker’s intimate connections to terrorists are very relevant to his credibility in this case.

Judge Mothman. Overruled. But please do not lead us too far from the case, Mr. Juarez.

Q. Isn’t it true that your father, Amichai Skywalker, AKA Dov Adar, was wanted by the police in both America and Israel?

A. Yes.

Q. In connection with bombing attacks?

A. Yes.

Q. And is it true that you knew where he was, and chose not to inform the police of either country?

A. He was dead before they could have arrested him.

Q. But you could have alerted the police, and you chose not to.

Mr. Calrissian. Objection. Prosecution is belaboring the point.

Judge Mothman. Overruled.

A. I chose not to summon the police to arrest a corpse, no.

Q. I’m not sure that the jury’s familiar with your father’s cause, Rabbi Skywalker. Do you want to tell them, or shall I?

A. My father lost the entirety of his family in the Holocaust. He came to believe that another Holocaust was inevitable, that antisemitism was ineradicable, and that the only solution was violent separatism. I should note that I wasn’t raised by my father, and in fact didn’t know he was my father until I was twenty-two.

Q. At which point you went to see him.

A. On his death bed. He was repentant.

Q. Do you have any corroboration for that statement, Rabbi Skywalker?

A. No. Only I and another person were present, and that person is also dead.

Q. So your father was obsessed with the idea of Nazis, with the idea of antisemitism, to the point of terrorist violence. And you were with him when he died.

A. I work as a chaplain, sir; I’ve been with many people as they died. I help them come to terms with the evil they may have done. I don’t condone it.

The court is late adjourning for lunch. Mr. Calrissian offers Leah his arm, and she seems to need it. Finn wanders behind them, so stunned that he doesn’t even realize Leah’s bought him lunch until she closes his fingers around the paper wrapping of the sandwich. He stares at her.

“Yes,” she says, quietly. “Our father was Dov Adar. He was a terrorist. The leader of a militia, in Israel. Which has grown into a political party. He has a cult following, there; settlers use his name in graffiti.” She takes a long drink of seltzer. “We would talk about it more if fewer lunatics worshipped him. As it is, it’s felt… dangerous. And I prefer to identify with the Organas. They raised me.” She rubs her temples, and her fingers nudge the ends of her hairpins, making her crown of braids tilt. “And, to the best of my knowledge, they never killed anybody.”

Finn doesn’t know what to say to that, so he eats some sandwich, and thinks. It has never really occurred to him to ask why Leah’s name doesn’t match her brother’s; he’d assumed she’d been married, and asking would have been rude. But with what Ben said, with what Rabbi Luke had said…

Every family has its secrets, he supposes. Every family has its pain. Wrapped around history like a vine around a tree.

He wishes Rey could join them. He’d seen her, briefly, that morning; she’d waited for him in the Canal Street 1 station, looking sleepy and smelling unwashed, and they’d talked, but she couldn’t come in to the courthouse. Not because there was a bulletin out for her – Too late there; we ran out the clock on ‘em, she’d said, gleefully – but for the old, usual reason: Rey had no government ID.

But her evidence is there. “You nailed ‘em down pretty well,” he says to Mr. Calrissian.

“It was very clear,” Leah agrees. “Even I understood it.”

“I’m glad you think so,” Poe’s lawyer says, and Finn notes the grim way he locks eyes with Leah. “That was not the… vibe I was getting from the jury box.”

“What?” Finn says. “But it was all there.”

“It was complicated,” Mr. Calrissian says. “Convoluted. They stopped paying attention. I sounded like a lunatic with thumbtacks and red string.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Leah says.

“And they made my principal witness look like a terrorist sympathizer.”

“You did a fine job on re-cross,” Leah tells him, soothingly. He is not soothed.

“Just fine enough. You know who they’re going to call for rebuttal, Leah. You know.”

She flinches, and they finish lunch in silence.

In the gallery, as the court reconvenes, Finn looks up when a shadow falls over him. “Lemme in so I can sit next to Leah, would you, kid?” says Mr. Baccarin. Finn hurries to comply – and bumps straight into Rey.

“Rey,” he hisses, “what are you doing here?”

“Chuey smuggled me in,” she whispers, and Mr. Baccarin waves a hand dismissively. The judge calls for order, and Rey sits down beside him. She doesn’t smell any better than she had this morning, but he’s glad she’s here; he takes her hand and she holds it tightly. He thinks she might be shaking.

The bailiff stands. “The prosecution calls Detective Benjamin Solomon Organa, of NYPD Special Unit 22.”

Rey’s fingers dig into his. He tries to look over at Leah, but Mr. Baccarin’s massive frame, bent tensely forward, is in the way; he can see only the edge of her hair, to tell him that she is holding her head up straight and high as her son is sworn in.

Finn had almost liked the ADA at first; the man seemed endearingly rumpled, and his slight difficulty in speaking made Finn, against his will, root for him to finish his sentences uninterrupted. By now, he hates him. He hates his smug swagger as he approaches the witness box.

Ben looks, if anything, worse than he had two days ago, when he came to their door. There are dark circles under his eyes, and the scar Rey left on him is an angry, irritated red that matches the red that even Finn, in the gallery, can see in his eyes.

“You’re Detective… Organa,” the ADA says.

“Yes,” Leah’s son mumbles.

“And you work in Detective Huxley’s unit.”

“Yes.”

“Please speak up, Detective Organa. If I can make the jury hear me, so can you.” The lawyer’s smile shows only a sliver of white teeth.

“Yes, I work with Detective Huxley.”

“And you were there, with him, in City Hall Park, on the evening of March 17th.”

“Yes. I was there.” Ben’s eyes seem fixed on his own hands. His big shoulders are hunched around his ears.

“Can you tell us what you saw happen when Detective Huxley attempted to arrest Mr. Polansky?”

“Yes,” Ben says, his voice falling quiet again.

“If you would speak up,” the ADA prompts again. Rey is hurting his hand. He flexes his fingers to make her loosen her grip.

“At the exact moment of arrest, Mr. Polansky was face-down on the ground.” Ben’s eyes don’t move; his shoulders don’t straighten. But his voice becomes loud and precise, rapid in a way Finn is now familiar with, but with a high, sharp resonance. “Prior to that, Mr. Polansky had been covering Rabbi Holdon with his body. Detective Huxley pulled him off and held him upright, manually restrained, while a man from the group of counter-protesters hit him in the head. Mr. Polansky’s head struck Detective Huxley’s face.” The ADA steps back, his head swivels left and right, and he starts to reach out with his hand, but Ben does not stop talking. “Detective Huxley threw Mr. Polansky to the ground, face-down, and placed him under arrest. At no time did Mr. Polansky offer any resistance.”

There is a long silence. The ADA stares at Ben, and Ben, finally, raises his head to stare back. The prosecuting attorney returns abruptly to his seat. “No further questions, Your Honor.”

Mr. Calrissian rises, not quite able to suppress his smile, to begin cross-examination. Ben’s head turns, abruptly, not towards him, but up to the gallery, just for a moment. His eyes flicker over all of them – his mother, Mr. Baccarin, Finn, and Rey – but it’s Rey they catch on, Rey they hold on, before he lowers them again to his hands.

Finn turns to Rey. Her free hand is over her mouth, and tears are running down her face.

“Would you say, Detective Organa, that it would be out of character for your colleague to overlook illegal behavior on the part of a member of a white supremacist group?” Mr. Calrissian asks.

“No,” Ben says. “I’ve seen it happen before. And not just him. I’ve identified four similar instances.”

“Can you tell us about that?”

“Was I really in Egypt?” Rey asked. That would be an exciting thing to tell Finn. “Before? I don’t remember.”

“I don’t know, I’m afraid. This here is just a way of speaking.”

“Oh.” Rey looked down; that was a bit disappointing. But Rabbi Luke was looking at her in a way that meant she needed to pay attention, so she turned her face up to him again.

“This is about you, Rey, but it’s also about me. This is true for everyone: our story begins in slavery and ends in freedom. And do you know what the most important part of this verse is, Rey?”

“No.”

“You shall then recite as follows before your Eternal God. Because when you recite something, you know it by heart. You never forget it. And we recite it before the Eternal, to show God we remember. Will you remember this? That your father was a fugitive Aramean?”

He looked so serious and so kind and his blue eyes were wet. “Yes, Rabbi Luke.”

“You began in slavery, Rey, but by the will of the Eternal, you’ll end in freedom. And so will we all. Liberation is the inheritance of humanity.”

NEW YORK V. POLANSKY, FINAL PROCEEDINGS

Judge Mothman. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?

Jury Foreman. We have, Your Honor. We find the defendant not guilty.

Chapter Text

On the 30th of March, 2018, which is also the 14th of Nisan, 5778, and will, after sundown, be the 15th of Nisan, Leah Organa will be preparing to host a seder at her home. The smell of brisket and parsley stems and roasting eggs will fill the apartment. There will still be papers and books and dust everywhere in the living room, but the dining room, at least, will be shining clean, with an extra leaf in the table and a white tablecloth embroidered in shining white thread with the round shapes of ripe pomegranates.

Based on what he knows of trials, Ben thinks jury deliberations are probably finished, or close to it. He’s wandering the courthouse hallways, feeling lightheaded, looking for the vending machines, when Hux finds him. The man who has been his partner is damp with sweat. “You rat. You fucking rat. Organa.”

“Listening to the testimony of other witnesses in defiance of an exclusion order could render you unable to testify if the case is appealed.” He’s still speaking in what he can’t help thinking of as his student voice – a little prim, and pitched higher than his natural voice, geared to carry in a lecture hall.

“You think Snoke isn’t going to hear about this?” Hux asks, incredulously.

“If you were listening, I assume you already emailed him.” Hux stops short and whips out his phone, glaring at Ben, who tries not to laugh, his voice returning to its normal register as the tension of the witness stand ebbs away. “You’re just so bad at this, Hux.”

“You rat,” Hux spits again, and sends his email.

“Snoke lied to you, too,” Ben points out. “He knew who I was all along.”

Hux breathes hard. “I should have known,” he says. “Your nose. Your hair.”

“What are you, a fucking phrenologist?” Ben sighs. “Move, Hux; I didn’t get lunch, and I – ”

Rey is fast and shockingly stealthy, in her borrowed tennis shoes; he barely even has time to focus his eyes on her before she’s dodged around Hux, seized Ben by the lapels, and pulled him down into a kiss.

She’s given him many kisses, now, which have been hungry and teasing, fierce and light, leisurely and desperate, but this one, which she gives him with an aching little gasp, burns him like none of them have since the first, at the edge of the well. And because he knows her, because now he can say that he knows her, he knows even before she stops kissing him what she will say, and the knowledge heats and consumes him as much as the kiss.

“You were so good,” she breathes, warm against his skin. “You were so, so good and brave.”

“I knew it!” Hux shouts. His eyes are wild. “You were harboring her! You let yourself be – seduced!”

Rey laughs aloud at the word, at Hux’s histrionic outrage, and leans into Ben. “Maybe I did,” Ben says.

“No,” says Rey, “you never would.” She looks at him with still-wet eyes. “You did it all yourself.”

“Well – she’s an illegal alien, and I’m going to detain her,” Hux says, reaching on his belt for his handcuffs.

The lovely girl who cut Ben’s face open in the snow scoffs. “Just you fucking try it.”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you.” Hux whips around; Leah Organa has one expressive eyebrow raised. “You could try, of course,” she says, with a thoroughly undeceptive mildness. “You could try to detain her. New York’s sanctuary laws mean it would officially be a waste of public funds, but you could. But remember, Detective – there’s currently evidence on the public record that you’re guilty of perjury in the first degree, in addition to official misconduct and criminal contempt. My son has just sworn to the court that he is a detective of NYPD Unit 22, which means, whatever his future plans may be, he’s still an officer of the law, and I’m sure his handcuffs are quite as good as yours.”

Ben agrees, “They’re very sturdy,” and Rey claps both hands over her mouth to smother her laugh.

“And if you wanted to make a struggle out of it, well.” Ben’s mother tilts her head. “I’m sure you’re in very good condition, Detective, but frankly, my money is on my son.”

Hux sputters, looking wildly around himself. “I’m going to – I’ll – you’ll – ”

Leah smiles thinly. “If I were you, Detective Huxley, I would do the sensible thing, and leave to confer with the captain who provides the closest thing to brains your operation has.”

Hux swallows, and manages a sneer. “You think you’re so smart, don’t you.”

“I do,” Leah says, complacently. “Especially when I’m standing in front of the representative of a group whose clever plan virtually amounted to a child’s game of ‘stop hitting yourself.’ I saw those transcripts, Detective; you don’t cover yourself in glory. But all to the good, I suppose.”

Rose comes racing down the hall behind Ben, and sees Leah and Rey. “He’s acquitted?” she gasps. “The bailiff just gave me my phone back and Finn says he’s acquitted!”

Leah’s smile is real. “Not guilty on all counts.”

But Rose sees Hux and sucks in her breath. She hurries past Ben and plants herself between Rey and Hux, glaring at him.

“Poe’s acquitted. You fucking lying facist. So don’t try to bully Rey; you better get the hell out before Leah sues your ass.”

By the expression on his face, Hux can only handle one diminutive Jewish lawyer at a time. He gives an inarticulate yell and steps backwards. “You rat,” he says poisonously to Ben, and then widens his address to include all of them as he backs away, “you fucking vermin.”

“You fuck right back off to 1940 with that,” Rose shouts after him.

“We should go find Poe,” Rey says. “He might be done shaking Lando’s hand by now.”

“Go,” says Leah. “If Danny should meet that detective in the hallway… ”

“Oh my God,” Rose says in horror, and takes off running. Rey runs her fingers lightly down Ben’s arm and whirls to run after her, leaving Ben to shiver, and catch his mother’s smirk.

“Don’t laugh at me,” he says wearily.

“Who’s laughing?” She steps to him and straightens his tie, which Rey has disarranged. “You’ve been brave, Benny; it’s good to see you’re lucky, too.” There’s rue in her voice and trouble in her face. “I’m afraid you may need some luck.”

“People live dangerous lives all the time,” he says, absently, repeating what he’s been telling himself for two days. If I perish, then I perish. “There are thousands of people in this city who live in fear of one force or another.”

“I’m your mother,” she says. “I want you to be safe.”

Poe’s cheeks are wet, his blue court suit rumpled, and he staggers with the impact of both Rey and Rose falling on him to embrace him. “I knew it!” Rose cries. “I knew we’d get you out!” She begins to dig in her messenger bag. “I made you cookies, see? Oh, and I took some videos of Baby to show you – ”

Poe briefly lifts Rey off her feet while she pats his curly head affectionately. “Bubbele, Raisele, my little detectives!”

“Rey worked so hard,” Rose tells him proudly.

“Rose made it make sense, though,” Rey counters.

Fresh tears come to Poe’s eyes. “You guys,” he says. “Everything you’ve done – and Lando – ” He twists, drawing his lawyer back into the circle of his gratitude. “I must have been your worst client; I’m so sorry – ”

“Please,” Lando says, waving a dismissive hand. “I once represented Han Solo in court.”

“Just once?” Chuey says. “You lightweight.”

“Where’s Leah?” Poe asks. “She was here before, wasn’t she?”

“She’s with Ben,” Rey tells him. It feels strange, to call him Ben in front of her friends, to be so proud of him. But she is proud of him; he’s so brave; she wants to tell everyone. She wants to buttonhole passing lawyers, busy clerks. Do you know what he did? That man who kisses me, who rubs his nose against my neck, who says he’s sorry in his sleep; do you know how good he is? He is handsome and clever and so, so good.

“That guy!” Poe exclaims. “Can you believe that guy?”

“What?” asks Rose, who has missed everything, in the witness waiting room, and oh, this is Rey’s chance.

“Ben told them everything,” she says. “His captain wanted him to lie, but he didn’t; he told them everything; he explained exactly how it happened, and he told the court all about other times the cops have sided with Nazis. They threatened him – Poe, Hux even broke into Ben’s apartment to try to catch me; that’s why I’m wearing Lando’s shoes – he told me cops who don’t lie when the department wants them to get killed sometimes, but he did it anyway!”

Poe blinks, and looks down at her shoes, and back up at her, and blinks again. “I’d say he won our case for us, really,” Lando says. “And I’m not just saying that because I remember when he used to put his alphabet blocks in my briefcase. Prosecution did an excellent job of making me look like a crackpot and Luke look like a terrorist.”

Rey gapes. “A terrorist?”

“Rey. I have so fucking much to tell you,” Finn says.

“If he hadn’t backed us up, I think my wiseass nightmare of a client could pretty easily have been convicted.”

“Oh God.” Poe scrubs his hands through his hair. “You mean I have to thank that guy? Just for not lying?”

“Well,” says Amilyn, smiling as she joins them, walking carefully, slow and stiff, “I’m sure we can agree that it’s possible for a single act to exist on multiple moral levels at once. It’s true that the commandment against bearing false witness is a mitzvah lo taaseh, but, Daniel, don’t you think – Daniel?”

Poe has sunk to his knees in front of her, his hands clapsed. “Amilyn. I want to hug you but I don’t know if your ribs can take it. But also. Amilyn. Rabbi. Please. For once. I beg you. Just. Call. Me. Poe.”

Amilyn’s smile widens, almost imperceptibly, and she bites her lip. “All you had to do was ask,” she says, and extends her hand to him. “And my ribs are still a little sore, so I appreciate your consideration very much, Poe.”

It’s rarely been hard to convince his mother that he’s hungry, and Leah has accompanied Ben to the courthouse vending machines, though she clearly views his choice to purchase and eat a generically-branded cookie the color of concrete with some skepticism. The vending machines are hidden in a far corner, down several flights of stairs; nevertheless, Uncle Luke has found his relatives.

“So,” he says, heavily, “did the Skywalker family’s sins ruin another innocent person’s life?"

"I didn't lie," Ben says through his teeth. “And he was acquitted.”

"I meant our father," Uncle Luke says. "My cross-examination was mostly devoted to his criminal record and our relationship."

"The ADA was strangely uninterested in letting my brother explain the nine necessary steps of teshuvah and how Dov Adar died with only five complete."

"Leah, he kept implying that I thought an apology was sufficient repentance."

"It's a state court, Luke, not a beit din."

"What could he have done?" Ben blurts. "What can you possibly do, if you think you're doing the right thing, if you think you're protecting people, and you throw your whole life into that, and it turns out you were that wrong? How do you pay for that?"

There is a long silence, in which his mother stares at him, and he stares at his uncle, and his uncle stares into the middle distance, at nothing, at God. Most of us do things in this life for which we should maybe never forgiven, his father had said. But sometimes we are. Ben can see plainly that he is being offered the chance to forgive his family, and to be forgiven in turn. But forgiveness seems so small, in the face of everything that’s wrong. His father’s forgiveness hasn’t freed his father from prison, hasn’t given him back to the woman who loves him. Ben’s forgiveness will not take away the cold memory of a gun at his head. It will not bring a downtown bus driver back to life.

"You're right," Uncle Luke says. "The harm he did in this world was much greater than anyone could hope to make restitution for. But restitution is like every other form of repair." He looks at Ben, then. "Every sin echoes down the generations; Amichai Skywalker died before he was able to begin undoing the damage; we will all die before we finish undoing the damage. But we have to choose some way to live with the knowledge of that.”

“'It is not given to you to finish the work. But neither is it given to you to abandon it.'"

Uncle Luke smiles, just a little. “I’m always pleased when my students remember their Talmud.”

Poe and Amilyn are bent over Rose's shoulder, watching all the videos she's taken of his dog over the past month. Rose's recorded voice says, Who's a good girl? Who's Poe's big good girl? and Poe baby-talks back at the screen, "You are; yeshyeshyesh Baby, you are!" Mr. Calrissian and Mr. Baccarin have fallen into competitive griping about the worst judges they each deal with.

Finn takes the opportunity to start explaining to Rey how little they know about the man who helped shepherd them through childhood. "So their mother gave them up to protect them, but their father thought they died with her, so he didn't look for them and also I guess he kind of lost it and went all in on violence as a strategy? But anyway they ended up being raised by two different families, and you know that story he told us about getting mugged? It was Leah who got mugged, and Luke punched the mugger to save her, and that's how they met. And the thing is that if my math is right, they didn't know they were related until a full year after they met."

"Oh my God," Rey says, open-mouthed as he knew she would be. "Oh my God."

"And apparently when he's in New York he kind of... haunts the place where they met. The cop, Leah’s son, said that he’s always – "

"Ben; his name is Ben. You were talking to Ben?"

"Rey, he basically invaded our apartment when he couldn't find you." Finn hesitates, then acknowledges, "I guess technically I let him in.” He hesitates again. His morning conversation with her had touched on so little – or rather, on a lot, but on such a little fraction of all the things there were to talk about. “He was kind of upset, I guess.”

Rey blushes. Finn examines that blush, reads it through the lens of what he has learned. There are a number of things he could say next.

“He helped me,” he says, a little grudgingly. “The liner of my mom’s tape folds out. There was an illustration and some Hebrew. He helped me read it. Interpret it.”

Rey clutches his sleeve. “And? What did it say?”

Finn swallows. What did it say? “The picture was of a branch of myrtle. And there was a quotation from the Megillah. He thinks her Hebrew name might have been Hadassah. The quotation was – it was about – being brave.”

Rey’s eyes shine. “Being brave,” she repeats.

“And then I had to go find Rabbi Luke to read the other part, which is how I found out he spends all his time in Riverside Park. And it turns out – it turns out my dad did the picture. He signed it. Illustration by Joshua.” Finn swallows. “So he was an artist, too. And that tape is all I have of either of them.”

Rey takes his hand.

“I just – it’s better to have something than to have nothing, right? But I – I just – there are so many things I’ll never find out. And I want to. I want to know so badly.”

“I know,” Rey says.

“I know you know,” Finn says, apologetically. Because of course for every question he has about his parents, Rey has twenty. He should count his blessings. But the questions spill out of him anyway. “Do you think they’d be disappointed?”

”Disappointed? How? In what?”

“In me; they were both artists, creative; they made things – I can’t play an instrument or draw or even sing – I just read things, just live on fellowships and read – ”

Rey seizes his face in both her hands. “Finn,” she says, “they would have been so proud. They would have boasted about you to all their friends. They would have told you every time they called you. They would have gone on and on about it; they would have been so proud it would drive you nuts; it would have been insufferable. ‘Our son, the UCLA Regents’ Scholar.’ ‘Our son, the Columbia Ph.D. candidate.’ ‘Our son, who does social justice activism in his spare time.’ ‘Our son, – oh, and did we mention he’s dating a law student?’”

He laughs, as he knows she meant him to. “What’s funny?” Rose calls. She looks up at them, her smile wide and sweet, her eyes brilliant, and Finn thinks that he cannot be said to have earned Rose’s love, and yet it’s the thing above all others he’s proud to have.

“Nothing,” Finn says. “I’m just… happy, I guess.”

“Ben,” his mother says, “I don’t know – I don’t know how safe you feel going back to your own apartment right now. You’re the best judge of how much of a risk that is. But – if you would feel – if you think you could feel safe staying with me, you know you’re always welcome.”

There is something in him that quails at the thought of returning to that apartment. He can feel the anxiety in his mother, but as the silence stretches on, she doesn’t press him for an answer, and he gathers himself and drags the fear out into the light and looks at it. Some of it is – well, Rey would probably say it’s trauma, the clinging residue of what happened the last time he was there. And some of it is older, is the helplessness of childhood. And some of it is a sort of superstitious terror that, if he lies down in his old bed, time will rewind itself, and he will be the person he was when he had only ever been Ben Organa, and never Kyle O’Ryan of the NYPD.

And for all his sins, he finds he doesn’t want that.

“Can I sleep on the fold-out?” he asks.

Her eyebrows raise. “I – if that’s what you want. Luke can take your bed.”

He is his parents’s son, his uncle’s nephew; he always has been and always will be. But he would like, for at least one night, to stand on the threshold as a guest, while he remembers what that means.

He offers his mother his arm. Her smile, as she takes it, is a quick flash, and his glimpse of tears in her eyes is even quicker. “Now,” she says, in her sternest grumble, “where on earth are we going to find a kosher restaurant that can seat us all?”

“Just order in from that Chinese place on Broadway,” Luke says. “You know, the good one; the one I like.”

“Luke, that place has been gone for five, six years.”

”What? Leah, what has happened to this city?”

Finn and Rose will be the first guests to arrive for Leah’s seder; Finn will have a shankbone in butcher paper under his arm, and Rose will be carrying a sweet kugel made from matzoh and grated apples and raisins, ready to be baked in Leah’s oven. They’ll be well-dressed, Finn in his grey suit and Rose in her favorite dress, blue with a white collar. Leah, who will be running slightly late with her preparations, will still be wearing an enormous Yale sweatshirt; she’ll exclaim over how nice they look, and kiss them both on both cheeks.

Amilyn will arrive next, dressed in white, carrying a stack of ten haggadot. After she puts them down, she’ll ask, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Rose and Finn were just about to start setting the table,” Leah will tell her. “I got the Passover dishes out for them, but the napkins and the silver are in the bottom drawer by the oven.” Amilyn will help with the table while Leah puts on a dove-grey dress with a neat blue jacket.

Then will come Poe, with a bowl of charoset. He will have made it the way his mother did, patiently mincing apples together with dates and dried apricots, mixing in almonds and cinnamon and Passover wine, chopping and chopping again, until he has almost a pound of a fragrant, sticky, red-brown paste to place on Leah’s table and spoon onto the seder plate, meant to look like the mortar of forced labor and to taste as sweet as freedom.

It will be about five minutes from the time of his arrival to the beginning of his first argument with Amilyn.

When Rey sees Leah on her son’s arm, she knows Poe will do the gracious thing. He would always have done the right thing, because he is himself, but because Leah is there, he will do it without grimacing or flinching.

He walks straight to Ben, his hand outstretched. “Thank you,” he says. “I know you were risking a lot, doing that. Are still risking a lot. I know that it’s probably futile for me to offer, but if there’s any help I can give you, all you have to do is ask. No – don’t ask – tell. Tell me, and I’ll do it.”

Ben looks at Poe’s hand, and then grasps it, and then stares at it as if he doesn’t know what to do with it. “It was nothing,” he mumbles.

“It was not nothing.” Poe shakes their joined hands. “It was the truth.”

“Yes, but I had to,” says Ben, which on the face of it doesn’t quite make sense as a response, but Rey understands, and she thinks Poe does too. He shakes Ben’s hand again.

“Rey seems to call you Ben,” he says. “Is that… Rey-specific, or should the rest of us call you that too?”

“Ben is fine.” He lets go of Poe’s hand awkwardly, and looks at Rey quickly, almost furtively.

“Well,” Poe says jovially, “good thing I didn’t get that ACAB tattoo in prison, eh?”

“Aycab?” Amilyn asks.

“It’s an acronym,” Ben says. “All Cops Are Bastards. Dates from around 1970; it’s more common in the UK, where it’s a standard prison tattoo, but it’s gained international traction; in the US it’s mostly gotten popular in anarchist circles over the past five-to-fifteen years, though you sometimes see it as a motif in otherwise apolitical graffiti.”

“Oh, I see,” Amilyn says. “How interesting!”

“Yes,” says Ben, “actually what’s really interesting is that it’s so common in Europe that it’s actually legally recognized as an insult to law enforcement in countries where English isn’t the dominant language, like Spain and Germany. But anyway.” He looks at his feet. “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be a cop.”

“We should discuss that,” Leah says, seriously. “Don’t hand in your resignation just yet, please. But I would like to take everyone to dinner, first, if there’s somewhere that can accommodate all our dietary restrictions.”

“There are some very good vegetarian Indian restaurants on Lexington around 23rd with hechshers,” Amilyn says. “Will that do?”

“Do they have good wine?” Lando asks. “I need at least half a bottle.”

With the help of a few smartphones, they settle on a place. Rey is not interested; Rey does not want to go to dinner. Rey wants Ben; he’s still got his mother on his arm, so she doesn’t feel like she can literally throw herself at him, but she can’t stop looking at him. I want you, she thinks. You’re so good; you’re so handsome; you’re so brave; I want you so badly.

“Amilyn, you’re still injured; we should get a cab,” Leah says. “Lando, will you ride with us?”

Lando gives her a considering look. “Of course,” he says.

Leah disengages from Ben, patting him on the arm. “The young and the strong can make their own way.”

Ben knows what she’s doing, of course; she wants Lando with her because they’re going to strategize, and they don’t want him to hear. He bristles, to be treated like a child, unable to have a say in his own fate. He is considering insisting on riding with his mother when Rey’s hand slips into his.

He looks at her, at her dirty hair and shining eyes. No one is looking at them; they’re all arguing about cabs or laughing at the jubilant, fast-talking antics that Poe has been repressing for a month, and which are now spilling out of him like candy from a piñata. “You’re not a cop,” Rey says to him softly. She puts her hand under his coat, under his suit jacket, over his heart. He thinks she must be able to feel it speed up, the blood rushing to his head. “You helped Poe, and you helped Finn. You’re so good. I knew. You’re so good, Ben.” He sighs, and though he almost wants to argue with her he melts a little into her touch. She goes on her toes and speaks in his ear. “I want you so badly, Ben.”

He leans his forehead against hers, closes his eyes, and inhales. “When,” he says, covering her hand with his own, “did you last have a shower?”

She jerks back, blushing. He keeps hold of her hand, not letting her get too far; she may smell like several days sleeping in public places, but he’s smelled worse and she’s still Rey.

“Mom,” he says, and Leah turns. “Can I have the keys? I’m exhausted and Rey needs a shower.”  

“Oh, yes,” she says, with a quirk of her mouth, “of course.” She turns to her brother. “Luke, can you give Ben the spares?”  

Uncle Luke digs in his pockets. He’s wearing the coat he’s always worn in New York springs and falls, brown tweed with a creamy lining. It seems to Ben that that sleeves come down farther over his hands than they had the last time he saw him. He produces the spare keys to the Organa’s apartment, and also Rey’s cell phone.  

“I’m afraid the battery’s dead,” he tells her. “I was never good with phones.”  

“I know,” she says. “You never answered any of my calls.” Ben thinks she’s trying for wry, but she sounds hurt. He tightens his grip on her hand.  

“I’m sorry,” Luke says. “I was… elsewhere.” His gaze on Rey is very intent. “We need to talk, Rey.”

“Tomorrow?”

Uncle Luke nods. “Sure.”

Rey rubs his hand with her thumb as they walk to the train, and pushes herself under his arm in a way that presses her breasts to him very tightly. “Rey,” he says, “this is Broadway.”

“Yeah,” she says, “but I’ve been really stressed and it’s been like four days.”

“Walk faster, then,” he says, and she takes off running.

He could catch her within half a block, but he knows he’s going to kiss her when he does, so he lopes behind her just fast enough to keep her in sight, and seizes her by the wrist only at Canal, so that he can press her against the barrier for the subway stairs. “You’re filthy,” he tells her. “I love kissing you.” She had cried for him, in the courtroom.

“Going to take me home and wash me?” she murmurs.

He starts to pull her down the stairs by way of an answer, and then stops. Is he proposing to fuck her in an apartment where he’s not sure he can bear to sleep in his own bed? “Would – would you take me home?” he asks, focusing his eyes on the scratched and tarnished handrail. “I should go to my mother’s but – I went to your apartment but I didn’t – you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“You’re lucky I have Finn’s keys,” she says, and pulls him the rest of the way down the stairs. “Come on; I can hear the train.”

They miss it. Ben’s metrocard gets bent, and he has to swipe it five times before the machine reads it. Rey laughs at him as he curses, because the motion of swipe-and-walk is so unified in his brain, twice-daily muscle memory of twenty years, that he can’t do one without the other, and he crashes into the unmoving turnstile every time. He makes it through just in time to hear the chime of the closing doors.

“God fucking damn it!” he shouts, as the exiting crowds move past him, avoiding eye contact, and Rey laughs again, and he grabs her and feeds his frustration into another kiss. She gives more than as good as she gets, letting him feel her teeth and scraping with her nails at the skin of his wrists as he holds her head. “Oh God,” he says. “Fuck. Oh God. Rey.”

She staggers a little when he lets her go, and then she’s back on him, her hands on his face and her trusting eyes on his. “Ben,” she says. “You did such good things. I love you so much.”

He almost falls. He seizes her by the waist; trying to hold on just enough to steady himself, not to clutch her greedily to him and demand she repeat herself. She’s a person, not a doll with a string he can pull, though if he could pull a string to hear it again he would; he’s weak and he would. But he can’t make her say it again, and anyway, he tells himself, settling himself on his feet, she doesn’t mean it like he wants her to. He understands what she’s telling him, the context – not that she loves him the way he loves her, but that she loves him the way she loves Poe, the way she loves Finn. He’s helped them; he’s part of their community. The circle of people Rey loves.

And yes, Ben is weak, and Ben is selfish, and part of him howls, because he wants to be her best and favorite and only; yes, Ben is stupid and self-destructive, as he’s shown repeatedly and clearly, on and off the witness stand. But he’s not yet stupid and weak and selfish and self-destructive enough to throw away even a little of Rey’s love just because he can’t have as much as he wants. And she does want him, and he’s wanted that so much, and she is still giving it to him.

So he just holds her.

But then she does say it again, and again, thrilling and fast, as if she couldn’t stop herself. “I love you; I love you so much; you’re my favorite, Ben; you’re the best.”

Rey must be able to feel it, the shudder that goes through him, that she’s ripped him open so efficiently, and seen the desperate, childish depths of his heart. He feels as abject as if she had taken everything from him, and as elated as if she had given him everything. She has done both.

He holds her as tight as he can; his voice aches in his chest. “Ani l’dodi, v’dodi li.” Words he has choked back, words he has tried to forget. Words for a song, words for a wedding ring. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.

Her hands clasp his neck, and she licks her lips, and swallows. Her voice is thin and fragile as she whispers it back to him. “Ani l’dodi, v’dodi li.”

He kisses her, blinded and dazed. Wind rises around them as the train comes.

“The thing is – and mind you this is a new argument to me, too – that when we say ‘stranger,’” Poe will say, paging through a haggadah, “we’re implying that people who are new to our community don’t belong to our community.”

“They don’t,” Amilyn will say. “Not yet. If they belonged fully to our community, they would be equal citizens; they would have the same rights we do, and they wouldn’t need protection.”

“But isn’t making them part of our community how we protect them?”

“I would say that the narrative inherently declares that the condition of being a stranger can be temporary. Slaves should be set free; strangers should be welcome. These aren’t permanent identities.”

“But don’t we – ”

The argument will be derailed when Lando and Chuey arrive, and Chuey sweeps Amilyn into a discussion of logistics for a legal aid fundraiser. Lando, meanwhile, will look at Poe’s suit, which will have only gotten shabbier since he wore in court, and will by then also have chalk dust from cuff to elbow, and give Poe a look of such transparent disappointment and disdain that Poe will laugh until it gives him a coughing fit.

Ben is very disappointed to discover that he can’t fit in Rey’s shower with her. He contents himself with watching her, and inhaling the heady, spicy steam, and being dragged into her room to hold her tight and fuck her like she begs him to and be kissed and kissed and kissed. He has a hazy impression of her room as messy stacks of books and circuitry strewn dangerously over the floor, coarse sheets he grips so hard he worries they’ll tear, and an absurd profusion of plants which add to his delirious feeling of having somehow stumbled into actual paradise. Rey’s hair, dark with water, streams over her shoulders, and he wraps his hands in it. A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters. “Mine,” she says, pulling at him, “mine, mine,” and he has never agreed with her more.

Afterwards he just wants to sleep with her in her narrow bed, but she insists there’s no room. He argues that there demonstrably is, but she reminds him that his mother might worry if he doesn’t go to her apartment. She’s right, but he feels downright mournful until he sees she’s putting on her shoes too. “You’re coming with me?”

Her head jerks up. “Do you mind?” she asks, almost flinching.

“Do I mind?” he asks her incredulously, and then picks her up and carries her out the door while she shrieks happily and demands he go back so she can get a bag.

“Anyway,” she tells him, as they wait for the train, “I’ve seen your mom’s apartment. Unless you’re planning to sleep with dusty newspapers as a pillow, you might want some help.”

“You don’t have to help me clean, Rey,” he tells her, and then, seeing her shiver in the wind with her wet hair, puts his hat on her. It slips down almost over her eyes, and she laughs, pushing it back, and he thinks what will become of me? and maybe I’ll die, and then I can’t; she might cry.

He won’t let her dust (“It’s basically my mother’s filing system, how deep the dust is”) but he does let her help him change the sheet on the fold-out. When the bed is made, she sits on it, and he sits on the floor and puts his head on her knee. He waits for what he’s sure is several minutes of her quietly combing his hair with her fingers before asking her if she’ll tell him again.

“Tell you what?” she asks. “That I love you? That you’re mine? I do love you, and you are mine.” She tugs lightly on his hair. “All mine.”

“Yes,” he says, “tell me that.” He bites her knee, gently, and she shivers. “Tell me I’m yours and you’re mine.” He climbs to his knees and pulls her face to his. “Tell me you love me best and you don’t want anybody but me; it doesn’t have to be true. Like a brucha. You don’t have to believe it, but say it anyway.”

“I love you best,” Rey whispers. “You’re my only beloved, and you are mine.”

He drops his head to her lap again. “I love you so much, Rey,” he says, straining not to cry. “Please don’t leave me.”

“Never,” she hisses, like the idea enrages her. “Never. I’ll never leave you, and I won’t let anyone hurt you. Not your captain, not Hux, not anyone. You’re mine and I won’t let them touch you.” And he has fought for ten years to make himself a shield, to protect the people of his city, but here, in the warmth of Rey’s righteous courage, he finally feels safe.

”Where are they?” Rose will fret. “It’s almost dark. Did they text?”

Leah will check her phone. “Not yet. But I’m sure they’ll be here soon. Let’s set out the candles.”

The two candles, narrow and white, will sit on the table in plain silver candlesticks, waiting to be lit, and Rose will fidget with their placement.

“Will you be able to reach them here?” she will ask Amilyn.

“I can walk around the table if I have to,” Amilyn will assure her. “It’s more important to put them where everyone can see them.”

Rey wakes up with her feet on the floor and her back on the fold-out bed, and Ben’s weight pinning her legs in place. There’s noise in the hall, and she hears Leah calling, “Luke – Luke, you idiot – ” and then Luke is in the doorway, looking at them bemusedly.

“Oh,” he says, and Ben stirs.

“Uncle Luke?” he says groggily.

“You have your clothes on,” Uncle Luke points out. He seems to be swaying a little.

“Luke, if you thought they might not, why on earth did you walk in?” Leah demands.

“I wasn’t thinking,” Luke tells her. And then, explanatorily, to Rey, “Lando was pouring. You should never let Lando pour.”

“Luke,” Leah says, and drags him backwards. He lets himself be dragged, but returns to the doorway.

“Rey,” he says. “In the morning, Rey.”

Then he goes, and Rey pulls Ben up on the bed with her, and rolls over to sleep on his chest, breathing in the cool, clean smell of him.

Leah doesn’t wake them up, but she’s clearly listening, turning on the stove the first moment she hears Rey stir. Rey has the imprint of one of Ben’s buttons on her jaw. She kisses him awake, and he smiles at her so adoringly she could cry. She returns his smile shyly, and he arranges her hair with tender, sleep-clumsy fingers. They neaten their clothes as best they can and stumble into the kitchen, where Leah is cracking eggs efficiently into the pan.

“I hope eggs are all right,” she says. “Let me know if you want anything else.”

“Eggs are great,” Rey says, eagerly. “Thank you.”

“Did you and Lando have a good time deciding what to do with me?” Ben asks, sourly. Leah looks at him, and then away. “You didn’t think my input might have some value?”

“That was not… the nature of the situation,” she says, stiffly.

“What was it’s nature, then?”

Leah swallows. “Your captain called me. As I thought he would. I wanted witnesses to the call. And I didn’t want you to hear him.” She appears to concentrate on the eggs, shifting them with the spatula. The kettle boils. “It was hard enough,” she says quietly, barely audible under the rising tone of its whistle, “without you there.”

“What did he say?” Ben asks, frowning, but Rey has read Leah’s face.

“He threatened you,” she says, with mounting outrage. “He did, didn’t he? He threatened Ben.”

Leah makes herself busy with eggs. “I don’t know your financial situation, Ben,” she says, “but if you can afford it, I recommend you resign without notice.”

Rey seethes. “How can they? If they’re going to act like the mob, can’t we – ”

“It’s fine,” Ben interrupts. “The desk clerk on the evening shift hates Snoke; he’ll let me in to do what I need without a fuss. I’ll do it tonight.”

“But they can’t make you do that, have to sneak into your own workplace and probably give up pay, just because you didn’t lie,” Rey insists. There has to be something to be done. She appeals to Leah. “Can’t we… sue them, or call the New York Times, or something?”

“The New York Times did a series on the subject in 2016. And they’re already being sued,” Leah says. “There are seven outstanding individual cases, I think. Which isn’t to say I’d be averse to bringing another, Ben.”

“I was assuming you’d already threatened to, if you spoke to Snoke.”

“I did threaten Captain Noakes with a lawsuit, yes, after he threatened your safety, although the plaintiff in question would have been Danny. Amilyn could take them to court, too, and Rose and your friend Mr. Wexler also have cases, since, as Rey has so ably shown, the police encouraged the hate group to target them.” Leah hands them plates. The eggs are extravagantly peppery and buttery and Rey savors them, leaning against the counter.

“Let them decide if they want to sue,” Ben snarls, not touching his breakfast. “Don’t bring me into it.”

“But they’d want you to be safe,” Rey protests. It occurs to her that perhaps they are eating standing up in the kitchen so that Ben will not have to sit at the dining table where Quira put him at gunpoint.

“Would you ask them to do it for you? You hide from the cops all the time,” Ben says. “Even before I – ”

“But I’m worried about deportation, not being killed; it’s not the same.” Would she ask her friends to give up a lawsuit, just for her? They already give up so much. It’s different. This isn’t about her, anyway.

“Maybe,” Ben says wretchedly, looking at his plate. “Maybe not.”

“Good morning,” says Luke, in an even rougher voice than usual. “Leah. Rey. Ben.”

“Good morning,” Rey says.

His sister asks him, in a distinctly unsympathetic voice, “Do you need aspirin?”

“I don’t. Thank you,” Luke replies, with dignity.

“Hi,” says Ben, and eats some eggs, to Rey’s relief.

“Have some tea, then,” Leah says, and gives him a cup.

“Goody. Hot leaf-flavored syrup.”

“Just because you didn’t have the good fortune to be raised by a family that drank tea – ”

“Didn’t you have something to tell Rey?” Ben interrupts. “We have things to do today.”  

Rey is not aware of any such plans, and starts to say so, when Ben kicks her very gently in the shin. Fine. She glares at him. “What’s up, Rabbi Luke?” Is he going to offer me a job? If he got more funding to re-start his kids program, I could teach them to code. But I don’t have my degree yet; and anyway Finn is here and now I have Ben. It’s a warm thought. Now I have Ben. She smiles at Luke. It’s kind of him to still be looking out for her.

“You know I’ve been doing some work with the elderly, these past few years.”

“Yeah?” Rey supposes the elderly might also want someone to teach them to code. They might be bored.

“I met a man in a senior home. His name is Oscar Platt.”

The plate breaks into splinters when it hits the floor. The eggs are ruined. “Leah – I’m so sorry – I’ll pay for it – I – ”

”Luke Skywalker!” Leah barks. Rey is kneeling, trying to clean the mess she’s made; Ben pulls her up and kicks the broken plate under the counter as his mother shouts at his uncle. “You take this conversation into the living room this instant!”

Ben folds the bed up messily, one-handed, holding her wrist as he does it; the sheets show at the edges of the couch as he throws the cushions back on and makes her sit. Rey tries to tuck the sheets away, and he grabs that hand, too. “I knew you knew his name,” he says through his teeth. “I knew he wasn’t dead.”

“Ben,” Leah says sternly. “Please give a moment’s consideration to what Rey needs.” Rey shakes her head, pulling her hands away from him. She doesn’t need anything. What a concept. She shakes her head again.

“Rey,” Ben says urgently, “what do you need?”

“Nothing.” Nothing. Nothing possible. So nothing worth asking for. Nothing worth thinking of.

“All right,” Leah says, “then we will just sit here quietly with you and be ready if you do think of something. Benjamin.”

Ben and his mother sit on either side of her. Ben puts his arm on the back of the couch, not touching her, but she can feel him, the way he leans, tense and ready to gather her up. Luke takes a deep breath. “I’ve spent a lot of time talking to Mr. Platt. Oscar. His memory is quite good. And I did some… follow up.”

“You found them?” she blurts. “You found my parents?” That’s ridiculous; he couldn’t find them; how could he find them –

“Yes,” he says, nodding slowly. “In a manner of speaking. You may have guessed this, Rey, but – ” He’s silent, and every horrible thing Rey has ever thought floods her mind. They were deported, or put in jail; they’ve been trying to find me all these years, making desperate bargains with terrible people, while I've been hating them; horrible, ungrateful child. Oscar Platt told them I was dead; they’ve been grieving, heartbroken; I'm awful for hating them; I don't deserve to have parents at all. They’re happy in Ventura with their new daughter. They always knew I was worthless.

Ben’s arm is around her – tightly, she supposes. “Just tell her,” he says, harshly. “Just tell her.” He’s wiping her tears with clumsy fingers.

“They’re not with us anymore, Rey,” Luke says softly. “They both died in September of 1998.”

1998. Maz cut her free that year, in the July heat, crouching beside her with the bolt cutters while Rey stared. They could have found her. They could have come back, any time. The whole time.

“How?” she asks.

“Their names were Max and Marina Plavnik,” Luke says. “Max died of… alcohol poisoning, essentially. Marina was with him at the hospital and identified him. She was struck and killed by a car three weeks later. She was walking on a freeway onramp. Her blood alcohol level was… ”

He trails off. “Of course,” Rey says, dully. Ben breathes like a bull, beside her, but all he does is hold her. “Of course. I see.”

Luke clears his throat. “Oscar had taken their passports from them as collateral. Along with – you. He sold the passports, later, for a small sum, but he examined them. They were from Belarus.” Rey should care. These are important things she’s learning, things she wanted to know her whole life. Her whole life that she can remember. “I found their marriage record in Vitebsk, but I couldn’t find any family; the listed witness died in 2002. According to Oscar, they had traveled to Israel in 1988, but I wasn’t able to find evidence that they had completed applications for citizenship.” Luke has gone to Belarus, to Israel, just to find these things out for her. “They traveled to Mexico later that year, and it seems likely that you were born there.” Rey’s head is filled with gruesome, sordid details. Vomit. Crushed glass.

“Rey,” Ben says, shakily, “do you need water? Tea?”

Nothing. She needs nothing. She looks at him, at his trembling lip. “Water,” she whispers, and he jumps up. She feels cold without him.

“Oscar arranged for their transport, with you, over the border near San Diego in 1996. He doesn’t know how old you were; he said that you spoke some Spanish and some English, and that you could run very fast. That you enjoyed running.”

There’s a long silence. Ben presses a cool glass into her hand. She drinks it all. When she puts it down, Luke says, “Rey, I know you’ve always known his name; I know you’ve never wanted to see him prosecuted.” He kneels in front of her, with a surprising smooth grace. “If you were born in Mexico, you’re a Mexican citizen. But I couldn’t find any proof, anywhere. Nothing. But if you give information to prosecutors, Rey, you could – ”

“No,” she says, “no. He’ll suffer. I don’t – he’s old.”

“I understand what you mean, Rey. And I respect your reasons. But that’s the point: he is old. Old enough to be eligible for compassionate release. You can ask for that, for him. He won’t enjoy a trial, but it won’t last long. Rey – “ he stoops until she meets his eyes – “I’m saying he can pay for your freedom. Not with his suffering. Only with his shame.”

If she does it – if she gets a visa – all the things she could have – all the things she could do – all the things she wouldn’t have to be afraid of –

Ben’s fingers are light on her arm. She turns and buries her head in his chest. He strokes her hair. “Shaina maidel, shaina maidel, he’s right. Listen to him.”

What currency can pay for pain?

She turns to Leah. “They really won’t hurt him?”

Leah nods, slowly. “It can be arranged that way. If he confesses, if his doctors cooperate, if you ask for leniency.”

“His doctors will cooperate,” Luke says. “I’ve spoken to them.”

“Is it… fair?” she asks. “Just. Is it just.”

“Yes,” Leah says, so swiftly that Rey is startled. “Yes. If you don’t do this, Rey, then you will suffer. Even more than you have already. I can’t make you do it, and I won’t try, but if it were my choice to make?”

Her fingers snap. A sound like a match striking.

”Finally!” Rose will exclaim, when Leah’s phone chimes.

“It’s Luke,” Leah will announce, opening her phone.

Finn’s mouth will drop open. “Rabbi Luke sent a text?”

Leah will peer at the phone. “‘Dear Leah, We had some trouble with the subway. Now we are in a taxi. Rey estimates that at our current rate we will be there in ten minutes. Love, your brother.’”

Rey needs air. She tells Ben so. He gets it for her. It’s so simple it feels like a miracle, like a crime. He brings her her dingy white coat and Lando’s white shoes, and that’s enough; it’s enough to go on the street and breathe cool April air, with Ben beside her.

They walk in silence for a while. “You really think I should do it?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Leave college and go to California and walk up to some desk at the LAPD, and say, ‘Excuse me, I’m a human trafficking victim, and I’d like to prosecute; give me a visa?’”

“Yes,” he says.

“And then push everything through the courts, through everything I was just fighting against?”

“If the system – ” oh, the ironic stress he puts on that word – “can once in a while work like it’s supposed to, why not let it?”

“Is that how it’s supposed to work, though?”

He rolls his eyes. “I dunno, Rey, is the system supposed to help people who’ve been victims of crimes and create even the slightest hint of consequences for criminals?”

“But – ”

“Rey.” He stops. “Do it. Go to California. Put him on trial, and tell the truth, and get a T-visa, and get health insurance and scholarships and a real ID and all the regular things you deserve to have. Okay? And then.” He licks his lips. The corner storefront behind him is empty; HOT COFFEE haunts the wall in ghostly outline. “And then come back to me. Please.”

“You won’t – you wouldn’t come with me?” Maybe he has things he needs to do here, urgent and important things. Maybe he thinks he needs to test her, or her love. Maybe he thinks she only really wants him for sex. Maybe he only –

“You want me to come with you?” He looks stunned.

“Ben,” she says. “Ben, of course, and I mean, Ben, the NYPD can hate you all they like, but if you’re in Los Angeles, they can go to hell. Right? Everyone can decide if they want to sue or not, and you don’t have to worry that they’re doing it for you. You can just leave.” She almost laughs; it’s so simple.

“Leave New York?” He sounds like she’s suggested moving to the moon.

“Los Angeles is warm, and there’s so much sky, compared to here; there’s sky everywhere, and the Mexican food is so good, and the thrift stores are way better, and there are parrots – ” She stops. “And you can come back and visit your dad, right? And your mom comes out all the time to see Luke and do law stuff anyway, right?”

He looks away. “But what will I do? In LA?”

“What will you do here?” He swallows. “And if you come with me, you could – help me, couldn’t you? You know about law, you know how to talk to cops.” She steps close to him. “Come with me.” He searches her face. She lays her hands against his chest. “Please, Ben.”

His hands close over hers, and he kisses her, sighing. When he lets her go, he frowns down at her hands. “Didn’t Finn give you your glove? I gave it to him to give to you.”

“Oh, that?” She digs in her pockets. “He gave it to me, but Ben, I think you made a mistake; this isn’t mine. I haven’t had a pair like this in ages; Rose gave me some wool ones for Chanukah, but I always forget to wear them.” She holds the glove out to him. “Did you find it on the stairs or something?”

He’s blushing dark red – it can’t be good for you to have that much blood rush to your head like that?

“No,” he mumbles. “It’s yours. It got – left, when I was returning your possessions. When you were detained. In November. It was an accident. And then I took it home. And I kept forgetting to give it back to you.” He takes her hand, rubbing it awkwardly. “And your hands always looked cold, when I saw you – and – you shouldn’t be cold – and – ”

“Well,” she says, and puts the glove on her left hand. “I’ll wear this one, and you can hold my other hand, and then I’ll be warm.” He takes her right hand in both of his, and kisses it. She does feel warm.

The doorbell will ring. “That was never ten minutes,” Leah will shout, Rose and Finn and Poe racing behind her.

“I know,” Rey will say, ruefully, as Leah kisses her on both cheeks. “It took Luke about nine minutes to type out the message.”

“He wouldn’t let us text, either,” Ben will add. He will be wearing a blue suit, which Lando will rate much higher than Poe’s, and carrying a large leather portfolio. Luke, behind them, will be pulling a suitcase and looking sulky.

“I just wanted to show you I could do it, Leah,” he’ll say.

Finn and Rose will hug Rey so hard she grunts. Poe, while he waits his turn, will offer Ben a decorous handshake.

“Is that – ?” Finn will ask, pointing at the portfolio, and Ben will nod, solemnly, as he leans it carefully against the wall beside Rey’s bag.

“Belarus?” Finn repeats, as they walk through Central Park with Baby on her leash. “Holy shit. Rey. I mean it makes sense they’d leave, but… ”

“Because it was a Soviet republic?” Rose asks.

“It… I mean, statistics from the SSRs aren’t consistent or reliable. But it lost a huge chunk of its population in the 40s. And about two-thirds of its Jews. And a lot of them were rounded up by their neighbors. So the post-war climate… ” Rey nods, stiffly. She said Luke couldn’t find any family, Finn remembers.

“And I don’t think you want to try to claim blood-right citizenship, if they even offer it,” Poe says. “It has literally the worst human rights record in Europe.” Baby nudges him with her nose. She does that a lot, ever since he came back from prison – maybe to make sure he’s there, maybe to remind him not to leave her again.

“I’m actually probably a Mexican,” Rey says. “Though I can’t prove it. But apparently I used to speak Spanish.”

“Bubbele!” Poe exclaims. “¿De verdad?”

“Used to,” Rey says gloomily. “Just my luck to lose an actually useful language and pick up a fake English accent.”

“When you have a visa,” Rose says, “maybe you can leave the country to take trips. You could go to the UK! Maybe the BBC will welcome you as a native.”

“Or you could go to Mexico,” Poe says. “Some nice abuela will seize you with tears in her eyes and tell you about how she was there when you were born and she always knew you’d come back.”

All these places Rey could go. All of them away from Finn. “Just – go to LA first,” he says. “And prosecute the bastard, and get your visa.” And come back to me. Because they’ve never been apart for this long, never more than a week, not since they met. But she needs this; it will change her life. He clears his throat. “And Skype us a lot.”

Rey throws her arms around him. “Of course.” She’s very serious as she looks at him. “And call me any time, Finn. Literally any time. I’ll always answer. You know I will.”

“I know.” He does.

Everyone will rush to the table to take their seats, with Amilyn at the head and Luke and Leah at the foot, ready to duck into the kitchen for whatever may need fetching. There will be an empty chair, which would be ordinary, of course, for Passover – the place at the table left for Elijah the Prophet, who could come to answer all questions and solve all difficulties – but at Leah’s table, the empty chair will not be an ordinary dining chair with a cushion, like the others, but a dusty armchair from the living room, where a man used to sit who will eat that night in the mess at Riker’s Island.

Amilyn will light the candles, blessing (first in Hebrew and then in English) them, and the holiday, and the sabbath that begins that night. They will pour the first cup of wine, the cup of sanctification, and everyone at the table will bless the Lord who creates the fruit of the vine, and they will drink, and bless the Lord who has kept them and sustained them and brought them to this holiday season.

Luke will remind them that Passover has its roots in a pascal celebration of the return of spring, as they all take sprigs of parsley and dip them in salt water, which Amilyn will remind them is a symbol of the bitterness of oppression. They will bless the Lord who creates the fruit of the earth.

Amilyn will lift a plate covered with a painted cloth and holding three thin pieces of unleavened bread. “Now,” she will say, reading from the haggdah, “I break the middle matzah and conceal one half. Later we will share it. Among people everywhere, sharing of bread forms a bond of fellowship. For the sake of our redemption, we say together the ancient words which join us with our own people and with all who are in need, with the wrongly imprisoned and the beggar in the street. For our redemption is bound up with the deliverance from bondage of people everywhere.”

The people at the table will read with her: “This is the bread of affliction, the poor bread, which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are in want share the hope of Passover.”

They will pass half the piece of matzah around the table, breaking off fragments for themselves.

Unknown Number
Hi, Finn? This is Ben Organa.
Me
Oh, hi

There is a long pause, of the three-dot variety. Finn turns back to working on his bibliography.

Unknown Number
So I found my old diary at my mom’s apartment and I did some looking and I must have gotten your mother’s tape at a Library Tigers show, so I asked Rey to tweet at their singer and she remembered the show and emailed me the merch guy’s info; if you want to reach out to him, he’s at [email protected].

Finn’s hands shake. Someone who has met her. Heard her. Might tell him something.

Me
Thank you
Unknown Number
No problem.

His phone prompts him. Unknown Number. Maybe: Ben Organa? Finn saves the contact.

Amilyn will read, “Four times the Torah repeats: ‘And you shall tell your child on that day… ’ From this, our tradition infers that there are different kinds of people; to each we respond in a different manner, according to the question and the need.”

She will nod to Rey, seated to her left, and Rey will read, “The wise child asks, ‘What are precepts, laws, and observances which our God commanded us?’ In response, we should explain the observances of Passover very thoroughly.”

“It is the wise who want to know what service is theirs to do,” the group at the table will read.

Ben, beside Rey, will take a breath to read, but Poe, on Amilyn’s other side, will jump in. “The wicked child says, ‘What is this observance to you?’ Since they say ‘to you’ and not ‘to us,’ they reject essentials of our faith. Thus we respond sharply: ‘It is because of what God did for me when I went forth from Eygpt – for me, that is, and not for you, since had you been there, you would not have known redemption.”

Ben will look across the table curiously at Poe, who will blush as they all read, “The wicked one withdraws the self from anything beyond the self, and thus from the joy of redemption.”

Again, Ben will take a breath, but this time it will be Luke who takes the reading from him. “When the simple child asks, ‘What is this?’ then we say, ‘With a mighty arm God freed us from Egypt, from the house of bondage.’”

“To the person of open simplicity, give a straightforward answer,” everyone will read.

But no one will choose to stop Ben from reading the fourth child’s part. “With the child unable to ask, you must begin yourself, as it is written: ‘And you shall tell your child on that day.’”

“With the one who has no need to know, no will to serve, you must begin yourself, to awaken the need, to give the will.”

Leah wears yellow rubber gloves to wash the dishes, handing Ben the plates to dry without looking. Rey is spending the night in the Bronx, packing. “Mom, it’s ten fucking years since I graduated.”

“It’s not like you’ve been waiting tables for ten years; you have ten years of very practical experience with criminal law.”

”New York criminal law, and isn’t the California bar supposed to be impossible?”

“If you’d met the California lawyers I have, you wouldn’t think so.”

“Mom.”

“Ben.” She puts down the plate and the sponge and turns to him. “I’m not saying you have to be a lawyer. There are a hundred things you can do with a JD, and you don’t have to use your JD. Become an administrator. Have Rey teach you to code. Wait tables if you want to. I’m just saying, if you don’t want to do something, say so. Don’t say ‘I can’t,’ because I know you can.”

Ben wraps the dish towel tight around his fist. “It’s not – it’s not what I want, or can – I don’t know what I should do.”

She sighs, and pats his shoulder with a wet rubber hand. “That, boychik, you do have to decide on your own. I’d help if I could.”

The people at the table will take turns reading the story of the redemption from Egypt. Though Chuey and Lando will have been at many seders here before and will not be by any means uncomfortable, they will be at their most fluent here, reading out a translation of a book their traditions share, telling how Pharaoh closed his eyes to everything good the Jews had brought, and chose to make his people afraid of them, so they would feel free to enslave them.

At the end of the story, they will all pour ten drops of wine from their glasses, grieving for the ten plagues that the Egyptians suffered. Amilyn will read, “Our rabbis taught: When the Egyptian armies were drowning in the sea, the Heavenly Hosts broke out in songs of jubilation. God silenced them and said, ‘My creatures are perishing, and you sing praises?’ Our rabbis taught: The sword comes into the world because of justice delayed and justice denied. Our rabbis taught: God is urgent about justice, for upon justice the world depends.”

And as they name the plagues, one by one, in Hebrew and in English, Rey will reach for Ben’s hand under the table. She will think, looking at the wine, which is nearly black in the candlelight, that it is dark as Ben’s eyes, and she’ll squeeze his fingers to make him turn those eyes on her.

“Come on. This way.”

“Wasn’t that Georgia O’Keefe back there? And since when do you need a guide to the Met?” Rey laughs. She’d been surprised to see him pick up the brochure at the desk, and was surprised, too, by the urgent way he tugged her along.

“I’m looking for something in particular,” he mumbles, glancing down at the map in his fist. “Come on.”

They’re in the south-west corner of the museum, when Ben closes the map and hurries around the perimeter of the gallery, looking. He stops in front of a medium-sized painting. A man sits on a chair with a woman in his lap, looking into her eyes, perhaps about to kiss her. His hands cup her; there is a table beside them, and a window with a view of a city, but there is a branch over their heads and a bird at their feet.

“Marc Chagall,” Ben says. He looks at his shoes, not the painting. Everything in it is translucent, shifting; the colors are like jewels, particularly the woman’s blue dress. Everything seems refracted through the light of everything else.

“‘The Lovers,’” Rey reads off the placard, and looks at the painting again. Ben moves his gaze to his hands.

“Marc Chagall,” he says again. “Born Moishe Shagal. In Vitebsk, Belarus. The skyline, in the painting – that’s Vitebsk.”

“Oh,” Rey says. “Oh.”

“Picasso said that only Matisse and Chagall ever really understood color. There are more in the Guggenheim, but I wanted you to see this one.”

“Thank you,” she says, quietly. She stares at the painting – she doesn’t know for how long, but suddenly Ben throws his arms around her as if he couldn’t bear not to.

“I love you,” he says. “I love you so much.”

Poe will cheer as they turn the page to “Dayeinu,” always happy to sing as loud as he can. Rey will laugh as he even bangs his silverware on the table, determined to make the song as raucous and as joyous as possible. “Ilu hotzi, hotzianu, hotzianu mi-Mitzrayim, hotzianu mi-Mitzrayim, dayeinu! Dai, dayeinu; dai, dayenu; dai, dayenu, dayenu, dayenu!”

Everyone will lurch into song as best they can, not everyone remembering all the lyrics, some a little rusty-voiced, but everyone loud and clear on the chorus. It would have been enough!

Ben, since he can read the Hebrew lyrics in the text fluently, will keep steady pace with Poe. His quiet voice will be a deep buzz in Rey’s bones and a deep warmth in Rey’s heart as he lists all the blessings of the Exodus. If God had given us manna, and not given us the sabbath, it would have been enough. If God had given us the sabbath, and not brought us to Mount Sinai, it would have been enough. Rose and Finn will lose the thread of the verses about halfway through, and Finn will somehow manage to go noticeably off-key, but he’ll put his arm around Rose and sway with her while she smiles up at him.

Yes, Rey will think. Any one blessing would have been enough, but there are so many. And she, too, will sing the chorus as loud as she can.

It’s their last night before the trip to California, and Ben is resting his head on Rey’s stomach. “I was thinking,” he says slowly. “The T-visa is only temporary, right?”

“Yeah,” Rey says, as she plays with his pretty hair. “They say there’s ‘a path to citizenship’ but it isn’t really clear what it is.”

“Would it be faster,” Ben begins. “Would it be easier.” He turns on his side, facing away from her. “I mean, I know it’s too soon to – suggest this. As, like, people. But would it help you.” He curls his legs up to his chest, and Rey can barely hear his voice. “You could marry me. If it would help you.”

Rey opts not to tell him that Poe has technically beaten him to this suggestion.

“We – ”

He interrupts her, hurriedly. “I swear I’m not just asking so you’ll be legally bound not to leave me; I know I – but I swear if you marry me for a green card and then you want to leave me you can, any time; I swear; I’ll do anything you need me to.”

She pulls gently on his hair until he looks at her. His whole face is red and his eyes are teary.

“Let me get my visa in my hand, first,” she says, “and then yeah, Ben, I think I can marry you.”

He nods, slowly, and turns face-down so she can’t see him. She keeps running her fingers through his hair.

“We can get legally married,” she says, “and do all the paperwork and things that we need to do. And then later we can get really married. As people. If you want.”

“If I want?” he says incredulously into her skin.

“Ani l’dodi,” she says. “V’dodi li. Now get some sleep.”

“You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger,” Amilyn will read.

“Having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt,” the group will answer.

“When strangers reside with you in your land, you shall not wrong them… You shall love them as yourself,” Amilyn will read.

“For you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

“You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the orphan.”

“Always remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt.”

And Leah will produce more bottles of wine, to fill the second cup, the cup of redemption, and she will tease Lando about whether the kosher-for-Passover wine meets his standards. Lando will search fruitlessly for a diplomatic response until Amilyn comes to his rescue by blessing the cup.

When they have drunk, Rose will pop up out of her seat. “And now,” she will cry, “dinner!”

Finn waits on the edge of the planter outside the law library, eating his way through cookies like they’re popcorn. I have to stop, he tells himself, they’re meant to be for Rose. He eats another.

Fortunately, before he’s actually eaten more than half of them, she tumbles down the stairs. “Finn!” she cries, smiling, “oh my God! And cookies?”

“Cookies,” he says, and hands her the bag. “Will you marry me?”

She stares at him. Shit shit shit shit this was not the plan at all.

“Ah!” He bangs his fist against his head. “I was going to ask you if you wanted to come eat the cookies in the park with me, and then there was, like, not a speech exactly, but like – oh God, I fucked this all up, and it wasn’t even that good a plan to begin with; I should have waited until you were done for the day. I’m sorry. If you want I can start over with a new plan.”

“I don’t think that’s… necessary?” she says cautiously. “I mean, you kind of already proposed, and if you want I can put off saying yes, but just in the spirit of all of this, I’m kind of telling you now, I will totally marry you,” she says, and bites into a cookie. “As long as we don’t actually do it until I take the bar. Okay?”

“Okay,” he says, like the dummy he is, and then realizes that he’s somehow managed to pull it off, in spite of himself, and kisses her, mouthful of cookie and all.

When he gets done kissing her, he takes out his phone. “Let’s call Rey, okay? And then I’m going to text Leah and ask if she’ll stand for my family at the service. Do you want – ”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Rose says. “Let me backtrack a little.” He stares at her in horror. That she might change her mind – this is a nightmare. This is a worst-case scenario. “When I say we need to wait until I take the bar exam, I mean we need to wait on everything, including wedding planning. Now call Rey; she’s gonna cry so hard.”

Everyone will get eggs and brisket (except the vegetarians) and tzimmes and salad and kugel, and no one will mention the bar exam, because the results aren’t back and they don’t want Rose to faint or Ben to scream. Finn will put on his mother’s record, and Poe will sing along, “Oh, what a beautiful city! Oh-oh-oh, what a beautiful city!”

Leah will ask, “So, Rey, do you want to show us?”

“Yes!” Rey will squeal, and run for her wallet. She’ll pass it to Leah, first.

“Rachel Niemand Plavnik Chagall Kanata-Organa. Permanent Resident,” Leah will read.

“Did you know,” Rey will say excitedly, “that when you get married in California, they hand you a name-change form and you can write literally anything on it? And Maz said I could. So that’s my name now! Look, I have a driver’s license, too!”

“Impressive,” Lando will say. His straight face will be the best at the table.

Rose will lean to Rey. “Not to be heteronormative or anything,” she’ll say, “but can I see your ring?”

Ben will blush. “It was an impulse purchase. I’ll get her a nicer one for the actual wedding.”

Rey, taking the ring off the chain around her neck, will say, with some fondness, “Ben, it’s not an impulse purchase if you spend an hour arguing with the guy behind the counter about fonts. I wanna see yours, too, Rose.”

“Scripts, not fonts,” Ben will mutter. “And it wasn’t an hour.”

The two women will trade – both plain bands, inscribed in Hebrew: Ani l’dodi, v’dodi li. Words for a song, words for a wedding ring.

“Can we see the ketubah?” Finn will ask, as casually as he can.

“Sure,” Ben will reply, also struggling to be casual. “Not here, though; you don’t want food on it.”

He’ll go to the hall for the portfolio, and carry it into the living room, laying it out carefully on the floor. The page inside will have been framed by artist friend of Paige’s with myrtle branches and sprays of roses, and the contract itself will be outlined in pencil in Ben’s best Hebrew and English calligraphy, ready to be inked. Ben’s hands will shake as he points out a blank spot, and says, rather rapidly, “I left room to put your Vietnamese name, but I wanted you to write it out for me by hand, if you don’t mind? So I can see exactly where the diacriticals go.”

Finn will be afraid to touch it, the contract of love and help that he and Rose will sign, but he will hold his hand over it, as if it might warm him.

Form I-914, Application for T Nonimmigrant Status, Supplement B, Declaration of Law Enforcement Officer for Victim of Trafficking in Persons, Department of Homeland Security

Part C. Statement of Claim.

1. The applicant is or has been a victim of a severe form of trafficking in persons. Specifically, he or she is a victim of:

[X] The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

2. Please describe the victimization upon which the applicant’s claim is based and the crime under investigation/prosecution, together with the dates of trafficking, statutory citations, date on which prosecution was initiated, and the date on which prosecution was completed (if applicable).

[X] Please see attached.

Part D.

The applicant:

[X] Has complied with requests for assistance in the investigation/prosecution of the crime of trafficking.

Attested:
Officer Maddox Canady

After dinner, they share the broken middle matzah, and pour and bless and drink a third glass of wine, the cup of blessing. (They will have drunk quite a lot of wine during dinner, but it will have been unblessed and therefore ritually insignificant.) Rose will be designated to open the door for Elijah.

“How come I have to be the kid?” she’ll grumble.

“You’re the youngest, so tough luck” Leah will reply, and then add, “unless, of course, anyone at the table would like to introduce any children of their own to the world any time soon, in which case you’d be off the hook.”

“I’m going, I’m going!” Rose will cry.

As she stands patiently by the open door, Amilyn will read, “The injustice of this world still brings to mind Elijah, who, in defense of justice, challenged power. In many tales of Jewish lore, he reappears to help the weak. For every undecided question, then, of pain or sorrow, of unrewarded worth or unrequited evil, Elijah would some day provide the answer. This is a ritual with its roots in pain and sorrow; we have made it into an occasion for hope.”

“Behold,” the group will read, “I will send you Elijah the prophet, and he will turn the hearts of the parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to the parents.”

Leah will look at Rose and Finn, at Poe, at Rey, and last and longest at Ben, and she will not let anyone see her cry, even for joy.

“He’s going to tell you to leave me,” Ben says, for something like the third time, as they walk down the corridor.

“Okay,” Rey says. “Do you think I’m going to listen?”

“People tell me he’s persuasive,” he grumbles. “Or charming. Or whatever.” Obviously he doesn’t think she really would, but… he just wants to mention it.

“Really?” she says, and does she have to sound so excited.

“That,” his mother says, “is highly subjective. Hello, you grubby scoundrel.”

“Who are you calling grubby?” his father asks. “And who is this young lady? Leah, if you’re going to replace me, don’t rob the cradle.”

“I’m Ben’s wife,” Rey says, and Ben’s chin rises, without his really meaning it to. Yeah. That’s right.

“You know she is, too,” Leah says. “Don’t be difficult; they’ve made a special trip out from California just to see you.”

Han narrows his eyes at Rey. “Green card marriage?”

“Technically, I guess?”

“Well,” Han says, “if it’s to fool the feds, sure. But promise me you’ll leave him as soon as you’ve got your papers, kiddo; marriage is a social evil and my son, though, God help me, I love him, well. Look at him.”

“Looks good to me,” Rey says.

“But look, all these lawyers around him, practically a lawyer himself, and does he sue that dirty old wretch who used to be his boss?”

“I’m leaving that to about six other people, Dad, and anyway – ”

“Useless, I tell you. You seem like a nice girl. You can do better.”

“Nah,” says Rey. “He’s good. I think I’ll keep him”

“Your funeral,” Han sighs.

“Don’t worry, Dad,” Ben sighs back. “I’m sure I’ll find a way to fuck it all up.”

Rey pokes him in the side. “Like hell you will.” Then she kisses him, and who knows – maybe, somehow, he won’t. Maybe, for once, everything will be all right.

After all the ritual, all the eating, all the argument, all the questions, it will be very late when they pour the fourth and final cup of wine, drawing on one in the morning. The fourth cup will be the cup of acceptance.

“As our Seder draws to a close,” Amilyn will read, “we take up our cups of wine. The Redemption is not yet complete. The fourth cup recalls us to our covenant with the Eternal, to the tasks that still await us as a people called to the service of God, to the great purpose for which the people of Israel lives: The preservation and affirmation of hope.”

Everyone at the table will bless the Lord who created the fruit of the vine, but before they drink, Amilyn will read, “The service now concludes, its rites performed in full, its purposes revealed.”

Around the table, Luke and Leah, Chuey and Lando, Rose and Finn and Poe, Rey and Ben, will reply, “This privilege we share will ever be renewed, until God’s plan is known in full, God’s highest blessing sealed,” and all of them at the table will raise their glasses, and just before they drink, they will say together, “L’shana haba-ah birushala-yim!”

Next year, in Jerusalem.

Next year, in the City of Peace.