Well, this ain’t gonna cut it, and Poe learns it pretty quickly. He learns to call general Organa princess—he can’t bring himself to call her Leia. Leia is something so familiar and intimate, and he just doesn’t know her like that. He knows her as a general so he sticks to his guns even though it means everyone at the rebel base makes fun of him for it. The rebel base is a wonder in itself. First few days Poe wanders around with wide eyes and everyone thinks him a new recruit, but the thing is, he’s neither recruit, nor new, nor novice at making himself comfortable at whatever place the leadership calls a base.
Of course, they pass him as a recruit. Princess helps him out a lot while she’s there but then she’s gone so he’s left to his own devices. He tries not to stare at Tycho Celchu or Wedge Antilles—both of them so young and yet removed from the fame they are bond to acquire in the future. They don’t know him. Nobody does. Not a single soul, and the only thing Poe can pray for is to not run in with his father or his mother or uncle L’ulo.
Living in the past is kriffing hard, and no one has told him that while he was taking his history lessons.
Trying to figure out his way back to his own time is even harder, especially now when the civil war is full-on. The first Death Star was destroyed just a mere year ago, and Poe knows that there is going to be the second one. He can’t tell anyone. He can’t do anything, really, and it is painstaking to keep all this information to himself. So he busies himself with being as far away from the rebels and their base as he possibly can. At first Poe doesn’t even really understand where to begin his search, but he has done it—looking for something no one knows where to find—for so long in his own timeline that now it seems almost familiar.
His search brings him to Jedha. It is the most peculiar place, and full of interesting things. Poe thinks that maybe his accidental time traveling is somehow connected to the Force, and if he just gets enough info about it he can repeat the trick—this time moving 33 years back to the future. But there is no Jedi Order yet, and no one to ask. Master Skywalker definitely didn’t look like someone who has plentiful knowledge and experience with the Force back when Poe last saw him at the rebel base. So it’s up to himself to figure this one out, really.
Jedha City looks exactly like a place first destroyed by a massive green laser from the sky and then rebuilt back from what was left and then some. There are catacombs here, and Poe desperately wishes that out there somewhere there is a bit of the Temple of the Whills left, like a basement or something. Preferably filled with lots of useful Force stuff. Like a datacron detailing time travel, for example.
He knows it’s wishful thinking.
He still thinks about it while landing his x-wing in Jedha City and secretly stealing away into the catacombs. Poe heard the partisans lost their leader in the dreadful blast that destroyed the city, so he hopes they also lost any courage to go on, disbanded and will not trouble him. Just in case he leaves BB-8 in the x-wing with instructions to call for help if he doesn’t return within 24 hours, and keeps his blaster close. One of his hands is occupied with a map—the best one he could lay his hands on, anyway. The flashlight he uses tears away chunks of darkness to show him bleak stone walls and animal bones here and there, but there is nothing else. It feels like the time stopped here. Or maybe even never flowed in the first place.