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Poe watches as Rey receives a no-holds-barred hug from General Organa in the middle of the hangar while half the base watches on. The exchange is missing the usual whoops and cheers of amusement that Poe would expect. The General is emotional; Rey's delivered her long-absent brother back to her, after all. (Didn't he also have a hand in it, though, really? Poe can't help but feel that he could have earned a place in that hug too. It's a hug he'd really, really like to share in.)
Finn's hand tightens in his own, knowing, reassuring, maybe even an indication of a similar feeling. They stand close together in the crowd, not making a big deal of it, though certainly not hiding it either. According to Jess everyone in the base already thinks the two of them are sickeningly sweet anyway.
Poe hopes that his already-established relationship with Finn doesn't make Rey uncomfortable. If he had his way he'd show them both off as much as possible because he's just so proud of them—but Rey especially is still getting used to a lot of how things work within the Rebellion, and Poe doesn't know whether that fact will make it simpler or more complicated for her to make the nature of their relationship public. It's not like what they have could really be frowned upon, but it's still a little unconventional.
Poe is happy so long as Rey's happy, and he knows Finn feels the same. After everything they've been through, figuring out how best to care for each other is something he's certain they can sort out with zero casualties.
*
"Of course I'd rather share your room," Rey tells Finn and Poe. They've been watching her with expressions of interwoven eagerness and wariness, and it's clear that this is the answer they've been hoping to hear.
"We agree," Poe says, while Finn grins and nods. "But that does lead to our next problem."
They've arrived at the boys' shared room, and as the door scans Finn's hand and slides open it reveals one bunk with two small beds.
Rey hasn't explained to them that for weeks she's been sleeping on the floor of the temple with nothing but her clothes for padding—and lying with her back against the stone was only marginally harder on her spine than her setup on Jakku. Rey looks at the little beds and wonders whether she'd get any sleep lying on them at all, with their mattresses and the extra cushions piled on.
"Do you have a spare blanket?" she asks.
"Sure do," answers Finn, stepping into the room and heading over to pull open a drawer filled with them.
"Perfect," Rey says brightly. "A few of those and some floor space is all I need."
Naturally the boys protest, so she gives her explanation and eventually they seem to realise her desire to sleep on the floor—which is actually carpeted and looks soft in its own right—solves their problem and shouldn't be fought against too hard.
The arrangement doesn't work out as planned for long.
Rey wakes, as she sometimes does, from a nightmare. They're a new phenomenon for her. She never had trouble sleeping on Jakku—just trouble waking, convincing herself to do another day of the same.
The snatches of consciousness she felt when she discovered the lightsaber left her mind uneasy, and even after the tutelage Master Luke has given her that unease remains seated in her subconscious. She sees true events played over again—Kylo Ren's face appears in more bad dreams than it doesn't—and she sees things that she hopes never come true. The darkness in the force taking root in her, twisting her into someone she doesn't recognise, someone Rey doesn't want to meet let alone be. Pressing in on her is the fear that if someone with a family as absolutely loving and unwilling to give up on their child as Kylo Ren's could turn out so wrathful then hope for someone like her must be slim.
"You okay Rey?" Finn whispers from his bunk, the lower one, right near where Rey's spread out her blanket on the floor. Finn gave her his extra pillow to rest her head on, too, and her neck is finding it strange while her head appreciates the softness.
"I woke you," Rey says as apologetically as she can, because she doesn't really know if she's okay but she does know she's sorry.
"Nah," Finn whispers. "Already couldn't sleep."
"Oh." Rey suddenly feels foolish for assuming her bunkmates are as fine as she isn't. "Well, do you want to keep trying or would you rather chat for a while? I don't think I'll be drifting back off for a while." No, Rey is painfully awake. Her heart is still thumping unsettlingly hard and fast, she feels sweaty inside her clothes, and she's too afraid she'll be dropped right back into the dream if she falls asleep again so soon.
"I'd rather hug you," says Finn, soft but matter of fact. "If that's okay with you."
Rey feels clammy and gross, and is still shaking lightly, but if Finn doesn't mind then there's nothing she'd rather do.
It's taking a while to recalibrate her sense of family, but with every waking word from Finn her sleeping fears lose their punch. She's not without family at all. This family is new but it's already overwritten years of loneliness, justified years of hope that one day her family would come and rescue her. She'd just been picturing the wrong faces all along.
"Do I come up, or do you come down?" she asks.
"Well, it's a nice soft place to lie up here, but it's cramped with me alone..." Finn pauses. Rey hears him poking around the edges of his bedding. It's still pitch dark, and even though her eyes have adjusted to it she's a long way from being able to make out what exactly he's doing. "Aha!" he says after a moment. "I can take off the mattress, put it onto the floor." Rey hears him climbing off the bed and starting by moving pillows and pulling at sheets. She hears a thud accompanied by a sharp, squeaky exhale and knows Finn has hit his head on the edge of Poe's upper bunk. She winces.
"Finn, stop, let's just turn on the light, okay?" she suggests.
"Poe's a light sleeper," Finn replies. "Wouldn't want to disturb him."
"Don't worry." The murmur is low and indistinct; still very much muddled by sleep, and half spoken into a pillow. Poe must have woken up when Finn hit his head. "Do the light."
Rey picks herself up and walks through the dark to where she knows the switch is. She squints in the harsh brightness, looks around and sees Finn doing the same. Poe's face is buried in his pillow.
With some visibility, Finn reattempts the process of unloading his bed onto the floor with much greater effectiveness.
"What are we doing?" asks Poe.
"Moving to the floor for hugs," Finn explains. "It's okay, go back to sleep if you can. I'm sorry I woke you."
Poe rustles around in his sheets and eventually pulls himself upright. "No way," he says. "I'm with you guys." His pillow lands by Rey's feet with a soft whump.
They push the two mattresses together, and combined there's just enough space for three, if they press close, which Rey is fine with doing. The sponginess beneath her is strange, and she's still not sure if she's going to be able to actually sleep on it, but she's got Finn's solid form at her back and Poe's strong arm draped none too lightly over her waist. They ground her where the ground itself doesn't.
*
They spend their first full afternoon together back at base baking, and Finn's never been so delighted in his life. That said, he's found himself feeling that way about many situations recently. One bout of ecstatic happiness is hard to measure against another—and what an inconceivably good dilemma that is to have.
Poe has brought Finn to the kitchens on various occasions since Finn told him he'd always wanted to cook, but they've mostly stuck to meals rather than desserts. They've gone nowhere near cinnamon buns, because they both knew Rey would want to be around for that. Now she's here and the waiting, the feeling like for all they were happy together they were still missing somebody, is over.
"So you don't add water at all?" Rey asks for the third time.
"Not in my recipe," Poe replies, as patiently as the first time.
"And you have to put them in a low-heat furnace to make them rise."
"That's right. The oven."
Rey squints at the dough currently sticking to her palms. "Weird." Tentatively, she licks a bit of dough off the tip of a finger. "Weird, but I like it," she concludes.
"Just wait 'til we get the filling in them," Poe says happily as he rifles through one of the kitchen's cupboards. "That's what makes them taste so good."
Finn helps with rolling the dough out flat while Finn hands Rey the necessary spices and sugar and she measures the quantities out. They take turns sprinkling it over the surface, and then Rey insists Finn have the pleasure of rolling the whole thing up into a long log. She takes her turn slicing it into small round pieces while Poe advises as to the ideal thickness. They lay the coils out on a tray, slide it into the oven, and are left standing around unsure of what to do next.
"Do you like ice cream?" Poe asks Rey, and Finn already knows what follows is going to be good.
Rey ploughs through half a container of mint ice cream, chosen for its bright green shade, and half a container of the sour yellow berry one that Poe likes best, chosen because he recommends it to her. Finn has several generous mouthfuls himself—chocolate chip is his flavour of the week this week—but can't keep up with Rey. (She still kind of eats, he thinks, like she might not get another chance to for days.) The sweetness and softness of the ice cream overwhelms him after a short while, and he's already learned the hard way that what tastes in his mouth like a good decision can feel a lot like regret upon reaching his stomach. Stormtroopers were never fed anything like this, and of all the stuff he's adjusted to since escaping the First Order, sweets are requiring the most gradual approach. Sweets, and alcohol.
Sweets, alcohol and the kind of easy, frank affection he's discovered here, he amends as Poe kisses him and steals a spoonful of the choc-chip ice cream while he's at it. Finn is as contentedly bewildered by the gesture as ever. Unlike the sugar highs or the drunken hazes this feeling never wears off, never turns to queasiness in the mornings.
"You're too sweet," he tells Poe.
"Aw," Rey coos at them between spoonfuls.
"No, I mean—" Finn pulls away and licks traces of Poe's berry flavouring off his lips, "you are literally too sweet. Take this," he holds the tub and spoon he's been gorging himself with away from his body, towards Poe. "I can't deal with all the sugar and you at the same time." And if he has to let go of one, to ration one, to get one or the other out of his system, then there's no contest as to which it'll always be.
*
Jess is just looking to nick some cooking wine from the kitchens when she finds the platter of cinnamon buns. Half have been iced, some more clumsily than others. They're still warm, which might account for the way the icing's melting in sticky drips off down the sides. Her first thought is that she's hit the jackpot. Her second is that she knows exactly whose doing this is.
She finds the wine—one she's had before, not only drinkable but genuinely pleasant—and then sneaks out a plate as well, which she manages to stack five buns onto.
She goes straight to Poe and Finn's quarters. It's nearly midnight, but if they're not up she figures she'll just eat all the cinnamon rolls herself. They can't have been too long, though; their baking hasn't even cooled all the way down.
"Who's there?" Finn's voice calls when she buzzes at the door.
"Jess Pava," she answers.
"Oh, hey Jess Pava! You're great. Come on in."
"Come in!" Rey's voice echoes Finn's, sounding muffled.
Jess wonders whether she and her wine have missed the moment and Finn is already drunk.
Now, Jess has known Poe a long time; they're practically brother and sister, and she's spent enough time with Finn since he got here to think she knows what to expect from them. Cinnamon rolls are par for the course. She's watched them fight over pudding cups at dinner: "No you take my pudding, I want you to have it!" "No you take mine." They wear each other's clothes so often they've started to forget who started out with what and switch back to their own items thinking they was the other's all along. She considers herself ready for pretty much anything they can throw at her—but, she discovers as the door opens, she hasn't had time to factor Rey into the equation properly. She isn't ready at all.
The entire room has been dismantled and recreated inside itself. She steps inside and almost collides with the edge of the little desk that's usually in the corner of sleeping quarters. A skin of sheets is spread over the top of an honest-to-stars fort. There's an empty drawer still hanging slightly open. This was the blanket drawer, Jess has no doubt.
"The entrance is around the far side, under the window," Poe explains from inside the fort, and there's nothing Jess can do but skirt around the structure to the other side.
The far end is entirely open, so Jess just plonks herself down on the floor there. She's half inside the little dome, half outside it. She doesn't know how far into all this she can actually go. They always welcome her, she knows that, but she still feels that they're just not as attuned to her as they are to each other—so when Poe had first explained that it wasn't just him and Finn but both of them and Rey too, Jess had worried a bit. A part of her has even asked itself whether she's jealous because she wants to be in on it too—to get into that inner circle.
She doesn't, of course; not like that. She loves Poe, but recoils at the thought of kissing him. The same dynamic has taken root between herself and Finn. She loves them. They're her brothers. Rey is cute, Jess thinks, and maybe if she wasn't with the other two... but she is. The fact is particularly inescapable as Jess looks in at the three of them bundled up in blankets, giggling like a trio of eleven year olds. Rey is becoming a sister to her before her very eyes.
"So I found these sweets in the kitchen," Jess says, "no idea where they could have come from, but I thought you guys might like some."
Finn groans, which is unexpected. "No," he murmurs, rolling over. "No more sugar. Can't."
Rey laughs and shoots upright, a sudden movement which prompts more groaning from Finn. "I'll have another!" she declares. It gets Jess wondering how many she's already had. The tray in the kitchen had looked full, but she's seen Rey at dinner the past two nights. There might've been a whole other tray of rolls that didn't last long enough to cool down.
Rey plucks the bun that's balanced on top of the others off the plate and takes a large bite. As she chews, she looks down at the bottle in Jess' other hand.
"Is that alcohol?" she asks, and her eyes light up impossibly brighter, so much that they might be glowing. Can the force make people's eyes glow? Jess makes a mental note to find out about that. Maybe she can ask General Organa. Maybe she can ask Luke Skywalker, now that he's more than just a fable to her. She'd love to ask him so, so many things.
"Sure is," Jess grins.
She likes Rey in the way of acquaintanceship, and she's ready to like her a whole lot better. She uncaps the bottle and passes it to Rey, who takes a swig. She holds it back out to Jess. Jess suspects that Rey's holding back for politeness' sake; that she'd have taken a long gulp if the bottle had been handed to her by one of her boyfriends. She knocks back a solid few mouthfuls just to demonstrate that Rey is welcome to do the same, and on the next pass Rey does.
"Save some for the rest of us," Poe chimes in, extricating himself from the blanket pile at last. He's not wearing a shirt—Rey is wearing his shirt, Jess sees now, underneath the green blanket she's wrapped herself in. She's got no trousers on, but the shirt is large even on Poe so it hangs off her like a dress. She makes it look good, Jess thinks. She makes it look easy. Maybe that's the perspective everyone around here should have—that after what else they've seen and done, the supposed complexities of loving each other shouldn't even occur to them. As it stands Rey, Finn and Poe's relationship, if it is complicated, is only complicated from the outside.
"Not all of the rest of us," Finn interjects. He sounds wrecked, Jess thinks.
"What happened to him?" she asks.
"Ice cream," Rey replies.
Jess laughs good-naturedly. "Don't worry Finn," she speaks to the pile of human still curled up on the ground. "I can't get far with ice cream either. Milk, cheese, all of it makes my guts churn. I'll show you some good alternatives."
"Thanks." The reply is faint, but sounds less agitated. Jess is pleased to have provided some comfort—and she's also (perhaps a little selfishly) happy to have made a connection with Finn that the others don't have. Happy at the reminder that she does have a part to play in all this, the proof that having two lovers doesn't displace the need for a friend or a sister.
"Give me that," Poe snatches the wine bottle and proceeds to drain about a quarter of its contents.
"Jerk," Jess declares. "Just for that, you don't get any of these cinnamon rolls." She laughs, knowing full well who made them, or at least presided over the baking process. She picks one up and jams as much of it into her mouth as possible. "Mmmm," she makes an exaggerated noise of enjoyment as she chews.
Finn groans in the background.
"Hey, shuffle in a bit more," Rey suggests, glancing over at poor Finn. She scoots backwards so that she's sitting in the space where she was lying when Jess arrived; the gap between Finn and Poe. She beckons for Jess to take a seat on a cushion which is well and truly inside their little fortress. Jess moves in slowly only to find that sitting with the three of them there is as simple as can be.