Chapter Text
General Organa meets his eyes. “Here?”
Finn considers. “No. Alone.”
She nods, once, a brisk, sharp movement. “You can’t be completely alone. It wouldn’t be safe. Fushia, go with them. Let them talk, but keep your weapon handy.”
“One more thing,” Finn says. He’s still amazed at the informality here, at how he’s not expected to acknowledge her rank each time he speaks.
“Yes, Finn?”
“Ma’am.” He includes the honorific out of respect. “Can we let her change out of that armor? It’s just, it’s not very comfortable to sit around in.”
Even as he says it, he wonders why. Why would he care if some First Order soldier is comfortable? Has he already decided to trust her?
No, that’s not it. It’s just that she’s a person. There’s no reason to treat her badly.
At least, not yet.
Something else occurs to him then. He knows the people here are careful, but they don’t know the First Order like he does. Armor can hide many things. “Did you check her for tracking devices?”
The General raises her eyebrows, gives him a look. She doesn’t have to say it out loud, he gets it from her expression. Do you think we’re amateurs?
“Ok,” Finn says, but something’s still nagging at him. “And explosives? Did you check for explosives? They’re not always on the outside.”
“Scanned as soon as she came on base, Major,” she reassures him. “But thank you for checking.”
From behind the general, Finn can see the stormtrooper watching them both. He studies her face above the white breastplate. Will she want to give up her armor before they sit down to talk? Or will she find a way to keep it, the better to fight her way out of here when she’s gotten what she came for?
General Organa speaks to an aide, who quickly leaves the room. “Ensign Aliss will bring her some clothes.”
The stormtrooper is looking at Finn as she says, “Thank you.”
He’s startled to realize: He knows her voice.
Most of the stormtroopers Finn would recognize are men. Helmets can come off for sleep, of course, and for eating and washing. But not for training, and not for work.
And outside of work and training, the First Order keeps men and women apart. They don't want their soldiers flirting, dating, or gods help them, reproducing. Not that Finn doesn’t know about women--there’s no army in the world that’s figured out how to stop whispered conversations or confiscate every pinup picture. He knows about things men can do together, too, but that would have been even more dangerous: the First Order believes that’s an aberration, and has no use for men like that. What they can’t use, they dispose of, and their soldiers are no exception.
So Finn would easily recognize the men he once worked with, but it was rare that he saw a female stormtrooper out of the white armor. Rare to have seen a woman soldier’s face.
Finn waits outside the door to the small conference room while the aide drops off some clothing. Captain Fushia is standing guard inside.
After a few minutes, the door slides open, and Fushia waves him in.
The stormtrooper’s armor is stacked neatly on the floor beside her. Her black shirt and leggings are folded and resting on top. She’s still wearing her First Order issued boots. Finn is reminded of how his own boots gave away his secret, how Han Solo recognized them, that crazy day on the Millenium Falcon. A few months and a lifetime ago.
The clothing they’ve given her is simple, soft, no buttons or clasps. It’s the same type of shirt and trousers they issued him in the medbay. It’s a good choice. There’s nothing about it that says “prisoner.” But If she tries to run in that outfit, people will notice something isn’t right.
She’s sitting in a cushioned chair with wide, padded armrests. In the armor she looked like a threat, like a reminder, a bad memory. Now, in the soft, pale brown outfit, with her hair down, she looks… like a person.
Finn sits down across from her. He hopes it appears casual as he leans back in his own chair, throwing an arm across the back and kicking his legs out, ankles crossed. This should be easy, right? He knows about Stormtroopers. He knows about escaping the First Order.
He opens his mouth to ask her the first question and realizes he has no idea how to do this.
Finn looks to Fushia. The Captain is standing guard between them and the door, silent, one hand on the hilt of her blaster. She doesn’t offer any suggestions.
He decides to go with old patterns, familiar ones.
“What battalion?”
“293rd,” she says.
He can already guess her rank, but he asks anyway.
“Private,” she says, and that matches her plain armor. Doesn’t really tell him anything, though. If she’s First Order Intelligence, she’d be well trained in how to play her part.
“Designation?”
“MN-1157.”
MN-1157 is a name from his training sessions, shouted past him by instructors urging her take him down. FN-2187 was often at the top of his group--and so was she. The designation matches the voice so far: a little bit rough, a little flat, like showing emotion is beneath her.
Finn notices how his mind immediately wants to shorten her designation to Min, give her a name instead of a number.
He goes halfway, to start. “How’d you find us, MN?”
Fifteen minutes later he’s sure it’s her, but he’s not sure of anything else. He remembers MN-1157 as skilled, efficient, and ruthless. While Finn was trying to make sure his squadmates didn’t fall too far behind, MN-1157 would step over hers without a pause.
Finn remembers the sight of a cadet falling to her death, the sound she made as her hands slipped off the edge of a catwalk. MN-1157 was next in line for the exercise. Her only reaction was to ask if she should start.
He asks her why she wants to leave the First Order, what she wants to offer the Rebellion, what she plans to do if they turn her away.
There’s nothing wrong with her answers. They make sense. They sound good.
But whether she’s a real defector or some kind of spy? He has no idea. He wishes he had some Force sensitivity, that he could gather something from her besides her words. She sits stiffly, but that’s just a Stormtrooper’s usual posture. You don’t relax in public, it’s a punishable offense.
Captain Fushia stands, silent and polite, through the whole conversation. Finally Finn looks to her again. “What do you think?” he asks, hoping she has a better idea than he does. She just nods, as if he’s told her they’re done.
“We’ll be keeping you in the detention center tonight,” Fushia says, and MN-1157 nods.
“I understand.”
“It’s comfortable enough,” the Captain adds. “We’ll see to it that you’re fed.”
“Thank you.”
“It was nice to meet you,” Finn calls after her, as the Stormtrooper gets up to leave. Fushia sticks close, following her through the door with a hand hovering near her blaster.
Finn returns to the meeting room, where he finds the General sitting alone at the table. She looks up expectantly, and he knows he is going to disappoint her. “I don’t know, General Organa.”
She lifts a hand and he feels the tiniest pressure against his thoughts. It passes quickly.
“I apologize,” she says. “I trust you, Finn. Old habits die hard.”
“Was that the Force?” He hadn’t known she had that ability.
“A little bit of it,” she says. “It helps me sometimes, to make sure I’m hearing the truth. It doesn’t do any good with someone who’s used to lying, though. I never had time to learn what Luke knows.”
“Luke’s back tomorrow, isn’t he?” Finn asks. Luke and Rey are away, part of a team that’s answering a distress call from a Resistance outpost on a Mid-Rim planet. They’ve always come back before, alive and uninjured, so he’s refusing to worry.
“He should be,” Leia says, and there’s a hint there of he’d better. There’s not a person on D’Qar who doesn’t know she’s still mad at him. “Get some rest, Finn. It’ll all still be here tomorrow.”
Finn likes the early morning. As a Stormtrooper, he rose when his masters told him to and slept when the overhead lights went out. But here on the Resistance base, unless there’s an emergency meeting or an early muster for a mission, the hour of first light is usually his own.
The morning after MN-1157’s arrival, Finn wakes before the chrono alarm blares. He’s drawn the blackout shade as usual, loving the option to sleep in total darkness. It was never fully dark in a First Order bunkroom. Glow-lights and security cameras reminded the soldiers that even their sleep was not their own.
Finn feels for the shade’s handle and lifts it slowly, letting pale light from the morning sky bring him fully awake.
Sometimes the early hours are busy, the refresher room crowded with men and women rushing to clean their teeth and tame morning cowlicks before pulling on flightsuits and boots.
Today, the corridor is quiet. Finn has the line of shower stalls all to himself. He hasn’t seen the detention area where they’re keeping Min, but he guesses it’s comfortable enough. There’s probably a guard outside the door, but he doubts she’s in shackles. He wonders if she’s comfortable in a room on her own, if it feels like a luxury or if she’s lonely there.
He spends an extra minute running a brush over his teeth while he’s thinking. Then, in spite of everything else that’s going on, he takes the time to check his hair, see if it needs attention. Poe, with his curls that can go months without a trim, likes to tease him about his frequent haircuts. But Finn’s short hair is one of the habits he’s happy to keep. It’s easy, he likes how it looks, and he gets to laugh at the others, who sometimes arrive at early-morning meetings with hair flat on one side and sticking up wildly on the other.
Finn pulls on his casual uniform, black trousers and pale brown top. The soft knit fabric isn’t that different from the clothes he wore under the white armor, but it feels different. He wears these colors, in this place, because he chooses to.
Outside, D’Qar’s sky is still deep purple at the far horizon, lavender above the hills that rise behind the base.
This planet is silent in the early dawn. Finn remarked on that, once, in his early days here. He’d encountered the General on one of his very first early-hours wanders, moving slowly then because his back was still healing. She was standing in the shadow of the Falcon, returned now from Ahch-To with only Chewbacca at the controls.
With the excitement of Rey’s rescue over, Finn remembered the rules of rank and wasn’t sure whether even to speak to her. But General Organa waved him over.
They stood together, looking up at the Falcon’s closed entryway.
“I miss him,” the General said.
Finn didn’t know how to answer. What came out was a quiet, “Yes ma’am.” And then he couldn’t think what else to say, to this legend standing beside him in her grief. Finally, half-desperate to offer something to break the silence, he said, “It’s so quiet here. In the mornings.”
General Organa smiled at him and he felt a swoop of relief. “It’s unusual, isn’t it? We’ve established bases in places that look similar, and we’d always wake up to birdcalls. You know what’s different here?”
“No ma’am.”
She looked up, into the sky that was now turning from lavender to pink. For a moment Finn wondered what she was seeing, and why he couldn’t. Then a shadow passed above them. A huge wingspan, so wide that he could tell, even from there, that this bird was huge.
“They hunt in the mornings,” General Organa said, watching it soar. “Everything on D’Qar is in hiding right now.” She turned back to Finn, and her eyes on him felt suddenly heavy. “It’ll be gone when sun comes over the hills. They don’t like the sunlight.”
“I like the sunlight,” he said, feeling like that was important.
“I know you do.” The General looked back at the sky, watching the winged shadow circling high above. “I wish everyone did.” She straightened up then, turning away from the Falcon, and he could see that she was setting her grief aside to leave it there. “Have a good day, Finn,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
This morning the road between the hangars is empty. The hangars are full of shadows, starfighters and mech droids quiet and still. As he passes by each one’s entrance, there’s a tiny drop in temperature, cool air drifting out from below the sod-and-soil roofs.
Finn’s out before the tech crews, before even maintenance and sanitation. No one knows he here, that he’s not in his room sound asleep. And if anyone on the Resistance base did know, they wouldn’t stop him. It’s a freedom he hadn’t ever thought he could have until a few months ago, and he wonders if this is what Min is seeking. Or if she even knows it’s possible.
He remembers his words, back on Starkiller Base, back when he’d have done anything to keep from being sent to Reconditioning. “Because it’s the right thing to do.” All he knew, then, was that the First Order was wrong, wrong for him, wrong for everything, and he needed to get away.
It had taken him longer to understand what was right.
He wonders if MN-1157 has any idea.
There are a couple of stars low in the sky where the darkness lingers. They fade as he reaches the end of the roadway, where the base gives way to forest. He’s alone there for only a few minutes, breathing in the clean air, waiting for the burst of light he knows will come when the sun clears the ridge behind him.
The sound of footsteps behind him sets him on edge for a moment, soldier’s instincts kicking in. But the voice that calls his name is familiar, safe.
Poe jogs up beside him. “Couldn’t sleep,” he says.
Finn is naturally an early riser, but unless there’s a mission, Poe will stay snuggled under a pile of blankets until his chrono alarm shuts off in frustration. Finn knows because, more than once, he’s been sent to haul the Resistance’s number one pilot out of bed in time for a meeting.
Poe’s dressed in workout clothes, soft grey, and shoes with flexible soles. Finn’s amused to see that his friend’s shirt is hanging crooked and his hair is a tangle of curls. He reaches out to tug the hem straight and flatten the worst of the tangles. “You’re really not a morning person.”
Poe nods acknowledgement, but what he says is, “What do you think, Finn? Did I bring us another hero, or did I just open a door and invite the First Order in?”
“I hate not knowing,” Finn agrees. “I’m sorry if I let the Resistance down.”
Poe looks astonished. “If you what?”
“The General asked me if we could trust her.”
“And you said you didn’t know.” Poe puts a hand on his shoulder. “That’s the best anyone can do, buddy. It would be worse if you said you knew and you didn’t.”
This is still a new concept for Finn, to be allowed uncertainty, to be trusted to give his best. He doesn’t like to admit it, though, so he just says, “Yeah.”
“Is it worth trying again today?” Poe says. “Maybe Rey or Luke can help?”
Finn can’t imagine Rey would go probing into Min’s mind. They’ve talked about what Kylo Ren did to her. She won’t even let Luke past her walls.
But Skywalker’s still an unknown quantity to him and, even after long conversations with Rey about her training, he’s still not completely clear what a Jedi is allowed to do. He also still doesn’t know which of the rumors he’s heard are true.
“The General said something about Luke,” Finn remembers. “She said it’s hard for her to tell if someone’s lying. That she can’t do what he can.”
“They should be touching down mid-morning. We’ll ask them, if she doesn’t.” Poe yawns. “You’re right, I’m not a morning person. Let’s go find some caf.”
As they head back toward the heart of the base, the first sliver of sun peeks over a hilltop. There is a fine layer of dew on the grass and the roadway and the vehicles parked beside the hangars, and the light makes everything shine.