Work Text:
Green light outlines everything and everyone in the Falcon ’s cockpit, the only consistent thing other than Finn’s eyes on Poe and his heart racing as the pilot jumps in and out of hyperspace. His heart keeps racing, faster and faster, as the ship speeds up, lurching again every time Poe yanks down on the controls. The pilot’s knuckles are white, drained of all blood, and Finn doesn’t know why he’s fixating on that, of all things, but then he doesn’t exactly have time to figure that out. He doesn’t have time for much at all, with the way things are going right now.
Planets fly by, so fast they’re nothing but momentary blurs punctuating the white-streaked blue of hyperspace, and it’s a miracle the Falcon doesn’t collide directly with anything—as it is, the telltale creaking and crunching of metal indicates that they’re taking the ship to its limits, and that they may have lost a few extraneous parts. What Poe is doing is like skipping stones into a tsunami and hoping they make a clean splash, and Finn can only hope that those parts they’ve lost are nonessential as well.
Then again, hope is the spark that lit the Rebellion, the spark that has kept the Rebellion-turned-Resistance burning even in the coldest, darkest hour, even after decades of oppression stamped out that flame over and over again.
Finn can hope that they’ll make it, or at least that, if they die, they don’t die for nothing.
He blinks, snapped out of his fervor by the sound, the feeling of the ship lurching yet again, and his palms are sweaty, fingers stiff, knuckles white, hands shaking as he grips the nearest solid object, grabbing for even the slightest illusion of control, or at least of not being completely at death’s mercy.
Someone is yelling, maybe in Finn’s head and maybe in reality, those two things are starting to blur together, and he’s beginning to think that of all the ways to go, being ripped apart into every individual atom he’s made up of, or dying in the quickest collision in the history of spaceship crashes, wouldn’t be the worst.
It’s certainly better than being captured by the First Order.
Poe is yanking the controls again. Finn doesn’t know how he’s held on this whole time, how he’s still holding on, how that fire in his eyes is still burning. And his eyes, a deep dark brown, Finn would be deluding himself if he said he hadn’t spend countless hours thinking about them, stealing glances into them, before, but he finds himself focusing on them now perhaps more than ever before.
“Last jump,” Poe yells, “maybe forever!”
His voice is still determined, burning, passionate, just one step—one impressive show of restraint—short of enraged, but there’s a chord of resignation in those last two words. Time keeps going, keeps moving at the same speed as always, and the Falcon jumps again. The white-blue coming in from outside is the same as the blade of the lightsaber Finn took up against Kylo Ren so long ago, as Starkiller Base fell apart.
His body no longer aches from those wounds, despite the scars he suffered, but his mind has yet to heal. Perhaps he will never have the time to heal, but Poe was there with him the whole time, and he’s here now, and for this...Finn is grateful.
He looks back to Poe.
The pilot’s eyes are closed, but somehow, Finn isn’t upset by this. He doesn’t say what he normally would, Shouldn’t you be keeping your eyes on course, flyboy?
And because he doesn’t say this, Poe can’t give the usual response— Well, sorry, hotshot, but the view inside is so much better than hyperspace , and he can’t give Finn that stupid, stupid kriffing wink and grin, because he’s somewhere between a smile and a gut-wrenching scream.
Tears are welling up in his eyes, and then he’s looking down at the controls, bracing himself to let go, and the upper half of his face is in shadow.
Finn sees Poe’s lips move, and it feels like the words aren’t in line with the picture as they reach his ears. His heart is being pulled at, tugged at by all the power of the Force, and something else, and Finn sends out one last desperate ray of hope to the Galaxy itself, that they’ll come out of this alive, that they’ll live to see another day, that they can set their feet down on solid ground and breathe real, unfiltered air.
“Finn?”
A tear slides down Poe’s cheek, glinting first with the green of the cockpit lights and then with the blue of hyperspace. The colors of the two lightsabers Luke Skywalker had. Finn doesn’t know how he knows this, but he knows it suddenly, and as surely as he has known many other things—that Rey was safe, could be trusted, that Poe didn’t die in the crash on Jakku, that joining the Resistance was the right thing to do.
That he loves Poe Dameron.
Finn feels his eyebrows turn upwards, inwards, his lips parting. His reply is barely audible against the pounding of his own heart and the screeching of the ship.
“Yeah?”
“I love you,” Poe breathes.
He thinks he might be hallucinating, or already dead, but he knows that this, too, is not true. His eyes are beginning to well up with tears, too, and he can’t be bothered to wipe them away.
Finn’s lips are still parted, and he breathes again, a single exhalation—maybe his last one, but it’s worth it.
“I know.”
It’s not until after the adrenaline of the Falcon ’s flight has long since faded away, when they’ve touched down and had time to breathe and, however temporarily, are safe and alive , that Poe’s words really settle in.
Finn is waiting when they do, because he knows it the same way he knew all those other things. He calls it an instinct, and perhaps that isn’t so far off.
It’s certainly an instinct when Poe leans in to kiss him flush on the lips, and he kisses back.