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One night, weeks after Crait, while everyone else sleeps, Finn catches Rey whispering to the darkness in a service corridor of the Millennium Falcon. The way her eyes soften at the nothingness before her, the way her hands reach for a silhouette Finn can’t see—he watches until he he can’t hold himself back any longer.
“What the hell are you doing?” He winces at his accusatory tone. There’s no mistaking the fury in the twist of her head, the terror etched into her snarl.
“I could ask you the same!” she growls, the nothingness into which she smiled at her back as she closes the distance between her and the intruder. “What did you see?” Desperation blooms in the two inch gap between their noses.
He won’t budge. “Too dark to see.”
“What did you hear?”
“Whispers."
Relief coaxes her shoulders from her ears. They sag and so does Rey, and for a moment Finn wishes he had taken the other path to the fresher. Then he lets her worm close to his chest and pretends not to hear her unsteady hiccups nor feel the tears that soak through his thin sleep shirt.
“He’s not here,” she whispers to his chest. “I see him, but I always end up alone.”
“Who?” Finn breathes, but she’s gone, still wrapped in his embrace but eyes glistening with stars from another side of the galaxy. He pats at her back until his forearm cramps and his legs beg him to shift under her weight.
When the Sith fall, and the First Order, too, Finn screams himself hoarse in celebration. Pilots clad in orange and white holler alongside mechanics in their khaki coveralls; Rose launches herself at Finn when she spots him among the crowd. Pressing a kiss to her cheek, Finn marvels at their luck: the two of them alive, the Resistance victorious. Just one night before had they huddled together, wondering if it would be their last embrace. Here in the jungle of Ajan Kloss, a future sprawls before them, unknown but intoxicating.
Frenetic chirps from BB-8 jar Finn from his thoughts. The chirps are drowned out by the growl of a familiar engine overhead. Straightening from Rose’s embrace, Finn catches the Falcon as it approaches the tree line, finds a clearing and lands too far from base for his comfort.
He runs anyway, lungs burning and eyes watering as he clambers over fallen logs and palm fronds to reach the boarding ramp just as it lowers. Familiar brown boots descend the rickety ramp, and Finn rushes to Rey, a sound in his throat suspiciously like a sob. She’s a tangle of limbs, a tug on his mind that smells faintly like flowers or maybe sea salt.
“You made it!” she exclaims.
His laugh cuts transparisteel, honed in the ashes of a hopeless war. “I made it? You made it!”
Breaking the hug, she waves a hand at the ship. “Saved by the garbage.”
A flicker in the corner of Finn’s eye pulls his attention from the radiance of her smile to the shadowy corridor of the Falcon. “Rey—?” She cuts him off, fingers on wrist and a plea in her lightsword-bright eyes. Despite the warning flicker sparking in his gut, Finn follows her.
The Millennium Falcon has no sick bay, just a few bunks in the crew quarters that have housed their fair share of the injured. One such bunk is occupied by a figure huddled under a therma-blanket. Only the tips of his boots peek out from the therma-blanket. No longer do they glisten with polish. Dust cakes the toes; dried blood, the heels. Residual darkness clings to the soles, cloying Finn’s nose and itching at his spirit.
Karking Force sensitivity.
As Finn lunges for his blaster, Rey grabs his wrist. “Saved by the garbage,” she repeats too evenly. “And him.”
He breaks her grasp with a jerk of his arm, scrambling backward with each step forward that she takes. “No.” But the softness in her eyes confirms his deepest fear. “No.”
The figure from the bunk makes no move to rise. When Finn looks past Rey, he notices the unusually white pallor of the man’s face, the sheen on his brow.
“He saved me, Finn,” she says, a thick hope that turns his stomach. “He healed me.”
“The night in the corridor. Say it wasn’t him.”
Not decent enough to look away, Rey smiles, thin faith in their friendship etched into the creases on her cheeks. It draws Finn’s hand from the safety on his blaster and his legs deeper into the jungle until he can no longer hear the jumble of thoughts over the pounding of his pulse.
“… And now they’re sharing food in the mess hall? In front of the people he fought to destroy?” Finn splutters between mouthfuls of energy pudding. He refuses to glance across the room, refuses to watch Rey and that monster sit shoulder to shoulder. Now that the med droids have cleared him to leave the sick bay, Kylo Ren hasn’t left Rey’s side.
Rose just stares at Finn until he dabs at the pudding smeared across his chin. “I knew you couldn’t taste,” she says, nicking the polystarch bread off of his plate and dumping the rest of her energy pudding in its place. “But I didn’t know you couldn’t see, either.” The snowgrape leaf at her throat winks.
“I can see that you stole my bread,” he huffs.
The grin Rose returns is positively cheeky, but Finn would trade tomorrow’s ration of polystarch bread just to see it again. “But you can’t see what’s going on between them,” she says gently before leaning in for a kiss.
“See it?” Poe repeats when Finn approaches him outside of the makeshift general’s quarters. “How can I avoid it? It’s disgusting, the way they’re hanging on each other.”
Notorious for exaggerating, Poe’s comment teases a frown from Finn. “I never see them touch.”
“They don’t have to touch to flirt.” When Finn wrinkles his nose, Poe lets out his first real chuckle since the First Order fell. “Why the face, pal? You and Rose should be experts on the subject.”
If the Acting General notices the blaster scorch marks scarring the durasteel door upon exiting his quarters, he doesn’t let on the next time he meets Finn in the mess hall. He just nods at his co-general before raising an eyebrow in the direction of Rey. She sits a few tables over, across from Kylo Ren—Ben Solo, Poe reminds him—and beams, a thousand planets evaporating in the wake of her laughter. It rises over the clatter of trays and chatter; the generals can make it out even if they can’t see Solo’s reaction from their positions facing his back.
“Disgusting.” Poe slides his tray onto an empty table. “But he’s got her smiling like I’ve never seen since she joined up with us. I like that.”
The echo of Finn’s tray slamming against the table fades in the hum of the meal hour. Only a pair of Ewoks at the end of the bench shoots him quizzical looks. He grits his teeth and drops into the seat in front of Poe. “But he killed your commanders. Blew up our fleet. Tortured you.”
Shrugging, Poe swallows half of his cup of caf in one gulp. “A home, family—Rey’s wanted all of that. With Solo, like him or not, now she’s got a chance.”
The Jedi never spoke of the electric prickles that roil under Finn’s skin as his sensitivity grows. Perhaps their awareness came on soft and slow, rather than all at once. Or maybe they never lived without an awareness of the tension that binds the universe together.
Finn’s newly-awakened Force awareness chafes. He longs to scratch the tingles that skip down his spine and burrow under his nails. No matter how he distracts himself, the energy tickles phantom-soft at the fringes of his consciousness. An empty pond, with the promise of water lapping just beyond his reach.
Rose doesn’t understand, not for lack of trying. Poe has little patience for abstractions, so Finn doesn’t bother bringing it to his attention. Busy as she keeps herself with her new friend, Rey might be his only hope for a drought of empathy. Once the remnants of the Resistance base have retired to their bunks, Finn slips from his bed and pads to Rey’s room in search of advice.
One rap at the durasteel door, then two before it slides open just a crack. Brown eyes scour Finn’s face, not warm and familiar, but suspicious and brittle. Ben Solo.
He peers down at Finn with a frown. “You’re not Rey. You’re the stormtrooper from the Finalizer.”
“You’re…” A Sith Lord? An emperor? A defector? No description fits the man wedged in the door, so Finn trails off with a cough. “Where’s Rey?”
“In the fresher.”
“Oh.”
Seconds stretch into eternities under such scrutiny, but Finn won’t look away until Ben pushes the door open only a fraction wider. An invitation. Inside he sits on Rey’s bunk, gesturing Finn towards the one form-chair, a black cloak slung haphazardly across its back. The bunk is not kind to a man as large as Ben Solo. Shirtless, he sits at the edge of the mattress in order to avoid hitting his head on the metal ceiling hanging only a few feet over the bed. The sheets underneath him are rumpled. Finn pretends not to notice the twin indentations in the pillows.
The silence calcifies, then crumples as Ben opens his mouth. “You defected from the First Order,” he says without malice.
“You burned it to the ground,” Finn fires back. Yet Ben might as well be masked again with how the barb deflects against his expressionless face.
“You hate me.” Maddening, the way he can’t summon any reaction beyond his collected nothingness. “I understand. I want to be free of this shadow, but it’s not so easy. Around Rey, though…”
“It gets lighter?”
Prickling at the nape of his neck intensifies; a familiar burnt copper taste coats the roof of Finn’s mouth. Ben frowns as he catches Finn rubbing a hand along his scalp, but inclines his head slightly. “Something like that.”
Silence again, broken again by Ben. “You sense it." His declaration leaves no room for argument. “The Force. Me.”
Finn doesn’t feel Ben the same way he feels Rey. Even in her absence, traces of Rey persist in the room, salt and blueblossoms wound into the sheets and between the legs of the form-chair upon which Finn perches. However, beneath her Finn can make out more of Ben than pleases him. The darkness that caked Ben’s soul aboard the Falcon has receded, leaving his presence almost as bland to Finn as the bodies that crowd the mess hall at every meal.
Not that he’ll admit that to the monster in his friend’s bed. “You don’t know a thing about me.”
“You’re right,” he concedes, sending Finn’s jaw into lock. “But I know the Force.”
The creak of the durasteel door opening has Finn unclenching his fists and standing up from the form-chair. “I didn’t know the line for the fresher could move so—Finn!” Rey beams at her guest before wrapping her arms around him. Once he extricates himself from her grip, murmuring farewells masquerading as greetings, she joins Ben on the bed, knees tucked in and one hand reaching for his thigh. A newness washes away the guarded apprehensiveness masking his face; his mouth curves into a tractor beam fixed only on her eyes.
Over Rey’s shoulder, Ben fixes Finn with a pointed stare, as if to remind Finn of their past lives aboard the Finalizer. Of his past life as a Sith Lord, master of the Force. As if Finn could forget. He knows that Finn feels something. That much he can’t hide, so Finn stares back until Ben looks away at a murmur from Rey. She glows under Ben’s gaze, and Finn feels her electricity tugging at the fabric of the Force again.
There’s another pull at the Force, a golden tether wending between bone and sinew to lash two souls together even as they strain against each other. An intruder on a connection too private, Finn bolts, his question about their Force sensitivity eclipsed by the unsettling, undeniable connection between Rey and Ben.
Alone Ben feels like just another lifeform, darker than most, indistinct save for the vague unease he inspires in Finn. Together with Rey, he becomes familiar, knowable. Together they’re bloodflowers and blueblossoms, leather, pine, and a tangy ozone so sharp it burns at the edges of Finn’s consciousness. Shutting the door dampens the intensity, yet a note of burnt copper lingers as Finn traces his way back to the room he shares with Rose.
She’s asleep when he arrives, another indistinct presence that Finn struggles to identify through the Force as clearly as he can Rey. Yet Rose is no stranger to the part of Finn firmly planted in the tangible world. Her soft snuffles, feet tangled in the blanket, the way she shifts into him when he slides next to her on the puff-cot: familiarity that comes from months of practice. Familiarity like the kind linking Rey and Ben together. He drifts off to sleep, the pit in his stomach shallower than it’s been in weeks.
When he tells Rose about the sensation as they dress for breakfast the next morning, she grins but doesn’t gloat, continuing to tug on a clean pair of coveralls as Finn sighs. “Just because I felt it,” he says, “doesn’t mean I like it.”
“Felt what?” she asks as Finn clasps her necklace around her neck. Her hands trace the cord, following his progress.
“They felt natural together,” he admits, even if the words are difficult to form. “In the least natural way possible.”
“Two halves of a snowgrape leaf.” A metal softer than haysian smelt would have worn away under Rose’s absent fingers, but it only gleams brighter with each pass.
To Finn, Ben Solo still reeks of a residual darkness whenever he gets too close. He’s content to stay at a distance, to offer an unpracticed but real smile when Rey pulls him aside in a service corridor on the way to the fresher to thank him for finally coming around.