Archive of Our Own

Trying not to panic, Finn's waiting for the Q train when her text comes through. Phasma's show is tonight and he has to be on hand to help out, as well as just be there for moral support, but the shitty demons of mass transit are wreaking havoc with all of his careful plans.

Her text is typically terse.

> yr officially late, 87

"I had class," he thumb-types back. "You know this."

> u can play pixelvision auteur when tf ever
> get here
> NOW

"I'm on my way. Hence my earlier OMW text."

> idk y i expected better

Finn rolls his eyes. He doesn't have anything to say in response to that, and whatever he does say will just piss her off more, so he pockets his phone and goes up on his toes to check down the subway tunnel one more time.

*

For any number of (bullshit) reasons, people are often surprised to learn who he is: you're Finn? The Finn. Phasma's Finn? They were expecting, he assumes, a skinny white kid with rounded shoulders and a perpetual hangdog expression. That's how Phasma characterizes him, at any rate. Her character "Finn" is a wet blanket, kind of a douche, definitely a buzzkill. He's kept around for one reason, and one reason only.

"Say it with me, ladies and enbies: cunni-fucking-ling-long-diddly-do-us." It's the climactic (ha) moment to which every irritated anecdote and longwinded narcissistic aside have been building. "Guy's tongue is like Da Vinci's brush. Genius."

Once they've confirmed that he is, indeed, that Finn, most of them school their expressions and ask, confidential and curious, "So, is it true?"

He doesn't answer any longer. He used to play dumb, make them spell it out, but now he just shrugs and turns away. It's exhausting, being known as the Muff-Diving Prince of Kings County and Lower Manhattan. Exhausting? He meant exasperating. Extremely extra.

It's a lot of things. Phasma's a lot, always has been.

*

*

The first time Finn met Phasma, she tackled him from behind, ground his face into the gravel, and knocked loose two of his teeth. To be fair, she'd thought he was laughing at her.

Also, she was only eleven. He was about five. It was his first day in that particular group home, and Finn, then known as Laurence, had wandered out to the play yard in back. He'd been sitting on his new bed for a while, still wearing his knapsack, when he heard kids shouting through the window.

After the last placement, he'd promised himself that he'd make friends here.

It was an instinct that Phasma praised him for, later, years on: "You got to find someone who's got your back, or you'll just be in the shit for the rest of your life."

Back then, of course, Finn just thought having friends would be a nice change. Even after a visit to urgent care to get his split lip sewn up, he believed that.

Phasma was the biggest kid in the house, taller and stronger than the couple teenaged boys who lived up in the attic and smoked a lot. She had messy blonde hair chopped into a bob and flat blue eyes and she was, on no account, ever to be fucked with.

Finn basically adored her. She'd named herself, years back, after a minor villain on one of those cartoons made solely to sell cheap toys. She called him 87, the last two digits of his casefile number, to remind him that the names they gave you came and went. So long as he kept quiet — never a problem for him — she tolerated his hanging around and tagging along.

*

"You're late," Phasma tells him when Finn makes it to the theater and tracks her down backstage. "I sent Slip home. You can do both."

"Bar and merch?" he asks.

She keeps her gaze on her phone. "That's what I said."

"By myself?"

"Maybe you shouldn't have been late," she replies. "Think about it."

"Just —" He swallows. More responsibility means more opportunity to fuck up. That's just simple math. "It's a lot."

He waits for her to respond, even to react, but Phasma merely sighs, her thumb twitching as she scrolls.

"Right," Finn says eventually. "Anyway, good luck. Break a leg?"

"Thanks, babe." She still doesn't look up, but she does blow him a kiss. "You're a lifesaver."

*

Recently, as the number of live appearances has increased, Phasma has taken on a new, dramatic look — scarlet lipstick and heavy, dark eyes that sometimes resemble bruises more than cosmetics. Her lips are pillowy, regularly plumped with fillers while the rest of her face is a pale, solemn mask. Except for those eyes.

Her hair, usually dishwater blonde, is platinum now, something bright and beyond color.

They dyed her hair the night before last. With a towel pinned around her shoulders, Phasma sat at the kitchen table. Finn stood behind her, wearing two sets of gloves and wielding a squeeze bottle of dye in one hand, a comb in his mouth, clips on the neckline of his shirt. The dye was a custom blend he'd perfected of soft lemon and harsh platinum. He liked to call it Phasma Yellow Chrome. He'd daubed Vaseline along her hairline first, and the jelly caught the bare light overhead as he turned and tilted her head.

These quiet nights, just the two of them in the apartment, were increasingly rare. They ate takeout beforehand, so he could still smell masala through the chemicals. She wasn't too tense and he was fairly relaxed: they met somewhere in the middle, where there were good memories and long-held trust.

It makes less than no sense, but he misses her, even when she's right over there.

*

*

For a couple years around the time he was twelve, he got a foster family that called him Finn after a grandfather who'd died just before the foster kid showed up. Phasma was almost out of the system by then, but they still saw each other. They usually met at the library (Finn's choice) or the 7-11 parking lot just before the strip mall (Phasma's). Finn checked her homework when she felt like doing it; she passed him candy nicked when she'd stolen beer.

Somewhere along the line, as time passed and they lost touch, things flipped around. Finn started skipping school, while Phasma, he learned later, went back to community college and took it seriously.

*

"Flanagan!" Snoke says as he approaches the bar. He makes it a point of pride never to remember Finn's name. "How goes life in the trenches?"

"Sweltering," Finn tells him. "What can I get you?"

The guy is loaded, rich enough to buy this whole block, raze it, and redevelop it without breaking a sweat. He doesn't pay for his Rolling Rock, or the vodka soda he orders for the young woman on his arm.

"Lucy here was just saying she'd like a shirt, weren't you, sweetness?"

"Extra-small?" Finn asks, hand on the edge of the carton. It's the size he offers most women here — flattery is the direct road to good tips — but the suggestion is entirely sincere in this case. She is teeny-tiny, pretty in a delicate way, like a dandelion head about to blow away. Breakable.

"Do you have, like. Little children's?" she asks, then licked the condensation off her cup like it's an ice cream cone. Both Snoke and Finn watch her tongue work.

Finn shakes himself back to consciousness.

"We don't," he says. "Sometimes there are onesies, but not tonight, and, anyway, I don't think even you could fit in a baby size but —"

While Snoke smirks at his babble, Finn resolutely ignores him.

"Forget it!" She looks like she's about to cry as she turned to go.

"Like what you see?" Snoke asks him.

"Pretty," Finn replies, but Snoke is already hurrying after her. Finn's telling the truth, but even if he'd been listening, Snoke wouldn't have understood.

It's not that Finn finds her attractive so much as he's fascinated by her. Like the vast majority of women here, Lucy does her makeup just like Phasma — fat red lips, wide dark eyes — but where Phasma looks like a warrior angel out to kick ass and collect heads as trophies, the others just look like kids playing at their moms' vanities.

He has to laugh. He's basically pulling a "not like other girls" about his own girlfriend. There must be some sort of rule against that.

"What's so funny?" a guy at his elbow asks.

"Me," Finn replies. "Always me. What can I get you?"

The guy, all mobile eyebrows and unruly hair and heavy stubble, shows him a business card. "Gossip, tea, whatever you know."

"About what?"

"Effo," the guy says, leaning over the bar. "You must have a lot to say."

"Why's that?" Finn nods at another guy ordering beers and moves down to grab them from the cooler.

Curly guy shrugs and gives Finn a long, slow smile. "You're Finn, right? Right in the middle of everything, yet strangely silent. Talk to me."

"I'm just trying to keep up with the crowd, man," he says without looking up from peeling the caps off the beers.

"Yeah, I get that."

When Finn turns around, two beers in one hand and a rum and coke in the other, the guy's gone. There's a ten-dollar bill paper-clipped to a business card where he'd stood.

Finn serves the drinks and pockets the money.

*

Fuck off.

Feral objectivity.

Friendly objection.

Fierce obstinacy.

Frequent obscenity.

Feminist obsolescence.

*

Effo use irony to express themselves, undercutting both the content of their claims as well as the possibility of dismissing those claims. What they say they stand for is in constant question: are they kidding? How serious are they? Is there even any room any longer to ask these kinds of questions, or have culture and society moved into such refracted narcissism that those questions are the real joke?

Finn understands the (il)logic of what Effo's doing. That's enough for him. His own mind doesn't work that way, with layers of irony and denial, jokes and intense analysis, but he's glad they're doing what they love.

He has always assumed that most people are decent at heart and capable of doing the right thing — this, as Phasma has pointed out many times, despite repeated and direct personal experience.

"You," she says tonight, leaning in so Finn can light her cigarette, "are as pretty as you are fucking naive."

After the sold-out show, they're up on the roof of Kyle's building, under a string of lights with only three bulbs working. She keeps one hand cupped around his, though the flame is out, and blows smoke out the corner of her mouth. From the outside, they make a strange figure out of some Renaissance altar piece, him holding up an offering, her leaning down to accept it.

"Harsh," Finn says and stows the lighter in his back pocket.

Phasma grasps his wrist and pulls him in and up, against her. "Kiss me."

"Ugh, smoke," he says but doesn't move. Her lipstick needs touching up and her eyes glitter like new frost. "Disgusting."

"But I want to." It's true, and it's all that matters. She squeezes his wrist and Finn rises on his toes, leaning against her immovable solidity. Phasma kisses him like she's inhaling on the cigarette; he tastes the sour smoke and sweet lipstick, then just the antic, slippery heat of her tongue.

She grips the back of his neck, keeps his arm folded up between them, and tongue-fucks his mouth until his head is swimming.

"There," she says, drawing back and taking another drag. "Feel better?"

"Sure." Finn leans back against the low wall. Phasma slides her arm around his waist, tucking her hand against the small of his back, then the swell of his ass. She tickles him there, watching him sidelong. Finn swallows and adjusts his posture; he has to spread his legs to make room in his pants.

Snorting, Phasma pinches his ass.

Finn tips his head against her shoulder. The strap to her silky chemise has slid down her bicep and tickles his nose. "You must be getting cold in that."

"I'm all right," she tells him. "Don't worry about me."

Except he always does. His concern is persistent, part of the very weave of his thoughts and choices. He doesn't worry in any sort of frantic, neurotic way (except, of course, when he does). Concern for her and what she'll think, how she'll deal, how she might react, is always part of his thought process.

*

After high school, he spent a couple years couch-surfing and working shit jobs. The last one, doing security at a chi-chi gallery out by the university, turned into something better. He started showing up earlier and the gallery owner let him browse in the office library, ask questions, even borrow books and DVDs. The whole situation didn't seem quite real; this was more like one of those inspirational movies about educating the underclass than anything that Finn had ever gone through.

"What do you want, though?" Phasma asked when they ran into each other and started catching up. She was moving to New York to do the last two years of her degree and she wanted Finn to come with her. They hadn't seen each other in years, but he was still part of her plan. "Do you want to suck the dick of some rich asshole so you can keep reading books you'll never afford?"

"It's not like that," Finn told her. He addressed his beer, actually; just a few hours after reuniting, and he was already remembering and reassuming all the old nervousness he used to feel around Phasma. The possibility of disappointing her was both real and terrifying. "He's not —. I'm not sucking anyone's dick."

She laughed at him and clinked their beers together. "Not for lack of trying, right?"

Flushing all over, he fiddled with the label on his beer. "I like girls, too," he mumbled. Phasma laughed more loudly. "I do!"

"Sure you do, 87, sure you do." She slung her arm around his shoulders and scrubbed her fist through his hair. "Take it from someone who knows you better."

Not until much later did he think to wonder, knows me better than what? Instead, he pushed forward, dragging his barstool with him, to kiss her. She still had her arm around him, so all he had to do was squirm and reach and mash his mouth against hers. Sitting like this, she was still a head taller than he was, but she pushed into the kiss, bending to meet him, then pinning him between her body and the bar. Finn was twisted in about fourteen different directions, yet he felt weightless and exhilarated.

"That's it," she muttered, smearing the kiss from his lips to his ear. Her nails dug into his scalp. "Show me what you've got."

*

Red/Brown Will Always Be Brown: How Effo and the Online "Left" Open the Door to Fash and Bow in Welcome

(And Just How Much Is Hedge-Fund Wizard Snoke Bankrolling Them?)

Palo Jemabie, transformtheworld-dot-net

The shirt pictured below sells for a cool $20 at Effo live events and in the podcast's online store. Made for pennies in Bangladesh, it sports what its sellers would certainly dismiss as a lolarious joke grouping: two revolutionaries joined with two of the most noxious, repulsive "thinkers" of the 20th century.

Effo's laughing all the way to the bank, or Snoke's pockets. Same difference. And they're dragging their fans through turd-laden mud as they go.

*

Below them, the jagged patchwork of Brooklyn blocks shivers and glitters. The park interrupts some of the activity, hunching dark and still. Traffic bumps around; apartment windows glow or go dim. There are so many people in the world, crowded here, strung out elsewhere, all of them dreaming and hoping and trying hard.

"Sometimes I can't believe we're here," Finn says dreamily. He's tired, faded, slowly relaxing against Phasma's warmth. His arm's slung around her waist, his chin against her shoulder.

Phasma flicks her cigarette over the edge of the roof. It makes a tiny red star, arcing down over the dark street.

"Believe it, Tinkerbell. Took fuckloads of hard work. You know that better than anybody."

Finn swallows against the cold suddenly rushing through him. "I didn't mean that."

"I worked my ass off to get here," she says. Her voice is low and hoarse.

"I know you did." He wants to laugh, not from amusement, certainly not at her, but to break whatever frigid tension has descended over them and trapped them here. When she gets angry like this, it takes everything he has to stay calm, just to get through it to the next moment.

"And I brought you along," she continues, frowning into the night, never looking at him. She doesn't have to look; he's pinned here. He's not going anywhere.

Any gesture or movement he makes in this moment could make it worse. Angry like this, Phasma is prone to misunderstand whatever you do or say as a bid to escape or argue with her. Both are equally dangerous.

"You're welcome," she adds, "by the way."

"I know," Finn says. He knows all of this. He knows it like he knows his own name — better, actually. "Thank you."

She is so still. He curls his hands inside his front pockets lest he disturb her.

"Don't want thanks, 87," she says. Her jaw is sharp in the low, strange light up here. "Just want you to use your fucking head for once. That's not too much to ask."

"No. No, it's not."

He threads a narrow line between patronizing placation and sincerity. He's always sincere, but a lot of the time, he sounds, he's told, patronizing. He never knows if he's succeeded. It's rarely up to him.

As stuck, as frozen here, as he feels, it's somehow worse when she stalks away toward the fire door and back to the party. Without her, he's alone, and she might never return. On her own, she could decide, finally, that she's done with him. She could realize at last how useless he really is. She's called him that a lot, only to forget it when she's no longer angry, but there's always the chance that this time, she'll keep on believing it.

It's neither exaggeration nor metaphor to say he can't imagine life without her.

He bends over, grabbing his knees, as his heart pounds and he tries to remember how to breathe.