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She breaks into a run the moment she sees the sign for the infirmary. She’d been holding it together up to that moment, keeping herself to a rapid walk and not pushing, nodding back to the people who nodded her – and there were a lot of them, people who’d seen her come out of the Falcon – but the stern, no-nonsense cut of the letters above the doors sets something racing inside her and her feet can do nothing but keep up. The doors part automatically before her once she’s close enough; “Finn,” she says to a being in stained white as she skids in, “I’m looking for Finn,” and she’s pointed through. Left, and another left. A private room, they say. She takes it at a run.
She’s rounding the second left when she nearly trips over an outflung leg. Something in her says, look!, and she sees it at the last second. Her arms windmill and her feet scrabble for purchase but she makes it to an abrupt stop just short. Huffing for breath, she follows the leg to its hip and up a set of worn fatigues to a face she’s only seen in the blue of BB-8s holos, on one quiet night on the Falcon.
“Poe,” she says, and then, “Poe Dameron.”
He looks up. “You just missed him,” he says, and she wants to point out, you’re right here, but she knows who he’s talking about and this isn’t the time for semantics.
“Where –“
“Surgery. Private.”
Poe Dameron is looking up at her with lazy, hooded eyes. His knee is vibrating – shaking, really. She tries not to stare, but there’s nothing else to look at in this pale, unshadowed hallway.
“It’s just the adrenaline,” he says, and she snaps her gaze back to his face. He’s almost smiling. It looks like it costs him something. “It can make you do crazy things.”
She looks down at him, then away to the door and its hidden, empty room. Gingerly, she lowers herself to the floor. Poe looks at her evenly. She stretches her feet out just a little, so there’s less space between his toes and hers.
Rey knows something about fear. She knows more still about silence. She lets this one settle, palpable like the space between their feet, and she meets Poe Dameron’s eyes and offers him a tired, barely-there smile that costs her something too. It scrapes out of her, jagged. She thinks maybe it’s worth it for the way the skin around his eyes goes looser under the grime.
They stay like that for – she doesn’t know how long. The only time they move is when a nurse goes rushing through, drawing their knees up towards themselves before resettling once he’s passed; maybe their feet are a little closer this time. Poe’s heavy-lidded eyes become heavier all at once, maybe an hour later. She rests her gaze on his slack face and turns inwards. Inside herself, she holds the tenuous thread of light she’d discovered in those white-blind moments in the forest. She cups it in gentle, scared hands. She doesn’t sleep, and the light doesn’t go out.
“Please, is there any news?”
“Not yet, dear. I’m sorry, I really have to go –“
Poe starts awake, feet kicking out instinctively. His gaze flickers the corridor, placing it, then finds her and the nurse beside her. There’s a moment where his face is lit with such unguarded hope and trepidation that her heart thuds in her chest, concussive. It covers up quickly, and she’s able to breathe again.
“Roonie,” he says, spinning charm in his smile like he’s not fairly crackling with dry sweat-salt at the edges and like he wasn’t dead to the world just a minute ago, “Roonie, lovely, give me some good news, you wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had.”
The nurse – Roonie, apparently – throws him a look that’s equal parts long-suffering and affectionate. “I’ve seen your medical charts, Dameron. I can well believe the day you’ve had.”
“Anything, Roonie,” Poe says, beseeching.
She shakes her head. “It’s too early to say, Poe,” she says, “and I’m needed now. Go sleep. If you don’t stretch and get yourself into a real bed, you’ll feel like hell tomorrow.”
The look on Poe’s face as Roonie leaves cuts into Rey. He looks about how she feels, and, Gods, she hadn’t known how much it would hurt, having people to care about. A person to care about. There’s an ache in her she doesn’t know how to excise; her hands itch for something strong to hold until she’s white-knuckled.
Poe's face is tight with a fear she can’t know but can easily imagine. She’d thought it was bad having no one. What must it be like, she wonders, to have and to lose?
She closes her eyes and feels for the light. Stay, she whispers, urgent. Stay.
She’s shaken awake by a calloused hand at her shoulder. When she looks up, it’s into the kind eyes of the General; she’d fallen asleep, Gods, she’d fallen asleep –
“Finn,” she breathes. The General is nodding before she manages to pull herself together enough to find the answer inside herself. “Thank you,” Rey says, “thank you, oh, thank you.”
She doesn’t know what she’s saying, who she’s thanking. She thinks she might be shaking. Her neck, true to nurse Roonie’s prediction, feels like hell.
Across from her, Poe Dameron is staring down at his hands in his lap. There are clean tracks cutting through the dirt smudging his cheeks. She stares.
“What’s happened,” she says, reaching to clutch at the General’s hand on her shoulder. Gods, what now?
The General looks down; her throat works. “He followed the medship away immediately when you landed. He hadn’t heard about Han.”
Rey blinks against the sudden heat at the back of her eyes. If the General isn’t crying, she won’t, she tells herself; she tries to slacken her grip on the General’s fingers, but finds that the General is gripping back just as strongly. Stronger.
“Come with me,” says Leia Organa, General of the Resistance, Princess of legend. “There’s a lot we must discuss.”
Rey bites at her lip, glancing back towards the closed door at the end of the long hall. “My friend,” she says, but Leia says, “You won’t really be leaving him. Am I wrong?”
The thread of light has achieved a new materiality in her mind; it’s not any stronger, but it’s easier to touch, like a cable in her speeder she’s located once and can find again that much faster. With a thought, she winds it around her wrist and knots it tightly. “No,” she says. “You’re not wrong.”
Leia smiles, warm. “I didn’t think so,” she says, and she draws Rey up by their joined hands.
Rey looks down to Poe, alone against the wall. He’s staring off towards the doors; whether he’s seeing them, or caught in some middle distance, she doesn’t know.
Leia squeezes her hand. “We’ll give him a moment,” she says, and Rey nods.
Outside the infirmary, Leia leads her to a mess hall, where she gets a bowl of something she barely tastes but that fills her stomach faster than anything she’s ever known. Leia sits across from her as she eats; she hasn’t taken anything for herself. Rey gets halfway through the bowl before Leia speaks.
“I felt it,” she says, and something in Rey freezes at the unimaginable before Leia continues, “when you reached for the Force, and it reached back to you. You’re strong. We need you.”
Rey doesn’t even have to think before she’s saying, mouth still half full, “I’m with you,” and she flushes, and swallows, and repeats, “I’m with you, General.”
“Please, says the General. There’s something, something in her eyes – “Call me Leia.”
Rey is pointed to the showers after the meal, the rest of which passes mostly in silence. The light hasn’t flickered once. After a quick rinse, she winds her way back to the infirmary and that quiet hallway, where Poe is still sitting. His eyes are dry now.
Did you know him, she wants to ask, what was he like, was he as brave as he seemed, was he as kind – all the questions that had been on her tongue but silenced in the face of the General’s grief.
She holds the knowledge of Finn’s light close until the dangerous burn in her eyes has passed. And how strange, she thinks, that the fact that Poe has stopped crying should make her want to cry so much more.
He looks up at her. “I waited,” he says. “While you were gone. Didn’t want to leave him unwatched.”
Finn wasn’t, but Rey says, “Thank you,” and means it with all that she has. She presses her shoulderblades to the wall and slides down. Her legs stretch out until her feet are once again close to Poe’s.
“You should shower,” she says, “I can watch.” She doesn’t extol the virtues of the shower, which was like nothing she’d ever encountered, because of course he already knows. She wishes, desperately, for Finn.
“I can wait a while longer,” Poe says. “This is far from the grossest I’ve ever been,” and it’s so unexpected – it comes with a smile, real under eyes that are still red-rimmed, and she laughs like it’s been knocked out of her.
“I bet I could beat you there,” she says when she can breathe again. He grins, and it’s easy, it’s so ridiculously easy. She inhales through her nose and reels, somewhere deep where she barely even registers it, at how she can feel so scared and so light at the same time.
Caring, she’s beginning to realize, is exhausting.
“You look like you’re going to pass out again,” Poe says. “You can, if you want. I’m not going anywhere.”
“It’s fine,” she says. She echoes him: “I can wait a while longer.”
They fall back to silence.
Finally, finally, a doctor emerges from the hidden depths and comes towards them. Rey straightens, and across from her, Poe does the same.
This is a military base; the doctor doesn’t ask if they’re family.
“He’s stable,” he says. Rey crumples with relief but Poe stays rigid, searching the doctor’s face with a hound’s intensity. The doctor nods at him and something in Rey goes cold. “The surgery was, however, unprecedented. He’s in a medical coma, and will be for some time, while we ensure that everything has gone according to plan and while his body heals around the supports we’ve given it.”
Rey blinks uncomprehendingly at him, and then looks to Poe. He’s closed his eyes; under the dirt he’s gone pale.
“Wait,” she says slowly, “are you – are you saying that you’ve put him in a coma, or that he’s in one, and it just happens to be medically useful?”
The doctor exhales a long breath. “You have to understand that this is not the kind of wound we’ve seen before. Much of the literature on lightsaber wounds was lost in the Wars, and while we’ve worked hard to learn what we can since, I’ve never known anyone to survive a spinal injury like this one long enough to receive care. The fact that your friend has is a miracle. We’ve done our part; it remains now to see how he responds.”
“What was the surgery?” Poe says, eyes still shut.
“Several vertebrae and nerves were severely damaged,” says the doctor. “The med-droids were able to install mechanical counterparts. They were successfully integrated and should be fully functional when he wakes. But injuries have tolls on the body beyond what we can concretely heal; once those have begun to ease, he should wake.”
Rey stares down at her feet and clenches her hands into fists, knuckles to the ground, while Poe thanks the doctor in a tone that’s much less even than it was before. A few more words are exchanged; she misses them. Footsteps recede.
A hand curls around her boot, knuckle of a thumb pressing into the soft sole at her arch and fingers brushing her laces. She looks up to meet eyes that are as tired as hers, and kind, even though – she’s only just met him, just hours ago, and how can he stand it? How can he offer kindness to a stranger like this? To every stranger? How do people do this, and not go mad?
“Doc said we can go in and see him,” Poe says.
“I heard him,” she snaps, although of course she didn't; for some reason, he smiles at this.
“Well, let’s go, then,” he says. “Can’t keep him waiting.” He lets go of her foot to brace himself against the wall as he rises. Standing doesn’t go much better for her; her bones creak as she forces them to unbend her, a sign of how long she’s been still and all that came before the stillness.
She can’t think of it.
The door at the end of the hall seem to hold a quiet menace now. She stares at it, and beside her, she feels more than sees Poe twitch, a full-bodied thing. Can’t still be adrenaline; it’s been hours. But the hallway is just one last obstacle before she can rest. She needs to see Finn; she won’t be able to think clearly until she has.
“Come on, then,” she says, and strides to the door, pulling it open in a graceless swing.
He’s on a flat bed, white sheets pulled up to his shoulders, arms resting slack on top. His eyes are closed. Someone’s cleaned off the dirt and sweat that had coated his face the last time she saw him; she’d pressed her face to his chest and he’d been rank with the smell of fear, and she’d thought that she’d never known anyone so brave.
There’s a soft sound from behind her as Poe enters the room. She doesn’t turn; she doesn’t want to see what’s on his face, and she thinks maybe he’d be grateful for it. Instead, she approaches the bed with measured steps. The hum of the observatory machines hovering near the bed is loud in her ears; her pulse is louder. She watches for Finn’s eyelashes to flicker, his fingers to twitch. They don’t.
“He looks – better,” Poe says. “That’s a good sign. Definitely a good sign.”
He does. It is. She feels for that bright light and presses a kiss to it because, Gods, it’s real – he’s here, and he’s alive, and she’d felt it all along but she’d wondered, quietly, too deep to acknowledge, whether or not it was just another sad lie for a sad little girl. Your parents will come home someday. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after. They’ll come. But here is Finn, alive and in front of her.
A warm certainty settles over her. Her aches ease; the dull throb at her temples recedes. She folds herself into one of the chairs beside his bed and she takes his hand into both of hers.
“He’ll be alright,” she says.
Poe collapses into the chair next to hers. “And you’d know, right?” he says. He’s staring down at Finn with his brow furrowed and his hands clasped tightly to the arms of his chair. “You’re – you’re one of those force-sensitive whiz kids, so you’d know. Right. Good.”
“I’m not a kid,” she says. She tries to stay stern-faced, but it’s hard with Finn’s skin warm against hers and the light shining so brightly within her.
He shoots her a look, startled, and grins, raising his hands. “Roonie’s words, not mine,” he promises. The smile that’s been hiding at the corners of her mouth breaks free of her grip and she ducks her head, just a little. He’s charming. It’s awful.
When she looks up again, his hands are still raised, hovering above the edge of the bed. His gaze skitters the length of Finn's body, avoiding his face. She thinks maybe he’s forgotten she’s there, or maybe he just doesn’t care who sees how much he cares. Or.
“Here,” she says, and she takes his closest hand in one of hers and lays it over Finn’s wrist. Poe’s hand is bigger than hers and just as calloused, and the breadth of his palm covers all the delicate bones of Finn’s wrist completely. “He likes holding hands. He would like this.”
Poe is silent. He looks at her with wide eyes.
She takes Finn’s hand back into hers. She and Poe are sat so close, her forearm just pressed against his. For a moment, she’s hyperaware of it, skin and fine hair brushing against her own – Gods, is this what it’s like, to be close to people all the time, to touch them all the time – but then it passes. There’s too much of that warmth and certainty inside her for the anxiety to linger. She closes her eyes, and Finn is alive and -- and cherished in her hands.
“He’s my best friend,” she says. “So -- yes. I do know.”
There’s a sigh of an exhale beside her. She runs her thumb across the jut of Finn’s knuckles, and settles in to wait.