Chapter Text
Finn was wheeled quickly beyond the crowd of people celebrating both their own survival and the more general victory. Then he was out of sight. Poe was briefly caught up in the crowd around the hanger and couldn't quite extract himself, though he craned to see which direction Finn was being wheeled. More than a few people, some dear friends, had been completely cut off from the reports as they came in and it would be cruel to disappear too quickly for them to confirm that, yes, despite the odds, he made it back. Jess caught him in a tight hug as he passed her, Snap coming around the other side and both of them pressing a bit too close for a second.
"That was close," said Jess and Poe huffed a laugh because she would understate everything until the day she died and that day was not today.
By the time he made it to the medics, Finn had already been ushered past the point where healthy people were allowed and this was inconveniently not one of the many times when Poe was himself ushered beyond after a mission.
General Organa appeared with an arm around a tall-ish girl and Poe realized that this, this was the hero of the moment, the miracle of the mission and he was horrified to find that he wanted nothing more than to kick her out–-to kick them both out–-and barricade himself in with Finn.
He settled for folding his arms and only glowering a little.
“Poe,” said the General with a nod. “You’ve met–”
“No,” he said, too quickly. The General raised an eyebrow but continued without pause.
“–Rey, who I think will be a great asset. She clearly is very sensitive to the Force and might be just the bargaining chip we need to convince my brother to return.” She maybe emphasized great asset a bit too much for Poe’s taste, who considered the great asset to be the one who somehow got his back slashed open on this girl’s watch, but he could see the General’s point. Also. He was an adult.
He nodded and stiffly held out a hand. Rey shook it just as stiffly.
“Oh good, I’m sure you’ll be fast friends,” said the General and there was just the hint of smothered laughter in her tone. “Someone get me a report on Finn’s condition,” she said to the medidroid hovering nearby.
“I can go and–” Poe started to say, but Rey was speaking at the same time.
“Let me go and–”
They both went silent and regarded each other sullenly. The medidroid, however, made that polite whirring sound that Poe mentally cataloged as “throat clearing” when BB-8 did it.
“I will make you aware as Finn’s treatment continues,” it said primly. “All of you.”
“I’ll wait,” said Poe, pulling out a stool.
“Me too,” said Rey, eyes darting between him, the medidroid, and the General. “If he can wait here, so can I.”
The General smiled and Poe knew her well enough to know that smile was the one that was warm around the edges but sad and lonely somewhere deep inside. She pulled Rey in for a hug, quick and tight, and then patted Poe on the shoulder.
“Keep me appraised,” she said and left to see to the other wounded, the other heroes of the moment who needed her. Poe was struck yet again—as he so often was–-that the General seemed to have an infinite amount of room in her heart for someone who was so fierce. He’d known many heroes, but she was something of an entirely different stuff.
***
They waited. Two hours later, sore from sitting on the cramped stool, Poe stretched.
Rey crossed her arms.
A quick check with the nearest medidroid gave back the report that Finn’s conditional was nearer stability, but that more time was needed.
They kept waiting.
***
Poe awoke with an undignified snort and realized it was because someone was shifting Rey in her sleep. It was, he realized, Chewbacca picking Rey up from where she was curled up into Poe’s side on the floor…on the floor of the medical bay, right, because they were waiting. He could see beyond Chewbacca to the open bay doors and, where it had been bright sunlight streaming in last he checked and was pitch black now.
Rey gripped onto a strap on the outer inflatable vest of Poe’s uniform in her sleep, refusing to be pulled away. It occurred to Poe how gentle the Wookie was being if the simple weight of her grip was holding him back. It also occurred to him that he might not have ever seen Chewbacca be so gentle in all the years he had known him. General Solo never needed anyone to be gentle with him–
–and then the druggat dropped and Poe remembered with a swoop of his stomach that Han Solo was dead.
Rey’s hand tightened again on the strap and one of his hands automatically hovered over hers, not quite touching.
It was the least he could do, he realized, because this girl was someone special not just to Finn, still unconscious beyond the double doors, but also to others. Special to General Solo especially. Poe might not know her---might not want her there at that particular moment---but that wasn’t even the majority opinion.
Poe shrugged out of the inflatable vest Rey was gripping, letting her take it with her as Chewbacca lifted her up.
Chewbacca assessed Poe briefly–-barely–and howled dismissively, “whatever.”
Rey, though. He was holding her so delicately and Poe realized that Rey’s grip on the strap of his uniform was just part of a general distress, a quiet sort of distress in the twitching of her eyelids and tiny convulsions in her fingers, and he reached out towards her face without even thinking about it. He brushed the hair off her forehead and she turned just slightly in the direction of his fingertips.
Chewbacca nodded this time and said, “better.” Wookies didn’t usually bother with full sentences except for people they especially liked or if something really important was on fire. They tended to get the point across as efficiently as possible even then.
“Go to your bed,” Chewbacca commanded. He shifted Rey in his grip so that she was nestled into his arms, curled up towards and against him.
“Yeah, ok,” said Poe and watched them leave before he also found his way to his feet. It didn’t seem fair to stay when Rey had been carried off in her sleep–-like cheating, somehow.
***
They were both back the next day.
The report was: Finn was in a “medically induced” coma which was different from other comas in ways that were clearly too subtle for Poe to see. Either way, he was out of the bacta tank for now and breathing on his own, which seemed good.
“I don’t understand, why is being out of the ‘bacta tank’ a good thing?” asked Rey, looking between the droid and Poe. “What even is a bacta tank?”
“It’s a healing tank,” said Poe as the droid clearly started booting up to give the technical explanation. “If he’s out of the tank, he’s stable. Healing.”
Rey took a deep breath, like she hadn’t been breathing for ages.
“We still have to wait, though,” she said, not a question.
“Yeah,” he agreed, settling back onto his stool.
BB-8 joined them later and Poe started half-heartedly cleaning out his encrusted circuits and digging the jammed sand out of his shell.
Rey didn’t watch exactly, but seemed to know which tool he would need next before he looked up to try to find it. She held each one out toward him, her gaze steady but still not exactly friendly. The rest of the time, she was focused on a tiny schematic of the map to Skywalker.
Poe found himself biting his lip when he looked back down after their hands brushed.
***
When they were finally allowed in to see Finn, they were instructed that it had to be one at a time.
“Too much too fast could be detrimental to his health,” the medidroid explained. “Who shall be first?”
Poe and Rey glared at each other a moment in silence.
“I met him first,” said Poe.
“Yeah, well, I spent more time with him,” said Rey.
“I’m older than you.”
“I’m younger than you.”
“That doesn’t even make sense. Why should you being younger get you in first?”
“Oh, like it makes so much more sense that you go first from being older?”
“I’m just saying, age before wis—”
Rey cut him off with a loud snort and, yeah, fair point. She folded her arms defiantly.
“Fine,” said Poe. “I can be the adult here. You go first.”
Her glare intensified. “No, I’m going to be the adult here. You go first.”
“No,” insisted Poe. “Ladies first.”
“Fuck ladies,” said Rey. “You. Go. First.”
“OK, I really am going to go first then, you said it,” said Poe. “So I’m going first.”
Rey waved sarcastically the door. “There’s the way in,” she said. “You just have to put one foot in front of the other.”
***
“Your girlfriend is so annoying,” Poe told Finn’s motionless form.
***
“Your boyfriend is the worst,” said Rey to Finn as soon as the door closed behind her.
***
The next few days were quiet after the raucousness of the celebration. Too many dead, too many funereal rites. Poe carried at least a dozen caskets to burial sites and spent hours upon hours in the vidbooth calling widows and parents. Between that and trying to scrounge together a new fleet of spaceworthy crafts out of the leftovers--ships that had already been retired for one reason or another--Poe's days were packed. Between all these tasks, though, he managed to find his way back to the medbay and, thanks to a tenuous accord reached with Rey, he didn't even have to share his time slots.
Eventually, Rey had to leave. Luke Skywalker–-against all common sense–-was not going to return on his own, apparently, and really did need someone to go fetch him. The General was right, Rey would be the best emissary in that capacity and Rey herself couldn’t deny that she needed to know more and he was the only one who could help.
Outside the medbay, Poe pulled at the sleeve of his jacket-–not the one split in half currently sitting at Finn’s side—and fidgeted because it really did feel like cheating to think of getting to toss the careful schedule of rotating shifts with Rey. It was alright to press for more time with Finn or to insist that he get first slot of the day if Rey was there, but it felt like pressing an unfair advantage to hog all of his coma time if she had to leave.
It was actually his turn in Finn's room, but he pretended not to remember so that Rey could duck in and say her goodbyes. He returned to the hanger and did a perfunctory sweep of his T-70, flipping open and closed various control panels just to dawdle. He made his way to the medical bay afterward, just in time to see through the open door as Rey finished brushing a quick kiss to Finn’s forehead. He coughed loudly so that she would know she was being observed and by who.
She looked up and their eyes met. There was just a hint of gloss to her eyes–-not teary, but somewhere along to way to teary. Poe looked away.
She stood, straight and tall, and joined him in the doorway.
“You’ll watch over him,” she said. It wasn’t a question but it also wasn’t certainty-–not asking him
to, but hoping.
“Of course,” Poe said. Even if you hadn’t just assumed you were the only one who cares about him, he wanted to say, irrational and sullen. As if he wasn’t already my top priority.
“And you’ll send word if–” Her jaw clenched. Poe softened. Yeah, Finn was his top priority, but Rey didn’t have the luxury of choosing hers.
“If anything changes. When. When it changes,” said Poe.
She nodded.
***
Poe helped Chewbacca load up supplies and do his last checks on the Falcon. He knew for a fact that Rey was having her last meeting with General Organa, probably very classified material being exchanged, and he didn’t want, you know, anything to suffer from neglect. It was the Falcon, after all: historically significant, yes, but also, strictly speaking, spacejunk.
“Stupid,” yowled Chewbacca and threw a spanner in Poe’s general direction. Poe assumed Chewbacca had heard the disparaging thought about the Falcon. That, or he knew everybody who wasn’t Rey, Han, or himself wouldn’t trust the ship farther than they could throw her.
No one had any way of predicting what kind of planet Skywalker had chosen for his refuge, Poe thought as he carefully stowed the spanner. It might be freezing. It might be rainy.
It’s not like Rey had a lot of experience with rainy planets, he reasoned.
That was why---that was specifically, solely, why---he fetched one of his more durable jackets from his room and stuffed it into the container with the rest of the outerwear. He’d worn it on a mission to Daroon a while back and he’d spent half the mission at least with it draped over his head as the rain poured down like pellets. If the planet she ended up on was rainy, she’d be covered.
He was just arriving at the thought, ‘Oh no, what if it’s cold not rainy’ when Rey and General Organa arrived.
“I was not touching anything,” he said quickly. The General gave him that look again, the one that made him want to apologize for things he hadn’t even done yet, but didn’t she comment.
“He’s so stupid,” said Chewbacca to the General. He threw something softer at Poe this time, but Poe didn’t stop to look at it. He tossed it behind him onto the open container so it hid the jacket.
“I should go--I should probably go to--,” he started to say, pushing past the General and Rey both. He didn’t have anything to rush off toward, but he knew when he was the third wheel on an upcoming emotional scene. If things had worked out differently, everyone knew Han Solo had offered this girl a job. Everyone knew Chewbacca---who hadn’t chosen anyone Han hadn’t chosen first in over four decades---chose her to be his co-pilot. Hell, if things had worked out differently, this might have been Rey’s new family.
He stopped at the bay doors and turned.
“Rey!” he shouted.
“What?” she shouted back, looking over her shoulder.
“You better come back,” he said.
She huffed and turned back to Chewbacca, who was holding up a laser calliper in one hand and something that looked an awful lot like a homemade Meson taloscope in the other.
Poe nodded to her back. She’d be fine. Probably. She was mostly annoying and he didn’t care.
***
Poe tried to stick to his fair share of time with Finn after Rey left, but it was more difficult than he’d thought it’d be. It didn’t help that no new missions were being planned until they got word back about Rey’s mission. There wasn’t much to do while the First Order troupes they had been tracking before the Starkiller base had lost their Resistance tails and left to regroup who-the-hell-knows-where and Force knows they had plenty of wounds of their own to lick in the meantime. Even the funeral services finally wound down.
It was just that he didn’t sleep so well.
During the day, he went about his business like a normal, rational soldier. He did his drills, trained with the rookies, and put in his time in repairs. He could sit in the cafeteria with Jess and Snap and the rest and he’d joke and laugh and everything was fine.
And then he’d wake up again in the middle of the night drenched in sweat and sure---absolutely, gut-clenchingly sure---that Kylo Ren was standing over him, one hand somewhere in his brain and he was squeezing.
So he’d go jogging around the complex in that pre-dawn greyness and find his way back to sleep for maybe another hour (if he was lucky) sometime just before first call.
By the time he found his pocket of time to lounge around in Finn’s room each day--the new room, dedicated entirely to Finn, less starkly white and antiseptic and more just clean and empty---he’d be so tired he could have fallen over. And with his feet propped up on the base of Finn’s cot and his head resting against the back wall, the only door was across from him and between that and Finn’s steady breathing, he could sleep.
So he bent the rules---well, not rules so much as the unspoken division of time he and Rey had reached when she’d been there. What had been an hour became two, became three.
It wasn’t perfect but it worked. It would do.
***
Given the fact that Finn utterly defied expectation at every turn, it shouldn’t have been so surprising that Finn ended up waking up Poe and not the other way around. Poe was sleeping more and more with his feet propped up on Finn’s cot and Finn was---every medical professional on the planet assured Poe---doing well, getting better all the time. It was only the fact that they kept telling him that and he kept looking at Finn and seeing nothing but an inert form that had kept him from really believing them.
He felt someone’s hand on his face and he started backwards so fast and so vehemently that he hit his head on something dangling overhead and he swore and rubbed the spot before he realized--
“Oh, damn, I’m sorry,” said Finn. “Are you okay?”
He had pushed himself up onto his elbows and that looked like it hurt because he was wincing.
“What? Yes I just hit my--” Poe said and then gaped at Finn. “Finn! You’re awake!”
Finn nodded but his focus was still on Poe’s head and he pulled on Poe’s arm until Poe had to duck towards him to avoid hitting the---the medical...thingy(??) overhead again.
“Let me see,” Finn insisted and Poe honestly had not a single clue what he meant until he felt Finn’s fingers at the spot that hurt, somewhere in his hair. “Let me see,” Finn repeated and tugged harder on Poe’s sleeve.
Poe ducked all the way down and let his head be examined.
“No abrasions,” said Finn thoughtfully. “Slight swelling.” He let go of Poe’s sleeve and Poe straightened.
“Sorry,” said Poe. Then: “You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh,” said Finn, smiling, “sort of? I mean, I passed all the certifications. But only field medical stuff. You know, emergencies.”
Poe had reached the end of the small talk he could make because holy shit Finn was okay, he really was.
“You look good,” said Poe, nonsensically. “I mean---just, that it’s good to see you.”
“Thanks,” said Finn. He winced as he shifted again, clearly pulling something on his back.
“I should get someone--” said Poe, and ran to tell the medidroids. They bustled him out a moment later and Poe…
...Poe ran away.
***
“--so this is me--” he told the holovid recorder attachment on BB-8. “--telling you, Rey, that Finn is fine. Awake. He’s fine and he’s awake. Like we knew he would be. Of course.”
He reached down and switched off BB-8’s recorder. He let out a long sigh.
That was a completely standard holovid message, BB-8 assured him.
“Yeah, sure,” said Poe.
You have delivered all the requisite information in a moderately efficient manner, said BB-8. She will judge you to be a moderately efficient human with fantastic hair.
“Flatterer,” laughed Poe, patting BB-8’s chrome. But he did feel better.
***
“So two weeks of pining at his sickbed and the minute he wakes up, you book?” asked Jess, sliding back into her seat with another pair of bright blue drinks. The last round had been pink and it had been delicious so Poe wasn’t complaining.
“I wasn’t pining,” said Poe. “I was….waiting.” He tried for dignified detachment and was horrified at how he landed more in the territory of...well, pining. And generally pathetic.
“Uh huh,” said Jess sarcastically.
He dropped his head onto the tabletop in front of him. “I just wish we had a mission,” he said mournfully. “I wish I could just go be heroic somewhere and maybe die and maybe he’d cry.”
“Not pining at all,” said Jess. She downed her drink in one go. “And don’t jinx us.”
***
Of course he jinxed them.
***
“You have to leave?” asked Finn, wide open and sad. Then he clearly caught himself and schooled his features into what he thought was something more appropriate but not at all in reality achieving it. Poe resisted the urge to laugh at the absolute readability of Finn's face.
“It’s just a quick mission,” said Poe. “In and out. We’ll be back in, like….a week.”
“A week?!”
“Two, tops.” Poe bit his lip and looked at his feet. “I, um, I could file some paperwork and, um, I could make you one of my emergency contacts? If you like? So you can be informed if anything--”
“Like what?!”
“--not that anything will, but, you know, just in case anything….happened.”
Finn’s eyes were wide but he nodded quickly. “I’d--I’d be honored to be your emergency contact,” he said solemnly. Poe winced from the sheer sincerity.
“One of my contacts, I still have my dad back on Yavin 4, but it’s--I mean, it’s not---I don’t want to make extra trouble for you,” said Poe. “I just thought….if you wanted?”
Finn nodded solemnly again. “What do I have to do?” he asked, sitting up straighter in the bed. “I can’t really stand for very long right now, but if I--”
“No, nothing like that!” said Poe, pulling the folded up paper out of his pocket. “Just sign your name here,” he said, pointing. “And full name there.”
“That’s all?” asked Finn, looking somewhat disappointed at the partially crumpled sheet.
“And you can hand it to a medidroid when they come back,” said Poe. “But, I should really go.”
It was so true, he was supposed to launch in twenty minutes and he hadn’t even done half his checks yet.
“Oh! Absolutely, you should go,” said Finn firmly. “I can handle this.” He waved the paper in the air. “I have always had an aptitude for paperwork. All my supervisors said so.”
“Good, that’s….good,” said Poe, not wanting to touch that with a ten-foot pole. He started to leave and then turned back. “Just...it was good to see you.”
“Yeah,” said Finn, so fond and open and Poe needed to leave quickly. “It was good to see you too.”
***
“Did you dip him when you kissed?” asked Jess when she tossed him his helmet. “Did he swoon? Did you?”
“Shut it, Testor,” he said.
She made absurd kissing noises at him while he secured the cockpit.
***
He noticed a few days later when he checked in that his ID had two links under “emergency contact” instead of just the one it had had before. The box was so small, though, he couldn’t see anything other than an “F--” next to the new one.
It still made something clench inside his heart and he had to bite his lip to stop himself from grinning like an idiot at the screen.
***
When he checked back in a week and a half later en route back to base, there was a blinking dot next to “Messages.”
He opened it and watched as a tiny holographic Rey flickered into existence on his dock.
“Message received,” she said brusquely. She stooped down as if to turn the holovid off but then she changed her mind and straightened. “I appreciate it,” she added. “Thank you.”
The figured flickered and disappeared.
He didn’t bother not to smile. No one was around to see it, after all.
***
When he got back to base, Finn was waiting in the docking bay. Poe jumped out of his cockpit and didn’t even bother to hide his enthusiasm when he caught Finn up in a hug that pulled Finn a little off his feet.
“You’re back!” said Finn. “You made it!”
Poe grinned back and opened his mouth to respond but Jess was suddenly at his side, clapping him on the shoulder.
"I haven't seen such sloppy flying from you since back in your Academy days, Dameron," said Jess. "Getting soft in your old age?"
"Bite me, Testor," said Poe with a laugh. "I was marvelous then and I'm a marvel now."
Finn looked back and forth between them.
“Finn, this is Jess Pava,” said Poe, waving his helmet at Jess. “And Jess, this is--”
“Finn Dameron,” said Finn and Poe nearly swallowed his tongue. “Nice to meet you,” Finn continued and pulled Jess in for a hug as well.
She looked at Poe over Finn’s shoulder and mouthed what the fuck.
Poe shrugged, eyes wide.
“You don’t mind, do you, Poe?” asked Finn, turning back to Poe. “I needed a surname for the form and the medidroid said it was related to familial line, but I don’t have one of those so I thought, you know, an emergency contact is sort of like a familial line, right?”
Poe nodded. “Sure, just like that.” He grinned. “You’re welcome to it.”
“Is this your whole squad?” Finn continued, moving past him. He started introducing himself to each of them in turn and just when they were about to reach out for a handshake, he went in for the hug instead.
“Is he real?” asked Jess at Poe’s side.
“Yeah,” Poe breathed. “So real.”
***
Poe didn’t really have a reason exactly for the next holovid, but it seemed polite. Neighborly. Something. It seemed fair, mostly, to keep Rey up to date.
“--and the mission was a success and Finn is,” he said to BB-8’s holovid recorder and then sighed. “Finn is fine. He misses you.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I hope you’re--I hope you’re well.”
He reached down and turned of the recorder. He sighed and ran a hand through his hair.
It’s fine, Friend-Poe, said BB-8. She would have learned your true nature at some point anyway.
“Yeah, but maybe I could have fooled her into thinking I was suave for, like, two more weeks,” said Poe.
I do not believe that is a reasonable extrapolation from past data, said BB-8 and then rolled away before Poe could protest.
***
The next week a smuggler arrived with cargo he had gotten from another smuggler who had gotten it from another smuggler who had gotten it from Rey.
The package was mostly technical data--records, plans, necessary information. But it also contained a vacuum-sealed package of some sort of ration-bread thing with directions addressed to Finn for how to eat it and a small fuzzy parcel addressed, oddly enough, to Poe.
It turned out to be a….not a jacket and not really a sweater. It was brown and lumpy and so, so, so warm and comfortable.
The only note Rey had attached said: Sleep well.
He hadn’t been sleeping well, of course. Not since Finn stopped being a safe corner of the base where Poe could keep his back to the wall and his friend’s quiet breath in his ear. Did she know? Was this….was this a Force thing?
He ignored the parcel on his bed until the night was quiet and so dark and then he pulled it on and curled up in the corner of his bed, pressed up against the corner-join of the walls and he slept.
He slept quiet and deep until well past dawn.
***
Finn continued to be a marvel. He made friends quickly and with absolutely everyone. Even Commander Nunb, who absolutely everyone knew did not make friends, was charmed by Finn’s habit of hugging first and asking questions later. Finn even sat through a whole meal with Commander Nunb and the scuttlebutt said someone even heard Finn laugh and Commander Nunb had never, ever made a single joke in his whole life.
Finn mostly listened so intently and so enthusiastically that it would take a monster to withstand the barrage of his friendliness.
General Organa found him in his physical therapy session about a week after he woke up and watched calmly as he went through the motions. A couple of times, she snapped out a quick, “Again,” and he nodded, grateful and guilty about how clearly he needed the order to get the job done.
Poe, who had volunteered to help him with the routines, found that nothing he said in careful, affectionate terms worked so well as the General’s quick, clipped, “Again.” So, after a while, he just stayed on the sidelines and watched, feeling oddly cut off even while in the same room as them.
The General’s mood had been grim since the Starkiller mission, but somehow standing with her arms folded watching Finn try do push-ups made her come back out of the cocoon of sadness. When they finished, she patted Finn’s cheek, proud and happy and sad all at once.
“You’re a good man,” she said.
Poe---who had said so himself on more than one occasion---couldn’t keep the stupid grin off his face. He was so proud of Finn, so happy to share in everyone’s pride in Finn, even if he only got to do it from the audience rows.
***
Finn somehow seemed to become a part of everything around the base. When Poe turned a corner, there was Finn helping a repair crew or holding the medbag for a doctor or even one time patiently painting a gold layer onto C3PO’s red arm and listening patiently as the droid complained.
Jess took him flying. Jess Pava. She wasn’t even in the top five of pilots on the base, whatever she said. She was, like, sixth best. If that.
She shrugged apologetically later and said, “he asked me.” OK, so maybe she was second best after all.
Snap ran gunner drills with Finn over the next mountain ridge and they came back laughing.
“Hey, Poe,” said Finn cheerfully as they passed. “See you at dinner?” Finn had an arm around Snap’s shoulders as they walked.
“Yeah,” said Poe, watching as they walked away.
He recited his own gunner scores in his head, all of which were better than Snap’s.
***
Poe turned his attention to building a new squadron. He’d lost a lot of pilots in that last mission and, even if the recruits were suddenly pouring in from the former Republic Army, they weren’t anywhere near ready. Any day, the First Order could start up again and Poe wasn’t sure what he’d be able to get done with raw recruits. Some of the pilots he had lost had been flying with him since they were all in simulators in the first year of the Academy. They had all been top notch, and they'd been blown out of the sky. He couldn't make so with any less, not when his people's best had barely cut it last time.
He spent most days training, running through flight and combat tests, and all the while Finn never once came to him for the training he was clearly picking up elsewhere. They overlapped every now and then over meals and Finn was….everything he always was. With everyone.
Happy, open, and so so honest. He told Poe’s new squad members about how they met and grabbed Poe’s hand a couple of times, pulled him to his feet to demonstrate a couple of moves. And, yeah, it was adorable when he made the blaster sounds for the TIE fighter and, yeah, he kept Poe close with an arm draped around his shoulders, but, no, it didn’t mean anything.
When they sat in Poe’s bunk in the evenings, though, and Finn leaned even closer towards Poe, close enough that Poe’s breath often caught in his throat, Finn would inevitably turn the conversation to Rey’s latest holovid. Even when a new holovid finally relieved the questions of the last, it was like he had some sort of encyclopedic recall of the entire backlog of holovids. He’d wonder if maybe Rey has changed her mind because she hated the sea mist three weeks ago, but now she’s calling it ‘bracing’ and ‘thrilling’ and then again I would have thought she would never want to touch ration packs again, but I think she might actually miss them.
And every one would end with bright, honest eyes turned toward Poe and the same expectant, forthright, “what do you think, Poe?”
Poe wished he could tamp down on the urge to say something cutting or, even worse, the stupid impulse to do something heroic to get Finn’s attention onto him.
Instead, he said, “maybe she figured out where the raincoats are,” or “sometimes you miss what’s familiar.”
And Finn would smile or nod thoughtfully and dive back down into more musings about Rey.
Poe got his own message from Rey a couple of weeks later. The tiny figure looked more loose, like something had finally unclenched after a lifetime of strict control.
She was also wearing the jacket he had stowed in her luggage.
“Thank you, Poe Dameron,” she said formally, a bit like she was reciting something she had memorized. “Your gift has been incredibly helpful. I appreciate your thoughtfulness and care.” Then she cocked her head to one side as if she was listening to someone beyond Poe, someone out of scope of the holovid. “I also appreciate that you have time to devote to Finn that I do not.” She folded her arms and huffed a breath out from between her teeth. She looked like she was going to say something snide, but then she clearly changed her mind.
“I wish I could be there with you. With you both.”
It was honest and raw. Poe was struck by how much her honesty must cost her, and how comforting it must be for her to be faced with Finn’s barrage of honest friendliness.
“Please….send me another message, Poe. I...like hearing from you,” the tiny Rey said.
Poe’s heart did a clench and he thought with absolute horror, Oh no, Poe, don’t you dare--
But it was really an inevitability. Finn and Rey---how could you like one and not both? To appreciate the frankness and undiluted joy of the one, how could you ignore the resilience and the steadfastness of the other?
The tiny figure sighed and bent to turn off the recorder.
You must respond with equal candor and affection, instructed BB-8 primly at Poe’s side. Anything less would be an insult to Friend-Rey, who is deserving of much care.
“Yeah, I’m getting that,” said Poe thoughtfully.
He’d been cruel, he realized. He’d been selfish and cold to someone who deserved better---who was better.
***
He attached a digi-novel to his holovid. It was the kind he had always loved, about a princess with just a little skill with the Force who manages to defeat a band of pirates and save her kingdom and then reforms the pirates and they all rule the kingdom as a republic and live happily ever after. Everyone is a hero and nobody loses, that had always been his favorite genre. His mother used to read them out loud to him, right up until she died even though he should have been too old to be read aloud to.
His father had sent this novel to him a cycle ago and he’d rushed through it at breakneck speed.
“I’m sending you a novel,” he told the holovid recorder. “I, um. I hope you like it.”
He fiddled with the controls without turning off the recorder. BB-8 chided him with a low chirp.
“I’m glad to talk to you, Rey,” he said finally, turning to face the recorder directly, looking straight into BB-8’s viewfinder. “You’re a good person and I hope you count me as your friend. I’d like it if you would.”
BB-8 practically purred.