Chapter Text
“Shit. Shit shit shit,” Finn muttered as he slouched forward and tried to make himself invisible. His terrifying TA for statics was heading in his direction and would undoubtedly get some sort of vindictive pleasure from seeing a student absent from Professor Statura’s class and dragging them into the lecture hall in ignominy. Finn cast his gaze around desperately, looking for any sort of plausible excuse that wasn’t the pathetic truth of oversleeping, and saw a boy sitting on the edge of the quad’s fountain, legs crossed, tapping away at his phone. Good enough, he thought, and sidled over to the fountain. The boy looked up, eyes partially blocked by dark curly hair, and lowered his phone. The TA stomped up to the two just as Finn kneeled down, slid his arm around the boy’s shoulders, and whispered, “please play along or I’m fucked.”
“If I remember correctly, you’re in Professor Statura’s statics class.” Finn’s stomach did an unpleasant flip. “And, if I remember correctly, Professor Statura’s class is meeting right now, and he doesn’t tolerate absences from his class.” Finn met the TA’s frosty look with what he hoped was an earnest expression.
“I know, yeah, I’m so sorry. I’ve never been late to class before but he needed some help and I was going to take him to the infirmary to make sure he was okay.” The boy beside him caught on instantly and, to Finn’s relief, let out a rather convincing groan.
“Hey, I’m sorry I held him up, man, I think I almost passed out and he caught me and I…oh, boy, I feel really lightheaded.” The boy added another piteous moan for effect and cradled his head in his hands. The TA relented his scrutinizing, glare shifting into something between skepticism and concern. Finn unwound his arm from the boy’s shoulder and patted his back.
“Yeah…okay, I guess, whatever. If you don’t show up to class after that, though, I’ll make sure Professor Statura kills your attendance grade.” Finn nodded vigorously, helping the boy up and walking in the direction of the infirmary. Once the TA had crossed the quad and walked into the student union building, Finn let go of the boy and stood back, breathing hard and silently thanking any higher being for the boy’s superior acting skills. The boy, in the meantime, doubled over with laughter, hands on his knees, gasping for breath.
“Oh, man, thank you so much. You saved my ass, I thought my TA was gonna rip me a new one.” The boy straightened up and wiped away a tear before clapping Finn on the shoulder.
“Hey, no problem, buddy. Seems like you’ve got a fascist TA—no one deserves that much shit for being late to class.” He glanced away for a moment, as if moving on to another train of thought, before glancing back at Finn with quirked lips. “Any particular reason you’re missing class? Hangover? Spent the night with a lady friend?” This was accompanied with a gleeful waggle of his eyebrows. Finn could feel his face flushing and coughed away some undetectable itch in his throat.
“Um, no, nothing that exciting. Just overslept is all, I’m really not a morning person. Actually, I should go—better get to class before my TA comes back and verbally skewers me. Listen, thanks again for your help, I owe you one.” With a taut smile and a little one-shouldered shrug, Finn turned to leave, fingering the strap of his backpack compulsively. As he started to stride away, though, he felt a hand on his shoulder and turned back to the boy, who was still smiling just as warmly as before.
“I didn’t catch your name, buddy. I’m Poe—Dameron.” Finn could feel the beginnings of a smile blossoming at the corners of his lips; something about the boy’s—Poe’s—cheerful unconcernedness warmed him.
“I’m Finn.”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Finn.” Poe flashed another smile, wide and twinkling, before letting his hand slide off Finn’s shoulder and turning to walk away. Finn watched him for a few moments, wondering how he’d never seen someone as vibrant as Poe around campus before now, but jolted out of his reverie when he realized that he was still late to class and still had to show up. His step had particular spring in it, and he couldn’t find it in himself to be truly concerned about Professor Statura’s potential wrath.
* * * * * * * * *
Finn quite enjoyed the easy camaraderie he and Rey had almost accidentally developed after Rey had nearly broken his nose upon meeting him. Granted, neither party was completely at fault, the incident having been more the product of the school’s all-gender rooming policies. Two days before classes started, Finn had opened the door of his new dorm to find a girl, mid-change, staring at him from the middle of the room.
Rey, naturally, hadn’t immediately come to the conclusion that it had simply been her new roommate opening the door at an inopportune time and had taken what she considered to be appropriate measures.
Once he had informed her and they were both apologizing profusely at each other, Finn for accidentally seeing Rey half-naked, Rey for decking her roommate in the face and giving him a memorable nosebleed, they found themselves laughing over the strangeness and absurdity of the situation. After that first encounter, the rest came quite easily.
“Hey. Finn. Hello, am I talking to anyone right now or have you taken up your rightful place in the world as a vegetable?” Rey giggled as Finn batted at her arm in mock indignance and bumped his shoulder against hers. He appreciated the easy physical contact they regularly shared, something he’d never had in his life and didn’t realize he had been missing.
“Nah, sorry, just spaced out. What were you complaining about?”
“Shut up, I’m not complaining! Okay, I totally am, but that’s not the point at all. So this guy has come into the shop, backward hat, you know the kind—complete wanker. And when I ask him what’s going on with the car, what he wants me to fix, you know, he actually asks to see a man working there because he doesn’t think I could get the job done! So I just went in the back and got my manager, and of course she comes out of the back with the most terrifying expression on her face, you know the one, and the wanker just gets up and leaves. Not sure if he was embarrassed or terrified, but I hope it was a healthy mix of both. Anyway, I love working for Maz, it’s so much better than back home when I had to work for Plutt.”
Finn loved the long-winded stories that Rey would often launch into as soon as he walked in the room after classes, especially after particularly long and grinding days. Though she didn’t warm up easily to other people, Finn assumed she mustn’t have many people to talk to back home based on how brightly her face lit up when she shared even the most mundane of stories with Finn.
Removing his notebooks and textbooks from his backpack, he put them all back in their places as he and Rey continued chatting. Not a great tendency, Finn knew, but some habits die hard, especially when they’d been driven into him so hard that he could still feel the proverbial grooves. Everything of Finn’s had its place. Bed made, chair pushed into the desk, books organized on the shelf according to author’s last name, notebooks stacked in the drawer according to when he had each class, shoes placed in a straight line in the bottom of his closet, slightly pitiful and severely lacking wardrobe hanging up and organized by colour. His computer always rested on his desk, right in front of the chair, plugged in and charging in perpetuity. He hadn’t arrived with any photos or personal items other than clothes, but Rey had made sure to rectify that quickly.
A photo hung above the head of his bed, positioned perfectly straight, of Rey and him smiling and laughing. Rey had taken the impromptu picture, much to Finn’s chagrin, after he’d told her that he’d never tried ice cream before and, horrified, she’d dragged him to the nearest ice cream parlor.
Rey’s side of the room was a different story entirely.
While she also had few personal belongings in quantity, she made up for the lack by strewing them about the room, almost as if to take up the otherwise empty space. She somehow always managed to throw at least part of her sheet and blankets onto the floor when she slept, ensuring that they cascaded from the edge of the bed and snaked along the carpeting. Finn had managed to trip over said blankets more times than he could count. Her desk always had more stuff, for lack of a better word, on it than could reasonably fit, and she filled her shelf with tchotchkes and odd objects that she seemed to collect on a whim. Rey often hung her towel from the curtain rod of their window, which he now opened to let in some of the cool midafternoon air.
They both had more homework than either cared to admit, but it was easy to pass the time relating stories and, when Finn told Rey about that morning’s incident, teasing and being teased.