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1. Poe
Poe’s not sure what he expected when the Stormtrooper removed his helmet (her? their? – the back of Poe’s brain instantly supplies a stream of alternate pronouns, chiding him gently for jerk-of-the-knee assumptions in a voice that sounds disturbingly like a cross between his ma and General Organa). Anyway. Poe’s not sure what he expected. He’s not sure if he expected anything at all, because so long as he can remember, in his mind’s eye, Stormtroopers were never anything but rows and rows of white masks, so polished and so pristine and so mindlessly deadly in their uniformity that some part of him almost believed that if you removed the helmet, there would be no face left to find. No eyes, no smile, no facsimile of expression or life.
It won’t occur to Poe until later, a name and a jacket and a particularly dramatic crash landing later, to consider that this might have been an impression deliberately manufactured by the sort of people who think Stormtroopers are a good idea.
But that, of course, comes later. Right now, at this very second, the Stormtrooper is removing his(/her/their!) helmet.
Later, again later, Poe will remember that in the moment that helmet came off, Poe’s traitorous, Force-fogged brain could only dredge up childhood memories of how the craggy-faced aunties from the Bey side of the family used to waggle fingers and tut and mutter about knots in time, little stitches in a person’s existence that unravel pieces of themselves: how they think, who they are, what they do. Points that anchor you in space, and turn the tide of life. Moments within moments that change the course of choice and destiny.
The Stormtrooper removes the helmet, and all at once, the Stormtrooper is, quite abruptly, no longer a Stormtrooper.
Pop! goes the little knot inside Poe’s head.
“I’m busting you out,” says the girl who was a Stormtrooper something like eight-point-four seconds ago. She’s a solid square-jawed soldier of a girl, with close-cropped hair and skin as dark as her armor is pale, but a girl nonetheless: a terribly, viscerally human girl sweating and tight-lipped and staring at Poe with great black eyes that he’s never seen in a Stormtrooper. Or in any other life form, really. You could lose yourself for days, in eyes like those. “Can you fly a TIE fighter?”
Stars, she’s young. Poe practically feels his bones creak while his heart breaks, watching the hope and terror warring in her face. Or maybe that’s just time in Kylo Ren’s chair catching up to him. Even odds at this point, really. “I can fly anything,” he says, because whatever else he’s been and done, Poe Dameron’s ma raised her boy honest. “Why are you helping me?”
She draws herself up a little, as if to make herself taller – this stocky, square-jawed girl of little-more-than-twenty, this girl behind a Stormtrooper’s death dealing mask – and shoots back, “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
Poe squints at her. “You need a pilot.”
“I need a pilot,” the girl amends, deflating a little, but that look in her eyes hasn’t changed, nor the stubborn set of her shoulders. Watching her, Poe feels something deep inside him warm and flutter.
“We’re gonna do this,” he tells her, grinning like a green-as-grass cadet, feeling for all the galaxy like he’s a half-grown, half-drunken schoolboy again. Her answering smile is a sun peeking out from behind an eclipse, and he wonders how he ever could have even half-believed that Stormtroopers had no faces of their own.
Time picks up again. They move. When their bodies brush, skin on skin, hands clapping on shoulders, the girl’s spine curving against Poe’s as he makes that TIE fighter sing into space, he understands this much: heat, electricity, and something else unnameable, something that has bound the two of them now.
2. Rey
Rey’s first view of the girl she’d come to know as Finn is this: a stocky, squinting young woman in a too-loose jacket that hung just so on a sturdy, sinuously muscled frame, dark-skinned and dark-eyed and backlit by the blazing Jakku sun. Captured in that moment, framed through the market stalls between them, Finn looks like a desert soldier-girl out of one of the old-fashioned, softly colored paintings the traveling art merchants sell to anyone stupid enough to waste credits on romantic frippery.
Then BB-8 points out that the romantic desert soldier-girl stole the jacket she’s so fetchingly wearing, and the rest is a very short and rather violent history.
One very put-out astromech droid, one chase through the market, and one adventuresome joy ride in a stolen piece-of-garbage spaceship later, Rey’s got a lot more realism to go on: up close and in person, Finn is almost comically animated. The other girl is constantly in motion; she’s all mobile limbs and eyes and mouth, gesticulating wildly across a spectrum of expression, from delight to terror to exasperation.
It’s hard not to be a little fascinated. Rey’s never met a Resistance fighter before. Rey’s barely ever met any other girls her own age, and Finn is a study in contrast. She’s bigger than Rey, and for all her flustered babbling, moves with a subtly militaristic grace that Rey chalks up to Resistance training. Rey’s not sure she could mimic the way Finn walks if she tried.
Rey’s heard people talk about beautiful girls – lusty-eyed men and gossiping women and, with a distinctly colder air, the particular dead-eyed merchants who make their trade in writhing bodies on display and cheap neon signs guaranteeing single nights of pleasure – but she hasn’t had much call to give beautiful girls real thought. Rey knows she is a girl; whether or not she’s beautiful seems stupidly immaterial to how much she can fix and scavenge and trade at market for another day’s sustenance, another day of waiting and wondering and living on a world where everyone’s one misstep from dying.
Rey looks at Finn, though, studies the other girl in sneaking, hurried glances between snatches of conversation, and wonders about beauty. She remembers that first glimpse of Finn, framed through the market stalls and caught against the sun like a painting. She thinks Finn might be a beautiful girl, Finn with her soldier’s walk, straight back and solid muscle and soft curves under that beaten-down man-sized jacket of hers. Under that jacket, Rey thinks Finn might –
BB-8 knocks hard against her knee. “Ow!” Rey exclaims, and glares. BB-8 twitters a sound at her that isn’t a word, just something coy and bordering on lewd. Rey glares harder, and BB-8 skitters away, laughing a smug little droid-laugh in a sequence of piercing, annoyingly delighted beeps.
Rey rolls her eyes, hard. Unfortunately, she rolls them at just the right angle to catch Finn’s inquiring gaze in turn, and nearly loses her seat.
The other girl darts forward, all stupid militaristic soldier grace, to catch Rey’s elbow. Heat skitters under Rey’s cheeks, and she’s horribly jealous, for a second, that Finn’s complexion is dark enough to hide any such giveaway blush. Not that Rey assumes Finn would blush at Rey. Or that Rey wants her to. Because Finn is – Finn is – oh, never mind.
“Um,” says Finn when the pause has grown sufficiently awkward. “You okay?”
Rey blows a stray bit of hair off her forehead. “I’m fine,” she manages, her voice a little high. “Just fine. I know how to –“
“Fall out of a chair without me holding your arm. I know.”
Rey’s gaze snaps right back to Finn’s. The other girl looks uncertain, but she’s also grinning, that full, coy mouth twitching with muffled mirth. Rey bites down on her own lip, eyes crinkling in a mirror reaction, which is how BB-8 rolls back in to find a pair of girls sitting on the floor of a beat-down wreck of a spaceship, laughing at nothing at all, in that way which can only be done by two people who have not laughed in far too long, and found one another at last.
3. Finn
After the crash on Jakku, Finn swathes herself in Poe Dameron’s ghost like he’s a blanket. His discarded jacket shields her from the merciless rays of the desert sun, and the name he gave her shields her from worse things which threaten to crawl out from the recesses of her memory.
My name is Finn. My name is Finn. My name is –
Poe is a pivot. Before Poe, there was no Finn; there was only a designation number, a suit of armor, the weapons in her hands, and the dull promise of eventual bloodshed. Before Poe, there was no future. Before Poe, there was no way out.
There’s no more Poe now, and what Finn retains of him is this: her name, his jacket, his mission.
That Poe’s mission comes beeping angrily up to Finn with a stunningly angry young woman in tow is, frankly, probably not something that should actually surprise Finn, given the course of her luck. Rey looks at Finn with shining, furious eyes – really looks at her, like Finn’s a person, a real girl named Finn, not a Stormtrooper designated FN-2187 – and Finn wonders if this is how it feels to stare directly into the desert sun above with no jacket to shield your eyes, its beams bright and overwhelming.
Finn didn’t grow up with many other women. There had been Finn herself, and there had been cool, aloof Captain Phasma, but most Stormtroopers her age had been male, and seeing another girl now, unmasked and expressive, fills her up with something she can’t put into words. She hasn’t stopped looking at Rey since. Sometimes, she catches Rey looking back – or maybe half-wishes it – and stars, when the other girl smiles, it’s all Finn can do not to stare open-mouthed, like Rey’s an oasis after a week of nothing but sand and heat. She’s pretty sure that none of the other Stormtrooper girls, rare as they were, ever looked anything like Rey, brilliance and wonder and fierce determination all somehow compressed into one small, powerful body.
But then, none of the Stormtrooper boys, plentiful as they were, ever looked anything like Poe Dameron either. The realization cuts her inside, some place deep and tender.
Is this how all sentient existence outside Stormtrooper barracks is measured? In the people who walk in and out of your life and gift you with the pieces that anchor you? A name. A mission. A smile which reminds you that you are you, that you are a girl, a girl named Finn, a girl who sleeps and wakes and answers to you, and you, and no one but you. Maybe if Finn collects enough pieces, she’ll stay human, and stop dreaming of white masks and red blood, the screams of villagers and the blaster cold and heavy in her immobile hands.
The first time she sees Poe after his death, he’s a mirage, and for split seconds, Finn wonder if she’s back in the desert and hallucinating this: a dark and tousled head, an orange flight suit, and a smile that, unfettered, shines bright enough to match Rey’s.
Then BB-8 is zooming past Finn’s legs, shunting her aside, and the mirage is kneeling down, arms splayed wide. It looks up, sees Finn, and oh, that’s not a mirage at all. “Poe Dameron,” she croaks, her throat constricting tight around a dead man’s name, “you’re alive?”
He moves toward her, purposeful, and Finn’s legs bend into motion like they’re possessed. Suddenly, she’s got an armful of orange flight suit, and she’s being lifted clean off her feet, her nose buried in hair that smells of sweat and engine oil and a whiff of shampoo. He whoops with joy, and she shuts her eyes and inhales, breathes him in while he spins her around.
Poe. Poe. Poe.
He tells her to keep the jacket, so she does, after a fashion. She shares it with Rey, the two girls trading the beat-up leather back and forth as if an old scrap of fabric alone might shield them against the galaxy, might keep the two of them close. Finn’s not sure exactly what this means, to wrap Rey in Poe’s jacket, and carry both their sunlit smiles in the space beneath her chest. It’s not the sort of thing covered in Stormtrooper basic – probably is, in fact, exactly the sort of thing that would get a trainee iced.
Finn’s never been allowed to have people before, really. Stormtroopers are wind-up soldiers more than they are human, arms and legs of the First Order, mechanized components of a whole. When you’re a cog in a machine, you’re not supposed to notice the exact fragrance of someone’s shampoo, or the angle of another hunger-worn girl’s fierce, glancing-eyed gaze, or how it feels to find and lose and find a beloved face again.
Finn lost Poe to the crash, lost Rey to Kylo Ren, but she also keeps finding them again, the three of them cycling back together and together and together, like gravity’s own irrevocable call.
My name is Finn. My name is Finn. My name is Finn, and I have people, because I too am a person.
It’s a revelation. It’s a declaration. It’s a statement of rebellion. Finn tastes the words in her mind, carries the weight of Poe’s jacket-smelling-of-Rey on her shoulders, and offers her own smile to the sky.