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Poe finally finds Finn sitting by the lake, huddled beneath a tree, staring out across the water. “Hey, buddy. What’s going on?” he asks.
When Finn doesn’t respond, Poe crouches beside him and puts a hand on his shoulder. Finn twitches away. Poe rocks back on his heels, takes a second look at Finn’s rigid expression, and settles down beside him, carefully leaving a foot of space in between them.
Gnats dance above the surface of the water. Rounds of blaster fire sporadically echo from the training yards at the base. A freighter approaches the landing bay with the subtlety of a bantha in heat. Poe looks at Finn, the trees, his hands.
“I killed everyone I ever knew.”
Poe’s head snaps back towards Finn.
“Not single-handedly, I know that, and probably you all would have figured out a way to attack the base without me, but still. I’m partially responsible for the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people. Taken from birth, like me. Most of them, at least. And even the ones who signed up for it—who knows whether they still wanted to fight? There was no exit, once you were in the system. I knew that, I knew them, and I helped kill them all.”
Poe’s gut clenches in aching sympathy. “Finn,” he whispers.
Finn turns to him with a fiery snarl. “Don’t give me some nice mynock shit about how it was necessary and I’m not the only one and blah blah fuck!” He picks up a rock, throws it violently into the lake, hisses in pain, puts a hand to his back.
“I wasn’t going to, buddy,” Poe replies softly. “It’s an incredible pain to bear. I can’t even imagine what it would feel like.”
Finn grunts in acknowledgement. “I don’t understand why it felt different from the villagers on Jakku. Just because I was face-to-face with them, just because they weren’t wearing helmets? The troopers on Starkiller were just as innocent. All but the highest commanders. No matter what they’ve done, how many they’ve killed or stolen or tortured, none of the troopers chose that life. Why did they deserve to die, and not us? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Poe doesn’t know what to say. Nice words are not the cure for feelings like this. He knows because he's punched at least three people for trying that, since first joining the Republic. Thankfully he'd graduated from punching people to just leaving rooms by the time he joined the Resistance. And his guilt has only ever for the loss of other lives, the lives of sworn enemies. Not for comrades-in-arms. Not for an entire community. Poe wonders for a moment how the old guard felt after the first and second Death Stars exploded. He’s heard countless tales of the festivities afterward—watching the medal ceremony, dancing with Ewoks, using Stormtrooper helmets as drums—but never any stories of regret, shame, guilt. Only sadness for those of their own side who were killed in the fighting.
“No,” he says at last, throat tight. “It doesn’t make any sense.” He looks away, looks back, unable to keep the words in any longer. “But Finn, they took away your entire life. The lives of all of those thousands of troopers you knew. Isn’t that self-defense? Now they can’t take anyone else, not until they rebuild, and that’ll take years—maybe we’ll crush them for good by then. So you’ve saved the lives of thousands upon thousands—millions, probably—of innocent children. Isn’t that worth it?”
Finn hugs his knees closer to his chest. His broad, strong body shrinks in on itself as though trying to disappear. Poe clenches his hands into fists to stop himself from reaching out to comfort Finn’s trembling lips. Finally Finn speaks again. “But that’s not why I helped to kill them. I just wanted to get Rey back. To get revenge for my own life, and Slip’s. To keep Han and Chewie alive. To keep—” He swallows. “Tokeepyoualive,” he finishes in one single word. “For six lives, I helped kill a hundred thousand. That’s not a debt I can ever repay.”
Poe swallows hard. “No,” he says at last. “No, it’s not.”
Water ripples against the shore in a constant series of wavelets, blown in by the wake a low-flying Y-wing. Finn traces lines in the dirt, face haunted and ashamed. Poe takes a deep breath.
“Finn. It is a horrible thing. But it's not just you. We're all responsible, everyone in the Resistance. We all share the guilt. You’re talking to the guy who fired the final shots to that oscillator, you know. If anyone’s responsible—”
Finn shakes his head. “For you, it was self-defense. They had destroyed the entire Republic. They were about to destroy your base and all of the people you fight for. For me, it was just murder. I knew them. I knew they didn’t choose it any more than I did. And I still killed them.” He punches the ground by his feet with a vicious sadness–once, twice, three times.
“Yeah,” Poe says at last. “Yeah, you did.” Finn looks at him with dark, wounded eyes. “What else could you have done?” Poe asks.
Finn sinks his head into his hands. Poe closes his eyes, heart tight with reflected pain.
“I’ll carry that debt for the rest of my life.”
Poe looks up. Finn’s eyes are resolute and sorrowful.
“Yeah. You will.” Poe’s voice scrapes in his throat. “We all will.”
Finn’s eyes hold Poe’s, dark and solemn. Finally he nods, tucks his chin onto his knees, looks out across the water.
They are silent.
The lake glows golden in the low sunlight. Poe leans his head on his fist, watching swallows swoop and dive low over the water. A trio of X-wings flies high overhead, returning home from the afternoon’s formation drills. He glances at his friend. Finn’s face doesn’t look right when it’s sad—it’s too heavy, too still. There is nothing Poe would like more than to ease his pain. There is nothing he can do.
He tries anyway. How can he not try?
“The first time I came back from a battle,” Poe starts, voice low, “I was dizzy with victory, so proud of myself, crowing about having taken down three TIEs. It wasn’t until that night, lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, that I remembered there were pilots inside those TIEs, too. Pilots that were now drifting out through space as stardust.” Poe smiles wearily, eyes hooded with sorrow. “Lost my dinner. The dreams I had—”
Finn looks at him, eyes level. He knows that sort of dream now.
Poe shrugs. “They never really go away. I wish I could tell you they did, Finn. I wish I could tell you it goes away—the grief, the guilt. I can't. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” The lines around his face tighten. “There’s nothing anyone of us can say that can take the pain away. We all feel it. All of us who fight.”
Finn stares up at the darkening sky. “What do you do?” he asks quietly. “When you feel it?”
Poe’s breath huffs out in a short laugh. “Get smashed. Fuck someone. Fuck someone else. Run until you can’t feel anything. Go on another mission and blast the hell out of the people that are causing all of this pain. Gamble. Punch someone. Punch something. Get numb, get cold, get blown up. It’s not a pretty life, Finn,” and he doesn’t even know why he’s saying all this now, why his eyes are blurred and stinging and his voice is cracking. “It’s hard and it’s painful and it ends badly. If you want to leave—if it’s too hard for you to kill your own people—I would understand completely. We would all understand. Leia offered—”
“I know what Leia offered,” Finn interrupts, voice harsh.
Poe shuts up.
Finn rubs a hand against his head.
“I’m glad you mourn them.” Poe’s words scrape softly against the tightness in his throat. “Somebody ought to. They deserved better than they got.”
Finn’s face crumples in on itself. Poe can’t stand the distance between their bodies any longer. He slides over to Finn, wraps an arm around his shoulders, pulls Finn’s head down to lean against him, holds onto him tightly. Finn makes no noise as he cries.
For that alone, Poe wants to blast the First Order until nothing remains but stardust.
“What do you do?” Finn asks at last. “I know you don’t sleep well. I think we’re tied, these days, for frequency of nightmares.”
Poe laughs low in his throat. “Yeah.” He wants to see Finn’s face, so he lets his friend go and leans back on his hands, but the absence of touch is pulling at something in his gut. “Right. Well. If we’re being honest.” He looks at Finn. “I fall pretty thoroughly into the ‘fuck people’ category. I could be called up for a mission at any moment, so alcohol is out. I can’t fight if I’m drunk or hungover. Or—” his lips twitch. “At least, not very well. Running’s good too, but it’s too easy to get lost in your thoughts before the fatigue sets in. Sex?” He shrugs. “It’s fun. Feels good. Lets me forget the world for a bit.”
There is something shuttered and cautious in Finn’s gaze. “Oh,” he says eloquently.
“Lately, though, I—” Poe looks down at his hands, scrubs again at a stubborn grease stain ground into the lines of his palm. “I haven’t. Since coming back from Takodana.” He lifts his eyes to meet Finn’s.
Finn raises his eyebrows. His gaze is sharp, direct, thoughtful. “Haven’t needed to, or haven’t wanted to?”
Poe wishes for skin as dark as Finn’s, dark enough to not reveal his thoughts. He clears his throat. “I always want it, and I always feel like I need it. But these days, I’m finding that talking works too.”
“Huh,” Finn replies. Finn’s eyes no longer belong to the terrified ex-trooper who rescued him. Poe can’t look away.
“Talking is good,” Finn murmurs at last. He looks out over the water. “Talking with people who understand, at least. I’m afraid to talk to anyone else on the base about it. I don’t think they’d understand.”
Poe cocks his head as he considers this. “Everyone on this base knows what grief is,” he says. “Snap’s been here longer than I have. He’s lost thirty-one pilots in action. The General—she’s been through this whole thing once before. Watched the Empire destroy her home planet. Lost her husband. But—you’re right. They might not all understand the guilt. It was easier, I think, when we didn't think of stormtroopers as real people. That they might not have chosen to fight. That they—Force, I would never have believed that they could take babies, not even give them real names, condition and recondition them like you’ve talked about. When I think about it—” Poe looks over at Finn. “I want to crush the ones who started it. Snoke, Hux—” He swallows. “But the rest, the ones who had no choice? Maybe there's another way. Maybe you can help us figure out how to free them. And then we can win this without any more death.”
“Huh,” Finn repeats, struck by the thought. He nods to himself, thinks it over, keeps nodding. “I’d like to do that. Yeah. I’d like that very much.” He looks back at Poe. “Can it be done?”
Poe laughs. “You tell me, buddy. Can a planet-sized weapon be destroyed by fourteen X-wings, three humans, and a Wookie? We’ve pulled crazier stunts before. Why not this one?”
And Finn’s glowing, suddenly, and Poe’s glowing too at having brought light back to his face.
“Yeah,” Finn’s grin cracks across his features. "Kriff yeah. We could really do this.”
“You’re in charge, buddy. Go talk to the General. See what she thinks.”
“I will.” Finn leans back, clasps his hands together low across his knees. He stares out at the lake, watches the stars starting to glimmer in its waves, the reflection of the first two moons rising in tandem. He turns back to Poe. “What happened on Takodana?”
Poe starts. “What? Oh. Uh—well, nothing.”
Finn’s eyes bore into him. “Then what happened after Takodana?” His voice bears the commanding tone of an ex-trooper who has been studying what it means to wield power.
It would be stupid to ask what Finn means. Poe looks at his hands, twists his fingers together, slides them apart again. He lifts his eyes back to Finn’s. “I found out you were alive. On the comms, heading back. And then again from BB-8. And then with my own eyes.”
Finn’s eyes do not waver. “What does that have to do with fucking?”
Poe flinches. He shifts in his seat. So does Finn, Poe notices. He takes a deep breath and plunges in. “There are no old pilots.”
Finn raises his brows. “Han was pretty old.”
“Han left the fight. And—” Poe snorts. “Han’s skills are legendary, anyway. Best pilot in the galaxy. I don’t think the normal rules apply. No, I mean ordinary fighter pilots. I lost half my fleet on Starkiller, Finn,” and he has to stop for a moment to clear his throat. “I could have died there just as easily. Or on my next mission. Or the one after that. I’ve always been careful not to get attached to anyone. I don’t want to hurt anyone when I don’t come back.”
“You still haven’t answered my question. And you’re not even making sense.”
If Poe ever wondered what Finn’s face looked like when he faced down Kylo Ren with an archaic weapon he’d used only once before, he knows now. “I—” He scrubs his hand across his mouth.
When Finn marched him into the hangar bay, shackled and broken, Poe had only felt a sheer desperation to do something, anything other than give up any more of the Resistance’s secrets. An urge to flip his finger at the First Order, to take a few of them out on his way, to die a clean, honorable death in space. But then there was a sudden moment—after Finn unlocked his shackles and he could move his arms at last, as his hands settled onto the ship’s controls and he felt the engine roar to life beneath his body–—when his mind had turned from dying to living. From broken to fighting. He closes his eyes now to remember that moment, the thrilling lift under his heart, the heat in his temples.
“Since I found out you had survived, Finn, you’ve been the only one I want to touch. And I don’t want a single night. I want years of them. I want mornings, too. I want to hold your hand when you’re conscious, not nearly dead. I want—” Poe’s throat closes up. “I want all of it. But I don’t want to hurt you. You’re already grieving everyone you know. You don’t need one more to add to that list.”
Finn’s surging to his feet, fists clenched. “You’re a fucking coward, Poe Dameron. A coward and a liar. What happened to ‘you’re a free man now, Finn!’ ‘No one else will make decisions for you now!’” Poe stares up at him open-mouthed, trying to arrange his thoughts into some kind of reasonable order. “I don’t want you to die,” Finn continues roughly. “And I don’t want to have to mourn for you. But I sure as hell don’t plan to waste any moment of the time that we do have—here, alive, together. And I think there’s another option.”
"What?" is all Poe can say, incoherent as the day they first met. One of his engines is missing, he thinks, blasted off by an ex-trooper who turned around and decided to fight.
“You listed the options for how to stay sane in all of this mess. Fucking. Drinking. Gambling. I forget the rest. I didn’t like the sound of any of them. And I think there’s another option.” He takes a deep, shaky breath. “Being with someone. When I thought about escaping, I never dreamed of anything more than being away from them. Not having to be afraid any more. But then I sat with you in that cockpit and thought I could choose to love someone now. I had a partner. A friend. A buddy. And then you lived. And then I woke up to find you sitting by my bed. Looking worse than bantha shit, like you’d been living there for weeks. And I thought to myself—this man is mine.” Finn’s eyes are intense, hungry, fierce. “I hope he wants me. Because I’m not letting go of him again. Not now. Not ever.”
Poe sinks his head into his hands and tries to make the world spin back into place. It doesn’t. His ship is darting wildly beneath his hands, soaring with a life of its own. “Finn,” he says, hoarse. His mouth knows that word. “Finn, I—” He looks back up at his friend.
“You were right, Poe. Life is short. We don’t have time to waste. If you don’t want me, then say it. If you’re too much of a coward, then say it, Poe!” Finn flings the words in his face.
Poe stares at him. Slowly he rises to his feet to face Finn. His brain is running a continual short-circuit, snapping and fizzing at odd intervals. “Do I have any other options?” Poe asks dazedly. His voice rasps against the tightness of his throat.
Finn stares back, bold and determined. “You tell me,” he returns.
“What if I want to be your boyfriend? Can I say that?”
“I think you just did.” A smile is trembling across Finn’s lips.
“Well?”
“What if I want to be yours?”
Poe tilts his head, considers this, tries to fit the pieces of his mind back together. “That would make things a bit less awkward, I suppose. One-sided relationships are kriffing weird.”
“You’re going to have to teach me everything,” Finn says. “I mean, ok, I know a few things, but not a lot of detail.”
Poe’s mouth quirks up at the sides. “I seem to remember you being a pretty fast learner.”
Finn’s face lights up. It’s the same complete and total glee that Poe remembers from their short-lived tilt against the First Order. The same one that still snaps straight down his spinal cord to his groin every time he sees it.
“Yeah,” Finn says. “Yeah, I think I am. And you were an ok teacher, I guess.” His eyes are daring Poe to take the bait. Poe just shakes his head, tucking the thought away for revenge at a better moment later. But Finn’s eyes are suddenly flickering with doubt. “I don’t just mean with sex, you know. With relationships. I know what they are, we always used to talk about the idea. What it would be like. Who we would pick, if we could. But I don’t really know how it works. If I could learn something like that.”
A slow smile spreads across Poe’s face. “Huh. Well. You know, my parents used to talk to me about it sometimes. What makes for a good relationship. Honesty, they said. Communication. Courage.” He shrugs sheepishly. “Going by those standards, I think you just kicked my ass in the relationship sector. Are you really willing to throw in your lot with a liar and an idiot and a coward?”
“And a dramatic, insecure, mouthy—”
“Watch who you’re calling mouthy,” Poe interrupts. He lunges a step towards Finn, grabs him tightly, and pulls him in for a breathless kiss. Finally, finally, finally, his brain is repeating, stuck on that one word. Finally. Their bodies, colliding mid-step, kindle a fierce, victorious, exultant heat.