Work Text:
Atlantic City is as glittering and beautiful as it is grimy and crime-ridden, and Poe wouldn’t have it any other way. Life is prettier after the war, and the air is sweeter. He flew with honors over Germany and watched regimes crumble and fall, and New Jersey is a damn sight nicer than any trench.
Now that the war is through and the country has gone dry, he works for Mayor Organa and keeps order in the city. Miss Organa prefers to go by her maiden name while in office; Poe doesn’t think he’s ever met her husband. He wonders if her brother, treasurer of this town and legend in his own right, would ever come home from his “sabbatical”. (He knows it’s not his place to ask, and he knows his asking will only make the mayor sad.)
It’s summer of 1921 when Poe gets nabbed while picking up some paperwork for Miss Organa. He fights as best as he can, but they still toss him in the back of a paddy-wagon and haul him away. When they finally let him out, he’s in a barn someplace along the outskirts of town.
There’s two men before him, both looking like fashion plates. One’s red-haired with a sullen expression, and the other has a queer black bandana wrapped around his face, covering his mouth. They call themselves Mr. Hux and Kylo Ren, and they ask him, first nicely and then not-so-nicely, where and how Miss Organa moves liquor through the city. They want a piece of the business for their boss, you see. Poe pretends to think about it, and decides to hock a loogie onto the redhead’s shoe. It goes over about as well as you’d think.
They rough him up (he’s had worse) and toss him in a shed, and he’s sure he’s going to die protecting the only person who would give him a job in this whitebread city after the war. At least, until the shed door opens and gentle hands cut his ropes away.
This person, as it turns out, is Finn. He asks Poe if he can drive a Ford. (Buddy, he can drive anything.) Finn hands him the keys (they belong to Mr. Hux, Finn tells him later in a conspiratorial whisper), and they get the hell out of there.
Poe learns the whole story, in stops and starts on the long journey back to Atlantic City: Finn had been part of the Snoke operation since he was a kid. It was the only family he’d ever known. He never questioned how they handled business; at least, until the dry laws were enacted and men were shot in the name of liquor. Finn never had much luck; Snoke killed his father, and took him before he could remember his birth name. Poe loves him and protects him anyway.
“The Snoke operation owns half of Manhattan,” Finn says, and Poe can see the tremor go through him. It doesn’t scare Poe and it shouldn’t scare Finn. Poe looks at Finn, skin shining like it’s rubbed with oil, and feels blessed.
They get back and tell Miss Organa what happened. Her eyes are hard when she takes in Poe’s injuries, but they soften when he tells her of Finn’s bravery, and the personal cost he had in saving him. She offers Finn protection and a pardon, and Finn accepts the former and not the latter, saying he deserves whatever the law can dish out. She tuts, and gives Poe a look that says “what can ya do?”
Finn does jobs for Mayor Organa, and it’s on one of these excursions that he picks up a stray, one that he’s clearly taken with. Poe can’t disagree on that front.
The girl was hard-spitting and hard-fighting; they all called her Rey. She was a wild, feral thing, and quick on the draw. She lived in a little town called Tabor Heights, and said she was waiting for her folks to come get her. She wore old threadbare clothes, hand-me-downs from the previous tenants of her apartment. She had cut her hair herself, mimicking the “New Woman” style.
Snoke wants her; that much was true, and he sends his men to get her. What they get is cut down; Finn tells Poe all about her and her Civil War-era Smith & Wesson pistol, an heirloom that Miss Organa can’t stop staring at when she meets the girl in person.
(She tells Poe later, in private, that her father owned the same pistol. Poe doesn’t put two and two together, until later.)
Mayor Organa makes a lot of phone calls in the months to come, trying to make nice with New York City officials. She can’t halt the bootlegging business, but she can regulate it, to an extent. The main problem is Snoke, and the stranglehold he has on business. Poe doesn’t learn until later that the mayor has more personal reasons for her enmity with the New York boss.
When Snoke sends his latest offensive, Poe is ready. The forest paths of New Jersey light with gunfire, leaving Atlantic City as the victor; the shootout fells Miss Organa’s wayward fella, the reformed Han Solo, who had returned to see his son (yes, son) safely home. Poe drives Finn and Rey home, relieved to see another day.
Rey is dreamy; asks about the Follies. Finn promises her a show or two; Finn would promise her the world, if need be. Rey is beautiful and tough with strong muscles and calloused hands. Poe likes the feel of those hands. The three of them go to beach as often as they can, feet and hands caked with sand, cold sea air tearing at their faces.
When they all figure it out, nothing stops them; Poe’s room at the Ritz becomes their pleasure den. Rey can pin her boys with a look, and they are happy to oblige her with kisses, licks and caresses. The three are well-matched. Poe especially likes these nights, lying in bed, arms a tangle of limbs and both boys marked with her crimson kiss.
Eventually the truth of the pistol comes out, and Rey follows a paper trail to Mayor Organa’s brother, Luke. She writes back with a new legacy, and a new wardrobe, paying a local photographer to take some racy pictures. She’s a modern girl now, wearing drop-waisted skirts and kicky heels. She’s found a family; that was something.
Finn wonders what the future will bring. He thinks about moon landings, and space travel. Poe doesn’t think about it all. He’s happy with his feet on the ground, for the time being.
Rey eventually comes home, and what’s extraordinary is that she brings Luke Skywalker with her, a red poppy pinned to his lapel and sorrow on his mien. The legendary pistol glints in her hand. And she smiles.