Chapter Text
He was drowning.
Unconciousness clung to him, liquid and impossibly dense, and he struggled against it for what felt like a lifetime. Every time he got close to breaking the surface, he was pulled back down, as if by waves rolling over him. He could sense the light of day above him, could almost taste the air, but he could not reach it.
He was burning up.
His back felt like it was resting on red hot coals, skin melting away and flesh charring, and there was a terrible searing pain on his right shoulder. He tried to move, to will his muscles to roll away from the burning at his back, but his body wouldn’t respond beyond a few feeble spasms.
He was trapped.
Voices reached him through depths of confusion. He couldn’t make out their words, but he knew that they were asking him questions, insistently and urgently.
He would give them nothing.
Who were they? The Resistance? The Republic? Some other post-Imperial faction bent on eliminating the First Order and claiming all the chips for itself?
It didn’t matter. He would not break under questioning. He had been well instructed.
“Designa-“ his throat felt like an open wound, and his tongue was a dead slab of meat. He put every ounce of energy in his body into getting the words out. “Designation FN-2187. FN-Corps, 3rd Division.”
His eyes were half open, but he could not see. The glaring light shot pain through his skull, so he squeezed his eyes shut again.
The voices reached him again, more aggitated now.
The harsh smell of chemicals burned his nostrils, and he had an irrational fear that it would burn a hole right through his lungs, straight through his body to join the fire at his back.
He would die before he betrayed the First Order. He would remain loyal to the Order to his last breath.
No, not to the Order. To the other troopers. His squad. His own. Their features materialized briefly through the inky darkness. A flash of red hair. Bright hazel eyes. A scar against dark skin.
FN-2199.
FN-2003.
FN-2000.
And him.
“Designation FN-2187,” the words came a little more easily this time. They were all he would ever give them.
He hoped that death, or at the very least unconciousness, would come soon. He knew that this was his only hope of escape from the pain.
No one was coming to rescue him.
He was just a stormtrooper. He was expendable, and his usefulness was spent.
Still, he refused to be broken.
Suddenly, a new sensation, strikingly different from the ones that came before it. A pressure and a warmth against his left hand. Soft, comforting.
A voice sounded closer to his ears now, and he could almost give it a name, a face.
“Finn,” the word cut through his pain and confusion like a beam of light.
Yes, that was it. He remembered now.
His name was Finn.