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Finn may have been trained from birth as an indomitable human weapon, but that doesn’t mean he’s any good at it.
In the Stormtrooper Cadets, they used to start every day with a timed run around the barracks complex, followed by an hour of calisthenics before breakfast. The idea was to form soldiers whose dynamic strength and cardiovascular fitness would allow them to rise to any physical challenge. In practice, it mostly just formed soldiers who were really good at timed runs and calisthenics. Finn has kept up the routine as much as possible since he joined the Resistance – well, okay, he has kept up some of the routine, as much as anyone with free choice and no threat of immediate punishment could reasonably be expected to – so it’s not that his muscles or his maximum lung capacity aren’t theoretically equal to the task before him now.
It’s just that the task before him now is neither a timed run nor calisthenics, and frankly, it sucks.
‘We must be almost there,’ he gasps as he hauls himself up a sheer stretch of rock by his fingertips. This incline they’re on can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be a hill or a cliff, and for every few walkable paces, there are another few he has no choice but to climb. His shoulders, arms and core are all burning. By the time they reach the summit, he’ll be lucky if he has enough sensation left in his hands to hold onto the strange, curved, chitinous hiking poles their local guides gave them for the mission. The poles are slung over his back now, clacking loudly as he climbs and jabbing him in the calf every now and then with the sharp pincer tips on the end.
Poe, panting just as hard, cranes his head back to measure the remaining distance. ‘About halfway, I think,’ he says. ‘It’s–’ He breaks off, swearing, as a chunk of muddy rock crumbles beneath his grip, forcing him to grab frantically for another handhold; Finn can’t hope to catch him if he slips, but fortunately, Poe finds a new hold before Finn can panic and make an ill-advised lunge to save him anyway. ‘Hard to tell from this angle,’ Poe finishes grimly.
‘How far up is Rey?’ Climbing played a much larger role in Rey’s self-taught youthful curriculum than either of theirs, and she has her Jedi powers to help her; the last time Finn caught a glimpse of her she was bounding up the rock face like a mountain-nargle, weightless and sure-footed.
‘Can’t see her at all,’ says Poe. ‘I bet she’s left us behind.’
Finn doesn’t look up to check, because he has learnt from Poe’s near-death example just now and also because he doesn’t want to look as if he doubts himself. ‘She wouldn’t leave us behind,’ he says firmly, triple-checking that his toes are securely wedged into a crevice before lunging upwards for the next handhold. ‘She’s not like that.’
The part Finn’s leaving out is that Rey did, in fact, try to leave them behind once already. Rey didn’t want Finn and Poe to join her on this mission in the first place.
She’s been drifting away for a while now. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, like a moon hanging motionless in the sky that somehow, each time you look up, has moved slightly further on its arc. The three of them have spent the months since Exegol doing what they’ve always done: fighting the First Order, whose survivors seem to have largely missed the memo that their war is lost. Even now there are still fugitive warships to be hunted down, security to maintain on worlds that freed themselves during the Great Uprising, and occupying forces to expel from worlds that didn’t. It’s been keeping Finn busy. Poe, even busier. But although Rey shows up whenever they ask her, it’s like her heart is no longer in the fight. She’s getting more and more obsessed with her Jedi stuff, training alone, poring over those old books for hours on end, and even when she’s with them, there’s something about her that feels … distant. Reserved. Like there’s something she’s intentionally holding back from her two closest friends.
She never did tell them exactly what happened during that short time Finn lost track of her, from when she fled the Death Star wreckage in Kylo Ren’s ship to when she arrived back on Ajan Kloss after the battle in Luke Skywalker’s. Palpatine was dead, she told them. Ren, too. Balance had returned to the Force. The look in her eyes warned Finn not to push for more details. Poe, less sensitive than him to Rey’s warnings, got a curt “It’s done now, it’s over” in response to his reckless further questions.
And the thing is, that’s not enough for Finn. Maybe it should be. Maybe he should just be grateful that the enemies with superpowers are dead, and that the only people left to lead the First Order now are overzealous paper-pushers and third-rate officers who waited out the D-day carnage on postings too remote to be touched by the big revolutionary surge. Maybe he should just be glad Rey’s not dead, even though he knows he felt her die that day. Maybe the questions bursting to escape him (why did I feel you die, how did I feel you die, what does this power inside me mean, what is it for, am I a Jedi, can you help me be a Jedi, can we be Jedi together, please, Rey, can you just talk to me) are better left unasked. Finn’s no good at asking questions anyway. He was raised to say yes, sir and no, sir and how high, sir; in the Stormtrooper Corps, betraying any sign of curiosity was enough to get you assigned to latrine duty if you were lucky and reconditioning if you weren’t. Deciding to leave all that behind didn’t magically equip him with the skills to handle a situation where an unforthcoming friend probably would not scour the inside of his mind with repurposed Imperial torture tech but might just be good old-fashioned mad if he asked the wrong thing.
Maybe he should let it go. But he can’t. And since the Force is awake inside him and won’t go back to sleep, and since Rey shuts down any attempt to lead their conversations in a direction of hey-so-about-this-Force-thing, Finn has felt he has no choice but to squash the questions down inside him and let her do her thing.
Then the rumours started swirling about a planet called Ordon. Truth be told, Finn had never heard of the place before, and even once he started listening, there wasn’t much to hear. Ordon exists in a quiet corner of the Colonies region, but never seems to have been actually colonised; there’s hardly anything there worth the effort. Tiny native population, undeveloped land, scarce natural resources. So while its wealthier neighbours were being plundered by a succession of greedy galactic regimes, the Ordonians built themselves a single small spaceport from which they export modest quantities of a popular kind of edible marshweed and not much else. And then one day, all of a sudden, the whole galactic trade network started talking about them. Freight ships had gone missing. Traffic had been yanked from nearby hyperlanes and never heard from again. Freak gravitational events centred on the planet had caused disruptions to the entire surrounding sector, and no science seemed able to explain what was causing them. Pilots who did return reported flashes of wild light and something even stranger, something they couldn’t explain; a pressure in their heads, an overbearing sense of presence before they could shake their ships loose of the planet’s gravity and escape.
‘It’s pirates,’ was Poe’s surmise when Resistance Intelligence brought in a report about it.
Rey’s distracted eyes had sharpened and turned skeptical. ‘Pirates are attacking marshweed traders with an overbearing sense of psychic presence?’
‘No. Pirates are attacking marshweed traders the normal way, with tractor beams and laser cannons. All the freakier stuff is just typical spacer exaggeration. It happens all the time, Rey. Some people get spooked out in the black. Some people know that other people get spooked out in the black, and make up scary stories to mess with them.’
‘We can rule out First Order military activity, anyway,’ Finn said quickly, before Rey could lash her tongue at Poe. ‘This isn’t their MO. We should check it out, though. Even if they’re not hiding warships in the Ordonian marshes, the First Order used to have fingers in just about every pirate pie. And if it’s not pirates, then…’ He shot a glance at Rey, trying hard to make it look meaningful enough to register but casual enough not to activate her defences. ‘It could be something to do with the Force.’
Okay, so, maybe Finn had his own agenda. Neither Force stuff nor civilian piracy fell strictly within the Resistance’s operational purview, but the pirates really could be working with the First Order, and if Finn couldn’t figure out how to approach Rey about the Force then he could at least engineer a situation where the Force was likely to come up organically in conversation. His instincts, whether Force-driven or plain common sense, told him the First Order was vanishingly unlikely to have even tangential involvement in a marshweed smuggling operation. Illegal weapons, that was more their thing. Spice trade. Sentient trafficking. Whether it necessarily followed that the disturbances had anything to do with the Force was a lot more dubious. But it couldn’t hurt to check.
‘I’ll fly to Ordon myself,’ said Rey. ‘It’s not pirates. I can feel it.’ Despite never having officially enlisted with the Resistance, let alone attained a high rank, she had mastered a tone of authority that could have knocked a whole room of hierarchical First Order power-grubbers to the floor.
It didn’t work on Poe. ‘Well, I can’t feel kark,’ he said stubbornly. ‘Finn’s right – we have a duty to investigate all unusual surges in criminal activity. The New Republic writing off every disturbance as “just pirates” is how the last war happened.’
‘It’ll be so much faster if I just–’
‘We go together, Rey.’ His tone was final. ‘If anything starts levitating, I promise I’ll back off and let you take command. Until then, this is Resistance business.’
So the three of them flew to Ordon together. They landed the Falcon on a marsh flat early this morning, and so far they have met zero pirates, zero freakish Force events, and a whole bunch of Ordonians who are almost too grateful that someone is taking an interest in their plight. Upon first disembarking, Finn, Rey and Poe were swiftly surrounded by a crowd of cancrine, grey-shelled individuals who hastened them to a mudbrick town hall where they were presented to the Ordonian mayor.
The mayor’s story matched with the reports coming out of the traders’ whisper-network. Work at the spaceport had ground to a halt as offworld ships stopped coming; exports were piling up in silos while imported supplies dwindled; wrecked ships had been sighted falling from the sky, though where exactly they landed, the Ordonians couldn’t say. From their viewpoint on the ground, the disturbances seemed to emanate from a wild land far out beyond the city and its spaceport. The mayor pointed them in the right direction. Then he told them they would need to get there by foot.
‘No fly,’ he warned sternly, mouthparts clacking around each word of stilted Basic. ‘Sky light shoot you down. Many ship go. None return. No fly!’ He pinched his chelipeds together and stamped two of his other legs on the ground in what Finn guessed was an emphatic gesture. ‘You must scuttle instead.’
Finn and his friends, of course, lacked the anatomy to scuttle. It also struck Finn as unlikely that they’d be safer approaching a completely unknown threat on foot than in a heavily shielded smuggler’s ship with full weapons complement. But then, mission planning is another thing the First Order never bothered teaching its footsoldiers. Finn has learnt to improvise during his service with the Resistance but he’s even better at deferring to a higher authority. The Ordonians seemed confident they knew what they were talking about. With disapproving clacks and dark glances at the humans’ mere two legs apiece, they furnished their guests with emergency kits and hiking poles that resembled their own legs, complete with pincers on the ends. They guided them to the edge of town and then skittered back to their mud burrows leaving Finn, Rey and Poe to find their own way by the mayor’s directions.
The terrain was marshy at first, and the pincer-poles came in handy for picking their way through tangles of aquatic foliage and puddles of mud that swallowed their boots up to the ankle. But after a few soggy, miserable klicks, the ground firmed up and spat them out into an airy forest of wide-spaced trees with tall, thin trunks and a canopy of bluish leaves. They spent a pleasant few hours traipsing through it, following the arc of the sun that glittered wanly through the leaves, letting the carpet of low ferns brush the mud from their feet as they passed. Then, just as Finn was settling comfortably into his optimism about the rest of the trek, the horrible hill-cliff-slope thing slammed into being before them like an activated forcefield.
And now they’re climbing. How long they’ve been climbing, Finn can’t begin to guess. His burning muscles make each minute feel like an hour. The summit doesn’t seem to be getting any closer, no matter how hard he strains. He doesn’t dare let go of a handhold to check his chrono.
Finally, his scrabbling hand finds a flat ledge wider than the handholds he’s been clinging to. He hauls himself up onto what turns out to be a narrow plateau of perhaps ten metres across. There are rock formations and a stretch of wind-flattened grass before the razorback hill plunges straight back down into the forest as steeply as it rose.
Finn collapses on the flat, sweaty and trembling from exertion. Beside him, Poe takes a shuddering breath and hacks out, ‘We need to get us some jetpacks. Like the First Order. Remember those flying stormtroopers on Pasaana? Don’t suppose you have an old contact who could hook us up?’
With a heroic effort, Finn turns his head sideways and spits out a mouthful of grass. ‘The First Order doesn’t really do military surplus,’ he says. ‘We might have better luck with the Mandalorians.’ Finn has never met a Mandalorian before. It’s on his bucket list.
‘Nah, we wouldn’t. Only Mandalorians are allowed to wear Mandalorian gear. It’s a religious thing, I think.’ With a groan, Poe levers himself up to sit. He surveys the scant few metres of flat terrain available to them before the drop. ‘Rey jumped off the other side, didn’t she?’ he says, shaking his head in mock disgust. Finn knows him well enough to see the grudging admiration behind the gesture. ‘Probably did a nice little midair somersault before landing as light as a feather on her feet. I told you. She’s left us behind. We’ll never catch up to her now.’
‘You might,’ comes a voice from out of sight. Rey sounds only lightly puffed, and when her head pops up over the opposite cliff’s edge, her eyes are bright and energised. She likes this, Finn realises with a wave of something like disgust himself. This wonderful, powerful, profoundly weird woman actually likes climbing. ‘I’ve been scouting ahead,’ she explains. ‘The forest on the other side looks just like the one we just came through, but I started seeing strange things along the way and so I thought I should come back to check on you.’
‘Strange things?’ Finn makes a valiant effort to sound like his lungs aren’t on fire. It doesn’t work.
Rey shrugs. ‘Things that didn’t look like they belonged. Organic matter, but they didn’t look anything like the other flora we’ve seen on this planet. I don’t know exactly what they were.’ She doesn’t look too concerned about it, and that’s good enough for Finn. ‘Anyway, I think we should camp up here tonight, just in case. The sun’s almost down and you look … I mean’ – she catches herself, with an uncharacteristic display of tact – ‘we’re all getting tired. We have the high ground here. It’s as good a spot for a rest as any. We can investigate tomorrow when we’re fresh.’
‘Sounds good,’ says Poe. ‘If you’re absolutely sure you need the rest.’
Rey gives him a scornful look but says nothing.
They lay out their bedrolls in the shelter of one of the rock formations. It’s not cold, but Finn can feel his muscles beginning to seize up from the day’s exertion, and since Rey seems blithely unconcerned about the risk of attracting attention, he lights up the portable camping stove the Ordonians lent them. It burns pellets of compacted marshweed and issues a strange, faintly fungal-smelling smoke, but its warmth washes over Finn like a hot bath and his stomach receives the heated rations with gratitude.
Exhausted in body but not quite ready for sleep yet, the three of them lie back on their bedrolls and watch as encroaching night washes the last residue of daylight from the sky. Their conversation is languid and trivial, driven mostly by Poe; Rey answers his scattered remarks intermittently, and Finn, comforted by the backdrop of their voices but feeling no need to join in, gazes up at the stars that are winking into being as darkness falls.
First Order stormtroopers lived, trained, and served most of their deployments aboard vast warships that were always in motion, hopping from one empty system to the next to evade the notice of their enemies in the New Republic. During the dark year between Crait and Exegol, the Resistance was forced to move its base around nearly as often to evade detection. Gazing up at the sparkling night sky with its millions of tiny lights, Finn wonders what it would be like to stay on one world long enough to learn its stars. You can navigate by them, he’s been told. The native Ordonians can probably read their planet’s night sky like a map, and recite the names of the constellations like cadets learn to recite orders of battle.
That one up there, that vaguely oblong star cluster, that could be called the Mouse Droid. Another constellation, bright and close, could be something aquatic – a fish? The Big Fish? Those two stars over the north horizon, reddish and low, they’re the Lovers, Finn decides. They look like they’re floating right next to each other. Like they could reach across the sky and take one another’s hands. In reality, in the vastness of space, they’re probably far enough apart that you couldn’t fly between them at sublight speed within the span of a human life. If your hyperdrive blew out you’d have a multigenerational trek home on your hands, and if that’s not a sad, pathetic metaphor for the sense of impending loss that’s been hanging over Finn since Exegol then he’s not sure what is.
Unnavigable distance: that’s his relationship with Rey in a nutshell. Has been since the start, really. He takes her hand; she snatches it away. He opens up to her; she gathers her secrets tight to her chest. He follows; she runs. Finn knows her too well to take it personally. Before he joined the Resistance, he had never slept a night in his life without a crush of same-age cadets all around him, bunks stacked mere inches apart to save space. He was lonely with the First Order, desperately lonely, but he was never actually alone. Rey grew up in the wastelands of Jakku where the population density is something like half a head per hundred klicks. She and Finn are friends but she needs her space. Finn gets that. Or at least, he tries to. It’s just hard to accept her detachment when he himself could be happy in her company the whole rotation around.
The truth is that when Finn first met Rey, he thought it was finally happening for him, the thing they were so strongly warned against in the Stormtrooper Corps, the thing his fellow cadets seemed unable to resist even as all the spiteful weight of their disapproving commanders bore down on them. It was the same thing that went on to later wreck Finn’s relationship with Rose when the feeling and its attendant desires, despite his best efforts, failed to materialise. When Finn first met Rey, he thought he was falling in love. His heart was racing – but that was just adrenaline from his escape and the crash and the imminent risk of recapture. His loins were astir – but that was just sweat-chafe from having walked so far in his under-uniform blacks in full sun. He’d felt seen by Rey in a way he’d never been seen by any friend before – but that turned out to be because his prior “friendships” with other stormtroopers just really, really sucked, and he was comparing her more or less normal degree of human empathy to the indifference of a cohort who’d been brainwashed to see all gentler impulses as shameful points of personal weakness to be crushed without remorse.
Once he’d calmed down and changed clothes and gotten to know her better, the physical agitation wore off and what was left behind was … well, Finn doesn’t know what to call it. Rey is one of the most amazing people he’s ever met. He likes her more than any of his other friends besides Poe, but the difference is definitely in the amount of liking, not its fundamental quality. He admires her, he enjoys spending time together, he cares about her wellbeing, and honestly, he wants what they’ve got now to stay the way it is forever, with her and him and Poe all living on the Falcon and doing everything together. But he feels no particular urge to romance her. He definitely doesn’t need to see her naked. Finn wasn’t good at being a stormtrooper, but he clearly learnt one of the First Order’s lessons a bit too well, because no matter how many romcoms he watches on the holoprojector on nights off, no matter how closely he observes other couples and triads and larger polycules around him, he can’t find any trace within himself of the emotion everyone seems to mean when they talk about romantic love. And if he can’t feel it for Rey, who is pretty and kind and brave and such a genuine joy to be around, then Finn knows with sinking certainty that he’s never going to feel it for anyone.
Things with Poe are easier. They’re both generals of the Resistance, so for as long as there’s anything left to resist – which is likely to be for a long time, given how determinedly the fanatical remnants of the First Order are refusing to accept the reality of their own defeat – Finn and Poe share an official, formalised, built-to-last bond. But the more Rey drifts away from the Resistance, the more she immerses herself in this whole Jedi thing, the more Finn sees a near-inevitable end rushing up on him. It’s only a matter of time until Rey decides she has to go and find herself a padawan, or run off on a pilgrimage, or set up a new Jedi temple, or something else all spiritual and drastic that will leave no more room in her life for Finn and Poe.
He has a solution. That’s the most frustrating part. Finn has the Force; he could join her in the Jedi stuff, if she’d only let him. He could be her padawan. He could go with her on pilgrimage. He’d have to find a way to juggle his military and spiritual duties, but lots of the old Jedi were generals in the Clone Wars, weren’t they? He could make it work. And then he’d get to keep Rey and Poe both, and with him as the bridge between them, nothing would ever have to change.
He should say something now. Tell Rey he’s been practising trying to make his dinner rolls float, that he’s almost sure the other night he finally saw one of them twitch. Tell her he has now had three whole dreams that ended up coming true, and sure, they were only about petty stuff, but all Jedi have to start somewhere with their prophecies, don’t they? He should tell her that he doesn’t know any lightsaber forms yet, but he was always the top of his class with bayonets and riot batons, and he knows he can learn this new weapon in a heartbeat if she only gets him started with a few pointers.
The words won’t come.
It doesn’t help that Poe keeps interrupting every mid-length stretch of silence.
‘The skies are so quiet,’ he says, sounding almost personally offended by the fact. ‘Nothing’s moving. No beacons, no satellites, let alone manned traffic … what was it the mayor said? Don’t go by ship or the “sky light” will shoot us down? I’m telling you, this has piracy written all over it. I bet the locals saw a skirmish in upper orbit and mistook the flashes of laser fire for the wrath of some terrible creature from beyond the void.’
‘The Ordonians didn’t strike me as superstitious,’ says Rey, waving her hand dismissively. ‘Language barrier aside, they’re just being practical. No one’s been hurt planetside yet. All the reported victims have been spacers.’
‘Yeah, because it’s pirates.’
‘It’s not pirates,’ Rey says with finality. ‘There’s something here, I can feel it.’
‘I can feel it too,’ Finn blurts before he can lose his nerve.
It’s not a lie. He can feel something here, for sure. Maybe only his own wishful thinking, but this planet feels … alive. Alive with something other than pirates and crab people. Rey turns to look at Finn, starlight reflecting in her eyes, and studies his face with an expression so thoughtful it’s almost sad.
‘Can you really?’ she asks.
Before Finn can answer, Poe huffs a huge sigh and says, ‘Not you, too. We’re here now, anyway, so there’s no point arguing. We’ll find the pirates tomorrow, and I’ll graciously accept your apologies and then we can all go home and sleep under blankets that don’t stink of marsh mud.’
‘I think the blankets smell fine,’ says Rey.
‘That’s because you have the lowest standards for physical comfort of anyone I’ve ever met.’
‘You mean, I’m the only person you know who isn’t a pampered little–’
‘Guys,’ says Finn. The moment is gone. Finn doesn’t blame Poe; it probably wasn’t leading anywhere, anyway.
Like hell is he calling that constellation the Lovers. It can be something else. Something that says it’s fine for two celestial bodies to be light years apart, separated by unfathomable stretches of void; they can still see each other. They can still shine. Finn doesn’t have a good name yet but he’ll find one.
Here’s another thing Finn never learnt at Stormtrooper school: how to be okay with grey zones. Things were either right, in the exact way the First Order said they should be right, or they were wrong and needed obliterating. Nobody ever clapped you on the back and gave you points for effort. If your performance wasn’t perfect, it was worthless. Finn once got slapped with a week’s worth of punishment rations and extra training for missing the very last shot on a blaster simulation. He finished second place in his squad, when before the mistake he’d been poised to come first. It wasn’t good enough.
Out of all the people Finn has met since leaving the First Order, Poe is the one who has given him the least reason to fear judgement. The first time they ever met, their effortless friendly chemistry bowled Finn over after a lifetime at the edge of his cohort, never quite fitting in and never understanding why. Poe has always been himself around Finn and he’s never expected Finn to be anyone other than who he is, either. And yet Finn has a secret from Poe that everyone else in his life already knows, Rey and Rose and Chewie and even Captain Solo and General Organa, before they passed.
Poe is the only one who doesn’t know that Finn is only a hero by accident.
Poe first met Finn as the brave stormtrooper who saved him from First Order captivity, took off his white helmet and mounted a daring escape for them both. He wasn’t there when Finn then tried to book it on the first smuggling ship that would have him. He wasn’t privy to the lie Finn told to lure the whole Resistance to Starkiller Base for Rey’s sake, or his attempt to desert during the Battle of Oetchi that was only stopped by Rose tasing him in that escape pod. Poe has no idea that Finn tried literally everything else he could think of before embracing life as a Resistance fighter. He certainly doesn’t know that even now Finn is thinking of compromising his commitment to the cause again, by convincing Rey to take him on as a Jedi – and it will be a compromise, no matter what he tells himself, because there are only so many hours in the day and generalship takes up a lot of them. Finn’s not enough of an optimist to think becoming a magic monk will be any less demanding.
But above all, Poe doesn’t know how hard Finn tried to make life in the First Order work for him before he finally defected. He has never told Rey this, either, but he has a feeling she knows; she’s too clear-sighted not to. Poe, on the other hand, is too fiercely loyal to ever think badly of his friends. It’s how he gets away with trading such sharp insults with Rey all the time: she knows he doesn’t mean his, and he pays her the over-generous compliment of assuming she doesn’t mean hers. Poe doesn’t know that when the First Order brainwashing stopped working on Finn, he tried actively for ages to take over brainwashing himself; he wanted to believe. He wanted to belong.
He’d love to think that his conscience would have pricked him of its own accord eventually. He’ll never know for sure. What he does know is that if he hadn’t watched Slip fall to blaster fire during the attack on Tuanul – Slip, his favourite squadmate, the closest thing he had to a true friend in that whole miserable sewerhole of a regime – then there’s every chance he would have stood proud by Slip’s side and fired on the rounded-up villagers as ordered.
Because Finn’s loyal, too. Not to regimes or ideologies but to people. The fact that the people who finally offered him the sense of belonging and acceptance he’d been looking for happened to be the good guys … well, that was just sheer dumb luck. Even if he had left the First Order on his own steam after all, even if he had decided he wasn’t cut out to be a killer in the stormtrooper mold, there were a whole lot of other things short of senseless mass murder that his skillset could have proved good for. A gangster could have offered him a kind word back then and he’d have jumped just as high for them as he now jumps for Rey and Poe.
Finn wasn’t built to be alone. That’s the thing. That’s what makes it so messed up that he also doesn’t seem to be built for any kind of normal romantic partnership. The galaxy’s most ubiquitous way of forging a sacred bond with the people you love, and Finn, who’s never truly wanted anything but to be bonded to people he loves, can’t do it.
It’s not like he really thinks that Poe would turn on him if he knew the truth. It’s just that being Resistance heroes is the one big thing they have in common, the one formal thing that says: Hey, you two belong together. Finn can’t bring himself to jeopardise that even in theory. So he keeps on lying by omission, and if it eats him alive inside a little, who’s to be any the wiser?
Poe, unlike Rey, can’t sense falsehoods.
‘I feel like I must have gone six rounds with a Wookiee cage-fighter,’ Poe grumbles, as he climbs stiffly out of his bedroll the next morning. ‘Muscles I didn’t know I had are screaming at me.’
‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about,’ Rey says briskly. She’s already up, of course, heating their breakfast over the camp stove and looking obnoxiously cheerful. ‘You’ll be fine, anyway. Down is easier than up.’
‘Maybe a bit too much easier,’ says Poe, with a dark look at the cliff’s edge. ‘I need some time to limber up before I try to climb, or I’m not going to make it down in one piece.’
Rey sighs. ‘The sun’s been up for an hour already. If you’re so tired, why don’t you wait for me here? I’ll go on ahead, and–’
‘We’ve already had this argument, Rey. Finn and I are coming with you.’
‘Fine. Limber up all you like, then. I’ll meet you at the bottom. I will,’ she promises irritably, as Poe shoots her a distrustful glare. ‘I might as well get in some lightsaber practice while you two are oozing around at snail’s pace. There’s no room for footwork up here.’
Rey might not want them along, but she never breaks a promise once she’s made it. Finn watches without any further misgivings as she slurps down her rations, tightens her satchel across her chest, and disappears over the ridge. If she’d rather add a lightsaber training session to the punishing difficulty of the trek than wait an extra half-hour so they can all climb down together, so be it.
Out from under the oppressive weight of her impatience, Finn finds it a little easier to emerge from his own cosy bedroll and start packing up camp. He could kick himself when, on inspecting his hiking poles for damage, he finds an extendable rappelling line built into one of the hollow leg tubes. Apparently, the critter-like beings whose settlement looked so low-tech have a trick or two up their chitin sleeves when it comes to navigating the local terrain. Go figure.
‘Damn,’ says Poe, echoing Finn’s thoughts when he shows him. ‘A line would have come in handy yesterday when I was dying of lactic acid burn.’
One of the first things any stormtrooper cadet ever learns is to thoroughly check his kit before a mission. Finn’s training must have atrophied even more than he realised, for him to have carried a useful piece of gear so far without even knowing it. He goes through the rest of his borrowed Ordonian pack with an attention to detail that even the hardest stormtrooper sergeant couldn’t have found fault with. By the time Poe declares himself sufficiently limber to start climbing, Finn could wire up the whole new kit with his eyes closed.
It still takes them a while to get down the ridge. As on the ascent, there are stretches of sheer cliff down which they can safely rappel, and then other stretches of steep but technically walkable slope where they can’t use the lines at all due to the entangling growths of shrubbery and loose rock. Finn’s hands are so sore that even holding onto the rope feels gruelling. His under-armour used to include a robust pair of synthleather gloves. He curses his more recent, liberated self for having so recklessly decided that bare hands were where it was at.
On the other hand, without Rey around being all effortlessly better than him, Finn doesn’t feel as much pressure to put on a tough face. Together he and Poe wince, groan and grumble their way down, stopping for breaks at a frequency that would drive Rey mad if she were here to witness it. (She has long since reached the base of the cliff; now and then, when he looks down, Finn catches a glimpse of lightsaber flashing as she moves through her forms far below them.) He’s a long way from having fun, but he’s also starting to think that climbing’s not so bad when you’re allowed to go at your own pace.
He voices this to Poe when they’re paused on a flat ledge sipping water from their canteens.
‘Allowed,’ Poe echoes, smiling ruefully around the bottle’s rim. ‘We could just tell her to slow the hell down. Practice some of that famous Jedi patience. But we’d never dare, would we? Not if she was here. We’re like a pair of henpecked husbands.’
The phrasing gives Finn a strange pang in his chest, very separate from the muscle stitch. ‘Do you think I’d make a good husband?’ he asks, trying to sound offhand, unconcerned. He has no idea if he lands it or not. Stormtroopers aren’t allowed to be offhand. If there’s nothing important to say, they keep their mouths shut.
If it weren’t for the sex and romance parts, Finn would be great husband material. He knows he would. But the short-lived fiasco of his relationship with Rose made it very clear that people who are looking for husbands tend to see sex and romance as an important part of the package.
Poe tucks the canteen back in his pack and gives his numb arms a shake. ‘I don’t know,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘You might be asking the wrong guy. I’m not really the marrying type myself, so I’ve never thought about it.’
‘Think about it now.’
Poe looks Finn up and down. His lips twitch into a smirk. ‘Well, in my humble opinion, you pass the physical. Mostly thanks to that extremely tasteful jacket.’ It’s the jacket Finn pulled from the wreckage of Poe’s cockpit all those years ago; Finn punches him in the arm. ‘You’re good company, too,’ Poe continues, shaking off the blow. ‘Smart. Funny. Handy with a blaster. Those are the essentials, right?’ The quirked lips are joined by a quirked, questioning eyebrow. ‘Why? Did you have someone in mind?’
‘No,’ Finn says quickly. It’s not a lie: he really doesn’t want to marry Poe and Rey. He just doesn’t especially want to not marry them, either.
‘Well, when we get back from this pointless pirate chase, we’ll find you someone.’
‘Please don’t.’
‘Spoilsport.’ Poe sighs and looks down at the ledge by his feet, the next painful step of their descent. ‘You ready to keep going?’
What Finn’s ready for is a therapeutic deep tissue massage at one of Maz Kanata’s spa joints. ‘Yeah,’ he sighs, and scans for a new place to fix his rappel hook. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
Rey meets them at the bottom as promised. ‘You two took ages,’ she complains.
‘Didn’t want to interrupt your training,’ Poe says blithely. Rey gives him the stink eye but says nothing else as she leads them to the forest path she found on her scouting yesterday. Soon they’re deep under the cool blue canopy, pleasantly sheltered from the heat of the morning sun.
It’s hard to feel like they’re approaching a mysterious danger that has caused the disappearance of multiple ships. A gentle breeze sighs through the boughs, and here and there a woodland creature skitters across their path. Rey is enchanted by the small, fluffy mammals with striped grey tails that fall docile under her Jedi mind-trick influence and accept morsels of hardtack from her hands with their timid little paws. Finn admires the birds and their piping song. Poe whacks at the underbrush with his hiking pole and grumbles when sticky fronds cling to his legs.
‘These pirates could have done us the courtesy of setting up on a main road,’ he says.
‘There are no pirates,’ Rey says for the millionth time. ‘And this place is beautiful. All the greenery…’
‘You didn’t get enough greenery on Ajan Kloss? Remember when we were first setting up our base there, and we had to clear that landing space for Leia’s capital ship? I swear, those vines were growing back faster than we could chop ‘em.’
‘Ajan Kloss was a jungle. This is a proper forest, like in story books. I’ve never been in a proper forest before.’
‘Didn’t Kylo Ren almost kill you in a forest one time?’
‘Two times,’ Finn corrects, remembering the wilds of Takodana and the frost-rimed trees of Starkiller Base. The memories don’t bear dwelling on. ‘I didn’t have story books growing up. Or greenery. We lived our whole lives aboard Star Destroyers, and only made planetfall when we were going to smash a place up. I don’t think you could run a stormtrooper program in a place like this. It’s too nice. Everyone would be too relaxed. We’d all have taken one look at those stripy critters and laid down our arms for good.’
Poe snorts, but it’s a fond snort. ‘Right, I keep forgetting. Military brat and desert urchin. Well, I grew up on Yavin 4, which I guess is more a jungle than a forest, but it’s way nicer than Ajan Kloss. Fewer mosquitoes, anyway. The Rebels set up there during the last war and had the place well tamed by the time I was born. I can take or leave greenery. It’s nice to look at, I guess, but it had better not get in my way.’
‘Spoilt little earther baby,’ Rey tuts playfully. ‘You don’t know what you’re taking for granted.’
They should be close to the source of the disturbance now – Finn has been keeping loose track of the distance they’ve travelled, counting klicks the way he was taught in Basic – but it still doesn’t look or feel like anything’s wrong. ‘Keep an eye out,’ Rey says as they clamber over a fallen log. ‘We’re not far from where things get strange.’
Strange is the right word. Past the next thicket, they reach a cleared space where a strip of large trees have been knocked down, their trunks splintered and the fallen boughs not yet engulfed by the undergrowth. It’s not hard to spot the organic matter that caught Rey’s attention yesterday: there are large mounds of what looks like coral protruding incongruously from flattened patches of native fern.
‘Some sort of infestation, perhaps,’ Rey muses, stepping close to one of the mounds but not quite touching it. The matter moves a little, not quite with the breeze; Finn can’t tell if it is flora or some kind of very rudimentary fauna. ‘Or pirates in disguise,’ she adds with a sly glance at Poe.
‘Can it, Jedi,’ says Poe without heat. ‘What do we do now? Follow the trail?’
‘It definitely looks like it’s leading somewhere,’ says Finn. The splintered trees lead off in a trail of destruction, accented here and there by further growths of coral.
Finn can feel something. Maybe that’s him flattering himself, but there’s a strange sort of prickle on the back of his neck, like they’re not alone here. It’s not a malicious presence, though. He’s not scared. Just … curious. Looking at Rey, he sees a sharper, more analytical version of the same feeling on her face.
‘Weapons handy,’ she says, patting the lightsaber at her belt. ‘But not drawn yet. Finn, Poe, set your blasters to stun until we know more.’
Finn keeps his toggled to stun by default. In his stormtrooper days, it was one of the few acts of defiance he could get away with, a “mistake” that would be punished, if caught, with a rebuke and some punitive drills but not reconditioning. These days it’s a habit. Poe, who Finn knows well by now is the more trigger happy of the three of them, flicks the switch on his blaster before reholstering it loosely. They walk slowly forward. There are still critters around, Finn notices. Still birdsong overhead. Whatever knocked down these trees and left these weird mounds behind, it doesn’t seem to frighten the locals.
The trail of destruction leads to the bank of a lake. The waters are still and dark; tree roots lap thirstily at the edges before the waters appear to drop off into a sudden depth that Finn can’t quite measure by eye.
‘Well,’ says Poe, ‘this looks–’
‘Shh.’ Rey holds up a hand. Her eyes are bright with concentration; she approaches until the water touches the toes of her boots, scanning the vast expanse of the lake and listening intently. ‘You feel it too, don’t you, Finn?’
Finn’s heart leaps at the unexpected inclusion. ‘I, uh, think so,’ he says haltingly, and then, realising this is his chance, goes on in a quick tumble of words. ‘You know I haven’t had any training in this stuff, which is a shame, because I’m definitely a … you know, a Jedi, or the Force is with me, or whatever. Only a little bit. Not as much as you. But I bet if you trained me I could be really useful, maybe help you rebuild the Jedi Order if that’s what you want to do, find new students, what do you think? Because I think it’d be–’
It happens so fast that Finn, trained to think quickly under threat of punitive calisthenics assigned in brutal fifty-set increments, barely even registers what’s happening. One moment the waters are just barely rippling in the breeze that blows across the lake. The next, they’re a churning mess of spray and waves and – are those tentacles? – and he draws his blaster and looks to Rey for permission to fire, but Rey is being dragged past the shallows towards the depths by an immense, slimy tentacle wrapped around her waist. Stun shots glance off the monster’s glistening suckers. Rey has breath for just one cry – not even a scream, just a startled little “Oh!” of surprise – and then she’s gone beneath the water, leaving only ripples behind.
For a moment that feels like an eternity, Finn is paralysed, able only to stare into the depths of the water and scream her name. But then, his long years of conditioning kick in. Thank the Force his stormtrooper background has turned out to be good for something. A blast of purposeful calm clears the haze of panic from his mind, and the time he spent procrastinating with that gear check this morning pays off as well, because he knows now that there are rebreathers in the emergency kits the Ordonians gave them, and more importantly, he remembers exactly where he stowed his. ‘Watch our backs, I’ll get her,’ he shouts at Poe, wading out and scrambling to get the rubbery bit between his teeth. The tentacle monster just overwhelmed them when they were on land where they belong; he has no idea how he’s going to fight it on its own turf, but he has to try.
Or … not. Adrenaline pounding in his ears, Finn wades out through the shallow water to the place where the lake floor suddenly drops off into darkness. He’s soaked up to his knees and struggling against the sucking underwater mud, when a sudden surge in the water throws him off balance. The surface of the lake is churning again and more tentacles are breaking the surface, one of them still holding Rey – but Rey looks inexplicably calm. Finn’s eyes lock with hers as his arms pinwheel frantically, and then another wave surges around him and, in trying to prevent himself falling backwards into the mud, he overcompensates and instead goes plummeting over the shallow ledge into the deep, dark water.
He decides, a bit later, to put the whole embarrassing rescue out of his mind. Being scooped up by a tentacle is neither the least dignified nor the most frightening thing that has happened to him during his tenure with the Resistance, and when he breaks the water’s surface with panicked gasps and flailing limbs, Rey and Poe are kind enough not to laugh at him for it. Rey explains the little misunderstanding as Finn joins them aboard an inflatable raft Poe has pulled from the emergency kit, emptying his boots and wringing water out of his jacket. The tentacle creature (not a monster, Rey corrects him in an indignant hiss) only wants to talk to them. It pulled Rey underwater for the purposes of a friendly conference; as soon as she made it aware of her biological compulsion to breathe air, it brought her straight back to the surface with apologies.
So now the three of them are all out on this raft in the middle of the lake, and a large aquatic alien is gazing at them from just below the surface with its single bulbous eye. One tentacle protrudes from the water for Rey to hold in her delicate grip. They’re communing, or something. Finn is drenched to the bone and muddy and disgruntled and still sore from all yesterday’s climbing, and it strikes him for the first time that maybe he doesn’t want to do this Jedi thing, after all. Maybe this Jedi thing is a load of banthaspit.
‘They’re stranded,’ Rey explains when she finally takes a break from her psychic whatever-the-hell. She’s as wet as Finn from her own submerged “misunderstanding”, but she wears it more gracefully, and of course the fine white linens of her attire are already starting to dry in the sun. ‘Those coral mounds we saw, they’re the wreckage of a spaceship – a sort of machine-organic hybrid that’s standard back on their homeworld, I don’t fully understand it, it’s nothing like any other ship I’ve seen. Even if we had all the parts I doubt I could help them repair it.’
There’s a glee in her voice that shouldn’t go with having just been half-drowned by a betentacled alien of totally unknown origins, but Finn kind of gets it. He grew up on warships that all looked exactly the same, surrounded only by people of his own species because the First Order saw the abject failure of the Empire’s human supremacist policies and thought the answer was to double down harder on them. It’s only since his defection that he has come to appreciate even a fraction of the diversity that exists in the galaxy. Rey spent her whole childhood surviving on her ability to quickly learn her way around the guts of any spaceship wreck she came across, and yet there are still designs out there that can flummox her.
‘But we don’t have the parts,’ Rey goes on. ‘Half the ship got broken up in orbit. What didn’t burn off in the descent is underwater with the pilots. They dragged it here when they took shelter in the lake. The engine is completely destroyed, and all its comms, and all but one lifepod, and since they can’t survive in open air, they’ve been stuck here just trying to get a rescue signal out.’ Rey’s eyes shine happily. ‘I was right about the Force being involved; their species is Force-sensitive. Powerfully so.Those deaths and crashes, those were misunderstandings, too. They were just trying to get the pilots to come down and hear their message, so they used the Force to manipulate the weather to bring the ships down lower. Those “sky lights” the mayor mentioned? Ion storm discharge, is my guess. They thought it wasn’t working. They thought everyone was just flying back off and ignoring them. They had no idea they were killing all their potential rescuers.’
‘Well, that’s comforting,’ says Poe, who despite being perfectly dry is also grumpy. But then, that’s normal for him. ‘But you said they still have one lifepod. Why the hell don’t they use it?’
‘Well, there are two of them,’ says Rey.
‘So one goes and brings back help for the other.’
Rey shakes her head. ‘I don’t fully understand this either, but their species live in bonded pairs. They’re mated, and they have to keep mating regularly, or – I don’t know, just stay in close contact, I’m not clear on the details, but some sort of physical touch seems to be necessary for them. If one of them left in the lifepod to get help, the onboard life support would keep it healthy until it could reunite with others of its species, but the one left behind would die. Or possibly just be in agony? I don’t know, okay?’ She frowns at Poe’s raised eyebrow. ‘Telepathy is hard. If you don’t like the job I’m doing, you can do it yourself. All I know for sure is that they’re desperate. They can’t leave the water and they can’t leave each other, and they’re just trying to figure out how to get home. But now we’re here.’ She beams. ‘I’m sure one of our contacts can supply a ship with inbuilt water tanks. The Mon Calamari like to be submerged sometimes, and so do the Quarren, I think. All we need to do is get back in signal range, put out a call to the Resistance, and help will be on its way in no time.’
‘Great,’ says Poe. ‘What are we waiting for?’
‘Oh, we can’t go yet,’ says Rey, and for once she’s not trying to provoke Poe; her enthusiasm is purely innocent, and by the look on Poe’s face, all the more infuriating for it. ‘Our new friends aren’t in a hurry now that they know help will be here soon, and there’s so much I want to ask them about the Force. Their powers are like nothing I’ve ever seen or read about before, completely different from the Jedi methods. We need to compare notes.’
‘Great,’ says Poe again. ‘Just great.’ He turns to share a long-suffering look with Finn. Finn forces his face to comply out of loyal solidarity, but his own sense of being put upon has evaporated under the warm light of Rey’s excitement. He hasn’t seen her this cheerful about anything Force related in a long time. Not since Exegol.
So they lie there in the sun aboard their flimsy craft, and Finn hangs his jacket to dry – the tentacle creature, perhaps anxious to prove its good intentions after their misunderstanding, holds one tentacle up out of the water like a coat hook, and Finn is too tired and confused at this point to question it – and Rey communes in silence until her frantic edge of excitement has faded to a deep satisfaction. She’s so pleased that she doesn’t even look annoyed when Poe needles her about the delay on their paddle back to shore.
‘That’s a funny way of saying “you were right, Rey,”’ she says.
Poe scoffs. ‘Why would I want to say that?’
‘Because I was right. There were no pirates.’
‘We don’t know that. Being stranded and being pirates aren’t mutually exclusive. They could be stranded pirates. And we’re about to set them loose on an unwitting galaxy.’
‘I think the galaxy will be fine,’ says Rey.
They bicker the whole way back through the forest, but that’s fine, too. Business as usual. Finn breaks up a piece of hardtack as he walks and sprinkles crumbs along the path for the critters.
They camp in the same place as last night, on the sheltered side of a rock formation at the top of the high ridge. Poe falls asleep quickly after his meal, breath evening out to a low, sighing rhythm as he nestles inside his bedroll. Rey is tucked in too, but her eyes are open; Finn can see the starlight flickering on and off in them as she blinks up at the sky.
He lies back as well. Those two large reddish stars, the ones that aren’t called the Lovers, hang bright just above the horizon. Finn still has to come up with another name for the constellation. Or not. They’ll be off this planet by nightfall tomorrow and he’ll never see them again, and they’ll be just one more constellation in the long list of skyscapes he has left behind and forgotten.
‘It seems like too much, doesn’t it?’ says Rey.
‘Hmm?’
‘Those poor creatures in the lake. Being bonded so closely to another person that you’ll die if you ever leave them. Even Ben and I…’
‘Who?’
Rey turns her head to look at Finn. ‘Ben Solo,’ she says, like it should have been obvious.
Ben. Right. That Ben. It’s not like Finn didn’t hear the name Han shouted at Kylo Ren on Starkiller Base, but honestly, it was one of the less interesting things that happened on that mission and he hasn’t exactly dwelt on it since. For the first year of his freedom Finn was too busy trying not to get killed by the maniac to care what was on his birth record, and after that … well, after that Kylo Ren was dead, so it didn’t matter any more one way or the other. Among the Resistance forces, and certainly among the three of them, their late nemesis has always just been “Ren”.
Something of his confusion must show on Finn’s face, because Rey sighs and says, ‘There’s so much I haven’t told you.’
‘You don’t have to,’ Finn almost says, because she sounds exhausted at the mere thought of all that lies unsaid between them, but then he checks himself. It may not be his business what happened on Exegol, or how Palpatine and Ren wound up dead, or exactly when in that process Ren became “Ben Solo” to the woman who killed him. But the same power that runs in Rey’s veins runs in Finn’s, and as far as they know right now he’s the only other person in the galaxy that’s true of, and he deserves some answers about that if nothing else. ‘Listen,’ he says instead, ‘I know you don’t like talking about this, but it’s important. I have the Force. You know I have the Force. You’ve been pulling away, dealing with all this Jedi stuff by yourself, but you don’t have to. I don’t want you to. You can train me, and I can help you, and you won’t have to be alone. If you never want to tell me the truth about what happened on Exegol, that’s fine, but–’
‘It’s not that,’ Rey interrupts quickly. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to tell you the truth. It’s just … well, it’s complicated. I hardly know where to start.’
‘Start anywhere,’ Finn urges, because it’s not a flat “no” and that alone is more than he’s had from her since Palpatine’s death day. If the trade-off for her finally talking is that he has to deal with a bit more confusion, well, that’s worth it. ‘I’ll keep up.’
Rey returns her gaze to the heavens. Watching her closely in the dark, Finn thinks he can almost track the movements of her eyes over the constellations he has named and the ones he hasn’t. ‘The thing is,’ she says at last, ‘it’s all tangled together. The Jedi stuff and the … interpersonal stuff.’
The weight she puts on the word “interpersonal” gives Finn the sense that she means something else. ‘You and Ren,’ he says cautiously, testingly. Now there’s a thought he wasn’t prepared to handle today. Even if he were totally on board with the concept of romantic relationships in general, he’s pretty sure he would find this specific one weird.
But Rey is already shaking her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not like that. Or at least not on my side. Like I said, it’s complicated. The truth, Finn, is that Ben and I were a dyad in the Force.’
‘A dyad in the Force? That’s a thing?’
‘A very rare thing. Almost unheard of. Ben and I were the first in generations. Perfect equals in the Force, connected through all time and space since the first time we met.’ The first time Rey met Kylo Ren. That time he kidnapped and interrogated her. Finn grimaces; no wonder she hasn’t wanted to talk about it. ‘We could talk to each other, no matter where we were. Sometimes we could even read each other’s thoughts. Obviously–’ Here, Rey snorts, a wry little laugh with no real humour behind it. ‘Obviously our opposing loyalties were by far the biggest problem with the bond, but they weren’t the only one. He turned, you know, in the end. He helped me defeat Palpatine. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about it.’ She pauses, swallows, and Finn senses in the silence a plea for him not to push. ‘For me, the way I saw it, a Force bond, two souls literally interconnected – that’s the most intimate thing you can imagine, right?’ Finn nods, though she doesn’t seem to need a response; she’s still gazing fixedly up at the night sky, inky black between the twinkling lights. ‘Not for Ben. I could see in his mind what he thought our bond should be and it was … well, different than what I wanted from him. Or from anyone. Because I’ve never … I just don’t … but I don’t think even his best self, the one I met at the end, would have been able to understand that. He would have taken it as a rejection. There would always have been tension. Maybe in the end he would have gotten tired of me altogether.’
Sex. Romance. That’s what she’s talking about. Finn’s heart clenches with resentment at the thought of Kylo kriffing Ren, of all people, holding Rey’s bare soul in his hands and deciding it wasn’t enough because he wanted her tits, too. As if that tantrum-throwing, mass-murdering jerk deserved to share even the same air with one of the best people Finn has ever known in his life.
And she sounds so sad about it. So defeated, so inadequate, in a way that’s not like her.
But Finn knows the feeling too, doesn’t he? If he separates his dislike of an old enemy from the basic interpersonal conflict Ren and Rey were dealing with, it becomes all too familiar. Finn doesn’t resent Rose, exactly, for the way things ended between them, but it still leaves a bitter tang in his mouth when he thinks that all their great conversations and camaraderie weren’t enough for her. She can’t help being the kind of person who wants something else out of her closest relationships. He can’t help being the kind of person who doesn’t. It just sucks, that two people who are otherwise so great together can fall apart over something that to Finn seems so beside the point.
And Rey feels the same. That’s what she’s saying, what those awkward, uncertain gaps in her speech mean; it’s not just his wishful thinking. He never dared wish in the first place. Honestly, he never thought this could be something he’d be able to share with her; never thought he’d be able to share it with anyone. He just assumed he was the only one, an outlier whose failure to see the natural link between emotional intimacy and exchange of bodily fluids was all on him.
Rey sighs. ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘like I said, the two things got all entangled. The Force and the … other stuff. But then Ben passed into the Force, and as you can see, I’m still alive. I miss him, but I’m okay. It didn’t kill me. He died happy. And I never want to be involved like that with anyone again.’
He should tell her. She’s opened up to him; it’s only fair that he return the favour. The words still don’t want to come. ‘I’m not going to Force bond with you,’ he says weakly.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ Rey says flatly.
Finn takes a deep breath. He can do this. He spent most of his life pretending to be everything he wasn’t to survive in the First Order; being who he really is should be a cake walk by comparison. ‘Rey,’ he says, ‘I’m the same. I’m like you, not Ren. I don’t want any of that other stuff. I don’t even want to want it. When I ask you for help with the Force, that’s all I’m asking for. Well, that and…’
‘And what?’ Her voice is stern now. It doesn’t encourage further vulnerability, but that’s just Rey, always prickly when she feels threatened; Finn forces himself to continue.
‘I don’t want sex,’ he says bluntly. ‘I don’t want roses and kisses and sweet nothings. I’m not jealous when you’re with other people and I don’t like you any different than I like all my other friends, I just … well, I like you more. A lot more. And when the war ends, I don’t want you to go off on your own. I want us to stick together. You, me and Poe, just like it has been all this time. Whatever we decide we’re going to do with ourselves, whether it’s military or Jedi stuff, I want us to factor each other in. I want to know that we’re committed. That there’s a promise. So let’s not try to be partners, or lovers, or whatever. Let’s be … I don’t know. Master and padawan?’
Rey snorts. ‘I can’t be your Jedi master,’ she says. ‘I’m barely a padawan myself.’
Finn doubts that’s true, but he doesn’t push that, either. ‘Then let’s be padawans together. We can study the Force and go on weird quests to rescue stranded squid people from lakes and keep helping the Resistance.’
‘Sounds good,’ says Poe. Rey and Finn both jump.
Poe sticks his head out of his bedroll. His hair is rumpled but he’s obviously wide awake. ‘You’ve been eavesdropping,’ Finn accuses, heat rushing to his cheeks.
‘Nah,’ says Poe, waving a careless hand under the cover; his bedroll undulates. ‘It’s just kind of hard to fall asleep with you two having a big heart to heart right next to me. But relax. Nothing either of you just said is news to me. Well, the part about Ren was pretty weird. You had that maniac in your brain the whole time? Rey, what were you thinking?’
Rey’s eyes flash. ‘He wasn’t that bad in the end. And it’s not like I had a choi–’
‘Whatever,’ says Poe. ‘We can circle back to that. What matters is, as for us sticking together – where else would we go? We’re a team and always will be, no matter who’s in the Resistance or who belongs to which religious order. I mean, I agreed to come on this mission, didn’t I? To rescue squid people?’
‘You forced me to bring you on this mission,’ Rey reminds him. ‘Because you thought there would be pirates.’
‘Maybe I just wanted an excuse to hang out. I agree with Finn. You’ve been distancing yourself, Rey, and I wish you wouldn’t. It’s not either-or. You can be the last Jedi – or the second last,’ he amends hastily, with a glance at Finn – ‘and still have your friends.’
Finn looks at Poe. Then he looks at Rey. Then, heart filling like a balloon in his chest, he looks back up at the stars and the warm red glow of the stars that aren’t the Lovers. It doesn’t matter what he calls them, really. They can be the Two of Flasks, or the Troig’s Twin Assholes; they’re not relevant to Finn. They never were.
‘Maybe it’ll be pirates next time,’ says Rey, in the voice of someone offering a consolation prize to a disappointed child.
Poe laughs. ‘Yeah, well, it’s a big galaxy. Anything can happen. I’ll keep my hopes up.’
As soon as they get back in range of the signal tower, Poe sends a message via Resistance headquarters asking any ship with a large enough onboard water tank for help. Mon Cala volunteers a shuttle that’s customised for their own species’ comfort, featuring a fully submersible cockpit and crew quarters. The stranded aliens should be able to make their way home in it without any further issues.
The locals thank them warmly for resolving their planet’s danger. It will take a while for news to circulate the galaxy that the Ordonian shipping route is safe again, and a while longer again for the more risk-averse traders to start believing it, but they have what they need; they can weather a small economic slump, as the mayor informs them with a proud clack of his chelipeds. In gratitude, he gifts them a ceremonial carapace encrusted with strange, gooey-looking mud-gems that unlike the planet’s marshweed have found little purchase on the offworld trading market. Poe accepts the carapace with diplomatically worded compliments. Rey looks genuinely pleased with the gift; as far as Finn’s concerned, if she wants the souvenir, she can have it. Maybe weird trophy collecting is a Jedi thing.
He’ll have to start getting his head around that soon. But not today.
Today, a message has arrived from Resistance Intelligence that another small pocket of First Order holdout forces have been uncovered in the Abrion Sector. Finn’s hands are blistered and his body aches from his two days of strenuous climbing and sleeping rough, and he thinks longingly of Maz’s therapeutic spa, but none of his complaints matter once he hears duty calling. Finn may be a general of the Resistance now, or a Jedi padawan, or both, or neither; what he’ll always be under it all is a soldier trained since birth for toughness and hard work. ‘I can cover this one if you need a break,’ he tells Poe. He doesn’t bother extending the offer to Rey, who, aside from not being obliged by any formal rank to respond to the summons, seems to have suffered little more from all the climbing than from a light stroll on spring grass.
Poe shakes his head firmly. ‘We just got through discussing this, didn’t we?’
‘Sure, but I didn’t mean it had to be literally every single–’
‘Finn.’ Poe is smiling now. ‘I’m fine. I’m coming.’
‘I’m coming too,’ says Rey, with a meaningful look at Finn. She turns to the Ordonian mayor. ‘If you need anything else, you know where to find us.’
They board their ship for departure, and the stars of Ordon are soon dissolving into streaked blue as they jump to hyperspace. Finn has already forgotten what he named most of the constellations – there was a Gonk Droid or something up there, maybe? – but he won’t forget the stars that aren’t the Lovers. If the Ordonians do ever call on them again, he’ll have at least one thing to navigate by. It feels kind of nice.
And until then, he and the two people who matter most in his life will be out there kicking First Order butt. And Jedi butt. And maybe also pirate butt. Whatever butt presents itself for kicking, really. That's settled now. Finn has his place in the galaxy and everything else can go right ahead and be whatever it wants to be. They’ll face it like they’ve been doing all this time: together.