Three Times Will Get You
by imp

Three Times Will Get You

imp

Summary

Finn, a war hero and a Senator for the stormtroopers settled on Kef Bir, experiences an assassination attempt. The Senate, furious at Finn for insisting on stormtroopers' right to self-determination, assigns him a convict who's had his ability to access the Force stolen from him: Kylo Ren.

Then shit really starts getting weird.

Notes

None

Chapter 1

“Get down! Get down!”

None of the Senators moved, so Finn did it for them, sweeping Kalaar’s feet out from under her and shoving Barié behind a stone pillar as the assassin opened fire.

Blaster bolts were nearly impossible to dodge, normally, but Finn’s mind had been open for weeks, feeling like a bloody wound in the back of his head. He used it now, listened to the Force, dodged and rolled and finally managed to knock the blaster out of the assassin’s hand and subdue them.

By the time Coruscant’s peacekeepers came and took the assassin away, Barié and Kalaar were both looking at him with the distant, confused distaste he’d started to recognize from other Senators. His bill was dead, and if he didn’t stay lucky, he might be too.

“That wasn’t an Imperial loyalist,” Finn said.

“Didn’t recognize her?” Kalaar smiled, an unpleasant curl of the lips.

“Well, no,” Finn said. “But there were hundreds of thousands of stormtroopers. What I didn’t recognize that actually matters is the fighting style.”

They didn’t care about the conclusions Finn had drawn. Barié said, “Hundreds of thousands, and yet you only represent the sixty thousand who’ve agreed to settle on Kef Bir. It’s remarkable, if you ask me, that you’re granted representation at all.”

Finn had been elected six months ago and he knew the drill by now. “Ex-stormtroopers are persons under both Old and New Republic laws, Senator. I’m the representative of citizens who’ve chosen Kef Bir as their home, not stormtroopers as a whole. My bill -”

To his surprise, Kalaar laughed. “You really never stop, do you? I’ll vote for your damn bill, but you need to get yourself a bodyguard.”

So Finn petitioned the Senate.

“This is unjust.”

“I know, but -”

“This is a blatant expression of anti-stormtrooper antipathy! Half the members of the Senate, and the worlds they represent, weren’t even part of the Resistance! They allowed the First Order to rise and they have the gall to lecture child soldiers -”

“Rey. I know.”

She clenched her jaw in that way that meant she wanted to go do some pull-ups to forget whatever was making her angry. “I know. I’m sorry. I just - of all the people to assign to guard you. It’s clearly meant to be a rebuke.”

“Yeah.” Finn shrugged, a single lifted shoulder. “But I agreed to do this, which means I can’t tell the Senate to go kriff themselves, even if I have a Jedi by my side.”

“Even if you are a Jedi?”

It was another old argument. “Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

“Uggggggh.” Rey flopped back in her chair. “I know you’re right. I know. But Finn, if he lays a finger on you, I will kill him. I don’t care about the consequences.”

“He won’t,” Finn said with more confidence than he felt. “And anyway, I know how to defend myself against Kylo Ren. I’ll be fine.”

“Murder,” said Rey, who apparently wasn’t too worried about going dark side under these very specific circumstances.

Finn toasted her with his plum wine. “Hopefully not. But yeah. Murder.”

“This wasn’t my idea.”

“You’re a reviled war criminal who’s permanently blocked from the Force and has no political power. I know it wasn’t your idea.”

Finn steeled himself against the curl of Ren’s lip, the hatred in his eyes. “You’re going to die,” Ren said. His voice sounded the same as it always had: cold, furious. Utterly inhuman. “You’re going to die because you think some pathetic cannon fodder is more important than your life and talents. You turned traitor to advocate for people who could never touch you in skill. You’re pathetic.”

“And you’re my employee, which means you’ll shut up or I’ll deliver you right back to your cell.”

Ren was already the palest person Finn had ever met, but that made him go white as the sands on Crait. He glared and Finn could feel the fury rolling off him, but he didn’t say anything else, which was all Finn really cared about.

He understood why Ren hadn’t been put to death. Rey had talked about what he’d done: stood up to Palpatine, given his strength and nearly his life to save Rey. Finn loved Rey, and he loved that she was so in tune with the mysticism of the Force and all that implied, but still: he couldn’t quite accept the mercy she had asked the Senate for. Sure, Kylo’d saved her life and potentially the galaxy in the process, but he’d killed so many people; he’d done things that weren’t even in the same galaxy as forgivable.

“I know,” Rey had said, the last time he’d brought this up. “But someone has to stop the bleeding. If we can’t be better than they are, what are we?”

Finn had told her she was right, and part of him had thought it was true. The rest of him hadn’t, and burned with anger still.

Now, facing the object of the galaxy’s hatred, he found himself feeling a confused mix of fury and resignation. Nothing he could say right now would get through to Ren. The fact that stormtroopers were all children or barely-adults - that they’d been stolen and tortured, that they had never had any choice but to serve, and the enormous wonderful fact that some of them had managed to resist anyway - none of that would matter to him. He was totally irredeemable and Finn would be an idiot to try.

“I’m flying back to Kef Bir tomorrow,” Finn said finally. “You’ll be coming with me.”

“Do you want to tie me up while you sleep?”

For a dizzying moment, Finn thought this was some kind of come on, like he was - they were -

No. “I refused to fight for the Empire for a reason. Just be here at 0800 tomorrow.” He very deliberately turned his back on Ren, going into his bedroom and locking the doors.

The truth was, Finn hadn’t been sure what to expect immediately after they won. He’d only ever seen the ad hoc organization of the Resistance or the obsessive fascism of the First Order, neither of which seemed like it’d work well for long-term governments. But he’d only just settled in on Kef Bir when they’d received communication from Coruscant: the Galactic Senate was re-forming, and Kef Bir, its population quintupled, qualified to send a representative.

Sixty-two thousand, three hundred and forty-five stormtroopers had arrived on Kef Bir so far, including nearly all of the ones who’d rebelled prior to the First Order officially surrendering. Word had spread, and spread, and spread; Finn was famous, and so was Jannah, and Kef Bir itself was under a newly enormous spotlight.

“Pathetic,” Ren muttered under his breath as they made their way to the community building.

“Keep your commentary to yourself.” No, it wasn’t grand like Coruscant or even naturally impressive like D’Qar had been. But the community building had been put up by Jannah’s old company; the houses most citizens lived in had been collaboratively built by droids and stormtroopers who’d been liberated after Palpatine’s defeat. It was home, sure, but more importantly, every single person walking around represented a triumph of humanity, a restoration of rights. There was no way Ren could ever come close to understanding what Kef Bir meant to them.

“Damn,” Jannah said when Finn arrived. “I’d hoped it was just a nasty rumor.”

Ren didn’t say anything. He’d taken up a bodyguard stance so traditional that Finn assumed its primary purpose was to mock him, hovering behind Finn’s right shoulder with his hands behind his back.

“The Senate’s really mad at us,” Finn said. “For -”

“Wanting specific provisions for stolen children and appropriate punishment for surviving First Order financiers,” Jannah said. “Yeah, I know. I speak for ninety-seven percent of us when I say we want you to keep pushing anyway - but I’m sorry it came to this.”

“Ninety-seven percent?”

“Every society has its clueless contrarians,” Jannah said. “Meanwhile, planetside, I’ve got more boring problems. Every time we get a salt rain, our equipment has trouble. We’re trying to bargain for ’proofers, but no such luck yet.”

“Bargain with who?”

“Traders passing through, Tana, then Cerea. They’re expensive, but that’s not really the problem.”

“No one wants to trade with former ’troopers.”

“Or even take our money.”

It filled him with a kind of helpless, hollow rage to think of. It wasn’t like Kef Bir was some kind of idyllic paradise; they needed supplies, people willing to work with them. Respect. Without it, their long-terms plans would be so much dust.

Or, more realistically, salt-crusted rot. Damn it.

“I’ll think about it,” Finn said. “There must be something - there will be something.”

“Thanks. Now, let’s talk about Cerea.”

They didn’t need ’proofers.

He turned it over in his mind as Jannah and Finn continued to indulge in fantasies of farmland and agrarian complacency. ’Proofers could ensure any object remained free of salt buildup, true enough, but surveying and navigational equipment, speeders, and the like could be individually proofed against salt, sand, and water without using fancy polymers and sixty-directional sprays. At most they’d need a few droids, and this far out, simple non-sentients could likely be purchased for a scrap of durasteel pried off the corpse of the Death Star.

How could entire battalions of stormtroopers think a device intended for wealthy diplomats was necessary for a bunch of small farms? Well, stormtroopers weren’t taught much about self-sufficiency; quite the opposite. The First Order had followed the Empire’s standards for creating tractable troops, including extended periods of persuasive education and careful regulation of available information. But.

Finn was brilliant, that much had been obvious for a long time. And Jannah seemed relatively intelligent as well. They really ought to have been able to figure it out.

Finally, during a lull in the conversation, Kylo said: “You don’t need ’proofers. If your equipment is being damaged by the climate, buy a few droids through an anonymous party and ’proof the most valuable pieces yourself.”

Jannah’s stare would have withered most people, but Kylo had been glared at by Leia Organa for half his life; it didn’t trouble him. “We know. It’s a relatively minor example of the problem that’s plagued us with everything else: cloth, foodstuffs, mechanical supplies. But I don’t think a bodyguard needs to know the details of Kef Bir’s economy, actually.”

“If I’m going to protect Finn adequately, I need to make sure he’s safe and fed,” Kylo said, then contemplated surrendering his soul to the Force.

“I’m fed.” Finn didn’t even look at him. “But we’re negotiating our deal with the Senate, and I need to understand where our weak points are.”

Kylo didn’t answer. No one asked him to, either. They went on talking like he wasn’t even there.

The duties of a Senate bodyguard were well regulated and laid out so strictly it made the First Order look lackadaisical. Kylo suspected a death lay behind each elaborately worded rule, but nevertheless, they were rules. If he violated any of them, he could find himself back on a prison ship or even executed. Officially, the Republic wasn’t executing sentenced prisoners, no matter how egregious their crimes. Unofficially, he was Kylo Ren. No one would miss him. Many people would cheer his death.

But that was beside the point. The point, for the purpose of Kylo’s current life, was that he had a duty towards Finn, and that duty did not involve giving him a private suite to sleep in.

“A private room is acceptable, but I must always be close at hand,” Kylo said. “I’m fitted with a tracker: if I shirk my duties, it’ll be recorded. Unless your goal is to send me back to prison -”

“Of course not,” Finn said.

Kylo believed him; unfortunately, FN-2187 lacked even basic duplicitousness, one of the many traits that made him an inappropriate pick for Senator. “Then you will allow me to sleep in the adjoining room.”

“It’s a closet!”

Kylo shrugged and didn’t continue arguing. He’d already won. Any second now -

“Fine,” Finn said finally. “But I don’t like it.”

“No,” Kylo said, and took his leave.

He lay on a cot in the closet and closed his eyes, trying, as ever, to sense the Force.

Finn couldn’t stay on Kef Bir for long. One weird irony about being a Senator was that he spent way more time arguing on the Core than he did out at his actual home, among the people he represented. But he had a few days this time, long enough to tour the area, meet new residents -

(“Family,” Jannah had said. “We all are. We’d welcome anyone, of course, but no one has come. No one except other ’troopers.”)

“I just can’t figure out what it is. Of course, they had me doing recon, not mechanics,” said Khajee. She shook her head. “Not much cause to spy on people out here.”

“Did you check the igniter?”

“Sure, and the heat regulator, and the safety sensors. None of them were the problem. I meant to get Hera down here, she worked on speeders, but she’s busy at the community center getting systems up and running.”

“Uh-huh. Let me take a look.” Finn shrugged out of his formal jacket, and then - thinking of waste and Kef Bir’s tiny budget - his shirt.

“Ridiculous,” he heard Ren mutter.

But Ren’s job was to hang around in the background and keep Finn from being murdered, not tell Finn what to do when there were no credible threats in the area. Finn ignored him, wheeling himself under the speeder.

It was an older model, maybe even pre-Empire, and beat up beyond what members of a wealthy planet would’ve considered worth saving. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t be salvaged.

He fell into a nice rhythm, working through each mechanical problem, his mind drifting into that special, half-meditative space he felt when doing repairs. If Rey were around she’d remind him that he was using the Force, or communing with it, and Finn would make a face and brush her off - because the Force, glue of the universe that it might be, seemed mostly like trouble. He had enough drama in his day to day life.

But Rey wasn’t here. Khajee just saw a focused mechanic, and Ren -

As far as Finn could tell, Ren was avoiding looking at him altogether. Fine by Finn.

“Here we go,” he said, some hours later. The storm that had threatened on the horizon was nearly upon them. “Should be fine now, though you’ll have to keep the salt off yourself.”

“That’s no problem. Thanks, Senator.” Khajee smiled at him. “Can I offer you payment?”

“Kinda feels like you already know I’m going to say no.”

“Hm, maybe.” She hugged him instead. “Safe travels.”

“That whole display was disgusting,” Ren said as they walked back to Finn’s ship.

“What, the hug? I knew the First Order was prudish, but -”

“The charity”, Ren said, his voice thick with disdain. “You have a natural affinity for the Force, and you waste it on talentless foundlings.”

Finn took a deep breath. “You know, I spend a lot of my time in Senate sessions modulating my tone.”

“Indeed. Representing a hated cult will do that.”

“We’re not a cult. We are foundlings. We were forced to be. Talent or not, if I hear you slander Khajee or any other ’trooper again -”

Ren laughed, harsh and bitter. “What? You’ll kill me? I can’t access the Force: you’re welcome to take your chances. I’m sure you know no one will miss me.”

“I’ll leave you behind,” Finn said. “You’ll be stuck here, surrounded by people you hate. People you tortured. And no one’ll ask me what happened to you, or argue with me if I say you ran. You understand?”

Ren stopped dead on the salt flat. His nostrils flared as he looked at Finn. “You’d really do that. Interesting.”

“Not one more word.”

“Some might call such capitulation to temper evidence of the dark -”

“Shut. Up. Ren,” Finn said.

Finally, blessedly, Ren fell silent.

Apparently he preferred silence; he didn’t say a word to Finn for two days straight, a silent shadow as Finn visited newcomers and got his Senatorial priorities straight with Jannah.

She was a local leader, no doubt; she’d already told Finn she had no patience for parliamentary politics. “I’d go crazy trying to broker treaties that, three years later, maybe affect our people,” she’d told him. But she understood Senatorial politics better than Finn did; for him, it had taken hard study to understand the complex interplay of alliance and influence. For Jannah, the connections were obvious. So he traded stories with her, sketched out their position (weak) and their allies (few), and she helped him work through what his next steps might be.

It wasn’t promising. But by now, Finn had gotten used to being on the losing side of a battle. The thing that mattered most was still true: stormtroopers had a home. They just needed someone to defend it.

The worst part of the trip was actually at the very end. Finn packed himself back into his tiny transport with several data cards from Jannah and expectation of long weeks fighting bullshit back at the Senate. And then, glaring like Finn had tried to feed him sour fish jelly, Kylo Ren followed.

“I know this is a small ship,” Finn said as he initiated the takeoff sequence, “but we’ll be on it for days; do you think you could try being a little less of a buzzkill?”

“I have no idea what you mean,” Ren said, glowering.

“You’re a Sith, you do so know what I mean.”

“The Sith are gone and I was never among their number. And as you know, I can’t access the Force anymore.”

“Until you figure out a way around your implant and kill me, anyway.”

Ren sniffed and looked out the window. “You’re sure there’s not a faster course?”

“Just be glad I’m not actually detouring to Jakku.” Rey had gone back there recently and cleaned house. No little girls would be indentured to creeps anymore, and she’d even found an oasis to use for Jedi training.

“Showing a bias towards the galaxy’s most feared Jedi would be a political misstep I wouldn’t expect from you.”

“She’s the galaxy’s only Jedi, and thank you. I think.”

For some reason that made Ren turn rage-red. “It wasn’t a compliment.”

“Whatever.” Finn double-checked his calculations and sent them into hyperspace. “I’m going to take a nap; don’t touch anything.”

“Not even the ’fresher?”

“You know what, it would serve you right if I said yes.” Finn stomped back to his cabin and flopped down, gritting his teeth.

The thing was, it was actually really uncomfortable to have a bodyguard who was basically also his prisoner. Finn had sort of thought it might be perversely satisfying; how many times had he had to do what Ren said? How often had his fellow ’troopers told stories about barely avoiding the range of his saber? But instead of feeling satisfied with it, he just felt kind of sick to his stomach all the time.

Because of the rumblings of his conscience, the next time he saw Ren (eating a noodle cup in the gunner’s chair, like he thought someone would fire on a Galactic Senate vessel any minute), he said, “I’m sorry.”

Ren froze. His hand holding his spoon shook a little. “Excuse me?”

“It wouldn’t have served you right to be banned from the ’fresher. Legally, that’s torture.”

“I know. Legally, nothing the First Order did to ’troopers was torture.”

“Yeah, well, your laws sucked.”

“Yes.”

This conversation had gone off the rails way too quickly. “My point is, I apologize. It won’t happen again.”

“Okay,” Ren said, and went back to slurping his noodles.

He looked and sounded like one of Jannah’s horses. Finn shook his head and went back to the engine room. At least in there, all the annoying noises would be mechanical.

When Ren yelled, “Finn, get back up here! We’re being attacked!”, Finn’s first, egregiously stupid thought was: that’s the first time he’s used my name.

Then he realized how ridiculous he was being and ran to the cockpit. “We’re in hyperspace - how?”

“They’re targeting the ship’s computers. The First Order had the tech, but - damn it!” Ren shoved Finn into the pilot’s seat.

“Whoa, hey, first of all, do not touch me again. Second -”

Something metal clanged, and Finn found himself with a lapful of Kylo Ren as the ship lurched sideways.

For a moment he couldn’t breathe. Ren stared at him, eyes wide; Finn felt like they’d been thrown into the vacuum of space. Then his breath came back, and he gasped, “What are you doing!” as his heart did its level best to hammer its way out of his chest.

“We’re under attack. I need to - weapons,” Ren said, and launched himself off Finn’s legs, kneeing Finn in the kidneys in the process.

“Yeah, tell me something I don’t know,” Finn said, and threw them out of hyperspace.

It was definitely First Order remnants in the ships, but they had Resistance call signs and were Republic military vessels. So there was a mole, or maybe some corrupt officer had simply sold a ship. Finn did his best to save the information the ship received, and made his own observations out loud: “That’s a recon identifier, but they’re in transport vessels - they’re not Resistance ships. This could’ve been a dirty deal done awhile ago. Green identifiers on the sides, looks like Hutt make, maybe.”

“You’re really distracting me right now,” Ren said.

“We’ll need this information later to track down who shot at us.”

“If you distract me, we might not survive for later!”

“Oh, we’re going to survive.” Finn hadn’t made it this far to be taken out by some creepy fascist who couldn’t even accept defeat.

Ren couldn’t have used Republic weapons systems in the last decade, but if he was unfamiliar with the controls, he didn’t show it. They had three ships on their tail and even as Finn dodged shots, Ren took the two flanking ships out with two clean shots.

Now they just had the largest one. “I’m going to take us in a loop and shoot into hyperspace again,” Finn said.

“Were you not listening? They’re tracking us.”

“I know. So blow them out of hyperspace when they jump. They’ll have to jump on our tail - they’ll be vulnerable. And supposedly you’re a quick shot.”

“Supposedly, you -”

Finn jumped into hyperspace.

Ren cursed, but he got the shots off. The transport wasn’t fast enough to evade them, and Finn was right; the ship’s pilot was too focused on following them to evade. One shot scrambled their shields, one cracked their hull, and the third sent four pieces of the ship flying in all directions.

“Fuck,” Finn said, and they lurched downward just in time to avoid the shrapnel.

“Genius plan,” Ren said.

He’d inherited Han Solo’s sarcasm. And of course, thinking that made Finn remember who he was trading barbs with - not Poe, who he’d fought a war with, or Rey, who he trusted with his deepest secrets. No, he was freely lobbing insults at a dark-side maniac who’d killed his own father.

Suddenly he felt very tired. “It worked, didn’t it? I’m going back to bed. Stay on watch; I’ll take beta shift so you can get some rest, too.”

“Finn.”

Finn paused on his way out of the cockpit. “What?”

For a second he thought Ren was going to do something, though he didn’t know what. He felt a weird, awful suspension in the air - like the moment before a commander would order ’troopers to fire, or the silence right before a star destroyer appeared over the Resistance base.

But then the moment was gone. “Sleep well,” Ren said, so stiffly that Finn almost laughed.

Almost. “Just keep watch,” he said, and made his escape.

How was it possible?

Kylo was intimately familiar with the technology the Republic had put inside him. He knew with perfect precision exactly how impossible it should be for him to access the Force. The tech had been developed specifically to restrict people like himself. How could touching a stormtrooper - a middlingly poor Senator with more optimism than good sense - suddenly open the Force to him?

Even hours later, his gut still churned to remember it: touching Finn and feeling the Force, a glorious explosion of power filtered through Finn’s too-warm, too-strong presence. He hadn’t felt the Force since his sentencing nearly two years ago, had spent rage-filled hours trying and failing to get around the tech while hating himself, his mother, and the whole cowardly Republic for not just executing him. And now it had returned to him, for exactly as long as it had taken for Finn to gather himself enough to push Kylo away.

Damn it. Damn it, and damn him.

He could feel nothing now, lying in his bed as Finn supervised their flight. His cabin, such as it was, sat across the hall from Finn’s, and both were adjacent to the cockpit; he was maybe ten feet away, but he couldn’t feel Finn, much less the Force, much less the dark side. Having briefly glimpsed was he was missing, only to lose it again, felt worse than just being shut off had.

Damn it.

If only he had his master - but Rey had killed Palpatine, and he’d helped her do it. If only he could talk to Rey - but he didn’t trust her, and there was no universe where she’d be willing to help him access the Force again. He was alone in the universe, cut off from everything he cared about.

Unless, of course, he could touch Finn again.

He tried it again after he’d rested, faking a stumble into the mess table and brushing his hand over Finn’s neck in the process. For one glorious moment, he felt the Force - and then Finn’s eyes widened and he found himself on the floor.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Finn said.

“I slipped.”

“You did not! I’ve seen you do murder-backflips, you think I’m going to fall for that?”

“Well, what else do you think it is? You can’t possibly imagine I was trying to touch you?” Kylo sniffed, doing his best to sell the lie. “The Senate won’t let me die, but I assure you, I would find a way around their surveillance before consenting to something like that.”

“You’re so - no, you know what, never mind.” Finn shuddered like Kylo touching him was equivalent to having a dozen sand worms dropped down his shirt. “Don’t do that again. Ever.”

Kylo should’ve dropped it, but his back was up. He couldn’t help himself. “Never? What if my life’s in danger?”

“You’re resourceful. You’d figure it out.”

It rankled, to feel a flush of pleasure even as he wanted to snap at Finn’s clear dismissal. Did Finn imagine himself better than Kylo? Just because he was a decorated war hero and a Senator and could feel the Force? He wasn’t better than Kylo. Force take it, he wasn’t.

It became a mantra, something he insisted to himself over and over as their ship hurtled through space: there was nothing special about Finn; Finn wasn’t better than he was. There was no reason to care about Finn at all.

Chapter 2

Returning to Coruscant mostly just reminded Finn of why he’d been so excited to leave in the first place.

The Senate was better than the First Order. Obviously. For starters, they were generally against kidnapping kids to be soldiers; they were genuinely representative of most of the galaxy; they had a firm commitment to doing business in a democratic way. The Senate was so much better than the First Order that a few years ago, Finn would have scorned the idea of being critical of them at all.

But a few years ago, the First Order had seemed likely to conquer the galaxy. A few years ago, Finn’s involvement in the democratic process had been mostly theoretical. And, possibly most importantly, a few years ago, Finn had never heard a Senator’s assessment of stormtroopers.

Walking casualties, Senator Jiatie of Kuat had said. Better off permitted to die off, if you ask me. But I suppose we can authorize the funds.

He’d said that to Finn’s face, as Finn spoke as a representative of Kef Bir - of the free stormtroopers. Finn hadn’t realized he’d still been a little naive until that meeting had taken it all away.

Now, he at least understood how the game worked, and what role people thought he should play in it. That didn’t help so much during normal legislative sessions, though, when Finn had to grit his teeth through people talking about him, about all the other ’troopers, like they were garbage.

“I think you should become a terrorist.”

“Ha, ha,” Finn said dully, taking a long drink of his beer.

Rey made a face at him. “I know you can’t, not really. But you must admit they deserve it.”

They did; that was the problem. If Finn thought about it for too long, he’d go nuts, and he had to focus right now. “If I turn to terrorism they’ll just say it was Kylo Ren influencing me. I have to keep doing the whole diplomacy thing - pressuring them to do the right thing.”

“And you hate it,” Rey said, a statement rather than a guess.

Finn nodded. “Still, though.”

“Still.”

Still. Still he had to attend meeting after meeting, still he had to vote on matters that didn’t concern him or the people he represented. He was only on a couple committees, none of them high-profile, but all of them busy enough that he rarely had time to coalition-build on his own. He suspected it made some Core Planet delegates laugh to imagine the stormtroopers’ representative being forced to make decisions on manure formulations and transport regulations.

“How are things with your bodyguard going?”

Finn snorted in spite of himself. “You can use his name, you know.”

“Ugh. Maybe I just don’t want to.”

“Things with Ren are fine, mostly. I mean, he’s unbearable.”

“Oh, so I assume.”

“And still evil.”

“I don’t think anyone really thought he’d change.”

“Also he keeps trying to touch me.”

Rey went very still. Her spine stiffened. She narrowed her eyes and glared at Finn. She said: “What.”

“Not like that, you do not need to worry about that, I promise. No, he just keeps trying to grab my wrist. It seems more like he’s…” Finn couldn’t describe it, the twitchy hunger that seemed to overwhelm Ren when they were in the same room together. “It kind of reminds me of when you gave me some training, I guess? When you were talking about feeling the Force.”

“Hm. That does sound sexual, though.” She crossed her arms. “You’ll tell me if it gets worse, right? You do actually have the right to a bodyguard who’s not a creepy, neutered harassing piece of dark side shit.”

“I know. If I protest to the Senate and they tell me ’troopers are canon fodder that survived too long, though, I’m gong to go nuts.”

“Well, then you can tell me, and we’ll ensure he’s killed in action.”

“Ensure who is killed in action?” Ren said from behind Finn.

“You,” Rey said before Finn could prevaricate, “if you keep trying to hurt Finn.”

Finn’s head spun with remembered panic of thinking he’d angered a First Order officer as Ren said, “It’s my job to protect him, not hurt him.” He moved to stand in Finn’s field of vision, then said: “What’s happened to him?”

“What do you - oh, no. Finn.” Warm, calloused hands holding Finn’s. “Finn, it’s okay, don’t worry. Nothing’s happened. You’re fine, you’re okay.”

His head pounded. He could feel himself sweating. He closed his eyes, only opening them when a second pair of hands came down heavy on his shoulders.

“Calm down,” Ren said, voice flat.

It shouldn’t have worked, but something about the sheer indignity of being ordered around by Kylo Ren woke up Finn’s normal instincts. “You calm down,” he said, shaking Ren’s hands off and pulling away from Rey’s grip. He offered Rey, his actual friend, a not-quite-real smile. “Thanks.”

“Course.” Rey glanced between them. “I’ve actually got an appointment with Poe - he wants to look at the speeder I built. Are you all good here?”

He knew what she was talking her way around. Sure, his heart might be racing, but it wasn’t like he actually thought Ren was going to hurt him. When he was able to think. “I’m good.”

“See you.” She kissed his cheek, squeezed his hands, and left.

“I thought Jedi didn’t allow themselves to have intimate relationships.”

“That’s ancient history at this point,” Finn said. “Things have changed since your grandfather killed all the Jedi, apparently.”

Ren’s nostrils flared. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“What, you think I’m going to ask you for more information? You’re as unreliable a narrator as they come.”

“I came here to bring you news you’re unlikely to hear from the Senate for another two weeks, if ever,” Ren said, “but if you can’t trust anything I say, perhaps I don’t need to tell you after all.”

It was bait, incredibly clearly laid out. Finn knew he shouldn’t ask. But the list of classified information Finn cared about these days was pretty short and centered around Kef Bir, so he said, “What?”

Ren didn’t even make him beg for it. “Another group of stormtroopers have broken their conditioning.”

Officially, all stormtroopers were refugees entitled to resettlement on Kef Bir. Unofficially, the last of the First Order’s loyalist cells still held some stormtroopers captive, and other groups hadn’t yet made it home. Finn had to clench a hand to keep from saying something stupid. “When?”

“Two days ago.”

“Where?”

“Just off Naboo. On a transport ship.”

The planet name sounded familiar for some reason, but Finn didn’t try to chase down why; he had other things to worry about just then. “How’d you hear about this?”

“An aide of Mon Mothma’s likes to gossip and doesn’t seem to think bodyguards are capable of eavesdropping, or independent thought.”

“Huh, I wonder what it’s like to be around someone like that.” Ren’s expression didn’t so much as twitch. “That was sarcasm, by the way.”

“I had gathered.”

“Right. Well…thank you for telling me, but I don’t think I can get to Naboo right now.”

Ren’s face twisted. His nostrils flared. His face, never particularly smooth-complexioned, went mottled red. He clenched his fists at his sides.

More bait Finn shouldn’t take, damn it. “What?”

“You could leave within the hour if you wanted. I know you’ve read the procedural book - it’s well within your rights as Kef Bir’s representative.”

“Sure it is, but there’s not a ton of precedent, and I really can’t afford to burn goodwill on being censured for -”

“Governing?”

“Breaking the rules, even if it’s a case where it’s not technically breaking the rules.”

“Your cowardice is disgusting. Leia Organa would have gone and saved her people without this ridiculous hesitance.”

For some reason, that was what sent Finn over the edge. “You’re talking about your mother! Be normal! Say ‘my mother’!”

Ren sneered. “Organa -”

In the last fifteen minutes, Finn had experienced a bunch of really unpleasantly intense emotions, and Ren - or the regime he’d once led - was to blame for every single one of them. He took a step forward, then another, crowding Ren back against the wall of Finn’s living room. “Listen to me. I’m not the General. I can’t do what she did, and I’m not going to try if I think it’ll jeopardize Kef Bir’s representation in the Senate. Are we clear?”

“You’re not my mother because you’re a coward,” Ren said, and grabbed Finn’s wrist. It sent a little zing through Finn in spite of himself, and he thought Ren might have felt it too; something in the air changed, the pressure drop right before a storm.

Then Ren dropped his wrist, and everything went back to normal. Annoying normal. “Do something with the information, or don’t,” Ren said. “But if you want allies to confirm you’re permitted to govern prior to actually doing the governing, you’ll never be anything but dependent on those who hate you. I’ll be guarding the door.”

He was running away, Finn realized, and Finn himself was practically running away by virtue of not stopping him. But what else could he do, ask Kylo Ren to elaborate on his political advice? Sure, and maybe porgs would learn how to fly.

He sat down and went back to reading over the Stormtrooper Resettlement Aid Package bill, doing his best to ignore how much he wanted to sulk over a stupid fight with his stupid fucking war criminal bodyguard.

It bothered Kylo much the same way a grain of sand stuck in his helmet would have. A pity he was now legally barred from wearing a mask of any kind; he suspected his irritation showed clearly in his expression.

He hadn’t risked himself at all to deliver the stormtrooper gossip to Finn. The officials who’d been discussing it were loud enough that he expected the story would hit the news within the hour. If Finn refused to exercise his rights as a member of the Senate, it was really none of Kylo’s business. He didn’t care about stormtroopers, Kef Bir, or Finn; seeing incompetence was generally grating, but he hadn’t exactly planned to emulate Leia Organa and go into politics. He had other concerns, like the feeling of the Force, wild and expansive, rippling out from where his hand had touched Finn’s wrist. He didn’t care about Finn’s lost causes.

However.

It just bothered him. Finn was so ready to minimize his political power. Kylo had never been good at politics; he’d been terrible at making people like him, and had been encouraged by his master to simply intimidate people into obedience instead. But leaving aside that Finn could take that route if he chose -

Leaving aside that the power Kylo felt when he touched Finn was intoxicating and different from his own now-crushed power, from Rey’s power, leaving aside that Finn had a connection to the Force Kylo barely understood but knew to be incredibly powerful -

Leaving all that aside, the simple fact of the matter was that Finn was remarkably likable and most people who met him wanted to please him, to work with him. That wasn’t Kylo’s regrettable lust speaking; it was a fair evaluation of his abilities as a politician. Consequently, it made sense that he spend some of that social capital on ascertaining how many stormtroopers had broken conditioning and getting them to Kef Bir, where they’d strengthen his position as a legitimate representative of a large population.

Kylo stared at the wall opposite Finn’s apartment and thought about how quickly Kef Bir’s problems would be resolved if he had Finn’s power. He’d felt…compulsion, or the potential for it, in Finn’s power. It made sense, of course; Finn had rebelled independently, off nothing more than a bit of sentimentality and some deeply-baked morality. That he’d be strong with the Force in that way made sense.

He could likely sway a large crowd. Not the full Senate, of course; the Emperor had been able to do that, but he was singular in his range of abilities and sheer power. But a smaller group - a committee, or even a mid-size crowd. Kylo was fairly certain Finn would be able to sway all of them well enough that it never occurred to them they’d been influenced.

There was something here that he was missing, some aspect of the problem he kept almost thinking of before he lost his train of thought. Kylo bit the inside of his cheek and tried to ignore the horrible void in his mind where the Force should be, his almost all-consuming need to touch Finn and reach the Force again. He tried to focus on the problem at hand - the service which, when rendered, might buy him some time off his sentence.

(Or, a traitorous part of his mind whispered, the service that might allow him to touch Finn again. Who cared about a Republic criminal conviction when he could touch the Force any time Finn permitted him? All he had to do was make Finn want to allow it.)

Focus. Focus. There had to be a way to turn this situation to his advantage. To make Finn understand the sheer magnitude of the power he was stubbornly leaving on the table.

There had to be.

Finn gave up on his work shortly after lunch, locking his office door over Ren’s protests so he could stare at the ceiling and try to calm down.

Plenty of things were bothering him: the situation with the repatriation bill, the fact that a Core World alliance of First Order sympathizing assholes was trying to push through a motion stripping Kef Bir of governing rights, the ongoing efforts to find and help ’troopers and, where possible, reunite them with family members. He had so much on his mind that it was a wonder he could sleep at all. But what really kept bothering him, what came up again and again with such frequency that Finn was almost tempted to suspect Kylo of somehow mentally influencing him, was the issue of the ’troopers on Naboo.

They’d been moved to a hospital site on the planet proper. Finn’s communication with doctors there indicated that they were stable and recovering, though obviously traumatized. With any luck, they could travel soon, and then Finn would get to meet them the next time he returned to Kef Bir. That plan was fine. It meant they’d lose another chance to observe deprogramming in the early stages, and the question of how to get ’troopers freed would be pushed off to another day. But the population of ’troopers who’d freed themselves was only growing, and Finn knew all the arguments for focusing on his responsibilities in the Senate. He’d made them to Kylo just the other day.

But he couldn’t stop thinking about the tens of thousands he knew were still out there, in First Order splinter cells and missions they hadn’t received word to stand down from yet. If they studied this group, if they figured out how to replicate the switch-flipping that led to them being able to think for themselves, they could save lives. A lot of lives.

And then Kef Bir will become a client state, and ’troopers will be barely a step above droids, just like in the Empire. Yeah, Finn and Jannah’d had this conversation before. Their conclusions hadn’t changed. It just sucked as a choice - it was monstrously unfair and made Finn want to break something.

“Welcome to politics,” said a dry voice from Finn’s very empty window seat.

He nearly fell out of his chair. Then he turned around and saw the General, and he did fall. “Ow. Hi. What are you - who are you? What are you doing here?”

“One question at a time, Finn. What am I: a vision, of sorts. Who am I: General Leia Organa of the Resistance. What am I doing here: you’ve been dodging my calls, so I figured I’d show up in person.”

Finn didn’t respond. He simply could not. His chest squeezed up and he had to spend all his focus on trying not to shout.

The General had apparently gained mind-reading powers when she’d lost corporeality. She smiled gently and said, “Finn, it’s okay. I’m with the Force now; what you see is an echo, of sorts. I’m not here to hurt you.”

“I wasn’t really worried about that.”

“No, I expect not. Your concerns are more existential, aren’t they? Your people; your home. My son.”

Finn couldn’t stop himself from making a face. “Not so much that last one.”

“He’s your responsibility, is he not? I can tell how much you feel he is. You’re a big-hearted person.” She smiled a little, as crookedly as she had in life. “That’s going to be difficult for you to manage, but I promise it’s worth it.”

“My heart could be the size of a sun and I still wouldn’t be responsible for Kylo Ren. General.”

He got the distinct, very annoying impression of not being believed. “Of course, in this case he’s also correct.”

“No, he’s not.”

The General made a pbbt sound Finn wouldn’t have guessed Force-projection could make. “You’re not wrong to worry about the consequences of travel. You’re entirely correct that your position is tenuous. But you can’t be a successful representative if you’re this risk averse. In that evaluation, he’s entirely correct.”

Finn gritted his teeth so hard he was surprised dust didn’t come out of his mouth. “It’s an impossible choice.”

“It is. You’ll face a lot of them.”

“Easy for a ghost to say.”

“Technically I’m more of a projection,” the General said, “but you’re right in that, too. I’m dead: no one cares what I do anymore. But you have a life to live and a legacy to continue.”

“I don’t -”

“As the first stormtrooper to break free, who inspired tens of thousands of others, whose own existence in the Force has changed the path of our civilization and directed us towards justice for other stolen children, you have a legacy.” The General, being glowy and semi-corporeal, shouldn’t have been able to glare quite so effectively. But she did. “I’m not actually leaving this open for debate, Finn. The only question is how you plan to deal with your legacy, what you plan to do. And if your plan is to do nothing, to pretend it doesn’t exist - I won’t be the only one who’s saddened by that.”

Rey. Poe. Rose. Even C3PO. He knew what they’d all say, what they’d encourage him to do. “Ugh.”

“Indeed. It’s a hell of a world out there.”

Finn finally picked himself up, sitting back down at his desk and putting his head in his hands. Deep breaths, he reminded himself. In and out. “I don’t know how anyone does this. How you did it.”

“Half the time, I didn’t. I ran, I hid, I threw a fit. My father always told me about duty and righteousness, the history of Alderaan and how I fit into it. When I was young, I thought it was a lot of words to tell me I wasn’t free.”

“And then?”

“Alderaan was destroyed.”

“But you were in the Rebellion before then.”

“I was indeed, but I thought of the stakes as something lower than destruction of everything I’d held dear. I thought I understood how bad things could get, until I stood there and watched my people die. Then it became clear to me that I didn’t understand at all.”

So she’d dedicated her life to democracy, and eventually been killed by her own son. Two generations of evil, and the General and Luke Skywalker had stood between them. Finn held back a shiver. “It feels different now.”

“It always feels different. Still. I get the feeling you understand what the Force has led you to do, and why it’s you who has to do it.”

“Is that why you showed up?”

He looked up in time to see the General smile again. “I told you: I was bored.”

He tried to say thank you, to tell her he wished she hadn’t been killed. His throat closed up.

She stood up from the window seat and walked over to him. This close, he could feel her odd warmth, and see the edges of the projection, where reality became faded myth. “I know, Finn. Don’t worry. I’m going to head out now; I might not see you again. May the Force be with you.”

He nodded. Some small part of him still wanted to disbelieve it, to fight it. But even just thinking of Rey made him stop, determined to be better than his most cowardly self. “May the Force be with you.”

True to her word, the General faded from view.

Finn took a deep, watery breath. He looked over at the window seat, then back at his still-locked office door, then down at his work.

She was right, damn it. He had a job to do, and he was going to do it.

For some reason, Kylo had not anticipated the obvious, in retrospect, condition of Finn traveling to Naboo: he brought Rey with him.

It made sense. Stormtroopers freeing themselves of conditioning, rather than being carefully deprogrammed with the Republic’s imperfect mental imaging technology, was a new phenomenon, and one generally suspected to be associated with strength in the Force. Rey had a vested interest in those sorts of events.

Rey was still his dyad in the Force, after everything, and Kylo found that he hated her even more in the small confines of a transport ship, where he couldn’t feel her mind or anything else outside his own body.

“Stop staring at me,” Rey told him. “We’re still days out from Naboo, and if I have to deal with this the whole time, I’m going to -”

“What? Throw me into space? Who will guard your precious FN-2187 then?”

“I know you don’t think of him like that, and the answer’s me, you enormous idiot.”

Kylo did think of Finn ‘like that’, in Rey’s parsimonious terms. Finn was a stormtrooper; he had been a stormtrooper, and he’d continue to be a stormtrooper regardless of how high he rose in the Senate or how large Kef Bir’s population grew. Kylo kept that in mind because he knew Finn’s friends wouldn’t. They would refuse to acknowledge how others saw him, even as Finn’s ability to help his people dwindled because of that perception. Kylo, on the other hand, convicted criminal though he was, at least understood how the world worked.

He knew how dangerous it would be to express those particular thoughts, however. “I wasn’t staring at you. There are simply not very many places to look.”

“You’re lying. Or do you think I can’t tell?”

“I’ve had the Force taken away from me,” Kylo said coolly, “so I have no idea what you can and can’t tell. Our connection was always volatile, anyway.”

“Because you were evil.”

“Yes.” No point in denying it here, when the stakes were so low. Plus, it threw Rey off; he saw it clearly in the way her eyes narrowed, in how obviously she bit back a cruel comment. Rey would have done so well on the dark side, but Kylo now knew she’d never agree to travel down that path. “However, your own hesitancy to embrace your power affected us as well.”

Rey snorted. “Hesitancy! I went off to train and you were bothering me. That’s different.”

“Is it?”

“Of course it is. You wanted to kill me.”

He had, and in fact he still wanted to. It was funny; he could sense his own old desire to hurt, to conquer, to rule, alongside the human bit of him that recognized the Jedi in front of him as her own being, a person he didn’t particularly want to hurt. It was like holding two selves inside him at the same time.

In other words, it wasn’t very comfortable. “Wanted.”

“You won’t do it while Finn’s here.”

He raised an eyebrow at her unearned confidence. How on earth had she come to that conclusion? Not through whatever lingering connection she thought she could still feel, certainly. “Hm.”

She stared at him for a moment longer. He got the distinct impression she was waiting on something, but of course he had no idea what it might be, and he couldn’t give anything to her. After awhile, she huffed in dissatisfaction and left the passenger area, presumably heading to the cockpit to bother Finn instead.

Kylo kept breathing, in and out very slowly, reminding himself that this was just a job keeping him out of a cell. What Rey thought of him didn’t matter. What Finn thought of him didn’t matter. His own dreams, nightmares, none of it mattered. What mattered was the mission.

Ren waited until they’d docked in Naboo to get incredibly annoying.

“Why is he so twitchy?” Finn hissed. Ren had just physically blocked the doctor monitoring the ’troopers, refusing to let her talk to Finn until she and her three assistants had been vetted by the Senate’s database. “The biggest danger to me on this planet right now is him!”

Rey shrugged. “It’s not like I disagree with him being protective of you. What? I don’t. The Senate certainly hasn’t done due diligence.”

“And running a doctor’s name through a database is supposed to help with that?”

“It’s better than just assuming she is who she says she is - and that she’s not some kind of, I don’t know, radical anti-stormtrooper activist.”

“So like half the Senate.”

“Point.”

They sat together in silence while Ren did his interminable interviews in the lobby. Finally, he returned. “They’re fine. You can talk to them.”

“Wow, thanks,” Finn said, but as always, his effort was wasted. Ren didn’t seem to even notice sarcasm unless he was bored enough to already want a fight.

The doctor, a short Human woman with curly brown hair and teal tattoos on her shoulders, came over and said, “Senator Finn? I’m Doctor Blake. It’s an honor to meet you.”

“The honor’s mine, doctor. This is Rey. She’s a Jedi.”

“Hello.” Rey waved and smiled.

“A Jedi, you say?” Doctor Blake looked between them with obvious dubiousness. “And you brought the criminal Kylo Ren with you, too.”

Great, great. Finn loved this part. It definitely wasn’t a huge pain at all, navigating around the deliberate obstruction of having his bodyguard be the galaxy’s most famous criminal. “He’s my bodyguard, appointed by the Senate. I didn’t get much of a say in it. Rey’s here because, well, we think ’troopers breaking conditioning is often related to their strength in the Force. She can help me evaluate that.”

“The conditioning you refer to is neurological in nature,” Doctor Blake said. “You may or may not be right about ‘the Force’, but I can assure you, there is a scientific path to understanding how to help the remaining hostages.”

Finn blinked. “Hostages?”

“I understand the Senate has worked out a variety of legal definitions of stormtroopers. My team chooses to focus on the verbiage that best describes their experiences to date and how to treat them.”

“That’s good,” Rey said when it became obvious Finn couldn’t quite make himself speak. “Thank you, Doctor Blake. And I agree about the science. It’s just that the galaxy’s in need of people strong with the Force to understand what that means, and develop their skills. I’m only here to help with that, for the people who want it.”

“They might not be ready to tell you,” Doctor Blake said. She sounded almost gentle, but also like she might pull a blaster on Rey if she tried any funny business. It made something relax, deep in Finn’s mind, to know she applied that protection to her patients.

“That’s all right then,” Rey said. “Finn’s my friend, and I’ve never been to Naboo. I’ll get along.”

“And him?” Doctor Blake didn’t need to so much as glance at Ren to make her meaning clear.

“I’m only here to protect the Senator,” Ren said. He managed to make it sound like a threat.

But apparently the words satisfied Doctor Blake, because after that she took them to the medical ward. She explained along the way that Naboo had, upon learning of the transport ship mutiny, sent a boarding party. The newly freed ’troopers had cooperated, and they’d been planetside ever since.

“Almost six weeks now, and half of that they’ve been able to come and go just as you or I might.” She sounded satisfied with their progress. Finn guessed she didn’t know about the experiences of the ’troopers on Kef Bir. Most of them had thrown off the conditioning when the Resistance won and had been ready to fight within the day. The ones who’d fled the First Order afterwards had been worse off. Finn couldn’t pretend to understand why, but that was why Rey was with them. There wasn’t a medical explanation that could justify it. It had to be something with the Force.

“Here we are,” Doctor Blake said. “Any questions before we meet the patients, Senator?”

Finn took a deep breath and willed himself to be strong. A leader. What Jannah and all the other ’troopers needed him to be - and what General Organa had known he could be. “No. I’m ready.”

Rey took his hand as they walked into the hospital ward.

Overall, it was a pathetic sight.

The stormtroopers were much as Kylo had expected them to be: barely verbal, clearly traumatized, some physically brutalized as well. They all shied away from Finn when he tried to talk to them. Doctor Blake seemed to have a competent bedside manner, but in some ways that only worsened the situation. It was very clear that deprogramming was becoming harder over time. Kylo had wondered before at the Resistance’s unwillingness to use General Organa or Rey’s power to sway stormtroopers to their side. Now he understood quite clearly that they had no idea such an option was even on the table.

Worse than the somewhat predictable confirmation of organizational incompetence was Finn’s own stupefied reaction to the stormtroopers in their hospital beds. He was clearly empathetic, strong in the Force when it came to relating to other people. Now, he expressed that by flinching away when one stormtrooper cried out in pain and clinging to Rey’s hand like she was his nursemaid. Kylo could barely bite back a sneer. This was the cream of the Resistance crop? His - General Organa’s finest hope for legislative success? Finn looked like he barely knew which way was up, and Rey watched him with a concerned wrinkle in her brow, not paying any attention at all to what must have been a horrible agitation in the Force all around them.

And of course, Kylo himself couldn’t access the Force, which made the tableau all the more annoying.

“This is ninety percent of the battalion,” Finn said. “What happened to the other ten percent?”

“We had four deaths,” Doctor Blake said, “and ten are still in critical condition. I can take you to them, if you like.”

“What would they think of that?” Kylo said, not bothering to hide his sarcasm.

“They’re in an induced coma,” Doctor Blake said, “but the battalion as a whole expressed a strong desire to meet representatives of Kef Bir.”

Kylo watched, feeling half-amused and half-annoyed, as Finn’s expression twisted through a series of overly emotional grimaces. He seemed to settle on resignation as he said, “I’ll see them, then.”

Unsurprisingly, the ICU was worse. Finn cried, and Rey’s eyes went shiny with her own tears. Kylo stood in the doorway and tried to ignore the entire display.

It wasn’t until they got back to their hotel suite that Kylo, standing in Finn’s doorway, said, “There are easier ways to deal with this debacle than touring hospital beds, you know.”

“You’re the one who told me I should come here. What exactly did you think we’d be doing?”

“You weren’t hospitalized. Nor were the original inhabitants of Kef Bir. It’s getting worse.”

“We know that. You know that.” Finn turned from his spot at his window to stare at Kylo in disbelief. “Why are you even talking to me? You’re a bodyguard, go guard.”

“I want to be sure you understand the position you’ve put yourself in.”

Finn’s expression went blank. “Is that so.”

“There are ways to remove the conditioning for any affected soldier.”

“Soldier.”

“Yes.” Let Finn excoriate him for his verbiage later. “It would be fairly simple, and avoid these pathetic displays in the future.”

Finn turned back towards the window. For a moment, Kylo’s mood perked up. Perhaps Finn would take his advice, and Kylo could get the hell off Naboo and never return. He’d be free of hospital beds and uncomfortable displays of emotion.

Then Finn said in a low voice: “Get out.”

Kylo blinked. “Excuse me?”

Finn’s voice rang out with power that could only come from anger in the Force. “Get out!”

Kylo, made impotent by the Republic’s technology, was thrown out of the doorway by invisible hands as Finn’s door slammed shut. He staggered back several paces, staring at the doorway, before he realized someone was watching him. Rey sat on the couch, gaping at him.

“What are you looking at?” Kylo snarled, stomping out to the tiny front room that served as his guardroom. He slammed the door behind him.

It was all to regulation, perfectly safe. The only way to get to Finn right now was through Kylo. That meant he could turn his concentration inward, fuming at Finn for being a weak fool and himself for not thinking to reach out to Finn, to touch him, to take the power that positively simmered between them and use it for his own ends.

It was nearly eighteen hours before Finn sought Ren out. Any longer, and he’d have been in danger of creating some kind of diplomatic incident. Plus, Rey brought Finn some tea and said, “Do you mind talking to him? He can’t feel me, of course, but he doesn’t realize I can still feel him a little bit, and he’s been in a snit this whole time.”

Thinking of Rey being able to feel Ren gave Finn the willies, but he knew he’d have to make peace for one simple reason: he didn’t have a choice. He wanted to get off Naboo with Kef Bir’s hundred and thirty-six newest citizens, and Ren had implied -

“He thinks there’s an easy way to break the conditioning.”

Rey blinked. “I thought that was impossible.”

“So did I. If it’s not -”

“You can save thousands of lives,” Rey said at the same time Finn said, “’Troopers have been dying for nothing.”

Rey bit her lip. “I’m sorry. That’s - of course it’s awful. I shouldn’t have…”

“Been an optimist?” Finn summoned a smile, though judging by Rey’s grimace it wasn’t particularly persuasive. “You’re right, though. Jannah and I talked about the battalions still out there; we thought they might be lost. If they’re not, that would be huge.”

Rey touched Finn’s shoulder. “If I can help in any way, I’d be honored.”

“You’re kidding, right? You’re helping right now.”

“You know what I mean.”

He did. Rey had students and a weird-but-super-powerful political position and her own training, but she’d drop it all in a heartbeat for Finn. It was the kind of friendship he’d always hoped for. In a different life, the kind he imagined he might’ve had with Slip. “Thank you.”

She hugged him. “If you need me to hit him, the offer’s open.”

Finn snorted. “Yeah, I think I’ve got it, but thanks.”

He found Ren in his room, staring at the entrance to the suite. “Hey. I’m sorry about earlier; I overreacted. Can we talk?”

Ren didn’t move.

For a moment, something very strange happened: Finn found himself slightly worried about Kylo Ren’s health. Fortunately, the moment passed quickly. Ren was in a trance, not sick.

“Hey. Ren. You in there?” Finn waved a hand in front of his face.

Blaster-quick, Ren grabbed Finn’s wrist. Finn gasped in spite of himself, feeling the wave of some unidentifiable feeling sweep through him. “What the -”

Ren groaned, and for the second time in as many minutes, Finn found himself experiencing an emotion he absolutely could not square with the reality of Kylo Ren in front of him. This one was worse, though. He wanted to move forward, to keep touching Ren, to - to kiss -

He wrenched his wrist free of Ren’s grip. “Hey!”

Finally, Ren blinked and came back to himself, sunken eyes focusing on Finn. “My apologies,” he said, his usual flat voice rusty with disuse.

He didn’t sound particularly sincere, either. Never mind. Finn crossed his arms, as much to keep himself under control as to communicate distance from Ren, and said, “You said ’troopers could be deprogrammed. Explain, please.”

Ren tilted his head, examining Finn without a hint of hesitancy. Finn tried not to squirm, even though he felt like he could feel Ren’s gaze brushing against him. “Why would you trust I’m telling the truth?”

“I don’t. But if the alternative is condemning ’troopers to die -”

“I could be planning to kill them. My ‘solution’ could be a kill switch. Did that even occur to you?”

For a moment, Finn felt a wave of fury in spite of himself. He usually kept his anger ruthlessly repressed, because he had to, because if he let himself feel the full force of his anger and betrayal, he’d never, ever feel okay again. But right now he couldn’t keep it all buttoned down. He knew perfectly well that Ren wasn’t going to give him bad information, not with Rey two rooms away, able to sense his every motivation. Ren had to know he knew, too. He was winding Finn up for no reason other than his own shitty fucking evil love of seeing people in pain, and Finn was, he was in pain, because the thing Ren was winding him up about was the death of people like him, the closest thing he had to a family. Kids who’d been stolen like he had. Like Jannah had. Like Slip -

A warm hand on his upper arm, rough callouses scraping against his skin. Ren’s voice was rough again as he said, “You’re familiar with the mechanics of how kyber works? I know Rey has told you about the path of the Jedi.”

Something - Ren’s voice, maybe, or Finn’s shame - threw itself over his anger, banking it down again. Finn bit his lip and moved out of Ren’s grip again, losing the weird feeling that went through him when they touched, thank fuck. “Vaguely, yeah.”

“Conditioning can’t be broken with a word alone, but it can be broken by the Force, and that can be carried and broadcast. You’d need to hijack the holonet to deliver it, but of course the Emperor demonstrated the efficacy of such communication.”

Finn closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. There was no real reason to feel furious with Ren for having clearly thought about this before. It wouldn’t be productive to shout; it certainly wouldn’t help anything to try to hurt him. But -

Damn it, four ’troopers who shouldn’t have died would be buried on Naboo before they left. Why hadn’t the Republic gotten this intel before now?

“The one catch is it will require extraordinary strength in the Force to delivery the message,” Ren said. “The Emperor’s power was one of a kind, in that sense.”

“Rey’s powerful.”

“She is. She might not be powerful enough, not if you want it to be effective - and not if you want to be sure it won’t hurt the stormtroopers. You’ll need someone else.”

“Are you trying to tell me I should be clamoring to take your damper off?”

“Not at all. I was suggesting you look inside yourself.”

He didn’t know. He couldn’t possibly. Finn knew he’d kept what ability he had hidden; Ren had to be extrapolating based on what he thought of Finn throwing off the conditioning. “If Rey can’t do it herself, whatever I can offer won’t be enough to get her over the finish line. We’ll have to talk it over with her.”

“As you say.”

“And in the meantime, I want to go meet with the ’troopers who aren’t in critical condition, to get an idea of where they’re at.”

“Very well.” Ren stood. It occurred to Finn that the front room was pretty small; Ren towered over him, and Finn could smell him, too. He didn’t smell particularly good. Maybe spending half your life under a gross helmet meant you never really learned how often to wash your hair.

“Right, um, let’s go,” he said when he realized Ren was waiting on his instructions.

In spite of everything, seeing Ren nod and open the door for Finn sent a little zing of awareness down Finn’s spine. Ugh, he was losing it. The sooner they got off Naboo the better.

But first he had to make sure Kef Bir didn’t lose any more of its people.

Finn did his job. He went back and talked to Doctor Blake and ten of the newly free ’troopers; he set up a call between them and Jannah; he visited the still-comatose people in critical condition. Then, under Rey’s worried, too-sympathetic gaze, he got drunk.

“This is a bad idea,” Ren said for the fourth or fifth time since Finn had brought alcohol back up to their suite.

“I know,” Finn said. He didn’t bother to elaborate. If Ren had empathy, he’d understand; the proof was right there in the form of Rey, who was nursing a single drink as Finn drowned his sorrows. She occasionally patted his arm or hugged him to demonstrate that she cared for him, that she’d stay with him as long as he needed, and otherwise she left him to handle his shit.

“If someone were to attack -”

“We’d fight them off,” Rey said. She looked between them with an odd expression on her face: her nose wrinkled like she’d smelled something strange, her brow deeply furrowed. “Let him be. You know how hard this is for him.”

“He is sitting here here,” Finn pointed out.

“It’s not like it’s easy for any of us,” Ren said stiffly.

Finn didn’t bother to keep down the bitterness in his voice. Ren didn’t care about the ’troopers; there was no reason he should be upset. “What’s so hard about this for you?”

He nearly dropped his drink at the slap of memory that hit him just then. No, not memory - history. It was coming from Ren, Finn realized, a pointed, tortured scrap of family angst. Naboo had been where his grandmother was from, and his grandmother was long dead, killed by the grandfather he worshiped.

“Oh.” What a false equivalency, though.

“Don’t say a word,” Rey said when Ren opened his mouth.

“He needs to know -”

“He already knows.”

They were having a conversation Finn was too tipsy to follow. Was this about the Force? Of course Finn knew he could pick up on impressions and feelings, but he’d already told Rey he had no interest in developing that skill. Or at least, he’d told her he didn’t have time to, which was basically the same thing. He looked between Ren and Rey glaring at one another, muzzy confusion filling his mind. There was definitely something here he wasn’t quite picking up on.

Oh well. He closed his eyes, trying to block out the images of the ’troopers in their induced comas, the way Doctor Blake had looked when she said attempts to find their families had all failed so far. He’d get them to Kef Bir. He wouldn’t lose any more of them.

“Here, try this,” Rey said, and handed him a rosewater-flavored hydration pack. He drank it all down quickly, feeling his head clear as the enzymes within dealt with the alcohol in his blood.

“Thanks.”

She smiled at him, not bothering to disguise how sad she clearly felt to see him like this. “Want another?”

“Not just yet,” Finn said, and refilled his drink.

Eventually, Rey went to bed. Finn had done three cycles of drinking and rehydrating, and he only had one more rehydration pack before he’d be out for the night. Ren seemed to think he planned to self-destructively drink past that. It was kind of funny, in a ludicrous way; Finn wanted to tell Ren that he’d already had to learn how not to do that, but at the same time, he didn’t want to tell Ren anything about himself at all.

Instead, he nursed his drink and thought about Naboo. It had had more Resistance fighters than most planets, a relic of Senator Amidala’s early work with the rebels. He’d never made the connection to Vader before, but of course it was part of the history books; he could access thousands of articles about it with a single holopad query.

“Stop thinking about it.”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking,” Finn said. “You don’t have access to all your mind-reading powers anymore.”

“It’s extremely obvious. This has nothing to do with Padme Amidala.”

“Hmm,” Finn said, and finished his drink.

Ren huffed impatiently when he stayed at the table, staring at his empty glass. “Are you going to rehydrate or not?”

“I’d give anything to know who my parents are, even, much less my grandparents,” Finn said. He stood, grabbing the last rehydration pack. “You know that? You’re so lucky and you act like you’re some kind of martyr.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t I?” His head might be spinning a little, but he’d spent so much time lately - too much time - thinking about Kylo kriffing Ren. “I know you had a family you rejected, a home you repudiated. You chose to join the same people who stole me from my family and created armies of kidnapped children.”

Ren pursed his lips. “That’s beside the point. You’re drunk.”

“Barely.”

“And you neglect to consider the lure of the dark side.” Ren stepped forward. Finn realized, much too late, that Ren had moved closer without his realizing. Finn took a step back, and Ren followed him, until Finn stood with his back to a wall, Ren towering over him.

What a ridiculous position. But it was too late to move. “Back off.”

Ren leaned into him. Finn could feel him breathing against his neck. It was gross and frightening; his heart beat frantically and his stomach tightened as Ren said, “Tell me you don’t ever think about this. Look me in the eye and say you’ve never dreamed of making the Senate pay for their neglect, their willful allowance of the worst of the First Order’s excesses.” He inhaled deeply. “Tell me, Finn, and I’ll leave you alone.”

Finn’s brain screeched to a half. All he could think was: is he smelling me? And then the rest of Ren’s words careened into his mind, and he said, “Your excesses.”

He felt Ren go still above him, around him. “Excuse me?”

“The worst of the First Order’s excesses were your excesses.” Finn gathered his strength and shoved Ren back. It felt like grabbing hold of a live wire. “Listen, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Mostly I think I don’t even care. Stay away from me. Do your job, and stop - grabbing me, smelling me, whatever. I know you’re still all dark-side-y and I don’t care. Do not try and put me on it again, or I swear, I’ll have you thrown right back into the cell they dragged you out of.”

Ren stared at him. His nostrils flared; his weird-looking lips twisted. He was ugly and ungenerous and evil, the most evil person Finn had ever met.

Why, then, after Ren left, after Finn put himself to bed - why couldn’t Finn stop thinking about him? Why did his heart beat so hard he felt like it was about to make a break for it? Why, Force help him, why was he hard, lying in bed, thinking of the way Kylo Ren had surrounded him, how it had seemed like Ren was about to kiss him?

He didn’t get much sleep that night.

After their disastrous conversation over drinks, Kylo all but throttled himself every time he came even close to expressing an opinion he thought Finn might find inappropriate, or worse, offputting. Kylo didn’t particularly mind being offputting to Finn, except for the practicalities of it: if Finn felt put off, he wouldn’t let Kylo get close enough to touch, and then Kylo wouldn’t be able to feel the Force again.

He’d tried it with other people. Rey, of course - who had realized what he was doing, and laughed, and said, “You can’t honestly think the Republic would leave such a massive loophole in your sentence?”, and looked sad. He hadn’t corrected her assumptions, but he had also tried with Jannah back on Kef Bir, and with the administrative official on Naboo whom the Force ran through strongly. A distant third cousin, Kylo thought, but he didn’t pursue the relationship, as the Force didn’t reach Kylo through their skin.

He could only feel the Force through Finn.

Admittedly, four people were a small sample size. Still, the more he meditated on it, the surer of his instincts he felt. He was right, there could be no doubt of it. Finn was something special, and because of that - the unidentifiable characteristics which made Finn unique among stormtroopers, among rebels, among Senators - because of that irritating difference, Finn was Kylo’s only window to the Force.

“You know, I can tell you’re thinking about him.”

Kylo managed not to jump when Rey sat down across from him. They were in the suite’s living room, so it wasn’t precisely that he had expected to be alone, but - “You don’t know the nature of my thoughts.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Well, I wasn’t sure before, but now I’m glad of it.”

Good. “He’s an attractive young man. Are you really going to pretend you haven’t been panting after him?”

“I don’t think of Finn like that,” Rey said.

Before, when he’d still been connected to the Force, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to spot a lie. Now, it took him a minute to fully grasp what she was saying, to read the not-quite-lie in her body language. “You don’t think of any men like that.”

“Got it in one, good job. You sure you can’t feel the Force?”

“I’m positive,” he snapped.

She held up her hands. “Fine, yes, okay.”

“Why haven’t you trained him?”

“He’d say that’s none of your business.”

Kylo crossed his arms, glowering at her. “It’s my job to protect him. How am I supposed to do that if I’m told I don’t need to know highly relevant details of his life?”

“You’d protect him best by dying.”

“You know I won’t do that.” He nearly had, after saving Rey. He had clawed his way back to existence only to have the only thing that made the universe worth existing in taken away from him. Was it any wonder he focused on Finn now?

“He won’t let me train him,” Rey said abruptly. She frowned down at the table. “And don’t think I haven’t tried to convince him, because I have. He’s powerful enough that I worry about him hurting himself. But he doesn’t want anything to distract him from his efforts on Kef Bir.”

Powerful enough to hurt himself? Kylo had assumed Finn’s affinity for the Force was just that, affinity. Not power. That complicated things considerably. “Why haven’t you simply forced him to train with you?”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“I assure you, it does.” He hadn’t been able to resist Snoke for very long at all. It was a remarkably effective strategy, and quick to implement besides.

“Not with the light, it doesn’t.” Rey’s face twitched, almost like she might laugh - no, that wasn’t it. She felt sorry for him, Kylo realized. Disgusting.

“It’ll be on your head when he blunders his way into hurting someone, then.”

“Oi! Who do you think -” Rey’s communicator started beeping. “Yes? This is Rey. Poe - what - oh, no. You’re sure? You’re absolutely sure?” Her face went grim. “How long do they have? Right. Okay, thank you.”

Her face had gone white and she kept glancing at Finn’s bedroom door. Something was very wrong, and it involved Kylo’s charge. “What is it.”

“It’s Kef Bir,” Rey said. “The First Order has attacked it. The moon’s collapsing; it’ll be nothing but an asteroid field before the month’s out.”

Kylo didn’t say anything. With Rey’s stunted connection to him, he didn’t need to. He stood and went to do his job.

Chapter 3

They’d gone into hyperspace before Finn was able to push through the shock enough to say, “Tell me what weapon could do this.”

“Several different ones,” Ren said, which of course was no help at all. “But -”

Finn waited patiently, or at least he tried. When Ren stared into space instead of continuing, he said, “But what? Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Ren gave him a look, easily identifiable as Ren thinking Finn was stupid and naive. Fuck that. “Tell me what you’re thinking, or I’ll make assumptions you won’t like.”

“Threats don’t become you,” Ren said. “I’m thinking that the number of weapons that could cause a moon to slowly disintegrate are, for the First Order, numerous, but only a few could be manned and used with the organization’s diminished capacity. One of them is a favorite of Jurtel Hux, the deceased General Hux’s uncle, who retains a large fortune and Imperialist sympathies.”

“Right. So if it’s the weapon you’re thinking of - what’s it called?”

“A class six death star.”

For a moment, in spite of the careful detachment Finn had learned to cultivate when talking about the First Order’s dirty work, Finn could only stare. “How many classes were there? Never mind. Fuck. Okay, so if it’s a class six death star, how long do we have?”

“Weeks, perhaps months. We’d need to analyze the moon to be sure.” When Ren noticed Finn’s disbelieving look, he said, “Look, think of it from the perspective of Jurtel. Death stars take power to use, which means money. If he can destroy a moon for a bargain, he’ll do it. He likely means to send a message of cruelty, forcing stormtroopers to be refugees again. He assumes the Senate will turn its back on you, and you’ll die without him having to spend the extra to ensure it happens right away.”

Finn hated, hated how likely that seemed. “We’ll evacuate. But he might be right. The political will -”

“Will be there, if you make it,” Ren snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re a hero of the Resistance, with goodwill in many quarters, and if you wanted to you could bend them all to your will without even trying.”

From the back of the cockpit, Finn heard a snort. He sighed as Rey said, “You’ll tell him that till you’re blue in the face, but he won’t do it. It’s not right, and Finn actually cares about what’s right.”

Ren glared at the ceiling. “What’s worse: bending the nonexistent Jedi’s rules, or allowing your people to perish?”

“I can’t have this argument right now.” Or ever. “And I’m not going to, Rey.”

Her voice turned to concern immediately. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Weak,” Ren muttered.

“I’m not going to have this argument right now,” Finn said. “Which means I’ll gag you and send you to the cargo hold if I have to, got it?”

Ren actually rolled his eyes, like a sulking teenager. But, thank the Force, he subsided after that and let Finn talk over potential plans with Rey.

The problem was there were no good alternatives. Whoever had attacked them had picked their target well. People did like Finn, that was true enough, but Ren was himself evidence that public opinion had shifted. Billions of people had survived the First Order, and many of them were coming to believe that the First Order had never been that much of a threat - or, if it had, that its defeat had been preordained. “The Jedi don’t help with that,” Rey said. “I mean, we do try, obviously. But it’s all got that veneer of fate over it, which lets people pretend things were never all that dire.”

“And people hate us.”

“It’s not your fault!”

“But -”

“I know.” Rey sighed. “They do. I hate - I wish - never mind. Solutions, solutions. You know, Poe’s got some connections in the Senate, being a hero who knew the General and all. So does Rose, since her dad’s been elected mayor, and of course there’s always Maz.”

“Maz Kanata? You really think she’d help us?”

“Of course she would!”

“But are any of her connections, you know. Legal?”

“Smugglers are always connected to the government,” Ren said.

“I hate to admit it, but he’s right. And you’d know, eh?” This last was directed at Ren, who grunted like a bantha and didn’t otherwise respond.

He would know because of his father, who he’d murdered. Not the strongest recommendation. “It’s worth a try, I guess. But I don’t know where I could ask us to go. Kef Bir was uninhabited, and Jannah established squatter’s rights with barely three hundred people. With a couple hundred thousand, there’s nowhere in the galaxy we could go that’s not already inhabited.”

“Your political argument will obviously center around your status as child soldiers,” Ren said. “Now is not the time to pretend you’re anything but refugees.”

Finn did his best not to give in to the anger that sparked in him at Ren’s words. “We’re a hell of a lot more than refugees.”

Ren had the nerve to roll his eyes. “I’m aware. But for the purposes of convincing others to give you shelter -”

“No one’s going to give us anything!”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Rey said. “Finn, we’re in hyperspace, yeah? That means you can stop piloting and come grab some food with me. You should go to your room.” She directed this last at Ren, who obeyed even as Finn made an undignified noise of disbelief.

“What just happened?” Finn said, at the same time Rey said, “You really do just have to ignore him. You’ve got enough on your plate without taking his bait.”

“He’s not baiting me.”

“He is.”

Finn shook his head. “He honestly believes that crap. That’s not bait.”

“He’s trying to get a reaction from you.” Rey grabbed two plates while Finn rummaged around for snacks. “That counts as bait.”

“Ugh. He’s just so -”

“Unbearable?”

“Right,” Finn said, the realization of what he meant cascading so strongly that it felt like a physical blow. “He doesn’t really care about ’troopers, definitely not about me, and he sees us the way most of the galaxy sees us.”

“Hey now. He was worse than most of them.”

“But a lot of people did agree with the First Order, at least a little,” Finn said.

Rey frowned and bit her lip. “I wish I could say I don’t agree. If I were you I’d be turning to the dark side so I could pursue justice, you know.”

“You would not.”

“I might! I came a lot closer than you ever have. But you wouldn’t, because that’s not who you are. And you have a duty to the other ’troopers, and a duty to the Republic, to fight back against what other people are, and to change things for the good. To make sure that no one will ever steal kids away again.”

“Ugh. I hate it when you repeat my own thoughts back at me.”

She thumped him on the shoulder, very gently. “But I’m right.”

He leaned his head against her shoulder. “You are. I hate it, but you are.”

“Crisp?”

Finn took the proffered bag, and as they ate in silence, started to plan out his strategy.

It started with Naboo.

Politically, Naboo had been a mess for a long time. They had a beloved, now-dead Senator who’d led the original Rebellion, and a Senator who’d been the first Emperor. Behind both symbols were centuries of factionalism and a ton of money, among other problems. It was no wonder, then, that they extended an offer of resources to the ’troopers to help them evacuate, then rescinded the offer, then extended it again - as a contract this time, so the invitation would stick.

Jannah wasn’t sure. “We can’t trust them,” she’d said.

“We can’t really trust anyone,” Finn had pointed out. “But Naboo signed a contract. That means something. It’s enforceable in the Galactic courts.”

“Ugh,” Jannah had said, but Finn was right and she knew it. Furthermore, in the end it wasn’t really their choice. The ’troopers all voted, and they agreed to take Naboo’s aid.

But evacuation was only the first piece of the puzzle. The second was finding somewhere ex-troopers could live. Finn was all too familiar with arguments that arose when he mentioned that issue. Most Senators only had one opinion, and that opinion was: why couldn’t ’troopers simply find employment across the galaxy? Jannah had already led three votes on that question, and would lead another when the newest batch of freed ’troopers joined them on -

Well. Not on Kef Bir. But there’d be a vote regardless. The tally was always the same: they wanted to stay together. What did an ex-’trooper have in common with a moisture farmer or a Jakku pilot? They’d been forced to become siblings by violent fascists. They were going to stay together to ensure no one could do that again.

Hopefully he could turn that rationale into a stirring speech. Otherwise, their options were remarkably straightforward. They’d have to buy housing, somehow, or they’d be forced to split up. Even thinking about it made a low thrum of panic start up in his chest.

They landed on Kef Bir expecting chaos. In retrospect, Finn should’ve known better. They’d all experienced chaos before, and Jannah was the kind of person who could hold a squadron together through a blown hull.

The blast had landed just outside a settlement. One person had been killed in the resulting conflagration. “Zeri was a hero,” Jannah said. “She got everyone else out of the auditorium, but the fire got her.”

“One dead from a planet-killing weapon isn’t that bad,” Ren said. “If you keep it that way, it’ll be impressive.”

Jannah stared at him. Finn resisted the urge to smack him - a reasonable thing to do if he hadn’t been Ren’s actual employer. “Are you serious?” Jannah finally said.

“Of course,” Ren said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Finn watched Jannah’s hand flex and decided his ethical obligation didn’t extend to preventing Jannah from hitting him. “Zeri was a friend, in addition to a hero. She was a sister. A human life was lost. This isn’t something that will go on some employment evaluation. No one gets a medal, either. It was a senseless, stupid waste of life that a bunch of monsters caused.”

Ren tilted his head. For a moment Finn felt breathless from fear of the stupid shit he was certain was about to come out of his mouth.

“I agree,” Ren said. “How many working transports do you have?”

Jannah’s hand relaxed. She turned to Finn. “How far are we going?”

“Great question,” Finn said, and began to explain his plan.

They couldn’t stay on Takodana forever. (“For starters, it’ll be lava season at some point in a human lifespan, and I can’t protect more than the people already living there,” Maz had said.) The Resistance had maintained barracks there, though, and so they had shelter for at least a month or two, long enough to come up with another solution.

“Long enough for you to talk the Senate into helping its most vulnerable population,” Jannah had said encouragingly.

“Or die trying,” was Finn’s not-at-all-joking response.

They got over half of Kef Bir evacuated before the first collapsing sandstorm. No one died, but it was a grim reminder of how little time they had. Worse, Finn didn’t have more time to help with evac efforts after that. The Senate was back in session, and he had to go and argue their case.

“You realize their timing was deliberate,” Ren said the night before the Senate was set to re-open.

Finn had never used his bodyguard quarters before being assigned Ren; it turned out that a palatial apartment when it was just him turned into a cramped series of insufficient rooms when he had to deal with Kylo Ren glowering at him all the time. It was that irritation that had him snapping, “Whose timing? The Senate’s? It opens this time every year.”

Ren rolled his eyes, looking more than ever like an angry horse. “The First Order’s. Whoever it was. They knew you’d move people, and now they’re waiting for you to make some argument that will allow them to advocate for your people to be forced to stay at the evac point.”

“Doesn’t matter. They can’t stay on Takodana, we already know that.”

“Maz Kanata’s objections won’t overrule a Senate decree.”

“So the Senate will just endanger tens of thousands of people out of convenience?” Ugh, of course they would. “Don’t answer that. I already know the answer. Damn it.”

“There is, of course, your second option.”

“There is no second option.”

“You could persuade them.”

He blamed exhaustion for how slow he was on the uptake just then. “I’m going to try, but if it doesn’t work - no. No! I’m not going to use Force compulsion on the Senate, you know I’m not, why do you keep trying to get me to - what are you doing?”

His skin was zinging again. Ren was touching him again, one huge hand pressed against his forearm. He felt dizzy and off. “You’re shouting,” Ren said. “Ironic, don’t you think, that you shouted at me that you wouldn’t use the Force, and it was the Force itself that amplified you.” His nostrils flared as he took a deep breath.

For one crazy moment, Finn thought about just going for it. This whole touching-and-smelling thing was clearly some creepy dark-side variety of a come-on, and Finn felt more desperate than he had since those early days when he’d thought he could just run away from the Resistance. He thought about it, then he decided maybe he should go for it. Maybe he should just lean forward, kiss Ren the way Ren so clearly wanted him to, and see what happened.

“Don’t,” Ren said in a tight voice.

Finn blinked. “Don’t what?”

The air seemed very still when Ren let go of his arm and took a step back. “Don’t…reject out of hand a plan which might be effective. Even if it seems to use unsavory tactics.”

He felt so strange, like he’d just stepped from a blizzard into a too-warm room. He turned away from Ren, walking over to where he’d left his holopad and opening up the latest message from Jannah again. “That sounds like First Order logic to me.”

He could practically feel Ren biting back some shitty comment about how successful the First Order had been. “You represent Kef Bir, supposedly, and your…citizens…seem very devoted to the concept of direct democracy. More devoted than the Senate, you’re aware.”

“I’m the one who was actually in the Senate while you were sulking about not getting to finish your evil plan. Yes, I’m aware.”

“Ask them what they’d like you to do. I’ll be in my room; please shout if you’re being murdered. I’ll come running.”

Finn stood there like an idiot for long minutes after Ren had left, replaying the conversation and his own shitty options and coming up with absolutely nothing worth thinking about.

Would the dark side feed on his arousal, knowing as he did that it was sparked by a man who was grieving, furious, and blazingly bright within the light? Kylo would know the answer to his question if he dug into his skin and pulled out the dampener he’d been saddled with. But of course, then he’d be hauled off to solitary confinement again - if he wasn’t simply shot on sight.

He’d never know for sure what precisely moved around him just then, but he didn’t care, either. It took the barest touch of his hand on his cock to set him on fire.

This time, touching the Force through Finn hadn’t simply been good; it had been transcendent. He had moved within Finn’s connection to the Force as though it were his own. It had filled his body with vicious triumph, and for a moment, despite Finn’s pathetic protests about the ethics of stormtrooper resettlement, Kylo had felt like he could win a whole war on his own.

He clenched a hand around his cock, thrusting frantically, panting as he thought of it. What would Finn ha done if he’d used the power? Would he have fought it? Could he fight it? He was plenty powerful, but untrained, and seemingly reluctant to embrace who he was. Kylo could likely overpower him, then. He’d savor the moment Finn realized his error: the widening of his eyes, the quickening of his breath. The hardening of his cock.

Kylo came like that, thinking of power, of the Force. Of Finn, his window to the only part of the world that had ever mattered to him.

Keeping secrets had been second nature to Kylo before he’d learned to talk. Consequently, he had no problem looking Finn in the eye the next morning, even after spending the night fucking his own hand, thinking of fucking Finn instead, of taking the Force from him. “What’s your agenda for today?”

It was a perfectly standard question for a bodyguard to ask, but of course Finn shot him a suspicious look. “Why?”

“We’re on Coruscant. This is where your last assassination attempt occurred. If I’m going to protect you, I need to know your day to day plans.”

He watched Finn process a series of emotions very visibly. Incredible to think that he was a politician by choice; even more incredible to think that by some metrics, he was actually good at it. “The Refugee Committee is presenting their findings about stormtroopers today. I’m probably going to end up giving a speech.”

Kylo pictured Finn rising to his feet, reluctant, heroism etched in the slope of his shoulders as he took a deep breath in preparation to say some saccharine nonsense about ‘rights’ and ‘justice’. “Probably.”

“Definitely, okay? I’d really rather you stayed here. I’m pretty unlikely to be assassinated today.”

“I’m sure you realize political assassinations succeed based on exactly that kind of reasoning.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“But you won’t.” Kylo watched with grim satisfaction as Finn did a double take, frowning and crossing his arms.

“Using the Force to compel people isn’t taking care of myself.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No! You don’t even - the Force isn’t meant to be used for personal gain!”

It was so hard not to roll his eyes and ridicule Finn’s ignorance. Had he ever been so naive? He couldn’t possibly have been. “The Force isn’t meant for anything, if you’d like to be pedantic about it.”

“Everything’s meant for something. Even you, if you cared.” Finn crossed his arms. Kylo ignored the way his stomach tightened at the sight; he wanted so badly to touch Finn, to feel the Force running through him again. “You can come to the Senate if you want, but I swear, if you make fun of my speech, or interrupt it, or -”

“It’s forbidden by the bodyguard rulebook to interrupt your client’s Senatorial duties unless absolutely necessary for preservation of safety.”

“Sure, but you’re an asshole.”

Kylo just barely managed not to roll his eyes. Why bother demanding a promise from someone you didn’t trust to keep it? “I won’t interrupt your speech, or otherwise impeded your pathetic attempts to convince avaricious Senators to help you. Which they won’t do, by the way.”

“We’ll see,” Finn said, and that was that.

Still, Kylo hadn’t expected quite so many speeches to sit through. Finn hadn’t spoken after three solid hours of debate and testifying and other useless bloviating. Kylo had already known the Senate held Finn in contempt: why else would Kylo be assigned to him? But that knowledge hadn’t prepared him for the petty indignities of the mannered Senators. It brought him right back to his early memories of his mother belligerently breaking with the Senate. If Finn ended his own life in a similar way, Kylo wouldn’t be surprised.

He was so busy ruminating on the various ways in which the Senate had failed in his lifetime that he almost didn’t notice when it finally was Finn’s chance to speak.

Empirically speaking, he couldn’t feel the Force. During his training, however, he had been trained to be attuned to the Force: to watch for signs of it, to observe its work in others. All that old knowledge came rushing back to him as he watched Finn draw his audience in.

There was something painfully erotic about the way he used the Force. He had no knowledge, no training, no dyad, no ancient familial history, no latent well of inherited power to draw on. He should have been clumsier than Kylo had ever been, yet he wasn’t. His touch was light yet deft, the persuasion cast so gently that Kylo doubted even those sensitive to the Force could feel it. It couldn’t even properly be called persuasion; Finn would never deliberately use his power in that way, but he couldn’t help but be who he was, strong in the Force and inherently charismatic. Like the old holovids of Padme Amidala, Finn was simply too compelling to look away from. Kylo watched; as he watched, he wanted and hated in equal measure.

He had to figure out a way to get access to the Force again. To get access to Finn. It wasn’t a matter of preference or avarice; he simply had to have it. Failure was not an option.

Finn had never given a speech, in front of three people or three thousand, without feeling exhausted afterwards. It was so hard to focus on people. Drawing them out of their skepticism was bad enough when it was about something relatively minor, but no one in the galaxy felt neutral about the question of whether or not ’troopers should have resources and homes. Dealing with the conflicting feelings, the hostility, the indifference -

“I think that hurt worst of all,” he said glumly into his rabbit stew. “Imagine hearing Jannah’s story and just thinking, who cares. I’d almost rather deal with a whole Senate full of people who think we’re criminals or worthless leeches.”

Rose and Poe had both heard it before, but in the grand tradition of Resistance vets, they were ready for another go-around. Rose grimaced in sympathy and patted his hand as she said, “People trained themselves to be indifferent. We’ll get through to them. You will. You were on the news, you know. People care what you have to say.”

“And if they don’t care enough, we’ll make them,” Poe said.

“I hardly think bringing an X-Wing into the Senate would help the stormtroopers’ case,” Ren said from behind Finn’s shoulder.

Poe ignored him, just as he always did. “The General taught me all I need to know about getting a message across, isn’t that right, buddy?” BB-8’s antenna twitched as it beeped agreement.

“That reminds me, I was going to ask if you’re looking for a propagandist.” Rose waved her fork in Finn’s face when his mouth dropped open. “Not in a bad way!”

“How can you be a propagandist in a good way?”

“You know, pitch articles about ’trooper rights, do some lobbying, maybe make a few well-placed threats or call in a few favors.”

“In the Old Republic, they called that being a chief of staff, rather than a propagandist.”

Finn felt oddly sad to see Rose’s expression harden when she looked back at Ren. “Hey, Finn, your bodyguard’s not very well trained.”

“He’s a person, not a dog,” Finn said quietly. “And I know he’s awful, but can we just…the Senate assigned him to me.” I’m stuck with him, he didn’t say, but he could tell from the waves of emotion roiling off Rose and Poe both that they understood.

“Sketchy advice aside, he’s right,” Poe said. He still didn’t look at Ren as he leaned back and steepled his fingers. “I know the Senate’s hamstringing you wherever they can, but you do have a budget.”

“And I work for cheap!” Rose said.

He returned her smile in spite of himself - which she’d obviously intended, based on the way she beamed back at him. For a moment he felt, if not happy, then at least better: more sure that things would end up okay, happier with his presence in the Senate.

His, Rose’s, and Poe’s comms all lit up in unison. Finn answered his first: “What’s going on?”

“Kef Bir is collapsing ahead of schedule,” Rey said.

He knew right away that something besides that was wrong; she normally never sounded this calm. “Who’s still on there? Is Jannah okay? How long does it have?”

“Jannah’s fine. She’s here with me and nine other people. We supervised the last evac an hour ago. They took the Falcon. It’s too dangerous to fly her back to pick us up. Jannah says we likely have a few days at most before we’re lost.”

Finn felt his heart freeze, his chest collapse, his throat close.

Eleven people. Rey and Jannah. Fuck, fuck -

“Stay where you are and make sure your communicator doesn’t run out of juice. We’re coming to get you.”

“Finn, I called to say goodbye. It’s too dangerous. If I can’t get us off - I wanted to talk to you before -”

“We’re coming to get you,” Finn said again, and cut the connection.

Kylo had already considered it at length: there was no effective way to communicate to Finn that his chances of success were currently compromised by his emotional investment in his goal. He would interpret any comment as criticism, and given the traditional sentimentality of the Republic, would likely take Kylo’s comments as a signal to get even worse. Consequently, Kylo simply had to observe Finn in silence, keeping his (correct) thoughts on Finn’s strategy to himself, waiting to reach the collapsing planet so that they could perform the futile-yet-vital motions of failing to rescue Jannah and Rey.

They were, effectively, already dead. Kylo knew that, even as he tried not to dwell on it. His and Rey’s dyad hardly mattered anymore, crippled as he was, so what did he care? A straightforward, simple answer: he didn’t. But of course in the back of his mind, he continued thinking about her. If she was in pain, if she - and Jannah, and the other stormtroopers - would be crushed by rocks or slowly suffocate. Or burn to death in the magma exposed by the moon’s collapse, though that option seemed less likely than others.

Still. There were so many options and precious few answers. Kylo couldn’t feel Rey, of course. He couldn’t even feel Finn, though he didn’t feel that he really needed to. Finn’s emotions were pathetically obvious: his anxiety, his anger, his frustration, were all on display for Kylo. He had no sense of subtlety at the best of times.

His general demeanor - tense, distant, angry - made Kylo think, for interminable stretches of time, about touching him. Kissing him, fucking him. Not just to access the Force, though admittedly that idea held considerable allure. Beyond that, though, lived the obvious benefits of fucking Finn: his strong arms and steady gaze, his clever hands, his quick mind. Finn spent their trip to Kef Bir panicking about his friends dying, and Kylo spent that same trip fantasizing about making Finn come so hard he thought he was dying.

That juxtaposition alone demonstrated cleanly why they’d never be together. But…

The Force had flowed so powerfully through Finn. Why bother with anyone else? Why think of anything else, when that memory was easily accessible, sharp for how new it was, alluring like no other memory had ever been?

The ship hurtled through hyperspace. Finn took ragged breaths and visibly tried not to cry. Kylo, long since given over to the dark, thought of teeth and tongue and Finn’s cock, hard and begging for him, yielding at last.

The First Order, and the Empire before it, had invented a number of ways to destroy a planet. The Death Star’s lack of subtlety had led directly to Vader’s defeat, and Kylo had spent years dreaming of ways to improve upon his grandfather’s innovation in ways that wouldn’t be subverted by rebels. One of those dreams had become the weapon that would kill Kef Bir: a Class Six mining vessel with a proton-scattering beam capable of inducing gravitational collapse on planetary objects as small as asteroids and as large as midsize moons.

Kef Bir was a midsize moon. Its survival for several weeks after the attack spoke to the weapon’s limits as well as to sheer, dumb luck - but the First Order’s engineering wasn’t completely useless. The collapse might be late in coming, but when he and Finn exited hyperspace, it had come. Kef Bir was so near total annihilation that it didn’t have an orbit anymore.

“How are they still alive?” Finn said in a low, tense voice.

“Luck,” Kylo said. Rey’s power, his jealousy whispered.

“Well - not for long. Are you ready to land?”

“Are you asking me, or are you telling me I should be?”

“I’m - just answer the question.”

What did it say about him that even here, now, he found Finn’s frustration and visible impatience alluring? “As your bodyguard, I need to know what you anticipate if I’m going to protect you. I advise against allowing Dameron to persuade you to adopt his methods.”

“It’s not like ’troopers never improvise.”

’Troopers hadn’t been programmed with the intellectual capacity to even approach Dameron’s chaotic habits, but Kylo knew better than to tell Finn that. He said, “The plan?”

“We’ll be evacuating Rey and Jannah. Poe’ll provide air support. Rose is on her way with a medbay-equipped ship now.”

“And how exactly do you propose to complete the evac?”

“Oh, you know,” said Finn, the galaxy’s biggest idiot, “I figured we’d improvise. Buckle in, we’re landing.”

Kylo didn’t have time to respond. As their ship approached the planet’s surface, Finn’s comm crackled to life. “Remember what we discussed before,” Poe said in lieu of a formal greeting or callsign. “If anyone’s going to fall into a ravine during this little field trip, it’ll be the convicted war criminal, not you.”

“Don’t worry, I got this.” Finn took the controls and guided the ship to landing. Kef Bir’s frequently stormy atmosphere was worse now that the moon was nearly dead; wind howled all around them, and rocks hit the hull of their ship. Nevertheless, when they touched down, it was as light a landing as Kylo had ever experienced. Finn wasn’t lying about his skill.

As they descended on Kef Bir, Finn turned to Kylo. “We won’t have any time to debate once we’re down there. You’ll do what I say.”

Kylo barely even glanced at him. “Yes.”

Finn wasn’t sure he believed him, but they didn’t have time to discuss it further. They were landing on Kef Bir, and everything was very obviously going to shit.

Finn had experienced earthquakes before, but nothing close to this: the end of a world. The ground beneath their speeder roiled and cracked open. The air roared with unnatural wind; the atmosphere changed so rapidly he had to turn off his breather’s sensor warnings. His lungs felt like they might attempt to evacuate his chest cavity. Behind him, chest pressed to Finn’s back, Ren breathed heavily and grunted and said, “How much further?”

“Ten minutes at max speed, twenty if we’re slower, which we should be - we want the speeder for backup in case Poe can’t get evac.”

“Twenty minutes is too long. Unless -”

“What?” Finn could feel Ren’s contempt, his anger. He wondered if there was enough pain and ill will on this planet, enough dark side stuff to break through the Republic’s dampener. Hopefully not. “What aren’t you saying?”

This close, he felt and heard Ren grit his teeth. “Nothing.”

“Ren.”

“I doubt even a Resistance general thinks now is the time to press me.”

He had a point, so Finn just kicked the speed up a bit and leaned into the wind. Fifteen minutes would be better than twenty.

He could feel Rey and Jannah like a beacon, and for once that knowledge didn’t give him a bit of angst. They’d get there, they’d save them. All eleven of them. They had to. They had to. They had to.

The ground had caved in at the epicenter of the attack; Rey had sent pictures of their prison, several tons of heavy rock slowly filling with water. It would be a horrific way to die. Finn got to work right away, throwing rocks away as quickly as he could.

“Why can’t Rey move them?” Ren said.

Finn had wondered too, but the answer appeared in his mind before he even asked. “She can’t feel the Force. Something’s wrong. I can feel them, but they can’t feel me.”

“The weapon is working as intended,” Ren said. He sighed, sounding as put-upon as an officer asked to clear the table - and then he started moving rocks, too.

But it wasn’t enough. Of course not. The rain started as he and Ren began trying to push a boulder away from the mouth of the tunnel. The earth beneath them turned to mud, and the rock started to sink, directly over where Jannah and the others were trapped.

“This isn’t working,” Finn said. He felt insane, desperate, like his chest was cracking open. He fumbled for his comm - dropped it in the mud - grabbed it, flipping it open. “Poe, they’re trapped in a tunnel. We need manpower to get them out.”

“I can’t land,” Poe said. “I’ll try, but there’s nowhere steady enough. It looks like a planet made of quicksand, Finn. Scans say you have maybe half an hour, probably less.”

The trapped ’troopers definitely didn’t have half an hour. “I’ll figure something out,” Finn said, and shoved his comm in his pocket.

“Finn.”

“What?” Ren was standing there in the rain, hair plastered to his head, looking stupid and evil and useless. For one crazy moment, Finn thought: the implant was in his arm. What if Finn dug it out? Would he save them then?

Of course not. He’d kill them. But -

“Finn.”

It happened too quickly for Finn to track. One minute Ren stood a few feet from him, staring at him with water dripping off his weird-shaped face; the next, he had Finn pressed against the boulder they’d been trying to move. He placed his fingers against Finn’s temples, his enormous hands holding Finn’s head still.

His palms, Finn noted distantly, smelled oddly like herbs. “Get off me. What are you doing?”

“Shut up,” Ren said, and the world spun out of control.

He stood on the deck of a First Order ship -

No no no no. He stood in a meadow on Naboo -

He stood in the jungles of D’Qar, feeling the Force moving around him -

He stood on a screaming moon, and Kylo Ren stood in front of him and also, impossibly, inside his brain.

He licked his lips and Ren noticed, and Finn felt him notice, and -

“The Force,” Finn said. “You can - I can -”

“If I touch you.”

“Yeah, okay, speaking of: ow.”

Ren winced, but he didn’t let go of Finn. He did something much, much worse: he slid a hand down to Finn’s wrist while still holding on to the side of his head, and then he linked their fingers together and held his other arm out. A single curl of his fingers was all it took to send the boulders flying.

Boulders, plural, because the cave-in hiding Rey and Jannah and the ’troopers was really bad. They’d never have gotten through in time. Finn knew that, and he felt Ren’s certainty too - and he felt Rey, brilliant in his mind like she’d never been before.

“The dyad,” Ren said. “She’s angry with me.”

“Yeah, I am too.” But he’d deal with that later - and there would be a later, now.

After that everything happened very quickly. Poe flew in for evac; they got the ’troopers out first, then Rey and Jannah. It wasn’t until the hull of the ship was sealed and they were leaving Kef Bir’s atmosphere that Finn realized exactly what he’d done: nine ’troopers and Jannah stared at him in disgust, Rey in furrowed-brow concern, as he continued to hold Kylo Ren’s hand.

He dropped it immediately, of course. Then it occurred to him that Ren might not let him, and he took a quick step away - and another.

Ren just looked at him, mulish as ever. “You’re welcome.” He glanced over at Jannah with obvious disdain. “All of you are.”

“Fuck you, Kylo Ren,” Jannah said.

“Let’s - go up and see how Poe is doing. Shall we?” Rey didn’t wait for an answer, grabbing Ren by the arm and yanking him up the stairs.

“He can feel the Force through me,” Finn said as soon as the doors slid shut behind them, quiet enough that the other ’troopers couldn’t hear him.

“So Rey said,” Jannah said. “It’s disconcerting, but…you saved us, Finn.” She pulled him into a hug. He felt himself start to shake. Great, shock was always fun to live through. “Thank you.”

“No need to thank me. Just doing my job. Kind of literally, actually; the Senate charter has all kinds of weird allowances for emergency.” He stepped back, taking a deep breath and doing his best to be his job, to be a Senator. “I don’t think I know you guys by name. Hi, I’m Finn. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Rax.” “Klio.” “Feuli.” “What the bantha’s tits do you think you’re doing, cozying up to Kylo Ren like the Force is some kind of cure-all for murdering our people?”

Finn blinked at the short ’trooper with her arms crossed, glaring at him like she was about to gut him. He couldn’t help but think of Rose, even as she said, “Pia.”

“Pia?”

“That’s my name. Answer the question, Senator.”

The tension in the air was very nearly painful. Finn had had plenty of practice mediating awkward situations, but not like this, the burning strangeness of Ren’s touch still fizzing through his veins.

Jannah wasn’t going to help him, but she wasn’t going to stop him, either. So he decided upon selfishness. “He was freaking out. I can - I can feel the Force, so I held on to him to keep him steady. Even micro-chipped, we couldn’t deal with Kylo Ren having a panic attack just then.”

Pia’s eyes narrowed. For a moment Finn thought he might have to be his own bodyguard, but then Feuli touched her shoulder. They looked at each other, and Pia sighed, rolling her eyes and uncrossing her arms. “Fine. Where are we going, then?”

“We’re still figuring that out. Somewhere safe, I promise.”

“Fuel?”

“Plenty of it, and we can stop in Coruscant if needed.”

“Where are the others?”

“Naboo. For now.”

“we’ve been dealt a horrible crime,” Jannah said. “Finn is seeking justice through the Senate.”

“Right. Because they’re so pro-trooper.”

“We’re doing what we can,” Finn said, quietly, firmly. “Let me know if there’s any way you think you can offer help.”

“We’re all hands on deck these days,” Jannah added. “Speaking of - Finn, why don’t you go and let Poe know the interim plan?”

Meaning, take his weird Kylo Ren-related ambiguities and let Jannah talk the others down from their current cliff. Finn nodded, hugging her once last time before heading out.

When he reached the cockpit, he found Rey and Ren sitting across from one another, locked in some weird, nonverbal communication. He knew the dyad was muffled, or not working at all, with Ren’s implant - but apparently Rey had enough freaky Jedi skills to do some kind of communication anyway. That, or she’d just decided to stare at Ren’s face for the hell of it, but that was too disturbing to think about for long. “They’re okay now. No mutiny. Rey, I’m so glad you’re all right.”

“I’m glad you’re all right. What did you tell them about, you know.” She gestured between him and Ren.

“Nothing,” Finn said.

“So you lied,” Ren said.

“No fighting in the cockpit,” Poe said. “Finn, buddy, good to see you survived your hand-holding adventure.”

“He can’t feel the Force through me,” Rey said before Finn could bristle about mission-critical hand-holding.

“You tried? Rey -”

“It’s no more dangerous than you trying.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “And if you try and spout anything about Jedi training at me, I’ll dunk you in the nearest lake once we land.”

Finn thought growing up in a desert had given Rey some damaging ideas about when it was appropriate to punish people with water. “Fine. How do you know he’s not lying?”

“The dyad,” Rey and Ren said at the same time.

Force give him strength. “I need to trade him in for a different bodyguard.”

“You think the Senate’ll buy that?” Poe said. “Personally, I wouldn’t bet a credit.”

“I can try!”

“Hm,” Poe said. “Obviously I’m in favor, but I guess we’ll see.”

Poe sounded exactly the kind of smug that used to get him smacked during training exercises, but Finn currently had bigger fish to fry. He scowled at Ren. “You can’t just grab me every time you want to feel the Force.”

“But I suppose you think you can just grab me every time you have friends to save.”

“Child soldiers! Citizens, people I represent -”

“Most Senators are happy to take a salary and occasionally entertain a special interest. Your idealism will gain you absolutely nothing when ’trooper rights go to vote.”

“I’m sure a Sith acolyte can teach me plenty about politics, but -”

“The Knights of Ren weren’t Sith.” Ren folded his hands, giving the impossible impression of a pissed-off nanny. “Nor was Snoke.”

“I don’t care, evil is evil! Why didn’t you -”

“Tell you?”

For a moment it felt like all the air had been sucked out of the ship. Finn couldn’t think of anyone or anything else; Ren’s gaze pinned him, made him furious and somehow sent him back to Kef Bir, terrified and feeling the Force flow through him.

He made himself push through the haze. “I know why you didn’t tell me. I’m mad you didn’t, but I get it. But how do you think - you kept sniffing me.”

“Oh my,” Rey said.

Ren glared. “I wasn’t sniffing. I was trying to -”

“Access the Force through your nose on my neck?”

“Understand,” Ren gritted out, “what was happening. You must grasp that this situation is unusual.”

“I’m the victim of messed-up, faulty, technologically advanced brainwashing. You should grasp that it’s not that shocking to me that the Republic’s technology is failing.”

“The First Order’s conditioning -”

Finn held up a hand, an illicit thrill shooting through him when Ren immediately went silent. “We’re not going into that right now. We’re just not.”

Ren gave Rey a dirty look; she only raised an eyebrow in response, crossing her arms. Finn was ready to snap and ask what exactly their deal was when Ren said, “Finn, let’s go talk in the hallway, where it’s private.”

“You have all the subtlety of a poorly crafted saber,” Rey said.

“You’d know,” Ren shot back.

Finn was so, so tired, of cryptic argumentative bullshit. “Fine, come on.”

When they were alone - truly alone; Finn couldn’t feel the hum in the Force he always felt when surveillance cameras were pointed at him - Ren said, “The truth is I thought I might kill you.”

Finn blinked, then blinked again. “Excuse me?”

“You have to see it from my point of view.”

“I really, definitely do not.”

“Please.”

Once again, Finn felt the weird, vertigo-ish rush of shock. He shifted uncomfortably. “What’s your point of view, then?”

Ren held out a hand. Finn almost jerked away, but before he did, Ren stopped moving, his fingertips hovering inches from Finn’s forearm.

No, not hovering. Ren’s hands were shaking, a fine tremor that Finn could feel, the tiniest air current accompanied by terror in the Force.

He understood what it meant, of course. Ren wanted the Force more than anything; the thought that Finn might prevent him from accessing it terrified him. Finn couldn’t imagine what it was like, to go from someone who could casually order the deaths of millions to someone who had to beg for the smallest crumb of power.

Deep in him, the petty, furious part of him that he tried not to feed said, Good.

“I’m not going to let you pull the Force through me when you just said you think about killing me.”

“I didn’t say that. I said I thought I might.”

“Uh-huh.” Finn stepped away, back to the wall, and crossed his arms. “Words. Not Force mind-sharing.”

“Really? So you can project whatever nefarious intentions upon me that you want?”

“Project? You’re a war criminal! You just told me you want to kill me!”

“I said I thought I might. I said -” Ren made a frustrated noise, a weird kind of yowl that reminded Finn of a droid falling down some stairs. “Can’t you just -”

Finn couldn’t dodge this time. Ren grabbed his upper arm and pressed their foreheads together, his shoulders hunched in a way Finn distantly noted was really uncomfortable for him - and then he was swimming in a maze of vague impressions that he knew weren’t his.

I’m not that tall, he thought, and Ren snorted.

It only took a moment, after which Ren stepped back. But when it was over, Finn’s whole body felt -

Well. Hopefully Kylo Ren, convicted mass murderer, hadn’t picked up on the wave of arousal their connection had apparently triggered.

“You won’t report me.”

It wasn’t really a question, but Finn shook his head anyway. “It wouldn’t exactly be good for me either, you know, politically.”

“They’re legally required to give you a bodyguard.”

“The next one would be worse, somehow. Like, maybe they’d put BB-8 on my case.”

Ren’s lips pursed; belatedly, Finn remembered their mutual hatred. “Anyway. No, I won’t report you.”

“Until it will benefit you.”

“I won’t. I said so, okay? You can -”

“Trust you?” Ren raised a single eyebrow. It looked like it strained him a bit. “Why?”

“You saw in my head. You know I’m telling the truth.”

“And what do you know, Finn?”

It was an impossible question. Finn had seen penitence and admiration and pain in Ren’s mind. He was pretty much a hundred percent sure Ren could lie in there, too. “Not a lot, apparently.”

“Fine,” Ren said. He flared his nostrils and looked away.

Because of all the panic, it took Finn an embarrassingly long period of time to realize that Ren didn’t know Finn was waiting for him to leave. “Oh. Okay. Um. So, we’re going to Naboo.”

“I own a retreat on Naboo.”

“…congratulations?”

“It was my grandmother’s.” Ren frowned. “I’m not sure how many people it can accommodate, but it’s lain empty for fifty years now.”

“Are you -”

“The stormtroopers can stay there. For now.”

Ren turned and stomped away before Finn could even start to formulate a response.

“Oh hey, see? Told you he was alive,” Poe said when Finn returned to the cockpit.

“What happened?” Rey said. “I felt -”

“Anger? Yeah.” Finn rubbed his temples. “Ren said we could use his grandmother’s retreat.”

“Padme Naberrie?” Poe said. “We’re going to Naboo to hang out on Padme Naberrie’s old land?”

“I don’t know who that is,” Finn said. “But if it’s Ren’s grandmother, then, yes?”

“This is going to be a disaster,” Poe said. “Can’t wait.”

Rey patted Finn’s hand. “I’m sure it will be lovely,” she said, wholly unconvincingly.

Finn pulled out his holopad and sent Jannah a message: So, what do you know about Naboo? And Padme Naberrie?

It would be fine, he told himself as they hurtled through hyperspace. No, better than fine: everything was going to be great, probably. All he had to do was be a faithful representative of the ’troopers, and not let Ren kill him in pursuit of the dark side, and ensure no one killed Ren for deeply justifiable reasons, and get the ’troopers a new homeworld. Easy peasy.

Chapter 4

“I didn’t think it would be this overgrown,” Ren said, frowning at the vines that seemed about to rip down the walls of his grandmother’s estate.

“The structure is still sound,” the service droid said, “but maintenance of the estate has been under legal contention since the formation of the Resistance led to Leia Organa’s legal holdings being seized. Since her death, no further action has been taken.”

“I’m aware,” Ren said stiffly. “We’ll want the underbrush cleared. Landscaping. And the dwellings will need to be cleaned.”

“I will provision a corps of maintenance droids,” the service droid said, and walked off before Ren could respond.

Finn couldn’t blame it for ditching them. If someone told him the sheer awkwardness of Ren’s communication had sparked sentience in droids, he’d believe them. He made C3PO look suave.

“Well then,” Rey said with the false cheer Finn swore she’d learned in her weird Jedi training, “in the meantime, I’m sure we can clear enough to camp in. It’ll be just like old times, eh, Finn?”

“It can’t be like being with the Resistance as long as he’s here,” Jannah said.

She was only voicing what the rest of the landing party was thinking, but Finn winced.

“My apologies,” Jannah said, not sounding at all sorry. “Obviously, our Senator needs his body man.”

Ren sighed. “I’m not -”

“Let’s start with the receiving hall,” Jannah said. “That’ll give us a good base to work from.” She walked off exactly like the droid had; the other ’troopers rushed to follow her.

Rey looked between Finn and Ren, said, “You know what, I think they’ll need my help,” and ran off.

Jeez. “Well,” Finn said. “That was…awkward.”

“I offered this land out of convenience,” Ren said stiffly. “We can go elsewhere if you’d prefer.”

Finn sighed. He’d had this discussion with everyone, it felt like - with Jannah three or four times. Each time, his conclusion was the same. “Honestly, I think it’s awkward because we kind of can’t.”

Ren frowned.

“Our backs are against a wall. Naboo’s population is, what, eight billion?”

“Four. Large parts are agrarian.”

“Four billion people’s a lot more than a hundred thousand.” Optimistically; their official numbers were still only seventy thousand. “We’re running out of options. Kef Bir was barely habitable. There isn’t another moon just waiting for the galaxy’s unwanted to show up.” Finn looked around: riotous plant growth, hundreds of acres of rolling hills, and enough outbuildings to make up a whole city greeted him. There was more than enough room for them here.

Taking a convicted war criminal’s informal offer might be foolhardy; in fact, Finn agreed with Jannah that it opened them up to all kinds of problems. But it was the best offer they were likely to see, by a literal country mile.

“Finn?”

“It’s beautiful here,” Finn said, forcing himself not to think about the way Ren talked - how deep his voice got when he said Finn’s name, and how intent he always sounded. “We can live here. We’re unlikely to find anything better.”

“The land may well be poisoned by the dark.”

“The Empire had control of the whole galaxy.” Finn shrugged. “I’m not saying it doesn’t matter - it does, of course. But lots of things are poisoned by the dark. We can work that into the lease terms if you want.”

Like Ren. Like himself, he sometimes worried.

Ren stared at him. They were flooded in sunshine; birds chirped overhead, and bees happily buzzed on the flowers nearby. Somehow, that didn’t seem to matter. Ren might as well have been standing in the middle of a hurricane, he looked that grim. “I don’t understand you,” Ren said.

Finn was definitely not having that conversation. Not now, maybe not ever. Not with the person who’d ordered his reconditioning. “You don’t need to. You just need to keep me from getting killed.”

“Understanding why you choose to put yourself in danger so frequently would help with that.”

The mood shifted; Finn almost laughed. “Maybe so, but hopefully no one’s going to try to kill me on Naboo. Come on, let’s go see what the others found.”

For a moment he thought Ren might object. His hand - ungloved, which really should’ve tipped Finn off to the whole Force conduit thing - twitched, and he looked at Finn like -

Finn wasn’t sure. Or he refused to think about it. Or both.

“Fine,” Ren said abruptly, and strode past Finn, stomping the tall grass down as he made for the main building.

Finn was going to take Jedi training from Rey just to be able to pull patience out of the air. “A little help right now would be great,” he muttered to the ever-eddying currents of the Force.

It didn’t answer, of course. He took one more deep, calming breath of warm spring air, shook out his shoulders, and followed.

After seeing the rampant overgrowth, Kylo had entertained the possibility that the retreat might need to be torn down entirely. He had no direct access to the Organa accounts yet, but funds could be arranged; the logistics of doing so occupied several hours of his time as the others flitted to and fro, until Finn said, “It’ll be a good place for us.”

Kylo blinked and focused on him, frowning. “I beg your pardon?”

“Were you really not listening? You’ve been following me around for hours.”

As if he hadn’t perfected the art of appearing alert while living inside his own thoughts long ago. “No.”

Finn sighed, loudly enough that his breath caressed Kylo’s cheek. “We have some work to do. Stuff here is really overgrown, and there are a few cabins that we’ll need to rebuild. But overall, it looks good. We can live here.”

Oh. So Kylo wouldn’t need to transfer millions of credits through a complex web of shell companies after all. Unless… “Your citizens don’t have the expertise required to rebuild all of this.”

“Not all of us, but most do, or can learn. We’re a handy bunch.”

They had been programmed to be, he meant. Kylo crossed his arms. “You’ll need funding. Equipment. Consultants.”

“Galactic regulations -”

“Require inspection, even for buildings housing sentient nonpersons.”

“Are you being an asshole on purpose?”

“Excuse me?”

He watched Finn grit his teeth, the muscles in his jaw shifting in a way that made Kylo want to reach out and touch, study their movement under Finn’s skin. “We already know the odds are bad. We already discussed how to deal with them. But -”

“The estate has an endowment,” Kylo lied. “I’ll see to it that your office receives details on how to use the funds for restoration.”

Finn stared at Kylo. Kylo stared back. He tried not to show anything he was feeling: not the rage, not the hope, not the strange, skin-itching unrest.

“I can tell you’re lying,” Finn said finally.

“The Force -”

“Body language, not the Force.” Finn shrugged. “We all had to get pretty good at reading you.”

Kylo stiffened his posture, ready to - react. However he needed to.

“But I’m not sure what you’re lying about, to be honest. Not intent to give us the money. Not the estate, exactly.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Also a lie.” Kylo watched in gross fascination as Finn smiled, an awkward little twist of his lips that made Kylo want to reach out and touch him. “I was actually hoping for your input on one thing, though. The main resort has a suite that I think was your grandmother’s.”

“Ah.”

“We can look at it later, if you want.”

Kylo recognized this variety of pity. Finn likely thought he was being merciful. “We’re both here now.”

Finn didn’t bother trying to hide his skepticism, but he led Kylo to the suite anyway. They passed numerous ’troopers on the way in, all of whom flinched away from Kylo. It was an indictment of the First Order’s training that they didn’t seem to think of the obvious: he had no power now; he could not crush their throats with anything other than his own two hands. They should have the situational awareness to recognize that he was no longer a threat to them.

“They’re going to be afraid for awhile,” Finn said. “It’s not about training or whatever. It’s about trauma.”

He hadn’t said anything. He slanted Finn what he hoped was an inscrutable look.

“It’s really obvious when you’re starting in on the defensive First Order brainwashing crap. It was, even before all this.”

Kylo found it remarkable that Finn could describe, with seemingly no irony at all, a revolution, the destruction of several civilizations, and his own very personal rebellion as ‘all this’. “I’m here to make sure no one tries to assassinate you. I don’t care about anything else.”

“You care about that? Huh.”

“Just take me to the suite.”

Finn consented to that, at least. The rooms were even more run-down than the other parts of the resort Kylo had seen; the luxurious wall hangings had torn, the mosaic floor had become overgrown with moss. Naboo had always been too alive for Kylo’s tastes, full of bugs that might sting you and plants that could give you a rash. All of that was on display in what was, unmistakably, Padme Amidala’s inner sanctum.

He studied the holopad on the writing desk with all the detachment he could summon. “Have it cleaned out and repaired, like the others. It’s suitable for any number of uses, including its original purpose.”

“You think I should move into your grandmother’s rooms? Seriously?”

For a moment he closed his eyes and let Finn’s incredulity, free of pity or care, wash over him like a balm. “It would be suitable.”

“For so many reasons, no.”

“Where will you live, then?”

“I -”

Hadn’t thought about it. Kylo was well aware. “It’s foolish to imagine you won’t have to set yourself apart from them.”

“I don’t.”

“Don’t you?”

“I’m a ’trooper. We’re all - no, I’m not doing this. Don’t project your hierarchy onto me. It has nothing to do with what we’re trying to do here.”

So many possible responses to that little outburst, and of course none of them would convince Finn of his wrongheadedness. Kylo considered his options, then bowed his head. “Of course.”

Finn didn’t respond. When Kylo’s patience ran out, he lifted his head again to see Finn staring at him, clearly incredulous. Angry, even.

A sting of awareness darted down Kylo’s spine. He set his jaw, kept his gaze locked to Finn’s, and said, “What.”

“You’re being a real dick about this.”

“I’m paid to protect you, not coddle your delusions.”

“You -!” But then he caught on, of course. He narrowed his eyes and stabbed a finger in Kylo’s direction. “No. You are not doing this with me. I’m a Senator, not a Princess. I’m not your mother and I’m definitely not your grandmother, okay? These rooms are going to be Jannah’s, or they’ll be converted to collective use, but first we’re going to remove your family’s artifacts. There are crates over there. Get to work.”

Kylo wished, as devoutly as he’d ever dreamed of succeeding Snoke or stealing Rey away from his uncle, that he could leave Naboo, leave the galaxy, and start anew somewhere no one had ever heard of the Skywalkers. At least then he could build his own notoriety.

Instead, he followed Finn’s directions, and said nothing more in the bargain.

“I think I’m going crazy.”

Rey didn’t even look up from her porridge. “Oh? How shocking. I don’t imagine it has anything to do with your bodyguard.”

“How’d you know?”

She shot him a look. “Dyad.”

“I haven’t touched him since we got to Naboo!” A horrible thought. “Oh no, has he been touching me when I’m asleep? Rey, you have to tell me if -”

“No, fuck’s sake, Finn. No.” She took a huge bite of porridge, her cheeks poking out like a porg’s. “But the last time I felt him, it was all over the place. You could barely even feel the dark side with all that going on.”

Somehow, that was even worse. “You’re trying to tell me I’m, what - fixing his evil for him?”

“No, I think he just has a crush on you.”

Finn was long since accustomed to hearing ridiculous things, so he didn’t fall out of his chair. Barely. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Sure.”

He tried and failed not to think about it later, when he was alone in the outbuilding he’d claimed for himself, Ren stationed across the hall. At least the walls here were thick and mostly intact. Dyad, Rey said in his mind. Ugh, ugh, he didn’t want to think about it. What could Kylo possibly be thinking about him that was anything other than disastrously bad news?

Finn knew Kylo - wanted him. But Kylo was evil. His Knights of Ren had been a whole evil clubhouse, and Palpatine had been pulling all their strings. Kylo probably thought sex was the same thing as dominance. He’d try to choke Finn, or sneer at him and try to hold him down. Finn would have to use their connection to force him to be gentle, to make him behave.

Oh no.

But it was too late: the image snagged in his mind, Kylo stretched out on Finn’s bed in Coruscant, holding Finn down with carefully calibrated gentleness. Proving to Finn that he could be trusted, kissing his way down Finn’s body and holding him down as he took Finn’s cock in his mouth.

In the present, alone on Naboo, Finn was hard. He pressed a hand against himself and screwed his eyes shut. This was so wrong for so many reasons - but -

It would be for Finn, the restraint. Kylo wasn’t naturally patient or nice, but for Finn he’d try. Republic technology kept the Force from him; Finn would touch his face and feel their connection roar to life, tell him to be gentle as he took Finn in his mouth. He’d hold Finn close, pin him to the bed to anchor him when it got to be too much.

Finn let out a ragged breath, then another, and pushed his pants down to wrap a hand around his dick. He thought of Kylo asking to leave the room, bowing his head, standing behind Finn and waiting for a command in the Senate. He thought of Kylo touching him - kissing him, like Finn had been so scared he might. Fucking him, begging Finn to tell him it was okay, that he was making Finn feel good. Coming inside of Finn and clinging to him, the Force spiraling inside both of them.

Fuck.

He came just like that, his mind full of dirty images of Kylo. It was beyond ridiculous. Inexcusable, even. His heart was still pounding from exertion when the shame set in. What if Kylo had heard him? Only a thin door separated them. What if he could smell the fact that Finn had just jerked off thinking about him?

It was a ridiculous thought, but it haunted him all night and into the morning, when he left his room to find Kylo sitting on the couch, wearing -

“Is that a dress?” Finn blurted out, in lieu of the thoughts ripping through his mind like blaster fire: I jerked off thinking about you! I want you to fuck me! You’re a war criminal!

Kylo raised his eyebrows and stood up. It wasn’t a dress. He was wearing a long tunic and pants, not that different from what he wore any day, except this time the darkest color on him was a deep purple belt. Everything else was white or tan.

“Jannah requested my assistance with structural renovations.”

Finn’s mouth moved faster than his brain, fueled by shame. “She knows you’re better at destroying stuff than building it, right?”

If the blow landed, Kylo didn’t show it. “I told her I’d follow directions.”

He might as well have pulled it right out of Finn’s head. Finn wished he knew more curse words. “Right, well…I think I’m due to help with figuring out logistics. Sanitation, food.”

“You’re good at that.”

A fact Kylo knew because he’d participated in the meetings resulting in assigning his group to janitorial duties. Right. “So you think it’s safe for us to be separated?”

Kylo raised his eyebrows and didn’t answer.

“I mean, legally you’re my bodyguard. And you’ve been a stickler for the rules.” All the ones that benefited him, anyway.

“It’s common for Senators to be less closely guarded among their intimates. Do you think any of the ’troopers want to kill you?”

“Of course not!”

“There you go,” Kylo said. He paused, looking away from Finn. “One thing that could cause trouble is me being seen as…relaxed. Your constituents hate me.”

“Justifiably.”

“Just so,” Kylo said. “Nevertheless.”

Nevertheless, if they saw Kylo loafing around, if they somehow intuited Finn’s feelings, they’d be hurt and angry. He was right; Finn hated how right he was. “Fine. I’ll check in this evening, then.”

For a second, there was something really weird between them. Kylo looked like he wanted to reach out; Finn’s fingers itched to push him away. Then he nodded and left without another word.

Finn didn’t watch his shoulders or the movement of his thighs. He didn’t.

Losing his connection to the Force had felt like losing an organ; most days, Kylo could hardly think around how weak he was, how stupid he felt. But looking at Finn this morning, he didn’t need the Force to tell him that something had happened.

Finn wouldn’t meet his gaze. He jumped when Kylo stepped closer to him. He had stuttered when they arranged to meet for dinner. There was only one possible explanation: being around his compatriots had reminded Finn of Kylo’s violent past, and he was trying to think of a strategy for amassing enough political capital to have Kylo executed and replaced by another bodyguard, likely Rey Skywalker herself. Or little Rose Tico, or Poe Dameron. They’d probably get married, too, and the romance of such a union would sway the entire Republic to the stormtroopers’ cause. Kylo was truly the only obstacle between Finn and a lifetime of galaxy-wide adulation.

He would not move out of the way.

It went beyond being determined to cling to life. He was the last of Vader’s descendants. He owed it to his family, loath him in death though they might, to finish out this assignment.

“I’m not going to bow to your preferences, you know,” Kylo told Finn at dinner. He’d spent a long day lifting boards for Jannah, who seemed to find his exhaustion amusing. He wouldn’t have felt charitable towards the smallest youngling, much less Finn.

Finn snorted into his soup. “Excuse me, what? I don’t have - I’m not - who said anything about preferences!”

“It’s as obvious as your stormtrooper training.” Kylo picked up his fork. “We don’t need to discuss it. Just be aware that my answer is no; if you try to force me, you’ll have to opt for assassination.”

Finn had the nerve to scowl. “Who said anything about force? What is wrong with you?”

“I believe you have access to records detailing exactly that.” Kylo had lost his appetite. He picked up his tray. “I’ll be outside. Notify me when you leave.”

“I wasn’t - what exactly are you thinking -”

If he had to continue to have this conversation, he suspected he’d go mad. He ignored Finn’s spluttering attempts at diplomacy and took up his position outside the dining room.

The room itself contained barely-faded opulence; it had been sealed thoroughly prior to evacuation of the resort. The hallway was another story. Water had leaked in over the years, so the floors were musty and soft in places; the decorative wallpaper, deliberately old-fashioned in style and materials, peeled egregiously, especially near the ceiling. It would take thousands of credits just to repair this short stretch, especially since the estate, residential rather than tourist now, couldn’t be relied upon to recoup cost.

Jannah had discussed that today. Not with Kylo himself, of course; he’d been reduced to something between furniture and draft mule, and no one had talked to him except to tell him where to put things. But she’d discussed it with a few of her little ’trooper lieutenants. It was nothing Kylo hadn’t inferred from Finn’s business: the ’troopers had few marketable skills outside violence, and were aiming for subsistence farming before trying to scale up into being something of a civilization.

It was a ridiculous goal. Yes, they’d been trained for violence above all; yes, they were by and large a pitiable group of malcontents, with trauma issues, chronic physical health problems, and neuroses an entire fleet of med-droids wouldn’t be able to cure. They were also a comprehensively educated, physically exceptional, intelligent group of people. It seemed obvious to Kylo that a careful program of societal development and community care would enable them to operate a thriving city-state within the decade; they had the technical expertise to allow for urban growth, and this corner of Naboo was ripe for tourism even before you counted the people who’d come just to gawk at Trooper City. By rejecting the impositions of the Empire, they were also rejecting their own wealthy future.

He’d tried to express a bit of that to Jannah. She’d given him the most poisonous look he’d ever seen on someone not sworn to the dark side. “That’s not what any of us want, including Finn.”

“You want to doom your people to a life of dull toil?”

“I want my people to be able to do what they want, and that’s not programming holopads or building speeders or letting rich people gawk at them.”

He’d wanted to ask her if she’d thought of her own persuasive abilities. How could she be sure she wasn’t swaying ‘her people’ into declaring goals that aligned with her own? But given Finn’s obvious antipathy towards him, self-preservation dictated that he not antagonize Jannah.

“Of course. My apologies,” he’d said, gritting his teeth all the while. Her flat look in return didn’t seem to indicate forgiveness, but as long as she didn’t take her grievances to Finn, Kylo didn’t care.

Now, he surveyed the hallway and considered, yet again, the stormtroopers’ goals. He’d come to no useful conclusions by the time Finn joined him.

“I’m leaving,” Finn said, short enough to be rude. Kylo didn’t point that out, only nodded and led the way back to his - their - rooms.

Finn shut himself in the bedroom right away. Kylo lay down on his own cot, too short for him by several inches. His ankles dangling down made the thought of sexual arousal almost comical - almost. He was still angry about Finn, infuriated by the stubbornness of every single ’trooper on Naboo, and all that anger transmuted into arousal as easily as if he still had access to the dark side.

He fucked his own hand quickly, efficiently. He thought of Finn as he came; how could he not? But it didn’t mean anything. Proximity wreaked havoc on the mind.

It didn’t mean anything.

Everything would be fine, probably, if only Finn could stop thinking about Kylo Ren.

He had so much to do, was the thing. The resort, nice as it was, needed changes everywhere, and he only had a short amount of time before he had to go back to Coruscant with a whole new set of demands for ’trooper support. Now that they’d settled somewhere permanent again, the compounding trauma of Kef Bir being attacked and all their shared history resulted in more problems, too - physical fights, bitter disputes, and emotionally troubled people that Jannah frantically tried to reach before -

“Three suicides,” Jannah said. “We had two the entire time on Kef Bir. I hate this.”

Finn did, too. And beyond that, he hated that despite all of that - the sheer agony of loss - he still thought of Kylo Ren. Not in the normal way, either, the way you’d think about your annoying bodyguard who took his job too seriously and was also a reviled war criminal. No, Finn was falling asleep in agony over his failure to protect his siblings, and then dreaming about being fucked by the person who’d architected their pain.

What was wrong with him? Was this the dark side? He desperately wanted to ask Rey, but thinking of what she’d do with that information -

Dyad, said Rey’s voice in his head yet again. There were no good options there; she’d revile him or sympathize with him, and either way, Finn wouldn’t find any peace.

“No,” he said one night, as dream-Kylo pressed big, warm fingers against his jaw.

The dream wavered. “No?”

“This is wrong. You’re evil.”

“I regret what I did and only want to please you, with my dick, which is enormous,” dream-Kylo said.

Letting Jannah talk him into joining the ’trooper romance reading club had been a terrible idea. “I’m waking up now,” Finn said, and opened his eyes into darkness.

This part of Naboo was louder than he’d expected. They had some very loud bugs, plus nocturnal birds, plus the patrol droids. He breathed into that not-quite-silence, feeling electric down to his toes, desperate for everything he couldn’t have. The worst part was that dream-Kylo had been wrong and Finn knew it; when he closed his eyes and wrapped his hand around his cock, he thought of real Kylo, who’d be awkward and scowl through it, who wouldn’t be able to take a compliment, who’d probably whine if Finn laughed at him.

He wanted that Kylo, who was two doors away and impossible to have. Finn fucked his hand as quickly as he could, closing his eyes against the shame that washed over him as soon as his orgasm faded.

He was still thinking about how badly he wanted to fuck Kylo Ren - or, more specifically, how to stop wanting to fuck Kylo Ren quite so badly - when he ran into Khajee.

Literally.

“Oops,” she said, spilling an armful of hurricane ties everywhere.

“Auuughghgh,” Finn said. He leaped to grab some of them. “I mean, oops, sorry, are you okay?”

“Are you okay?” She squinted at him. “You look weird.”

“I’m fine, I’m totally fine, nothing to see here - I mean! No worries. All good. Oh, hey, look, some of them bounced over here. What are we even gonna use these for, anyway?”

She gave him an I see right through you look, but said, “Some of the structures are really old, and Jannah wants them reinforced. If someone attacks -”

Like on Kef Bir. Right. “Oh. Cool. Uh, you need help?”

“Oh, does the great Stormtrooper Senator want to help little old me?” She laughed at the appalled look on his face. “Of course. This way.”

It was still hard for Finn to believe that they could stay here, doubly so when he did hands-on work to fix the estate up. Sure, it needed tons of work, but the estate itself had massive sun-filled meadows, still-functioning aquaponic greenhouses, and endless faded decorations that reminded Finn that it had been owned by a princess.

Kylo’s grandmother. They were here on Kylo Ren’s sufferance. Even hammering in hardware to keep roofs from being blown off by the next big storm, Finn couldn’t stop thinking about Kylo.

“I’m thinking we’ll start by setting up a mechanic’s shop - you know, there’s a town nearby with no mechanics at all? They have to travel almost a full day just to get a tractor fixed. We’ll be helpful there, and then we can look at farming, too.”

“It’s a good plan.” Finn had only been peripherally involved in it, which made him feel - well. He had a different job; he was supposed to represent his people in the Senate. But sometimes he worried he’d wake up one day and not know any of them at all.

“Hey, there you go again. You gotta tell me what you’re stressing about, Finn. You look like someone stole your helmet.”

Finn winced.

“Sorry. Bad choice of words - but seriously, what’s up?”

“Oh…you know. Stuff.”

Khajee gave him an unimpressed look.

“Worried about the upcoming session. About, um, my bodyguard. And…stuff.”

“He’s not what I thought he’d be,” Khajee said.

“What were you expecting?”

“Well, I was repair staff on the Finalizer for awhile.” Finn’s face must have betrayed his horror, because she snorted and said, “Yeah, exactly. But he’s different, don’t you think? I heard he might’ve been - cured - by not being able to access the dark side anymore.”

“He’s still a huge asshole,” Finn said. That, at least, he could be honest about.

“I mean, sure, but everyone knows this was Padmé Amidala’s estate.” Khajee shrugged. “None of us owe him anything, obviously, so you don’t have to like him. I don’t! But it’s nice he knows he owes us, at least.”

Finn didn’t answer at first, trying to figure out what he could possibly say. The silence lapsed into something natural that didn’t demand a response; birds chirped and insects buzzed above them as they finished the first cabin and moved on to the next one.

“I hope this helps,” Finn said as they set the droids up for cleaning the cabins.

“The ties, or -”

“Everything. Having a place to stay.” Finn shrugged. “I mean, it seems really weird, doesn’t it? It’s nothing like the barracks.”

“Oh, right, I always forget you didn’t actually spend that much time on Kef Bir.” She must have seen Finn’s flinch, because she rushed to add, “Because you were busy being our advocate! I know! I just meant - it was kind of like the less nice version of this. No duracrete in sight, just whatever we could find on the moon itself. Some foraged pieces of the Death Star, even, which in retrospect is seriously creepy.”

It had been creepy at the time, but Finn didn’t think either of them needed to have that conversation. “Right. And you can still tell these were luxury accommodations.”

“Real beds,” Khajee said with satisfaction. “Not to mention the ’freshers. Did you see -”

“Finn! Finn!” Another ’trooper careened to a stop in front of them, her speeder’s brakes wailing with the effort. “Jannah’s trapped on the east side of the property - hurry!”

“Go,” Khajee said immediately. Finn jumped on the back of the speeder, heart pounding.

What did they think he could do? “How’s she trapped? Who did it? Is it someone -”

“Not First Order. Structural damage. A wall fell, they were trying to repair it - one of the cabins, they didn’t realize the foundation wasn’t sound - she’s okay, it’s her leg, but she’s bleeding and we need to get her help before it gets worse.”

“Floor it,” Finn said, and the ’trooper did.

It only took a few minutes to get to the other side of the property. Finn ran towards the building, obvious with its sloping roof and rubble that had previously been walls. It wasn’t until he was close enough to cough at the dust the collapse had kicked up that he realized the hand sticking out of the rubble wasn’t Jannah’s at all. It was pale, huge, and unmistakably one of Kylo’s. “What -”

“He didn’t do anything,” Jannah shouted from inside the structure. “I told him to make himself useful and try to get me unstuck. And hurry, please, my femur is -”

“The broken bone has pierced the skin,” Kylo said in his flat voice. “Finn. Take my hand.”

Despite himself, Finn looked around. No fewer than thirty ’troopers were crammed into the clearing, holding onto each other, clearly terrified for Jannah. And Finn -

Finn knew they’d be terrified of him, once he did this. But he had no choice, really, if he wanted to be able to look himself in the eye tomorrow. He stepped forward and grabbed Kylo’s hand, opening them both to the Force.

For a moment, Naboo itself disappeared. All of Finn’s half-formed longings, his nighttime embarrassments, his wariness of the Senate and his desperate need to belong coalesced into a wave of emotion that he couldn’t hope to keep from Kylo. He received anger in return, sharp and clear, mixed with muddy terror and a searing-hot need.

Kylo had wanted to touch him to get at the Force. Finn knew that now. But apparently, getting at the Force made him hard, wanting. Violent, just as it always had, but also hungry.

No. They needed to focus. Finn pulled Kylo’s power into himself. The knowledge of what they needed to do sat at the front of his mind. He couldn’t have held the roof up while shifting the walls on his own; it required control and experience he didn’t have. But Kylo handed that over like it didn’t matter, lacing his fingers around Finn’s hand and showing him how to take their power and push.

It only took a minute, maybe less. They only held the rocks up long enough to let Jannah and Kylo exit the structure, after which Finn - still clutching Kylo’s hand in full view of an ever-growing crowd - carefully lowered the remnants of the building.

He couldn’t let go of Kylo’s hand, he realized, because Kylo was using their power to support Jannah. Her leg was, indeed, seriously injured, and Kylo was using their power to suppress her pain, too. Her eyes were out of focus, her pupils enormous, her face twisted in a half-forgotten rictus of agony.

“Make a hole!” he shouted. “Move, move, we need to get to the clinic now!”

Fortunately, even the greenest of their bunch had emergency training. They completed evac with no further incident, walking the hundred yards to the makeshift clinic, sweating into each other’s hands as they carefully lowered Jannah onto a cot.

After that, it was up to the droids. They were a decade out of date, but Jannah’s injury didn’t require the latest and greatest tech. They had her leg set and immersed in bacta before it occurred to Finn that he really, very much did not need to be holding Kylo’s hand anymore.

He dropped it immediately, feeling like he’d just discovered bugs crawling all over him. “I - thank you.”

“No need.”

“It wouldn’t have occurred to me to hold her up like that.”

How did it occur to you, he didn’t say, but Kylo guessed the direction of his thoughts anyway. “My previous position required me to be conscious of others’ bodies.”

“So you could choke them into compliance.”

“More or less.”

“Well, still. I’m glad you were there.”

“I don’t think she will be,” Kylo said quietly, watching Jannah shift and scowl in her drug-induced sleep.

“She will.” She wouldn’t be grateful; Jannah was their leader because she refused to grant anyone who’d enabled their mistreatment legitimacy. But she was also truly their leader: she’d recognized Kylo’s usefulness even before Finn had. “Anyway - I’ll watch over her. If you want to, uh, clean up.”

“I’m your bodyguard.”

“I know, but I think I’m safe here. You were right about that.”

“I meant that next time you want me to leave, you should just order me to.” Kylo bowed his head, looking stiff and awkward, like a taxidermied bird that had died mid-squawk. He left before Finn could find words for him, or even figure out how annoyed he was. Medium? A lot? He was exhausted. It was impossible to say.

One of the droids brought him some caf, which he drank gratefully. He propped his feet up on a faded silk storage bench and waited for Jannah to wake up.

“…should have just gone back to your room, you idiot.”

Finn blinked and dragged himself back to waking. Jannah was glaring at him. Her leg looked good as new, and the bacta tank was nowhere to be seen. Whoops. “I didn’t want you to be alone.”

“It wasn’t that bad.” She sat up, closing her eyes against what Finn assumed was a wave of exhaustion. “Apparently we should have droids inspect all the buildings before we go inside them, though. Your bodyguard explained that to me while I bled out on the floor.”

“Kriff, Jannah, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. I think he was trying to distract me. It kind of worked.” She sighed, staring at the ceiling. “And he was right. It should’ve occurred to me. So many things…what the fuck are we even doing here, Finn?”

It was a question that had started in the back of Finn’s mind as a whisper and now dogged his every nightmare. He shook his head, his throat closing up.

“I know.” She closed her eyes. “I just…there’s so much and I never - that was the second cave-in I’ve been part of in two months. How am I supposed to - how does anyone trust me to know what to do? When I’m just - an idiot, a fucking -”

When she started crying, he didn’t give himself time to think. He reached out and grabbed her hand, squeezing it fiercely. “You’re not an idiot. Jannah. You’re not.”

“Tabloids disagree.”

“They think we signed up for this. Fuck them and the bandwidth they’re wasting. You’re doing your best, we all are. No one here wants anyone else leading them and you know it. Do you really think we, of all people, can’t tell what a good leader looks like?”

She didn’t open her eyes. “Laying it on a little thick, Senator Finn.”

“If I were lying, why would I even be here?”

There were a few obvious answers, ranging in cruelty: you care about your career, or I know your bodyguard’s secret, or even you are too weak to admit it’s not what you want. But none of them were true - or at least, Finn wouldn’t let himself be blackmailed over Kylo, not really. Jannah had to know that, didn’t she?

She sighed into the tense silence. “I don’t want you to be right. I want to be a failure. Then at least I could quit.”

He’d never been good at comforting people. When Slip had cried after being beaten by Phasma, Finn had offered to knock him out until he felt better. Still, he knew exactly what the last several months had cost Jannah; he knew he needed to try, at least, to help her. “Rey would say you won’t feel any better if you quit.”

Jannah snorted. “Rey’s too optimistic.”

She sounded fond, so Finn smiled. “Yeah, I know. But she’s not wrong, in this case.”

“We can’t all be Skywalker heirs.”

“But we can be someone. We can start something.” Finn thought back to the General: a legend, rich and famous and reviled by the New Republic for seeing the truth they’d been so determined to deny. “Even if it ends badly. We have to try.”

“Thanks. That’s very cheerful.”

He jostled her arm. “Well, I can get Rey to come in if you want cheerful.”

“Ugh. No thanks. Not yet, anyway. I need to shower - to get myself together before I deal with the Jedi.”

There was something weird there, something stilted in the way Jannah said get myself together. “Has Rey been rude to you?” It was hard to imagine, but -

“No, no, definitely not. I just feel - don’t you? - she’s a Jedi, she’s famous. A legend. I don’t want to look like an idiot in front of her.”

Finn had been an idiot in front of Rey since the moment he’d met her, so he couldn’t really relate, but it didn’t seem worth pressing at that moment in time. Instead, he said, “Anyway, next time you get stuck in a landslide or what have you - call for Rey. She won’t have to hold Kylo Ren’s hand to get you out.”

Jannah snorted. “Right, I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Jannah! Oh thank the Force, you’re all right!” Rey raced past Finn and threw herself into a hug - and Jannah, to Finn’s shock, returned it gladly.

Apparently, the Force really was with the Jedi. Finn could tell when he was becoming a third wheel. “Okie doke, I’m going to go shower. Um, glad your leg’s okay.”

They both waved, and Rey stole his chair. He was going to give her so much shit for that - later, when Jannah wasn’t smiling at her like she’d hung a moon.

The only upside of having such a shitty couple days was that Finn felt no guilt at all about barricading himself in his room.

First he had a nice, long cry. Then he spent some time in the ’fresher, making himself feel a little less like it was the third week of a Resistance deep cover campaign. Then and only then did he lie in bed, close his eyes, and let himself think about the overwhelming rush of desire that he’d felt when he grabbed Kylo’s hand.

It was wrong and he knew it. They were in a desperate position, more precarious than they’d been since the ceasefire. That Finn had the time and inclination to think about Kylo Ren, who’d killed so many people - a monster who wasn’t even really sorry for his crimes - that he was able to think about him sexually at all, that he wanted him -

Unforgivable.

Yet still you want it, whispered part of him. And he did. He couldn’t lie to himself when the Force had presented his desire so clearly - when he’d given in to it, opened up to it.

Fuck. Fuck. Opened up to it.

Kylo would do anything to keep his access to the Force, that much Finn was sure of. He thought back to before he’d realized what was happening, when Kylo had sniffed him. It had been so ridiculous, but now, lying in bed, his dick in his hand, all he could think of was the focus on Kylo’s face when he’d done it. What would it be like to have that focus on him, on all of him? To feel Kylo’s desire through the Force, to cling to him - to come on his fingers, with his satisfaction and need and obedience winding through the Force, all Finn’s for the taking?

He wanted it. He wanted it so badly that he came just from the rush of daring to imagine it, need overtaking him like a ship going into hyperspace.

Was this the dark side? It felt like it might be. He cleaned off his hand and screwed his eyes shut, trying to breathe through the panic threatening to break free of his ribcage.

He was in so, so, so much trouble.

Kylo heard the too-loud moan first, then focused enough to hear quieter, frantic movement. He’d already had himself in hand, needing to feel something other than the thin veil of rage that descended when he thought of all the power denied to him by the New Republic’s sentence. He came listening to Finn’s groans, imagining what Finn would be willing to give him if he opened up that paper-thin door, dropped to his knees, and took.

Chapter 5

They’d barely gotten the main building habitable again before it was time for Finn to go back to the Senate.

“Don’t forget, no one expects miracles from you,” Jannah told him as the droids loaded up his ship.

“So expectations are low enough that I really can’t fuck it up? I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” he said when Jannah moved to smack him. “But -”

“Expectations are very high, it’s just we all know what the Senate’s like. After they saddled you with Kylo Ren, we all just kind of…” Jannah shook her head. “We know what you’re up against. You’re a good politician, Finn - we don’t want anyone else. But don’t be too hard on yourself.”

“The odds of pro-stormtrooper legislation passing are insurmountably low,” Kylo said in his faded monotone.

Jannah didn’t jump, but her shoulders tightened. Finn hadn’t even noticed Kylo approaching. “Fortunately, you’re not being paid for your political acumen,” she said. “Finn, if you happen to leave your bodyguard on Naboo, we can take care of him.”

Kylo snorted, obviously picking up on the threat. Finn had to bite back a smile. “Nah. You guys have so much work to do, you don’t have time to babysit.”

He half expected Kylo to stomp off, but instead he just waited through Finn and Jannah chatting - about first steps for the next relief bill, and who might be expected to support them, and what they could do about the black mold in the resort’s store rooms. When Finn finally wrapped it up and went to board the ship, Kylo followed without complaint, a shadow at Finn’s right shoulder.

“It’s weird you’ve decided to be good at your job now,” Finn said after they’d taken off.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Following me, not interjecting - well, interjecting less.”

“We’ll be back on Coruscant within the week. There are very few people on Naboo, especially among the stormtroopers, who wish you harm. Nearly everyone on Coruscant does.”

Finn knew that, of course; how could he have missed it? But hearing it said in Kylo’s flat tone - knowing that it was undeniably true, and would be true no matter what Finn did -

Ugh. He couldn’t think about that right now; he’d go insane. “Your contract ends in six months. You should let me know if you want me to renew it.”

Kylo immediately started staring over Finn’s shoulder. “It should be obvious that I prefer a bodyguard position to returning to a prison ship.”

“I’m trying not to assume.” Or had he become selfish enough to want to hear Kylo say it, to force him to acknowledge his preference? Finn suppressed a shiver. “It’s fine. We don’t need to talk about it right now.”

“Renew the contract,” Kylo said. “Excuse me.”

The rest of the trip was lonely, but thankfully quick; even the New Republic’s least powerful Senator got a ship with a good hyperdrive. Once they were back on Coruscant, he was drawn into a whirl of activity, scheduling committee meetings and attending preliminary debates for the session’s legislation. Kylo attended all of them too, standing in the back of the room with the other protection details, never speaking out of turn or touching Finn at all. It was good, Finn told himself with a decided lack of enthusiasm. It meant Kylo had learned how to do his job. That was the point, wasn’t it? All the rest - the strange feelings, the Force moving between them - all of that was just a distraction.

Sure, and banthas could fly.

Then the social bullshit started.

“But of course, one must ask oneself what the New Republic - newly formed, destitute from the First Order and the Resistance’s militaristic tactics - owes former belligerents.”

Finn stared at Senator Rellyn and wondered, dull with old anger, if he honestly thought he was the first person to advance this argument. Maybe he’d slept through the ten or so times some asshole had said the same thing during debate sessions. “Citizens of the Republic are entitled to refugee assistance,” he said, as mildly as he could.

“Citizens! Ha! A bunch of entitled, freeloading war criminals are citizens now! Oh, don’t give me that look; I know advancing their cause is why you have a career. But you’re not like them, are you? You left.”

Somehow, that wasn’t an argument Finn had heard before. “They’re my brothers and sisters, Senator Rellyn. I’m just like them.”

“Ha! I won’t gainsay you, son. A Senator’s salary must seem like untold riches to you. But let me give you a few tips. People are going to invite you to events, and you need to be smart about the fees you charge, for you see -”

“Senator,” Kylo’s flat voice said behind him.

Cold relief washed through him. “Yes?”

“The traitor,” Rellyn whispered. But Finn had already turned to look at Kylo, putting Rellyn out of his mind as best as he could.

“You’re needed elsewhere.” Kylo’s eyes flicked to Rellyn, then away. Fury and betrayal howled in Finn’s mind in the Force. He wished he could pretend it was from Kylo.

“Lead the way,” Finn said. His voice only shook a little.

They made it out of the conference room and up three floors before Finn thought to ask, “What am I needed for, exactly?”

Kylo gave him an unimpressed look, then went into their apartment, checking the area before waving Finn in. “Nothing. You looked upset: it’s my job to look out for you. You have another hour before you’re due to meet with the Senators from Naboo and New Hosnian.”

Another hour. Finn closed his eyes as the door whooshed shut behind him and took deep breaths, one after another, trying to think through the morass of rage Rellyn had provoked in him. “Tell me what you think of the bill.”

A loaded pause. Then: “What I think of the bill?”

“Trust me, you can’t possibly have a worse opinion than Rellyn, and I have to be able to talk about it in an hour.”

He could tell Kylo wasn’t buying it, but at that particular moment he didn’t care. Kylo might not feel bad for his egregious crimes, but Finn was completely sure he wouldn’t bring up speaking fees, and he needed to be able to talk about this with a clear head.

“You’re not asking for enough,” Kylo said finally.

“Ha. Pull the other one.”

“I’m serious.” Kylo folded his arms behind his back. He looked ridiculous in a Senate security uniform, standing in the middle of Finn’s cold, borderline-unfurnished living room. “You ask for a small stipend and permission to form a city-state on the estate on Naboo. This will be whittled down in committee to permission, with no economic aid at all.”

“Refugees are entitle to resettlement funds.”

“But your bill barely acknowledges that. You heard Rellyn. You’ll be argued out of stormtroopers being legally considered refugees before the bill even comes to debate. And of course, when it’s passed, it will be positioned as a victory, the magnanimous New Republic granting a tiny corner of the galaxy to its most-abused inhabitants.” Kylo shrugged. “Meanwhile, your people will starve, or at a bare minimum spend generations trying to raise their standard of living above abysmal poverty. By the next Senate session, their plight will be old news. There will be no traction for another bill.”

It was all stuff Finn already knew, details he’d already considered, but something about the casual way Kylo discussed it filled him with helpless anger. “What exactly do you think I’m supposed to do, then?”

“Demand thrice the standard refugee stipend as recompense for time spent enslaved and drop the permission to resettle entirely. You can negotiate with Naboo directly.”

That was the political maneuvering of a despot. “What makes you think they’ll agree to it? They’re a sovereign planet, why would they agree to it?”

“You’re settling on private property. They gain more to agree to your settling, enriching the planet with infrastructure and taxes paid, than they do trying to fight it.”

Right. They were settling on Kylo’s dead grandmother’s private property. “About that. Are you dumping assets to avoid taxes, or -”

“I have no use for agrarian land in a planet distantly connected with relatives I never met and have long since forsworn,” Kylo said coolly.

Because his evil grandfather had killed his wife. Finn really hated Skywalker drama. “Okay. Well. I guess I’ll run your idea past the Senators when they get here.”

“Excuse me?”

“My meeting.”

“You’re telling them the details of the bill?”

“I have to. I don’t really have allies currently.”

“Rey. Rose. Poe.” Kylo scowled, hands curling into fists, and opened his mouth again. “Not to mention -”

Finn spoke quickly, mostly because if Kylo decided to berate him for some imagined political misstep, Finn was going to lose his mind. “Allies who are also Senators.”

“Fine,” Kylo gritted out. “You’re a charismatic speaker.”

“Are you saying you have faith in my abilities to persuade people? You know I won’t use the Force for it.”

Kylo shrugged, sullen. “I’m saying if you fuck it up it’ll be bad for your people. But you know that already.”

There was something going on here that he didn’t understand, something he was missing. Kylo’s cheeks were red, his hands moving minutely against his pants. He looked restless and irritable. What are you trying to say? Finn imagined asking - but of course, Kylo wouldn’t be honest with him. He might not even know himself.

It wouldn’t matter if he stepped forward and caught Kylo’s hands in his own. The moment they touched, he’d know exactly what Kylo was thinking and feeling. There would be no more misunderstandings, no confusion.

And of course, Rey would then know all about Finn’s boner, and his dumb impulsive choices. Right. “I do know that,” he said. “Thanks. I’m going to - go get ready.”

It felt like cowardice when he ran into his room, locking the door behind him.

During that meeting, Finn made his capabilities very clear.

He likely imagined Kylo wasn’t listening. Kylo was sure Finn would lock him in his tiny room if he thought he could get away with it, but Kylo’s own job description would never permit such neglect, any more than his own sense of curiosity would allow him to ignore the Senatorial ramblings.

Naboo and New Hosnian were good choices. Naboo, of course, had already permitted stormtrooper settlement on her lands. New Hosnian had powerful antipathy towards the First Order. Despite that, it was an uphill battle. Finn began by discussing the stormtroopers’ current achievements, then segued smoothly into listing out the challenges created by a lack of funding while trying to build and improve on their land. It was persuasive rhetoric, but Kylo already knew what the Senators’ response would be before Naboo said, “I have noticed, Senator, that you haven’t mentioned the source of your funding.”

“It’s not particularly interesting,” Finn said. “We’ve been granted use of an old estate.”

“By Kylo Ren, I understand.”

“By the estate of Leia Organa,” Finn said. “It’s true that Kylo Ren had to sign off on it, but he has a vested interest in my continuing to be a Senator as well.”

How interesting to hear the public portrayal of events, and how fascinating to be so wholly ignored. He might as well be an armchair. Or a stormtrooper.

They continued speaking over him, Finn doing the dance of impotent diplomacy that inevitably resulted from refusing to use the Force to enhance his natural persuasiveness. It was a self-imposed limitation that Kylo neither understood nor respected, but Finn somehow managed to work past it. By the end of his appointment, he had sincere promises from both Senators to support his bill in debates.

Not that you could trust Senators to keep their word - but it was still more than Kylo had thought Finn would secure.

“That was well done,” he said after they’d left.

Finn barely glanced at him. “Thanks.”

“Of course, they could still renege on the deal.”

“If you’re trying to goad me into touching you, it’s not going to work.”

Kylo blinked. When the world failed to right itself, he blinked again. Finn still stood there, arms crossed, staring at Kylo with a skeptical look on his face. “Excuse me.”

“You know I don’t want your - commentary.”

“My support was offered in good faith.”

“Right, right.” Finn let out a slow breath. “Look, just drop it, okay?”

“Obviously they wouldn’t renege if you used the Force to persuade them to keep their promises.”

“Drop it.”

But Kylo didn’t want to. Something drove him forward, a madness centered around the furrow in Finn’s brow, the calm way he’d talked the Senators around to his side. “I wonder that you think it’s unfair, to use your own power to hold someone to their promises. You’re flinching even now; you clearly think it’s cheating. But -”

Finn launched himself forward, quick as a blaster bolt. He stopped a breath away from Kylo, his hand trembling next to Kylo’s neck, face screwed up a furious glare.

Sparks danced between them, the Force thirsty for another conduit.

“Do it,” Kylo said.

“No.”

“You want to. You think I can’t tell, even as I am now?”

“I think you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Finn said, and gripped Kylo’s neck in a firm, furious hand.

They both gasped at the contact, indistinguishable from one another. To Kylo it felt like easing himself into a cool pool of water after a day spent in the desert. He could feel Finn inside him -

That’s the worst possible phrasing for this.

Finn shuddered and dropped his hand, but Kylo grabbed his wrist before he lost the Force, pulling Finn towards him. “No. Please. Just…” He took a deep breath, his lips just barely touching Finn’s temple. “Just one minute. Just one.”

For a moment, he thought Finn was going to step back anyway, and he had the stomach-turning realization that he was willing - he would beg. He’d go down on his knees. He’d do anything to keep being able to feel this.

“Kylo,” Finn breathed, and stepped back.

The Force disappeared. Rage descended upon him.

“These rooms aren’t really private,” Finn said. “Just…I’ll be in my bedroom if you need me.”

“I think I’ve been plain about the extent to which I need you,” Kylo said. He made his voice as cold as possible, but his weakness shone through anyway: he was trembling head to toe.

Finn half smiled. He looked sad, of all things, as if he pitied Kylo. Perhaps he was just sad about his own inability to take what was on offer. “Yeah, I know. I’ve got back to back appointments all day tomorrow, so try to get some rest, okay?”

Kylo didn’t dignify that with an answer.

Finn needed to learn more curse words. The ones he knew just weren’t doing the job right now.

He’d let his anger get the better of him, like he was Kylo Ren smashing a control panel or Phasma beating one of the new recruits. He’d felt darkness rising in him, and instead of dealing with it, he’d done what he wanted: he’d reached out and touched Kylo, skin on skin, the Force howling from their shared satisfaction at the touch.

Yes, Kylo had wanted it - but that didn’t really matter, did it? Finn hadn’t stopped to consider little things like what Kylo wanted. He’d only acted on his darkest impulses.

He hoped Kylo would avoid him after this. He didn’t want or need his commentary, his approval or disapproval. Really, he didn’t want Kylo’s acknowledgment at all. Thinking of the land in Naboo and his brothers’ and sisters’ plans for it made his head hurt, because he knew their stability depended on Kylo’s sufferance and he just hated it.

There had to be a long game, some reason Kylo was doing it. There had to be some trickery behind the money, the land, the endless goading. The alternative was just too much to consider.

And yet, it was still easier to think about, or think around, than the meeting he’d just had. Hearing Kylo belittle his attempts at politicking had sucked almost as much as the meeting. He’d been furiously restraining himself as the Senators, who should hate the First Order and care about justice at least as much as Finn, equivocated over the right to resettlement funds, the right to independence, and the Republic’s shitty treatment of ’troopers.

Bliobius of New Hosnian had even said, “After all, didn’t we all do things we regret? No one saw the First Order coming. The stormtroopers’ lot in life is pitiable, to be sure, but what right do they have for special consideration?”

Every right, was the answer, and Finn had choked back furious shouting, had restrained the darkness in him that rose when he heard people dismissing being kidnapped, brainwashed, beaten and abused, as some kind of action they’d taken. He could dress the whole Senate down and it wouldn’t matter, wouldn’t get Jannah what she needed to build them all a home. He had to play the game.

He hated it. He hated it. He hated it so much that Kylo Ren’s shitty commentary, his flat refusal to apologize, seemed almost more honest than anything anyone else had to say.

That’s just him being a familiar evil, said the Rey-voice in his head. She wasn’t wrong, but -

But. It had felt so good to give in and touch him.

Finn groaned and put his head down on his desk. Maybe he could just opt out of everything, quit his job and move to some uninhabited moon. It had worked for Luke Skywalker, hadn’t it? For awhile, anyway.

He dreamed he was in the Senate chamber, the last words of his speech for ’trooper rights still echoing through the speakers. Kylo stood behind him, arms clasped behind his back. “Well done,” he whispered as the first murmur of reaction broke out across the chamber.

He was suffused with warmth, connected to the Force with a strength he’d only felt a few times before. The chamber was full of doubt and anger, rage and concern, but underlying all of that was a powerful sense of possibility. He hadn’t used the Force to persuade, not in the way Kylo kept telling him to try, but he had been connected. He’d felt more than he’d ever felt before, and he saw his efforts reflected in the thoughtful nods and urgent motioning of the Senators around him.

In the dream, he had the power to effect change, and he used it.

But of course, reality was more complicated. For starters, his bill had to make it out of committee.

“Given the extensive legislation required to maintain a recovery fund, surely the Senator from -” the senior senator from Carida paused, a flicker of delicate malice passing over her expression. “I’m sorry, where do your people claim, now?”

“I still represent the ’trooper diaspora of Kef Bir.”

“Mm. Well, surely the Senator can recognize that some amendments are inevitable.”

“Of course,” Finn said. His voice didn’t shake; he told himself it was an achievement in itself to remain calm and rise above the petty digs at his people. “And I anticipate plenty of amendments and changes to the text of the bill itself. But Senator, I’m sure you recognize that a rider preventing dispensation of funds without a two-thirds Senate vote for its allocation will prevent the fund from being used.”

“Senator! It sounds like you think I want to ruin your bill. I assure you, I want nothing of the sort.”

He thought about mentioning what he knew of her: that her family were staunch Empire loyalists, that Kylo recognized her personally from his time doing diplomatic work under Snoke, that he’d read her book arguing that a strong Senate worked best under a powerful Emperor. He’d known already that she’d try to undermine him; nothing she was saying came as a surprise.

But what he hadn’t expected was the anger. No, it was stronger than that; it was rage, simmering hot under his skin. He’d learned to deal with this kind of thing early on as a Senator, but this time, with the memory of Kef Bir’s collapse - Jannah’s terrified face - his own impotent grief -

It was unbearable.

He took a deep breath, his expression unchanging. When he was confident he could speak without shouting or crying, he said, “I know perfectly well that this law doesn’t align with your views, Senator. For the sake of not wasting time, I’d appreciate it if you’d acknowledge it.”

“I simply am of the very popular opinion that stormtroopers, existing outside society as they do, given very little education and frequently plucked from barely-sentient groups of farmers, are not the best people to determine how to spend an unusually generous refugee stipend.”

“That opinion is legally discriminatory under the Galactic Constitution,” Finn said. “Kylo, were you recording just now?”

“Yes.”

Carida reared her head back. “Are you implying you intend to blackmail me?”

“No, I’m implying I intend to file a formal complaint. I know you’ll be fine, but it’ll be a pain, and in the meantime I’ll be busy funding your challenger. With my own money, I assure you.”

“Well said, and appropriately identified,” Senator Bliobius said. “Carida, you’ve lost this fight; sit down. No one else here will vote for such a draconian amendment anyway. We barely get time off as it is. Now, let’s move on to Amendment 3A: resolved that the Senate shall create a trust, which access is granted -”

“Don’t move.”

It wasn’t a blaster pressed against the back of his head, nor was it a lightsaber - obviously, or he’d be dead. It was a simple knife, rough-hewn but sharp.

Finn said, “Should I hold up my hands, or did you mean -”

“Don’t move,” hissed his assailant. “You too, Kylo Ren.”

Strange. Kylo had been sentenced in public, but his face had been obscured per New Republic privacy laws. Was this another ’trooper? A First Order loyalist? A Resistance veteran? Too many people had too many reasons to know his face. “Hey, what if instead of stabbing me in the spine -”

“The knife would enter your skull and sever your brain stem. You’d be paralyzed for approximately five minutes as you bled out.”

“Great, thanks, I’d rather not, though,” Finn said. “What if, instead, we talked about this?”

Bliobius’s expression twisted with annoyance. “Finn! You cannot negotiate with terrorists!”

The low hum of a blaster sounded just before Finn felt heat near his skin. “Don’t think I won’t shoot you both for interfering,” his captor said.

In, out. In, out. Finn breathed carefully, so carefully, thinking of Jannah and Khajee, of all the ’troopers, of his hopes for the future. Of Rey, so sure he’d be good at this. “I don’t want to die. Are you going to kill me?”

“Depends on what you do.”

Whoever this person was, it really didn’t seem like they’d taken many hostages before. “So tell me about the option that lets me live.”

“Senators,” his captor sneered. “You’re all the same. You aren’t even a real Senator, but you’re just as self-serving as any of them.”

“Finn is straightforward and honest and cares about his people,” Kylo said. “You’d know that if you were one of them, of course. Which means you must be someone else. I wonder who.”

Finn managed not to vocalize his annoyance - barely. “Not really the time, Kylo.”

“Kylo?” muttered Bliobius.

“I’m dealing with a lot of competing interests, here,” Finn told him, trying his best to sound reasonable. “So, how about we just -”

Kylo reached out, quick as a spark of Rey’s lightning, and grabbed Finn’s wrist.

The Force rushed into him, and his rage wasn’t banked. It was sharpened, honed, directed by the Force, filling him with bright and pure intent.

He knocked Bliobius and Carida out first, to eliminate witnesses, then raised a hand and sent the Force to grip Finn’s attacker. “Let him go or I’ll crush every bone in your body.”

“You’ll accept the threats of a First Order attack dog?” the attacker asked Finn. “What a cowardly reversal from the savior of the stormtroopers.”

“The Senate assigned me a bodyguard. He’s doing his job. Let me go.”

“Or don’t,” Kylo said. “It’s been so long since I killed someone. They keep me very well leashed. It would be wonderful to kill you.”

Oh, how he’d enjoy it. The dark side fairly sang with his desire. It would take so little effort like this, with his and Finn’s power both flowing through him.

And why shouldn’t he? They were threatening Finn. If Finn died, Kylo had failed in his mission and he’d be sent back to prison. More importantly, he’d lose his new access to the Force. It felt better this way than it ever had when he was alone. No rage, no pain, could compare to the sheer visceral satisfaction of feeling his and Finn’s powers combined.

“Kylo, no,” Finn said in a low voice. He felt the concomitant tug at his mind, Finn’s discomfort and - ugh - worry coming through clearly.

Don’t do this, Finn said through their link. Kylo felt the Force wrapping around himself, Finn’s care and determination overpowering every other sensation. It was disgusting that he could use the Force like that, to dominate through pure good intention. It made Kylo want to lash out, to throttle him, to -

Drop to his knees. Give Finn whatever he wanted. Find benediction with his mouth, his hands.

Everything happened at once during that hazy moment of disconnect. Guards rushed inside, apprehending Finn’s would-be assassin. Kylo dropped his hand from Finn’s wrist, severing his own connection to the Force out of fear someone would realize what he was doing. Finn gave the newly awakened Bliobius a hard look and said, “We’ll discuss this later.”

In altogether too short a period of time, Kylo and Finn were alone in their rooms.

“I’m not going to apologize,” Kylo said, anticipating the same tedious moral lectures he always seemed to get from light-siders.

“I wasn’t going to ask for an apology,” Finn said. “Actually, I was going to call you an idiot.”

Finn watched Kylo process his statement. For a moment he hoped for violence. His whole body felt like a too-tight coupling, ready to blow.

The dark side still coursed through him. It was - wrong, but wrong in a very specific way, feeling the aftereffects of Kylo inside of him. It felt exactly as dirty as that description sounded.

“I’m not an idiot,” Kylo finally said, sounding more like a sulky teenager than anything else.

“You are,” Finn said. “You almost let the dark side pull you in, and for what? To do your job?”

“Some of us don’t abandon our posts the first time things get difficult.”

His words were cold, intended to hurt - but they hit their mark. Finn thought of Slip, of his terror and anger and despair. He thought of the Senate, adamantly opposed to dealing honestly with the ’troopers. And he thought of Kylo, every ’trooper’s nightmare and arguably the only reason Finn was alive right now.

“Fuck you.”

“Try it.” Kylo took one step forward, then another. “Try it, and see what happens, Finn. Take advantage of this situation. Seize power, and use it.”

He was tall. Finn didn’t care. He’d faced down plenty of tall, evil people in his life. “Fuck off.”

“Fuck me, fuck off…you can’t decide what you want, can you?”

Before Finn could answer, Kylo kissed him.

It felt almost predictable. Almost right. Kylo’s skin was fever-hot and his hand shook when it cupped Finn’s jaw. The Force flowed between them, through Finn, bright and glass-sharp. Finn felt desperation and knew it was Kylo’s, but the horrible feeling sparked a twin in Finn’s chest, need and want and anger all tangled together.

It was Kylo who broke the kiss, stumbling back, his face contorting on itself as their connection blinked out of existence. He opened his mouth - Finn braced himself for caustic comments -

Kylo left, stomping to his little closet of a room, the door swishing shut behind him.

Finn walked on wobbly legs into his own bedroom, not sitting down so much as finally letting his knees give out. He had half an erection and his whole head was spinning. He felt like Kylo had reached inside him and - fuck. Fuck, he wished he had.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

There was an incident report to review and sign. There were interviews to give. Kylo was inspected by a judge and a med droid to ensure he hadn’t given the would-be assassins information.

(“I didn’t,” he told Finn, his expression indicating he thought Finn might call him a liar.

Finn rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know. I was with you in the Force, remember?”

And then it had been too awkward to keep arguing, because of course, they both remembered. That was the whole problem.)

Finn was kept so busy during the lead-up to the floor vote that he barely had time to think about the assassination attempt. Technically he didn’t have time to think about Kylo, either, but he still managed it, a bit. More than he wanted to.

Then the Senate convened for a vote. Finn gave a speech beforehand. Both senators from Naboo and New Hosnian lent their support.

The vote failed by a 20-point margin anyway.

Chapter 6

Finn kept reminding himself that he’d been expecting the vote to fail.

It had always been a long shot. Finn might’ve joined the Resistance, but he wasn’t exactly a wide-eyed idealist. He knew what Senators are like, how many of them had stood aside while children were stolen and Imperial loyalists mounted a coup. How many of them had profited, even, on the theft happening right under their noses.

He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t naive. But that night, alone in his suite, he felt like the biggest fool in the galaxy, a contemptible idiot. He hated himself. He hated the Senate. He hated -

“Rey Skywalker and Poe Dameron would like to see you.”

He hated his fucking bodyguard, who’d decided to pretend to be a butler for the night.

“You’re not responsible for screening my contacts,” Finn snapped. “Let them in.”

“I’m responsible for screening all security risks, Senator,” Kylo said in that provocatively toneless voice he sometimes adopted. Finn wanted to throw something at his head.

It would be nice if this was the dark side influencing him, but he knew it wasn’t. It was just him, Finn, furious and alone.

Well, not quite alone. “Those motherfuckers,” Poe said, fury infusing his quiet tone. He’d come prepared: he held three glasses and three bottles of liquor.

“How dare they!” Rey said hotly. She flopped down on the floor, glaring at the ceiling. “To just reject your entire argument like that! To pretend it all doesn’t matte!”

“Unbelievable,” Poe agreed, pouring them each a glass of bright blue liquor.

It should’ve been comforting. It was, kind of. But Kylo was standing in the corner, watching them with his hands folded behind his back. He obviously didn’t expect to be invited into the drinking, nor had Poe anticipated it. Fine. That was fine. Finn didn’t want to hang out with Kylo, anyway.

But if he had been talking to Kylo about this, he suspected Kylo would just be spewing contempt for the whole process: not just the Senators who’d voted against him, but the need to plead for money, the fact that Finn had refused to use the Force to persuade. All of it. And Finn didn’t want that, he really didn’t. But…

Well.

It just might have been easier to deal with, compared to Rey’s genuine frustration and shock, Poe’s grim certainty that the Republic could be better on this issue. They were trying to be supportive, but it felt, a bit, like another weight around his neck, another group of people to manage.

Those were the thoughts he tried to chase out with the liquor. It didn’t really work. An hour later he just felt morose, like he might cry or just fall asleep from sheer deadened disappointment.

“I promise you, I’m not joking,” Rey said for the third or fourth time. “Say the word, and I’ll do it. I’ll go dark side and make them pay you.”

“Ha ha,” Finn said dully.

“No, really, I - oh.” Finn glanced over in time to see Rey looking between Finn and Kylo, a furrow in her brow. “Finn, I’m sorry.”

Shit: dyad. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Well, but I didn’t do much right, either.” She reached out and put a hand on his arm. If that pissed Kylo off, she gave no sign of it. “We’re here for you. In whatever way you need.”

He wanted to be back on Naboo with Jannah and preferably no one who wasn’t a ’trooper, Kylo included. But that wasn’t doable just now, so he said, “Tell me about your recon mission. Did you find more kids?”

“Oh hell yeah,” Poe said, “but also, Rose got in a fight with a Hutt dealer - no, I’m serious!”

They kept drinking into the night, and the conversation stayed firmly away from the legislative realm. Poe had reams of good stories, all of them - deliberately, Finn thought - featuring people Finn had never met in situations that were both ridiculous and as non-political as possible. They didn’t talk about Snoke, or the Sith, or the Empire, or even the General or the Republic. Finn thought maybe it was cowardly: wasn’t he just running away from his problems? But it was also what he’d needed so desperately without even realizing it.

Eventually, the evening turned into the early hours of the morning, and even Rey with her juiced-up connection to the Force started looking tired. They got up to leave, Poe waving Finn off when he tried to get him to take the last of the booze.

At the door, Rey hesitated. “When you see Jannah,” she said, and stopped.

“…yes?”

“Nothing.” A lopsided smile. “Just tell her I send my best, I guess.”

“Weird,” was Finn’s verdict when the door shut behind her. But of course he’d do it.

“Not particularly. Her crush is obvious; I’m sure Jannah knows, too.”

He hadn’t forgotten Kylo was there, exactly, but he’d been so quiet the whole night that hearing an actual opinion out of him made Finn jump in surprise. “How do you you know?”

Finn’s head was only spinning a little. There was no reason to feel like the rug had been yanked out from under him when Kylo gave him a dry look, so similar to one of the General’s that it was almost like seeing a ghost. “As I said, it’s obvious. Everyone knows.”

“Well, it’s not obvious to me.”

“You’re not particularly perceptive with regards to romance.”

“Great, thanks.”

Kylo tilted his head. “You’re welcome.”

For a moment they seemed to be suspended in time, Finn’s annoyance prickling all over him, the bitter grief of the lost vote transforming into anger, the anger trying to make itself into - well. Something else. But it really was late. He didn’t actually want to start a fight, especially not with someone who was technically his employee. Or the Senate’s employee, anyway. Ugh.

Actually, that was a good question. “Am I paying you, or is the Senate?”

“The Senate provides protection to its members. They’re paying me.” Kylo’s lips lifted in a sneer. “Surely if you were paying for it, you’d have picked a different bodyguard.”

Finn met Kylo’s sneer with an eye roll of his own. “I know this is second nature to Leia Organa’s son and all, but I’m still learning the ins and outs of all this bureaucracy, okay?”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m - never mind. Are we done here?”

Finn waved a hand. “We’re done. I’ll be staying in tomorrow. I need to…figure things out. So you can do whatever you want.”

“I very much doubt that,” Kylo said coldly. But thank the Force, he left Finn to stew in his frustration.

Rey and Poe had both made Finn promise he’d try to rest, and he really did try, but every time he closed his eyes his thoughts only ran in circles. Eventually he dragged himself out of bed and went through his mail.

Jurtel Hux was trying to sue him, claiming he’d been awarded Padme Amidala’s estate for wartime valiance. “You lost the war and bombed our home,” Finn muttered to himself, but he sent a message to Jannah. They’d need to get a lawyer, something Finn had never even imagined needing to bother with before he’d been elected. And of course there were other problems as well: provisions needed for newly arrived stormtroopers, complicated paperwork for water rights, all kinds of crap.

He worked well into the morning without stopping. When he finally buzzed a droid for some food, he saw that Kylo had left his room.

Huh. He’d taken Finn at his word, for once. Well, more pancakes for him, he supposed. And then he could keep working, hopefully better able to concentrate without Kylo glaring over his shoulder.

Meditating without the Force was just sitting with your eyes closed, but Kylo persisted.

He simply couldn’t make this decision without meditating on it. And of course, Luke and others in Kylo’s life had repeatedly informed him that meditation was for everyone, not just those sensitive to the Force. The Force was everywhere, after all, and everyone had a mind. Supposedly.

Kylo had met too many stupid people to really believe that, but nevertheless: he closed his eyes and tried to calm his thoughts, focusing on oneness with the universe.

Finn was going to be furious.

But of course, that didn’t matter. Kylo didn’t care what Finn thought; Kylo didn’t care about Finn at all, in any way. He needed to meditate to think about the next steps in his ongoing efforts to retain access to the Force, which necessarily involved Finn, but it didn’t go beyond that relatively bloodless necessity.

His decision had been foregone for some time now. He stopped meditating and left, trusting Finn to keep himself safe while he did what he had to.

Finn likely wouldn’t forgive him, but he would be bound to Kylo. In the end, that was all Kylo required.

It took Finn an embarrassingly long time to realize Kylo was missing.

Okay: not that long, all things considered. Rey had gone off-planet once and it had taken Finn a week to realize. He figured out Kylo was missing after twenty-two hours, when he went to have breakfast with three other Senators and Kylo didn’t meet him at the door.

He tried not to worry. Kylo had a tracker on him, but given the unpredictable schedule of a Senator, galactic authorities wouldn’t be notified unless Finn reached out himself, which obviously he wasn’t going to do if he had any other options. He couldn’t stop thinking about Kylo’s eager expression, his desperation when he touched Finn. He wanted to reach the Force and he could only do that through Finn. Why would he leave?

Except, of course, everyone in the galaxy knew about Kylo Ren’s sentence. If someone sidled up to Kylo and told him they could fix his little problem with the Force, Finn had no problem believing that Kylo would take them at their word and try to make it happen. He was that kind of person.

So it was kind of uncomfortable, hanging around and waiting for Kylo to come back. But Finn didn’t really want to talk to galactic parole officers, regardless of his reason, so he kept his mouth shut for the time being.

One day turned into two, which became five, which became two weeks. The Senate’s session closed. Finn’s failed vote had happened towards the end, after all the major legislation had moved or been shot down. The last weeks were mostly political winding-down: promises to meet in a month, re-negotiated alliances, all the other bullshit that sometimes, eventually, turned into a law that might actually help someone.

Finn sometimes really regretted going into politics.

When the Senate session officially ended, though, Finn was in a pickle. He needed to travel back to Naboo, to report back to Jannah and plan their next move. But of course, he’d almost been assassinated the first time while he was traveling. Common sense said he needed a bodyguard, and Kylo was nowhere to be found.

Finn had sent him six messages on his comm before giving up. As far as he knew, Kylo wasn’t even checking in. He’d very thoroughly gone to ground.

Should Finn deal with it? Probably, he thought. If he asked Rey or Poe - Force, if he asked Jannah for sure - they’d tell him that he should’ve called it in already. But he just…couldn’t.

The assassination attempt had thrown everything off, and Finn had been part of that. He’d kissed back, taken advantage. In a small way, maybe, but still. It seemed plausible that Kylo had weighed his options and simply decided he needed some space.

In the end, Finn booked the trip to Naboo on his own. He had a couple droids, and while he was technically taking a public transport ship, his Senate credentials got him a private car. It would be fine, he told himself. No big deal. Nothing to worry about.

That was so close to being true until the third day. They had another two days to go till Naboo, and the transport had mostly emptied out. Finn was enjoying a thick, savory stew when his compartment door opened.

“Excuse me. I didn’t order anything.”

“I know,” said General Hux’s uncle, locking the door behind him and sitting down in the opposite seat. “Hello, Finn. How far you’ve climbed since I last saw you.”

It had been so long since Finn was a ’trooper, ages since he’d been in this sort of situation: helpless, abject, afraid. He hated how well he remembered it, how easily he could change his demeanor. But he also wanted to live, so he put his spoon down and took a deep, calming breath. “Jurtel Hux. Nice to meet you.”

“We’ve met,” Jurtel said, lip curling up in a sneer. “Thought not, I suppose, recently enough for you to have a name and an honorific. How fortunate for you, FN-2187. What did you have to do to get such a position, I wonder.”

“I’m sure you do,” Finn said, tone level despite the racing of his heart. “Still, though, I gotta ask, is there anything specific you want? Because I’m eating, and once I’m done I have a pretty full schedule. Being a Senator is hard work.”

“Mmmm, when one represents such a deceitful and poisonous populace, I imagine it is. What did you suppose you could leech from the Empire?”

Finn hated how familiar this was, helpless rage directed at someone who wanted to hurt him. Someone he had limited ability to hurt back. It wasn’t how things had been when he was a ’trooper, but it was a faded imitation, a ghostly reminder.

The worst part was, it was his job to stay calm now, and the consequences of failure were way worse: letting his people down, not just risking reconditioning or other punishment. “I suspect you read the bill,” he said, careful to keep his voice level.

“Indeed. How did it even make it out of committee, I wonder.”

“Just good at my job, I guess.”

“And so very persuasive.”

Finn’s heart felt like it might break out of his chest. He swallowed, hoping his nervousness didn’t show on his face. He hadn’t used the Force. He hadn’t. But he didn’t want Jurtel to know that was even a possibility. “Well, I went into politics for a reason.”

“Mmm. You know, you didn’t show up on our scans.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t play dumb, boy.”

Finn clenched his hand on his knee. “Mr. Hux, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

But of course, Jurtel ignored him. “We tested all of you for capabilities with the Force. Where do you think your bodyguard got his little knights from? But you never registered so much as a blip. How did you hide from us?”

It was almost certainly a bad idea to physically throw Jurtel out of his compartment. Finn gritted his teeth. “Look, I get what you’re trying to imply. You’re wrong, okay? And I know you don’t care about the truth, so how about you just skip to the part where you threaten my whole career and all that crap so I can get back to my dinner?”

“Oh, I’m not interested in your career.” Watery grey eyes focused on him. “I’m interested in you, Finn, and everything you could lend to the cause, if only you could be…persuaded. Enjoy your dinner.”

Finn didn’t, actually. As soon as Jurtel left, he pushed the bowl away and closed his eyes, willing his hands to stop shaking, his heartbeat to slow down.

Jannah greeted him with a hug so tight Finn was a little scared for his ribs. “Hi,” he wheezed. “How are things?”

“Fine. Listen, Finn.” She pushed him away, looking at him with a mulish expression that reminded Finn, inexplicably, of Rey. “You did your best. Don’t you dare let yourself think otherwise.”

“Maybe I was coming back to say I’d triumphed just by getting the bill to a vote, did you think that?”

Jannah rolled her eyes. “Don’t think I haven’t been talking with your Coruscant friends about this. Plus, we do get the news, you know.”

“Rey says hi, by the way.”

“I’m sure she does.”

Finn blinked. Jannah didn’t sound mad, exactly, but there was something weird going on there. “Should I comm her, see if she can visit?”

“Nah, she’ll be by when she gets time. Speaking of Jedi. Where’s your bodyguard?”

“He’s not a Jedi.”

“Speaking of Skywalkers, then.”

“Well, he repudiated -”

“Finn. Where the fuck is your bodyguard.”

Finn winced. “Okay, look. First of all, I’m here in one piece, so all’s well that ends well, right? But also, I, uh. Don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“He disappeared.” Not quite the full truth. “We argued, and then he disappeared.”

Jannah’s expression hardened. “And you’re not calling Galactic security why, exactly? Don’t tell me you feel like you owe him.”

“Of course not.” Giving them the estate didn’t come close to being true recompense for what the ’troopers had gone through. But: “That doesn’t mean I want to send him back to prison.”

“For violating the terms of his release.”

“For needing space.” Finn bit his lip. “Things have been weird, okay? And I might not pay him directly, but I’m still his employer. I don’t want to force him.”

“Force him to spend time around you, someone who’s never hurt him, which is more than you can say about him.” Jannah shook her head. “Of course, you won’t send him to conditioning or control his reading material, or have him bunk with thirty other people.”

“No. What they did to us was a crime.”

“And they’ll never pay up.”

Finn lifted a shoulder in response. “You know I’ll keep trying.”

“I do.” Glumly: she understood why he hadn’t called security, even if she didn’t like it. Finn couldn’t bring himself to throw another person back into captivity after what they’d endured. “All right, then. We’ve got plenty of work for you to do, anyway.”

Naboo was treating the ’troopers well so far. Kef Bir had been a hostile environment, remarkably poorly suited to agrarian society. After they’d spent the time to shore up the decaying structures of the Amidala estate, it had been simple to set up gardening plots. According to Jannah, the plants were already starting to thrive; they’d be self-sufficient within a year or two.

In the meantime, they needed to prepare for the coming weeks. Jannah put Finn to work repairing some harvest droids. Ideally, the whole process would be carried out by droids, from the harvest to cleaning the vegetables to preserving them. Droids could make them olive oil and beer, too. “But we watch over the process,” Jannah said, “and step in every now and then - we can’t afford the most advanced droids yet, and we don’t want any surprises during the canning.”

So Finn repaired the droids, one by one, slower than he wanted. They all had something different wrong: some were rusted, some needed new bearings, some needed software upgrades. That was, apparently, what happened when you bought robots on deep discount. He was in a zone after awhile, though, until he realized he was starving and the sun was starting to set.

The repair shed was a ways off from the cafeteria. Finn decided to take the shortcut he’d used the last time he was here, following an old, worn footpath through some woods. The woods mostly held wild game, but they’d managed to forage mushrooms, too; he kept his eyes peeled as he walked.

It was a good thing he did. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have seen Kylo sitting against a gnarled old tree, eyes closed, fists clenched on his knees.

“Where the fuck have you been!” Finn winced as soon as the shout left him. He hadn’t realized he’d been worrying, but seeing Kylo sitting there, looking stupid but uninjured, he realized: of course he had. It wasn’t like it was impossible that Kylo had been kidnapped, and Finn didn’t hate him enough to want him dead.

“I was busy,” Kylo said in that cold, nasal tone he loved to use.

“Obviously. So busy you couldn’t be bothered to do your legally mandated job?”

“Yes.”

“So why are you here now? You must’ve figured out I didn’t call anyone. You could’ve kept running.”

Kylo’s eyes darted back and forth, his expression completely impenetrable to Finn. “Of course I figured it out. As I said, I was busy. That doesn’t mean I intended to abandon my responsibility.”

“You already did, though. I got threatened by Jurtel Hux, which was just. Annoying.”

Kylo’s expression flickered, gaze sharpening on Finn. “What? What did he say? Did her hurt you? Or the others? Did he mention Kef Bir? When -”

“Calm down, it’s fine. Now, anyway.” Finn took a deep breath, trying to take his own advice. “Why are you even here?”

“I’m meditating. The woods are good for it.”

“I meant - here. On Naboo.”

“As I mentioned. I’m returning to my post.”

“Maybe I want to fire you, ever think of that?”

“I don’t believe you’re cruel enough to deprive me of my last connection to the Force.” Kylo paused. “And even if you were, there is the small matter of bureaucracy. You didn’t hire me; you can’t fire me without cause.”

Finn’s heart felt like it was beating in double-time. It made him stupid. “I have cause, though. And you’re forgetting an option. I could make you go away.”

The look Kylo bestowed upon him would have been hilariously pissy had he directed it at anyone else. “Given your refusal to use the Force in combat or persuasion, I very much doubt that.”

“Fine. Okay. Well.” There was really nothing else to say. “Thanks, I guess. Bye.” He couldn’t face the idea of going deeper into the woods, knowing he might run into Kylo again at any time, so he turned and left the way he’d come.

He wished, futilely, that Kylo had just stayed gone.

Kylo had intended to tell Finn right then. The words would not allow themselves to be released from his mouth.

All the lawyers had informed him this step was non-negotiable. Apparently, one could remove one’s own wealth on the flimsiest of motivations, but other accounting required consent of both parties. It was a pretty short sentence: “Come back to my room, I have documents you need to sign.” But he hadn’t been able to get it out.

What if he had? Finn would demand to know what the documents were for. He might even refuse to go with Kylo until he revealed the answer. Then Kylo would have to drag him there, and Finn would feel him in the Force and know what had happened.

An irritating set of possibilities. Kylo would simply wait for a better opportunity.

He had, however, arrived at his grandmother’s estate - the ’trooper’s estate - with the intention of staying for awhile. He’d already secured a room in the building closest to Finn’s, identified as such by Khajee, who took pains to make it clear that the ’troopers would have preferred Kylo leave Naboo entirely.

But she was honest; it was the room nearest Finn’s building, both in a newly restored part of the old Amidala complex. Which meant that it was really ridiculous to feel shocked when he saw Finn standing in the hallway, leaning against the wall, arms bulging with muscle, face covered in a thin sheen of sweat.

Kylo’s hands twitched at his side. He did not reach out to touch Finn. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting on a droid to bring me some cream for the poison nettles we apparently have growing all over,” Finn said. “Did you know about the nettles?”

“I’m not a botanist.”

“Well, neither am I, and yet.” And now Kylo saw it: little blisters all over the back of both of Finn’s hands.

“You’re an idiot,” Kylo said. He stepped forward before he could think about it, before Finn even had time to protest, catching Finn’s hands in his own.

It was ridiculous. The power Kylo felt was Finn’s, not his own; Kylo needed Finn to feel even an echo of the Force, but Finn could have grabbed hold of it any time. It was only his own negligent attitude toward his power that allowed him to experience any injury for more than a few minutes.

“Hey,” Finn said belatedly. He tugged his hands, a limp movement with hardly any will behind it.

“Hush,” Kylo said. It came out softer than he intended, like he was comforting a child. He scowled and began channeling the Force with vicious focus, driving it into the soft tissue under his fingers.

(Driving it into Finn’s hands. Finn’s hands, rough and soft and strong. Hands he - no. Not here, not with Finn’s brilliant consciousness alongside his in the Force.)

“There,” he said a minute later, carefully thinking of nothing at all as he released Finn’s hands.

But unfortunately, Finn was smarter than Kylo’s subterfuge. “Something’s on your mind. What’s up?”

“Well, my employer refuses to perform basic first aid on himself.”

“Healing me through the Force isn’t basic, come on.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Never you less! What’s going on? Why did you disappear, why are you being so weird?”

Now was the time. Just say it, Kylo told himself. But he couldn’t.

Finn took a step forward, going from ‘standing too close’ to something even more intimate. “Kylo. You can tell me, all right? If someone’s blackmailing you, or messing with you, you can tell me. I’ll fix it. Okay?”

Kylo laughed, a harsh bark of his voice. Trust Finn to be comically off-base in the way that was most sympathetic to Kylo’s own motivations. “I need to show you something,” he said, and jerked his head towards his own door.

He didn’t need to say the words, in the end. He only handed his tablet over and watched Finn read what was written there. It was easy to identify the moment Finn understood what the document meant: his brow furrowed and his hands began to shake.

“This isn’t real.”

“It is,” Kylo said, “but it’s not legally enforceable yet. Your signature is required for that.”

“Why mine?”

“Galactic law. I could get Jannah’s as well, since she’s technically your head of state, but as acting Senator you have the same rights as signatory that she would.” And Finn was marginally less likely to spit in his face.

“You can’t just…Kylo, what the fuck. You can’t sign the entire Organa estate over to us!”

“I can. I have. I did. My lawyer’s contact information is in the document, should you want more details. I’d recommend you retain him, actually; he won’t be particularly useful to me after this.” Finn still hadn’t signed. “Well? Sign for it, already.”

Finn shook his head a tiny bit, looking up to meet Kylo’s eyes. “Is something wrong? Are you dumping a toxic asset, or…is someone threatening you?”

Another bitter laugh. “No more than they already have.”

But it was obvious Finn didn’t understand. This was Kylo’s punishment for his many evil deeds: being forced to explain, word for word, his reasoning. “I am beholden to you right now. If you reject my services, I’ll be sent back to a penal ship. I have no desire to toil for the rest of my years, extracting selenium and aluminum from some miserable rock or sitting uselessly in a cell.”

“So this is, what? A bribe?”

Kylo gritted his teeth. “Insurance. Your bill was voted down.”

“It was never really up. I can’t believe I thought it might happen.”

“It still might,” Kylo said, “in five or ten years, when people start telling themselves - and each other - that they were always in favor of your right to self-determination, that they always knew you deserved somewhere safe.”

“But?”

Kylo closed his eyes. Opened them. Wished he could feel the dark side, if only to help him keep his voice steady as he laid bare the conclusions that had been evident to him since Finn’s friends were back on Kef Bir. “Five or ten years from now, without a massive infusion of cash, your little agrarian city-state will be dead, your ’troopers scattered throughout the galaxy. You may still receive payments; legally, you should. But the dream of Kef Bir will be dead, and with it, and with it, the relative freedom I currently enjoy.”

He heard only his own ragged breaths as Finn processed what he’d said. What was a fortune compared to the ability to breathe clean air and choose his own meals? Nothing at all, it turned out.

“I see,” Finn eventually said. He signed without complaint: two full signatures, ten initialed clauses. “I’ll need to meet with Jannah. You can…I mean, I’d appreciate it if you’d be around, but you know how it is here.”

Meaning: Finn was in no danger, and if he was, he had dozens of formerly-brainwashed brothers and sisters to guard him. “Yes.”

“Okay, then.” Finn nodded awkwardly, swiped on the tablet - sending the documents to himself, Kylo assumed - and then left, managing not to meet Kylo’s gaze the whole time.

Kylo wanted to smash his tablet very badly, but of course, he no longer had the funds to replace it. Instead, he lay down on the cold stone floor and stared at the ceiling, cursing in every language he could remember until he was able to enter a subpar meditative trance.

“Kriff. All of it? Force, General Organa’s money?”

Finn nodded. “Hundreds of millions of credits, six properties, all of it.”

Jannah whistled and leaned back in her chair. “Hell of a bribe to keep him on, don’t you think?”

For some reason, Finn had to fight the urge to squirm. “I guess.”

“We can use it, though. All of it. Kriff, Finn, this changes everything.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m kind of pissed about it, actually.”

“Oh thank the Force,” Finn said, relief rushing through him. “I just -”

“He’s the reason we were kidnapped! The conditioning -”

“I can’t even tell - it’s not an apology! I’d be pissed if it was, but it’s not!”

“Entirely self-serving, obviously,” Jannah said, nodding. Then she cut another look at Finn, some of her anger visibly ebbing. “Though still, it’s pretty lucky.”

“That’s what pisses me off the most,” Finn said miserably, slumping forward.

“Well, look on the bright side. We’d all die for you; you’re safe here. No need to keep your bodyguard close.”

“Would you let me quit if I decided to make that permanent? Send someone else to Coruscant to get shot at.”

“Aw,” Jannah said. “Absolutely not.”

Well, it had been worth a try.

Chapter 7

Finn wouldn’t call himself obsessed, exactly.

It just felt like a pretty big thing to miss, was all. When Kylo had disappeared, he hadn’t noticed, and then when he’d come back, Finn’d had no idea he was about to transfer his entire fortune - so enormous the New Republic’s ‘you’re a piece of shit traitor’ fines had barely dinged it - to the ’troopers. So it seemed reasonable, rational, and in fact advisable to keep a closer eye on Kylo. What else had he missed? He needed to be more vigilant. He was navigating tricky political waters, after all, and missing major signs of change in his own bodyguard had to be a bad sign.

That was why he was staring at Kylo while Kylo drank caf on their transport back to Coruscant. Professional reasons.

“What,” Kylo said flatly, putting his mug down.

Finn stared at the text - something written in Wookiee accompanied by a drawing that Finn didn’t think was genitalia - and said, “Nothing.”

Kylo’s hands were really big.

“I know you’re lying to me. What would you do if I grabbed you and confirmed it?”

“Report you and get you fired,” Finn said, promptly and completely falsely.

Kylo sneered. “Good thing it’s my job to prevent you from keeping secrets from me.”

“Not really. It’s your job to -”

“Keep you safe, which secrets impinge upon.”

“Big words from someone who kept a huge secret and disappeared about it.”

“I suppose you’re implying I’m a hypocrite. How unfortunate for me. I’ve never been accused of a worse crime, in fact; this will lead me to reevaluate my behavior, I’m sure.” Kylo picked up his mug again, taking a loud, rude slurp.

Finn knew when he’d been beat. He left Kylo, his stupid mug, and his huge hands alone in the kitchen, returning to his seat and reviewing the Senate’s upcoming schedule for a tenth time.

The schedule was pre-empted the day after Finn arrived in Coruscant.

He found out about it via a frantic knocking on his door. “Finn! Finn, open up, it’s important!”

Rey. He could feel her in the Force, disconcertingly, a bright and frantic presence. He wasn’t sure when he’d started noticing that stuff. “Door, open.”

Rey ran inside. “Have you heard the news? You haven’t, I can tell. Finn, Mon Mothma’s opening a formal inquiry about it. We’re all going to be called to testify. You’ll want Jannah here, and maybe Khajee and some others - definitely Chewie - I called him already, don’t worry. I can’t believe -”

“Rey, hang on, slow down. Mon Mothma’s opening an inquiry into what?”

“Oh. Right.” Rey’s eyes were wider than he’d ever seen them. He could practically feel her too-fast heartbeat. “New Republic loyalists are mounting an offensive to root out Imperial sympathizers, and they’re starting with the military. Finn, she’s opening an inquiry into Galactic funding of stormtroopers.”

A formal inquiry meant official summons and little to no insight on what might actually happen during the hearing. Finn received a summons, as did Jannah, Rey, and Poe. Finn expected all that. Kylo, though. Kylo stood in front of his office desk the day after Rey had told him the news, arms folded behind him, and said, “I expect you’ve been informed that I have also been summoned.”

“Um, no. Sorry. I’m a subject of investigation, so apparently they’re not going to tell me much.”

“What would you like me to say?”

Finn blinked. “Excuse me?”

Kylo heaved a sigh. He looked ridiculous, overly dramatic and put-upon. “Presumably my testimony will be regarded as untrustworthy no matter what, but nevertheless: I can ensure my communication conforms to whatever strategy you and Jannah have decided upon for your own testimony.”

Oh, no. Finn was feeling sorry for him again, that diffuse pity that settled over him when he had to think about how thoroughly broken Kylo was. It wasn’t a very helpful feeling; there was no real reason to feel sorry for Kylo, and pity only made Finn feel irritable. “We were just going to tell the truth.”

Kylo huffed a disdainful breath. “Well, that’s ridiculous.”

Finn propped his elbows on the desk and said mildly, “Is it, now.”

“Of course. What do you expect to gain from telling the truth?”

“Kylo -”

“I understand that Resistance alumni place an unnatural weight on the truth, but this is a very delicate time,” Kylo said. The words tumbled out in such a rush that Finn almost thought he’d rehearsed them. “The New Republic was captivated by your testimony. Many galactic citizens contacted their Senators on your behalf. Mon Mothma is opening the query on the strength of that uproar; she wouldn’t do it if she felt it was an unpopular choice.”

“Mon Mothma cares about the truth, too.”

“Of course, but she cares most of all about her own career.” A knife-thin smile. “I’ve known her since I was a baby; trust me on this one.”

Not as far as Finn could throw him. “Okay, fine, your cynicism might be justified. Still. Jannah and I care about the truth, because the truth explains why ’troopers deserve resettlement funds and a place to live, you know?”

“Yes, that was the core message of your speech. Nevertheless.”

Finn waited, but Kylo apparently thought that pompous intonation made his point for him. Finally, he gave in. “Nevertheless what?”

“A successful strategy would ensure maximally moving framing of your truthful accounts.”

“Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me what you think it should be, then.”

“Why do you think I -”

“Cut the crap, Kylo.”

Kylo made a face like he’d just smelled a Wookiee fart. “Fine. You should be focused on the fact that you’re Human.”

“The Republic grants equal rights to all sentients.”

“But the Republic is majority, and led by, Humans. You didn’t discuss your own childhood last time.”

If Kylo had buried a knife in Finn’s guts and twisted the blade, he couldn’t have landed a worse blow. “Because I don’t remember it. Because you -”

“Because Imperial soldiers, myself included stole you from it, yes. That’s a very moving thing to talk about. And the conditioning removes your memories, but I think if you asked your brothers and sisters, some of them might still have some inkling of what their life was like before we took them. You and I both know the conditioning was imperfect.”

Finn hated the completely unearned camaraderie underlying Kylo’s speech. You and I both know, like Finn hadn’t broken out of hell knowing Kylo wanted to kill him. Fuck. “Imperfect? You really are still a loyalist, huh.”

Kylo’s expression contorted into a sneer. “I’m sure it makes you more comfortable to believe that. Isn’t that what all your little friends want? A simpler world.”

It was a stupid, ridiculous, hurtful argument. Finn was still dwelling on it days later, when Jannah arrived in Coruscant. She also wanted a strategy, and when Finn reluctantly told her what Kylo had said, she said, “Well. I don’t think he’s wrong, precisely, do you?”

“I basically always think Kylo’s wrong as a matter of principle.”

“I mean about the need for a narrative. It’s crass and stupid, we both know that, but…”

“Senators don’t vote with their ethics. I know.” He’d lain awake for several nights and come to a similar conclusion, but - “Don’t you think it’s weird, though? How much he expects us to listen to him - how much we do? He gave us money, he’s giving us advice, what’s he going to want in return?”

“It’s self interest,” Jannah said. “He’s obsessed with you, and -”

“Hey!”

“What? He is. But more importantly, you’re his key to staying out of prison. Have you seen a New Republic prison? They’re brutal. I’d do the same in his position.”

“You’d never be in his position.”

“No. But that just means he’s as shitty as we knew he was, not that he’s some kind of master manipulator.”

Maybe the only thing worse than his lasting discomfort with Kylo was the aggressive understanding he got from Jannah. She’d grown up with him, after all - or alongside him, anyway. She understood what it meant to feel your chest squeeze tight when you saw him, to fear what he might do, even now that his power had been taken away.

What if he told her about the kiss? Heat of the moment, Finn had almost died. Kylo had used his - their - Kylo had used the Force to save him. If he said it out loud, how repulsive would it be? How badly would Jannah react?

Pretty bad, was Finn’s guess, and that was why it needed to be a secret forever. Same with how often he thought about doing it again. “Yeah. I guess. So, do you remember life before they took you?”

“Only a little, but I’m thinking that can be part of it. You know, strategically.”

It was grotesque. But: “Right. Because it tugs at heartstrings.”

“And it reminds them that there are parents out there missing kids, too. We field those inquiries, you know. Some of us agree to genetic testing, but of course that’s not the norm.”

’Troopers as a group weren’t too eager to give anyone else access to their medical information, Finn included. And Finn suspected plenty of them were like him: afraid to know about their families, because the Empire and First Order had laid waste to entire planets. The only thing worse than suspecting you were alone in the galaxy was knowing for sure. “Yeah. So we’re implying that this might be the only way for us to find our families eventually. Self-determination.”

“And funds for it, yes.”

“What does Mon Mothma want, do you know?”

“I’d expect you to have a better view on that, being a Senator and all.”

He shook his head. “I’ve been telling everyone, she’s a rule-follower. To be honest -” Kriff it, he’d just say it. “To be honest, I figured Rey might’ve told you.”

It was kind of funny to watch Jannah, poised and badass and leader of a whole diaspora, choke on her own tongue from embarrassment. “I don’t! We’re not! Listen, Finn, we’re not.”

“Sure, sure.” Finn forced down a laugh. He couldn’t quite repress a smile. “But you know, you want to, right? I’m pretty sure she does.”

“I can’t even think about that stuff right now.” She crossed her arms. “Enough nonsense. I would literally rather relive conditioning than go into the details of my love life, and lucky for you, talking about the conditioning’s part of our strategy too.”

They worked on it late into the night: who would say what, how to make the testimony organic while ensuring all their people touched on common themes. Finn knew they’d need to discuss Kylo’s testimony at some point, but it turned out he was a coward after all. He avoided the topic until it was late enough that they were both yawning, and then he promised himself he’d bring it up tomorrow.

Of course, that meant he was thinking of Kylo when he went to bed.

It just didn’t make sense. Kylo was a huge asshole, and specifically, he was a huge asshole Finn wasn’t sure actually cared about the ’trooper’s issues. He didn’t even think they were full people to Kylo, not really. Wasn’t superiority the whole point of his Knights of Ren? He didn’t have his stupid gang anymore, but it wasn’t like he’d fallen on his knees and begged for forgiveness or whatever.

No, Kylo’s motivation was clear as glass. He wanted to retain some degree of freedom, like Jannah had said, and he wanted to retain access to the Force through Finn. Of course, that led to another, scarier suspicion. Kylo could access the Force through Finn. Kylo was one of the most dangerous people in the known universe when he had access to the Force.

Kylo had to be planning some kind of jailbreak.

He’d take Finn with him, right? He’d have to. Finn would be his captive, bent to his will in the Force, and then -

But it was kind of hard to think through the possibilities.

The thing was, Kylo in the Force wasn’t exactly terrifying. Kylo Ren of the First Order had been terrifying, and Finn’s body still lit up with adrenaline when he was gearing up to fight, but the weirdest part about feeling Kylo in the Force was how certain he felt that Kylo couldn’t hurt him there. If he tried, Finn was pretty sure he’d be able to hold him off. But on top of that, Finn was completely sure Kylo wasn’t going to try.

It made him feel crazy. Maybe his judgement was just fundamentally skewed. If he brought it up to Rey, he was positive that’s what she would say, dyad or not. Kylo Ren was a murderer, as evil as they came, and Finn had felt that in the Force plenty of times, a creepy void where a conscience should be. Every time, though, it was controlled. Leashed. Because he accessed the Force through Finn, and Finn didn’t want him killing innocent people.

He closed his eyes against the shiver that sent down his spine. That was the central question, then. If Kylo took them both far away from Coruscant, what would he do?

Finn couldn’t just go along with it, so he’d never find out. He had a duty that Kylo didn’t bother pretending to understand.

Still, he dreamed of a different world, one with a Kylo Ren who wasn’t a complete sociopath. It was a nice dream. When he woke up, he girded his loins and went to talk to the real Kylo, who was reading his tablet on the couch in their - Finn’s - living room.

“I’m going to ask you not to lie to me.”

Kylo didn’t look up from his tablet. “I slept well, thank you, Finn. And you?”

“Jannah told me I should be suspicious of it all.”

Kylo sighed and put the tablet down, meeting Finn’s gaze. Finn hated the jolt of awareness that ran through him when he noticed the way Kylo’s fingers curled, big and blunt-nailed, around his own knee. “Jannah’s a paranoid maniac.”

“She’s a friend and the sovereign of the people I represent. Don’t be a dick.”

“Fine. Suspicious of what?”

This didn’t feel like a conversation between employer and employee. It felt like the kind of holodrama Finn never had time to watch. But he’d already started the conversation, so Finn gritted his teeth and kept going. “Signing over the estate and agreeing to testify in the inquiry. To an external observer it would look like you had a change of heart.”

Dark eyes on his. “But?”

“Well, I know you didn’t. Jannah thinks -”

“Don’t do that.” A low command, threaded through with some emotion Finn couldn’t identify. “Don’t project your own suppositions on Jannah. What do you you think?”

Fuck. Finn let out his breath long and slow, closing his eyes. “I think you have an escape plan, and it probably involves kidnapping me. I’m not sure if you’ll just drag me with you everywhere or if you’ll try to recondition me to ensure I can’t run.”

Said out loud, it sounded kind of insane, didn’t it? Except Kylo wasn’t answering, and Finn knew better than to just assume something sounding crazy meant it couldn’t happen. What else had the First Order been?

He still had his eyes closed, but he could feel Kylo moving; it wasn’t that big a surprise when he rested two fingers on the top of Finn’s wrist. He still wasn’t used to this feeling, though, like being thrown into a strong current. He could feel the Force and he could feel Kylo, and for a moment the two were one and the same.

Kylo didn’t do anything as simple as telling Finn what he planned to talk about. Instead, he just waited while Finn explored, poking at him in the Force. In Kylo’s mind there was that massive, cold blank spot, like he’d scooped out part of his own soul. Finn hated to even look at it, but now he tried to. Kylo was trying to show him something, right? So he’d meet him halfway.

It was Kylo who took his hand away, grounding them in their own minds again. Finn opened his eyes and took a deep gulp of air.

Kylo tilted his head, watching Finn. “You can still reach the Force.”

“Yeah.” Though it was easier after he’d been touching Kylo, for some reason. Maybe just because Kylo had more experience with it.

“I don’t plan to escape, or kidnap you, or recondition you.” The words sounded so mild, but Finn could hear Kylo’s frustration, could feel his irritation that he even had to explain it.

But he could also feel that Kylo was telling the truth.

“Then what’s your play here?”

“I’d like to continue doing this job, and Mon Mothma has made it clear that my current situation is contingent upon obeying the Senate subpoenas.”

“All right.” Kylo hadn’t really told him anything at all, but. Finn thought of that cold void inside him. Maybe there wasn’t anything else to tell. “Well. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Kylo said, and went back to whatever he’d been doing on his tablet.

Finn was one of the stupidest people Kylo had ever had the misfortune to be legally bound to. Oh, sure, he was perfectly intelligent in some ways, charming and good at mechanical repair and public speaking, but when it came to power he was an idiot to a degree Kylo found baffling and terrifying.

Surely he had to realize that if he truly wanted to be safe from Kylo, he should be trying to compel him. Kylo was certain that the New Republic’s implant would also render him incapable of defending himself from such an attack. Finn could simply use his power to order Kylo to tell Mon Mothma what he wanted her to hear, and he would be powerless to resist.

Instead, Finn - an idiot, a kriffing fool - had decided to trust Kylo instead. And for what? Simply to be the better man? It sent a hot, sick rush of resentment through Kylo, knowing that Finn was extending him such unearned charity.

He thought about what it might be like to betray Finn to Mon Mothma. Satisfying, surely, to have his testimony preserved in Republic history, forever denying Finn the indignity of his trust.

But of course, then he’d have to deal with Finn’s complaints, and probably Rey’s approbation as well. Plus, even if Finn kept his promise not to send Kylo back to prison, it seemed likely he’d retreat to Naboo, and Kylo would be forever stuck in his grandmother’s old powder room.

Right. He’d have to tell the truth. Maybe Finn didn’t trust him after all, and only knew he had leverage. A cheerful thought.

Rey was the first person to be summoned to testify.

“Bringing out the big guns early,” Poe said.

The inquest was private, though the report would be publicly disseminated in a month. It was an impossibly rapid timeline, but apparently the Senate wanted to move quickly, before protests for or against ’troopers had a chance to gain much ground. To mark the first day of testimony - or to force himself to calm the hell down about it - Finn had invited Poe and Rose over while Rey did the deed. Jannah was planetside, but she’d decided to stay in a hotel; “If I spend time around anyone, I’m going to lose my mind,” she’d told Finn.

But Poe wasn’t a politician, that was for sure. “She’s not exactly well-liked right now. After everything, Jedi are viewed with suspicion.”

“Sure, but she’s not like. You know.”

“Kylo Ren, your bodyguard-slash-roommate?” Rose said.

Finn grimaced at her. She stuck her tongue out in response.

It was nice to have friends. Still: “He’s sitting right there.”

“Hello,” Kylo said from his spot in shadowed corner. If Finn hadn’t known better, he’d swear Kylo called down darkness just to make it easier to be dour over there.

“Ugh,” Rose said.

“She’s not like Kylo, you’re right,” Finn told Poe. “But there are substantial anti-Jedi movements in the Outer Rim, and it doesn’t help that she chose to call herself Skywalker. Lotta grudges against them out there.”

“Fair enough. Still, though, she’s cute and she bleeds credibility. Her testimony’ll help.”

From the corner, an aggrieved nose-sigh, kind of a snort. Finn said, “Something wrong over there?”

“Nothing life-threatening, which means it’s none of his business,” Rose said.

“Correct,” Kylo said.

Finn wanted to put his head in his hands. Instead, he said, “Kylo?”

“You’re all so optimistic for a group that has been defeated time and time again,” Kylo said in his thin, smug, superior voice. His First Order voice, if Finn was being honest. “I’m simply admiring your energy. Personally, I couldn’t sustain such a delusion.”

“No, you were too busy deluding yourself that the First Order’s maniacal will to power was a good idea, and that the dark side doesn’t suck shit,” Poe said. His tone was mild, but his hand curled into a fist on his thigh. “Get a fucking grip, Ben. I know what you look like when you know you’re full of it.”

Silence. Finn, for lack of anything better to do, took a long drink of beer.

“Soooo,” Rose said. “Bets on Rey trying to fight some Senator’s aide?”

“Sucker’s bet,” Finn said over top Poe’s, “What, just to lose money? I’m good.”

That made them all laugh, at least, and if the corner was still dour, Finn found himself better able to ignore it.

Finn was one of the last people to be questioned. Every day that passed without his summons meant another day of jumpiness and another night of stress dreams. So he was in a terrible mood more or less all the time, for two weeks, until he finally received his summons.

To his surprise, the person across the table from him was a person rather than a droid - and Mon Mothma, specifically. She folded her hands and offered him a smile. “Mr. Finn. Thank you for coming.”

“I think you already know I just go by Finn.”

“I didn’t want to presume,” she said, “but yes, I had heard. Have a seat, Finn.”

Finn sat.

“You looked surprised when you came in.”

“That obvious, huh? Yeah, I figured you’d have a droid doing the questioning.”

“It’s not that simple, I’m afraid. An accelerated timeline for the inquiry means we don’t have the luxury of time to review recordings and transcriptions, or calling in witnesses for follow-up questions a droid wouldn’t think to ask.” She smiled again. Someone must’ve told her it was comforting; to Finn, it was so obviously fake that it was mostly just distracting. “How are you?”

He’d sworn at the door to be honest, so he said, “Exhausted.”

“I see. From your duties as a Senator?”

Kriff, this was going to be a painful two-to-five hours. “Not really. This inquiry’s got me dreaming I’m back with the First Order, so…”

“I see.”

“I really doubt you do.”

“Elaborate on that.”

Finn wanted to refuse. He wanted to leave, actually, and take a shuttle to Jakku, and bury himself in the desert. Drowning in sand might be miserable, but it still seemed better than this shit. “My time with the First Order - my time in captivity - was painful. Traumatic. Knowing I’m going to have to talk about it, but not knowing what I might have to say, what you might ask me or what I might need to remember, that’s also traumatic.”

“I see.” Mon Mothma’s expression was unfathomable, her eyes steady. She said, “My own experiences under the Empire were difficult. I can’t claim to understand your pain, but I do want to be very clear that the purpose of this inquiry is to resolve outstanding questions about the exact nature of the injustice you’ve experienced.” She paused; Finn, sensing she wanted some kind of feedback, nodded. “Now, with that in mind, I would appreciate it if you could take me through the conditioning process.”

It was a brutal first question - request? Whatever - and it didn’t get better after that. Finn talked about conditioning and reconditioning; he talked about the agonizing process of breaking free after he’d lost Slip. He talked about his brothers and sisters and how they’d all talked about family, the distant concept that they’d had mothers and fathers fading with time. He talked about the beatings, the near-constant fear and dehumanization.

He cried, several times. Mon Mothma offered him tissues, but she didn’t stop asking questions.

When he was done, he locked himself in his apartments and didn’t answer Rey or Poe’s messages. He lay in the dark and tried, and tried, and tried to remember where he was, who he was. What couldn’t be done to him anymore.

Kylo must’ve known. He hung back for almost a week, relegating himself to Finn’s shadow, speaking only when spoken to.

With one exception.

Finn found himself up late one night, unable to sleep, jumpy and irritable. The door to Kylo’s room was closed, so Finn figured it was probably pretty safe to sit in the kitchen with some caf and, well. Sob.

Kylo had more sense than to come out while Finn was crying, at least. But after, when he was finishing his caf and staring into space, Kylo’s door opened. It only took a glance for Finn to be sure he’d heard the crying.

Finn almost said something, but there was something fragile in the air, like a dome of water about to escape its own surface tension. Kylo must have sensed it too; he only went into the kitchen, opened a cupboard Finn had never used, and handed Finn a jar. He didn’t even give Finn a chance to inspect it before going back into his room.

The jar was full of candy that a quick holopad scan indicated was a rare Naboo caramel. Finn ate six. The caramel had sedatives, his holopad told him, and that turned out to be true: Finn slept half the day away and felt better when he finally woke up.

When the inquiry was released, with the recommendation that stormtroopers be paid refugee funds as well as restitution on behalf of the Republic, Finn felt a horrible pierced-balloon kind of relief.

The Senate then voted for those funds on a bill introduced by Bliobius of New Hosnian, one which carved out the same provisions for ’troopers as Finn’s bill did. This bill, however, had the co-sponsorship of a number of not-quite-sympathizers. People the inquiry might politically damage.

Finn voted yes and hated himself for it.

“I know it’s a mixed blessing,” Poe said that evening, “but a celebration might still be good.”

Finn sighed. “Please tell me you have reasoning beyond, like, you want to get trashed.”

“Oh, that’s always a factor. But no, that’s not really it. It’s just…this is a victory, you know? We all hate Bliobius. But you’ve still won your constituents something really important.”

“We don’t even need it anymore, really. Given everything.” Kylo’s family money, he meant, but he’d rather be chased by a flock of angry porgs than say that with Kylo lurking in the corner.

“It’s still vindication, though. And Finn, as your friend, I think I should remind you: being rich is more fun than just getting by.”

Finn rolled his eyes. “All right, all right, fine. I’ll throw a party. Happy?”

“Ecstatic.” Poe clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll bring the hooch.”

Jannah was still in town with a number of ’troopers; her presence during the vote was the only reason Finn hadn’t completely lost his mind. Add in Rey, Rose, Chewbacca, and Poe, and his apartment would already be pretty full. That was his excuse, anyway, for keeping it private. No need for any other Senators to attend, or really anyone who thought being seen with Finn would be good for their career.

And it was actually really nice. The legislative victory was bittersweet for all of them, so no one was looking sidelong at Finn for not being over the moon with joy. He could sit on his couch and watch Rey lean into Jannah and not worry about someone selling a story about tonight to a tabloid.

Plus, the booze didn’t hurt. Poe was right about that. Finn let himself drink enough to be relaxed, a little fuzzy around the edges.

“Isn’t it weird with him lurking in the corner all the time?” Rose asked, nodding not-so-discreetly at Kylo.

“Oh, very,” Finn said. “But it’s not like he could join this party.”

“I mean, he could. You know.” Rose made a face and hunched her shoulders. “Doing a toast like this.”

Finn was surprised into laughing out loud. “You could take that show on the road.”

“Yeah, but then I’d have to travel.” She grinned at him. “I just thought you could use a little levity.”

“I…yeah.”

“Mixed blessing?”

“Very much so.”

“Well, none of us are going to judge you if you kick us out early.”

“Nah, it’ll be fine. You’re all family.”

“Great, ’cause I’m trying to get myself a piece of that settlement money pie.”

Finn rolled his eyes at her and took another sip of his beer. Rose seemed okay with carrying the conversation, chatting about her adventures getting her engineering degree and her side gig fixing up speeders. “By the way, I meant to ask you. Chief of staff position still open?”

“It is, actually.”

“Awesome, because I have some ideas about leverage.” She’d taken a class with Mon Mothma’s third cousin, apparently, and they’d done some brainstorming.

Eventually, Rose was pulled into another conversation and Finn found himself alone again. Then he was alone-with-Chewy, then he was mediating an argument about sonic shower beers between Poe and Rey, and then, finally, the party began to wind down, and he was really alone.

Well.

He was really alone, except for Kylo.

“I’ve put in a request for housekeeping droids,” Kylo said, standing in front of Finn with his arms crossed behind his back.

“Thanks,” Finn said. Kylo nodded and went into his room without further comment.

Finn hadn’t even realized Kylo had unbent around him a little, but the difference was clear now: he was incredible uncomfortable, and had been since he’d given his testimony at the inquiry.

Well, good, Finn thought, more sourly than he probably should’ve. Maybe sometime in the next decade or so, Kylo would finally internalize just how bad his actions had been.

Ha. And maybe Hux would send him an apology card, too.

Kylo’s second disappearance started like the first, with one change: Finn noticed his absence right away this time. When it had been sixteen hours with no sign of Kylo, he contacted building security.

No sign of him, nor of anyone who might have taken him. Not in the apartment, not in the entirety of Coruscant.

As far as surveillance could tell, Kylo had simply disappeared.

Chapter 8

“Okay, I do feel the need to point out that we are gathered here to discuss the disappearance of someone who fully sucks, who we all hate,” Rose said.

“Well,” Finn said.

“You tolerate everyone; you don’t count.”

“I mean, I’ve also spent the most time with him.”

“Is that an argument in your favor? Huh,” Poe said.

“I do know that,” Finn told Rose. “And you can leave if you want. You guys too,” he told Poe and Rey. “But he’s technically my employee, and he’s still your dyad or whatever you call it.”

“Definitely not my anything,” Rey said. “The Force connected us. That’s as far as I’ll go. And I can feel him, actually. He’s alive, but I don’t think he’s nearby.”

“Can you talk to him?” Poe said. “Get a bead on it that way?”

Rey shook her head. “He’s still got the implant in. I assume someone’s worked out that taking it out will cause things to go very badly for them. It can’t kill my general awareness of him, but anything else is beyond me. Or him.”

Finn felt nauseated thinking of the sheer number of potential Kylo Ren kidnappers. “Okay. So. There’s no way someone magically disappeared him out of these rooms. There’s a clue we’re missing, something security didn’t catch. For my money, we start there.”

“You got it,” Poe said. “I’ll snoop around his room.”

“I’ll review flight records,” Rose said.

“I’m going to pace the hallway and try to get the Force to show me what happened here,” Rey said.

They all paused.

“I swear, it’ll be useful. Hopefully.”

“The fuckin’ Force,” Poe said, and they disbanded to search.

The problem was that it could be anyone. The results of the inquiry were public. Kylo had ruined so many people’s lives that every time Finn thought about it, he found himself wondering if he should even be trying to find him. For all he knew, Kylo would reappear announcing he was signing over some newly discovered First Order blood money to Finn. Or he’d show up able to access the Force again, and rip Finn’s head off.

But he couldn’t make himself believe that, so he kept searching.

“He’s been living like a monk,” Poe said after Finn’s third review of the still-empty security footage. “I was kind of hoping I’d find a smoking gun, some kind of blackmail note or something. There’s nothing. You?”

“The footage has to have been tampered with.” In the security footage, Kylo went into his room. No one entered or exited until Finn himself appeared on tape. “But no, I didn’t find anything.”

Rose and Rey came back soon after, reporting the same results. “It’s like he just vanished. There are no irregularities anywhere,” Rose said. “Flight manifests look normal - and it’s a slow week for freight, too, so there weren’t even that many to review.”

“What next?” Rey asked, looking at Finn like she expected him to pull missing-persons expertise out of his ass.

No. That was unfair; he was just upset, apparently more than he’d realized. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice cracking on the last word.

“Oh no,” Rose said, “Oh no, Finn, please don’t cry.”

“Over Kylo Ren,” Poe said in the same tone you might use to say ‘food poisoning’ or ‘Emperor Palpatine sex tape’.

“I know,” Finn said. He wasn’t crying. He was just kind of snuffly. “Look, I know, okay? But I feel responsible, and I’m - he’s -”

“Hey. It’s all right.” Rey patted his back. “We’re going to find him, Finn, I promise.”

“How?”

“Well.” Her tone got weird. Finn turned to see her wrinkling her nose, staring at his apartment door. “Um, you might want to go see what someone just left outside.”

They ran, of course, but whoever’d dropped the letter disappeared: the hallway was completely empty. The package was a letter on foreign-looking paper, folded three times. It demanded a sum of money almost exactly equal to the value of the Organa estate.

“Holy shit, someone’s got a lot of nerve,” Poe said. “Obviously you’re not going to pay it.”

“Of course not,” Finn said. There was something at the edge of his awareness, like how it felt when he persuaded people sometimes. “But -”

“But?” Rose said.

Finn handed the letter to Rey. “Does this feel weird to you?”

She frowned, running her hand over the paper. “A bit. Can’t say why.”

“Can you tell where it came from?” Poe said. “Or who wrote it?”

Rey passed the paper back to Finn, who closed his eyes. “Not really.” But there was something there, an impression or an echo. A pull, almost, like the spite and hatred was a physical rope. Finn closed his eyes and followed it.

A digital message could be traced by tech experts; it was harder, but not impossible, to feel the impression of a person or a place from electrical signals. Paper, though. This paper had traveled a long way, and it might be made of dead things, but it was still made: of an earth, somewhere, and not quite returned to the Force yet.

“Naboo,” Finn said, opening his eyes. Rey, Rose, and Poe stared at him with matching expressions of consternation. “Whoever wrote this note. They wrote it in Naboo.”

“Is Kylo trying to ransom himself?” Poe said.

Rey shook her head. “He signed the fortune over; why would he try to steal it back? Besides, it’s not just his grandmother who’s from Naboo.”

Shit. “The ’troopers. You don’t think -”

“I think whoever wrote this knows exactly how to retain leverage over you.”

“Guess we’d better go, then,” Finn said. As one, they headed for the hangar.

Jurtel Hux was a real piece of shit.

They didn’t know for sure that it was him, not yet. What locals said was that they’d noticed a ginger First Order loyalist moving into an ancient manor home in the area, and rumor was he had a bad-tempered man locked up in the great hall.

“That rumor spread in under a week?” Rey said.

The bartender shrugged. “Listen, lady, there’s nothing to do around here. He sticks out the remainder of his lease and we’ll still be talking about him two, three hundred years from now.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Rose said as they all huddled around their (traditional, apparently locally-made) wine jugs at a corner table. “Why would Jurtel Hux try to ransom Kylo? He’s rich.”

“Some of these assholes can never be rich enough,” Poe said.

“That might be it, but he’s threatened me before.” Finn shook his head. “I think this is about me. Us. The ’troopers.”

“Why does he think kidnapping Kylo will be enough to make you pay a huge ransom?”

“I doubt he’s thinking much at all. He just wants revenge.”

“Well, he picked the wrong group to try it on,” Rey said.

“Did he?” Poe asked, studying his wine jug like it might answer back. “There’s only four of us. Obviously Skywalker over here -”

Rey stuck her tongue out.

“- counts for at least four or five normal people, but still, we’re outnumbered.”

Rose glanced at Finn, who shook his head. “I’m not gonna ask ’troopers to help me bust Kylo Ren out of captivity. For that matter, Rose, if you want to stay behind -”

“And let everyone else risk their lives for that crusty old asshole? No, if you guys are going to be stupid then I’m going to at least try to help you.”

Finn looked at Rey. “Dyad,” she said, shrugging.

“I just want to see him cry on you when we grab him,” Poe said, tipping his jug in Finn’s direction before tilting his head back to finish it off.

Well, then. Finn felt responsible for rescuing Kylo, and his friends apparently felt responsible for him. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too hard to get everyone out in once piece.

“I’m not trying to be inflammatory,” Poe shouted, “but we are absolutely all going to die.”

The four of them were stuck in an antechamber at the manor Jurtel was renting. Apparently he’d never really thought Finn would pay the ransom, and in the few weeks he’d occupied the mansion, he’d managed to rig it with a disgusting array of booby traps. Rey had been drugged, rendering her control of the Force almost totally inert, before they’d even made it to this room. Now, they dodged blaster bolts from rigged weapons in the walls, flying blades launched by unseen machinery, and spitting acid from a creature in the rafters that Poe had already wasted two blasters trying to kill.

Fuck, fuck. “You guys should go. Run, okay? While you still can.”

“Not without you!”

“We have no idea where Kylo is,” Finn said, “and that’s kind of beside the point right now! Jurtel wants me. You can still get out - he’ll focus on me, but -”

“He’ll focus on you,” Rey said. “Finn. Finn! Listen to me. They’re observing us. You can - if they’re watching, you can compel them to stop. You might even be able to force them to take you to Kylo. You weren’t drugged, they don’t know about you.”

Well, they’d know now, if she was right and they were watching. But she really was drugged, barely able to stand, so Finn couldn’t blame her.

“Finn,” Poe said, having obviously come to the same conclusion.

“I know,” Finn said, and closed his eyes.

It was still so hard to feel the Force without Kylo touching him. He knew that was mostly training, his own suspicion of the Force impacting his willingness to access it, but that didn’t make it any easier to find it now. If only he had Kylo - but that was the whole point of this little suicide mission. Focus, he told himself, and reached deep down, to that place that had changed forever when he’d seen Slip die.

“Stop the bombardment,” he said. His voice echoed throughout the room, shaking the stone walls.

The blasters stopped firing. Finn thought the monster above them might’ve stopped moving too, but he couldn’t spare the attention to look. The Force had a grip on him - he had a grip on the Force - if he paused for even a moment he’d lose it, and the attack would begin again.

“Take us to the prisoner,” he said, and a droid appeared from a newly opened door.

They followed it through the doorway and down a flight of stairs barely twenty feet away. At the bottom was a row of ancient holding cells. In the first cell on the right sat Kylo Ren, bruised but very much alive.

Finn’s focus broke, and the Force abandoned him.

“Oh shit,” Poe said, “it stinks down here. Do you think - hey, hey, hey!”

Poe was quick on the draw. The droid Finn had been compelling - the droid he’d lost control over - fell to the ground, circuits radiating electricity, before it could finish its attempt to kill Finn. “Thanks,” Finn said, and then: “Shit. More’ll be coming. Kylo?”

“I’ve refused to play along with your pathetic hallucinatory drugs three times now,” Kylo informed him. “What makes you think this time will be any different?”

Shit. “Kylo,” Finn said, running over to the bars of his cell and stretching one arm through, “I’m not a hallucination, okay? I need you to come over here and grab my hand, or we are very much going to be killed by Jurtel Hux’s mercenaries.”

“Fuck off,” Kylo said.

“Hey! Don’t talk to Finn that way!” Rose lobbed a pebble with deadly accuracy, sending it straight through the bars and against Kylo’s temple.

He went down, and for a second Finn felt the breath catch in his throat. But then he was up again, eyes wide, silent and staring at Finn.

“Believe me now?” Finn said.

“Finn,” Kylo said, and lurched across the cell, grabbing Finn’s hand in his own.

The flare of pain Kylo felt at the contact, the cuts on his hands and under his nails, traveled through Finn’s own synapses. He hissed in sympathy, shared the power to heal. We need to get you out of here, he said, and his body thrummed with Kylo’s agreement.

He’d thought Kylo would seize power. He invited Kylo to seize it, as best as he could. But what he got back wasn’t aggression or even that odd, enveloping feeling he’d gotten the last time Kylo used his power. Instead, he felt…

He felt.

Kylo stood in front of him. Finn knew that, could see the big stupid bulk of him inches away. But between them, in the force, Kylo wasn’t standing at all. He was kneeling, offering himself - his power, and the body it used - to Finn.

Finn had handled dozens of weapons in the Resistance, and dozens more as a ’trooper. He’d never come close to a weapon as powerful as Kylo, offering himself up without reservation for whatever Finn needed him to do.

Fuck. “Let’s go.”

Kylo nodded and bent the bars of his cell, stepping out.

“Holy porg dessert,” Poe said when he spotted them holding hands. “Finn -”

“Run now! Questions later!”

There was an army amassing upstairs. Finn could feel them. Even with his and Kylo’s power in the Force, they might not make it out alive. But at least now they had a chance: Kylo put a hand against the side of Rey’s head, and Rey straightened up and nodded, jawline firming. She was back at full strength. Finn could feel her now, less dimly. Dyad.

Right. Here we go, he told Kylo, and got an impression back: bowing, almost. Telling him to lead the way.

So Finn did.

Kylo wanted to kill everyone they saw, but he wasn’t trying to influence Finn to do so. It sent a shiver down Finn’s spine to feel the bloodthirsty darkness in the back of his mind, like a barely-leashed guard dog. But the simile held true: Kylo wouldn’t do it unless Finn told him to, and Finn wasn’t going to order any deaths today.

Of course, that didn’t mean he was going to endanger his friends. Kylo flanked Finn as they fought their way out, trying to stop as many people as they could without giving them aneurysms or breaking their necks - but Finn felt deaths in the Force all the same, from his and everyone else’s actions.

Finn and Kylo’s power roared together, and combined with Rey’s, their escape was only a matter of time. As they neared the end of the manor’s drive, fifteen guards ran towards them. Rey lifted her hand, and Finn lifted his. Rocks flew up into the air; lightning crashed down from the sky.

The guards fled and the day was theirs.

Rose and Poe cheered the whole way back to the ’trooper estate. Poe had produced a flask and they were toasting to everything, everyone, even Kylo. Finn’s ears were ringing; he felt like he’d been hit over the head one too many times. Rey toasted Rose and Poe but kept a little quiet.

She had good reason to. Finn hadn’t let go of Kylo’s hand yet. They sat side by side in the ground shuttle, and Kylo’s big fingers were squashed between Finn’s hand and his thigh. He was sweaty, clammy.

He was probably, Finn thought, having an argument with Rey in his own head. Could Finn eavesdrop if he wanted to? He really didn’t want to, and in fact didn’t even want to think of it, but it seemed relevant, at least for some stuff.

Stuff like what would happen if he kept thinking about Kylo’s thighs, his still bruised-up torso, the sheer mass and power of him. Yikes.

They took the shuttle directly to Finn’s little house on the edge of the compound, bypassing everyone who’d think to ask them questions like ‘is that blood on your collar’ and ‘hey, why isn’t Kylo Ren wearing a shirt’. Kylo and Finn jumped out of the transport in unison, Finn’s hand still a loose band around Kylo’s wrist. They were the last out, closing a ragged circle of exhausted people.

“Guest quarters are near here,” Rey said. She glanced between Finn and Kylo. “Do you need any help healing?”

“I’m fine,” Kylo said stiffly.

“Yeah, and you’re welcome,” Poe said. He met Finn’s eyes. “You all right?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“Ooookay,” Rose said. “Anyway, we’re gonna walk across that field. Sound probably travels pretty well till we’re halfway across or so. Bye!”

Finn waved, unable to say anything else through the sheer burn of embarrassment. What did they think was going to happen?

“They think I’m going to fuck you,” Kylo said, very quietly. “They’re wrong, of course.”

“I - you don’t -”

“I’d let you fuck me,” Kylo said, “as I’m sure you can feel, connected as we are.”

“I really, really can’t.”

“But you wouldn’t, would you? Because I’m in your power. I’m your employee, and there’s nothing I could do - not even begging - to convince you otherwise.” A slight pause. “I’ve thought of begging. Have you?”

“I’m about to beg you to stop talking,” Finn said. He felt - insane. Completely insane. Kylo was the one who’d been kidnapped. How did he even have the energy to be like this right now? “Kylo, I don’t…I’m really tired.”

“You don’t need to bother with rejection. I provided you with one already.”

Finn pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. It didn’t help with the throbbing behind his eyes. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then what are you saying, exactly?”

“Can’t you tell? In the Force?”

“Apparently we’re not very good at that part yet,” Kylo said, so stiffly Finn knew he was embarrassed even before he saw the sunset-pink flush flooding his entire chest.

“Or maybe you’re saving all your feelings for Rey - hey!”

Kylo kept walking. Finn could just let go of Kylo’s hand; it still lay in his own, relaxed and trusting. But then he’d be even more confused, probably, so he rushed to keep up.

Inside, Kylo wiped his feet off on the mat and marched them all the way to the back of the house, into Finn’s bedroom. It had an old fashioned luxury shower in the corner, enclosed with sparkling glass and sloping stone floors. Totally open to the room, in other words, which suggested the kind of hedonism that Finn could barely think about.

“Please don’t go anywhere,” Kylo said, leading Finn to the bed. Before Finn could ask what was going on, Kylo slid his hand out of Finn’s and took his clothes off.

The sudden cold aloneness was about as unwelcoming as Finn had thought it would be, and worse: there was Kylo’s dick, half-hard and swinging between his legs as he walked towards the shower.

“What is happening,” Finn asked the ceiling beams.

“I’m showering, and then I’m going to beg you. Like I said.” Kylo turned the water on.

Finn felt like he was underwater, and very unlikely to find his bearings any time soon. “Okay, you can’t just say that! What the - Kylo, what is going on!”

He wasn’t exactly surprised when Kylo didn’t answer, but he was angry. He kept staring at the ceiling - kept looking anywhere other than at Kylo, buck-ass naked and only thirty feet away.

That plan didn’t work out very well once Kylo was done showering, though. Technically, when he approached Finn again, he was wearing a towel that hid everything interesting. He was also wet and looked even stupider than usual, the hair plastered to his head accentuating his weird-shaped nose, his clumsy lips. Finn wanted to touch him everywhere, and Finn wanted to disappear from the planet.

Kylo knelt on the floor in front of Finn, and Finn bucked his hips on the bed, almost falling off in his effort to get away.

“Wait, please,” Kylo said, voice very low, and grabbed both Finn’s hands in his.

The Force rushed in between them. It filled Finn’s head with static, with dread, with feelings from Kylo he couldn’t even begin to look at. “I don’t -” Finn tugged his hands, but Kylo’s grip was too strong to easily break free. “Kylo, knock it off. This isn’t funny.”

“It’s not a joke, nor is it…whatever you’re imagining.” At least Kylo was still able to sound like a disdainful asshole. “You came to get me.”

“Because I’m responsible for you, and -”

“Because you wanted to. You didn’t want me dead.” Kylo tilted his head, looking up at Finn with unfathomable eyes. “And when I offered myself to you, you took it. Me.”

“I didn’t take you. I didn’t agree to some weird sex thing just because I was trying to get us out of Jurtel Hux’s shitty rented manor house!”

Kylo sighed, like Finn was being slow or deliberately stupid. And of course, this whole time Finn had been ignoring the connection between them, but now he couldn’t resist. He opened himself up to the feelings Kylo was offering - shoving at him, really, every bit as rude as that description implied.

It felt like being submerged in a pool without knowing how deep it was. There was a depth of feeling Finn hadn’t known to anticipate, living right alongside hatred and terror. The dark side, sure: Kylo had never really abandoned it. But he wasn’t consumed by it, either. Instead, he was consumed…

Well. Finn closed his eyes, taking a deep breath and making himself articulate it. The dark side wasn’t consuming Kylo, because he was consumed by Finn.

“This is really messed up,” he said out loud.

“Only if you permit it to be.”

“That’s -”

“Don’t say ‘Sith logic’, please. It’s bad enough that I can hear you thinking it.”

Finn opened his eyes so Kylo could see that he was rolling them. “Fine, what if I just said ‘dumbass logic’? You’re not - you can’t give yourself to me.”

“Why? Don’t you want it?”

There was no way Kylo meant that the way it sounded. Finn was just going crazy, which the last hour had made very obvious.

“But you have. Thought about it. I haven’t given up so much of my power that I can’t tell that.”

Fuck it. “Why did you give this estate to us?”

Kylo’s eyes narrowed. Finn felt a rush of something in the Force, panic or arousal. Kylo’s hands tightened again around Finn’s, his skin too warm. “It was an expedient way to secure the loyalty I required.”

“But you were surprised when we came looking for you.”

“I wasn’t confident in my machinations until then.”

Machinations. When the Kylo in his head might as well have been a smelly, pissed-off cat tucked under his arm.

“That’s an insulting comparison, Finn.”

“Get out of my head then, Kylo.”

Another flex of Kylo’s fingers. “Why did you accept the estate?”

“We needed a place to live.” And he had hoped, in some way, that it meant Kylo was changing.

“I can’t.”

“Everyone can change.”

“Whatever conscience lived in Ben Solo, whatever generous inclination towards the universe and the sentients that inhabit it, that’s all gone now. They were right to leash me, Finn. You should know that, if…”

Kylo went bright red and clenched his mouth shut, but of course it was too late. With their connection, Finn could feel exactly what Kylo wanted from him, hot and vague at the same time, enough to make Finn feel unhinged.

But there was something Kylo had just said that needed more attention. “You said they were right to leash you. The Kylo Ren the Senate condemned wouldn’t have said that.”

Another flash of need. Kylo was still kneeling. His knees didn’t hurt; as far as Finn could tell, he felt perfectly comfortable there. Finn watched as Kylo flicked his eyes to Finn’s knees and then back up to his face. “Maybe I’m manipulating you.”

“Maybe,” Finn agreed, and leaned down to kiss him.

Kylo was tall enough that it wasn’t much of a lean, thankfully. They met in the middle, in the space above Finn’s thighs. Kylo was still an awkward kisser - had never, the knowledge rushed between them, kissed anyone but Finn. His skin felt like it was on fire; when Finn licked at his lower lip, his hands went limp, sliding up Finn’s forearms to keep skin-to-skin contact even as Finn gripped his elbows and dug his nails into Kylo’s arms.

“Come up here,” Finn said. The image flashed in both their minds, Finn’s dick in Kylo’s mouth, Kylo absorbed - consumed. Finn shook with how badly Kylo wanted it. “You can have that,” he managed to say. “But I just - first - I need. Come up here.”

Kylo stretched out on Finn’s bed was worse, in most ways, than Kylo on his knees. Finn had thought it would be better, that his submission would be less obvious. No. Kylo lay supine beneath him, wide-eyed and watchful, a hand against Finn’s bicep ensuring that Finn could feel how much he wanted this, how much he needed to be directed.

By Finn. Who had never done much before either, hand stuff and then, late in the Resistance when they were all worried they might die, a few disastrous threesomes.

“Threesomes,” Kylo said, his voice sounding like air knocking against a hollow tin can.

“What, like you wouldn’t if you could,” Finn said, and kissed Kylo again.

This, at least, he understood. Kylo’s lips were soft, his rush of need thrilling. He wiggled until he was beneath Finn, a bit, bare ankle hooked around Finn’s own. He touched Finn so carefully, but he wasn’t gentle. Finn wasn’t sure he really knew how to be gentle.

He felt Kylo’s annoyance in the Force, the full-body flash of a sense memory: healing Rey so carefully, almost dying from it.

“Yeah, I know all about your heroics,” Finn said. “But that’s not really the point here, is it? You want something else.”

“You,” Kylo said.

“Not quite.”

It wasn’t. Kylo couldn’t say it out loud. He got brick red and Finn felt Kylo’s arousal flag a little, the truth of what he was too much for him to bear. Finn kissed him again and fed it back into the Force: I know, it’s okay, I know, I’ve got you.

Because the need thrumming through them both was about more than just sex. Kylo needed someone to hold him back. He needed that implant in his arm. He didn’t want it - would have killed himself with it, if he hadn’t been fished out of prison and stuck guarding Finn.

And now, somehow, this was exactly where he wanted to be and what he wanted to be doing. Yielding. Guided.

“That’s fucked up,” Finn told him.

“Yes,” Kylo said, and kissed Finn again, better this time.

When Finn pushed Kylo all the way back and straddled his hips, Kylo didn’t stop him. His hands landed on Finn’s thighs, huge and electrifying. Finn shivered all the way down to his toes at how it felt: uncomfortably stretched, and the knowledge leaping between them of how far he could take it, what they could do together.

“Not yet, you maniac,” Finn said when he had enough breath to speak again. “I’m not - I don’t even think I know how.”

But there was one thing he knew how to do. He leaned forward and kissed Kylo’s chest, feeling Kylo’s furtive enjoyment at how he looked rapidly transform into almost uncontrollable arousal. He licked Kylo’s nipple and felt the effects rip through both their bodies. He was hard now, leaking onto Kylo’s stomach, and Kylo was desperate. Close to begging, so close that he didn’t care how much Finn knew.

In fact he pushed the thoughts onto Finn: Finn was beautiful, powerful, amazing; better than anyone or -thing Kylo had ever hoped to touch like this. Finn was gorgeous and kind and perfect in the images Kylo showed him, and of course he had to know better, being able to see into Finn’s thoughts the way he could. But he didn’t care. He’d pushed himself over the precipice under Snoke, uncontrollable. Now he took what control he had and leashed himself, leaving all that bottomless devotion directed at Finn. A bomb handed to Finn, on a timer but not defused.

And, ultimately, it worked. Finn had to face that, right here, biting at Kylo’s hips: he liked knowing that Kylo had placed himself in Finn’s power. He liked knowing he could keep both of them safe. That Kylo was his.

“Please,” Kylo whispered, and Finn wrapped his hand around Kylo’s dick and licked him, strong and steady like he already knew Kylo wanted.

The shock of contact ripped through them both. Finn found himself sucking Kylo off and fucking the mattress all on his own, arousal magnifying in an endless spiral until Kylo was close, so close -

“Too close,” Kylo gasped, and pulled Finn off. “I want, I need -”

For a moment they broke contact. Less than a second: Finn sat up so he didn’t fall, and Kylo’s arms fell back as Finn’s movements jostled his over-sensitized cock, and then Finn was alone with the Force in a newly quiet universe.

Kylo hissed and reached out, but didn’t touch.

Right. To Kylo, this was power, and he wanted Finn to give him that power now. Finn met him, twined their fingers together.

“What do you want?” he said. “Maybe we should, uh, talk about it.”

“Ugh,” Kylo said. “I want. Lie down?”

Those barely counted as words, by Finn’s estimation, but he went along with it. Kylo moved quickly, awkwardly, like a brand new droid with a warranty-triggering malfunction. “If this is bad, you can just kick me, or tell me to stop or kill me,” he said, and then.

Well.

Finn knew he liked being touched. He knew he liked being taken care of, even bullied a little. During those Resistance threesomes, he’d been out of his body at times: terrified, obviously, but also just floating on the power of not having to make many decisions for himself or anyone else. Now, Kylo took his huge hands and pinned Finn’s hips to the bed. Then he took Finn in his mouth, all at once, feeling hard and hot and desperate, so turned on by it that Finn almost came right then and there.

One hand stayed on him, splayed over his hip and his stomach, but the other hand became warmth at his hip, then his thigh, then a shivering-delicate presence down past his balls, pressing against and not quite into him.

“Kylo,” he said, like it’d been ripped out of him.

Kylo pulled off. “I wanted to kill them, before you came to rescue me. I wanted to kill all of them, and the moment I touched you I could have,” he said, and still his finger rubbed against Finn’s hole, like this was some kind of sex talk. Was it?

No. Not quite. Finn caught up a little too late, the Force hindering more than it was helping. Kylo wanted Finn to know all the bad stuff before Finn told him yes, sure, fuck me, because Kylo thought that being fucked was some kind of final violation, an intimacy beyond all others.

You’re so fucking stupid, Finn told him through the Force. I already knew. Kylo had been the monster in Finn’s nightmares for longer than he’d been anything else, and that would be true for so many more years.

Shame, thick and oily, suspended itself between them.

Finn didn’t roll his eyes and he didn’t throw all his feelings into the Force, though both were tempting. Instead, he said, “Give me some credit, okay? The dignity of knowing what I’m getting into, at least, unless you think I’m stupid.”

“I don’t.”

“Then if I tell you I want you to keep going.” He tilted his hips, pressing against the blunt pressure of Kylo’s finger. “I really do mean it.”

He felt the fluttering of Kylo’s intention, butterfly-light against Finn’s own heart. The power that hummed between them also spiraled out from them. Finn was in his bed in Naboo, and he was in the blackness of space, the dirt of a distant planet, the minds of a billion billion sentients.

“Yes,” Kylo said.

He was right here, with Kylo’s warm hand pressing him down, and a newly-lubricated finger pressing inside him.

“Did you search my room?”

I heard you thinking about it, Kylo told him, and thrust a little roughly.

Finn gasped, his legs falling open of their own volition. He said, “It’d be easier,” and moved to roll.

“No,” Kylo said, and Finn felt his body lifting off the bed.

It felt obscene, and according to Kylo looked obscene, too. Finn half wanted to protest - fine, yes, the Force was everywhere all the time, including during sex, but this felt wrong - but then Kylo pressed another finger in, inexorable, a little too much pressure but also not nearly enough, and Finn was surrounded, incapable of focusing on anything except how badly he wanted more.

Kylo leaned down, making a satisfied noise, and kissed Finn’s inner thigh. It sent a wave of awareness through him, curling his toes with how badly he wanted more. Kylo’s skin was fever-hot, a little rough as he rubbed his chin against Finn’s skin. His tongue dragged up and down Finn’s cock, bright red lips and slick spit. Finn felt the air around him firm up a little harder as Kylo began to thrust his fingers.

And it was too much, really, the mirror image of arousal, the way he could feel how hungry Kylo was when he looked down at Finn. Being split wide open, so turned on it almost hurt, desperate for more -

He lost awareness of everything except Kylo’s hands and the space, still too vast, between the two of them.

“More,” he said, moving his hips.

So Kylo gave it to him. He was slick and hot when he pressed inside, and when Finn moaned and said, “Harder, come on, I know you can feel it,” he obeyed. His body arched over Finn’s, a parenthesis, boxing Finn in. Somehow, Finn didn’t mind it - wanted more of it, he found himself thinking. The thought triggered a wave of need from Kylo, which in turn made Finn desperate for more, until they were kissing as Kylo fucked him, wet and messy.

“Fuck, fuck, please, fuck, please,” he said - no. He wasn’t saying it, Kylo was, but it rattled his bones and lodged itself in his soul. Yes. Please, because Kylo wanted…

Finn reached up and grabbed Kylo’s hair. Tugged.

The Force lit up between them, and Kylo hissed, “Yes.”

So Finn kept at it, kissing Kylo and biting his mouth, tugging his hair. Saying sharply, “Harder, don’t stop,” and “Touch me, come on,” and “You feel so good, you feel perfect,” until Kylo finally made him come.

Being able to feel the way he felt, to see what Kylo saw as Finn fell apart beneath him - it was more than Finn had ever experienced, more than he’d have said he could bear. He almost blacked out from it, floating in the connection between them, even as Kylo’s desperation peaked and he started fucking Finn again.

His rhythm was off, uneven. He was so desperate. Finn kissed him and said, “Come on, Kylo. Show me what you can do.”

And that was it. Kylo came with a low moan, his hips stuttering between them, filling Finn with his come.

The Force glowed between them, an endless ebb and flow of emotion and sensation. Finn was Kylo; he was the universe; he was himself, sweaty and exhausted and happier than he’d ever anticipated being.

“Finn,” Kylo said, dropping his head to kiss him again.

Kylo was going to say something stupid. Finn could sense it. He said, “Tomorrow. Or - later.” When he wasn’t so Force-drunk.

“Whenever you want. Whatever you want. That’s -” In the Force, a wave of feeling, desire and submission and love. “That’s all I wanted to say. That this, I’m. Yours.”

It was exactly the fraught confession Finn hadn’t wanted. He should’ve been annoyed, but instead he felt a ridiculous wave of tenderness. He was really stuck with Kylo now. Kriff, they were going to have so many arguments.

“Me too,” Finn said. Though not in the same way, obviously, an observation Kylo felt in the Force and agreed with. “Now go to sleep.” He yawned, unable to repress it any longer, cracking his own jaw.

In the end, he fell asleep with Kylo sprawled all over him. Kylo had too much limb and gave off way, way too much heat; he was a restless sleeper, twitching and mumbling. After decades of sleeping in shitty bunks, Finn had learned to love being picky about when and how he slept. Objectively, being squashed beneath a massive asshole who drooled on Finn’s own pillow was bottom-tier.

He fell asleep almost as quickly as Kylo had, and slept an unbelievably peaceful ten hours.

Finn was kind of worried about what might happen if he stopped touching Kylo. He woke up before Kylo did, still pinned under his stupidly long arm, and stared at the ceiling, doing his best to stay still. If he rolled away right now to go to the bathroom, would Kylo wake up? Would he be mad? Did he feel entitled to this now?

I’m yours, he’d said, but what did that mean?

“Mrhmm,” Kylo said. He yawned and stretched - and rolled away. “G’morning.”

Finn hadn’t realized how cold it was, to be alone in the Force. He flexed his hands and didn’t reach out. “Good morning.”

“It’ll be okay.”

No sense in pretending Kylo hadn’t picked up on his thoughts. “Will it?”

There was no way Kylo fell back asleep that quickly. No fucking way. But Finn waited a good five minutes, and before he was able to protest or call Kylo a coward - or try to get out of bed and put the whole thing out of his mind - Kylo started snoring.

Asleep. Ha. Right.

Finn did eventually get out of bed; Kylo kept sleeping, or fake-sleeping. He put some clothes on and went to the restaurant nearest his little house, situated at the edge of one of the public throughways between the Amidala estate and the nearest city. He bought some caf and an assortment of legume dishes, sat down, and started to eat.

“For the record, next time, you should tell Kylo to give me a heads up.”

“Auuughghgh,” Finn said, and flung beans all over himself.

He looked up to see Rey biting her lip. “Whoops. Sorry.”

“No, no, it’s fine. Why do I care? I don’t.” He flicked beans off himself as a cleanup droid rolled over. “Also, um, sorry. How much can you…feel?”

“Enough,” Rey said. When Finn looked back up, her expression was more than a little grossed out. “Actually, okay. More than enough. Finn, are you really sure about this?”

He knew this was the first of many questions on the topic. He had to keep his cool, because everyone else would be even more blunt, and they weren’t even wrong. He knew. But it still rankled, and he heard his own peevishness when he said, “Yeah, Rey, I promise, I’m sure. I did not hop in bed with noted dark lord Kylo Ren without thinking about it first.”

“I’m not going to apologize for worrying about you. Either of you, really. May I sit?”

“Of course you can sit.”

So Rey did. She had her own caf and a sad little tube of protein compound; she’d never gotten into food as a thing with meaning beyond nutrition, but then, neither had Jannah. They were definitely a match made in heaven. Finn, on the other hand, loved a legume.

“I’m kind of scared shitless. I think,” Finn said, before he could chicken out of this too.

Rey raised her eyebrows and slurped her protein paste. “Yeah?”

“What happens when I take the Force away from him? When he’s being all - you know, evil? What if he tries to kill me?”

“He’d go back to prison, which we know he doesn’t want.”

“If you care about someone, sometimes you’ll risk prison.”

“Not generally to kill them, though.”

Finn stared at her, hoping that communicated the Kylo of it all.

Rey sighed. “Yes. I see your point. Well, for what it’s worth, I haven’t really gotten the impression he wants to do that. Obviously, or else I’d be killing him myself. I’m your friend, not his, no matter what the dyad thinks.”

“Can the dyad think?”

Rey’s mouth twisted. “If it could, I doubt we’d be bonded.”

Right. Rey, at least, hadn’t chosen this particular attachment. “I really want to think he won’t hurt me.”

“Sounds like a conversation you might need to have with him.”

“Yeah, no shit. But with everything, I just kind of. Haven’t.”

Rey took another swig of protein paste and looked around. She’d picked up some bad habits from all her Jedi training, in Finn’s opinion. She clearly wanted him to look around, too. And damn it, it worked: after an awkward moment, Finn cast his gaze around at the restaurant, the road, the blue sky and rolling hills.

“It’s really beautiful here,” Rey said.

“Yeah. But.”

“Kylo,” Rey agreed. “I mean, you need to talk to him. But Finn, you should probably consider. I mean. Um. Well, ah, you know…right? Tell me you get what I’m trying to say.”

“You’re making less than no sense right now,” Finn said without hesitation.

It was kind of morbidly fascinating to see Rey turn bright red, then dark purple, like her embarrassment was so deep it might be bruising. “You don’t want to be used. Because you were, right, you were a weapon, and you never wanted to be one. It was awful and painful.”

“Yeah, I mean. Everyone’s heard my testimony.”

“Yes! Exactly. So.” Another protein paste slurp. The tube was depleted now; Rey set it down on the table. “The thing is, that’s not the case with Kylo. He’s well aware of what he can do. He hates what he’s done. I’m not saying he’d sign up for an implant if you took it from him now, but he…agrees…that he needs to be restrained. And -” She screwed up her face. “He likes it’s you doing it. You see? He chose this. He wants it. But it’s disgusting to think about, so please, you should really have this conversation with him and not me.”

And Finn…

He’d thought about it before, but knowing that Rey had picked up the same thing changed things. Finn had already half convinced himself it was a stupid sex thing, but Rey wouldn’t be talking about it if that were the case.

He looked around again. Blue sky. Birds. A guy back in his house who liked him, maybe. Wanted to be kept by him, definitely.

Weird. Fucked up. But something, maybe, that he could work with.

“All right,” he said. “Thanks.”

Rey gave him a relieved smile and sipped her caf.

“So about your whole thing with Jannah,” Finn said, and laughed when she spat her drink across the table.

In the end, he just kind of blurted it out.

It had been a week since they’d rescued Kylo, and in that time they hadn’t really done anything differently. Kylo was still following Finn around, a dour shadow making his shoulder blades itch. Finn was still occasionally looping him into conversations or giving him orders, but was mostly just ignoring him.

Finn couldn’t speak for the rest of it. The ‘frantically jerking off every night’ part. He certainly was, and every time he thought of Kylo. Maybe Kylo’d managed to forget it all.

Well, okay, no. Kylo definitely still cared about reaching the Force. But while Finn occasionally saw his hand flex if he stepped too close, Kylo didn’t turn those wordless little motions into action. He watched Finn, and his breath caught if Finn brushed by him, and that was the end of it. Until.

It had been a long day even by Senate standards, featuring a rapid round of votes and then a debate on mineral rights forfeited by First Order operatives that went into the small hours of the morning. Finn felt like he’d been dunked in water and then wrung out. All he wanted was sleep, and Kylo was standing in the middle of his - their? - living room, one hand behind his back, frowning at Finn.

“I was unaware of your itinerary until tomorrow. Traveling to Jakku without a full security detail is foolish.”

“I’ll have you, and once I’m on Jakku I’ll have a bunch of Jedi-in-training, you, and Rey. I think I’ll be okay.”

“Jedi-in-training aren’t known for their restraint, and I am powerless, as you know.”

“You have a blaster, and if things get really bad you can just hold my hand and help me kill people.”

He watched Kylo’s flinch - and his greedy glance towards Finn’s hand, like he couldn’t help but imagine it. “You can ask, you know.”

“Can I.”

“Yeah,” Finn said, and took a step forward. Kylo stood his ground.

“I won’t go to Jakku without more people if you really don’t want me to. But I think it would be fine, which implies I trust you, and I know you hate that. Still.” He reached out and caught Kylo’s hand. It was so warm. The feeling of the Force opening between them had finally become familiar, kind of, at least enough that he didn’t feel like he was being pushed over by it.

“You shouldn’t.”

“Yeah,” Finn said, and kissed him.

He’d meant for it to be a conversation, but that became less necessary as they kept kissing. Kylo was - intense, needy, overwhelming. Something, someone, Finn still didn’t want to care about, but he couldn’t deny that he did. And Kylo in the Force was a revelation. He yielded over and over, and Finn let him. Enjoyed it.

Held on to his hand, still, as Kylo dropped to his knees.

He sucked Finn’s dick right there in the living room, and then Finn dragged him in to the bedroom and said, “Stay,” pushing Kylo down on the bed. He jerked Kylo off, kissing his neck, sucking on it until bruises bloomed along the meat of his shoulder. Kylo gasped and moaned, and feeling bloomed between them.

It took maybe half an hour, overall. It was one of the better half hours of Finn’s life.

“Stay,” Finn said again, flinging a leg over Kylo and closing his eyes.

“All right,” Kylo said, very quietly.

The message from Jannah came the next day: they’d discovered a massive cache of Old Republic-era speeders in an abandoned garage, and they needed mechanics.

“Senate’s in recess,” Finn told Kylo, unable to hide his glee, “which means I get to go do something fun.”

“What happened to Jakku?”

“Rey can bring her baby Jedi to Naboo. Say yes.”

They were still touching, sides pressed together. Finn already knew what Kylo was going to say, but he still savored the slight eye roll, the way a corner of Kylo’s mouth just barely twitched up. “Yes.”

“Hell yeah,” Finn said, and kissed him.

Everyone was pretty grossed out by him holding hands with Kylo, but the gossip didn’t stay exciting for long. Rey arrived a day after Finn did, and she kissed Jannah in full view of thirty ’troopers.

“Not a word,” Jannah said to Finn, “or you’ll learn how accurate my knife-throwing skills are.”

Finn mimed locking up his mouth and throwing the key. Rey was laughing enough for both of them, anyway.