The crushing, beloved weight of his master's power brought him to his knees as pain shot through him. He gathered it as he had been taught, funneling it into power, as his master said, "I sense a great disturbance in you, my apprentice."

He tried and failed not to think of Han Solo, face crumpling as life fled from his body, falling from the platform. "It has only deepened my desire to purge the galaxy of Jedi, Master," he said.

"Liar," his master hissed, and another bolt of pain shot through him, sending him to his knees.

The strength of the mind invading his nearly made him scream. He realized it was inevitable that his conflict would be discovered, that the resulting punishment would be unending and limitless in its capacity to produce suffering. His only hope was to give another, more palatable reason for the conflict, to prevent further exploration.

And so Kylo Ren took a deep breath, opened his mind, and began to lie.

"I think it's really good that you thought you could do it," Finn told Rey. "It didn't work, obviously, but —"

Rey made a face. "You're almost as bad as General Organa. It could have worked. I mean, I had to give him a chance. Luke said —"

She paled then, and looked back down at her food. Finn grimaced and patted her shoulder.

"I get it," he said. "That's the whole point of the Resistance, right? Trying to save people." Rose still lay in an observation tank, kept sedated until the worst of her wounds healed. He wasn't going to forget her lesson any time soon.

"Trying to save people," Rey echoed. "I suppose it's good that I hit him on the head, then. That counts as saving, given the context."

"Of course it does," Finn said, hugging her before they parted for Jedi training and mechanic work, respectively.

Kylo Ren had been behind enemy lines for nearly seventy-two hours now. In that short time, he hadn't forgiven Rey for bashing him over the head and carrying him off the First Order's ship. Personally, Finn thought that was way better than he deserved, but he could tell from Rey's wide eyes and troubled mien that her conscience was pricking her.

It had to be those visions. Finn shook his head to think of them. Rey had told him they were Snoke's doing, but she'd seemed to think the good she'd sensed in Kylo was still real, and not part of his whole manipulation gambit.

Maybe Rey was still under Snoke's influence too, a bit. It didn't matter much, since Kylo was locked up, kept in a Force-dampening pod in the infirmary, sedated. There was no way anyone would be questioning him for awhile.

Or so he'd thought. An hour into his tricky nav-system rewire, a droid found him and said, "Finn, Kylo Ren has requested your presence in the infirmary."

He dropped the hydro-wrench. "I'm sorry, what?" he said as he scrambled to retrieve it.

"Kylo Ren has requested your presence in the infirmary. Message: get me the traitor. I don't care what you think. Find the traitor and bring him here. End message."

"How'd you identify me as the traitor?" Finn said. "That's not — I'm a member of the Resistance now, he doesn't get to call me a traitor."

"The meaning was clear in context, Finn. Allow me to demonstrate my linguistic decision-making tree." An enormous, impossibly complex hologram sprung to life between them.

Supposedly, this kind of droid wasn't really sentient. Supposedly, there was no way it was being a pill right now because it didn't like Finn making its job harder. Right.

"Fine, fine, I get it," he said, and made his way to the infirmary. It was easy enough to find Kylo: he was the one under guard, the bed everyone else gave as wide a berth as possible. He struggled to sit up when Finn arrived, thrashing and scowling when he didn't have enough room to maneuver. "Tell them to remove these shackles," he hissed at Finn, raising his wrists to show off the thin plastisteel strips.

"Buddy, you're lucky they haven't wrapped you in ferrocrete head to toe and dropped you in the nearest ocean."

"They hurt." He sounded sulky now, of all things, petulant as a toddler. "I can feel the Force dampening, you know. The Force User Equitable Treatment Act of —"

Finn laughed in spite of himself. "Seriously? You're quoting Republic law? You're an enemy combatant. You don't even acknowledge the Republic's existence."

"I'm a prisoner of war. We have rights."

"Unfortunately," Finn said. "Since I really do think they should just drop you in the ocean."

For a moment, Kylo narrowed his eyes and Finn felt — strange. He felt like Kylo knew something, knew Finn was lying and knew he was scared, despite the Force-dampening manacles he wore. Or, he thought Kylo might have been about to say something important.

But an orderly came to fiddle with one of the monitors he was attached to, and Kylo only said, "I suppose it's your right to feel that way. I treated you poorly."

"You treated everyone poorly. It was kind of your thing." Is, Finn thought, fingernails biting into his palms.

Dropping him into the ocean would've been wrong, a horrible betrayal of Resistance ideals. But Finn, standing there faced with the man who'd once held his life in two cruel hands, who'd almost killed him, wanted to betray those ideals just then. He really did.

"But I treated you especially poorly, my dear," Kylo said, yanking Finn back to reality with his silky voice and ...

And his glances at the orderly, as though ...

Finn had been commended more than once for his ability to draw accurate conclusions based on scraps of evidence. It was a good quality for a solider to have. Right now, the scraps of Kylo's words arranged themselves into a horrifying picture: Kylo's own room on the Finalizer, coercion, twisted lust, all the forms of power that First Order officers supposedly weren't interested in when it came to stormtroopers. That had always been a lie. Stormtroopers had been subjected to all forms of abuse.

But not Finn. Only Kylo, right now, apparently wanted to amuse himself by pretending otherwise. By acting like he and Finn had been, what, lovers?

"That's sick," Finn said flatly. "You are a very, very sick man."

Something sparked in Kylo's gaze. "Yes," Kylo said. "That's what you told me before, too. You broke my heart."

The orderly dropped a swab.

"I never even spoke to you," Finn said. "What are you doing?"

He had never seen anything as sinister or creepy as the way the side of Kylo's mouth curled upwards in a half-smile. "Trying to win you back, FN-2187."

Cold stole through him. "Don't call me that. And don't try to summon me again."

"But you'll come," Kylo called at his retreating back.

No. No, he wouldn't.

He had to tell someone about it, of course. After worrying about it for hours, he went to Rey. "Oh my," she said when he related the story. "You'll want to tell the General, of course."

"That's what I was hoping, yeah. It's so —"

"Creepy." She wrinkled her nose. "And strange. Why would he try to convince anyone that you two were — like that?"

He'd never be able to tell her how grateful he was that she never asked him if it was true, that she automatically assumed Kylo was a liar. Fine, most of the Resistance wouldn't believe Kylo if he read a weather report, but Finn had seen the sidelong glances, the suspicious frowns. No one here knew what it was to be a stormtrooper, but they all had really active imaginations. He was sure if Kylo wandered around telling everyone Finn had been his — what? Boyfriend? — that people would believe him.

Ugh.

He dreamed about it that night. The other FNs watched as he prepared to go to Kylo Ren's private rooms. No one said anything, he felt himself sweaty with fear and a horrible, sick kind of anticipation. A Force user could make him want it, or think he wanted it, for long enough for him to be...compliant.

Long enough, and no longer. Finn's heart hammered in his chest as he walked down long, dark hallways, feeling the weight of Kylo Ren's desire pressing in on him, panic rising to choke his throat —

He woke with his heart racing, half-convinced he could hear whispering in his tiny bunk. Sweat stuck the sheets to his skin. He very nearly screamed.

That day, he dove into his work without even swinging by the canteen for breakfast. He let himself get lost in the tangle of wires, the spark of almost-rightness running through the broken-down ships. That spark could guide a tech to what needed fixing, if the tech paid attention. Machines weren't like sentients, but they weren't dead, either. The Resistance needed their ships to have as much soul as anything else on the base.

He almost forgot about Kylo, until the alarms sounded.

They landed in pairs, squadrons of stormtroopers flanking the entire camp. Finn had no idea where they came from; the First Order's cloaking technology was ahead of the Resistance's, but not by this much. They should have had safeguards in place; the First Order shouldn't have been able to find them at all.

He ran to fight, of course, but Poe and the other pilots stood with their hands over their heads, absolutely still. "What's going on?" Finn hissed.

"This is a retrieval mission," Poe said. "We're overwhelmed. So we're standing down."

Kylo. "They're here for him. He had a tracker?"

"It appears so. We'll have to evac after, of course." Poe swore. "I'd just gotten the still set up, too."

That really didn't seem like the biggest of their problems, just then, but Finn didn't argue. He stood with Poe, keeping his hands up, too, waiting for them to be gone.

He felt the cold and final tip of a blaster press behind his left ear. "FN-2187."

"That's not my name."

"It's your designation," said the stormtrooper. "And I've got my orders: get the Knight, get the boyfriend. Come on."

"Boyfriend?" Poe said. "Wait, hang on, what are you talking about — ow!"

Poe had been pistol-whipped before. He'd be fine. Finn, on the other hand...

"I won't go with you." He managed to will his voice not to shake, just barely. "I'm not going back there. Not ever."

"Suit yourself," the stormtrooper said, and shot him.

Blaster stunning never lasted long. He woke up as they dragged him to the ship. "No," he said. "No, no, don't do this, please don't —"

"My love, it's time for you to be quiet," Kylo Ren said. He fell into step next to the two stormtroopers who were dragging Finn.

"Don't call me that," Finn snapped. "What is wrong with you?"

"Hmm," Kylo said, and Finn felt the pressure of the Force at his throat, preventing him from talking, almost closing off his airway.

He closed his eyes and breathed. In, out, in, out. One, two, three, four.

The stormtroopers took them to the Starbane. Kylo's new ship, apparently: "A most welcome gift from the Grand Admiral," Kylo said with a sneer. Hux had given himself a promotion, it transpired, and done away with the title of Supreme Leader altogether.

Finn assumed Kylo was furious; he wouldn't know. He'd been deposited in Kylo's quarters as the ship took off, blindfolded and told to wait by a stormtrooper who sounded happy about getting the opportunity to tie up 'the traitor'.

The traitor, and the boyfriend. Finn was in so, so much trouble.

Kylo was gone long enough for Finn's fury to fade to impatience. He announced his presence, finally, by saying, "FN-2187. I missed you. Darling."

"First of all, that's not my name," Finn said. "Second of all: take this blindfold off. Third of all, no one, least of all me, is going to believe you mean it when you call me 'darling', so what do you think you're do —"

Fingers over his mouth, tight and unforgiving. Hot breath against his ear. Fear down his spine like cold water in the brig. "Silence," Kylo hissed, and kicked him, sending him sprawling to the floor.

It occurred to Finn that the whole lie might have been an excuse to get him here, on the floor and entirely helpless. The recycled air, the cool tile, the grey-and-black panels on the walls: it was all hopelessly familiar. It felt like coming home and it made him want to cry. The fact that he might now have to deal with Kylo's... attentions...on top of it all almost didn't matter. The horror of the First Order was so much greater than what one man, no matter how insane and evil, could do to him.

He turned to tell Kylo all of that, or at least part of it. But Kylo crouched and said, "Stop doing this. Stop making me — reject you."

"Reject, huh? Is that what you call kicking me?"

"I loved you. And you turned away from me. You ran, and I had to follow. I would do anything for you, but you must not reject me again."

"What are you even talking about? Can you hear yourself right now?"

Kylo met his eyes and held them. "You. Must. Not. Reject. Me. Again."

Click, click, click, went the bits of the puzzle as Finn pieced them together. He'd had a tracker: he had intended to get rescued if he was captured. But he hadn't meant for them to take Finn. Finn had been 'the boyfriend' for some reason, and now Kylo was telling him that he had to keep up the ruse, because —

I would do anything for you.

It had been important, somehow, for some reason. That was the threat. Kylo would kill him if he didn't keep up that insane lie, for no reason that Finn could see. He wasn't interested in Finn at all, not like that, but he was committing to the fiction that Finn was his — lover — and if Finn didn't go along with it, that was the end for him.

Son of a Sarlacc lover, Finn hated the First Order so kriffing much.

"Yes," Kylo hissed. "That's it. You burn with it, don't you? You're a fool, a perfect fool."

"Don't call me that."

"What should I call you then, FN-2187?"

"My name is Finn."

Kylo laughed. "Let's be reasonable, shall we? Your kind don't have names."

Finn closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cold floor. I will kill him, he told himself, and then he turned around.

"If you want me to be your beloved ex, or your lover, or whatever you're after: you'll have to call me Finn."

Another spark of something in Kylo's eyes, smothered again as soon as Finn saw it. "Fine. Finn. You broke my heart by turning traitor. I had become attached to how well you...augmented...my power."

"That's sick."

"It's the truth." Said with another one of those bizarre half-smirks.

"When I figure out what your game is, you are finished," Finn said, very softly.

"Of course." Kylo caught Finn's hand, touched the knuckles one by one. His touch burned like a fever. "Nothing pleases me more than seeing that spark of yours."

Finn couldn't imagine any response that wouldn't end in tears, or him being spaced, so he kept his mouth shut. Kylo made arrangements for the adjoining room to be Finn's. He implied to no fewer than six 'troopers that the door would stay unlocked so he could use Finn at all hours. He touched Finn's cheek in full view of Grand Admiral Hux, and laughed when Hux voiced his disgust.

He was playing a game, with Finn as his pawn. Finn had to look impassive, marginally willing.

Hatred burned within him like a star, long after the door of his not-private room was shut. He fell asleep with his fists clenched, and woke to silence. The door that would let him access the rest of the ship was locked. He had a holopad to order food and entertainment, and a closet of First Order uniforms that no stormtrooper would be permitted to wear.

It was very clearly a prison, couldn't have more obviously been so if the door that wouldn't open had also been covered in durasteel chains. Despite that, it was the most luxury Finn had ever been experienced on a First Order ship. That simple fact, his own relative freedom, kept throwing him back to how it'd felt to be a stormtrooper. His heard pounded; his head swam. He had to take several deep breaths through the fear that threatened to overwhelm him.

He wasn't one of them anymore, but he was trapped in a different, possibly even worse way.

After hours of silence, the door between his and Kylo's rooms opened. Kylo stepped through with his usual dour look. "Finn. Attend me."

"I thought I wasn't your soldier anymore," Finn snapped.

Kylo sighed, staring at the ceiling. A voice whispered in Finn's head: my room is not under surveillance. A pause, and then, like Finn might've otherwise doubted the source of the thought: You idiot.

"Not my soldier," Kylo said out loud. "But someone whose company I do still...require."

He couldn't have been more blatant if he'd thrown Coruscantian dildos at Finn's head. Finn got to his feet and followed Kylo into his room.

As soon as the door slid shut, Kylo whirled around and said, "Are you really this stupid? I was given to understand you tested exceptionally well, for a stormtrooper."

"Maybe freedom made me dumber. Or maybe I know how stupid it would be to just go along with this crazy lie of yours."

"They will kill you," Kylo said. "They may yet kill me, but they will certainly kill you first. If you want to die, by all means, rebuff my advances."

"Romantic," Finn said. "I can see why Rey was so into you now."

He scored a hit there: he got to watch Kylo flinch. It didn't really make up for how terrified he was, or strongly he suspected he might not survive another decade of captivity with the First Order.

"The bond doesn't matter now," Kylo said. "If you want to stay alive, then you'll do as I say."

Finn looked back at Kylo's bed, huge and flat with undisturbed sheets. He looked at Kylo. His mind presented him with a wide variety of suggestions regarding what exactly doing as Kylo said might involve.

Did he want to stay alive? Did he want it that badly?

The realization chased the question, nipping at his heels. No. The only thing he wanted that much was freedom.

"You'll do well with my mother's chosen stooges: they appreciate such idiotic impulses there," Kylo said. "I have no interest in forcing you to do anything, much less anything...intimate."

"Except you do want to order me around. And pretend we're — whatever."

"That's not forcing. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement."

"This whole thing is crazy." And he was tired of talking around it. "I'm not going to pretend to be in love with you just because you told a lie and don't want anyone to know you're a liar."

"It's not about pride. It's about life and death. My life, to be precise. And yours, as a consequence."

"What on earth is important enough about the First Order that you're willing to risk — never mind," Finn said as Kylo opened his mouth, "I don't want to know. I don't care." He looked again at the bed and then at Kylo, thought of his murderous hands and virtually unlimited power, and everything that could go wrong between them.

"Fine," he said, hating every minute of it. "I'll play along. But you can't touch me, not really. If you do, it'll be the last thing you do to me." Because he'd end his own life, he didn't have to say.

Kylo only rolled his eyes. "Somehow, I suppose I'll have to restrain myself."

Finn went to go back outside, then remembered the surveillance thing. "Will they expect me to be — gone, or —"

He wasn't going to say, are you a 'stay all night' kind of guy or a 'kick out the subhuman you used' kind of guy? — but he could tell Kylo was intruding on his thoughts again, based on the face he made.

"Stay if you want. I actually have to sleep." He tossed the covers back without ceremony, his cloak and tunic flying off him to hang in the corner.

It was a totally unnecessary display of everything: his power, his body. Finn looked away. "Fine. I'll take the floor."

"This is the biggest bed on the ship."

"Yeah, and it's full of the biggest asshole, currently." And he'd slept on worse than a floor that, unlike the stormtrooper quarters several levels below, was heated. He lay down, making a pillow out of his jacket, and forced himself to sleep.

It didn't really get better after that.

Finn rarely saw anyone else, but the people he did see were First Order officers. One of them looked at Finn, looked at Kylo, and said, "Really, don't you think letting it out of a uniform is going a little far?"

Kylo had established their whole fictional thing as affectionate. Finn didn't get it, but that incident was one time he saw benefits to it: Kylo smiled tightly as the air went leaden around them and said, "Frankly, Denbar, I think letting you in a uniform was going a little too far."

Denbar went very pale and didn't so much as look at Finn for the rest of his visit, which was how Finn preferred it. Insomuch as he was allowed to prefer anything. He couldn't have any holonet access; he had the books Kylo brought him, but he had terrible taste and seemed to think Finn would too, all weird long books about people having aggressive sex or incredibly dry military texts featuring way more Galactic Empire propaganda than Finn had ever seen, outside his own childhood education.

It sucked. And it sucked, too, that Kylo spent most of his time in his rooms, meditating or doing Force stuff and never, ever talking to Finn unless someone else was there to perform for. It wasn't like Finn wanted to talk to him, but —

He was lonely. And he wanted to escape, but it turned out that when people knew you'd escaped before, they watched you harder. He hadn't realized how much the First Order assumed stormtroopers didn't think. It would be hard to get down the hallway alone without catching a blaster shot between the shoulders, now.

"Don't try that," Kylo said sharply, and Finn realized he'd been broadcasting his thoughts. Or Kylo had been tuning in; Finn wasn't really clear on how that all worked.

"Nor should you be," Kylo said, still not opening his eyes. But to be clear, I can hear every tedious thought that passes through your still-stunted mind.

They were in Kylo's room, which meant Finn could say, "Maybe my mind would be less stunted if you'd bring me something actually interesting."

"I did. I brought you fiction. Dramas."

"Romances," Finn said, "full of people being thrown around and penetrated with the Force, which is, uh. Not my thing. And kind of gross."

"The rest of civil society disagrees with you on that point."

The rest of civil society wasn't regularly sharing a room with a deranged evil Force user. "Yeah, well, I'd like a book about — how engines work. Or how we grow food on-board. Or even just a story about something other than being Force-fingered."

He watched as Kylo's entire face turned bright red. "It's not Force— the descriptions of sex acts are tactful and restrained!"

"Sure," Finn said. "I guess you probably see way crazier porn, since you're evil and all."

"I — that does not merit a response."

Which was a response itself. Finn rolled his eyes. "I'm bored. I would be less bored if I could read something that wasn't weird propaganda, okay?" In the romance books, the Force belonged to the Dark Side and was used for sexy domination; that counted as propaganda.

Kylo huffed an angry breath, like a bantha presented with a steep hill. "Fine. I'll see what I can do."

The next day, he tossed a microchip at Finn's head. It contained two books on modern produce production, two books on the structure of the new compression circuit that powered faster-than-light communication, and a romance novel about an Outer Rim conman who discovered he loved being erotically dominated by a Sith Lord.

Kriffing Kylo. But four out of five was better than usual, so Finn spent the day reading. He got so absorbed in the descriptions of droid-built plant nutritive systems that he almost didn't notice Kylo coming into his room.

"Darling," Kylo said. "It's late."

"Sorry, what?" He looked up, then blinked at Kylo's lack of shirt and extremely fake-looking affectionate expression. "I got distracted. I should order something to eat."

"It's nearly halfway through gamma shift," Kylo said. "You're not likely to get anything but rehydrated protein. Which I already have, in my room. Where you should come. Now."

Finn spared a moment to contemplate the horrifying possibility that Kylo was actually trying his hardest to seem in love, or sexually obsessed, or whatever the story was. Maybe this was Kylo at his best and most romantically alluring.

Poor Rey. "Fine, I'm coming."

Kylo's shoulders relaxed as soon as the door slid shut. "I really wish you'd keep track of time better. I dislike those little performances as much as you do."

"I'm going nuts cooped up in these rooms, you're lucky all I do is get too absorbed in reading. You just don't like the First Order thinking you still have to woo a lowly stormtrooper, instead of me just being your willing toy." Finn snored. "Like in the books you give me."

"I told you! Those books are romantic! And half are produced in the Republic, you — ungrateful —" Kylo shook his head, looking away. "Anyway, I only got you one this time, and it's lowering to be seen in the market too often."

"You could just have them sent to my holopad, you know."

"Ah, yes, why didn't I think of that? Of course I'll open up your device with note-taking capability and an application called 'Diary' to the First Order 'net. What a sensible course of action."

Finn ducked his head, then did one better and dropped to his usual spot on the floor. "Like I don't know how to keep my thoughts to myself. You really don't know anything about stormtroopers."

Kylo didn't answer. Finn filled in his answer for himself: I don't need to know anything about the mud on my boots, FN-2187.

He was nearly asleep when Kylo gave his actual answer. "I'd let you tell me, if I thought you wanted to."

"Stop performing. There's no one listening." He barely got the words out, he was so tired. He slipped into sleep before Kylo could give another belated retort.

He should've expected the nightmares, really. There was a reason he tried to think about counting sheep, or hanging out on the Millennium Falcon with Rey and Chewie, instead of — everything else. Where he was, who he was with, who he'd been, and who he was now. Especially that last bit, because it scared him sometimes, how relatively easy it was to bide his time in First Order custody. He'd been ready to die for freedom, and he thought he still was, but —

"Stay with me," the Kylo in his dreams hissed, and Finn did, made helpless by the Force or his own weakness. A soft bed, food, things to read, and no freedom at all, but wasn't that better than it had been? Wasn't that better than dying righteously of starvation or a blaster shot to the head? Stay, hissed a vast dark force, and Finn thought, maybe I will, and then the snakes darted up from the pit and grabbed him, bites on his arms, on his legs, pain like fire in his limbs, like the only time he'd tried to talk back during training, you are no one, FN-2187, and I will demonstrate that to you however I must, broken arms, electric shock ripping screams out of him -

He woke as he often had, catching the breath in his throat before he could scream. The floor had gotten weirdly soft and warm — and then his sluggish brain caught up and realized that was Kylo's arm pressed to his side, and the pinpricks of light in the room were reflecting off Kylo's eyes.

Fresh terror rocketed through him. He held himself very still.

"Oh, stop it," Kylo said. "You were muttering. It was annoying. Now you're up here, and you can sleep without making a fool of yourself."

"I'm not — what?"

"'Where's the rest of my squad,'," Kylo said in a voice that Finn guessed was meant to be his. "'I'm so alone, don't make me sleep alone.' I had no idea the barracks were so luxuriously collegiate."

It would have been less embarrassing if he was wrong. But Finn wasn't awake enough to argue; his heart still pounded in terror, and he thought if he kept trying to talk he might cry. He rolled over instead, hugging his pillow, trying to ignore the mass murderer behind him.

He dreamed of his friends. Slip and the others, from before, but also Rey, Poe, Rose, BB-8, even Chewie, who probably made fun of him a little too much to really count. But in the dream they surrounded him, hugging him, reminding him of why he'd fought to be free. Why he'd finally really committed to the Resistance, not just for one friend, but so that people like him wouldn't have to be afraid anymore. In the dream, he knew he was just dreaming; it didn't feel real. But it felt like it mattered, all the same, right until he woke up.

Kylo lay curled around him, warmer than Finn had ever known a person to be. His arms were locked around Finn's waist, and he had been breathing on Finn's neck for awhile, judging by the gross dampness. Finn tried to move away, but as soon as he started rolling, Kylo's arms tightened around him.

Oh, come on. Finn pushed at Kylo's arm, careful to do it slow and subtle so that Kylo would stay —

"Go back to sleep. Go back to that dream. I liked it."

— asleep.

"I don't know what you were dreaming," Finn managed to say, "but you weren't in my dream."

"Warm. Nice." Kylo's clammy nose poked the back of Finn's head. "Who's Slip?"

It was like being thrown in ice water. Finn shoved Kylo away and clambered to his feet. "Don't ask me that again," he said, escaping to his room before Kylo could answer.

But he was lonely.

He'd never spent so much time with only his thoughts to occupy him. It was simultaneously boring and terrifying; he wasn't particularly interested in reliving the last time Phasma had beat the crap out of him, but that's what his brain queued up for him if he didn't keep it occupied enough. The books were great, but they weren't people, and Finn's mind still wandered sometimes. If it wasn't wandering to his past issues, it was stuck on Kylo, and in some ways that was worse.

He'd been so — not nice, not good. Nothing, really, except not-horrible and available. Nothing like being a captive of the First Order to lower your bar for human interaction, Finn supposed, but knowing it was situational didn't make him stop thinking about Kylo, wishing he had the guts to make Kylo share his bed again, wishing Kylo'd come back a little sooner in the evening so they had time to talk.

It was disgusting. He knew that. He wasn't Kylo's — whatever the First Order thought he was. He didn't even like the guy. But he was still marginally better, most of the time, than talking to the wall.

Sometimes, not so much. They'd been back with the First Order for three weeks when Kylo stormed in, clearly furious, snarling to himself and bashing his lightsaber at the wall. "Whoa, man, careful," Finn said before he could think better of it.

Kylo whirled around, brandishing his lightsaber at Finn. "You think you can tell me to be careful? You? You're nothing!"

Finn had been with the Resistance just barely long enough to get some background on what the Dark Side really was. He held up his hands and said, "Rage and pain, I get it. But I have to live here too, and —" he didn't quite glance at the cameras, let the space where he might've done so hang between them — "you love me, right?"

He watched as sense slowly crept back into Kylo's eyes. "I...find you satisfactory."

Finn watched, heart pounding, as the lightsaber deactivated. "Uh-huh. Good. Okay, then."

"Attend me," Kylo bit off, and stomped into his room.

For a second, Finn let himself wish Kylo only meant 'give me sexual favors', and not, 'put up with my tantrums and lie for me'. Giving Kylo a handjob might be one of the grosser thoughts Finn had ever had, but at least it would be over faster than this whole thing.

The bedroom door slid shut behind him. Finn watched Kylo take off his robes and then his tunic, and that was — a lot of muscles on his back, very broad shoulders, which Finn already knew. He did. But he wasn't usually made to look at Kylo's back immediately after thinking about giving —

"You do remember I can hear every tedious thought that flits across your profoundly damaged mind, don't you?"

Finn blinked. Kylo hadn't turned around yet; he stood with stiff posture, blotchy red spreading across his shoulders. Finn wanted to look away, and found he couldn't; how could Kylo be this sensitive to someone thinking weird stuff, when he could hear thoughts all day long?

"Yours are more obvious. Than others'."

Weird. Finn took a step back without thinking, then shook his head at himself. "Put a shirt on. I don't actually want to jump you."

"I'm well aware," Kylo said, his tone stiff and pissy, his lips pursed. "But I could do without graphic thoughts about my — about us —"

Wow, Finn thought as Kylo struggled and failed to finish his sentence. It really did matter to him.

Finn had thought about it more casually. Handjobs, kissing, he'd done all of that and more in the barracks. People had needs, and he'd had friends there.

But Kylo...maybe Kylo hadn't.

"I'm going to sleep now," Kylo snapped. "You should too."

For a horrifying second, Finn thought about doing something really crazy, like offering to help Kylo deal with his tension. Like asking him if he was being weird about it because he'd never felt someone's hand on him, or their mouth.

Kriffing hells, get it together, Finn told himself. He lay down on the floor and stared at the ceiling. Normally, he could will himself to sleep easily; it was self-defense more than anything else.

Tonight, he heard the chime signaling the start of the next shift before he even started to feel sleepy.

It all went to hell the next day, and it was Finn's fault.

Kylo was in the middle of some political bid. Finn didn't know any details and hadn't asked him to elaborate, since any First Order politics were just the machinations of monsters. He was really absorbed in cellular hydroponic theory when his door slid open and Kylo led some First Order goon inside.

"Darling." His smile was an angry slash of too-thin lips. "It's so lovely to see you."

Finn panicked a little. "Love — muffin," he made himself say. "Um, hi."

Kylo's eye twitched, but the First Order officer with him smirked. "You've trained him well, I see."

What would the Resistance say? Finn wondered with awful clarity of mind. What would they say if they saw him standing here, complying with Kylo's demands, weak and cowardly? He'd told Poe that he wasn't one of them, not really. What he'd meant was that he'd barely felt like a person, and he'd needed to learn how to be one before joining up with a cause.

Now he felt like a person, all right: a pathetic one. If Poe could see him now, Finn thought, he'd be disgusted. And Finn would deserve his contempt.

"I have," Kylo said, much too late — long enough for Finn to come back to himself and realize the First Order officer was looking between them with what seemed to be the beginnings of suspicion.

"I wonder what else you've taught him to do." The First Order officer looked Finn over again, eyes lingering on him in a way that made Finn realize, with sudden horror, that he might be asked to —

Perform.

"I'm sure you do," Kylo said coolly, and the officer laughed and looked away.

After that, Finn's job was just to be ornamental, basically, a humiliating task that he'd had to get good at these last few months. He thought they might finish out the night without anything else dramatic happening, right up until the officer said, "I have to know: if he displeases you, can you just toss him out an airlock, or is there paperwork?"

The air in the room went very still. Kylo's face froze for a minute, and then his eyes narrowed. The First Order officer smirked, said, "Come on, it's just a —"

"Do not speak," Kylo said, and Finn watched the officer's face go red as his jaw slammed shut.

"I have worked very hard to bring my beloved back into the fold," Kylo said. "I could not, and would not, toss him out an airlock, as you say." The officer began rising in the air. Kylo watched him with disinterest, like it wasn't his power levitating the guy, choking him. "I would have no such compunctions about you."

"Need...my support..." The officer choked out.

"I've changed my mind. Goodnight." The door at the far end of the room slid open. The officer hurtled across the empty space, landing with a crash in the hallway. Finn thought he might've heard bones breaking, but the door slid shut again too quickly for him to check.

"Attend me," Kylo said, and stomped into his room.

Why was he so angry? Was it a challenge to his control, someone threatening Finn? It couldn't be his concern for Finn's safety; Finn was well aware, every awful second of the day, how little anyone on this ship cared about him. But — why, then?

Well, he wouldn't get answers waiting out here. Finn followed Kylo into his bedroom, waiting to hear the click of the lock before saying, "Why —"

He slammed against the wall of Kylo's bedroom, and Kylo followed. For a moment, Finn felt completely paralyzed, his legs held in place by Kylo's bulk, his arms held in place by — nothing, he realized with growing panic. There was nothing at all there, except for the Force, except for Kylo's power. Oh, kriff, was he going to kill Finn right here?

"Shh," Kylo said. He screwed his eyes shut, his face going a dull, mottled red. "Just...don't speak for a moment. Don't do anything."

Finn didn't want to get thrown across the room, so he stayed silent. He suspected that if he tried to speak, he wouldn't be able to, anyway; Kylo had that kind of power. He took a moment to let the stormtrooper-fueled repression slip, just enough to think about the massive unfairness of all of this. Why was he here? Why didn't Kylo just have him killed? Was this going to be the rest of his life, stuck in two tiny rooms, vulnerable to Kylo's every whim?

"Stop," Kylo said wildly. "I told you, I can hear when you do that. Why can't you just — stop."

"Yeah, I can't stop thinking," Finn said. "That's not how any of this works."

"I can't do this," Kylo said. He stepped away. Kylo was shaking, Finn realized, his hands trembling, his breath coming in huge bursts. "Leave me. Stay in your room. Don't look at me, don't think about me."

For a moment, he felt only anger, and he knew Kylo sensed it too: he stiffened, his eyes darting to Finn and away again. Finn didn't care. He was furious.

"Don't even think about ordering me to 'attend you' again," Finn snapped, and left.

The fury didn't die down. He paced his room for awhile, glared up at the cameras, tried and failed to read the books Kylo had brought him. Books he only had because of Kylo's indulgence. He hated it. He hated it! He'd tried so hard to ignore the fury, and now that it had broken free, he couldn't stop feeding it. It screamed through his mind and his body, until he felt like he might fly to pieces if he didn't direct it at something, or someone.

He sat up, looked around, trying to find — something — he wasn't sure what. Something to throw? To destroy? The anger wouldn't stop building in him, and he hated it, he hated — he needed — he —

The door at the far end of the room slid open with a quiet snick.

He acted without thought, racing towards it. He was out of the hallway before it occurred to him that he didn't even have shoes — but who cared? He wasn't going to chance that the mechanical malfunction would fix itself in time for him to get dressed. He crept down the hallway, dodging the few people he saw with relative ease. He knew how to move around a ship without being seen. And this was an Imperial-class ship: he knew where they kept the escape craft, too.

Two more floors down. One hallway with no nooks to hide in if someone saw him. He raced down it, then stopped outside the shipping bay, trying to calm his racing heart.

All he had to do was get to a ship. No one had bothered to take out his ident chip, and these ships didn't check for validity, only that you could interface with them. If he got to a ship, he'd be very, very hard to stop.

"What exactly do you think you're doing?"

Finn looked at Kylo, standing in the doorway of the shipping bay. How long had he been following him? It didn't matter. If the only way to freedom was through Kylo, Finn was just going to have to take his chances.

He charged the door. Kylo stepped aside — Finn nearly fell, overbalancing. "I asked you a question," Kylo said, like Finn hadn't just tried to kill him. "I expect an answer."

Finn broke out in a quick walk. A few techs milled around. He found himself thinking, don't look at me, don't look at me. "I'm escaping," he said tightly. "You should let me. I know you don't really want me here."

"Too late for that," Kylo said. "All they'll have to do is look at the tapes. I could force you, you know. Knock you out and drag you back."

Finn knew. "You wouldn't."

"You have no idea what I'll do."

He didn't have time for this. "Look. Are you going to knock me out and drag me back? I can't stop you. I know I can't. So if you are, you should just do it now, because otherwise, I'm taking one of these ships and I'm going back to my friends."

"You — I — seven kriffing hells, may the Force bury your soul," Kylo hissed, and then he turned in a swirl of black and marched over to one of the ships.

Finn stared for one, two, three heartbeats, trying to understand what he was seeing and failing utterly. Was Kylo escaping too? Was Kylo helping him escape?

Get in the kriffing ship, Kylo hissed in Finn's mind.

And no, he didn't have time to worry about Kylo's motivations. So he ran to the ship and flung himself into the pilot's seat, activated the shields and got them out with alarms blaring — a smoother escape, all things considered, than he'd accomplished with Poe, even though Kylo wasn't helping even a little bit.

It wasn't until they hit open space, en-route to the Resistance, that he let himself realize what he'd done. He'd stolen Kylo Ren from the First Order. Kylo Ren was — his prisoner? His responsibility?

Oh, no.