"This is stupid."

Finn double, triple-checked his safety belt before responding. "So's going over to the Dark Side, but you know, there you are."

For thirty blessed seconds, there was only silence. Then, just as the ship chimed a warning that they were about to jump to light speed: "I had my reasons. And I'm very powerful, you know."

Finn only didn't roll his eyes because he had the horrible suspicion Kylo would know he'd done it. "Sure, whatever. You never did tell me why all your power didn't stop you from having to pretend I was your boyfriend, back on that ship."

As soon as it left his mouth, he knew it was a mistake. He wasn't actually curious; he'd thought then, and assumed now, that it was just a power trip for Kylo, a way to make himself feel important. He really didn't want some stupid First Order pseudo-justification.

Kylo said, "I had to lie to my Master. You were convenient."

"I'm sorry, what?"

"When I killed my — Solo. My Master sensed a great disturbance in me. Killing Han Solo was meant to bring me power and the clarity of purpose. I had to convince my Master that the task, once completed, had its intended effect."

That was such a complicated way to say — "So you made up an unrequited crush on me, so Snoke wouldn't know that killing your dad made you miserable, and then you kept it up, because otherwise people would know you'd lied?"

"Yes."

"That is demented."

No response from Kylo, only stiff irritation poking at Finn's mind as they hit light speed.

They met Maz at her bar. She didn't bother to say hi, only said, "Come here, then, let me look at you," and proceeded to stare at Finn and Kylo through her huge goggles.

"Hm," she said after a few minutes. "The Force is having a field day with you two. It's pinging around in your insides like sand flies."

"That's not how Force conduits work," Kylo snapped.

"Well! I bow before your superior expertise. I suppose your mind's half-grafted onto Finn's because you wanted it to be. Won't your mother think that's interesting."

Finn couldn't stop himself from staring as Kylo clapped his mouth shut, scowling and staring at the ceiling.

"Now, I could tell you I have no idea what's causing it and send you on your way." She looked between them again, very deliberately. "Or, I could send you off on a merry chase that has very little to do with the real cause of all this."

"Like you did with Canto Bight?" Finn said before he could stop himself.

"Well, I like that! I was trying to help you. It nearly worked, too, or so Rose tells me. Nice girl. Listens to her elders." Maz sniffed. For a second Finn thought it was a disapproval thing, and he felt himself stiffening, feeling defensive in spite of himself — he hadn't grown up with parents, how was he supposed to know how to act — but then he realized she was actually smelling something.

No, scratch that, not something. Kylo. She was smelling Kylo.

"Angry with me?" she said, then laughed when Kylo scowled. "Oh, no, I see. It's going to be harder if you're stubborn, you know."

"Just teach him to control himself."

"I'll teach you both to control yourselves, but you're the one who's —"

"Teach us both, then," Kylo said quickly.

Finn waited for Maz to strike Kylo down. He wasn't disappointed: she took her blaster and whacked him on the back of the head. He yelped, and Finn had to bite back laughter.

You're the one who's what, though? But he knew Kylo wouldn't tell him if he asked.

"It won't take long," Maz told them. "A week, maybe a year. No more than a decade, anyway."

Kylo gaped at her.

"I think we can take a month," Finn said. Time ran differently when you were super old, apparently.

"A month it is. There's a hut at the end of the street, made up just for you two. Go sleep until you're less irritating. Go on!"

They barely made it into the street before Kylo said, "I never liked her."

"I don't know. She's smart. Wise."

"She's annoying, and a criminal, and not trustworthy, and —"

"The General thinks she can help."

"My mother is not known for discriminating taste in associates."

"I don't know, she doesn't want the First Order around. I'd call that discriminating, personally."

There was indeed a human-scale hut at the end of the street. Finn ducked inside even as Kylo huffed his irritation.

He hadn't thought to expect anything until he looked around and saw the single, enormous bed and intimate table jammed into a sunlight-filled corner. It looked like an ad for some ridiculously rich Core Planet mogul's quaint vacation home. It had clearly been designed for humans: the bed and chairs were exactly like they'd be on a Core planet, and there was a 'fresher with all the usual stuff tucked away, too.

It couldn't have been designed specifically for Finn and Kylo. That was impossible; Finn had to keep believing that, or he'd probably go crazy. Maz just had a weird sense of humor, that was all.

"I hate that little —"

"I hope you're not about to say some slur for aliens," Finn said. "For starters, there's no way you know where Maz is from."

"She's like Yoda. Like a worse, alive, more annoying Yoda."

"Whoever that is." Finn looked around. They'd be eating rations, it seemed, but there was a cabinet of holochips, the display on the front advertising dramas, histories, instructional manuals — anything you could want, in other words. Plenty of potential there to help him ignore Kylo.

"Stop it."

"What?"

"I can hear you thinking."

"Not my actual thoughts." It better not be.

"Your nervousness. Fear." Kylo narrowed his eyes at him. For a moment Finn felt a horrible kind of vertigo, because with his lips pursed like that, Kylo somehow looked exactly like the General. "I don't plan to hurt you."

"Leaving room for spontaneity?"

"Do you work to be this tedious?" Kylo burst out. "Do you enjoy it?"

"Of course not."

"Then why must you — " Kylo huffed out a breath and whirled away without elaborating.

Finn should've just dropped it. He was a smart guy with plenty of experience around Kylo's particular brand of bullshit; he knew when not to press the issue. But -

He didn't want to drop it.

"Why must I what? Come on, say it."

"Why must you always press for more? Why can't you just accept what I say?"

"Accept it? You mean, trust you?"

As ridiculous as that sounded, as stupid as it was, when Kylo's gaze dropped and his hands clenched, Finn realized that he'd actually meant something much worse.

He'd meant — "You want me to just — let you tell me what to do. Accept it. Not question it."

"It seems," Kylo bit out, "that wouldn't be too difficult for you, given your history."

Drop it, Finn told himself. He's not worth it, not here, not now.

He wasn't worth it. But Finn was. "Do you know why I left?"

"Mad impulse?"

"Because what the First Order was doing was wrong, and seeing the blood, hearing the screams, made me understand that. Here." He touched his chest. "Five minutes, that's all it took. All the conditioning in the world couldn't keep me from thinking for myself when I absolutely had to. And you think I'll just listen to you? Just like that?"

"Dagoban hells, you really believe what you're saying."

"Of course I do."

"Did it ever occur to you, then, to wonder why no other stormtrooper broke through the conditioning?"

Every night, as he replayed the moment he'd known Slip would die. "I just know I did. So, no. It's not easy for me to accept things without questioning."

For a moment he thought Kylo might attack him, or at least start shouting. He was breathing hard, hands still in fists, staring at Finn like — like -

Finn didn't know. He wanted to stop forward, to get under Kylo's skin, to force him to act. But whether that action would be punching Finn, choking him with the Force -

Kissing him —

He didn't know. He didn't want to find out. So he said, "I'll take the floor," and spent the rest of the night pretending Kylo didn't exist.

"Oh, good, you're here. Ben, you'll be with the woodworkers today. Pip here will show you the way."

"My name is Kylo, and what do you mean I'll be with the woodworkers?"

"Would you like to learn about ancient empathetic expressions of the Force?" Maz blinked slowly at him as he sputtered. "Didn't think so. Off you go."

Kylo thus dispatched, she turned to Finn and said, "The impression I've gotten is that you two didn't intend to burrow into each other's minds like sandworms."

Finn shook his head.

"My question then becomes why you haven't shut it down."

"I couldn't! I don't know how!"

Maz snorted. "A thousand years of Jedi-Sith nonsense has really damaged this galaxy. You don't need to know how. You'd need training to lift a grown man off the floor or glimpse the future. You need no training at all to exercise basic control over your own mental privacy. If it had bothered you enough, you'd have done so already. You did, back in your 'trooper days. Don't bother denying it."

He hadn't thought about it, but as soon as he did, his stomach sank. Yes, he'd closed himself off during the conditioning, during their lessons and drills. He'd thought of it as — self-protection. His teammates did it, too. "Gotta keep sane somehow," they'd joke.

But even then, he'd known his methods were a little different. He'd felt it, the same way he felt others' fear or love.

"Maybe Kylo forced me to keep it," he said, a wild stab in the dark.

"You really think that?"

No. He didn't.

Maz's expression changed, shifting almost to pity. "You came here for a reason, Finn. Drop your assumptions about what that boy wants or could do; they're half-wrong, anyway, I promise you. The mental link is a signal of something larger. That's what I'm going to tell you about."

Finn swallowed around a lump in his throat. "Thanks."

"Of course. Here, this is 180-proof whiskey. Drink it, then we'll talk about the Force."

Finn felt vaguely like he should protest, for his health if nothing else. But thinking about what she'd gotten him to admit — thinking about Slip, about the FN squad, even about Phasma and the screaming fury he'd always cowered from — overrode his other senses. He took the drink and downed it in a single gulp.

And then he and Maz discussed the Force. It wasn't like any lesson he'd ever had. She didn't tell him how the Force worked, or even really what it was. She just had him expand his mind, tell her what he saw. He left not even sure he learned anything — but then he got back to the hut, and he felt Kylo before he saw him. Not just his feelings, either: he knew, before he opened the front door, what he'd find.

"Wear a serum next time," he told Kylo's incredibly sunburned back.

"Leave me alone."

"At least you got to go outside. My day was boring."

A flash of envy from Kylo, then a flash of — something else, buried too quickly for Finn to categorize it. He followed it, curious, but found himself firmly shut out.

"Stop it. Couldn't that witch teach you manners?"

"She told me we could kick each other out if we wanted," Finn blurted.

Kylo's back went stiff, and then he whirled around. "What are you talking about?"

"She said it wasn't learned. It was instinctual enough, if either of us really wanted..." Finn shrugged. "We'd be different."

"Archaic nonsense. Of course it's learned."

"I'm going to trust the ancient, super-smart alien over you, just so you know."

"She's as batty as the rest of them. The Resistance." He said it with a sneer, clearly bait.

Bait that Finn couldn't help but take. "You joined up! Your mother is the leader! Who do you think you're kidding with this?"

"If I returned to the Core, I'd be prosecuted as a war criminal." Kylo spoke like he was explaining something to a very stupid child. "And the First Order is under General Hux's control, which leaves —"

"Bullshit."

"Excuse me?"

"You could kill Hux if you wanted, without breaking a sweat. You could bring plenty of stormtroopers to your side just by using the loyalty conditioning. You chose to leave the First Order, and you chose not to just run and hide." As Finn had wanted to. As part of Finn still wanted to, if he was being honest with himself. "You're not fighting for the Resistance just because, what, you're too embarrassed to go anywhere else, or you need a defected stormtrooper as a comfort blanket."

"What if I did?"

The question was stupid enough that it took Finn a minute to work through it. "What if you —"

"Needed a comfort blanket." Kylo stabbed a finger at Finn. "What if the only reason I'm in the Resistance at all is because I can't stand to leave you?"

The moment stretched out, thin and brittle and so, so dumb. "We went over this," Finn said. "You told a demented lie. Fine. Just...stop lying, okay? About the Resistance, at least."

"You really don't want that," Kylo said, still holding Finn's gaze.

Maybe Finn was a coward, but it was too much, in the end. He shook his head and stood, going over to the hut's little 'fresher and fetching the ointment Kylo needed.

Maz really was wise. She was ancient and unapologetic about telling you when she thought you were full of it, and two hours with her taught Finn more about the Force than he'd have thought possible. But —

"You should seal the bond off, you know."

— she was also way, way too perceptive.

"I," Finn said, gearing up to lie. No; no point there. "I'm — I want to. I can't."

"He can't be that interesting."

"He's not." Having Kylo in his head was like having a sore in his mouth in just the wrong place. But — "I can't explain it, but I don't want to get rid of him. I won't."

"If you think this will keep him from going back to the Dark Side, you're kidding yourself," Maz said, not unkindly.

Finn laughed in spite of himself. "That's definitely not what I'm thinking."

He didn't know why that made Maz look at him with pity. "Well, then," she said. "Let's discuss healing."

He didn't turn out to have a talent for it, except that he could calm people down with a touch, if he wanted and if he concentrated. He tried it on some people at the doctor's, and she thanked him so profusely that it was embarrassing. "Don't you have peacekeepers in this town?" he asked Maz afterwards. "That's a lot of stab wounds for a city this small."

"We're a port city full of bars," Maz said. "People get drunk and disorderly. It happens."

"But if you had people to keep order, then it would be safer."

"Tried that. Attracts the wrong kind of attention, at least for now."

Finn almost protested. The argument sprang to his mind fully-formed: any attention attracted by having a robust police force would be good attention, or good practice for the police. There was much more to be lost by not having a policing force than there was to be gained. An armed force was necessary to preserve order on a planet, any planet.

He caught himself just in time. Those weren't his thoughts and never had been.

"Got it," he said finally, after an internal struggle that went on way too long to go unnoticed. But Maz didn't say anything. She patted his arm and then turned, pulling a jar of seeds off a shelf and launching into an explanation of how to use the Force to coax them to life.

"Of course," she said, "the Jedi call this sort of thing immoral."

"Wait, why?"

"Bringing life back where otherwise it would stay dormant. Exercising control over the universe."

"It's just a plant! They can't be serious."

"Oh, they were, just as the Sith will tell you the brutalization of entire planets is a reasonable price to pay for power." Maz snorted. "Yoda, bless him, called me a coward once. We weren't out of bed for even twenty minutes, and he stroked my shoulder and told me if I had half the courage of one of his little padawans, I'd be fighting against the Dark. He kissed me and told me he could never see me again, because the Jedi were taking a new course, one of disconnection from physical pleasure. Imagine!"

Finn had seen holovids of Yoda. "I'd rather not."

"Oh, fine. Spoilsport. My point is, this galaxy won't be healed by more ancient dogma, and that includes me. I want you to use your head and figure out what you think is missing, yourself. You have three days."

"What am I supposed to —"

"Three days!" Maz said, and shooed him off without another word.

Even if the town was full of sober, honest people, Finn would've felt weird talking with them about his ideas about how to heal the galaxy. In reality, most of the people he encountered were some mix of drunk and dishonest.

Kylo was really sober, and Finn could tell when he was being dishonest. So that night, Finn cornered him as he sat at their little kitchen table. "How would you heal the galaxy?"

Kylo blinked at him. "Do you really want me to answer that?"

"Sure. If it's bad advice, I can just ignore it."

"I killed my own father."

"I know."

"Snoke told me to do it, but I didn't have to obey. I chose to obey, because I wanted to bring the Republic back to my master."

It was incredible. Kylo sounded totally steady, completely solid in his conviction, and yet Finn could feel the maelstrom of anger in him. Anger at Finn, sure, but also anger at Snoke — and implacable fury at himself. "I know. Kylo —"

"If I cared about the galaxy, I'd commandeer a ship and fly myself into the nearest star." Kylo offered him a thin-lipped, unpleasant smile. "So you see, I'm the wrong person to ask."

The worst part was that he was right and Finn knew it. Snoke had pushed him one way, but Kylo had adopted the ideology as his own. Even if he stuck with the Resistance, he'd never be trustworthy; he had a core of rage and fury that Finn knew would never go away. He'd tortured Finn; Finn didn't even like him.

But he couldn't ignore what he felt. He said, "Someone should've protected you."

"Excuse me?"

"From Snoke."

Kylo sneered. "My parents tried. So did my uncle. Well, my uncle got tired of it, I suppose."

Finn decided he wouldn't point out that Kylo had said my parents, not his parents. "I don't think he was tired of you. I think he was scared. The Jedi weren't up to combating someone like Snoke, and Luke Skywalker was just one person."

"I didn't think Maz would teach you philosophy like that. So it's no one's fault, then? Not Skywalker's, not General Organa's, not Han Solo's, and not even mine? If I didn't know any better, I'd say the Dark Side had corrupted you."

And if Finn didn't know any better, he'd say the Kylo sitting in front of him was further from the dark than he'd ever been before. "Someone should have protected you," he said again, "because if there's anyone more responsible for all of this than you, it's Snoke. And you know it. You don't want it to be true because it means you're not all-powerful like Vader, but —"

"Stop," Kylo said.

"Someone. Should. Have —"

The Force tightened around his throat even as it lifted him in the air. He blinked and found himself slammed against the far wall, his breathing almost completely cut off.

"I said stop," Kylo snarled. "Why do you never listen?" The Force moved against Finn, pressing into his shoulders and his hands, like Kylo wanted to send him straight through the wall. "I don't want to hear your sniveling apologies for my behavior. I did it all, I liked it, I'm proud of it. I'd enjoy killing you right now. Is that enough, or would you like more?"

Finn didn't answer, and Kylo stepped forward, once, twice, three times. The hut was tiny: he stood inches from Finn, fury in his eyes. "I wanted to kill your little desert love," Kylo said quietly. He sounded almost tender; the grip on Finn's throat loosened a bit. "On the Starbane, I wanted to kill you. I thought about it every day. What do you think about that?"

Run! Finn's instinct screamed. Hide! He's not kidding!

But Finn felt pain swirling around both of them, and he was tired of fighting. Maz had asked a question he had no way to answer. He thought part of an answer might be right here.

"I think you're a dick, and maybe a psychopath" he said, "but someone still should've protected you, because plenty of people are dicks and don't go full evil. And I think the only reason you don't agree is because it means you weren't super special after all. If you're just some jerk who got taken advantage of by a bigger jerk, you don't have a special destiny or anything like that. You have to really be responsible for yourself, then."

The pressure on his throat disappeared, but the Force still held him tight, shoulders to toes. Finn forced himself to breathe slowly and look at Kylo calmly. He couldn't let Kylo think he was freaked out.

"You're a fool," Kylo said finally. The words slipped out quietly, almost like —

A flash of a half-remembered dream: whispers of endearments. Gentle hands on him.

Embarrassing. "Maybe," Finn said. "Let me go."

Kylo's eyes flicked down to Finn's mouth. For a moment, Finn felt something awful, a yowling hunger that filled him and made him reach out and —

The Force around him disappeared, the hunger with it. Kylo stepped back.

"Don't try that again," he said coldly, and left the hut before Finn could answer.

Finn's heart still pounded furiously. What was that? Why did Kylo twist every emotion into some weird blend of anger and lust? Why did Finn keep falling for it, like a freshly minted cadet?

He'd only rarely felt as threatened and wild as he did right then. He sat down on the bed and closed his eyes, like Maz had taught him, trying to find some kind of peace.

The bed was still warm; Kylo had been here recently. He could smell them both, if he concentrated, Kylo's scent sharper and —

No. The point of this was to focus on something other than Kylo. He guided his mind out, widening his awareness to include the city. There were so many emotions here, most of them negative in some way: loss amplified or barely muffled by alcohol, fear, anger. Maz did keep the peace, mostly, but not in the way Finn was used to. People only rarely died, but everything was so messy. And when he expanded his awareness beyond the limits of the city, he found that the surrounding forest was the same way. Maz had kept it wild; he felt her influence in every dripping leaf and copse of mushrooms. Safety, here. Guardianship.

Guardianship. Finn's mind snagged on it, and he followed the thought. Someone should have protected you, he'd told Kylo, but that was only half the truth. Someone should have protected him, too. He told himself he didn't remember, but here, with half a world in his mind and the Force flowing through him, he knew that wasn't true.

He had been so frightened.

Someone should have protected you. He was frightened now, too. When he thought of the First Order, he felt like he couldn't breathe. All that power, bent to a single, horrible purpose.

Someone should have protected you, whispered the Force as it flowed through Finn. And then: I'm looking at the eyes of a man who wants to run.

He did then and he did now. The farthest edge of the galaxy might not be far enough, but maybe there he'd find peace, at least for awhile. Protection.

The forest disappeared in his mind, and he saw instead a distant outline of a map, a system he hadn't seen before. It was in the Outer Rim, but the labels were a little too smudged to read. What was it? Somewhere to run? Was the Force giving him an out?

The wind rustled leaves on the trees outside, escaped into the window and caressed Finn's cheek. Someone should have protected you, he thought again, and he knew this time it wasn't just his thought.

The map disappeared. He opened his eyes and grabbed his holopad, scribbling as quickly as it would let him, reproducing what he'd seen.

"Well, butter a wampa and grill it for breakfast. This is better than I thought it would be."

"I don't understand," Finn said. "Why did I see this?" He'd reproduced the map faithfully, but that hadn't really helped.

"Why do you think?"

"I think it's really unlikely the Force was just like, hey, kid, I'm done with you. Go take a vacation." Finn hesitated, but the truth was there, and Maz knew it. "And — I don't want to. I mean, I do, but I have other stuff to do."

"Right you are." Maz patted his hand. "If you want to find out why you saw this, my suggestion would be to get a ship and tell General Organa you need a few more weeks. Just make sure you take her wet blanket of a son with you; he's damaging my sales down at the bar."

"Also, if I left him here, I'd be stranding him."

"Pfft. You'd rather."

True enough. "Well, I — thank you. You've been really helpful."

"And well paid," Maz said, "so there's no need to get sentimental."

Finn smiled in spite of himself. "Do I need to register on the exit docket?"

"Ha! That's a good one. Just send me a postcard, would you? I have a few old friends out that way."

"Time to pack," Finn said when he got back to the hut. "We're taking a trip."

Kylo swore in Wookiee, then in Standard, then in a language Finn didn't recognize. "Is your goal to tour the galaxy and drive me insane with packing and leaving? Or is it simply to drive me insane?"

"I'm sorry, what? This isn't about you. It never has been, actually. But this time, it's really, specifically not. I saw a map, I told Maz about it, now we're heading out there." Finn pulled up his copy of the map and pointed at the spot he'd seen.

"It wouldn't surprise me if she put that image in your head," Kylo said grimly. "An Outer Rim planet. Imagine something so ridiculous."

Finn had been to plenty of Outer Rim planets during his training. He'd preferred them, since there were fewer crazy commanders that far out. "We're going to head out in a couple hours. Just make sure you're packed, okay?"

"I could stay here."

He didn't know why Kylo thought that was a threat. "Sure. I mean, Maz told me to take you with me, but she's probably got work for you down at the bar."

He couldn't possibly have missed the waves of malice emanating from Kylo. "I dislike you so much. More than anyone I've ever met."

"Same," Finn said, and starting putting clothes back in his travel sack.

Despite all his whining, Kylo followed Finn onto the ship barely an hour later. Finn keyed in the coordinates and they were off. It would be nearly a full day before they'd leave light speed; he had plenty of books on his holopad to keep him busy.

Of course, Kylo interrupted him before he'd even finished a chapter. "What do you plan to do after this trip?"

"Sorry?"

"Will you go back to the Resistance, keep fighting their hopeless war?"

"Will you?"

Kylo looked unmoved. "Perhaps. I don't share your fascination with running and hiding."

Finn half wanted to be mad at that. It would be convenient, getting all worked up over Kylo's jackassery; it was an easy target.

But they were hurling through space faster than a human brain could comprehend, and Finn was tired of their weird never-resolving back-and-forth. "Sure you don't. Look, we'll get a hotel when we land, and you can have a room to yourself, get your aggression out all on your own. But we're still hours out, so what if we just left each other alone until then?"

He couldn't possibly be feeling disappointment from Kylo — but of course he was; Finn couldn't imagine he was feeling anything else. Ridiculous, he thought, even as Kylo huffed his way down to the cargo hold.

Twenty-six hours later, Finn secured landing codes and guided the ship down to the hovering landing strip. He didn't bother saying anything to Kylo except, "Hey, we're here."

"Where is here, exactly?" Kylo said as they walked down the gangway.

"Ben and Finn, right on time," Lando Calrissian, Rebellion war hero and historically popular mayor, said. "How's that old bat Maz, anyway?"

Finn recoiled from the lash of fury he felt in the Force. "Whoa. Kylo, what —"

"I am going to kill you," Kylo snarled, and raised his hand, gathering the Force around him.