"Finn!" He felt joy in the Force before Rey barreled into him, clutching him close. To his shock, tears sprang up in his eyes. He'd missed her, even more than he'd missed the entire Resistance. "You're finally back!"

"We had kind of an adventure on the way home," Finn said.

"I heard." She pulled away, her face falling. "Kylo's gone back?"

"Finn doesn't think so," Rose said.

Rey raised her eyebrows at Finn. "Really? We're talking about the same Kylo Ren? Tall, rude, sulked, and tried to run back to Hux five or six times after I whacked him over the head?"

"Same guy." Finn grimaced. "I don't know how to explain it."

"That's how I feel about the Force every day. Only I didn't think you and Kylo — I mean —" She made a dubious face. "Well. I suppose he did tell everyone that you used to, um."

"Date."

"That wasn't the word," Rose muttered.

"Still, though, it's not like it was true."

She couldn't have laid a more accurate hit if she'd actually shot him with a blaster. Finn grimaces. "Yeah. I mean, it wasn't. True. But —"

"Oh boy," Rey said, very quietly.

And — it was easy sometimes to forget how much he and Rey had in common. She shared Finn's delight at new experiences, strange places, the wealth of a galaxy that had been mostly closed to them. And she'd been raised half-feral, exactly the same as Finn and yet the opposite. Where he'd had Phasma beating him and the First Order brainwashing him, she'd had the endless silence of the desert and starvation at the hands of a stationmaster.

So it wasn't a surprise, really, that she immediately understood. She looked at him with sympathy, fellow-feeling, even though she clearly felt disgust at the idea of anyone having feelings for Kylo Ren.

"Ew," Rose said.

"Hey, get in line," Finn said. "I mean — it's gross! I know! I just — augh."

"Oh, Finn." Rey's voice quivered with barely-restrained laughter. "Let's go get a drink, shall we? I'm off for a whole forty-eight hours, that never happens. And Rose has promised to teach me how to play a Core Planet game!"

"Tiles," Rose told Finn in an aside.

It was clearly their way of consoling him. "Yeah, okay," Finn said, and let them lead him away.

As it turned out, half the pilots had the day off, too, and Rose's entire engineering crew. He found himself wedged between Rose and Poe, watching Rey take on Jess Pava for a full month's wages. The General surely wouldn't approve of this, since the Resistance barely had money to pay people at all some months, but Finn was delighted. And distracted from the fact that he still had bruises on his thighs from Kylo's too-strong, too-good grip.

"Okay, enough, I'm pretty sure you're cheating," Poe said when Rey won the third round in a row. "Hey, Finn, you went off on some Jedi quest, right? Is she cheating?"

"If I went off on a Jedi quest, would I tell you?" Finn said. "All is as the Force wills it, and all that."

Poe laughed. "Hey, good point. Only one way to fix that." He nudged Finn's drink towards him and winked.

Finn tried to will himself to feel into it. Flattered. Horny, even. Mostly he just felt sad; he missed Kylo and wondered if Kylo was thinking about him even a fraction as much as Finn thought about him. Ugh, he thought, and took a drink.

"So there's three Jedi now, is there?" said a pilot whose name Finn didn't know. "Rey, Finn, and the evil one?"

"He's not evil," Finn said reflexively. Oh. "And he's not a Jedi, either. And neither am I."

"Whatever, lots of denominations." The pilot waved his hand. "Still, though. Three? Against the First Order?"

Finn tried to think past the alcohol, which was suddenly feeling like a much worse idea. He reached out with the Force and felt Rey's tough watchfulness, power beyond anything he'd felt even from Kylo. And then the pilots: touched by the Force, strong in it, most of them. The pilot asking questions didn't mean anything bad by it; he was just drunk and a pessimist, which Finn could hardly blame him for.

"The First Order has a bunch of brainwashed kids and a megalomaniac nepotism-appointee as a general." Finn shrugged. "We've at least got talent on our side. I mean, look at you guys."

It was an obvious ploy for sympathy, but it worked. The pilots laughed as one, and then one of them challenged Finn to a game of cards, and on the night went without another blip.

But later, after almost everyone had left, Poe said, "Not a Jedi, huh?"

Finn shrugged and took a long drink of water. "No."

"Rey told me you're different. In the Force, I mean. I think I can kind of feel it, but —"

"The General sent me off to some people who are...not Jedi. Kind of like, aggressively not Jedi. Ever heard of the Guardians of the Whills?"

Poe snorted. "Is that a joke?"

Okay, fine, they were kind of obscure. "They're an old order. Not Jedi, but Force users. Or Force practitioners, anyway. They —"

"Finn." Poe held up a hand. "I meant that I know who the Guardians were. Well, were. You grow up with the Rebellion, you learn about the destruction of Jedha."

Finn had never heard of it, but he'd gotten good at covering up gaps in his knowledge; he'd look it up later. "Well, so — I learned from one. A survivor, or, um, acolyte? I'm not sure. But he taught me how to deal with the abilities I have, and how to kind of...shape them."

"And Kylo comes into this how?"

"He came with me. And he helped me, kind of."

Poe made a noise of polite disbelief.

"He did, I swear."

"I guess you had to be there."

"Hey, I'm not saying his personality got better. I'm not that good a liar. But he's powerful, I mean, he's the General's son."

"And wouldn't he like to forget it." Poe's tone was light, but his eyes spoke volumes, bright with old, bitter anger. "Listen, I'm happy for you, but this isn't exactly convincing me that the Force doesn't just cause people to have psychotic breaks."

Finn laughed in spite of himself. "It kind of does feel like that sometimes."

"What else does it feel like?"

Finn couldn't answer for a moment; he had no idea what he might say. Finally, after taking more than his sweet time considering it, he said, "Hope. It feels like hope."

The Force bloomed around them. Poe smiled. "Hey, good enough for me."

The war, somehow, dragged on.

Hux wasn't exactly a master strategist, but thanks to laundered money, he didn't need to be. The Empire had had some very old, very rich supporters, and they were clearly giving the First Order all the money they'd previously reserved for the Emperor.

Poe led strike teams, and General Organa directed raids according to what their growing spy network said were high-value targets. It was working, in the sense that the First Order's expansion had halted for now. Finn told himself that was enough — or, if it wasn't enough, it was the most they could do. He thought of that as a very mature response, very Guardian-y. He couldn't single-handedly win the war. No one could, not even the General herself.

But when Rey said glumly into her drink, "I honestly think more of these cautiously strategic raids might drive me insane," Finn couldn't help but agree.

"Obviously they're valuable," Rey said. "And I mean — well, the Force."

"The Force," Finn agreed. He knew exactly what she meant. He could feel the Force all around them, even when the First Order attacked, the malignancy of their power overwhelming and painful. Rey spent the time she wasn't actively fighting doing lightsaber drills and practicing physical manipulation of the Force. She got Finn to practice with her, sometimes, but the thing about their respective training was that Finn loved all the sitting around and exploring the Force. He'd gotten a kick out of her telling him about Luke poking her with some grass. He'd gotten better at detecting people's feelings and the Force moving in and around them, and at pushing things his way — calming the panicked, redirecting the darkness around squadrons of 'troopers.

It wasn't enough. Rumor was they were gearing up to destroy another system. None of it was enough.

"Ever feel like we're doomed?" Finn asked before he could stop himself.

"All the time," Rey said immediately, with the wide-eyed honesty he both loved and was terrified by. "Less now that Kylo Ren's disappeared, I suppose, but — well, they've got all the money. And a whole, massive army. And their wannabe-Snoke guys."

Because of course Kylo Ren vanishing had led to others stepping up in his place — the woman Finn had killed, sure, but others too. "Yeah. Well. He hasn't defected, at least."

Rey raised an eyebrow, scooping up her green sauce with her bread. "This isn't another conversation about him, is it?"

Finn didn't miss the implication. Whatever; he'd only talked about Kylo a few times. Well, three or four. But he'd been stranded with him, and traveled with him. It was only natural that he'd come up occasionally. "No. I just. I don't know what my point was."

"Doomed," Rey said around a mouth of sweetcake.

"Yeah." Finn sighed and looked down at his plate. His noodles and egg, which had seemed almost unimaginably luxurious when he'd selected it, looked suddenly limp and pale. Like the Resistance's chances of winning the struggle, he thought, and felt the Force shake around him with reflected cynicism.

"Hey." When he looked up, Rey was staring at him with her brow furrowed. "We've still got each other."

"True."

"And Poe, and Rose, and the General." Rey pursed her lips. "And engineering's terrifying liquor."

That, at least, made Finn laugh.

It was Chewie who realized the new recruit was Finn's sister.

Finn had barely noticed. They got defectors all the time now — courtesy, many of them said, of the holonet's efficient distribution of Resistance news. Even in areas where the First Order had banned the communications, people found a way around the firewalls. Recruits were great news, but Finn, somehow, had become sort of — well, he was busy, and he spent a lot of his day talking to the General and Rey.

So at first when Chewie started howling furiously, Finn went cold down to his toes and thought: Kylo's back.

He realized moments later what a ridiculous thought it was. He'd know if Kylo was back, he felt that deep in his bones. He'd know the moment he broke atmosphere. But then, what was wrong?

"What is it, you old lug?" the General said, looking up from her map of First Order sympathizing banks.

Chewie howled again, pointing at the door.

The General's expression barely flickered, but she glanced at Finn before she pursed her lips. "You're absolutely sure?"

Chewie nodded, then said something more quietly.

"It'll be fine. Go get her."

"So, what just happened?" Finn said when Chewie left. He could feel the General's distress, and he could feel it directed at him. "Is Kylo back?"

"No." The General did something with her face, a grimace that was trying hard to be a smile. "Chewie just told me he's met the new recruit. I — there's no easy way to say this. She's your sister, Finn."

For a moment, the world seemed to stop. "I don't. My —"

"Sister," the General said. "I understand if you'd rather not meet her, at least not right now; she was working on a First Order kyber mining venture, is my understanding, and she has quite a lot of high-level knowledge, so they're sending her to me. But —"

"No, no, I want to meet her," Finn said, tripping over his own words in his haste to say them. "She's my sister, I don't —"

He bit down on his tongue to keep from stating the obvious, which everyone in the room knew, and which would only make him feel pathetic: I don't have any family.

It didn't help. The General said with heartbreaking gentleness, "You don't have to stay if you're not ready. You know where the door is."

Finn did know, and what's more, he knew she meant it; he could feel nothing but empathy and worry for him. Great. He kept the door in his vision and white-knuckled his way through a strategy discussion until a woman appeared in the doorway.

He'd expected to feel doubt. He didn't remember his family, after all. Chewie might have a Wookiee's sense for human DNA, or whatever was going on there, but who was to say that would translate to Finn? What could they even possibly have in common?

Everything, it turned out. The Force in her reached out to the Force in him, and he knew, truth woven into his bones, without needing to say a word. He cleared his throat eventually, fighting his way through the humiliation of all the attention on them, and said, "I. Um. Hi. I'm Finn. You're...?"

"Lyssa," his sister said, and reached out with both her hands.

Her hands were warm and dry and very calloused. He held them tightly as the Force flowed through them both.

I missed you, Finn, she said in the Force. If he'd ever had another name — if she'd known him by anything else — she didn't say. He was her brother, and he was as he stood in front of her, not a memory or a disappointed expectation. He nearly sobbed with the relief of it.

Lyssa was two years older. She hadn't seen their parents or their other two siblings in over a decade. The kyber mine was brutal, and like all the other First Order activities, people were conscripted into service. It took only the blink of an eye for Lyssa to communicate all of that to him; in return, he shared his own memories of the 'troopers, and then the nicer stuff: Rey, the Resistance, and Lando.

"I'm so glad I found you," she said out loud when he was done.

He blinked and looked around. Maybe a minute had passed, and no one was looking directly at them. "Wow. Yeah, me too."

She squeezed his hands and dropped them, took a deep breath, and squared her shoulders. "General Organa. You wanted to speak with me?"

And the day continued.

He should've talked to someone about it, really. Rey or Poe would've been happy to talk to him — or get him drunk, in Poe's case. The General would have listened, too, if he'd wanted advice from someone with actual life experience. Even Chewie probably would've listened, though whether he'd care or do anything other than steal Finn's money over dice was kind of up in the air.

The Resistance was full of great people, so many people would've helped Finn through all this, but he felt panicked when he thought about talking to any of them. What was wrong with him? Why couldn't he just be happy that he'd found his sister, an event that was vanishingly unlikely against the backdrop of the First Order's tyranny?

"You're scared," Kylo said in the dream he had that night, where he blurted all of that out while Kylo picked at a flower's petals.

"I mean, obviously."

"But you don't want to admit it." Kylo glanced at him, his long eyelashes casting shadows on his cheekbones. "Kind of funny, given your mystical affinity for the Force."

"Stop making fun of me."

"Then stop being ridiculous. Acknowledge your fear and learn from it."

"Thanks, I love dark-sider advice from a figment of my imagination."

Kylo's mouth twisted bitterly "That would be something more like: embrace it. Make your fear worse and shape it into a weapon. Not that you'd know, in your imagination."

Finn wasn't sure why Kylo emphasized it like that, aside from his usual drive to be a jerk. "Sure. Well. I'm scared because I don't know her, I guess, and I'm freaked out because I don't really know how to have a family. It wasn't something I thought I'd have to learn."

"You're worried she'll hate you?"

Finn shrugged. "Sure. Or just that, I don't know, I'll be a bad brother?"

"What exactly do you imagine a bad brother looks like?"

You, Finn thought. "Selfish. Um, self-centered."

"Those are the same thing."

"You'd know."

He expected Kylo to get mad and leave the dream; he had plenty of times before. But Kylo just blinked at him, a little pole-axed, before laughing. "She won't hate you. She won't think you're a bad brother. You are absolutely, without a doubt, the most disgustingly kind and generous person I've ever met — and my mother's a war hero. Perhaps you could disappoint the Supreme Leader, but I suppose we'll never know. Anyone else would be overjoyed to call you a relative."

It was the kind of speech Finn hated knowing he'd dredged up from his subconscious, a speech that revealed with painful precision exactly the kind of nonsense he was desperate to hear someone say.

Ugh, no, it was worse than that: the kind of nonsense he was desperate to hear Kylo say. Gross.

"You have to say that. You're literally only here to tell me what I want to hear."

"Sure, Finn." Kylo reached out then, brushed his long fingers down the side of Finn's face, his neck. "What if I told you I'm jealous she's there and I'm not?"

Finn wished his heart would stop racing. "I'd say that's really weird, since she's my sister and you're. Not."

Kylo smiled. "No." He leaned in for a kiss.

It was awfully familiar, emphasis on awful. And yet, Finn started to kiss back, even as the dream faded.

"No! Wait!"

But it was gone. He woke up just enough to pull his blanket up a little, then fell back into deep, Kylo-less sleep.

He was working the midnight shift in the shipyard three days later when his sister came to see him.

"I have no affinity for machines," she said, watching him with what looked like amusement.

Finn shrugged, unable to make himself meet her eyes. "I've spent a lot of time around them, I guess."

"Were you trained to be a mechanic? With..."

"With the 'troopers?" He'd had so much practice making himself sound casual when referencing his past; he hated how necessary it was to do so now.

"Yes." She hesitated, then said, "I'm sorry. If you don't wish to discuss it —"

"No!" Too loud. "No, no, it's fine. I mean, everyone here knows I'm...well."

"I didn't think it was possible to escape." She watched him so carefully. What must she be picking up from him in the Force? Finn didn't want to think about it. "They tell me you broke the conditioning. Of course, the holonet says it can't be done."

"The holonet's wrong."

"Hm, technically. I think generally it can't, though." She reached out and placed a hand against the ship Finn had been working on. He felt her power shimmer over the metal, briefly saw an impression of an old seam of iron on a planet far, far away. "You're different. Like me."

His first thought was that it sounded ridiculously self-aggrandizing — only of course she was right, and he felt her gentle humor when he came to that conclusion. He had no idea what kind of person his sister was, only that she was nice when she spoke with him, and very possibly even more powerful than he was.

No. No, he was lying to himself. He knew who she was through the Force. She was genuinely kind to everyone; she was a good person. She'd never practiced killing people. She'd never shouted 'Hail the Supreme Leader!' with love and belief in her heart.

"Finn." He was yanked back into reality by her hand on his arm. "They put those feelings in you, you know. I think it's amazing you managed to resist them."

She was telling the truth, too. He bit the inside of his cheek against the waves of shame and desperate longing that filled him. He just wanted a family. He didn't deserve a family. He wanted -

"Oh, Finn," she said, and hugged him.

Finally, he cried.

He wasn't sure how long it lasted — minutes, probably, but it felt like hours. When he pulled away, she offered him a scrap of rough fabric. "My old mining uniform," she explained.

He paused in horror, midway through blowing his nose. "I'm dumping all this on you, and you —"

She shrugged. "It's a terrible existence. It all is. But we in the mines, we weren't reconditioned. We were mistreated, but not brainwashed. Oh, Finn, it's okay to be sad. I cried on the General the other day, you know, because I was showing her a mine shaft where my wife died. It's nothing to be ashamed of."

And he knew all that, he did. But to have his sister saying it -

"Stop that," she said when self-recrimination closed up his throat. "Let me be your big sister: it's been long enough, I need practice. So you can cry on me, and I'll call your crush on Kylo Ren gross."

"Aughhhhh," Finn managed to croak.

She rolled her eyes, and — oh. They really did look alike. "What, did you think I wouldn't notice? He's all threaded through your memories, you know. Like mold ruining fine bread."

"Ha, ha." He needed to change the topic, faster than immediately. "Tell me about our family?"

Sorrow in the Force, powerful waves of mourning. "Gone. But I know you want to hear more than that."

"Please. If you can."

"I've got records. Holovids, some handwritten letters. They're back in my barracks." She stood. "Meet me after your shift's over, yeah? I'll grab some dinner from the canteen, and we can go through it together."

"I'd like that."

She smiled at him, a crooked sort of smirk he'd seen in the mirror. "Don't think I'm going to forget about Ren!"

"I wish you would!"

She left laughing. Despite his humiliation, he finished up his work with a lighter heart.

So, family.

He was surprised to find that his sister really was a lot like him. They put her to work almost immediately in engineering, since she'd worked on both the practical aspects of how to keep the kyber mines from collapsing, and the actual droids that brought the kyber in and out, and mined it in areas that weren't too dangerous.

"They reserved the really dangerous spots for people; we're less expensive," she said as she fixed up a droid's laser sight. "There you go."

Finn's heart twisted, but he got it; he thought of being a trooper the same way. Not something to talk about unless it was relevant, brutality not really worth dwelling on. Through the Force, she reached out to him, and he held her, a grip of solidarity and growing love.

It was nice. It was good. He caught Rey wistfully not-looking at him a few times, while he hung out with his sister and learned about his family's history, their place in the galaxy. The Resistance was still a grind, long hours and danger around every corner and the twisting awful fear that none of it mattered, that the First Order was bound to win — but having Lyssa there lightened it. It made him think that maybe, if it all ended someday — maybe he could go back and ensure their stories lived on.

And then Kylo came back.

It started as a whisper, a rumor between pilots, lurking in the back of Finn's own mind. Or maybe it started as a dream after that first time he heard someone say Kylo Ren had been spotted looking for the Resistance base.

"What are you doing?" Finn said in the dream, as Kylo unbuckled his tunic.

Kylo paused, long fingers curled around dark fabric, looking as supercilious as he ever had when Finn had been captive on his ship. "Undressing. What does it look like?"

"Pava said you'd been sighted a system away."

"Is that so."

"Are you coming back? Half the Resistance thinks you've deserted."

"I did."

"You're not with them, though." Thinking of Kylo back with the First Order made Finn's chest clench. It couldn't be real, it couldn't. It couldn't.

"No." Kylo cocked an eyebrow. "Maybe I'm thinking about forming my own cult. I'd be better at it than the self-styled Grand Admiral Hux, don't you think?"

"No."

He spoke without thinking and realized it was true afterwards. "You're not very good at being ruthless," he said when Kylo made a face at him. "You've got a ton of feelings and you're also, um." This was a dream, so it didn't really matter if he told this Kylo the truth, right? "You're a dumbass."

Kylo's lips twisted, his annoyance plain. "I suppose you'd do a better job?"

Finn shook his head. "Look, most people don't do a good job at being evil dictators. It's fine. It's actually a good thing. The only person I can think of who'd really be good at that is the General, and it's really just lucky she doesn't want to."

A weird look passed over Kylo's face, like he knew Finn was right but didn't want to admit it. After awhile, he said, "Well, thank you for the psycho-analysis, but I had planned other things for this little rendezvous."

"Like what?"

"Like this," Kylo said, and walked towards Finn with his open tunic billowing dramatically behind him, slipping one huge hand behind Finn's head and kissing him.

He was, as always, a little too clumsy, a little too strange. He must have been alone for awhile, Finn thought, before remembering that this wasn't really Kylo. This Kylo, a construct of his mind, was just what Finn thought Kylo might be like, after months of traveling.

Apparently what his subconscious wanted was Kylo falling to his knees and looking up at Finn like Finn held the secret to happiness, to finally being free of the Dark Side. He felt desperation from Kylo, and desire, and something else that he couldn't pin down: an intense almost-angry focus that held Finn at its uncompromising center.

"Let me do this," Kylo whispered, his tone begging despite the words. "Let me touch you, let me — let me." He pressed his forehead against Finn's hip, shaking.

Finn reached down and touched his hair, clumsy, feeling stupid. This was his fantasy? Really? "Sure," he said lamely.

Kylo looked up at him — and then gasped, "No, wait," as the dream faded.

Finn woke up sweating and shaking as Kylo had been. Weird, stupid dream, he thought, pressing a hand against his eyes.

He was so lonely. That was the problem. He'd realized it after Lyssa arrived. Before, he'd been singular. If he felt lonely, it was just because there was no one else like him: no other defected stormtroopers, and no family either. He and Rey had bonded over that, the feeling of being alone in basically every way.

Now, though, he had a sister, and it threw his loneliness into sharper relief. He didn't just want anyone. He wanted Kylo, and he wanted the lie Kylo'd been selling — or a version of it, anyway. He wanted love. He had the love of friends, and now of a sister. It had made him demented. He wanted someone to love him in the way where they'd kiss him, too.

And of course, as always, it wasn't just anyone he was thinking of. After all these months, he still wanted Kylo. Ugh, it was gross even to think about here, lying alone in his tiny barracks room.

Maybe he knew before he left his room that day. He had learned, with Lyssa's help, how to pay closer attention to the Force, so that he was consciously aware of the people and power moving around him. That new consciousness came with a price, though, because halfway to the cafeteria he realized he could feel Kylo close by.

This wasn't a dream. He took off at a run, following the feeling and his own panicked half-joy, running down the hall and across the repair yard and -

A ship, small, of indeterminate origin, definitely not a First Order ship, but not a Resistance ship either. Kylo stood in front of it, tall and weird-looking as ever, a sarcastic, half-bored look on his face as he pointedly didn't look at the six blasters pointed at him.

"You should've called ahead if you wanted us to throw a party," Poe said.

"Don't. Move," Rose said.

"What have you done to Finn?" Rey said. And then, when everyone else looked appalled: "What? I thought now's as good a time to ask as any."

"I told Finn I wasn't returning to the First Order, with the implication being I'd come back eventually, I'm not moving, and I didn't do anything to him." Kylo's lips curled horribly. "Aside from telling him I wasn't returning to the First Order."

"Oooh, you —"

"Hey, guys," Finn said, before Rey went full Dark Side and killed Kylo in front of Poe and everybody. "Maybe we should take him to the General?"

"I'll come quietly." Kylo tilted his head a little. "If you come with me. Finn."

"Oh, don't worry, we're all coming with you," Poe said grimly.

"I was talking to Finn." Kylo might've sounded pleasant if he hadn't been so, well, Kylo. "You can do whatever you want. Obviously."

"Oh, obviously." Poe tucked his blaster in his waistband. "Come on, then."

Finn walked beside Kylo, mostly because he felt like Kylo would be a real pill if he didn't. They didn't talk, even though Finn was bursting to, wanting so badly to find out why Kylo'd come back, where he'd been, what he planned to do next.

If he planned to do anything next, really.

The General had clearly been briefed on who'd landed. She didn't even blink when Kylo walked into the war room; if Finn hadn't felt the Force screaming between them, he'd have assumed she didn't feel anything at all.

"Ben," the General said. "Sit down."

It wasn't a suggestion. Kylo sat.

"Let's start with the debrief," the General said. "We've taken Finn's report of being stranded on that moon. Now I'd like to hear yours."

Finn felt panic in the Force, and he honestly couldn't say how much of it was his and how much was Kylo's. He'd been honest with the General when she'd debriefed him, but then, he hadn't had an audience and she wasn't his mother. They'd done so many inappropriate things.

"I would request privacy," Kylo said stiffly.

Finn moved to leave.

"Except for Finn."

"Oh, come on," Rey said.

But Kylo didn't give in. He only sat there, looking as stupid as Finn had ever seen him, but also pretty inflexible.

"This shouldn't take long," the General said. "Go ahead."

And so the next thirty minutes of Finn's life were taken up by Kylo haltingly recounting their time on the moon, makeouts included. Finn had recounted it as dully as he could, not sparing any of the ridiculous behavior, but not discussing his feelings, either. Kylo did the same — or he tried to. But it was painfully obvious what he was feeling at any given time. He turned bright red, his voice shook, his hands began moving like panicked birds. Finn's heart twisted when he described the way Finn had killed the other Force user, even though the words were as dispassionate as Finn's had been.

When he finally finished, the General said, "Good news: your story's consistent," and waved the others back in.

With four witnesses, she then said, "Now tell me what you were doing when you deserted the Resistance."

"I didn't desert!" Kylo said hotly. "You'd have to join to do that, for one."

"Is that a fact? My mistake."

"I'm not a member of the Resistance."

"How do you identify yourself, then?"

"As — I'm —" For some reason, Kylo glanced at Finn then. Finn couldn't have said what what going on in his head just then if a million credits had been on offer. Kylo sat in the middle of an unfathomable maelstrom.

"Any time, Ben," the General said, her tone drier than the deserts of Jakku.

"I'm here because I want the First Order to burn," Kylo said finally. His voice was dark and furious, and it sent a shiver down Finn's spine. "I don't need to be a sworn loyal member of the Resistance to do that."

He was sneering at the Resistance, and personally, Finn was ready to knock him on the ground for it. What did he know? Nothing, apparently, judging by what an asshole he was being. But -

The General only smiled. "Of course. And so you'll stay here, not officially a member, but serving us, loyal to us, reporting to...us."

"Yes." Kylo glared at her, as furious as Finn'd ever seen him.

"I'm missing something here," Rey mumbled. Finn, safe in the privacy of his own thoughts, heartily agreed.

Finally, the interview was done. Kylo was officially a Resistance-allied fighter pilot, and as such was free to go till his next rotation. Finn half expected the actual pilots to revolt at the news, but when he asked about it, Poe just shrugged. "We'll try the sociopaths who stuck with the First Order, after we win. Who's going to tell General Organa's heir that he should be rotting in a prison cell instead?"

"He's not her heir."

"No, probably not." Poe looked at him thoughtfully. "But he's something to her, and to you. Everyone's something to someone. We're here to win a war. He's got power. That's pretty much the end of the conversation, you know?"

Finn managed to keep himself from scowling. Barely. He didn't want — Kylo wasn't anything to him! Except, of course, that he was, and the Resistance loved gossip and was tight-knit and frankly understimulated in between battles. So everyone knew about his thing for Kylo and most of them seemed to pity him for it. Even Lyssa regarded it with baffled tolerance, not angry with him but fundamentally uncomprehending.

That was all bad enough. Worse was the fact that Kylo would not, even if Finn literally begged him, stop following him around all day. Like right now, as Finn worked on an X-Wing and Kylo just sat there, not helping at all.

"I just keep asking myself," Finn said for what felt like the hundredth time, "don't pilots have responsibilities? Duties? Jobs?"

"Everyone has a job in the Resistance, Finn, don't be ridiculous."

But Kylo wasn't meeting his eyes, and he'd clearly slammed up some kind of barrier to keep Finn from poking at him with the Force. All that added up to one thing. "There's something you're not telling me, and it's related to the fact that you're following me around like this."

"Hm, is it?"

"Yes! It is! It's really obvious and weird and — and awkward!"

Kylo shrugged. Faced with that wall of determined nothing, Finn found himself falling back into silence.

But it wasn't a comfortable silence, because his thoughts just kept swirling. Why was Kylo doing this? Was it pity? Was he really that worried about Finn? Why? Finn was — he was becoming a Guardian, he had family now, not to mention the secret to immortality that he'd sort of half-forgotten for everyone's own good — but still, it was a pretty significant accomplishment. Who was Kylo to worry about him through all that?

"Lunch."

"Huh?"

Kylo smiled thinly. "You didn't eat breakfast. I followed you straight here. It's lunch hour for the zeta shift, and your hands are shaking."

"They are not — they are, oh." Finn very carefully put the oscillating plasma wrench down. "Okay, well. Let's go?"

"Of course."

They went to get lunch. There was a line because of course there was: it was zeta shift lunch hour. Finn was psyching himself up to wait in it, which he hated for a variety of reasons: it was boring; it reminded him more than anything else of being back with the First Order; he often felt awkward and stared at in the cafeteria even when Kylo wasn't following him.

But instead, Kylo said, "Go find a spot to sit down, I'll get you food."

"I — what about you?"

"I had energy paste." Kylo smiled at him. It looked like he was having some kind of weirdly specific face seizure. "Go on, sit down."

For a second Finn felt the Force howl around him, and only some of it was due to his own feelings. "Are you — okay? Do I need to call someone? A doctor, or, I don't know, a Jedi?"

"The only Jedi on this planet would rather vivisect me than help me resolve this specific problem. Go sit down and let me bring you lunch, okay?"

Finn, utterly at a loss, let Kylo bring him lunch. And then watch him while he ate it — like a fish in a too-small tank, Finn couldn't help but think, or a droid model you weren't totally sure you'd successfully reprogrammed. What the spaced Emperor was this?

He lasted two days. Two days of solicitousness and Kylo following him around like a lost bantha before he broke and said, after Kylo had brought him another lunch, "What are you doing?"

"Excuse me?"

"Why are you doing this? Being nice to me, giving me food and —" Staring at him. So carefully, like he was waiting for something that Finn didn't understand. "- everything! Why are you doing this? Do you think it'll, I don't know, redeem you? For everyone else?"

"Do you think I need redemption?"

"What kind of question is that?"

"Just a question." Kylo's watery eyes sought Finn's, held them. "What do you think of me? Finn?"

He had done so much in the last year. He'd learned about what the Force was, how to use it, and how to guard it: a much more important duty, he thought furiously, and one he'd fought to be loyal to. And now Kylo Ren was quizzing him about, what, his soul? Finn felt simultaneously furious and utterly, fundamentally exhausted.

"I think you're a jerk," Finn said finally. "And you want something from me, but I don't know what it is, and I don't know why you don't just tell me. Okay?"

They were in the cafeteria. Kylo couldn't murder him in the cafeteria, a very important thing to keep in mind when he was looking at Finn this murderously. "Do you really not know?"

"No, I don't."

And it was true! Kylo'd have been able to tell in the Force if he was lying, and anyway: he wasn't. He wasn't lying. He had no idea why Kylo, after having deserted the Resistance and after having been really weird and sexual towards Finn, had returned only to be — watchful. Nice. Romantic, maybe, not like Finn had a huge frame of reference to go by.

"You really don't know."

"You know I don't."

Kylo stared at him, wide-eyed, some kind of tortured emotion all over his face. It was ridiculous how many feelings he had — and in the cafeteria, of all places, where everyone could see him and gossip about it later. But Kylo didn't seem to care. He shook his head and said, "You still haven't figured it out. I thought you must have."

"Figured what out? Throw me a bone, here. Tell me what's going on, why you're so —" But then Finn couldn't finish. He couldn't think of a single word to embody the unbearable feelings moving between them, the bond he could feel and almost touch but didn't understand at all.

"Never mind." Kylo stood, looking down at Finn with a totally unreadable expression. "I'll see you later."

And then he was gone.

"Whew," Pava said under her breath, the next table over. "Breakups suck."

"Hey, stop it," Rose said. "Finn. You okay?" She switched tables, bringing herself over to Finn. "He's a, um. You won't like it if I say he's a jerk, huh?"

"Not really."

"He's just having some problems, that's all." Rose wrapped her shredded meat in the day's flatbread and took a bite with confidence Finn envied. "It'll all be fine."

"Sure. Um, thanks," Finn said, and ate his beans.

It wasn't fine. He didn't see Kylo at all for the rest of the day, and when he fell asleep, the first thing he saw was Kylo.

They sat in some anonymous plaza on a planet with beautiful bright sun and lots of rich green plants. It seemed fake, really; they were on top of a huge building, in an enormous city, but Finn could see beautiful sunlit meadows on the horizon. It was too good to be true.

"We're on Naboo," Kylo said.

"Where?"

"Don't play dumb, it doesn't suit you."

"I know what Naboo is," Finn said. "A rebellion terrorist hotspot." Or so they taught 'troopers. "But I've never been here, so how would I know what it looks like?"

"At this point I have to assume you're doing this on purpose."

"Doing what?"

There was something there — an answer to a question that Finn desperately needed, an explanation for whatever was happening here that had Kylo so worked up. He was forming a question, the outlines of an interrogation that would get him the information he needed, when Kylo made a furious noise and stomped forward, kissing him.

Always, always, every time, he felt like this: enveloped in Kylo's scent, his literal actual life force, as Kylo kissed him. All coherent thoughts fled, and Finn kissed back, feeling his grip on the dream loosening.

He woke with his heart racing, his dick hard, aching all over. He lay alone in the dark and tried not to cry.

The First Order was planning something.

"I do wish I could be more specific," Lyssa told the General. "I only caught — wisps. They're good at hiding from Force users."

"Ironic, since there are so few these days. The Emperor made sure of that."

"It's not surprising that people who seek to misuse power fear others having some for themselves," Lyssa said. "Don't you think?"

The General raised her eyebrows. "I think that was in a speech my mother gave to the Senate many years ago. How'd you learn that on a mining rig?"

Lyssa smiled. "You wouldn't believe the holobook black market."

Finn really wouldn't. Stormtroopers were never brought in on that kind of thing. "So we know they're planning something, we know it's big," he said. "It's gotta be focused on the Resistance, right?"

"Oh, almost certainly," Lyssa said. "That's how I knew to run away here. It took me awhile to piece together the memories they tried to take, but...here." She handed the General a microchip. "That's everything I know."

Finn assumed it had something to do with Rey: capture the fledgling Jedi before she had a chance to put Skywalker's training to use. But the general, after reviewing the information, seemed to think differently. "There are a bunch of implications here that don't fit with what they know of Rey," she said during the second meeting Finn had been called to that week.

"Like what?" Finn said.

"They keep referring to 'the traitor'," the General said. "Setting aside confirmation bias, it could be anyone, really, at least half our troops. But..."

Finn's heart felt like lead in his chest. "You think it's me."

"We all think it's you," Rey said. "Sorry."

"Space it, I never should've gone to learn from Lando." Because of course he was still afraid, and now on top of being afraid he also felt — worried, angry. Infuriated, really, that the First Order thought they could have him again. And worst of all, he could feel everyone else's emotions, too. Concern from Rey, nervous anger from Poe, bone-deep exhaustion from the General. "What do I need to do?"

"Nothing, for now," the General said. "I've told my son that he has a real job now: guarding you."

"Oh, great."

"He's agreed to behave." The General gave him a speaking look. "I expect to be told if he's not."

Something awful occurred to Finn. "Could it be Lyssa? Could she — I mean, they know about her, right?"

"Not as much as they know about you," Poe said. "Sorry, buddy. I know it's not great news to get. But we're not going to let anything happen to you, okay?"

"Of course. Yeah, no, I'm not worried." He was, he was so worried. "Um, can I — I kind of want to talk to Kylo. About it."

"He should be right outside. Go ahead."

"Finn, you're sure you're all right?" Rey said.

"Hey, this is war, right? I knew what I was getting myself into." He forced a smile. "See you."

Kylo was, in fact, waiting right outside. He stood at attention, his hands clasped loosely behind him. His eyes widened when he saw Finn. "What's happened? Are you — is your sister —"

"Everything's fine. It's just, I mean. The First Order's hunting me now, but you knew that, so."

"They're what?"

"The General said she told you." Only, she hadn't. She'd said Kylo had orders to protect him. She must not have said from what.

Tricking Finn into talking about it. Kriff. "Yeah, I guess because of what I learned about Guardian of the Whills stuff."

"They won't capture you. Of course not. But you need more than one person watching out for you, what was my mother thinking?"

"Probably that the Resistance has barely enough people to count as a Resistance. Also you're super powerful." Finn forced himself to shrug, to stay relaxed. "It's fine."

Kylo stared at him for a second, the harsh lights of the hallway doing really unflattering things to his face. "Let's go," he said, whirling around and starting to walk without even checking to see Finn was following.

"You're supposed to be guarding me, not bossing me around!" But Kylo didn't so much as twitch, and he'd put up mental walls around his feelings yet again, so Finn really had no choice but to go ahead and follow him.

They walked out past the shipyard, beyond the droid-patrolled boundaries of headquarters, down a path Recon had worn into the forest, then past that, too, into a copse of trees sheltering a meadow. It was very beautiful, Finn thought, looking around. Like something out of one of his shameful, stupid feelings-dreams.

"I didn't want anyone to overhear me," Kylo said, "when I told you that I know exactly the methods used to train stormtroopers to hide their emotions. It won't work on me."

"I'm not a stormtrooper anymore."

"No. But their mark is still on you." Bitterness shimmered around him. "I know you're afraid, and I know you're upset."

"Okay. Well, I guess that doesn't have much to do with protecting me, so..."

"Seriously?"

"Do I not sound serious?" Finn felt anger rising in him. He tried to dismiss it, tried to be — who Lando had told him he could be. Better than he was, currently, with all the terror and horniness. "I don't need a — lesson, or a talking-to, or whatever you're thinking about."

"Neither of those." Kylo sounded impossibly cold. "If you're upset it will impair my ability to protect you. It's in my best interest to resolve the problem."

Bullshit, Finn thought. Kylo's scowl deepened. "You need to get better at hiding your thoughts."

The mature thing would be to try to shut this whole argument down. Instead, Finn said, "You need to get better at hiding your emotions."

At the best of times, Kylo was a pale that could reasonably be described as 'corpse-like'. Now, though, he went white as a salt lick. "You — selfish, in-denial little — argh!"

Really: Finn should've seen the kiss coming. But he was too busy reeling from the wave of something coming off Kylo, emotion so strong it nearly physically knocked him over. He was unprepared to be pinned against a tree, unprepared for tender hands to clasp around his face, unprepared for Kylo to lean in and press himself against Finn as he furiously kissed him.

"Why do you think I lied to Snoke?"

He might as well have asked Finn to solve quantum penta-dimensional math problems. "What?"

"I lied to Snoke. About you, about...us."

There is no us! Finn wanted to yell, only of course there was: Kylo's hand on his hip, his breath mingling with Finn's. All Finn wanted, really, was an us.

"I wanted it." Their connection prevented him from thinking the vicious whisper could possibly be a lie. "I needed to tell Snoke a lie he'd believe, something that had the taste of truth. I watched you, when you weren't you. I wanted you. As a stormtrooper, with no will of your own, no self —"

"Stop it."

"Why should I? You wanted to know, didn't you? By the time I was punished for losing you and Rey, I'd already imagined a thousand ways to fuck you."

"We have — they have will," Finn said. "They have thoughts, okay, I had thoughts. It's not — we're still people. Every time the Resistance kills 'troopers, they're killing people, you realize that, right?"

"We."

"What?"

"You're part of the Resistance, Finn." A finger stroking Finn's jaw, tender and cruel at the same time. "So you kill 'troopers. Your friends."

"What exactly is the point of this?" He should've been able to tell. It should've been obvious. But he couldn't and it wasn't; the typhoon of feelings coming from Kylo illuminated nothing at all.

"The point is to remind you that I'm a monster, and the absurd affection you're harboring should be directed at anyone or anything else."

"I'm not —"

"Whatever dreams you might have. Let them go. I will keep you from being assassinated, and you will deal with your anger and fear so that I can do so." Dark eyes pinned him in place. "Promise me."

Beneath the frankly insane story about Snoke, there was a grain of real truth: people who were angry behaved irrationally, and if Kylo was going to protect Finn, they had to work together. Finn hated it, but there it was. "Fine."

"Good. Let's go, then."

They left the beautiful, sunny meadow. Too bad, Finn thought. It would've been a nice place to spend an afternoon — romantic, even, like in his dreams.

He didn't think of it till later, lying alone in bed and trying to convince his insomnia to take the night off. In his dreams. Whatever dreams you might have.

He bolted upright, suddenly wide awake. Shit. That couldn't have been what Kylo meant. They were just stupid dreams, inventions of Finn's subconscious. They couldn't be real. Kylo couldn't possibly know about them.

The things Finn had said in the safety of a dream...

No. There was just no way, and that was that.

It was weird having Kylo lurking behind him while he went about his daily routine, though. Lyssa definitely thought so, too. She kept casting him uneasy glances while they worked on repairing Pava's hyperdrive.

"Sorry," she said the third time Finn caught her at it. "I know you can feel how —"

"Nervous you are? Yeah. It's okay. I mean, he's —"

"A monster?" Lyssa said. The truth of her anger and fear rang between them in the Force.

And she was right. Finn hated the truth of it: Kylo had become the monster Snoke wanted him to be, and a year of semi-repentance didn't erase that fact. But — "I was a monster, too."

"The first time you had to kill someone, you ran."

"I wasn't the close personal apprentice of Snoke." Finn shrugged, thinking about what Poe had told him. "I'm not making excuses for him. He fucked up. But when we're done here — when we win — we're going to have a lot of fucked-up people to govern. So if he's truly repentant — and that's what this is. The General's having him guard me because it's boring, it's not particularly important, but it does require loyalty."

He felt anger in the Force, and he knew it was coming from Kylo. Whatever. His fault for eavesdropping.

"I know you have a point." Lyssa shook her head. "I just worry, you know? About you, about both of us."

About, he heard in her silence, the family they barely had, just the two of them. All the more precious for how fragile it was.

"Me too," he said. "Hey, can you take a look at this? It looks like the sub-atomic scanner's on the fritz."

He had lunch with Rey that day, as he always did on odd-shift days. He probably should have anticipated that she'd spend the hour clutching her silverware in fists, staring at Kylo with murder in her eyes.

"I hate this plan," she said.

"Careful. From what I'm getting, you're close to going darkside."

"Ha ha," Rey bit out. "He's —"

"Evil? Not anymore, technically."

"Untrustworthy in general," Rey said, "but specifically, incredibly untrustworthy for someone who's meant to be protecting you! I can't believe the General's permitting this!"

"Well, he's her son."

"She was ready to blast him out of the sky. If she's allowing it, it's because she thinks it's a good idea — for somereason."

"But you said you can't believe —"

"She's worried about you," Kylo said. "It's obvious."

When he hadn't spoken for awhile, Kylo's voice got throaty and even deeper than usual. Finn, unfortunately, knew it was also how he sounded when he was turned on. It made him all topsy-turvy: he almost dropped his glass of water.

"No one asked you," Rey said icily. "Finn, let me guard you."

"You're too important. And the General trusts you enough to go off-base alone. Push comes to shove, I could stop Kylo from doing anything too bad, planet-side."

Kylo snorted.

"He could wipe the floor with you and you know it," Rey told him.

"I suppose we'll never find out, will we?"

Finn reached out without thinking, wrapping them both in the Force the way you might swaddle a kitten in a towel. "Both of you, knock it off. We all have our orders, and we're following them, and that's that."

"Auuuugh," Rey said, and stabbed her textured vegetable protein with alarming force.

Kylo snorted. He was looking at Finn like — Finn didn't know, but it was way, way too intimate, too knowing. Finn dropped his control of the Force and drank the rest of his water.

It happened on a clear and beautiful day, a week before Finn was due to be sent to the Core planets on assignment, two weeks into Kylo protecting him.

The ships appeared as if from nowhere; they tripped no alarms, and Finn felt nothing in the Force until, suddenly, he felt a terrible screaming rage. He fell to his knees, nausea and shame ripping through him —

Kylo shouted his name —

And a battle erupted. Stormtrooper boots on the ground, the Resistance mobilizing. He saw Rey in the thick of it, brawling in the way she truly excelled at, and he saw Kylo firing blaster shots at 'troopers. He saw a fighter in the air that could only be Poe, loop-de-looping and firing at the destroyer like a tiny little X-Wing had a single hope of stopping them.

And then he saw Hux, and his heart went cold.

This wasn't a full-bodied assault on the Resistance. It had only been a few minutes. This was a targeted retrieval mission.

"Grab him," Hux said.

Kylo was too far away, in the thick of three — no, four fighters, specialists and not troopers. Rey was facing off in a lightsaber duel against another Force user. Finn tried to pull protection around himself, but he was too late. He was hit with one, two, three blaster shots, and darkness overwhelmed him.