Okay I’m so sorry for the delay but HERE. Also, bear with me, there is in fact some fluff here, but this kind of turned into a crash course in my favorite tropes, so the fluff is…at the end. We’ve got dramatic rescues! We’ve got canon references! We’ve got hurt/comfort after interrogation! We’ve got the Damerons being stupid in love with each other! We’ve got Rey being deadly as fuck even severely compromised! We’ve got Finn the patron saint of revolution! We’ve got disguises and drugs and sweary droids! And eventually we’ve got fluff. Also this is like…twelve pages, pushing 6K, I have no excuse. I’ve also decided that Shinedown’s Cut The Cord is the new theme song for the Stormtrooper revolution.
Poe wasn’t sure how long they had been there—definitely days, but probably not more than a dozen. Probably. It was hard to tell, with irregular ration schedules, and there were no other prisoners in their dark cell to ask. The brig was far from the hull of the vast First Order battlecruiser, too, and although the impenetrable black wouldn’t have helped with timekeeping, he wished they could at least see the stars.
They didn’t seem interested in him, but they had taken Rey from him three times since they were first captured—all his injuries were from trying to keep them from taking her, against her direct orders. The first time, she had walked, as graceful and serene as a dead moon, between the Stormtroopers. She had been weak with the cuffs on her wrists, cutting her off from the Force, clean and crisp as a lightsaber slash, but she was strong. They had returned her to him bruised and exhausted, wilted with it, and she had bared all her teeth at him proudly and snarled that they would never get answers out of her.
The second time, she had limped on a badly bruised leg, and she had been gone even longer. He had been terrified that she was dead, or worse, Fallen. He’d been so swamped with guilt that he was breathless, when she was half-tossed back into the cell, her blurry brown eyes wandering. Poe didn’t know what they’d given her, but it made her limp and pliant, curled up on his lap and alternating between snatches of song and mumbled speech. The only real moment of clarity had been when she reached out and gripped his shoulder with stony strength and ground out, “I didn’t tell them anything.”
“I know,” he said, smoothing her hair back from her damp forehead. “I believe you.”
The third time, she had been too drugged to go quietly and she had killed a Stormtrooper with her bare hands before they wrestled her to the ground. Poe had tried to help her fight, and he’d gotten four broken ribs from the attempt—clearly, whatever orders were keeping Rey mostly unharmed didn’t extend to him. She came back quickly, that time, grinning like a drunk and bleeding from a nasty cut bisecting one eyebrow and barely missing her eye.
Now she was lying on the ground, half in his lap as he pressed a scrap of cloth torn from her layered Jakku gear to her forehead to stem the bleeding, renewed by an absent minded rub at her eyes, and she mumbled absently about…nerfs? Her eyes were closed and her hand formed a loose cuff around his free wrist, and Poe couldn’t help smiling down at her.
Force help him, but Poe loved this stupid reckless Jedi. He bent and kissed her cheek, opposite the cut, and said as much, because even if Rey survived this whole mess, he might not, and that would overall be a shame. Finn would be upset, and Rey would be upset, and the General would be upset, and therefore Poe was upset about the possibility.
“Poe?” she asked, her eyes blinking open in bleary surprise. He nodded—she had been forgetful, on the drugs. When she spoke, the sibilants dragged and vowels slurred, but she appeared lucid, a nominal improvement. “Where’re we? These aren’t our quarters.”
“We’re on a First Order ship, querida, remember? We were captured. They’ve been interrogating you.”
Her gaze sharpened minutely. “Right. Finn here?”
“No, he wasn’t captured with us.”
“Right…” She trailed off and her hazy eyes wandered to the door. “Someone’s coming,” she said. “I can feel it.” She knocked a hand against the floor and Poe realized that he could feel it too—the synchronized thud of boots on durasteel.
“Fucking hell,” he swore.
“’S all gon’ be okay, Dameron,” she muttered, and sat up, pushing his hand away. She looked more than a little grisly, the right side of her face smeared with her own blood and her skin mottled with bruises. He had her blood tacky on his hands—it had been the only constant since their capture—and probably didn’t look too good himself.
“Liar,” he said, faint and fond, and reeled to his feet, one hand around his broken ribs.
“It’s tact,” she said, and her voice was clearer as she leaned against the wall Poe had been sitting against. He was glad she hadn’t tried to stand—taking a header into the floor as a result of the vertigo wouldn’t help her situation. “Luke said I should try it sometime.”
“What’d you say to that?” Poe asked, hoping to keep her clearheaded.
She snorted a laugh. “That his sister believes tact is for the weak and seems to have done all right.”
“Fair enough,” he said, and offered her a tense smile before looking back to the door.
The door opened with a quiet, efficient whoosh of pneumatics and Stormtroopers marched in, all glossed white armor and blank black eyes. There were five, the standard number used to collect Rey, and Poe straightened as much as he could, stepping out to block her from view. Rey was better in a hand-to-hand fight than he was, any day—she had the killer instinct, always looking for the quickest route to the jugular, fighting like she didn’t mind if she lost an arm as long as she won the fight—but he could hold his own.
“She’s not in any shape to be interrogated again,” Poe snarled, feeling his broken ribs grind in his chest.
“Close the door,” the lead Stormtrooper ordered, voice flat and warped through the vocoder, and the pneumatics sighed again, the hallway closed. Poe tensed, ready for trouble, and then the lead Stormtrooper reached up and yanked off his helmet with a familiar quick twist.
“Finn,” Poe gasped, and almost dropped on the spot as the relief crashed over him. He’d never swooned in his life, but Finn was challenging that track record, what with the dramatic rescue and everything. Finn’s broad, handsome face was creased in concern, deep circles under his eyes, but he smiled at Poe and stepped forward with his arms out. Poe went and wrapped one arm around the shoulder of the cold white armor, muttering “Broken ribs” when Finn touched the arm tucked around his chest in concern. Finn’s frown deepened and he brushed a brief, warm kiss over Poe’s lips.
“Anything else?” Finn asked, holding Poe at arm’s length and looking him over in alarm.
“Just some scrapes and bruises, buddy,” Poe said, dismissive, and looked over Finn’s soulder at the four Stormtroopers standing at attention behind him. “Um…who are your friends?”
“Right,” Finn said, startled. He pointed helpfully, and each Stormtrooper snapped off a salute as he listed them. “That’s KV-5693, Bullseye, that’s KV-9447, Fours, that’s KV-9050, Zero, and that’s KV-8494, Scraps. Their whole squad is defecting. You four, this is Poe Dameron and—hang on, Poe, where’s Rey? Did you say they’ve been interrogating her?”
“Yeah,” Poe said, stepping aside and tugging Finn back to where Rey was curled on the floor. “I don’t know what they gave her, but she’s been pretty out of it,” he started, a warning, and winced when Finn said her name quietly and she threw out a hand in a snap-quick punch.
Finn managed to dodge, and said, “Rey, it’s me, it’s Finn!”
“No,” Rey said, squinting up at him. “Finn’s not here. He’s safe. And he’s not a Stormtrooper anymore. So you’re not him.”
There was a brief pause, then Finn slowly lowered himself to his knees in front of Rey. “It’s me, I promise. I’m Finn. I’m here to rescue you. See?” He set the helmet on the ground and offered her a smile, just a shadow of his usual gorgeous face-cracking grin. Otherwise he was still, with that perfect Stormtrooper stillness he hadn’t quite managed to abandon. “It’s me.”
Rey studied him for a moment, then spoke in a small voice, like a child lost in the dark. “Finn?”
“Yeah,” he said, and she sighed, reaching forward and wrapping her arms around his neck, pressing her bloodied face into his throat. He didn’t seem to mind, tucking his arms carefully around her in return. Something warm boiled up in Poe’s chest and he smiled, watching Finn tuck his chin over Rey’s spine protectively. It was a terrible time to have the thought but Force he was fucked, he was the luckiest damn asshole to ever stand under the stars, he was going to marry these two noble crusading idiots someday.
“Hey, cute boyfriend,” Rey mumbled into Finn’s skin, and he grinned.
“Hey, Rey,” he whispered. “We’re always going to come back for you.” She made a humming noise and he asked, “Did they call what they gave you karine?” She nodded against him and he frowned. “Okay. Do you think you can walk?”
She leaned back from him and made a non-committal movement with one hand. “I dunno,” she said brightly. “We’ll find out.”
“Can you fight?” Finn asked, and she slowly bared her teeth in her thinnest, most dangerous smile, made wicked by the smeared blood. “Good. Scraps?” He stood and the Stormtrooper tossed him something silver, so quickly that Poe couldn’t make out what it was until it smacked into Finn’s hand—Rey’s staff, with the paired lightsabers in either end. “All right, I have a plan to get you both out of here. KV unit is going to defect to the Rebellion, they helped me set it up. The rest of the unit is prepping a trooper transport to ship out, we’re going to go with them and rendezvous with the Falcon about a parsec from here. We can get back to the base from there.”
“Spec is better with code than anyone I know,” one of the Stormtroopers—Poe thought it might be Zero, but he had no idea how they told each other apart in that armor—said, tense and anxious even through the vocoder. “He’ll wipe anything that could lead the Order to us off the computer and Eng is going to yank all the tracker hardware. If we can make the jump to hyperspace, we should be in the clear.”
“Um,” Poe said, feeling anxiety twist up his spine. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Finn’s judgement wholeheartedly, but… “No offense intended, but how do we know we can trust you?”
One of the Stormtroopers stepped forward and reached up, twisting off a helmet and revealing a pretty woman with skin somewhere between Finn’s and Poe’s own. Her dark hair was cropped short around her face and her eyes were steady, and as she tucked the helmet under her arm, nerves were painted all over her face. Stormtroopers could read body language like a book, but Poe had figured out quickly that none of them could control their faces—they were too used to the safety of the helmet, hiding their emotions from the world. Finn’s poker face was improving, largely because Poe’s squadron was entirely composed of inveterate gamblers who were thrilled by the prospect of Finn as a decent poker player after he wiped the floor with them by watching their hands. But this woman might as well have printed her thoughts across her forehead.
“I’m Bullseye,” she said, voice quiet and steady—the unit commander, Poe guessed. “And you don’t know that you can trust us. But my unit is tired of being killers and drones and numbers. We want people to know us by our names, and we want to end this war. We’re tired of—of little ones dying in training and we’re tired of being killed by our commanders and we’re tired of being the latest in a long line of dead bodies who aren’t even remembered.” She straightened up, lifting her chin, and her voice was louder, angry. “I want a funeral when I die, not a rubber stamp. And—and FN-2187 was a Stormtrooper,” she said, trailing off. She looked over at Finn and smiled, faint and hopeful. “And now he’s not. And we—we’re tired of being Stormtroopers. We want to be like him.”
Finn was getting that particularly stony look that said he was fighting the urge to bury his face in his hands, embarrassed, but Poe was grinning so hard it made his bruises ache. Even Rey, still half-sprawled on the floor, looked delighted.
“Oh, I like you. Poe Dameron. Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Bullseye—you want to stick with Bullseye?”
She shrugged. “My whole unit called me Bullseye since we were little ones. It’s my name.”
“Bullseye. Nice. I’m Rey. How many of you are there?” Rey asked, a better degree of lucidity coming back into her eyes. “How many Stormtroopers would rise up if we could find a way to make it happen?”
Bullseye smiled, grim and wide and clever. “There are twelve billion Stormtroopers in the First Order, including all the survivors of the Empire and all the little ones too young to fight. We’re the boots on the ground, the strong arm of the Order. They treat us like bantha shit—do you know what happens to dead Stormtroopers? They strip our gear and give it to the little ones aging up to fight, and they jettison our bodies with the trash. I’d say that for every three true believers, there’s someone who believes that FN-2187 was a Stormtrooper, not a spy or a traitor like they say. Someone who believes there’s a way out.” She glanced at Finn. “We did. And we left a message for the others who do.”
Rey was sliding to her feet, propped heavily against the wall, and smiling. “Finn, the not-Stormtrooper,” she said fondly. She looked pale under the blood and smudged black and blue, but she was vertical, and with the wall at her back in no danger of falling.
“The patron saint of last-minute rescues and revolutions,” Poe said, grinning, and Finn cocked his head in bemusement—the First Order didn’t care to teach their cannon fodder about religion, Poe supposed. “Come on. Let’s get out of here and bring the general the best news of the year. What’s the plan?”
“We’re Stormtroopers,” Finn said with a shrug, bending down to pick up his helmet again. “We have orders to escort the prisoners to interrogation on the other side of the ship, and the hangar is the best shortcut. Anyone with questions can take it up with our superiors.” He offered a crooked smile and said, “And if anyone wants to stop us, I think five Stormtroopers, a spy, and a Jedi—even a drugged one—can get us to the door of the transport. We’ll have to sell it, so someone will have to march you two.” He glanced at Rey, whose eyes were fixed on a corner of the room, one hand pressed flat against the wall as if feeling the floor spin underneath her. “Um…I think Bullseye and I should both take Rey.”
“Probably smart,” Rey said faintly. “You make good escape plans, Finn.”
“You can tell me how good my plan is after it works,” Finn told her, and settled his helmet back onto his head. He and Bullseye, identical in their masks, stepped up to Rey and took her arms, one on each side, and Poe saw her sag in their grip as if too tired to stand on her own. He had a moment of automatic terror, because he’d seen just about enough of Rey limp and loose-limbed between the immovable pillars of Stormtroopers, but took a deep breath and reminded himself that this was Finn, and if he could trust anyone, it was Finn.
“Hi,” another Stormtrooper said, sounding almost shy through the vocoder as they approached Poe and gingerly took his wrists, pulling them behind him. “I’m Fours.”
“Poe. Easy on the left arm, I’ve got some broken ribs.” He looked over at Finn, still holding Rey’s arm in one hand and her staff in the other. “All right, buddy,” he said with a nod. “Let’s do it.”
“Great,” Finn said. “Look scared.”
“That should be easy,” Poe muttered, and the door slid open.
Being marched through the pristine corridors of a First Order ship never got old, Poe could grant that much. The Rebellion was largely scraped together out of whatever was available, funded by whatever donations the General and her liasons could drag out of wealthy citizens and senators—although not senators, not anymore, since the Hosnian system had been annihilated. The whole affair was moved from planet to planet whenever necessary and jammed into any building large enough to hold them. It wasn’t a lifestyle that lent itself to use of the word ‘pristine.’ The First Order, though, was state of the art, every ship on the cutting edge and polished to a shine. It was perversely fascinating, even when the predominant thought in Poe’s head was how could we think we might win against this.
The hangar was almost identical to that on the Finalizer, right down to the TIE fighters tethered to the walls. There was a selection of larger ships, all identical and blocky—the troop transports, Poe gathered—and Finn led them silently toward the one closest to the hangar bay doors.
They’d almost made the ship when a sharp voice called, “What are you doing with the prisoners? Stop them!” Poe’s head snapped up and his heart lurched into double-time as, all around them, Stormtroopers started forward, drawing blasters.
“Poe, catch,” Bullseye ordered, releasing Rey and tossing a blaster to Poe. He caught it—pain shot through his chest with the motion, but he thumbed off the safety and shot over Bullseye’s shoulder to hit one of the oncoming Stormtroopers in the arm. She whipped out a second blaster and started firing beside him, and Poe could see where she’d gotten her name. Old stories about Stormtrooper incompetence notwithstanding, every one of Bullseye’s shots struck weak spots in her old comrades’ armor, shoulders and hips and throats. She raised her blaster higher and started shooting again, destroying the air filters and glossy black visors on helmets.
“Give me my staff,” Rey ground out, straightening and shrugging off Finn’s hand. Poe could almost see his scowl through the helmet, but he handed over the staff and the lightsabers on either end sang to life, blue-white and glowing.
Rey, normally, fought like she didn’t need to touch the ground at all, as if she was walking on wind, as if she might just walk away into the blue arch of the sky overhead. Now, she stood with her knees locked and her head down, as if it was demanding all her attention to remain on her feet, and waited for her opponents to come to her. Her lightsaber swept like a scythe on an old agrarian planet, the long upper blade mowing down waves of enemies in a steady slice and the shorter lower blade brought up to deflect blaster fire, as if Rey couldn’t command her arms into her usual quarterstaff forms. Even wielded by someone without the energy to really fight, though, a lightsaber was a lethal thing, and armor-clad corpses scored with black char piled at her feet.
The problem with Stormtroopers, Poe thought as he kept firing, starting to feel breathless with the pain in his chest and the need to dodge blaster fire, was that there were just so many of them. This was how the Empire rose, sheer force of numbers, a never-ending tide of white armor—twelve billion, Bullseye had said, and he felt nauseated to think of so many. Rey was sick with the drugs, Poe was injured, Finn was exhausted, they just didn’t have the people to stand against this tide. They would be captured again, and Finn would be killed, and KV squad, who had been so determined to help them, would be executed.
Behind him, there was a whir as the gangway of the troop transport opened, and boots clattered down onto the hangar deck, blaster fire blazing over his shoulders and head to hammer back the ocean of white armor.
“Boss!” a voice called. “We’re ready to go!”
“All right!” Bullseye called back. “Get the Jedi and the pilot into the ship!”
And a hand clamped on Poe’s shoulder and dragged him backward, threatened to topple him over if he didn’t go along with it, and when he spun, blaster raised, it was another Stormtrooper. This one had three stripes of what looked like drying blood over the visor of their helmet, and was shooting one-handed with calm skill.
“I’m Locks, KV-2954,” the Stormtrooper said. “Come on.”
Poe almost refused, but Finn shot him a look and gestured at his visor. “The blood,” he said, close enough to get away with not shouting. “He’s with us.”
“Rey,” Poe said. “Get Rey.”
“Keys is getting her.” Locks pointed, where another bloodstreaked Stormtrooper was taking Rey’s weight and helping her onto the ramp. Poe sighed and sagged, nodding, and Locks swept him up the ramp between the members of KV squad, all of them firing with perfect icy calm, all of them streaked with the triple line of blood.
“Can you fly this thing?” Poe asked Rey, and she nodded, shoving the staff at him and making her dizzy way over to the pilot’s chair in the cabin. “If not, I can–”
“I can fly,” she said. “Get Finn. Is there a gun on this ship?”
“Copilot sits there, gunner’s seat is at the wall,” Locks confirmed, pointing.
“Get me Finn. I need a gunner. And you better get the others back in here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Keys said, and vanished down the ramp again. The engines hummed as Rey started flipping switches, feeling her way along the console as if to ensure that she knew where the controls were. There was a clatter on the ramp, boots starting into the ship, as Poe sat down in the copilot’s seat and started running through what he knew of the startup of a First Order ship.
“Everyone’s in, doors are closed,” Finn said, appearing breathless over Rey’s shoulder, helmet hanging from his hand, and reaching out for the console. He punched a sequence into the keypad and an alarm started to wail through the hangar—and the doors cracked open, the vacuum of space dragging at anything that wasn’t bolted down. “We need to beat them out.”
“Got it,” Rey said, tendons standing out in her neck and jaw as she gritted her teeth and slammed the throttle forward. The transport’s engines roared as it burst free from its berth, almost hurling Finn back out of the cabin before he managed to catch the gunner’s chair and pull up the targeting array. “Everyone hold on,” she cried, her voice raw and ravaged, and the transport spun, twisting on its axis to scrap through the half-open doors.
And then they were out, in the velvet black of space, and Poe breathed, feeling like he hadn’t managed it in days. Finn was figuring out the targeting system rapidly, firing back at the hangar door to keep them from launching a pursuit—it was nothing like the Falcon or even the TIE fighter they’d flown on their first escape, where the gunner could shoot on line of sight. The transport was clearly not designed for combat, forcing the gunner to depend entirely on the computer rendition of their surroundings in order to aim. But Finn was managing it—because he was brilliant, Poe thought, feeling breathless again—and Rey was demanding everything that the sublight engines could give her, tearing away from the First Order at top speed, and Poe couldn’t hold back a whoop of delight.
“You have the weirdest sense of humor,” Rey said, prepping the hyperdrive.
“He was like this last time, too,” Finn called, and Poe shot him a look over his shoulder. Finn was grinning, the feral all-teeth grin he’d learned from Rey, and Poe laughed.
“Come on,” Poe said, panting a little in pain. “You were having fun with it too.”
“Yeah, but let’s try not to end this escape the same way!” Poe could see Finn pulling up a starmap beside the targeting array, plotting a path. “We’re meeting the Falcon a parsec away, heading 152.469, got it?”
“Got it,” Rey said, half a growl, and the ship slammed into hyperspace.
“Okay,” Finn said once the ship had settled, standing up and making his way over to Rey. “Rey, maybe you should…come on,” he said, gently peeling her hands off the yoke of the transport. “Locks said that Green can pilot this thing. Let’s go get you and Poe sitting down, okay?”
“They’re going to come after us,” Rey said, her back so taut that Poe imagined Finn’s fingers striking her tendons like guitar strings. “I have to–”
“We’re in hyperspace,” Finn said, shooting a half-desperate look at Poe. “Come on, Rey, when you start to crash off the karine you’re going to be a mess.”
Poe levered himself up out of the copilot’s seat and steadied himself on Finn’s shoulder, hooking his fingers into a joint of the armor. “Rey,” he said. “It won’t be long until we reach the Falcon. One of the others—Green? Green can take it.”
Finn picked up her staff and smoothed a hand down her arm, soothing. “Please, Rey,” he said quietly. She scowled for another moment, then sighed and went limp, leaning into Finn’s hip as if abruptly far too tired to remain upright.
“A’right,” she said, and the clarity she had managed to scrape together for their escape was fading rapidly. “D’nno if I can walk.”
“That’s okay,” Finn said. “Lean on me.” He insinuated an arm under hers, lifting her onto her feet by main force, and half-carried her from the cockpit. Poe let himself be towed along by Finn’s strong shoulder, weary and worn and remembering the pain of his injuries now that their escape was made.
“Finn,” one of the Stormtroopers said once they entered the troop bay, shooting to his feet with his blood-marked helmet under his arm. He stood at stiff attention, eyes forward and feet together, back straight as a board, and around him the other Stormtroopers straightened in their seats. Finn looked uncomfortable.
“You get promoted lately?” Poe asked in a murmur, and Rey gave a vague giggle.
“No,” Finn said, embarrassment so clear on his face it might have been printed there in Galactic Standard. “Green, you’re up to pilot. Rey’s going to fall over.”
“Yes, sir,” the standing Stormtrooper said. Poe looked him over—the name must be for his eyes, an impossible grassy green that pointed to nonhuman ancestry somewhere in his bloodline. He looked at Finn the way Bullseye had, the way they all did: like a child looking up at a hero, or a savior. He also moved out immediately and efficiently toward the cockpit, claiming two more troopers as his copilot and gunner without missing a beat. Poe decided that he liked Green.
“Okay,” Finn said, sounding almost as tired as Poe felt. He steered Rey and Poe toward an empty bench in a corner of the troop bay, sitting Rey down carefully and directing Poe to do the same. Poe sighed, leaning back against the wall, and watched Finn strip the many parts of the crisp white Stormtrooper armor off, leaving him in blacks and nothing else. Rey gave the nearest bit of armor—a gauntlet, glove still attached—a spiteful kick and sent it skittering over the floor to come to rest at Locks’ feet.
“The rest of you can take off the armor, too,” Poe said to the nearest Stormtrooper, a delicate-faced girl with hair buzzed so short he couldn’t identify the color. She gasped, as if startled by his voice or his words, and turned scarlet.
“He’s right,” Finn said, sitting down between them, and Rey keeled over to curl gingerly into his side. Poe did the same, sliding down to rest his head comfortably on Finn’s shoulder, the steady pulse of Finn’s heartbeat under his fingers. “You don’t have to wear the armor for the trip back. And you can clean your helmets, if you want.”
“No,” the girl said, a protective hand coming down on her helmet.
“What does it mean?” Poe asked, gesturing at his own face with three fingers, and her chest puffed out beneath the armor.
“It means we’re free,” she said proudly. “The vid footage of FN-2187, after he refused to fight for them, his helmet has blood on it. Bullseye did it for us, except for the ones who needed to blend in.”
Finn made a noise that was something akin to an embarrassed grumble, but didn’t say anything else.
“I like it,” Rey said, her eyes closed. “Wake me when we get to the Falcon. Artoo will be mad.”
“He’s furious,” Finn said, amused, and rested his cheek on Poe’s head, his arm looped around Rey’s waist. “I’ll wake you.”
“Thanks,” Poe mumbled, and turned his head to press a half-drowsing kiss to the firm curve of Finn’s shoulder. He expected to have trouble sleeping, with the adrenaline humming through his veins and the quiet clatter of the Stormtrooper unit around him, but Finn’s warmth seeped through the uniform blacks and into Poe’s bones, and he dozed off at once.
Finn woke them gently just a few minutes later and said, “Green’s docked with the Falcon. Come on.”
“Right,” Poe said, and drove himself to his feet with a pained groan as Finn half-pulled Rey to her feet. She was barely conscious, her eyes focusing strangely and one small fist clenched in Finn’s blacks—Poe recognized the crash she’d suffered after the first dose of the drug, but she’d been taken again before it had been out of her system, so he hoped Finn knew how to handle it. “Which way to the airlock?”
“Same as the boarding ramp,” Finn said, and sighed, bending down to scoop Rey up with one arm under her knees and the other supporting her back. She yelped, clutching him dizzily, and he made a soothing noise—it was for the best, Poe figured, since walking had been totally out of the question the last time she’d come down from the drugs. “Bullseye, I’ll have one of the astromechs on the Falcon hail you and give you the coordinates, you can follow us back to the Rebellion base.”
“You brought BB-8?” Poe asked, following Finn toward the boarding ramp.
“BB-8 brought BB-8,” Finn said, and Poe could almost hear the eyeroll that accompanied it as they stepped onto the gangplank, enclosed in a sturdy shell to protect the atmosphere from the vacuum of space. “I barely managed to make C-3PO stay behind, you know how he likes to follow Artoo around.”
“How’s this work?” Rey asked, reaching out to trail her fingers along the durasteel shell connecting the stolen First Order transport to the Falcon’s old airlock. “They…c’mbined it.”
“I’m not an engineer,” Finn said with a careful shrug, barely jostling Rey’s shoulders. “The shell seals to the hull around the other ship’s airlock, but that’s all I know. It’s supposed to let us take ships quickly, without messing around with moving a few troopers at a time through an airlock—you can march a whole unit down one of these, in rows of three.”
“Not a bad plan,” Poe muttered, a little disturbed by the mental image, and then Finn was stepping carefully over the ledge into the Falcon’s airlock, and the outer door was closing behind them, and the inner door opened. Poe let out a breath, but before he could close his eyes and enjoy the feeling of being back on known territory, he was distracted by an absolute cacophony of noise—a roar of greeting, and a pair of distinct binary beeps and whistles. Chewbacca lumbered up and bent over Rey in Finn’s arms with a concerned scowl, but grumbled a greeting, and she smiled blurrily up at him.
“’M fine,” she said, reaching out to pat the nearest bit of Wookie she could reach—an elbow—and earning a softer croon. “Jus’a li’l drugged. Flew a First Order transport, though.”
<Friend-Poe!> BB-8 half-shrieked, caroming off a wall and coming to an abrupt halt barely a hair’s breadth from Poe’s feet.
“Hey, BB,” Poe said, looking down at the droid with a smile. “Miss me?” He started to crouch down and winced when it twisted his ribs painfully.
<You are injured, [f u c k i n g] moron,> BB-8 replied, still high and loud with delight and anger. <R2-D2 said you would be. You and Jedi-Friend-Rey and Coat-Thief-Friend-Finn remind him of old friends.>
R2-D2 was, apparently, too old and dignified to come screeching up to his missing friends, and wheeled up more sedately to cheerfully add, <They were all [f u c k i n g] morons too.>
“Missed y’too, Artoo,” Rey said drowsily, and smiled down at the old astromech.
R2-D2 managed a good binary impression of a disdainful sniff. <I’m too old for this [s h i t], get the [f u c k] out. And teach your ball-droid to come up with shorter names.> He paused as he wheeled toward the cockpit and rotated his dome to direct his optics port back toward Rey. <At least you’re as lucky as my first owner was, Padawan. Force [d a m n e d] Jedi. You’re all the reason my coolant system is corroding.>
BB-8 laughed, a short repetition of a few scalar notes, and said, <He talks [s h i t], but R2-D2 likes Jedi-Friend-Rey, he was [f u c k i n g] [p i s s e d] when she was taken.>
<Suck my memory port, ball-droid!> R2-D2 beeped from down the corridor, and BB-8 laughed again.
Rey grinned a little, head resting on Finn’s shoulder. “’M touched.”
“Can you three fly the Falcon back to base?” Finn asked Chewbacca. “Rey’s coming down pretty badly off a terro drug, and Poe’s a mess. And I can’t fly.”
Chewbacca rumbled reassuringly and patted Finn’s back. Poe didn’t speak Shyriiwook, but the affirmative was obvious, because Chewbacca gave Rey another remarkably delicate pat on the head and loped off after R2-D2 toward the cockpit.
“Okay,” Finn sighed. “We have some basic osteo regen tablets that’ll help your ribs, Poe, but nothing like what they’ll be able to do for you on base. And Rey’s just going to have to ride it out, terro drugs are nasty.”
“Terro drugs?” Rey asked as the three of them—BB-8, who had apparently decided to leave the ship in R2-D2’s control, in their wake—started toward the nearby crew quarters.
“Interrogation drugs. Karine is the worst of the lot,” Finn said. “But you seem like you’re one of the ones who just gets drunk when you come down off it.”
“I’m drunk? I feel drunk. Poe, am I drunk?” she asked, leaning precariously over Finn’s arm to look at Poe, her dark eyes wide and serious as a child’s.
“Yes, querida, you’re drunk,” Poe said. “I might take you up on those regen tablets, or at least something to wrap my ribs, buddy.”
“Sure,” Finn said, setting Rey gently on the first bunk they reached. “One second, okay?” He brushed his lips across Poe’s cheek as he passed, and Poe sighed, settling on the bed next to Rey.
She rested her head against his hip and mumbled, “’M glad Finn came back for us.”
“Yeah,” Poe said, leaning back and feeling the Falcon’s familiar hum through the bulkhead behind him. “Me too.”