fic: Small Victories
Aug. 20th, 2016 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
splinteredstarHe is Finn, and now he has to decide what that means.
Finn, adjusting to life at the Resistance and choosing what he wants to do next.
This would not be the fic that it is without the advice, feedback, and insight of
nenya85nenya85 Beta work provided by the indispensable
veleda_k . (warnings: mild ptsd, the aftermath of abuse, conflicted emotions about abusive situations, people trying to help without quite knowing how. Also, war is complex. There’s no abuse on screen, but the recovery from it is central.)
Finn has now been Finn for 57 days.
He keeps other counts, too. It has been 58 days since Slip, and 56 since Rey. 52 days since Starkiller. Poe tells him that Rey left to train 43 days ago, when Finn was recovering in the med bay. He has been out of medical for 12 days. The General (Organa, he reminds himself) has met with him twice; there are 10 squads of x-wings, and 7 of y-wings.
Today, he wakes up and for a long moment he does not move, because he does not have to. Because this is not the Order, his day is not organized down to the second (he counts them anyway, but he doesn’t have to), and so he lets himself waste time. Because he can.
He is with the Resistance, now, but he has not been given a job yet. He has been given orders: “Tell us about the Order” from the General and, “Go to physical therapy” from the doctor and, “Relax and ask me anything,” from Poe. (Some orders are easier than others.) He has a meeting with the General after lunch, and physical therapy after that. He has a list of instructions for his back.
(He did not expect to wake up, in truth, but the doctors here are kind and did not once talk about decommissioning him. They even gave him a bottle of painkillers, which he’s been much too confused by to actually try.)
He has orders, but he does not have a Purpose. He left his purpose behind on the Finalizer – no, in the bloody desert sands of Jakku. He had thought that Rey would be his purpose, but Rey is training, and he cannot help her from here. It is a terrible thing to miss, he knows, balanced against all of his reasons for leaving, but he does: he may have despaired of ever being fit for his Purpose in the order, but at least he always knew what it /was/.
He is free, now. He is Finn. He is free, and there is no one here to tell him what that means. It is terrifying, in the way he thinks good things shouldn’t be. No one else around him looks as terrified of freedom as he is. But he already knew that he is a coward, so the terror doesn’t surprise him.
(Besides, he remembers each time he closes his eyes to see Slip dying: while freedom is terrifying, the Order was much, much worse.)
Poe waves a hand at him as Finn leaves the base library. There are entire chunks of the base that Finn is not allowed to visit - it’s not that they didn’t trust him, Poe had insisted, it’s just without an official position in the Resistance there are some places he doesn’t have clearance for yet. But he is allowed in the library.
Finn has been offered a place in the Resistance, of course. Poe has raved about his gunnery skills and his courage, apparently. Every time they meet, Poe offers to teach him how to fly; every time, Finn does not say no but neither does he say yes. Over the last 12 days Poe has suggested 12 different roles in the Resistance for Finn to take, from officer to spy, and Finn has not chosen any of them for his own. He feels like he must be disappointing Poe with his lack of a decision, but if Poe is it does not show.
(Every time a position is suggested, all that Finn can think of is a Stormtrooper on the other side of the battlefield. It’s usually someone he knows. He doesn’t think the Resistance wants to know that, though.)
“Hey, buddy.” Poe claps a hand on his shoulder as Finn approaches. It is a friendly touch, he thinks. He saw officers do it to each other on the Finalizer. Poe is smiling. Poe is often smiling. “How’s your back?”
It’s a common question, Finn has noticed. Not just from Poe but from the doctors as well. As if his progress is not only measured in charts and figures, but in comfort and amounts of pain. Finn’s still not used to it, so he just shrugs. Some noncommittal responses are universal.
“Did you spend all morning in the library again? I can’t imagine reading for that long!” Poe, Finn has noticed, has an attention span common to many of the pilots he’s encountered – able to register a million moving things at once but incapable of focusing on a single static object. (He is not sure if Rey is the same. He thinks she might be. He’ll find out when she comes back, he decides.) “What’s got you so focused?”
From another trooper it would be a warning; from a superior it would be a threat. But Poe is neither, so Finn answers.
“Histories,” he finally says as they walk through the base. Finn hasn’t mapped the base yet – it uses a different organizational system than the Finalizer – but thinks they might be heading towards the shipyards. Poe looks at him, curious. “The version of history that the Order taught was…” He trails off, gesturing vaguely with one hand.
It’s taken him 5 days to establish the knowledge base that most of the histories expect him to have, instead of the warped version troopers were taught. But he has filled in gaps and corrected errors, claimed knowledge that the Order cannot stop him from having. He is learning, and it feels like victory. A tiny one maybe, but a victory, and Finn takes what he can get.
“Ah, yeah, I’ll bet.” Poe says, wincing, as if this is a revelation. It might be. Finn knows from his brief exchanges with the librarian (Twi’lek, female, age unknown) that Finn’s corrective study is not necessary for most people in Alliance space. Poe has never had to recreate his understanding of the galaxy from nothing; this is something they do not share. Finn has a brief traitorous spike of longing for the rest of his squad, for the comfort of common experiences and knowledge and sameness. It was worth it, it was all worth it, but Finn is weak and he still misses it.
“Ya know,” Poe adds casually, making Finn look over at him, “when you get up to the fall of the Empire, there are a bunch of veterans around the base you can pester for first-hand accounts.” Poe grins, one side of his mouth hitched up, at Finn’s surprise. Finn is still learning all the different shapes of Poe’s smile. “Not sure if we’ve got any Clone Wars veterans, though…”
It is not complete understanding – Poe doesn’t get it, not completely, this is not something they share – but it is something.
Finn will take what he can get.
They end up at the shipyards, of course. Poe seems to walk towards his x-wing by instinct most days, dozing off in the shade of its chassis more easily than in his bed. It is his home, Finn thinks, more so than the battered space in the barracks with his name assigned to him. Finn has no home, now – he left his home to burn, and now he has nowhere to return to.
(His home was already burning, choked Slip in its smoke. He left for a reason.)
Poe does not give him any orders, as such, but gestures to the spot next to him in the shade of his ship’s wings, and Finn interprets it as instructions anyway. This is a thing that is done, here: spending time with people simply for the sake of doing so. In the Order, even spending too much time with squadmates outside of training and meals was discouraged, to avoid personal investment in each other. Stormtroopers were each a part of a machine, each one fitting in their place perfectly but ultimately replaceable. Finn had been warned, often, that he cared too much about them; about /them/ and not about what they could contribute to the Order.
Poe waves at people who pass and shouts greetings at fellow pilots, and then he pulls out sandwiches and drinks, offering one of each to Finn. Finn takes them, because it is another implied order or at least it is safer to assume so, and besides Poe has gone out of his way to get lunch for Finn. In his squadron – his old squadron, he reminds himself - whoever had the worst training scores had to get lunch for everyone.
That always meant Slip, of course. Finn offered to help him once, but their trainer wouldn’t let him. Something about encouraging competition, about making everyone work their hardest.
He can’t stop thinking about Slip today, it seems. He wishes he could. He thinks that he’s supposed to, or that it’s supposed to happen automatically – he is here with the Resistance, now. Things are better, people tell him, and he knows they are. He can forget about it all, and move on, because none of that matters anymore.
Finn thinks, a lurch in the bottom of his stomach that feels like treachery, that Slip didn’t matter to the Order either.
He rubs his thumb over the cool bottle in his hand, smearing condensation. It might be water, or it might one of the strange flavored drinks that Poe insists on introducing him to. He thinks its water, though.
Troopers did not get funerals; when one died, their body was stripped of any useful gear and then either thrown into space or cremated. Slip’s body, Finn remembers, was left where he died. There was no mourning for a trooper’s death, not even a day off for the fallen soldier’s squadron. Still, he thinks there might have been – rituals, tiny acts of mourning when officers weren’t looking. But only for friends, or close partners.
Finn is sure that no one in the squad bothered to pour out a portion of their water ration for Slip.
(Or for him, for that matter, but that’s less important.)
“Hey, what’re you thinking?” Finn jerks his head up, feeling like he was caught out by an officer. But it’s just Poe, smiling at him, all the pilots he was talking to back at their work. Finn swallows and looks down again, opening his water and taking a drink to keep from having to talk. “You were looking pretty serious, there.”
Poe is always smiling, but Finn is not. Long years spent mostly in face-obscuring helmets means that his default facial expression is somewhat blank. But Poe knows the difference between blank and serious, Finn thinks.
The First Order is not supposed to matter anymore. Finn’s old squadron is irrelevant now. He should not be thinking about them.
But Poe asked. Poe asked, and Poe has helped Finn more than he ever needed to, and Poe has accepted all of Finn’s hesitation and confusion and misunderstandings. Finn may be about to disappoint Poe, again, and he hates that, but – he asked.
(And Finn’s started to hate lying, too.)
“I was thinking about my old squad mates. With the Order, I mean.” Finn looks up to see Poe’s expression, somewhere between sympathetic and sad, and looks away again.
“You’re safe here, buddy.” Poe’s hand on his shoulder feels like a gravity well, a black hole, the opposite of a comfort. Poe just wants to help and Finn feels guilty for not being comforted and letting it slide off his shoulder without acknowledgement. “You’ve got nothing to be afraid of from them.”
“That’s not,” Finn starts, before silencing himself. Poe would only be disappointed to hear that Finn was wondering whether or not pouring out his water ration in someone’s memory mattered in a place where he was allowed to have as much water as he wanted. His old squad mates aren’t supposed to matter. “Never mind.”
With any luck, Poe will leave it at that, and the conversation will drift to a more normal track, like introductions to other pilots or Poe telling stories about exciting missions. Normal, and as familiar as anything is in this strange world without Purpose, and almost comforting.
(Except today Finn’s not sure if he could listen to those stories without wondering about the Stormtroopers killed in them, without asking himself if they were mourned by their squad mates, if anyone scratched their numbers into the inside of their vambrace.)
(Almost without thinking, he traces the numbers into the inside of his arm: FN-2003.)
“What did ya mean, then?” Finn grimaces and picks up his sandwich, but doesn’t start eating it. “If you wanna explain. You don’t have to.”
It’s not an order (Finn thinks, at least). Poe will not force him to talk. So Finn talks, or tries to.
“I’ve just…” He looks away, rubs at his shirt cuff. Poe is like looking into a star, too bright to stand and yet necessary to survive. “I’ve was thinking. The night you were captured,” he pauses, wincing, thinking of what Poe suffered that night. “It was my squadron’s first time in combat. One of my squad mates,” he stops there, suddenly aware of all the context he could add, all the times he helped Slip in training, all the times that his squad shared together. He shakes his head instead, tries to stop his hands from shaking. “He – went down. Blaster shot. It – it could have been fixed, but no one tried.”
(Finn spent a guilty half-day in the library looking at medical textbooks, searching treatments for blaster shots. He had to know for sure, for some reason: he had to know one way or another, if Slip could have been saved if he knew more, if he’d had the right training.)
“That was why I left,” Finn finally says. “Not just because of you,” it feels disloyal to say it, but it’s true. “Because Slip died and no one but me cared, because it didn’t matter to anyone that he was dead. They didn’t even bother to pick up his body after the battle, they just stripped his gear and left him there.” Finn curls one hand around the other arm, tracing Slip’s number onto his arm again with his thumb. “We’re disposable to them,” he says, knowing that he’s not supposed to count himself as a Stormtrooper any more but saying it anyway, “And I – I guess seeing him go down made me realize that.”
Poe is silent. (Finn counts 34 seconds off in his head.) It’s long enough that Finn is certain that this is it, he has finally disappointed Poe past recovery. He still feels what he isn’t supposed to, still cares about people that aren’t supposed to matter anymore. He always cares too much.
(He doesn’t want and can’t believe in a universe where the death of a Stormtrooper was irrelevant. But if the First Order and the Resistance both think so, who is he to disagree?)
Finn finally looks over. Poe is not smiling. His eyes are half-shut, his mouth twisted into a slight frown. But he does not look – angry, Finn thinks. Maybe sad. It’s one of those in-between expressions that people outside the Order seem to have sometimes: not entirely thoughtful, not entirely sad, but somehow both.
Finn swallows. “Yeah. I mean, Zeroes transferred in from another squad, but that was six years ago.” Something shifts in Poe’s expression, the sadness getting a bit more visible. Finn’s still not sure what it means. “Slip was in my squad for as long as I remember.”
Finn looks down again, tracing half of Slip’s number again before catching himself. He feels like he’s self-reporting to an officer, expunging traitorous thoughts so that they could be corrected. Reconditioning always went easier on people who self-reported. “I – I want to do something for him, for Slip. To – I don’t know. Remember him, I guess.” As if he could ever forget.
(Maybe if he makes a symbol of it, he’ll stop dreaming about him, stop feeling the blood smeared on his face.)
He isn’t sure that explains anything. He isn’t sure what he’s trying to explain. There are so many things he doesn’t have words for yet, so many concepts he’s still learning. He’s only just learned the word for grief, mentioned in passing in a history book about the fall of the Old Republic. He had to look it up in the dictionary.
Finn glances up, sees the look on Poe’s face – so sad, with other things that Finn doesn’t recognize, yet another expression he doesn’t have a word for - and looks down again.
“I know that I’m supposed to move on,” he mumbles, staring at his uneaten sandwich. “That they’re not supposed to matter to me anymore, but I still-“
Finn’s words skid to a stop. He takes a deep breath, and then another. He remembers the sense of hope he felt, that first time he self-reported at the Order – now that he has bared his flaws, he can get rid of them. Maybe Poe will be able to fix him in the way that Order couldn’t.
Poe’s hand lands on his shoulder again. Finn lets out his breath, and looks up.
“Hey buddy, it’s okay,” Poe says, and he’s smiling, sad and gentle and friendly all at once, and it hits Finn somewhere in his stomach – this is not the Order. (He’d forgotten, for a few seconds.)
“You’re – look, when people say the Order doesn’t matter anymore, than you can move on, it’s.” Poe waves his hand, his half eaten sandwich scattering crumbs everywhere. “What they – what /I/ mean, at least, is that you don’t have to worry about what they think of you, or be afraid of them. Not… that you’re not supposed to care about the people you left behind.” Finn stares at him. Poe rubs his shoulder through the jacket, a slow circle with his thumb, still smiling. “I mean, you guys grew up together. You’re practically family.”
(Family is another word that Finn had to look up. One of the first ones, actually.)
Poe looks away for a moment, his gaze settling somewhere in the sky. He lets out a breath, and when he looks back at Finn, he’s smiling, but there’s still something sad around the edges of it. Ben Organa-Solo, Finn thinks suddenly, that boy he’s only heard whispers about. He’s not sure who Ben became, but he has his theories.
“I mean, you left the Order, and they didn’t, or didn’t get the chance to – but they still mattered to you, and that’s – you can still mourn that, you know? We’re not gonna ask you to – forget them, if you don’t want to.” Poe shakes his head, frustrated, pulls his hand from Finn’s shoulder to run it through his messy hair. His fingers catch on tangles. “I’m not explaining this well.”
Finn smiles. Something in the bottom of his stomach has untangled, releasing warmth. He pauses for a second, thinking, and then leans over to bump his shoulder against Poe’s.
“No, I think I get it.” Finn looks down, traces Slip’s number again, and doesn’t stop himself half way through this time. “Thanks.”
Poe grins at him, all sadness faded from it, and bumps him back, as easily as he would with any of his fellow pilots. “Any time, buddy.”
Finn arrives at his meeting with the General exactly on time. To be early would be to say he was shirking other duties – to be late would be to waste the General’s time. Finn does not know the General well, and understands her even less – understands her even less than he understands most things here – and so he defaults the rules he understands. (It makes the other soldiers suspicious, so Finn tries not to. But he does not know how to live without rules, yet.)
He sits across from her. Between them is a huge desk, metallic and covered with data pads and folders. And yet despite the distance between them when she looks at him he knows that he is Seen, in a way he thinks has little to do with the Force – she meets his eyes and focuses on him, as if he was worthy of attention. As if his existence were important to her.
General Organa, sitting at her huge desk with her sharp brown eyes and her hands that still have blaster callouses, looks at Finn as if he is a person, and Finn thinks he understands that the least. Officers did not look at troopers like they were people; officers looked at troopers like they were tools to be inserted wherever necessary. (General Hux, Finn thinks suddenly, looked at everyone like they were a tool, even the other officers.)
"Finn," she says, and that’s strange too - even if he had been Finn on the Finalizer, no officer would ever use it. Officers only used designations. "Have you decided what position you want in the Resistance?” She glances over papers on her desk. “From what I’ve been told, you would be an excellent fit for any role you wanted. You would be on an officer track, if you joined the infantry.”
Finn’s fingers curl on his legs, forming fists. He was set to be an officer in the Order, too.
“I,” He starts. He considers not finishing, but changes his mind. This is not the Order, he thinks. (He reminds himself.) Still, he closes his eyes rather than face her. Poe shone like a star but General Organa is a supernova. “I don’t want to join the infantry. Or be an officer.”
It is not a refusal to join the Resistance, he assures himself. (It is refusal enough, he thinks.) Sweat gathers in his palms. He is suddenly terrified of what she will do: accuse him of treachery, tell him he has to leave. (What will Rey think, coming back to find that he is no longer here?)
“Do you mind telling me why?” His eyes shoot open. General Organa looks – she does not look angry, he thinks, but he isn’t sure. Can’t be sure. He wants to wipe his palms dry, but doesn’t. The General is asking his reasons, as if she cares, as if he is not refusing their offer after they have done so much for him.
He opens his mouth, and then closes it again. Finn takes a deep breath, and thinks: this matters.
(This is the moment that matters, not what comes after it. It is not the success of an action but choosing to act – it was not escaping with Poe but deciding to rescue him. It is not how he mourns Slip, but knowing that there was someone there to mourn.
It was not the panic of Jakku, or the adrenaline of the tie-fighter fight, but the moment in between moments: when he set his feet against the weight of habit and conditioning and inertia, and /chose/.)
(He is Finn, and he will decide what that means.)
He lets out his breath. “General, I left the Order because I had watched a friend die. Because they asked me to hurt people.” He swallows. “I don’t want to hurt people.” He forces his fingers to uncurl, and he cannot begin to understand her expression.
“You fought people on Takonda, and Starkiller.” She finally says. It is not what Finn expected, and he still does not understand. “Even made several kills, if the reports are accurate.” Finn thinks he must have, though most of what he remembers is pain and panic and Rey being hurt and Nines calling him a traitor. (Finn nearly shouted back that, yes, yes he was, but he didn’t have the breath.) “Were those times different?”
For a moment his surety cracks, for a moment he is destabilized by the force of memory, of officers insisting that he did not feel what he felt, that his thoughts were not what they were – and then he takes another deep breath, and thinks about Poe and his attempts to understand, and Finn feels his surety solidify again.
(He thinks: I have decided, and that will not be taken away from me.)
(He thinks that General Organa probably won’t try to.)
“Those times – Rey was in danger, and so was I.” Finn thinks that something in the General’s expression has shifted, changed somehow, but he’s not sure what it means. “I – I can fight, if I have to, but I don’t want to.” The distinction is important, he decides.
General Organa nods. Finn thinks there is something of a smile in her expression.
“All right,” she says, and Finn’s certainty shifts a little bit once more in surprise. Even as he said it, he wasn’t entirely sure she would accept it. “Of course, you don’t have to join the Resistance in any capacity if you don’t want to.” Finn stares at her. She raises her eyebrows, and adds, not unkindly, “This is not the First Order. Everyone here is a volunteer. Your help would be appreciated, but if you want to leave we won’t stop you.”
(Briefly, he considers it: leaving, going somewhere else, starting a life away from all of this. Pretending that he was never anything else, that he is a man without a past.)
(He wraps his right hand around his left arm, and traces FN-2003 with his thumb again.)
“I want to help,” he says, finally. “I just…” Don’t know how, he does not say, though he thinks she hears it anyway.
“If we have any other Stormtrooper defectors, I would appreciate your assistance in helping them,” she says, and Finn is nodding even before she finishes speaking. Of course, of course he’ll help them. (He would even if she hadn’t asked, and he thinks she knows that.) “Aside from that, you’re welcome to train in any position you like, non-combat included.”
For a second he’s blinded by all the possibilities, frozen by the multiplicity of choices. (It’s another thing he’s still getting used to.)
Then he stops to think, about the time he’s spent in the medical center for his back and the doctors there; doctors unlike any in the Order, talking about things like “patient comfort” and “quality of life” instead of “cost effectiveness.”
He thinks about Slip, bleeding out because no one who cared could help him. He thinks about Rey’s hands, covered in scars and callouses, how casually she talked about having to bind her own wounds.
He takes a deep breath, feels certainty solidify, and lets it out again.
“I’d like to train as a medic.”
General Organa nods once, smiling at him, and it feels like a victory.
