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prompt post one

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(A/N: Okay, okay, I'm sorry, but I come here from the reprompt page and I definitely didn't read the original prompt first and I couldn't get in the Finn/Poe dynamic like, at all. Hope this does is at least a good stop-gap. Someone else please fill this better.)

Jakku, again.

He thought it was a training sim at first. He thought he had messed something up during the Jakku conflict and they wanted him to correct it.

So, when Kylo Ren orders the corralled villagers shot a second time he makes himself raise his blaster and shoot.

He realizes it’s repeating again the next morning at breakfast when Nines makes the same nervous crack about their first real mission. He’s so surprised to hear it for the third time, he misses his own nervous reply and the conversation lulls, but command will hardly be faulting him for that.

It had taken him until the start of the fighting the day before to realize it was a training sim. Disoriented, he’d been sloppy and off his game and, he admits to himself as he frowns at his gruel, he had shot when Kylo Ren commanded but had only hit one person.

He resolves to do better. He forces himself to shoot and shoot again that morning. They’re just simulations, after all, he’s done this before. It should be easy. It doesn’t matter because they aren’t real.

He does it ten times as perfectly as he can, just in case they’re being careful, making sure his actions are deliberate and that he’s learned his lesson. When he wakes up on the eleventh morning and the simulation hasn’t ended, he decides to change tactics.

He had conducted himself as well as he thought he could, but now he concentrates on running through the sim without the slightest flaw. He handles the repetition well, like that. Each run is another chance to change his footing, alter the path of a bullet, correct his errors.

Eventually he gets to know the Jakku conflict like a dance.

Exit the carrier under cover from the other troopers, shoot the figure in the foreground, because otherwise he will shoot Zeroes, who’s following FN-2187 down the ramp. Turn, shoot the two using the market deliveries for cover – he doesn’t even have to take time to aim now.

Walk in sync with his unit. Shoot, shoot, cover, pull Slip down to miss the shrapnel, shoot.
None of the troopers within his range die. Not one.

He wonders if that’s the wrong solution. Captain Phasma has told him before that he’s too careful of his fellow troopers. This sim can’t possibly be designed to encourage that. But he can’t see the value in just letting them die when they don’t have to. Even the Captain would admit that troopers are investments that warrant protecting when it doesn’t jeopardize the mission.

There’s a moment, just a moment, at the end of the fighting if he stands in the right place at the right time and with perfect, eager posture. The Unit Commander looks to him and orders him and Nine Nine to search their new prisoner’s X-Wing before destroying it. If he’s doing that, he misses the massacre entirely.

Repeat repeat repeat.

Nothing he does is working.

He lets his team members, he lets any storm trooper, die.

But Nines makes the same tired joke at breakfast the next morning. He goes back to watching their backs on the battlefield.

He hates going to the hot, sandy planet more than the never ending simulation.

The day doesn’t reset at any specific point. It continues until he goes to sleep.

So, he takes his turn in the refresher back on board the main ship and then heads to third shift duty assignment rather than the barracks. One day stretches into two… but if he stretches it into three Captain Phasma will become so disgusted with his performance that she’ll order him corrected.

Sleep deprivation makes him react oddly to orders and see things that aren’t there. Even though none of it is. It isn’t real. It’s not real.

Why can’t he break the cycle?

The technicians put him to sleep after debriefing, before correction, and he wakes up two days ago, again.

By now he can tell it’s the same morning just by the rhythm of breathing around him, and the particular shuffling of the earliest risers.

Sometimes he takes a few moments, lying there in the bunk before most of the others are awake, just to turn his hand over in front of his eyes. Is he aging? A few hundred days isn’t enough for him to be able to tell. After ten thousand days will his skin wrinkle? Could he die, truly, of old age? In twenty thousand days? Fifty? One hundred thousand?

He’s learned, by then, that a normal death only resets the scenario. If he’s killed coming off the carrier, or later in the battle, or decommissioned after because he’s raised his blaster and aimed it at Kylo Ren—

No. An ordinary death changes nothing.

In the morning they board the carrier and go back to Jakku.

FN-2187 would die a hundred times in a row just to never return to Jakku again.

He might not have so much trouble if they had gone anywhere else, literally anywhere else. Why did their first real mission have to be against untrained villagers taken by surprise?

Sometimes he kills their commanders, because they’re the reason he’s trapped in this endless hell. He’s no longer convinced obedience will save him. He’s not even sure any more if the first day ever really happened or if the entire thing was a simulation from the start.

He can’t guess at what the purpose is besides punishment, but he’s also at a loss as to what he did to deserve it.

Once, once, Nine Nine is killed in the fighting and no one replaces him at FN-2187’s side at the right moment. He’s sent to search and destroy the prisoner’s X-Wing alone. When it explodes and knocks him backwards he lays on the ground staring up at the sky until it tilts into the dark. It had been hours and he hadn’t been unconscious or dreaming. The battalion had left long ago, leaving him with the dead.

He wakes up in the barracks.

His escape attempts are largely futile. He’s never been trained on a TIE fighter and after the first few dozen attempts it’s obvious that he’s not going to learn in the ten minutes snatched between gaining the cockpit and being dragged out. Not unless he’s willing to repeat it a few thousand times more.

If he flees on foot, planetside, he’s either killed by bandits before dark or he lives long enough to collapse in exhaustion and fall asleep.

He tries to steal the X-Wing once, before it can be destroyed, but its controls are even more confusing than the TIE fighter and he’d just killed Nine Nine for nothing.

There’s no other way off the station once they return, save reconditioning which doesn’t work.

In the beginning he’d spent a handful of days figuring out how to convince Captain Phasma to let him into the prisoner’s interrogation. By then he knew that none of the storm troopers would be successful at getting information out of him, and he’d thought that if he could be the one to do it –

He hadn’t been. And he’d only ever talked himself into it once. Ever since that day, he’d memorized the duration of the interrogations and fastidiously avoided that the corridor where the prisoner was kept until well after they were done. His room-turned-cell wasn’t sound proofed and the screams echoed.

He’d never interacted with the prisoner himself, not even during the one disastrous interrogation sit-in. In the beginning, he’d tried killing him during the conflict, before he could shoot at Kylo Ren, but it was distracting and he’d tired of it. He’d also inspected the man’s X-Wing hundreds of times by now. He knew the picture the man kept tucked into his cockpit frame, he knew what notch he kept the seat at and that the radio was set to play soft music. He knew the man could fly an X-Wing.

That morning he’d fumbled the planetside conflict. It was the first time Nines had died, ever. He didn’t know what he’d done differently, after hundreds of runs, and he’d been so caught off guard that he’d missed his mark after the fighting died down and been ordered to shoot on the civilians for the first time in ages.

Nines’ blaster had exploded in his grip and in his last motion he’d reached up to touch FN-2187’s faceplate. The dirty streaks his touch left ran across his vision.

He couldn’t even bring himself to aim his blaster at the huddled group before them. They screamed.

When he tore his helmet off on the ship he could finally see the dark red of the smears Nines had left there.

He only ever sav—he only ever stole the prisoner the one time.

By then he could have gone anywhere he wished on the ship and have a reasonable excuse. Sometimes he’d done it wavering on his feet from sleep dep, which was more obvious than his jangling nerves. The guard didn’t even question him. He collected the prisoner with Kylo Ren’s name on his lips and shoved him into the closest deserted corridor.

“Listen carefully. If you do exactly as I say I can get you out of here.”

He’d had a surprising number of first conversations that day. First time he told Zeroes and Slip that Nines was dead. First time Captain Phasma had had to tell him to put his helmet back on.

But

“You need a pilot.”

He’d seen right through him. For countless days, every conversation FN-2187 had had been either scripted or full of easily swallowed lies while he tried not to reveal things he had no way of knowing.

The newness was like electricity under his skin, crawling bright and restless. He led them through the bay to his chosen TIE fighter with his blood practically singing. Even the resulting disaster wasn’t enough to quell the excitement. Next time he’d know to unclip the fighter before they got in. He turned the guns on his fellow troopers to get the practice more than anything. Next time they’d make it to the hanger forcefield before anyone had even noticed.

But then, they snapped free of the mooring line. They were out in free space.

He practiced shooting the turrets.

He didn’t need to practice. He was good.

Unbelievably – incredibly – they succeeded. He was going to ride out of this nightmare with the prisoner, Poe. Poe Dameron. On the first try.

Except the jackass wanted to go back to Jakku. And then they were shot down.

He spat sand out of his mouth when he woke up, groaning, aching, hot. Everything hurt and there was a burning line of pain across his shoulder where his armor must have pressed.

A quick panicked breath. He’d just woken up. He wanted to cry for the sand up his nose and gritting up the corners of his eyes.

He’d done it. He’d broken the cycle. He was free.

He was also alone.

The TIE fighter disappeared into the sand when he found it, taking every trace of Poe Dameron’s body with it except the hastily snatched jacket. Nines was dead, maybe for real this time. He’d killed all those people on the station, maybe for real.

Finn had escaped, but he’d blown up the whole world to do it. And now he was stuck on bloody Jakku, utterly alone.

This is wonderful! I love how you wrote it. Amazing. <3

Ahhhhhhh! Thank you so much.

This was so so good! The idea to have Finn think it was all a training sim was brilliant, him using the resets to perfect the optimal massacre plan was fascinating (if chilling), and the fact that it kept throwing him back to Jakku was AMAZING. I can NEVER get enough of Finn hating Jakku.

He turned the guns on his fellow troopers to get the practice more than anything. Next time they’d make it to the hanger forcefield before anyone had even noticed.

I really love this detail, and then how his freedom from the cycle comes with the cost of realizing that his actions were, in fact, For Real That Time.

Also, it's interesting that in this new canon timeline it's Nines that dies instead of Slip. I'm picturing Slip showing up outside Maz's for the "TRAITORR!!" confrontation, whipping the baton around and probably whacking himself in the face, poor Slip.

Thank you so much for the kind comment!

I didn't realize there was canon confirmation of who died, although Slip definitely makes sense. I feel like poor Slip needs a break. And he is definitely the one that attacks Finn later. Slip might be sort of sad and downtrodden, but he has a lot of repressed resentment and bitterness... he'd probably jump at the chance to avenge himself against Finn.

Finn hating Jakku makes even more sense than before.

Finn is probably so glad to see green stuff at Maz Kanata's his awe rivals Rey's. Unfortunately for him what he actually hated about Jakku wasn't the planet itself.

OP here. Sorry it's taken me so long to get to this but I LOVED IT. I love that he thinks it's a training sim, and his process, as he works through the scenario and the attempts to perfect it. And I like that the thing that eventually leads to his escape is Finn messing up and missing his mark, as it were. This was just a really cool concept/take on the prompt, and I enjoyed it. Thank you!

Now cleaned up a little and reposted at AO3: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6761068

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