PROMPT POST #7 - CLOSED

[themodawakens]

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FILL: Finn/Poe, Finn meets Bodhi Rook [2/3]

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry this took so long lmao, finished it up as part of NaNoWriMo!

---

“How have you been, Poe? Kes won’t tell me anything.”

Finn’s glad — at least, he’s pretty sure he’s glad — that he asked Poe to come. Rook (Uncle Bodhi) is a different man around him, softer and brighter and a little rougher around the edges. He smiled at Finn when they walked in, but he lit up when he saw Poe.

“A lot of it’s classified,” Poe says very seriously, even though he’s tapping the side of his nose and grinning. “I’m sure you know the drill.”

“I don’t mean that,” Bodhi says, flapping a hand as he bustles about making them tea; he has the very distinct air of a man who is used to being in constant, nervous motion, but starting to get too old for it and struggling to find other outlets. It’s all Finn can do to watch, fascinated. “I mean your father won’t tell me anything.”

He looks very meaningfully between Poe and Finn, and Finn’s delighted by the not incredibly common sight of Poe blushing bright, bright red.

“Good,” he says, voice a little strangled. “I’ve — we’ve been good,” and somehow it’s the most startling thing yet when Bodhi throws back his head and laughs, eyes twinkling.

“I’ve known your boy here since he was knee-high to a womp rat, toddling around after Shara and begging me for war stories,” he informs Finn, over the sound of Poe sputtering indignantly and clutching at his chest as though his wounded pride is a physical thing.

“Please tell me he had an awkward teen stage,” Finn says very seriously, mostly to watch Poe squirm; he’s pleased, the feeling buzzing warm in his chest, when he gets another laugh out of Bodhi, warm and genuine and maybe a little mean.

“He most certainly did,” he promises, even as Poe swears and says, “Don’t listen to him, Finn, and if you show him any pictures, old man —”

He’d known it would be different, with someone else in the room — a common thread, a link; it’s the reason he’d asked Poe to come, besides simple moral support — but he hadn’t anticipated how different. The person he’d met yesterday, stiff and pained and old, the lone survivor, that had been Rook: pilot of Rogue One, surviving defector of the Empire. This man laughing with Poe, teasing him with the idea of showing Finn holos from the greasy, pimply days back before he left to be a fighter jock out in Republic space, isn’t him; it’s Poe’s Uncle Bodhi, Kes’ friend, a transplant who’s set down solid roots here in the jungles of Yavin 4.

“He’s being good to you, right, Finn?” Bodhi asks him. His tone is heavy with faux seriousness, but his eyes are twinkling. “I don’t need to have a talk with him?”

“He’s good,” Finn laughs, head spinning a little from the cognitive dissonance of having this conversation with a man who, unknowingly, impacted the entire trajectory of his life. He’s growing more certain he was on the mark last night: surely this must have been what it was like for Poe to meet Leia, this feeling that the reality is too big and too small all at once.

“Aren’t you supposed to give him the shovel talk, not me?” Poe complains, and Bodhi laughs at him again; Finn can’t quite decide where to look, whether he should be more captivated by the living legend or by his boyfriend, who for once seems to have lost every single bit of the weight on his shoulders. Poe looks years younger, clearly effusively happy just to be here, surrounded by people he loves — and Finn’s still as astonished as anyone that he fits in that category — and it’s infectious; Finn can’t help but feel lighter, too.

—

They stay longer this time, and Finn’s not sure whether to be overwhelmed or grateful. It’s what he’d wanted, part of why he’d asked Poe along — he hadn’t quite been satisfied, before — but now he’s thinking he should have been careful what he wished for, because it’s just this side of too much.

Dusk is gathering by the time Poe stands and says, “Uncle Bodhi, you coming over for dinner?” But Bodhi is shaking his head, with a small, secretive smile, before he’s even finished speaking.

“I won’t steal you from your father any longer,” he tells Poe, then turns to Finn and adds, “and I may know Poe well enough to know that he’s the heartbreaker here, but I’m sure Kes is still trying to impress fear into you, and as much as I’d like to see that, I wouldn’t want him to get stage fright.”

Finn can’t imagine Kes Dameron being too nervous to speak in front of an audience, and he’s not sure one extra person counts as an audience anyway, but it’s a nice excuse and Poe’s loudly defending himself again even as they gather up to go, so he lets it lie.

Bodhi sees them out, and they’re hovering on the threshold before he hesitates and meets Finn’s eyes and says, “Come over after dinner for a cup of tea, if you like. I’ve got more stories to share, and I’m sure you do too.”

He shoots Poe a look that clearly emphasizes that he means for Finn to come alone, but Poe’s a smart guy; Finn’s sure he would have gracefully excused himself even if Bodhi had intended it as an invitation for both of them.

Dinner is good, all the local dishes and ingredients that seem hopelessly exotic compared to what they eat back on base, let alone what Finn had grown up eating in the First Order, but he hardly tastes it; he watches Kes and Poe’s back-and-forth but doesn’t really participate, his mind whirring away instead with renewed nerves. He doesn’t even know what he’s nervous about anymore. When he’d arrived, it had been the fear of meeting a legend, and later the fear that Bodhi would be dismissive somehow, but over the course of the afternoon those fears had faded. It seems they’ve only been replaced by something else, though, and it really bothers him that he can’t but his finger on what.

He insists on doing the washing up, because Bodhi had been right about Kes being a bit of an intimidating figure, and though he’s been perfectly polite, Finn wants to do everything possible to get — and stay — on his good side. But then he puts his jacket (once Poe’s, of course, and he doesn’t miss the look father and son exchange when he shrugs it on) and walks out the door. Poe follows him, presses a kiss to this temple, and sends him off down the road to Bodhi’s, watching silhouetted in the doorway.

It’s not far at all, and having made the trip several times now Finn’s relatively confident of it, even in the dark. And Bodhi is waiting for him, sitting in an old chair just outside the front door, holding a lantern in his lap. He raises a hand in greeting and Finn raises one back, his steps quickening in the dark.

They don’t talk much until they’re inside the house, Bodhi flicking his lantern off as soon as they get indoors and leading the way to the kitchen. He offers tea. Finn accepts, because what else is he going to do? For one thing he doesn’t want to cause any offence, and for another thing, everything is something new to try. There’s a teapot already sitting out, and Bodhi pours two cupfuls, passing one to Finn and taking the pot with him as he crosses over to the low table in the living room.

He settles on one side, setting the teapot and his small, round cup down with quiet earthy sounds, and Finn sits on the other side. There are cushions on the floor, but he sits up straight instead of relaxing into them, and a part of him thinks, distantly, they burn it into your blood. The cup of tea is warm and rough in his hands, and he takes a sip.

“They’ve told me a little about you,” Bodhi says eventually, glancing across the table at him over the lip of his cup, and Finn understands they to mean Kes and Poe and probably some other Resistance contacts or something. “But I want to hear it from you. What was your story, Finn?”

You know mine, so tell me yours goes unspoken, but Finn hears it clear as day, and swallows. He’s over any star-struck feelings he might have once had — more or less — and down now to the strange, itching uncertainty of talking to someone who knows so much and yet so little about what he’s been through. More, maybe, than anyone else in the galaxy, at least that he knows of, but still nothing at all.

So Finn doesn’t mean to, really, but he ends up telling him everything. Everything, including even the things he didn’t tell the General when he debriefed with her; even the things he hasn’t told Poe, because even if he tries, Poe’s eyes start to go dark and sad until he can’t quite go on; and even the things he doesn’t willingly think about himself, during waking hours.

There are plenty of differences in their experiences, of course. The First Order is, despite the obvious parallels and surface-level similarities — and, above all else, a commonly-held cruelty — in many ways quite different from the Empire by design, and in any case, the lives of pilots and infantry are quite different. Bodhi visibly blanches any time FInn mentions reconditioning with any level of detail, and when he references the ways certain officers in particular take liberties with their Troopers — apparently such things, if they happened in the old Empire (and Finn knows in his gut they must’ve done), at least nominally occurred under the radar.

“They didn’t have you on stims, though?” Bodhi asks, voice getting a little raspy from extended use. He sounds genuinely curious and open.

Finn shakes his head. “They tried, I think, with some of the earlier Trooper series. I overheard an officer say at one point that Hux thought it made us too unpredictable. But by the time they got to FN series, anyway, they definitely didn’t.”

By now, the teapot is empty and cool between them on the table, and Finn takes the last swallow of his tea while Bodhi considers that, his own cup already empty.

“‘Unpredictable’ is right,” Bodhi acknowledges, scratching at his chin with one hand. “But there are benefits, too. From their perspective.” The qualification is absolutely unnecessary, but it makes Finn laugh.

They lapse into silence after that, as Finn taps absentmindedly on the edge of his cup, his nails producing a quiet ringing sound on the cool ceramic. The night is warm and humid, the sounds of it drifting in through the small window that’s set high into the wall. After they started drinking the tea, Finn was able to relax into the cushion a little bit, but his shoulders are still a bit tense as he steals a glance at Bodhi, who seems almost fluid, loose, a thin lobe hanging limply away from his frame and pooling on the floor.

“What made you decide to leave?” Finn asks quietly, and Bodhi goes preternaturally still from across the little table.

They haven’t quite delved into this yet. They’ve touched on the how, the when, and the where — Finn knows more now about Jedha than he ever could have imagined, including something called ‘Bor Gullet’ that Bodhi had mentioned with a grave tone that suggested terror dulled slightly by age — but not the why, and he watches intently as Bodhi slowly, intentionally relaxes one muscle group at a time, finally letting out a deep, gusty sigh that all but sends a thrill through the room.

“It was a lot of things,” Bodhi says eventually, slowly. “I told you about Galen Erso.”

It’s not really a question, but Finn nods anyway, and Bodhi nods back, his eyes distant. “He was a big part of the reason I left — or the reason I had the courage to leave, I suppose — but not all of it.”

He trails off and doesn’t say anything else for several long moments, but Finn knows better than to talk. He’s seen often enough what it looks like for soldiers to remember faraway battles, and he understands the whirling emotions that come with it. He lets Bodhi take his time.

It’s a complicated question, too — one Finn’s not entirely sure if he could answer, either, which is something he’s thought a lot about. There are a ton of factors: Nines’ death, the villagers, the ache of knowing there was something missing, something the First Order had taken from him, even the way Poe had looked at him when he’d said “We’re gonna do this,” which had killed whatever lingering doubts he might have had. Even harder to answer is the question of why he’d stayed with the Resistance, but that kind of question is way beyond the scope of anything he’d feel comfortable asking Bodhi right now.

“I got the sense, my whole life, that something was wrong,” the old man finally says, slowly, quietly, methodically; Finn can almost hear the wind blowing Jedha’s cold sands in the corners of his voice. “Something was off-kilter in the whole galaxy. Maybe that’s the Force; I suppose I don’t really know.”

He takes a deep breath and continues; Finn had gone absolutely still at the mention of the Force, and he stays frozen as Bodhi goes on.

“When Galen Erso starting whispering in my ear,” he explains, “it was that feeling more than anything else that made me stop and listen. I mean, obviously, I’d heard about the Empire doing terrible things, and I’d seen it with my own eyes, and I knew what the Death Star would be capable of if it was ever completed, but there was this other factor that I didn’t even really realize was there until I already knew what I had to do.”

Finn is quiet. Finn doesn’t know what he could possibly say in response of that, doesn’t know what Bodhi could possibly want to hear. He swallows, but there’s a dry lump in his throat that just doesn’t want to go away, and as though from a great distance he hears his own voice say, “I know what you mean.”