Chapter Text
Once, when Finn was still called FN-2187, a group of stormtroopers was killed in action. Not an unusual occurrence, actually: you knew, since the moment you donned the white helmet and armour for the first time, that one day you would leave your military base to never return. It wasn’t the disappearance of the soldiers which struck Finn as an event of some interest, then. It was the way FN-0945, who was standing next to Finn when the news got to them, had reacted. He had sighed, looked at the sky, and whispered: “I hope their gods took pity on them and allowed them into their heavens”. That was the first and only time Finn had ever heard anyone mention the word “heaven”, or even merely hinted at the existence of a god like the old ones, those self-aggrandising ideas that the wild imagination of the inhabitants of that small blue planet in the Milky Way - Earth, as he would much later get to know it - kept creating. And yet, the likelihood that a magical, joyful place where you could be sent after death actually existed kept gnawing at Finn’s brain.
He hadn’t thought about that day for a while. Actually, it might have been the first time since he had left. The image of those who had been his fellow soldiers came back to Finn, triggered by the weekly tidying up of the room he had been assigned. He was taking a look at the dusty mess under his bed, when he heard a knock on the door. Finn stood up, grasped the door handle, pulled it, and unexpectedly found himself before Poe, leaning on his door frame. Finn’s friend had his arms crossed and his lips curled into the hint of a smile. “I’ve only just realised”, he said, “you patted my stomach.”
Finn frowned, trying to remember what he was referring to. “When?” he asked.
Poe stood straight and uncrossed his arms, placing his palms on each side of Finn’s door frame. “The other day,” he said. “After the blast. You ran to me and kinda hugged me, and patted my stomach.”
A sudden memory of the day resurfaced in Finn’s mind. It had been a full few days and he was struggling to keep up with everything that had happened. “I suppose I did,” he acknowledged. Then, unsure of what Poe exactly meant, he mumbled a “Sorry”.
“Oh, don’t apologise”, said Poe, stepping - or maybe striding, as Poe was many things, but he was not indecisive - into Finn’s room, looking inquisitively at the stuff scattered around the place. “You’re welcome to do that again whenever you like.”
Finn was dumbstruck, uncertain once again about the meaning of his words. Then he noticed that Poe was still smiling, and Finn had not lived long, but he had seen people smile that way before. So he just stepped closer to him, grabbed the lapels of Poe’s jacket, and, before he could ponder on an explanation of his own actions, kissed him full on the lips. It only lasted a few seconds, and Finn soon tried to move his face away from Poe’s to check his reaction, when he felt Poe’s hand curl at the nape of his neck and pull him closer. And then Poe’s lips started moving against Finn’s, and Finn still had doubts any kind of heaven existed, but if it did, it could not be anything better than this.