She had known what love was before Finn and before Poe. She had known even on Jakku that she had had a family that loved her. They had to have loved her otherwise it wouldn't have hurt so much when they'd left her. She remembered flashes of that love during her life on Jakku and she had used it to keep surviving during her time on Jakku.
And even on the desolate wasteland that was Jakku there had been examples of love for her to see as she'd grown up. She had seen mothers and fathers with their children and she had watched a marriage ceremony or two in the middle of cleaning her haul for the day. She had known what love was when she met Finn.
It had just been over a decade since she'd felt anything like it in relation to herself.
She had discovered from the start that falling in love with Finn had been thunderous, loud, and intense. Rey could pinpoint the exact moment that she had known that Finn was something special. It had happened in the aftermath of their escape from Jakku, in the few quiet moments they had gotten in The Millenium Falcon before everything went to hell. It had happened when Finn had smiled at her and the universe had just stopped for those few seconds and she had just known that this man who had literally run through fire with her was supposed to be hers and that she was supposed to be his.
They had been tied together in that moment, forged themselves separately in the fire and then somehow, someway had welded themselves back together in the aftermath. She still had trouble finding names for what they had between them sometimes but then Finn smiled and she stopped trying to think at all.
She had loved Finn from just after the start of it all. She had known she had loved him and that somehow, someway, as sure as the sun would shine on the Jakku desert she had known she would be with Finn.
She had known.
What or rather who she had not known or counted on at the time was Poe Dameron.
Poe Dameron who had come to her on that first night with the Resistance with his frankly ridiculous hair, bright eyes, kind smile, an even kinder heart and offered her food and a seat beside Finn when he'd come out of surgery. Poe Dameron who had somehow known that she hadn't wanted to talk but had also known that she had not wanted to be alone and just sat beside her in the silence and let her be.
Poe Dameron who had also had his mind pulled apart by Kylo Ren and understood that sleep just wasn't something that happened easily after something like that happened to you. In those first few days after she'd come to the Resistance she'd often found herself unable to close her eyes without seeing him in the darkness that followed. She'd toss and turn in the room the Resistance had been kind enough to give her before giving up and going to medbay to sit with Finn. More often than not Poe would be there or follow her soon after. Together they'd sit and listen to the machines and the med droids checking on their various patients, usually they'd be silent, lost in their own thoughts but sometimes as the night wore on they'd talk.
No one else knew what it was like to have him in your head.
No one else knew what it was like to hate him so much you could barely breathe sometimes.
No one else they could tell because it might get back to the General and the last thing she and Poe wanted to do was cause her more sorrow.
So they talked to each other in those quiet nights with Finn in his medically induced coma beside them, used him as a comfort when the nights were too much.
If asked Rey would tell you that those quiet nights were where she believed it started with Poe but she wasn't completely sure of that. Where Finn had hit her with a certainty on day one, Poe had been a quiet revelation in the months that followed.
He had happened in the nights beside Finn's sickbed and in the months that followed as her main point of contact at the Resistance base when she'd left to find and then later train with Luke Skywalker. He had happened when she had been the first person he'd called with a very groggy but awake and smiling Finn beside him. He happened when she saw that he cared about Finn just as much as she did in those nights beside his bed and the time he spent beside him after he woke up. Poe was invested and he cared and the fact that that was directed at Finn and apparently her made something warm run through her veins and settle in her heart.
She believed that was where it all started but she hadn't fully accepted just how deep she was until she'd returned to the Resistance with Luke Skywalker and walked straight into Finn's waiting arms with her new sense of purpose and a power that pushed itself through her like a wave from the ocean and basked in Beebee Ate's excited chirps and Poe's offer of food and a place with all of them after being alone for so long.
It happened on a quiet morning after a night of drinking a little too much wine and gorging on sweets and falling asleep on Poe's bed after he'd come back from a long mission. It had happened when she had woken up late and gotten to enjoy being warm and snig between the two of them. It had happened when Poe had blinked down at her with his messy dark hair and smiled and she'd just stopped and thought oh. It was not the thunderous jolt that she'd gotten with Finn but a quiet burst of energy that floated through her and settled in her heart beside Finn.
Quiet. But no less powerful than the fire that had brought her and Finn together.
It had been natural after that look, after that feeling, after everything, to lean up and press her lips to Poe's, to delight in his startled gasp and grin at his nervous stammers when she pulled away and rolled over to do the same thing to Finn until she was lightheaded. It had taken exactly no encouragement from her to get Finn to kiss Poe and she spent a few minutes being smug about the fact that she was right about those looks between them before the two of them broke apart and turned those looks on her.
She remembered the next several hours in a haze of heat and skin and going from Rey and Finn and Poe to ReyFinnPoe. Intense, blinding, and now burning, burning, burning, together, the loud and the quiet smashed into the other with her, drowned out everything but the three of them in that room, in that moment, and refused to let go. It's the closest connection she'd had to the Force yet, the closest place between rage and serenity she has ever found and continues to find with them.
It's not perfect, what they have but it's theirs and theirs alone and to her that's one of the most precious things she could ever own and more importantly share with the two people she spends her life with. She'd never been able to share before, she still has problems with it sometimes, but with Finn and Poe she's found it to be easier than it is with most.
She had not planned on Finn and she had no planned on Poe. She had not expected to fall in love with each of them in such different ways. She counted herself lucky that they reciprocated, that they kept wanting her as much as she wanted them and they felt in her bones what she did in her bones; that they were hers and she was theirs.
"How exactly did you beat us here?"
She turned in the doorway to their new joint quarters, the ones they had applied for and been given to by a very smug General this very morning to grin at her two lovers standing with boxes in the hallway.
"It's the Jedi way," she told them both solemnly as Beebee Ate rolled around her legs and into the room to inspect everything.
"Jedi way she says," Finn told Poe. "Couldn't be that every droid on base loves her and gave her inside information before us could it?"
"No, not at all," Poe shook his head. "Or that she didn't want to move boxes with us despite the fact that she can move things with her mind."
"I'm pretty sure that some of your boxes are heavier than the boulders Master Luke makes me move," Rey pointed out as she stepped aside and let the two of them in. "And that he would frown upon me using the Force to help us move."
"Well we can't have that," Finn said as he dropped the box he had been holding on the floor and looked around with a whistle. "It's nice. Big."
"We'll have it looking like a home in no time," Poe said as he followed Finn's lead with his own box.
"Home," Rey repeated the word and smiled at the two when they looked at her. "Home sounds good. Let's get started."