Something warm on Finn's shoulder breaks him from sleep. He shoots up. Touch still shocks him sometimes, when he isn't prepared. Whenever he's nudged awake by a person instead of ripped from dreams by a blaring alarm, a tingle of panic bursts in his stomach.
Tonight, though, it is Rey. "I didn't mean to scare you," she whispers.
"No, no, you didn't." A dumb lie, but he's barely gotten to speak to her since she returned with Luke. She's been in tactical meeting after tactical meeting, often behind closed doors. "What's… uh, what's up?" Ugh. It would be best to throw himself back under his blanket. She'd become a Jedi, General Leia's new right-hand woman, and his first question is what's up?
Rey, however, does not seem to mind. She takes his hand and leads him out of the barracks. "I have something to show you."
"Is it a cool Jedi thing?"
"No, something much better." She looks back with the smile he had not realized he'd missed quite so much.
They get to the outer hall and Finn begins to hear the taps and splatters of rain. She quietly uses the Force to open the door without the security code, and Finn almost protests going out. It is not a light rain. It pours from the sky in sheets, shaking the trees and drowning the grass. They will be soaked the second they step across the threshold.
Rey lets go of his hand and runs into it. Her clothes sink down on her body with the weight of water and her hair comes undone but she is spinning, smiling, laughing. She is so radiant that Finn cannot fathom that a rainbow does not form in her light.
"Have you ever seen something so wonderful?"
Finn cannot say that he has. He wonders how many times she has done this; if she made Luke put Jedi training on hold every time it rained. He hopes she has done it a hundred times and will do it a thousand more.
As soon as he joins her she takes him by the wrists and he is spinning and laughing too. The water is warm and the air warmer, thick with humidity and something much sweeter. He slides his hands so their fingers interlock. The moment stretches out; there is no war, no Jedi or Storm Troopers, just the two of them—two people, small and ordinary in the scope of the galaxy but miraculous all the same.
And then Finn's foot slips on the wet grass. He lands on his back, not hard, but Rey's face is full of fear.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah." Even as he sits up, her eyes are wide. "I only slipped."
"I was so scared," she says, and he realizes she's talking about more than this moment. "I thought…"
He decides to match her honesty. "I thought you might not come back. Or that you would but not…"
"I never…"
"I always…"
They go quiet. She drops to her knees and wraps her arms around him. He holds on to her tightly. Muddy water is soaking through his pants, but he barely feels it alongside the way her chin presses into his shoulder.
"I didn't want to leave you," she finally breathes.
"But you came back. That's what matters."
He feels her smile. "Just like you did." She pulls away, and he almost begs her to come back again. But she takes his face in her hands and kisses him on the forehead, as light as a breath of wind. He puts his hands over hers, a want filling his chest cavity with such weight he cannot move any more than that. She leans back in. They are nose to nose and forehead to forehead and the distance is too much and too little all at once. Finn has nothing to hide behind, no mask. He knows people do this, he has seen it all the time on base, but he had never imagined it could be so much and so terrifying.
Rey does not close the last bit of distance. Water runs down her face and sparkles in what little light comes from the base. "I don't know what people say right now. There must be words I never learned."
He wracks his mind for things he's heard, but they are always whispers. "They don't teach them to Storm Troopers either."
The rain has clumped her eyelashes together, he notices as her eyes search his. "We'll have to make our own."
"Yes." He closes his eyes and breathes. He can feel his pulse beneath her hands. "Rey."
"Finn."
When they kiss it is slow, shaky, but Finn starts to smile in spite of himself and Rey does too, until they finally pull away with small giggles. They each open their mouths to speak, but Finn doesn't know what to say and neither does Rey, so they press their lips together again to voice the words they don't have. It ends again in smiles. Finn cannot remember how to make his mouth form any other shape.
"We're going to have to sneak our clothes into the laundry."
Rey laughs. "I hadn't thought about that." She looks down at herself, at the water dripping from her shirt and the mud caking at her knees. "I've never tried sleeping in wet clothes."
Finn laughs back. "It's not fun, believe me."
She takes his hand and helps him up. "Do you know the way?"
"The General has had me on laundry plenty." Finn leads her towards the basement. "And knowing her, she'll somehow feel it's right to put me there tomorrow."
...
"Is she being punished for something?" someone asks the General, shocked to see the new Jedi put on wash duty alongside the former Storm Trooper.
Leia looks down into the laundry room, where Rey and Finn scrub clothes back to back and fail to hide their smiles. "I'd hardly call it a punishment." She feels a smile form on her own face. It was a pity, truly, that no one had ever had the guts to make a princess clean up the messes she and Han had made. From here, it looks to be half the fun.