ABOARD THE MALACHOR, 40 YEARS ABE:
Finn and Poe raced across the threshold of a heavy blast door. Finn turned as he ran and shot-out the control panel. The damage triggered the blast door's automatic emergency protocol and it irised closed less than a meter in front of the pursuing stormtrooper squad behind them.
"This way!" Finn shouted, bolting down a side hallway. Poe, panting, stayed on his heels as though they were wingmates in the middle of a space battle.
"That door won't hold them for long," Poe said. "We gotta come up with some way to throw them off our tail so we can get to the ship without bringing the whole army along for the ride!"
The alarms helped by covering the noise of their passage, but they also made it hard for Finn and Poe to hear pursuit when it neared. They'd had enough narrow escapes that Finn approached every corner as a threat. They ran for several seconds in silence, save for their labored breathing and the distant sirens, until they bolted through another door and found a fresh squad of stormtroopers running towards them up the hallway.
"Stang!" Poe cursed and they quickly scrambled back the way they'd come. Finn again shot-out the door controls, but they were running out of paths to take. If they cut themselves off from the hanger that held their exit strategy, they'd eventually be captured no matter how fast they ran or how many doors they sealed.
Breathing too hard to spare any oxygen for talking, Finn grabbed at Poe's garish flight suit to get his attention and pulled the pilot down another cross-hallway. It was a maintenance corridor, narrow and less brightly-lit than the main parts of the ship, with exposed pipes running along the ceiling. It branched off in three different directions but Finn ignored the cross-paths and ran for the far door at the end. They staggered to a stop together midway there and Finn listened desperately for sounds of pursuit. He couldn't hear anything but the rasping of his own breath in his ears. Even the alarms seemed to have faded, or maybe he was just breathing so loudly he couldn't hear them anymore. He yanked his helmet off, sucking down unfiltered air and trying to get his breath back. They had moments before the troopers chasing them figured out which way they'd gone.
Finn heaved a breath deep enough that he could force words out again, and said, "Hanger's through that door. Go ahead; I'll hold them off."
"Are you crazy?" Poe retorted, sounding just as breathless as Finn. "I'm not leaving you."
"I'm armed and armored and you're neither," Finn retorted. "Just go."
"No way." Poe shook his head, sweaty curls bouncing furiously. "You against a whole squad? That's suicide."
Suddenly Finn knew what he had to do; it was almost like there was a voice whispering in his ear, guiding him to the solution. "You're right," he said, and shoved his helmet into Poe's startled grasp. Then he spun his blaster around so that it was pointing at his own armored chest and, over Poe's shouted protests, he squeezed the trigger.
It was an awkward shot-Blastech E-19s weren't designed to shoot the people holding them-but Finn's aim held true: the crimson bolt glanced off the white plastoid shoulder of his armor, leaving a smoking divot behind.
Finn bent double with the pain and growled, "Augh, yeah, that hurts!" Then he forced himself to straighten, took his helmet back from Poe, and shoved the blaster into his hands instead. "Now go," he said. Poe continued trying to protest but Finn shook his head, cutting him off. "Without you, I'm just another stormtrooper."
Poe's expression was frantic as he stared back and forth between Finn's face and his injured shoulder, his voice anguished. "That's not tr-"
"I'll tell them you went the other way and they'll believe me!" Finn explained, gritting his teeth against the pain and dropping his helmet back into place. "Unless they see you! Now go!"
He used his uninjured arm to push Poe away and the pilot staggered backwards, distress and indecision turning his handsome features haggard. "Be careful," he finally said, and turned and ran.
Finn waited until he was sure Poe was really leaving, then slumped back against the wall and let himself sink to the floor. He clutched at his shoulder but couldn't feel his hand through his armor. It felt like his entire arm was on fire, his entire chest. He'd been shot before so he'd known it was going to hurt, but that knowledge did nothing to lessen his current agony. The armor had dissipated most of the energy from the blast, but at point-blank range like that even a glancing blow dug deep. Finn forced himself to shove the pain aside like they'd taught him to do in training, to fight through it.
The sharp hiss of the maintenance hatch opening and closing told him that Poe had made it to the hanger; Finn didn't see him go because at some point after sitting he'd squeezed his eyes shut. Now he heard boots pounding towards him around the corner and he forced them open again, looking up in time to see a squad of stormtroopers running his way.
Time to see if he was as clever as he hoped he was…
"Trooper!" the one in front shouted; Finn was too bleary from pain to read the man's designation or rank in his HUD but if this worked, he wouldn't be here long enough for Finn to need to know it.
He forced himself to pry his hand away from the wound; to raise his uninjured arm and point, shaking, down the branching corridor away from the hangerbay-away from Poe. "They went that way!" he shouted.
The stormtrooper in the lead nodded and barked, "Let's go!" to the rest of his squad. As they confidently ran off in the direction Finn had indicated the leader looked back over his shoulder just long enough to yell, "Get to medical!"
"Yessir!" Finn said obediently, lying.
He let his arm fall and just sat there for several seconds, until the thudding of their feet-that same uniform gait that had once dominated so much of his life, the sound that had once meant fellowship, that had once meant help is coming-faded from his ears. Then he took a deep breath and forced himself upright.
"Ahh kriff, that stings," he muttered and limped after Poe towards the hanger door and the shuttle and salvation that hopefully lay on the other side.