Author's Note: If you're interested, a lovely person made a podfic of "The Story of Finn" to be listened to instead of read if you're into podfics! Unfortunately, I can't link on this site, but if you Google "The Story of Finn" and "annabelle_myrtille (annapod)", you should be able to find it very easily! There's direct links on the version of this fic on AO3.
THE STORY OF FINN
CHAPTER FOUR: LIFE AND DEATH
"What the hell did you do, you little shit?"
Doublo blinks through fuzzy eyes and tinted glass at a familiar face, at wide lips made wider in a vicious snarl and dark eyes cold against a warm face.
"BeeKay?"
Doublo gets her helmet slammed against the wall again, which doesn't help her ability to formulate an answer to BeeKay's question at all. She's still trying to shake the swirls out of her eyes, trying to breathe against the plate of armor pressing into her chest, when BeeKay apparently gives up and releases her, letting her drop to the floor with a heavy clunk.
"Get the whole bunkroom in here in the next ten minutes," BeeKay orders sharply to the two Troopers fearfully watching their exchange. "Eighteen, GeeVee and One are doing ship maintenance. Gigi, Sixteen and Two-Three are coming back from speed drills in two minutes."
"What about Postcard?" Eighteen asks quietly.
"He's cleaning off that swamp gunk from his data run," BeeKay snaps back. "Nine minutes and thirty seconds now. Tell anyone who asks that it's a discipline issue and that they'll answer to me if I don't have my subordinates where I want them immediately."
Doublo forgot just how closely BeeKay watches over them, how she's so plugged into the network of their base that she could make a data droid shriek with envy. She has their schedules memorized, knows even their solo mission parameters inside out, and Three says, only partly joking, that BeeKay can hear the ding of a message entering an inbox before it arrives.
BeeKay probably knew within a minute that Doublo had deviated from her routine.
Without another word, Eighteen and Gigi run past Doublo doubled over on the floor to obey BeeKay's orders. None of them have ever seen BeeKay like this before, all at once cold and furious and unnerved enough to physically act. Not BeeKay, who makes every effort to appear the perfect Stormtrooper outside of their recently ended Story Circles, who's never given them anything worse than a knock to the helmet for little mistakes that could get them reprimanded or reconditioned.
Impatient for Doublo to recover, BeeKay grabs her by the front of her armor and hauls her up.
"Was it you who wrote this pile of shit and sent it out to everyone?" BeeKay demands.
Doublo nods and tries not to throw up in her own helmet.
"What's your plan now?"
Doublo just stares at her. Plan? She didn't actually think she'd get away with her treason, though there was a general idea to take a ship and run. Doublo doesn't have anywhere to go, doesn't have any idea how to survive outside of life under the First Order, and knows therefore that the probability of her successfully defecting the First Order, which is on-edge and on-the-hunt for defectors now, is unlikely.
"You... you don't have a plan now, do you?" BeeKay realizes slowly, eyes widening.
Still dizzy, Doublo nods again.
BeeKay makes a sound of utter disgust and with a powerful heave, basically tosses Doublo down into the nearest bunk. Hard enough to bounce, even though Stormtrooper bunks are in many ways comparable to rocks.
"We're all screwed then," BeeKay announces to the empty bunkroom, kicking the nearest empty bunk and sending it flipping into its neighbor. "They're going to find out where it came from, who exactly wrote it, and then dismiss everyone on this damn base for good measure! You didn't even have a plan for the after of your actions? Why would you do this?"
Doublo tries to answer, but it comes out as an incoherent mumble. She's pretty sure that BeeKay dented her armor somehow, which while impressive, doesn't exactly make for a Stormtrooper in condition to give their commanding officer a decent report.
"Louder!" BeeKay barks.
Doublo rips off her helmet and tosses it down with a careless thunk, then slowly pulls herself up tall in her seat on Two's bunk – she's not up to standing right this minute, because it seems her legs have finally caught up to what she's done and stopped working – and glares right on back at BeeKay. Face to face and eyes to eyes, like the first night where BeeKay changed her world.
Doublo hardly makes for an intimidating picture, because while she's muscled and stocky like a Stormtrooper has to be, she's young, barely more than cadet, and a little short for a Stormtrooper. She thinks her skull is strangely shaped and her bare fuzz of hair only makes it look stranger. Doublo's round face is unhealthily pale from never seeing the sun without armor, and it's completely covered in ugly red splotches and spots that are nothing like BeeKay's smooth skin.
"Because it had to be told," Doublo grits out, vision still dazed and stomach still whirling, throwing her commanding officer's own words back in her face.
BeeKay stares at her, long and hard, and then laughs. It's not a beautiful sound – it's not even a pleasant sound – but a harsh and foreign one that Doublo usually hears from the higher-ups that she hopes never to encounter again.
"You stupid little brat," BeeKay says then, fondly, giving Doublo that gentle smile from the very first time again. "I should have it would be you who finally pushed us over, with the stories you liked." Then she drops down onto Three's bunk and laughs again. "I guess it won't matter that much if I move my plans up a week early."
Doublo just blinks stupidly at her commanding officer.
"What?" she says.
BeeKay just smiles at her, wide lips tightly closed, and that doesn't clear up any of Doublo's confusion as to what in the galaxy is going on. The meetings between her helmet and the wall are not helping her here, because plans? What plans? BeeKay had plans?
But before Doublo can ask BeeKay what the helmet that's supposed to be, Postcard bursts into the room in his rest blacks, obviously caught halfway into cleaning himself of swamp gunk; if Stormtroopers got the same luxury of showers that the higher-ups do, he'd be soaking wet. As it is, Doublo notices a suspicious brown stripe on his scarred neck as the door whooshes shut.
"What's happening?" he demands.
BeeKay looks at him, still smiling, and he blinks at her, obviously not expecting such a laid-back grin from a woman who's been rigid with wariness since Starkiller was killed. It probably doesn't help his confusion, just like it doesn't help Doublo's, that Sixteen and Eighteen's bunks got kicked out of where bunkroom regulations say they ought to be.
Once he's done looking about the half-wrecked room, he looks back at BeeKay. "Eighteen said it was really, really, really urgent?" he offers, as though he maybe needs to remind her, his tension evaporating some in his bewilderment.
"Oh, it is," BeeKay agrees, smiling gently. "We're all defecting."
Postcard stares at her.
Then he looks at Doublo, who was busy gaping at BeeKay but turns to look at him too.
I have lost all control and all knowledge of everything, her expression probably tells him. Doublo feels confused and helpless and excited and terrified, and has lost all ability to process what little thought the First Order has trained her to be capable of, and then the rest besides.
Postcard looks back at BeeKay.
"...Okay?" he says.
oOo
Her bunkmates aren't happy about what Doublo's done to say the least. Gigi looks like he wants to throw her out the nearest window for a moment, but no one, not even once, ever makes the suggestion that they should hand her over. And Doublo's pretty sure, or at least hopes, that it's not just because they don't want to be the one to tell the higher-ups what she's done.
Once everyone is rounded up – Two, Three, Postcard, GeeVee, Eighteen, Sixteen, One, and Gigi – BeeKay announces flatly what Doublo's done and then informs them that they're defecting.
All of them.
Several of her bunkmates don't look happy about this either, but that's probably because they're too busy being surprised... shocked... stunned. One (JA-0781), a young and pale male who's the shortest of them next to Doublo, even temporarily looks in danger of needing medical attention.
BeeKay doesn't give any of them time to object, verbally beating them into line by pointing out that it doesn't matter if Doublo runs or gets caught, their bunkroom is going to be investigated from floor to ceiling for Resistance Propaganda or whatever caused Doublo's treason.
With their Story Circle, which itself is treason, going on for as long as it has, not a single one of them would make it out of a First Order investigation without being dismissed. They'll be interrogated, tortured, and only reconditioned and re-educated if they're very, very lucky and the First Order decides their potential usefulness is worth the risk of further defection and treason.
BeeKay doesn't have to say that the First Order isn't taking any risks on that after Finn.
"What do we do?" GeeVee asks fearfully, tucked tight to Postcard's side.
"Defect," Eighteen answers, only recalling BeeKay's words, not herself determined.
GeeVee reaches out to take Eighteen's hand and demands, "But how?"
"We run," BeeKay says grimly, smile long-since gone. "We take a ship, we take everything of value that we can get our hands on, and we run. We're smart. We're clever. We can be smart and clever about this and make it out of here before the higher-ups know what hits them."
The room is silent for awhile. Doublo sits penned between Two and Three, her head in her hands. She didn't think about how her treason would spell out dismissal for her bunkmates. Of course they'd investigate her, bring down all their weight and attention down on the Story Circle, which is everything that BeeKay has done her utmost to avoid and protect them from.
She's killed them all.
"...I know how to deactivate all tracking devices and go completely off the system."
Doublo looks to her right, towards Two, who's just made an admission that stuns her because it sounds like a suggestion – an offer. He looks back at her, down at her, and then back at the rest of the bunkroom, who are all staring back at him with wide-eyes.
Except for BeeKay, who looks smugger than a higher-up.
And Three, who makes a show of yawning as he says, "So what? I can do that too."
Doublo looks to her left and gapes at him.
"I don't," Sixteen says... worriedly? Sixteen (HB-0116) is a brawny man with dark hair and slanted eyes and a flat nose (all just like Doublo, only without spots), who specializes in Thing Stories. He and Doublo have never got on well, mostly because he won't listen to Far-Hand Stories because he thinks them fake, or at least wildly exaggerated.
But maybe that's changed... since Finn.
"That doesn't matter. You don't need to," BeeKay informs Sixteen coolly. "We're all going together."
"On the same ship?" GeeVee demands incredulously. "But wouldn't it make more sense to split up? Confuse the trail and make it more difficult to catch us all?"
On either side of her, Two and Three immediately press closer to each other as though they're worried they're going to be torn apart. It's probably subconscious, but that doesn't stop Doublo from pushing back because they're both tall and heavy and squishing her.
"No," BeeKay answers. "Together. I've spent too much time keeping your helmets in line and too much effort planning an escape for all of us for Doublo to ruin it just by committing treason and forcing our leaving date up to today."
The whole room stares at BeeKay, even Doublo, who heard something of the like before but still can't believe it. BeeKay was planning a defection for all of them? Since when? But why? And how?
"Besides," their commanding officer continues, unfazed by their staring, "do any of you have a plan to avoid being shot out of the sky for stealing multiple ships? Then a destination and a plan in mind to actually survive on the outside beyond making it out? Unless, of course, you'd like to crash down on a desert planet and just try your luck."
Doublo thinks about trying that and immediately inwardly recoils, because she did a data drop on Jakku once, never went anywhere but between her ship and a building, and she kept on finding sand in her armor and inside her blacks for weeks. Granted, she also tripped over a step partly hidden under the sand because their helmets aren't great for peripheral vision, but still, the prospect of possibly going through that again is moderately terrifying.
I don't want to be that much like Finn, she thinks desperately.
BeeKay looks around the room, something triumphant in her stance as she studies them. No one is objecting or speaking up. The faces around the bunkroom – their helmets are discarded in a pile on BeeKay's bunk right now at her insistence before they started this... Defection Circle – are just considering at the moment.
And maybe... a little hopeful.
"Nobody?" BeeKay asks challengingly. "No one wants to question my orders?"
Doublo almost wants to point out that BeeKay is their commanding officer in the First Order only and since all of them are defecting right now, they technically don't have to obey any of her orders. But just as she's thinking that, BeeKay turns a look on her, and Doublo presses her lips tighter together just in case any rogue words try to defect from her brain.
"Good," says BeeKay. "Now, before we get moving and do this... remember: we can't sit in this room and tell stories anymore, Troopers. We can't. There's no going back to that now, no way out of this but all the way out and I know all of you can feel it."
Doublo can. Doublo does.
"This safe place isn't a safe place anymore," BeeKay reminds them, chin raised high, recalling recent nights spent in suspenseful silence under watchful eyes. "So we can stay here and pretend otherwise before we die in horrible pain at the hands of planet killers who don't give a damn about us, or we can go out there, survive, and live. And I don't know about the most of you, but I'm not done collecting or telling stories yet."
BeeKay looks them all dead in the eyes, one by one.
"I want to live," she says.
oOo
BeeKay's plan involves carrying a lot of boxes, boxes that Doublo has actually carried before. Boxes that make Doublo realize that they've all been helping BeeKay with her plan for a while and she just didn't tell them. They didn't ask about it because when a commanding officer tells a Stormtrooper to do grunt labor, that Stormtrooper doesn't even think about it while doing it.
Their base is a shipping and communications base, and they therefore have a lot of storage. They have rooms upon rooms of boxes, moving in and out every day at every hour. Besides the massive rooms that house blocks of food and ship parts that don't stay more than a day before being sent out in different directions, they also get large piles of replacement parts in less busy rooms that get chipped at over several months or even several years. Sometimes it seems like everything in the galaxy moves through their base at some point or another.
They even get things like contraband and stuff confiscated from criminal ships, all of which is sorted neatly in various secure rooms until there's enough of it to ship it out to what they call the 'Waste Base', where it'll get turned into something useful or destroyed. No one goes into these rooms; no one really checks them beyond making sure they're not a fire hazard, since it's basically one step above garbage to the higher-ups. It's apparent that BeeKay has just been helping herself to anything potentially useful for awhile without anyone the wiser.
No one cares about junk.
BeeKay borrowed a spare sanitation storage unit and she's filled it with boxes of potentially valuable stuff from the junk rooms, plus more boxes of things like food, water, weapons, survival gear, and everything and anything a defecting Stormtrooper could wish for. It's all neatly piled and tightly packed away, and clearly the result of a lot of hard work.
BeeKay's plan, Doublo realizes as she gapes at the treasure trove, is a lot better than hers.
She didn't even have a plan.
"Stop staring and get to moving them," BeeKay orders, apparently able to sense when Doublo is gaping, and gives Doublo a knock to the back of the helmet for good measure. "Take everything to Hanger 3B, Dock 7. Doublo, move boxes into the hallway; One, stand guard by the pile by the dock; Two-Three, move them between locations."
"What about you?" Doublo blurts before she can stop herself.
BeeKay answers first with another knock to the helmet, then says, "As you can see, these are the shipments necessary to our mission that has been unexpectedly moved up. Observe closely and report the missing object, Troopers."
Doublo looks around and can't tell. Neither can One, Two, or Three by their silence.
"Unable to identify missing object, sir," One reports finally.
Even through both their helmets, Doublo can feel BeeKay's look drilling into the side of her head.
"A ship," BeeKay informs them. "Thanks to Doublo, we lack that necessary object."
Oh, Doublo thinks, oh no.
"I'm going with the others to improvise on that part," BeeKay continues smoothly, sounding completely and utterly unconcerned. She knocks Doublo's helmet again and Doublo just takes it with an accepting wince. "Get to work."
oOo
As a Stormtrooper, repetitive grunt work is something that Doublo could do all day because she's done it many times before, for days on end for as long as she can remember. It doesn't take long to get into the groove of work, moving boxes into the hallway so that Two and Three can take them off to Hanger 3B, Dock 7, and the corresponding mindset of mindless motion while thinking about other things. Doublo wordlessly hands boxes off to Two and Three, who wordlessly take them, and she even exchanges nods with the occasional Trooper that passes by.
The first time that happened, Doublo caught herself afterwards and had to take a moment to think about it. She's committed very dangerous treason that could potentially influence the whole First Order, she's committing treason right at this very moment, and a pair of Troopers walked right by as though she was just another Stormtrooper hauling boxes.
Technically, she is, and Stormtroopers hauling stuff – especially official First Order storage units, sealed and labeled – around is hardly a novel sight on their base, but still. She wonders what they'll think of her and her bunkmates' activities in a week, when a bunch of Stormtroopers have just vanished and Doublo's Story of Finn has made the rounds.
While working, she giddily wonders if anyone's read it yet, told it to their subordinates as the memo orders. What will happen now that Doublo's dropped such dangerous ideas into their helmets? How many Stormtroopers out there are learning about Finn, who wouldn't fire and who's just like them, right now? About names and freedom and fighting back and choosing? What will they do with his story?
Doublo then wonders if anyone will hear their story. Will another pilot on their base do a data run and whisper to a nutrition worker about the bunkroom that just upped and disappeared? Will they talk about BK-1245, the Stormtrooper who stole her way to freedom? Along with all her troops?
Will they talk about her? About Doublo? About JN-1500?
The Stormtrooper that told the Story of Finn.
Doublo likes the sound of that. She really likes the sound of that, feels it in her chest and all the way down to her toes. Which is part of why she did it in the first place, and also the reason why BeeKay was so easily able to introduce Doublo's helmet to the wall immediately afterwards.
At the reminder of that, Doublo winces and does her utmost to sober herself, handing another box off to Three and sending him back down the hall again. She has a feeling that if she lets herself get all excited and giddy again, she'll somehow attract attention from the base commander or something else to get them caught, or BeeKay will just slam her helmet-first into a wall again as a lesson to stop doing stupid things like write a bunkroom-damning treason memo without having an escape plan.
She just really didn't think about a time beyond telling Finn's Story. There was a fanciful moment about stealing a TIE Fighter like he did, but that wouldn't work for a very long list of reasons, and plans that can be described in a single sentence don't count as plans. BeeKay says so.
Finn had a Resistance pilot by his side, the best in their whole fleet, when he took that TIE Fighter and there was probably some plan between them. How else did Finn manage to recover the BB-8 droid with the Map to Luke Skywalker and then deliver it to the Resistance?
Some part of Doublo thought that choosing to be like Finn was more or less akin to choosing to die, and she was okay with that. She would rather give her short, pitiful life up for Finn, the temporarily single most important person in the whole galaxy, and his Story that will incite so much in every Stormtrooper that hears it, than to the First Order that claimed her life and her death and gave her a designated number in return.
But the thing is that Finn's Story isn't being told because he died. The Stormtroopers know Finn's name because he defected and then fought back and he survived. They know Finn's name because he lived to go off and protect people and be protected by them in return. They know Finn's name because he joined the Resistance, he helped kill the Starkiller, and he's still living right now.
They know him because he has a name.
His name is Finn.
And his story – a People Story – is ongoing.
Doublo was ready to die, because she thought that's what she was choosing, but she doesn't want that. She accepted it, but now it's looking more and more unacceptable. If she still has to, she would, but... she wants what BeeKay's offering now. She wants to go out and be free with what little family she's found for herself, there to look out for her, to be beside her, to come out to live like people were supposed to live, to fight for the right to exist on their own terms. She thought she'd chosen something to die for, but this is different and she wants different.
She wants people to whisper about BK-1245, the woman who stole Stormtroopers away; about JM-2002 and JM-2003, the brothers who stayed together through everything, about all of them. She wants them to hear the Story of Finn, which seems almost impossible when one took a step back, and then to hear their story too and realize that it's true. All of it.
Doublo wants them to tell the story of JN-1500, the Stormtrooper that told the Story of Finn against the will of the First Order and then chose to follow him down the path he forged for all of them. For them to tell each other that she's still out there, free and fighting, just like Finn.
I want to be like Finn, she realizes. I want to live too.
oOo
Author's Note: This fic is finished and chapters will be posted daily until it's complete. There will be 7 chapters.