A/N: Finn's story is adapted from Star Wars Adventures #3, Pest Control, with some liberties taken.

The gas giant Yavin didn't rise until later in the evening, so they had the fire going before the sun set and plunged them into darkness. Or Kes did. He fussed quietly off to the side with an odd knife, a clever little powered vibroblade-thing that cut through wood like a knife through hot butter. Hux made a mental note to take a better look at the blade later.

Eddiva Birnham was helping Poe's father, though her woodcraft was about as limited as Hux's. Rose was crouched close to the fire, performing the more conventional human activity of poking at it with a stick. Finn was on the log behind her. Opan had gone inside the house to use the refresher, which Hux assumed was an excuse to snoop. Hux and Poe sat together, Hux's arm was around Poe's shoulders and holding him close. If Nera was in the area, and Hux assumed she was, she was keeping herself unseen.

That left Liyema alone on her log. She looked over at Finn. "You were in the First Order military as a stormtrooper?"

"Yes." He turned to face her, blinking a little because he'd been staring at Rose's silhouette and was dazzled by the fire as a result.

Liyema said, "Tell me about your missions."

"Oh. Um." He glanced over at Hux, who curled his fingers along Poe's shoulder and had nothing to say. He didn't even know what Finn was looking at him for. She might be his mother, but he wasn't interested in controlling what people told her. Finn looked back to her. "Yeah, well, I had a few. Not many, you know."

"Tell me about one."

"Uhh … well." He coughed. "You have to understand- My first- Yeah." Finn rubbed his mouth. "When I was in training, we had a lot of different assignments. Let me tell you about one of them, instead."

Liyema nodded agreeably.

Hux thought to Poe, I have to assume he doesn't want to speak of Jakku or Pressy's Tumble.

Probably not. He's run into a lot of people who … aren't open-minded about shooting innocent people, even if he didn't do any of the actual shooting.

Hux suppressed a snort and put his lips to Poe's temple, appreciative as ever of Poe being willing to overlook things most people wouldn't. Poe gave a happy sigh.

Finn glanced over at the sound, then began his story. "We were sent to this planet to practice deployments – large scale stuff, whole legions involved - how to form up, get loaded, land, debark, fan out, establish a perimeter, all that stuff, and then load back up. Basic, right?"

She nodded.

"I tried to volunteer to be in the first wave that went down, but it didn't go over well with Captain Phasma." He laughed a little. "She had some things to say about the dangers of volunteering and then assigned me to swab the transport ships clean when they came back." He chuckled again at his naiveté. "So that's where the story starts – I was in the hangar bay disinfecting the side of this mud-caked transport – I guess part of the training exercise should have been for our pilots not to land us in swamps, ha – when I heard something moving inside the shuttle."

Finn leaned forward, warming up to the story. Rose scooted away from the fire to put her back against the log Finn was sitting on, and looked up as he talked. He said, "Everyone had left for debriefing, so the thing should have been empty. I went up the ramp to look inside, and that's when I saw it." He paused dramatically. "There was this creature inside." He glanced to Rose. "You would have loved it. It had blue and purple fur, two legs, four arms, and biggest, sweetest, most innocent eyes you've ever seen."

"Aw," she crooned.

"It was little. Like this tall." Finn gestured about knee-high. Kes and Eddiva looked over, then went back to whatever it was they were doing, speaking in low voices. Finn said, "It was the cutest thing I'd ever seen. Cuter than a baby. I melted a little. It must have shown in the way I was standing or something, because that little six-armed rat jumped on me! Just leapt off the floor, right onto my head!" Finn threw himself back, waving his arms around in pantomime of a struggle.

Rose giggled. Kes and Eddiva had stopped talking again to listen and watch his antics. Liyema was smiling, listening raptly.

"It tore my helmet off and ran off with it! And that's a big deal. Helmets are. You have to wear them all the time if you're a stormtrooper. There's a transponder in it that links with the one in your breastplate so they're a matched set. If you lose yours, you can't just grab anyone's. They'll still work some, but not everything and anyone who looks at you can see …" Finn caught himself from rambling about tech specs. "Well, anyway, it's a big deal. I had to get it back, right away."

Hux rubbed the tip of his nose on the side of Poe's forehead. Poe leaned into him. It still felt odd to be allowed this sort of public intimacy, although it helped that no one was looking at them at the moment. They weren't looking because they didn't care, as far as Hux could tell – this was genuinely acceptable. Also, every time he did it, Poe gave him such a surge of pleasant emotions it made him a little giddy. Poe was delightfully lavish with positive reinforcement for the things he wanted most.

Finn continued. "I chased the thing. It was fast! Really fast! Ran across the hangar bay and vanished down a corridor before I could catch up to it. It was lugging along my helmet the whole way. Normally, there's people in the hallways, but not today. Hallways were empty. No help. Every time I almost catch the thing, it darts away. It's making these noises as it does, so I can tell it was having the time of its life, like this was all a game. It was making these little 'prrt!' noises and squeaks 'eeek!' real cheerful."

Rose grinned.

Finn shook his head ruefully. "Then it ran too close to a door sensor and when it opened, it jumped inside." Finn lowered his voice. "I go there, inside the room. Only it's not just an empty room. It's an executive conference room. I didn't even know they had them that close to the hangar bay! Not that I'd ever been in one anywhere! It's a freaking star destroyer – kilometers long, dozens of decks, tens of thousands of people on board. And who is in that conference room? Huh? Who?"

"Who?" Liyema asked, playing along with the story.

Finn pointed at Hux. "Him, for one. General in charge of the entire ship." Poe turned his head to look up at Hux. Hux gave him a small peck on the stiff hairs of his brow. Finn went on, "And Kylo Ren. And a half dozen other folks so high-ranked they weren't even from the ship we were on. They had their own ships. Top brass, all of them. In some secret, high-level meeting. Come to think of it, that's probably why they were right there next to the hangar bay. They must have flown in just for that meeting."

Hux made a small nod when Finn looked to him. He still hadn't placed the meeting Finn was talking about. He didn't have enough details yet, so his nod was more a hope that Finn would continue than a confirmation of events. Finn turned back to Liyema. "Remember – I'm the lowliest of grunts-in-training at that point, having been assigned to punishment detail for speaking up, this alien has my helmet-"

Non-human, Poe thought with a long-suffering, inward sigh. Hux smiled at him mentally, amused that Poe had apparently not succeeded in rooting that word out of Finn's First Order lexicon.

"-and now we've interrupted this huge meeting." Finn leaned forward, once again dropping his voice conspiratorially. "Except we haven't interrupted it yet. You see, an executive conference room has this section to the side for techs or data analysts or comm officers or whoever to operate equipment, do analysis, scans, conference people in, or whatever – the things the big shots don't want to bother with while they're in the middle of important stuff, or when they need someone to do some number crunching or research in the background. Anyway, it has this half-separate section. That's where all the controls are, so the techs can project the information into the main room, right?"

Liyema nodded, following along. Eddiva was watching Finn with unbroken interest. Hux was watching her and Kes, wondering about her intensity. He assumed she, too, was trying to place the meeting Finn had dropped in on. Kes was looking past her into the darkness. Hux had a vague sense of some kind that Opan had returned and was now lurking. Poe and Rose remained attentive to Finn's story.

"For this meeting, it was empty," Finn said. "This critter still has my helmet. By now I'm starting to wonder if I should have just shot the thing before it got in here."

"No!" Rose protested.

Finn shook his head. "I mean, by protocol I should have, but I didn't want to. It was so cute. And now here we are in this room with the biggest deals of the First Order outside of Snoke himself, and I am about to get roasted! I look back over to where the alien was, and it reached up and messed with the controls." Finn's eyes got big and he leaned back, gesturing outward with wide-stretched hands.

"The lights go out! All through the room. Kylo Ren was in the middle of some angry … speech, proclamation, something! And suddenly it's dead dark. I hear the thing scuttle off. I run toward it. The door opens and we both end up outside."

Oh, I remember that. Poe grinned, showing Hux his own memory of Ren lifting his lit lightsaber like a glorified glow-rod. This time. See?

Hux pulled his attention away from Eddiva. Hm? He reviewed the memory. Ah. Yes. Well, that solves that mystery. I had wondered about the lights. It had seemed like a simple mechanical failure, but the techs later reported being unable to find the issue. He'd had more important things to worry about, but it was nice to know. Eddiva's expression showed a subtle shift. She, too, had worked it out. She turned back to Kes, then glanced over at Opan and gave him a curt hand gesture to come nearer.

Finn was talking again. "I got the helmet. I caught the critter. I put it in a crate to take back to the planet. As it happened, I was in the next deployment. So we get down there and I lag behind to let it out of the crate, but the crate's empty! The thing is in the pilot's compartment. I have no idea how it got there. Honestly. It should have been in the box."

Opan settled on the other end of the log from Liyema, crossing his outstretched legs in front of him and looking prim and composed. Poe studied him for a moment, tried to decide if he was a threat in some way, and decided he wasn't. Poe's attention went back to Finn.

"I have another near-disaster at the controls, but this time of the shuttle – I swear the thing was intelligent and knew how to operate stuff. It really seemed to know what it was doing – and then I'm on the ground with it and Captain Phasma tells me to blast the little guy!"

"Oh," Liyema said in disappointment. Rose pursed her lips and sniffed as though holding back an equally unhappy response. Eddiva turned to Kes and murmured something. Hux glanced her way, then went back to listening to Finn.

Finn shook his head. "No, it's okay. Happy ending, okay? Don't worry. But right then I didn't know that. Phasma is scary. She was my commander. She was personally telling me to kill it. I pulled my blaster and it did that thing again, where it looked so sweet and helpless and innocent all over. I just … I couldn't. And I stood there wondering if this was going to be it, was I going to be shot for insubordination or even just processed for reconditioning over this alien. No matter how cute, was this really where I was going to draw the line? So I pointed the blaster, but there was no way I could pull the trigger. I was really, really struggling at that point."

Liyema and Rose were leaning forward, especially invested in the story. Hux thought, He's become better at storytelling since he told you that haunted forest story of Starkiller. He knows how to work an audience. That's a valuable skill.

Yeah, it's cool. Poe felt a swell of pride for Finn's social skills. He'd always had a natural talent for it, not that the First Order had done much to cultivate it. He'd had plenty of opportunities once he'd left. Finn loved telling stories and he had a lot of interesting ones to tell.

Finn said, "I had just decided that I couldn't do it when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye – more purplish-blue fur. I let the blaster fall and looked up. Phasma said something, but I was looking at how we'd somehow ended up surrounded by dozens or even scores of these little guys and none of them looked 'cute'. They looked vicious – each and every one of them except the one in front of me. Then the other troopers and Phasma saw them, too."

Finn grinned with a lot of teeth. "Phasma showed her colors." He snickered. "She had us all back on that transport as fast as possible. Then we were off that dirtball and on our way back to the Finalizer. But this time, without a stowaway."

True colors? Hux thought with a mental snort. By his own admission, she was herding trainees who can't even reliably get on and off ship! The mission was not to fight the indigenous life! You don't engage an unknown enemy under those conditions unless you absolutely have to and you certainly don't do it for vanity or pride! Ridiculous.

Poe took hold of the wrist Hux had draped over his shoulder, then twisted upward and to the side to give Hux a peck on the cheek. Thank you for not telling him any of that. It was a good story. None of them know Phasma. Let her be the villain.

I'm not going to tell him. Don't worry yourself. I, too, know how to read an audience.

Yeah, you do, Poe thought to him. Poe shifted. He pulled his arm from where it was braced on the log behind Hux so that his shoulder was in front. Then he reached up to clasp the back of Hux's neck with it, running his fingers over it lightly.

What is this? Hux thought. Do I lean forward? Though it didn't seem that Poe was trying to pull him anywhere.

No. I'm just touching you. I like feeling you enjoy it.

Ah. And he did enjoy it. Hux drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly as Poe's fingers skimmed up and down the nape of his neck, ruffling the hair at the base of his skull and traveling down to shift the collar of his shirt. Hux let his eyes fall to half-shut. He thought about the depths of despair and depression he'd been in no more than a year before, not caring if he lived or died. The only thing that had mattered to him was surviving and patiently working toward the day when he could grind his enemies beneath his heel. Many more things mattered to him now.

Poe's hand drifted to the side, idly caressing Hux's ear. Hux saw Finn send them a lingering glance, watching Poe openly and unabashedly provide him with affection. Finn smiled a little and put a hand on Rose's shoulder, rubbing it gently and turning his attention to her. Hux sighed – in pleasure, in relaxation. He let down his shields.

I love you, my dearest hero, he thought to Poe.

He could sense the self-satisfied, smug smile on Poe's face. I know.

(And that's it guys - end of story. Thank you so much for reading.)