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The jacket is soft, perhaps the softest piece of clothing FN--know, Finn, her name is Finn now, that's what the woman with the dark curls had named her as they fell from the sky together--has ever touched. She kneels in the wreckage of the ship, burnt and bruised and shocked and cooking in the heat, impossibly alive, turning it over in her hands.
It's clearly well-loved, worn and mended, occasional patches of different cloth interrupting the odd, gridded pattern. The colors are ridiculous, terrible for stealth, and would no doubt receive a raised eyebrow from the patrons at any higher-up's shindig, but something about them soothes her.
She's never seen an article of clothing with a pattern like this before, so silly and impractical. She thinks she likes it.
In the pockets Finn finds a few incomprehensible notes in chicken scratch, bits of gears and parts from machines whose use and appearance she can only guess at, a black ribbon to match the one Poe was wearing when they took her down, a vibroblade, a dinged-up old space compass, collapsible binoculars. She knows next to nothing about Poe Dameron, but all of this stuff seems to fit the woman pretty well.
Finn presses the jacket to her nose and breathes deep. Through the sweat and blood and smoke, she swears she can pick up something like Poe, even though it's like not Fin ever got any opportunity to um, really, smell her.
Maybe it's really more of a feeling, one of the strange feelings she gets sometimes, the kind that warns her of danger and death. This isn't that, though; it feels good, feels right.
She decides to keep the jacket--Poe will want it back, after all. Because Poe is alive, somewhere out there, and Finn is surprised by that certainty, but not surprised enough to doubt.
As she walks Finn strips off her armor, useless in this heat with the cooling system damaged, finding it easier to breathe with every step away from those bloodstained pieces. She uses the jacket as a pitiful shield, and it shouldn't do anything to keep the heat from grinding her down completely, but as she hangs it over her head, she swears she can hear Poe in her ear, whispering: Step by step, that's it.
Step by step, we've got so much farther to go.
"It's yours," Poe says, like it's not even a question. She reaches up and gently takes Finn's hand, stopping her in the middle of trying to (reluctantly) take the jacket off. "You've earned it."
Their hands fall together, still linked. Finn can sense the feeling she's come to associate with Poe humming through her tangled fingers, only so much stronger and brighter; the whole messy, determined, ass-kicking mess of Poe Dameron unspooling in her hand. It dawns on her that she doesn't want to let go, any more than she wanted to take off the jacket.
"Besides," Poe says, with the kind of flirtatious smile that's probably had women swooning from Coruscant to Tatooine. "It looks good on you." And Finn should probably have some kind of witty rejoinder, but instead she just grins like an idiot, because of course she does.
She wakes up gasping, memories of Kylo Ren's fury burning through what will become permanent scars. Something shudders around her, in her, and somehow Finn is both surprised and not to see one of the medbay lights shatter overhead.
Of course, she passes out. When she wakes up, there's Rey bickering with some girl in overalls, General Organa talking quietly with an older man in robes, BB-8 zooming circles around a fiercely beeping astromech for some reason, and Poe smiling down at her, holding the carefully mended jacket in her hands.
"You scared the shit out of me, jerk," she says happily. When Finn can stand Poe's, the one who helps her up, who carefully slides the jacket over her shoulders. It settles into place like it's never belonged anywhere else.
"It was a gift from a friend," Poe says later, on a stakeout. She'd noticed Finn tracing the patterns on the jacket--plaid, that's what she'd learned it was called. Finn had loved the sound of that word in her mouth, plaid. Kind of ridiculous, but also steady and solid, in its own way.
"Not that kind of friend," she'd added quickly, when Finn raised an eyebrow. "She was a piloting instructor, a lot older than me. She was...I guess you'd call her an elder, in the community."
"What community?"
"Well, ours, I guess," Poe says. "You and me, and Rey and Rose once they figure out whatever they've got going on, and even Master Luke and that guy in the helmet, and a whole bunch of other kinds of people, too. People who don't really fit with what's supposed to be 'normal,' but we don't need to fit."
She traces her hand along the jacket's sleeve, looking at it--at Finn--with an expression that's fond, if a bit sad. "She was a good mentor," she says. "Taught me a lot about flying, and quite a bit about living, too. And then, well...."
Poe's voice trails off, and she bows her head, pain blooming through the air around her. "I got the jacket in her will," she says quietly.
"I'm sorry." Finn reaches out to take her hand, giving it a squeeze. It feels like the right thing to do, somehow, and she's been learning to trust her instincts more and more these days.
"She would have loved you." Poe traces her finger along the jacket's cuff. "Wherever she is now, I'm sure she's so glad you have this." And she squeezes Finn's hand back.
Finn can't face the crowd after the last battle. After starships burning across the sky, after Finn was nearly brought to her knees by learning she wasn't the only stormtrooper who's escaped, after Leia and Master Luke sacrificed themselves and she and Rey faced Ren, she has to get away.
She leaves the celebration, politely avoids Rey and Rose clinging to each other beneath a tree like they might fall apart if they let go and makes her way deeper into the woods. The lightsaber she used to cut off Ren's head is a steady weight at her hip, white blade sheathed, a somewhat soothing counterpoint to the shredded cloth she's got cradled in her arms.
Poe finds her curled up under a tree, clutching the pieces of the jacket to her chest. Rex hadn't physically injured her as much as in their first battle, but he has left his mark.
Finn doesn't look up when Poe settles at her side, but she does lean into the arm she puts over her shoulder. "I'm sorry," she whispers into Poe's shoulder. "I didn't mean for it to get messed up."
"It's okay," Poe says, and she's about as force-sensitive as her star cruiser, but Finn can feel the effort she's making to concentrate on her own positive feelings in the hope that Finn will pick up on them, and the tenderness of the gesture makes her start sobbing.
"That's it," Poe whispers, pulling Finn close, and she can feel a few of Poe's own tears dropping onto her close-cropped hair. "Let it out."
And Finn does let it out, because she just killed a man (even if he was a grade A asshole), because the adrenaline crash is hitting her like a punch to the face, because she's exhausted and overwhelmed and Master Skywalker's dead and Leia's dead and so many people are dead. The jacket is only a small part of all that, really, but she knows it means a lot more than any ordinary piece of cloth would, and something tells her Ren knew damn well what he was doing when he sliced it off her body.
Poe holds her until Finn cries herself out, and then she keeps holding her. Finn closes her eyes and listens to the steady beat of the other woman's heart through her flight suit; she realizes abruptly she wants to wake up hearing that heartbeat for the rest of her life.
"We'll fix it," Poe promises, confident as she is about anything. "I'll get some thread, extra cloth if we need, and we'll stitch the pieces together. Mama taught me all sorts of good sewing tricks."
Finn hums; her mind’s a bit clearer, now that she’s cried, and she can get where Poe's coming from, but still... "It'll take a lot of work."
Poe shrugs, the motion lifting Finn up and down a little. "We've got time now, don't we? What do you say?"
Finn pushes herself upright and looks at Poe, wrapping careful fingers around her chin. She patiently waits for Poe to start leaning forward, giving permission, and goes to meet her. Their lips touch softly at first, then with more hunger, more teeth. Finn reaches up to run her hand through Poe's curls and thinks that if there's a heaven anywhere, it would feel like this.
She pulls away, one hand still in Poe's hair, the other reaching down to steady the jacket they're going to help each other fix, same way they're going to set about fixing the rest of the galaxy. "I think it sounds pretty damn good," she replies, and kisses Poe again.