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Rey would have been Finn’s first choice of teacher, but Rey had been weird since Exegol, always off in corners holding muttered conversations with herself. (One time Finn had been sure he’d seen the indistinct shape of someone tall and dark-haired standing there with her, but then he’d blinked and it had just been Rey again, poring over her ancient texts with a face that brooked no interruption.)
He and Jannah had tried studying together, but they didn’t get far; they were in the same transport, two renegade stormtroopers still learning how to live free, ill-equipped to navigate the immense cosmic mysteries of the Force without a star map. Poe was of course no help. Leia was gone, and Luke Skywalker too, and all the other Jedi Finn had ever heard of. It was out of desperation that he finally approached the strange Mandalorian who kept showing up on base with a lightsaber on her hip. She didn’t look friendly, but the vets from the Rebel Alliance all seemed to know her, and that was good enough for Finn.
“Are you a Jedi Master?” he asked when he caught her one day outside the munitions bunker. She looked old enough to be a Jedi Master. The First Order had taught that the Jedi were extinct, but the First Order had taught all sorts of other stuff that turned out not to be true.
The woman snorted. “Do I look like a Jedi Master to you?”
“Well, you’re carrying—” He gestured at the lightsaber, confidence flagging a little under her cool scrutiny. “I’m Finn. Er, General Finn. Of the Resistance. I have some questions about Jedi stuff, and I’m looking for someone who…well, you looked like maybe you’d know.”
The woman lifted an eyebrow. Finn waited; the silence drew out for several long, uncomfortable moments. At length the woman spooled her hand impatiently and said, “Well? What are the questions? Spit it out, kid.”
“So you are a Jedi, then?”
“I was trained by a Jedi Master. Never got the hang of it, to tell you the truth. But I know the basics.” She held out her hand; Finn shook it, feeling a strong grip and a knuckly hand with palm callused from work. “I’m Sabine. Sabine Wren.”
Finn’s heart sank. He knew that name entirely too well. “You’re one of them.”
“One of who now?”
“The Knights of Ren.” He’d assumed they’d all gone down on Exegol with their leader, but it would have been just like Rey to fall for some “change of heart” sob story and bring one of them home with her.
Another snort. “Wren, kid. Wesk, resh, esk, nern. It’s a Mandalorian name. Those bargain basement Sith have nothing to do with us.”
“Oh.” Finn felt his face heat; this was not going the way he’d hoped. “Look, I don’t know much about Mandalorians. Or the Jedi. Or anything, really. That’s why I need help. I didn’t mean any offense, I just—”
“Kid. Finn. General. Bring it down a bit, okay? I already said you could ask.” For the first time, Sabine’s stern resting face softened into a smile. “You’re Force-sensitive, aren’t you? That’s what this is about. You’re looking for a teacher. Well, I can teach you some stuff. You might not like my style, though. Me and the Force, we don’t really get on.”
Embarrassment gave way to confusion. “You’re giving some very mixed signals,” Finn said.
“Come on.” Sabine jerked her head in the direction of a beat-up ship; Finn was beginning to wonder if this whole thing was a mistake. Maybe he should have asked Rey, after all. “Let me show you some stuff.”
*
The inside of Sabine’s ship was no less battered than the outside, but to the wear marks of age and hard use had been added elaborate vistas of paintwork. The bright colors made Finn’s eyes water. The art wasn’t bad—to Finn’s limited knowledge it looked pretty damn good, actually—but it was a lot.
“Here,” said Sabine, leading him into a space that had been cleared for training. “Put this helmet on.”
Things were awkward enough without Finn spilling his guts to a woman he’d just met about his stormtrooper-related hangups. “I don’t really do helmets—oh.” He caught the round object she threw at him. It had been spray-painted a gleeful mess of colors, with a Rebel firebird blazoned across the faceplate, opaquing what should have been the clear visor. “What’s it for?”
“Put it on and I’ll throw things at you.”
“Uh…no thanks.”
“Don’t worry. They won’t be very heavy things. Trust me, this is how it’s done. It’s how my master did it.”
Finn put the helmet on. Sabine threw something at him that was, in fact, heavy; it thunked off his shoulder. “Ow!”
“You’re supposed to dodge.”
“I can’t see!”
“Yeah, that’s the point. Use the Force to sense what’s coming, and dodge it.” She threw again; something even heavier hit Finn in the ribs. He took a few more blows, floundering in darkness, before wrenching off the helmet just in time to catch one last projectile to the face.
“Damn,” Sabine said, once she’d sat him down at the edge of the training ring and supplied an icepack for his rapidly swelling eye. “You’re worse at this than I was.”
“You didn’t tell me what to do,” Finn protested, stung by her judgement. As a stormtrooper he’d never placed lower than the top third of his class. He was a good learner when actually taught.
“You’re not supposed to need telling,” said Sabine with a shrug.
“Says who?”
“Says my master.”
“I’m not sure I like this master of yours.”
Sabine scoffed. “You would if you met her. Everyone does. But okay, fine. We’ll change things up next time.”
Finn was starting to think there probably shouldn’t be a next time. He nodded anyway, and exited the gaudy ship into the merciful green-and-khakhi duochrome of the jungle base, resolved to just wait until he could catch Rey in a rare good mood and ask her for some pointers. Surely with a small amount of guidance he could teach himself the rest.
*
“What happened to your face?” Poe asked when Finn entered the mess, setting down his meal tray beside him with an irritable thunk.
“Apparently I’m not cut out to be a Jedi.”
A man Finn didn’t recognize looked up from his plate and said, “I wouldn’t worry. You’re not missing much.”
“Finn,” said Poe, “this is Jacen.” There was the briefest of pauses that should have been filled with something like “He just enlisted in the Ordnance Corps” or “We went to flight school together” but wasn’t. “What are you trying to be a Jedi for, anyway?” Poe went on in a tone of perfect innocence, though he looked shifty, and now that Finn thought about it, it was strange how close he and this Jacen guy were sitting. “Rey’s a Jedi and look at how she’s turning out.”
Finn followed the jerk of Poe’s thumb and saw Rey eating alone in a corner, engrossed in what looked like a heated argument with herself. From the corner of his eye he noticed that the man called Jacen was looking, too, not at Rey but at the empty seat across from her. Jacen’s eyes narrowed. “Who is that girl?”
“She’s a Jedi,” Poe repeated. “Weren’t you listening? Anyway, Finn, Jacen’s going to be sticking around for a while. He has clearance for whatever he wants, okay? Unless he wants one of our ships, in which case, tell him no. Also his clearance does not extend to his droid.”
“Chopper doesn’t need clearance,” Jacen said, tearing his eyes away from the empty seat. “If he wants to infiltrate this place, he’s already done it and there’s nothing you can do to stop him. Anyway—Finn, was it? What’s this about you trying to be a Jedi?”
“Jacen flunked out of Jedi school,” said Poe.
“I didn’t flunk out, I quit. You should quit too, Finn. It’s a waste of time. But if you don’t want to quit, I can introduce you to my Aunt Sabine. She’s the best teacher I’ve ever had. If she can’t whip you into shape, no one can.”
“Oh.” Finn felt a wave of gratitude to his past self for not having revealed where the black eye came from. “We’ve met, actually. So you’re a Jedi too?” After how the last attempt had gone, Finn was less warm on the idea of getting lessons in the Force from strangers, but anything that moved the conversation away from his disastrous lesson with Sabine was fine by him.
“You’re not listening either,” Poe complained. “He flunked out.”
“I don’t follow the Jedi religion,” Jacen said. “There are…certain limitations that don’t work for me.” For some reason he shot Poe a sidelong look as he said this, smirking. “But I’m Force-sensitive, if that’s what you mean. You don’t actually have to be a Jedi to use the Force.”
“But they’re the only ones who teach it,” said Finn. “Them or the other side.”
“You mean the Sith? Nah. They’re all dead now.” Jacen’s eyes darted briefly Reywards again. “There are other users who walk their own paths, and some of them are evil, and some of them aren’t. I’m not evil—”
“Debatable,” cut in Poe.
“—I just don’t like a bunch of dead monks telling me what to do. You should think about that too. Why cut yourself to pieces just to fit inside their boxes?”
That attitude was all well and good for the naturally talented. Finn hadn’t exactly been getting far on his own. “I’ll think about it,” he lied. It wasn’t as though he was in a rush to find an alternative to Sabine’s painful method; clearly, Rey was busy.
Maybe it was the busyness driving her crazy. It had to be hard, being the Resistance’s only practicing Jedi. Maybe if Finn could get the hang of this Force thing without her, instead of adding one more thing to her plate, he’d be able to take some things off.
He wasn’t going to ask her after all. Damn it.
*
“And this,” said Sabine, toggling the holoprojector, “is another example of Bith post-restorationism. See the cross-hatching in the brushstrokes?”
“I see it,” said Finn. “I don’t see what it has to do with the Force.”
“Absolutely nothing. I just found this holo-archive on the ’net last night and thought it was cool.”
Finn sighed. “Maybe we should get back to you throwing things at me.”
“You think third millionth time will be the charm, huh?”
“I swear I almost dodged that last one.”
“You stepped right into it.”
“Well, I sensed it coming. That’s the hard part, right?”
“Your problem is you lack focus.” Sabine thumbed the projector switch again. “Now, look closely at this one and see if you can date it for me.” Finn opened his mouth to protest, and she scowled. “If you can’t follow a simple primer on art history, how do you expect to unlock the mysteries of the Force? There’s more to being a Jedi than just swinging a lightsaber. There’s culture. There’s curiosity. There’s a thirst for knowledge that crosses interdisciplinary lines—”
“You just want someone to look at these pictures with, don’t you?”
Sabine threw a wobble ball at him. He batted it away. “Doesn’t count without the helmet,” she said. “Now, back to the art. Use your brain. The clue is in the pigmentation.”
“Uh…is it post-reconstructionist, too?”
Sabine flung her hands up. “I can’t teach you.”
*
Finn did, eventually, get the hang of sensing where projectiles were coming from. He couldn’t tell whether it was his connection to the Force that was sharpening or his subconscious awareness of subtle air currents and sound, but he was finishing Sabine’s lessons with fewer bruises each time. He was also starting to reliably distinguish between Meerian impressionism and the Duros dot painting revival.
“Can you show me how to make things float?” he asked one day, when Sabine seemed less grumpy than usual. Her cropped hair, flame-red yesterday, had been freshly dyed a dark mudberry purple, and the chestplate of her armor sported a brand new art design that put Finn in mind of later High Republic temple abstractionism. Because that was the kind of thing he knew about now.
Sabine looked at him over the pauldron design she was pencilling in and said, “No.”
“Come on! I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to.”
“What’s that got to do with it? I can’t show you how to make things float because I can’t make things float. I told you, me and the Force don’t get on.”
Finn ran his hands through his locs in frustration. By that point, he was halfway sure Sabine was toying with him. “What kind of Jedi Master are you?”
“I thought we’d been over that. I’m not a Jedi Master. I was a padawan for years, and according to my actual Jedi Master, I was bad at it. Why do you want to make things float, anyway? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, picking them up with your hands is going to be easier.”
“I…” Finn hadn’t really thought about it. He wanted to make things float because that was what Jedi did.
“I can teach you some lightsaber moves instead,” Sabine offered. “I’m much better at those.”
“I’ve had plenty of hand-to-hand training. It’s the psychic stuff I’m trying to figure out. Moving objects with my mind, jumping crazy high, seeing the future. That kind of thing.”
“Why?” Sabine asked again.
“Because…” For a moment Finn was tongue-tied, realising he didn’t have a good answer. Then he laughed. “Oh, I get it. This is part of the training, isn’t it? It’s a philosophical exercise.”
“It’s a simple question.”
“I want to learn the Jedi arts because through mastery of the Force, I can make a real difference in the galaxy.”
“Haven’t you already made one?”
Finn sighed and gave up. He’d tried his best, but if he was honest with himself, his answer was a load of blurrgspit. “I just think it would be cool, okay?”
Sabine’s lips twitched into one of her rare smiles. “If it’s cool you want, I can do better than a telekinetic party trick. Do you still have your old stormtrooper kit? That white armor paints up beautifully.”
Finn couldn’t remember ever having disclosed his stormtrooper past to her. He wondered briefly how she knew, then pushed it away; either she was lying about the extent of her psychic abilities, or she’d heard it from someone else. It wasn’t exactly a secret. “I told you already,” he said. “I don’t really do armor anymore, since—”
“You hate it, you can throw it out afterwards. But you might be surprised by how much fun it is to personalize your own gear. You got a favorite color?”
*
“Love the new look,” said Poe, eyeing Finn’s freshly painted armor with what looked very much like genuine envy. “Where’d you get that?”
“Did it myself.” Finn was never going to go helmeted again, no matter what color it was. But he’d sprayed an old pair of greaves and vambraces in special-ops black with chrome trim (take that, Captain Phasma), and the breastplate half-tucked under his jacket had an orange firebird painted over the heart (Sabine had lent him a stencil). “You know, art’s really good for your focus. Some of the old Jedi even considered it sacred, and—”
“Poe, I need to talk to you.” Jacen barrelled up out of nowhere, causing Finn to step back quickly lest a collision damage his new paint job. Sabine had warned him that, though touch-dry, the paint would take a few more hours to cure. “It’s about your friend. That girl, Rey. It’s hard to be sure but I think she—oh, hi, Finn!” Jacen broke off and pasted an unconvincing smile on his face.
“It’s okay,” said Poe. “Anything you can say to me, you can say in front of Finn.”
Jacen gave Finn an assessing look, then nodded, satisfied with whatever he’d found. “You know what, it’s probably best if he hears it too. You’ve been studying the Force, right, Finn? So, like I said, I’m not one hundred percent sure, but…” He shook his head, and muttered a curse. “It’s hard to know where to even start.”
*
For the first time in their whole friendship, Finn pulled rank on Poe to insist on being included in the confrontation that followed Jacen’s disclosure. Poe had been ready to go off half-cocked. Finn himself wasn’t much happier about it, but it did explain a few things that had been niggling at him. Things he’d put down to his imagination. He was still learning to trust his Force senses, and while Sabine’s training might have been making him better at dodging, it hadn’t exactly bolstered his confidence.
“Hi, Rey,” said Poe in a loud, fake-casual voice as he barged into her quarters unannounced. “So, funny story—remember how you told us Kylo Ren died on Exegol? Well, Jacen says that actually Kylo Ren is still alive, and you’re in contact with him.”
Rey’s face, which had been just starting to flush with indignation at the intrusion, turned pale instead. “Who is Jacen and what would he know?” she said, but Finn didn’t need any special Force powers to detect the lack of conviction behind the denial.
“I’m Jacen,” said Jacen from behind him.
“He’s a Jedi,” Finn explained.
“No, I’m not,” said Jacen, at the same time as Poe said, “He’s a failed Jedi. But he can sense people’s souls or whatever it is you people do. And he says he’s been sensing Kylo Ren, but only when you’re around, and specifically when you’re having one of those episodes where you talk to yourself, which frankly I was starting to have questions about anyway, and Jacen says it’s because—”
“For the last time, Poe, I didn’t fail. I deliberately quit my training because I didn’t want to—”
“Why did you lie to us, Rey?”
That last one was Finn. He didn’t say it loud, but somehow the words cut through the others’ bickering, and when Rey’s eyes fell in him, it was like some invisible thing passed between them, like maybe all the time Finn had spent having things thrown at him in the name of heightened Force-sensitivity wasn’t wasted after all. He knew exactly why she didn’t tell them. And she knew, heard loud and clear in his thoughts, what he was really asking: Why didn’t you let me help you?
“There’s a lot to explain,” she said, very specifically to Finn and not Jacen or Poe. “Yes, Ben’s alive, and yes, we’re in contact. It’s hard not to be when we’re a dyad in the Force.”
“A what now?” Poe glared at Rey a moment longer, then rounded on Finn and Jacen. “What’s she talking about?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Jacen mulishly. “I flunked out of Jedi school, remember?”
“I, uh.” Finn swallowed. “I haven’t learned that one yet.”
“Not now,” Rey snarled through gritted teeth. And then, to Finn again: “Sorry. I wasn’t talking to you. We can talk about it now, if you like.”
For just a moment, as Rey gestured the three of them resentfully inside her chambers to sit down on the bunk and hear what she had to say for herself, Finn fancied again that he could see a faint man-shaped ripple in the empty air beside her.
*
The next day, Finn barged aboard Sabine’s ship without waiting for an invitation. “I’ll tell you why I want to learn the secrets of the Force,” he said.
Sabine emerged from her cabin with puffy eyes and a rumpled sleep-shirt, rubbing her hands over her bristling purple scalp. “Those vambraces weren’t cool enough for you?”
“You’ve been holding out on me,” said Finn. “I understand why—these aren’t secrets you hand out to just anybody.”
“Actually,” said Sabine, “it’s more that I don’t really—”
“Well, here it is. I need to learn the secrets of the Force so that if I ever need to fight Kylo kriffing Ren, who is alive and well and has somehow persuaded my best friend that he’s a great guy now who she can totally trust to hang around inside her head at his leisure, I’ll be strong enough to kick his ass.”
“Finn,” Sabine said. “I’m not a Jedi. I have made a thing float exactly once in my life, and that was under some fairly exceptional circumstances. I can’t make you strong enough to fight—what the hell, by the way? Since when is Kylo Ren not dead?”
“It’s a long story.” Not one Finn was eager to retell, in any case. He’d already wasted enough of his life on hearing it the first time. “I get it. You’re not a Jedi—I’m not much of one either, not like Rey is. But I think you know more than you’ve been letting on. And if you won’t stop jerking me around, then I’ll have to find someone who’ll teach me for real. And then you won’t have any leverage to make me listen to you talk about this pointillism stuff, and then what are you going to do?”
For a moment, Sabine’s face was an unnatural blank, and Finn felt sure he’d crossed some kind of line; she was about to throw him out. Then, suddenly, her face broke into the widest grin he’d ever seen. “All right, you got me, kid. General.” She tapped her forehead sardonically. “You weren’t serious before; it would have been a waste of both our time. Trust me, I’ve been there. But you’re serious now. So let’s do this. Helmet on. Mind focused. Ready to learn how to make Kylo Ren float?”
“Hell yes,” said Finn, and jammed the training helmet onto his head without a word of complaint.