naberiie:

thank you for sending this in 💗 (please do not hesitate to let me know if I need to tag this with a warning of some kind!) @finnreyfridays

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Some days are easier than others.

When he keeps count, Finn’s proud that there are more good than bad now. Kix says trauma will bubble up; that their recovery will
not be a steady incline. There are dips, valleys.

Nights, however. Nights are worse.

There are some nights when Finn can’t move, can’t sleep when
snow and bitter icy cold haunt him every time he closes his eyes. His wound –
long healed – sometimes aches with that same strange chill. So cold that it burned. He has to sleep on his stomach,
most nights.

And sometimes, when Hosnian Prime – where it should have been, where it would have been – when that now-empty
space crosses the sky, Finn still hears the echoes. General Organa – no. Leia, she insists. She doesn’t like
being called Master Organa, either;
even though she has taken him under her wing as her Padawan. Leia tells him she feels the same when the
Alderaanian graveyard’s orbit takes it above the skies of D’Qar. There are
ghosts in the Force, she tells him, eyes weary with unbearable sadness. Ghosts
everywhere. The Force amplifies them. Alderaan’s ghosts are older, but he can
hear them, too.

Rey can’t sleep at night, either. She was already a light
sleeper because sometimes scavengers crept along under the cover of night,
looking for easy scrap to pick off of others, but sometimes she sees – Finn’s
jaw works in anger – sometimes she sees a masked monster in the shadows. She has
to move around; she never sleeps – rests – in the same place for longer than three
nights. Finn goes with her. The freedom to move when he wants, of his own
accord…

The war has taken so much from them; from everyone on the base.
He longs for the day when it goes quiet.

But it is a long way off.

Rey’s hands still on his head. “A bad night?” Her voice is gentle
and cuts across the rising, numb chill in his blood.

He presses his face into the crook of her neck, and it’s all
the answer she needs. When she reaches out to him through the Force, he can
feel it soothing the rippling anxiety in his head. She doesn’t drown out the
static, but her heartbeat, her presence… it helps. For now, it is enough.

He reaches back as his arms wrap around her body, and they lay
in easy silence, curled together under thin blankets that kept out the D’Qar
chill, but not the ghosts. Not the memories, the nightmares.

For that, they have each other.