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It takes approximately no time at all for Finn to become everyone’s favorite on the base. Poe can only smile every time he sees Finn accidentally charming yet another member of the resistance with his smile, his earnestness, or his incredible enthusiasm for hearing everyone’s backstories, even the most prosaic, humdrum ones. Poe once had to drag Finn away from one of the janitorial staff because Finn was listening, rapt, listening to the time this man broke his arm as a child.
“Okay, buddy, time to eat now,” Poe had said as he’d dragged, actually dragged Finn away to eat, and it was hard to tell who looked more disappointed, Finn or the janitor.
“I can’t help it,” Finn says in the mess hall, slowly eating his grathis soup--not out of dislike, but from the sheer novelty of eating food that actually tastes like something. “Everyone’s just so different, they all have different stories and experiences and it’s just…” His smile turns a little shyer, and he looks down at his plate, abashed. “It’s really cool, that’s all.”
“Yeah, it is,” Poe says, smiling helplessly at Finn--but what else is new, Poe is physically incapable of not smiling at Finn these days.
*
Poe isn’t actually jealous of Finn being everyone’s favorite on the base, because what is also clear is that Poe is Finn’s favorite on the base. And really, Poe isn’t complaining one damn bit.
Somehow, it’s become a regular tradition for Finn to spend the night in Poe’s quarters, the two of them sprawled out on the floor together, attempting to take Finn’s tolerance for alcohol somewhere beyond ‘nonexistent’.
To be honest, Poe’s kind of hoping Finn always has a horrible head for alcohol--it’d be nice to have a fellow lightweight for a friend, the other pilots have no shame in drinking Poe under the goddamn table, it’s awful.
This is great though, the two of them drunk on moonshine in Poe’s quarters, Finn helplessly giggling, his face turned into Poe’s sleeve, his body a warm weight against Poe’s side. Poe curls into him, beaming, giddiness rising inside of him like a bubble floating up as he listens to Finn laughing.
“You’re an easy audience, you know that?” Poe says, once Finn’s laughter has mostly settled down into these quiet little snorts that are, like everything else about Finn, incredibly endearing.
“I like your stories,” Finn says simply, and when he lifts his head to look Poe in the eye, he’s smiling. “Your stories are like you--they’re fun.” He says the last word with a tone of awe and wonder, like fun is still a new word to him, a concept he’s still wrapping his head around.
“Well, I do aim to please,” Poe says in a lofty tone, and just like he’d planned, that sets Finn off again, and he’s laughing, that wide grin of his lighting up his face and it’s--it’s a beautiful sight. He’s a beautiful sight.
Poe is well aware he has no objectivity about Finn whatsoever, but he can’t be blamed for it--there Poe was, captured by the First Order, as good as dead, and Finn arrived, a miracle that Poe would’ve never dared hope for, simply because while he might be an optimist (or a daredevil, if his grandmother has it right) he could never have dreamed up someone as wonderful as Finn. His imagination’s never been that good.
He’s looking at Finn while he’s thinking this, and Finn’s expression changes, his smile gets smaller, more shy as he finally asks, “What are you thinking about?”
“Why do you ask?” Poe replies, turning onto his side--the better to see Finn’s face, he figures. If it means that they’re even closer now, their faces only a few inches apart now, well, that’s just a bonus.
Finn lowers his gaze, his eyelashes dipping down, and Poe’s stomach lurches at the sight. “Nothing, it just--it looked like it was a good thing, whatever you were thinking about. You seemed happy.”
He was. He is. But it’s too much to say that out loud, too much to explain, so after a moment of staring wordlessly at Finn’s perfect face, Poe’s brain goes completely off the rails and he leans in to kiss Finn instead, his lips brushing against Finn’s for one electric moment before he pulls away.
His heart pounding, Poe looks at Finn’s dumbfounded face, his wide eyes and asks, “Finn?”
Finn gapes at him for a moment, eyes so wide he can see the whites around Finn’s dark irises, and then--and then Finn actually licks at his mouth, in an apparent unconscious gesture that still accomplishes to send all of Poe’s higher thinking crashing into the gutter. “So that’s what kissing is like,” Finn murmurs, his eyes still huge in his face, and oh, Poe is going to be thinking about that for a while. Once his brain starts working again, anyway.
And then Finn asks, shyly, “Do it again?” and right, okay, so Poe’s brain is just never going to work again. That’s fine, he can do without it.
Poe doesn’t make Finn ask twice, just leans in and kisses him again, keeping it slow, letting his hand curve around Finn’s jaw as Finn kisses him back, awkwardly, tenderly, and with so much trust that it has Poe almost shaking from disbelief, from joy, from sheer thankfulness that Finn is here with him now.
After what feels like both an eternity and no time at all, Poe pulls back to look Finn over. Finn blinks up at him, dazedly, and Poe asks, the smile automatically spreading across his face as he does, “Finn, you with me?”
The answering smile on Finn’s face is slow, electric, and intoxicating. “Yeah,” he says, and Poe is already leaning in to kiss him again as Finn’s saying, breathing out against Poe’s mouth, “Yeah, I’m with you.”
*
Finn still listens to people’s life stories in the mess halls, but more often than not it’s with Poe by his side, Poe’s arm slung around his shoulders as Finn listens, leaning into Poe’s touch all the while.