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As promised, here’s the outtake from chapter 6 of Found Cat. I wrote it because I had to know what the hell Poe and Rey talked about in the like five minutes they had alone before Finn walked in. Also, because I’d already decided what Poe’s side jobs were, and I realized that nowhere in this fic does it actually mention that Poe is in a goddamn mariachi band which has got to be, like, the image of the century, and no one but me will ever see it, unless I share this scene.
Poe trudged up the stairs, resenting the fucking hat box he was carrying more than anything in the entire world. It just figured that of all the paying gigs as a musician, the most lucrative one and the steadiest was in a fucking mariachi band. His father thought it was hysterical.
Poe didn’t mind the music, though it wasn’t anything he’d been raised with— it was a uniquely Mexican idiom, and hadn’t had a lot of traction in any of the places Poe had been raised, and given that his father and mother were Cuban and Guatemalan respectively there wasn’t really any precedent for it in his lineage— but he did sort of resent the way most of their gigs were for vaguely racist touristy things. He spent a lot of time in Mexican restaurants pretending not to be bothered by drunk white ladies wanting to borrow his hat for photos. Occasionally, to amuse himself, he pretended not to speak English. It had gotten him in trouble once, though, when he’d had to go off on a particularly drunk tourist who’d gotten handsy with the pretty girl who played violin.
Tourists getting handsy with him seemed to be part of the admission price. He’d learned to be gracious about it. The charro outfit had really tight pants, and the bandleader insisted that he had to wear pants that really fit him (his guitar playing, she’d explained, was about the tenth thing down the list of reasons she’d picked him to join the group). Somehow, this made his ass a magnet for unwelcome attention. He was resigned to it, but he wasn’t really entirely happy about it.
This time hadn’t been so bad, it had been for a cultural festival, so there’d been all kinds of stuff going on and the tourists had been more or less under control. But it had been a long fucking day and a lot of performance and standing around, and he was tired.
He tried the door handle instead of using his key, thinking perhaps Finn might be there. Which would be nice. Coming back to an empty place with frantic cats was his least favorite part of gigging. The door opened, sure enough, and he came in with his face stretched into a goofy grin he could just feel. Being around Finn was so uplifting, he couldn’t help but be a total dork about it.
Sure enough, neither cat came running, which meant they were adequately entertained elsewhere. He hung the hatbox just inside the door on the hook where it lived, and set the guitar case next to it, and came in a little farther with his overnight bag so he could take his shoes off.
“Finn,” a woman said, “I think I found something.”
Poe straightened up very slowly, and stepped a little farther into the room. He didn’t see the woman at first, but BB gave away the woman’s position by her rapt attention. BB was on the back of the couch, craning her neck to watch the woman, who was—
On top of the bookshelf, where she’d pulled his Internet router down from where it was mounted to the wall, and had disassembled part of it. “What’d you find?” Poe asked.
“They say these filters are to reduce noise in the line,” she said, and then looked up and saw him and froze. “You’re not Finn.”
“No,” Poe said.
“You’re Poe,” she said.
“You’ve got one up on me,” he said. But he couldn’t really find it in himself to be very alarmed. She had to be Rey; Finn wouldn’t have let anyone else in here.
“I know Finn’s told you about me,” she said. “And I can explain what I’m doing up here. But, first, quickly, while Finn’s not here, can you tell me whether you’re attracted to him or not? Because he keeps agonizing over it but I don’t know anything about that kind of thing so I don’t know what advice to give him.”
“What?” Poe squinted at her.
“Fine,” she said, “I’m checking to see if the apartment’s bugged, I’m Rey, now I’ve explained myself, can you answer my question?”
She was young, white, and pretty, but there was not one iota of fucking around anywhere in her entire person or presentation. Poe supposed he could admire that.
“The apartment’s probably not bugged,” Poe said, “I’ve actually checked before and I vetted the Internet guy pretty thoroughly. I have a history. As far as being attracted to Finn, of course I fucking am, but the last thing a kid like him needs is a fucked-up oldster like me dragging him down.”
“No,” Rey said, “he needs you to be good to him.” Incredibly, she was reassembling the Internet router, quite skillfully. She clearly knew what she was doing. “I don’t know anything about human relationships but I know when he talks about you it’s not like anything else he’s ever talked about.”
“I’m probably the first person who’s ever been nice to him,” Poe said. “It’s not actually the divine hand of fate or anything.”
“No,” Rey said, “he’s had a lot of people be nice to him. One of the other residents kept trying to get in his pants and he was just not interested. He’s really gone on you.”
“I think anything between us would be a disaster,” Poe said, chest going tight.
“He’s extremely competent,” Rey said, “both at crises and other people. I think you underestimate him. Whatever your particular bullshit is, I’d say he’s got a really good chance of being able to handle it.”
Poe blinked at her. “Oh, you think so?”
“I know so,” she said. “He said you didn’t want to ever have sex with anyone again, and he said he would be okay with that, but I think it would be a tragic waste because I don’t understand sex at all but I think he’d be really good at it with you and I kind of like to think about that sometimes.”
“Wow,” Poe said. “You really don’t mess around.”
“There’s no time to mess around,” Rey said. “He’s coming back up the stairs any minute now. Think it over, Poe.”
“I’m not going to drag him down into my—“
“Shh,” Rey said. “Finn’s too strong, you couldn’t drag him down into anything even if you wanted to. Don’t patronize him. This is him coming up the stairs, he can’t know I said anything.”
Poe could hear the footfalls, she wasn’t wrong. “You,” he said.
“Shh,” she repeated. The door opened. Finn came in.
“I told you to come down—“ Finn began, and then saw Poe and stopped dead. “Oh.”
“Hi,” Poe said.
“Hi,” Rey said.
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