AN: Hello, dear readers! I'm very excited for this chapter, and the journey that will continue after it. Hehe. Enjoy!

"Where are the troopers?" Someone in the mob shouted.

Rey slowed the speeder down, and Ben hopped off just as she turned it off. They faced the crowd once more, minds tumbling with what words would possibly calm the protestors.

"They proved our point! Those flaggers are dead!"

At last words escaped Rey's mouth: "Stop this!"

For a moment she had them. For a moment the crowd looked at her and considered silence. Then someone yelled and the shouting started once more. A blaster shot rang out from the crowd and shot a hole in the Falcon.

"Listen!" Ben shouted into the din.

"I know what you're feeling!" Rey told them, trying to quell the fear in her heart. They were two people in front of a mob. It was a dangerous position. "Farming is the only life you know, and when it seems the alliance would take it away from you by fighting near your lands, it hurts."

She breathed. Slowly, the crowds were listening. "I come from nowhere, from the junkyard Jakku. I built a life for myself when I was a child, and I became a scavenger to survive because I had no one else to rely on." She paused.

She could feel Ben looking at her, could feel him truly realizing what her life had been. So too could she feel the mob watching her, wondering.

"I have taught myself how to survive, and to fight. That's why I have found my people in the alliance, because they understand the way life is meant to be lived. I know you understand survival too."

Rey gestured at the destroyed farmland. "Your crops were destroyed by a terrible war, a war that is now over. True, there are still members of the red flag like the troopers who just self-destructed, but the war is over."

She breathed, and let them hang onto every word. "Now it is a matter of surviving in the after-effects."

The bond was tingling with adrenaline. She breathed the feeling in and out and in and out, let it pump through her veins and simmer out her boots.

"Reconstruction crews and engineers will be coming soon to help you rebuild. My question to you is this: will you turn the alliance away, or will you accept their help so that you may keep living?"

The mob shivered.

She asked again. "Will you live?"

Now she had them. They roared yes.

* * *

Two hours after the mob had disintegrated, Ben found Rey elbow-deep in the wires of the Falcon, grease smudged on her skin and brows furrowed in concentration.

"That blaster shot messed with these wires," Rey murmured when he stepped close.

Ben nodded and leaned against the wall. "You taught yourself all this," he stated.

When she looked at him, Ben knew she understood him. He had always known the life she had lived, but had never stopped to truly think about what it had meant, what survival and living on one's own required.

She turned his unspoken question away with a wave of a grease-smudged hand. "Lots of people live by themselves. Being an orphan doesn't mean anything."

Ben watched her for a moment as she returned to her work. "You've never told the troops about your past. Why now?"

"These aren't troops," she responded. "They needed someone with a shared history, not a commander with only orders to give."

Ben said nothing, but his silence spoke for him. The bond gave away his memories. He was thinking about an old conversation, when she first left to lead troops and when his mother was lying injured in the medbay.

"I know," she said. "I didn't want to lead."

"You told me you had to, and so you did," he said, and when her jacket snagged on a ragged edge of metal, he unhooked the fabric for her.

"It's what I've always done," Rey said, and her voice was softer now.

Perhaps, Ben thought, she was remembering her home planet, where survival was her sole purpose in life, and hope was found in drops of water clinging to the inside of a canteen.

"Will you go back?" He asked. Back to Jakku. Back to her old life.

Rey ripped a wire from its place and shook her head. "There's nothing for me there, not anymore."

She had stopped wearing her hair tied back in its three knots. It was leftover from the thought that her parents would return and would recognize their daughter from her childhood hairstyle. Ben hadn't even seen her staff back in her room at base. Slowly, her old life was falling away from her.

Rey reached deeper into the wiring, and suddenly sparks exploded. She cursed.

"There's an easier way to do that," Ben said at last, remembering what he had done with the cameras in the hallway with Hux.

"The Force?" Rey asked. "That's cheating."

She wiped away the remnants of Jakku that clung to her, and managed a grin. She rummaged in the wiring for another moment before laughing softly.

"There. Fixed."

* * *

When the reconstruction crew finally landed, Ben went out to greet the members. He recognized some of the faces, and realized that part of his troops had signed up and taken the volunteer positions. He shook their hands, and his heart hurt when his troops nodded and looked at him pointedly.

It was a sign of trust, of their belief in him, and it hurt because it was harder than it should have been to believe anyone besides Rey could see something good in him.

He shook their hands and managed smile after smile.

"Soldier."

* * *

Night swallowed the sun, and quelled the light that blinded the alliance's eyes. The reconstruction crew was already making plans of which places needed assistance most, of which families needed ultimate protection. Many of the farmers were homeless, and plans were being drawn up as to where they could be accommodated.

Somewhere long above them, stars were spinning circles and moving the heavens. Without the warmth of the bitter sun, night brought a blanket of cold that enveloped everything.

"When I was a child," Rey told Ben as they sat in the cockpit, "the nights were this cold in the desert."

Her voice was poetry. Ben looked at her. She smiled a soft smile, and the movement alone was a verse.

"I came home later than usual one night, so I hadn't brought anything warm enough. I had scavenged farther than usual, and I had to sleep in the sand." Rey paused. Ben waited. "There was an old man, a peddler. He didn't ask for anything, but he gave me a blanket, and wouldn't take any portions in return."

Ben nodded. "You feel obligated to return the favor."

"Not to him," Rey said, "but to someone else."

"The war's over. You have time," Ben told her.

For a long time she paused, and they looked out of the cockpit to the moonlit grasslands, silver-blue and wind-washed.

"I saw a girl in the village today," she said at last, and this time her voice was sewn with something deep. "I thought it was Ira."

There it was. There was the reason she had been so affected by Ira's death. Rey had seen herself in the child.

"I saw something too," Ben said.

Rey turned to him and waited. "Rey," he said, "I saw someone use the Force."

"Who?" She exclaimed, and her heart pulsed through the bond.

"A boy," he told her, "maybe five years old. I don't think he realized what he was doing."

Rey nodded. Then her brows rose and her lips parted. "I've been thinking," she admitted, "about the children with the Force."

They hadn't mentioned the children in a long time, not since confronting Hux. "What about them?" Ben asked, although he was sure he knew.

The moon shivered outside. "I want to teach them," Rey said.

Ben nodded and for the first time, when he remembered being a student he wasn't angry. "And will you need company?"

She smiled. That was answer enough.

Later, when exhaustion crept on hands and knees through their souls, when they lay stretched out beside one another, she asked a question.

"Have I ever told you?" She murmured into his chest, into his scar.

"Told me what?" Came the whispered words.

There was a long pause, and her steady breathing made Ben think she might have been falling asleep. But when the bond told him she was anxious about something, he understood she was simply stumbling over the words.

"Thank you," she said.

In the moonlight Ben kissed her forehead and thanked her back.

He understood what she meant.

Rey was fading softly in the night and in his arms, reaching out toward sleep as much as it reached to her. Her mind was calming, dissipating, readying itself for the terribleness of the dreams that would surely come.

Strange. She heard something while she was drifting in the moonlight.

"Did I ever tell you," a voice was whispering, "I love you."

* * *

The next day, Rey sat alone in one of the tents meetings were being held in. It was a crude thing, made of cream tarp and held in place with half-rusted nails. Inside there was a table and chairs, and room enough for all the commanders. A meeting had just finished, but Rey had lingered.

Hot air wheezed through the flaps in the tent, and pieces of fractured sunlight fell upon the grass floor.

In the dry humidity and soft breeze of the planet, Rey's hair flew gently upwards. She sat facing the table, reports in hand. It was a position she was accustomed to, and it was one that should have been easy for her to focus in.

But now that she was alone, she was remembering the night before, and remembering the dream she had. She wondered if his words had been real or not. She had been tired. Maybe her mind was playing tricks on her. Still, a part of her hoped she hadn't dreamt it, hoped that his feelings matched hers.

She flipped a paper over and realized she hadn't read the page before. Rey huffed and turned back to reread. She was letting herself be preoccupied, and was slipping away from her tasks far too easily. For a moment she closed her eyes and shook her head, chastising herself and forcing herself to focus.

When she opened her eyes, the words on the report were clearer, and all thoughts of love were pushed back. She would think about that some other time. For now, there was a job to do.

"Commander Rey?" came a voice from outside the tent.

"In here," Rey responded.

One of the other commanders who had been at the earlier meeting came through the tent, hand pushing aside the tarp to stand tall inside.

"What can I do for you, Peck?"

Lorn Peck stood before her in his commander's jacket, brows sewn tightly together. "I was just given orders to go down to the village," he said. "I know you're close with Solo."

"What's going on?" Rey asked fearfully.

"All of us going to the village," Lorn told her, "were given orders to help the elderly first."

"I don't understand. What's the issue?"

Then the other commander told her, and betrayal ate her whole.

* * *

The door behind him opened harshly, and through the threshold Rey marched with guarded tone and heavy breath.

"When were you going to tell me?" she asked, and for the first time in far too long, her voice guarded and sharp as knives.

He had almost forgotten about this side of her, the only side he used to know. He had wiped away the memory of her hate, but now that shield was coming down. He felt the reverberations of every word she spoke.

"Tell you?" Ben asked, and he pushed away from the table. Across the desk, reports creased with the movement.

"I don't know you did it," Rey said. "How you hid this from me."

Something was slipping down his throat, something vile as medicine. It slipped toward his core and coiled there, like a snake ready to strike.

"What are you talking about?"

Disappointment flickered across her face and mingled with the exhaustion already there. Her lips were turned down in grief and fatigue, her eyes half-focused but sharp nonetheless. "I thought we had stopped lying to one another."

He furrowed his brows. "I haven't lied to you. What's going on?"

"I've just spoken with another commander," Rey said. "He told me he received orders from you."

"What's the issue? I always give out orders."

"You've gone too far, Ben," she said, and it was evident that somehow his words were hurting her.

It was aggravating to see her this way, when somehow he was hurting her even when he tried to understand the problem. He paused. He couldn't decide what to say when everything that came out of his mouth seemed to make things worse.

"They are children, Ben," she said, and her tired eyes glassed over.

Her voice quivered. Her breath missed a step.

"By doing this, you've sentenced them all to death. What about the boy with the Force? What happened to not killing children?"

Ben still didn't know what was going on, but the final accusation struck hard. "I don't kill children. You know that."

"Did you lie to me when you said you don't understand the bond? I don't know how else you could have kept this from me." Rey's glass eyes cracked. "No help for the children. Let them fend for themselves. How can you do that? How can you wear that commander's jacket and not have any construct of morality?"

"You know me," he said, voice low. "I didn't give any orders like that."

"Then how did this commander receive them?"

Her words shocked him more than perhaps they should, but that was one of the repercussions all the old poets understood came with emotion. If you were to feel something for anyone else, you allowed yourself a way to get hurt. That story was well told, Ben knew, and perhaps he hadn't ever had cause to believe it but now he understood.

He looked at her angry, hurt eyes and for a moment wavered. Something terrible was happening, Ben knew.

"There's a traitor in the alliance we still haven't found. Would you really assume I would sentence children to death?"

Yes, something terrible was happening, but it wasn't simply the traitor in the alliance. It was the fact that Rey so easily fell back onto her old way of thinking, of her accusations toward him.

Monster. Yes. I am.

Ben realized quickly what was happening, and so he also recognized the irony. There was peace now. They had found each other. But none of that mattered when peace itself would destroy them, would tear them apart.

He glared at her. His eyes accused her, and through the bond he knew it when she realized the truth.

Rey blinked. She was thinking. Tears hovered without falling. "This wasn't you."

"No," Ben told her, painfully.

She watched him, and then finally understood. The bond was hung with grief and regret, but Ben didn't let himself dwell on it. He couldn't, not when she had stopped trusting him, not when she would think him capable of something so hellish.

"Ben," she said. I'm sorry.

I'm sure you are. Ben told himself he couldn't care, because these were the repercussions, weren't they? He had no one to blame but himself. How ironic. How ironic that in the end she would drive him away, not the other way around.

"Don't."

The word was short, and just as sharp as a blade.

"You have to understand, I was told-"

"And do you believe everything you're told? You're too smart for that," he said. "No. You wanted to believe this, and so you did."

She was still calling him through the bond. I'm sorry.

"We'll find the traitor, but whatever is between us has to stop."

He turned, and his boots clanged on the floor when he walked to the door.

Rey had given up on him. It was true that once she had believed in him, but all things must come to an end. It was the way of the galaxies. He knew she had meant what she said back then. He knew it because he knew her, and so he could feel it when those words of encouragement came.

But things had changed.

"I heard you the other night," she said desperately, and he stopped.

Don't, he imagined himself saying, but the words never came. They sat trapped inside his lips, and he nearly choked because he knew what she was going to say next.

"I thought it was a dream, but I realize now that it wasn't. Ben, I love you too. That's why I was so upset when I thought you had given those orders."

She couldn't do that. She couldn't use love as a last resort.

He breathed. "Well then," he said, "I'm sorry for the both of us."

The door shut loudly behind him, and he pretended he couldn't feel the bond when it wept.

AN: oops. Don't worry. Things can always get better. Feedback? Also! This story is at a grand total of 51,819 words and I am very proud of myself for that haha.