AN: For a while Wattpad was glitchy, but I managed to write this chapter anyway haha!

"What are you planning on doing about the red flag platoons?"

"That's right! One of my kids died in those fights. Are you gonna let more die?"

"It's Kylo Ren, solider. I'm pretty sure he's up for anything."

"And you expect us to believe you? That you want to change the First Order?"

Ben slammed his hands on the table and spun around, facing away from all the threatening voices and accusations. Didn't they understand what he was trying to do? Why couldn't they let it happen? He knew it wouldn't be easy, but they were making it impossible.

"What's wrong now? You giving up?"

"Too good for us?"

"Stop this!" Rey's voice rang out loud and clear above the shouts.

Ben turned to watch her step closer, put her hands on the table and lean into it for support. He stepped closer too and watched the people change. They respected her.

She looked so tired, stretched thin and worn down. Nevertheless her voice was strong, and they listened to her. They stopped talking, and even though they were watching him warily, their dagger-eyes were better than a thousand voices.

"The red flag platoons are the problem, not the new Supreme Leader," Rey told them.

Only Leia nodded, understanding immediately. But the rest would not settle, not when they were dealing with the fearsome Kylo Ren.

"He's so weak you killed Snoke and the guards and knocked him unconscious without him stopping you!" An admiral spoke out.

Ben exhaled loudly, and Rey glanced at him. She was asking him how much she could say. He nodded. Go ahead.

"That's not the truth. He disobeyed orders to kill Snoke instead of me. We killed the guards together."

Leia looked between them, wide eyes knowing the truth but surprised nonetheless. Ben couldn't help wondering why Rey hadn't told Leia any of this.

"Son?" She asked.

"It's true," Ben said gruffly.

"Okay," another voice said, "so he killed the old bastard. But then she knocked him unconscious. Easily."

Ben rolled his eyes. "We both blacked out, but that was something different."

Ben could feel her tension through the bond, and knew she wanted to keep whatever their connection was a secret. It had no place in this meeting, full of people who didn't believe in such fairy tales. It would be scrutinized and picked apart and destroyed, and it didn't mean anything to the soldiers here.

Neither Ben nor Rey said anything more, and strangely, no one asked.

Rey was looking around the room, meeting the eyes of each leader. "There are still the red flag platoons. I know you are fighters. There will always be people to protect and battles to fight."

She gestured at Ben. "We already think the red flaggers are growing stronger. They're going to keep attacking villages and killing innocents and under this new order we'll still need your troops to help protect those towns. We'll need con artists and spies, hackers and code writers, soldiers and leaders and every member of the Resistance."

Her words were turning them. Ben saw it.

Still someone asked, "Why should we trust him?"

Rey cocked her head. "Do you trust me?"

Murmurs of assent followed her words, and she nodded.

"Okay, then." She paused. "I trust him. There's your reason."

* * *

The fleet ended up landing on the edges of the base, and it was making everyone uneasy. Feelings didn't disappear simply because their leaders had declared an alliance.

People were watching Rey everywhere she went. She knew her troops remembered the lightning she had made, and by now the entire base had heard about it. Besides that, she had told people she trusted Ben. So everyone watched her, curiosity and warily, whispering and mumbling.

She learned to tune it out, and busied herself with the meetings. Two, three, sometimes five a day. Always her and Ben, always Leia. The others changed depending on whose expertise was needed. She wore the commander's jacket everyday, never washing it, never taking the sturdy leather thing off.

It was the very definition of security, and it reminded her of everything she had promised Leia to be.

* * *

Ben stood up. Someone was knocking. He reached out, poked really, and yes-it was her. Two days he had spent in the Resistance base, mostly in meetings, but the other time in his room. True, she had been there, but they hadn't really talked since she had agreed to join the new order he was creating.

"Hi," she said, when he opened the door, peering down at her. "Can I come in?"

He opened the door wider, and in she walked, something leather in her hands. It looked like the jacket she wore, and Ben had a sinking feeling about what it was.

"What is that?" He asked, though he likely already knew.

"A gesture from your mother. She promises it's less political than it seems," Rey told him, holding the commander's jacket out.

Ben shook his head. "I can't take that. It means too much."

Still she held it out, the jacket looking way too large next to her. "Take it. She wants you to have it."

He raised a brow. "And she sent you? Why didn't she come herself?"

He knew the answer before she spoke, but he wanted to hear her say it.

"I volunteered. We're partners now, you know." She paused, then gave up and threw the jacket at him.

He caught it easily, small smile creeping on the edges of his lips. "What was that for?"

"My arms were getting tired," she told him, grinning. "Put it on. We've got another meeting."

* * *

On the third day, cameramen scurried in front of the Resistance base, in the fields that surrounded their buildings. They were preparing the entire grass for a broadcast video. None of the buildings or soldiers were to be in the shots, nothing that would give away the actual location of the base.

There were people working on protecting the signal and making it untraceable. No one would be able to figure out where the base was. Finally the stage was set. The cameras and lights switched on. The time had come for Hux to give the announcement.

Hux stood on the stage, in front of Ben and Rey in their commander's jackets. He wore his general's uniform, proud chest puffed out toward the cameras, words pouring down his haughty nose.

"Today there rises a new order," he began. "Behind me stand the two people responsible for this new government. I have been asked to tell each of you about their plans. We stand near the Resistance base. We are here peacefully and our armies have formed an alliance."

Hux paused. Ben watched him carefully. Go on. Finish the script.

Hux never was good at obeying orders. Hux smiled terribly and continued.

"There is a problem. This man has asked me to pledge allegiance to the new order against my will."

Ben gestured at the cameramen who were trying desperately to switch the things off. But there were ten cameras, some of them slower than others. It wasn't working.

Ben stepped forward, grabbing the back of Hux's collar to pull him off the stage. If the cameras weren't coming off, Hux was going to be silenced the old fashioned way.

"Long live the red flag!" Hux yelled as the cameras flickered between open and shut, his voice pulled taught.

The cameras were finally off, and Hux was laughing even as Ben pinned him to the ground, not even struggling when his hands were pulled behind his back.

"Damn you," Rey said, crouching down next to them. She sounded unsurprised.

"Both of you," he began, grunting as Ben pressed him deeper into the grass, "trust too easily."

Rey laughed. "No. You trust too easily."

Hux watched her carefully, saying nothing.

"You thought that broadcast was real?" Ben asked.

Their plan had worked. It was an elaborate thing to set up the cameras, but finally they knew where Hux's true allegiances were.

"That was fake?" Hux spat.

"The cameras were on, but yes, the broadcast was fake. Do you think we would let you betray us that easily?" Ben asked.

"You're being stripped of your title, Armitage," Rey said condescendingly.

Hux glared at the two of them, struggling under Ben's grip like a fish out of water. He struggled and cursed, and still was held down.

"Where are the red flaggers now?" Ben asked.

The question carried so much weight, and all of three of them knew it. It was a last chance of sorts, one that Hux would take if he was wise. But Hux wasn't wise enough. He had too much pride. So he smiled as his face was pressed into the earth and chuckled as his cheek rubbed against the grass.

"Kill me. It'll solve nothing. The First Order will always live. Snoke will be avenged. You will die, and the red flag will be flown above every house."

Rey met Ben's eyes over Hux's form. Ben knew what that look meant. Hux was telling the truth. If Hux had planned his tactics right, which surely he had, then surely he had a chain of command, multiple soldiers who would carry on giving his orders even when he was killed.

Rey bent down, eyes dangerously hard. "You underestimate us. It will be your undoing."

Then Ben hauled the man to his feet and let guards carry him away.

* * *

Days passed as quickly as sand through a sieve, and all Rey did was stand in meeting after meeting, strategizing and planning and visiting the room full of coders and hackers to learn if they had found anything about the red flaggers. It was tiresome work, repetitive even, but it felt so good to be doing something.

Rey had started to search for the red flaggers every night and at every instance of free time she found. She had learned so much from her time as a scavenger and most of it transferred over to the computers she searched on.

She left a meeting, went to the computer room to plug in more code, went to another meeting, and another, then back to the computer room with lunch rations in hand. Ben watched her, she knew that as well as she knew herself. She could feel his disapproval at the way she threw herself into the work, but she continued on.

She was a leader, wasn't she? Should she ask someone else to do something she wouldn't do herself? Rey learned quickly; that was how she survived on Jakku. So she learned how much she could take on, and only worked slightly beyond that threshold.

She was fine.

So she sat late into the night, empty tea mug beside her, in front of the computer that kept flashing error messages and telling her there were no results for all her searches. Over and over the error messages. Over and over time ticked forward. Over and over her eyelids drooped.

It was so frustrating, to sit in front of the computer day in and day out, repeating things that had already failed and going over the notes from other coders. She thought immediately of Hux, who sat in a Resistance jail cell in isolation.

Then she had a terrible thought. Their problem was that Hux wasn't talking. What if they used other means-

-no. No! How could she even think of such a thing? Hadn't she been tortured? How could she think of doing the same thing to another? Snoke had split her mind apart, forcing his terrible fingers into her soul and laying everything she was open to him.

Who was she for even thinking of doing that to someone else?

Rey sighed and pushed the chair away from the desk. She needed air, and sleep. She gathered up her papers and stuffed them in their folders, holding the empty tea mug on one finger as she opened the door. She had been alone in the computer room, so she flicked off the lights as she left.

It was quiet in the halls, with only a few guards awake, and she shivered at the eeriness, hurrying to get to her room. She opened the door, dropped the files on the floor, haphazardly laid the mug on a table, and dropped face-first-clothes and all-onto her bed.

Three hours of sleep, that's all she needed.

She was fine.

* * *

Ben was tired, but not in the way he knew Rey was. She was pushing too hard, putting too much pressure on herself. When he finally gained a moment of time between meetings, he went immediately to the computer room, ignoring the dozen of other coders in the room and going to the desk in the back.

Papers, files, mugs of tea, tea bags, commander's jacket rolled up her arms. She was typing furiously, searching and imputing. She cursed. The program had failed. She started over.

He touched her shoulder, and she jumped, looking at him with bloodshot, baggy eyes. Something stammered in his chest. What were her eyes doing to him? What was she doing to herself?

"Get some sleep," he told her. "I'll take it from here."

"I can't," she protested. "I think if I just switch the language, maybe I could-"

"Don't do this to yourself. Go sleep."

She watched him for a long time, hair falling in her face as she blinked. She could barely keep her eyes open, let alone give enough energy to arguing when he asked a second time. Something ached within him, and he told her a third time.

"Get some rest. I got this."

For a moment she looked peaceful. She nodded-thank you-and stood from the chair. She wobbled, legs giving out. He reached out but she steadied herself on the back of the chair. People turned.

"I'm fine," she insisted. "Stood up too fast. Will you tell Leia I won't be at the-"

He nodded. "Go."

She stumbled out the door, and he kept their bond open in his mind for a while, fingers ready. She didn't stumble again. He could breathe. So he sat, and typed, and failed, and typed some more.

She slept while he continued on, working through her old programs and the reports she had pulled up on the screen. What she had been trying to do, the way she had tried to intercept links, it was ingenious. He continued where she had left off, following the trail deeper and deeper to the core of the mystery of the red flaggers.

He nearly missed the next meeting, which lasted only a blessed hour. Leia seemed unsurprised when he told her where Rey was. She had seen Rey's exhaustion too.

Ben hurried back to the computer room, breaking past another barrier-that one only took him four tries, thank the Maker. He followed the path she had started, closer and closer. Submit program. Failure. Failure. No matches. Rewrite.

Another meeting. He made tea; somewhere along the way, Rey had taught him. He drank it scalding hot while he went back to the room. Coders left. It grew dark. Still he typed, still he was getting closer.

Then the words danced across the screen and Ben stood, pushing the chair back and startling the only other person in the room.

Of course.

* * *

Someone was knocking at her door. Rey thought for a moment it was her dream, so she stayed lying down. Then the knocks stopped, and she opened her eyes just as Ben burst into her room.

She blinked. "What's wrong?"

She sat up and swung her legs over the bed, boots and all.

"The Knights," he said simply, and she stared.

"What?"

"The Knights of Ren started obeying Hux the day after the throne room," he told her.

Rey blinked, unsurprised. Still she kicked herself for not following through on that idea.

"Were you looking at my old programs?" She asked.

He nodded. "The Knights are leading the next attack on the planet Kore. The red flaggers aren't just platoons anymore."

Rey's heart quaked. She was remembering the girl in that beautiful yellow jacket. "Kore is a farming community. There's no army to fight back."

The moment she said the words, she looked at him and knew what he was planning. There was no army, and she was already tied down with her orders on the ice planet. She had met with her soldiers earlier that day to tell them they were going to go back to the snow tomorrow.

She could feel the way Ben needed this, needed to do the right thing and protect the farmers whose land and harvest the red flaggers surely wanted. He needed it because he was once their leader, and it meant something for him to attack them, to fight those that he had trained.

She breathed. It was so selfish of her, to look at him and know how much she needed him. How could he go? How could he leave her here while she stumbled over her existence? She knew nothing of the lightning still flickering within her, nothing of the dark thoughts of torture she had already produced so easily.

Who would she become without him? What if he died, what if she lost him forever and their bond died with him? They were so tethered she was sure she would die too. If not her body than surely her soul.

Rey was selfish. "Stay," she pleaded.

"Don't," he begged.

She looked at him and felt her chest cave in. How could she breathe? How could she move or act or lead? He couldn't leave. She wouldn't let him. It would be her undoing.

AN: This story is writing itself at this point, and I'm along for the ride. Feedback?