AN: As always, I'm trying to delve deep enough into character analysis I can predict each character's arc. Let's see if I can keep it up haha.

"General?"

Leia turned, gray hair tied up off her neck. She wore a deep blue shirt and brown vest, and she looked exhausted to hear that name. Her arms were hanging heavy from her shoulders, and her eyes were nearly void of strength.

"What is it?" She asked sorrowfully.

Ben swallowed and stepped closer, and closer, and closer, until he was two feet away from the tiny woman. He waited, nearly too long he waited. Leia's brows crinkled as she watched him, emotion dancing in her eyes.

"Mother," he said at last.

Then he bent down and took her in his arms, and she cried.

* * *

Crimson-soaking her hands, soaking her knees as she knelt in the icy cave again. Crimson covering the yellow coat of Ira, sliding across her small hands.

"You promised. The Resistance wasn't supposed to let us die."

"I know," Rey said, as she always did. "I know. I'm so sorry."

"I won't see my Daddy when he comes back," Ira said faintly, ghostly face beginning to fade.

"I'm sorry," Rey said as she shook, as she watched Ira's dark eyes glass over.

She was completely alone in the caverns now. Her soldiers were trapped beyond the fallen rock, and she was the only one on this side of the cave, and she was alone with the small body in her hands.

As always, she waited while she grieved. She expected Ben's hand to touch her shoulder, but he never came. She stood at last, head spinning as she began to walk with Ira in her arms. In the dim light she could barely see what was before her.

As always, she didn't see the body. She tripped, catching Ira with one arm as she fell to her knees. But the other hand touched something, as it always did.

More crimson stained her palm. Then, as always, she saw Ben's face-ghostly white with unseeing eyes. Rey dropped to her knees, swallowing ash and smoke and fear. Ira settled on the ground beside Ben and for a moment she could only look between them, seeing but not comprehending what had happened.

But then, as always, she realized Ben was gone and his eyes weren't seeing her anymore, that his heart had stopped beating and that the bond was truly ripped from her. Grief like rain. She folded into herself. The word never-she had had a taste of it once, when she thought Ben was gone and the bond broken.

But now never was her reality.

Rey snapped awake, soaked in sweat and shaking in the aftermath of the dream that had come for the third time. She breathed and breathed and reached through the bond as she always did, but he was fine. All was well.

She put her head in her hands and blinked, trying to rid her mind of everything she kept reliving. Memories came to her in her sleep, but they were always altered. Always Ben died, always she was too slow.

Rey swung her legs over the bed and put on her boots. It was almost dawn, and she knew she wouldn't be getting any more sleep, not when the smell of smoke was still faint in her mind and blinding grief still trembled in its dance with fear. So she left the converted flagger base and the dim hallways, and stepped out into the salty air.

She ran down to the water's edge and then ran along that, wind whipping her hair, calves burning, lungs stretching. She had to move, had to do something. She owed it to the dead. It wasn't like she could forget how she had lived as a solider and start living like a civilian again. No.

She ran along the water as the dawn came and colored the sand with a yellow so bright the water was blinding. At last she turned and ran back the way she had come, the familiar feeling of sand being kicked on her skin a welcome distraction from the fear in her chest.

They said some dreams are visions, and they said some visions come true.

* * *

Ben was on edge constantly and whenever he walked through the halls he expected an attack. His eyes were tired of seeing things his mind conjured, and his entire body was drained. Ben used to need power, and when he was cut off from it, he would collapse in on himself.

It was true that he didn't need power as much anymore, but when the war was over and soldiers stopped waiting for his orders, he felt the loss deeply. He was born to be a leader, it seemed, but the universe had cut him off from the only job he knew he was good at. He wasn't sleeping well, either.

Seeing Rey die each night made him more on edge than ever. He didn't know if he should tell her what he saw, because he didn't know if he should put that much faith in dreams. Sometimes he saw Snoke, whispering words that tickled his mind and kept him tossing in the night.

Snoke was dead. He put no faith in those dreams, those passing slideshows of old memories overlaid by burning words. So how could he put faith in the dreams where Rey died? Probably, Ben thought, it was because he was a weak fool who needed someone else and defined his existence on another.

Snoke meant nothing to him but pain and fear, and he was dead. But Rey . . . Rey was everything, and she was alive.

With nothing to do, with no reports to busy himself with scanning, he was walking on eggshells, almost waiting for himself to crack and the old rage to come pouring out in ribbons. He didn't crack, and he didn't sleep, but he grew more tired, more useless, more unneeded than ever before.

Ben was a fighter, and he couldn't pretend to be anything else. So when he finally decided he'd had enough of the confining walls he stepped out into the sunlight and the sand and almost walked straight into Rey.

"Ben," she said, winded.

"Were you running?" He asked.

He could feel tension through the bond and he wondered faintly if it was because of what had happened on the dock.

She nodded. "I couldn't sleep."

They stared at each other for a moment, and then he noticed something. "Your bandage is falling off."

She moved her arm to look at it, and sighed. "I didn't notice."

"Come on," he said gently. "You've got sand all over it."

When he cleaned her burn and applied fresh bandages, his chest was tightening and caving in, because he knew he couldn't lose her. In the aftermath of the fighting and the carnage, when there were no soldiers to lead, when there were no questions of morality that needed answering, the only truth he knew was simply Rey and all that she was.

They stood in the medbay in silence, in a room adjacent to the injured. Tenderness shouldn't have been between them there, Ben knew, not when there were soldiers dying and gasping and living in the other rooms, but he felt it and he wondered that he wasn't guilty.

He should have been mourning the loss of so many soldiers; he should have been grieving for the past life he used to live, now that with the Knights gone it was resting in peace; he should have been doing anything but feeling what he felt for the woman before him.

War was war, yes. But the bond shimmered and curled around them, shifting like blades of grass and drifting like snow, engulfing them like hope and drowning them like a storm. He couldn't see it break each night, couldn't relive the time he thought Rey had died.

"Something's wrong," Rey stated softly when he finished.

He looked at her and knew she had felt his fear. He couldn't hide anything from her, or she from him. It was how Ben knew something was wrong in her too.

Slowly he spoke. "You mean too much to me. I'll be nothing without you."

Rey's mouth fell open and her brows inched together painfully. "I'm here," she said.

Ben shook his head. "I lose you every night."

The implication of his words made her close her eyes, and he was surprised to see relief on her face. Relief danced from cheekbone to eyelashes. It caught in the sand on her falling shoulders as the tension left her and formed puddles at their feet.

But Ben knew her, and so he knew she had been losing him too.

* * *

When they were finally called to a meeting by Leia, Rey practically ran down the hall, commander's jacket whipping behind her while she shrugged it on. She had been sitting still, doing nothing but feeling emotions and dreaming terrible dreams. Finally she was needed as a leader.

Ben looked behind him when she entered the meeting room, and she took the place beside him as the others poured in.

Leia stood before them at the head of the table, leaning over it as though her entire frame was too heavy for her. They had known peace for half a second, and now surely there was something wrong, or why else would the commanders have been called so frantically?

Leia's words confirmed her suspicions. "We've won the war," she began, "but the red flag hasn't died, not completely. A group of them are starting to rise up, and we have reason to believe they have found the other base. That camera footage got leaked somehow, and now we have to pay the price."

Rey had almost forgotten about the elaborate set-up that betrayed Hux's true intentions. "General," she said, "that means the flaggers have a spy on the inside."

Murmurs rose higher as Leia nodded, grave face drawn once more with exhaustion.

"What about our spies? We sent members of the alliance to join the flaggers," a commander said. "Have we heard anything from them?"

"Do we know if they're planning an attack?" Came Ben's voice beside her.

Leia shook her head. "We haven't heard anything yet, but to be sure, we need a group of commanders to go back to the base and protect it."

Rey didn't have to hear Ben to know he wanted to go. "I'll go," he said.

Leia looked at him, considering. "It's not a bad idea. You were Supreme Leader. You'll intimidate them."

"My troops want to fight," Rey said. "I'll go too."

There was a chorus that followed her response as commanders considered things. They were in the room for an hour after that, discussing the state of the injured and whether it was worth it to bring them back to the other base, where there were more doctors, or whether the flight would hurt them more.

When everything was decided, Leia dismissed them, and Rey went back to her room to get her things in order. She was going to have to make an announcement to her troops. Maybe she shouldn't have been feeling excited about returning to a place of danger and fighting once again beside Ben, but she couldn't help it.

Later, when she gave the announcement, her worry disappeared because her soldiers had been restless too.

"Get a good night's sleep," she told them, standing on the stage that would carry her voice. "We leave at dawn."

* * *

Garnet, like a rose, covering her hands. His face, white like bone, cradled in her arms. She was staining his face red, dying his dark hair bloody. She was rocking like a madwoman, back and forth as the grief engulfed her, as his glassy eyes stayed open and unseeing.

Rey awoke, breath heavy in her throat. She couldn't go on like this, couldn't keep feeling so terribly alone when she knew she wasn't. She thought, and then decided.

When she knocked, feet bare and breath husky from exhaustion, Ben opened the door quickly. They didn't say a word, but he opened the door wider when he met her eyes and they fell asleep in each other's arms.

It didn't get rid of the nightmares, no. Nothing in the galaxy was ever that easy. But when she woke and thought his blood was still on her hands, his arms pulled her back down and held her close, and slowly-

-slowly their greatest fears became terrified of them.

* * *

There was a hand on her hair, and in the red darkness of her eyelids, Rey softened. She could feel the dim light of the sun tiptoeing toward the two of them, and the fingers dancing through her hair felt even warmer than the light. She pulled closer, and there was nothing but relief.

It had been so long without this-this warm comfort in the midst of terror, and Rey couldn't bring herself to move. Never in her life had she been held like this, but perhaps she didn't deserve it-happiness, that is. She had done terrible things, and so many had died in the war they fought.

She hadn't forgotten about the lightning in her fingers, or the old Jedi books locked away in her chest at the other base. Rey still wore the key around her neck, and it was pressed between them now as they lay.

But peace was the morning, with his hand in her hair and their chests rising and falling like the waves on the ocean.

"Rey," he said softly, and her name sounded like a breath.

She hummed into his chest, and knew what he knew.

"It's time," she said faintly.

They didn't say anything else after that, but she lifted her head and they met each other's eyes for a moment. Slowly peace was trembling and fading like a coward, as the knowledge of their roles called to them.

When they slipped out into the hallway, dawn was just beginning to leap over the ocean. Rey wasn't stupid. She knew exactly what it looked like when she left his room in the morning, pulling her commander's jacket around herself to go to the shore.

The world was blinding and alive, and it was as though the shore had never been a battleground. They walked past the places soldiers had died, the places once stained with blood but that had now been washed clean by the ocean.

Rey braced herself for everything that would come, for the time when whatever was between the two of them would come spilling out from her as their secret disappeared, for when fighting would come again and she would have to make the conscious choice to control the electricity in her veins. The bracing was her armor and it would make her strong.

She needed to be strong, needed to be wise and ready and two steps ahead of any enemy to cross her path. She needed all this because she wasn't alone anymore, wasn't simply fighting to survive another day with a good scavenger haul. No.

She needed all this because she knew the man beside her needed her as much as she needed him, and it would hurt more than anything to let him down.

So when they stood side by side with the other commanders, with the troops before them and the Falcon brought by Chewie behind them, she put her armor on and readied herself for the darkest of days.

AN: oh noes there may be more fighting in their future. Feedback?