AN: Hello! I hope you enjoy:

Someone's palms slammed on the table and the meeting tent shivered. "I will not stand by and let this alliance fall!" The Commander said. "We have to find this traitor before it's too late."

Rey nodded. "I know. We've got programmers on it day and night."

"What if that's not enough?" Someone else asked. "What if the red flaggers rise again?"

"That flagger's death in the village made the farmers angry," said Ben to Rey's left.

Rey said, "That's why we need to find this traitor quicker. If the programmers aren't doing enough, we have to try a different tactic." She paused. "How many rooms have we searched?"

"Only ours." Only the commanders'.

Rey huffed. "And we found nothing."

Across the table, Poe said, "The traitor hasn't struck again since we started to search the rooms."

"No," Ben said, and met Rey's eyes.

Rey understood. "That's not why he hasn't struck."

"He hasn't struck since we mentioned the traitor in the first place," Ben said. "He hasn't done anything else since we started to talk about him in meetings."

"The traitor's one of us," Poe said. "There's no other answer." He exhaled sharply and posed the question, "Then what do we do if we can't trust anyone?"

His words affected Rey more than he could have possibly imagined. She could trust Ben. She knew that for certain.

Nevertheless she understood that the traitor was still out there, that just because the two of them could trust one another and work together, that didn't mean the rest of the commanders would have an easy time making decisions as a group.

"We can't communicate through the computers because the traitor has access to all of our accounts," Ben said. "So its either continue these meetings or don't talk to one another at all."

"Then tell us, Supreme Leader," someone said, "how you can believe the alliance won't tear itself apart."

Rey waited for Ben to respond harshly, to take the childish bait and respond in kind. He scarcely moved, scarcely changed his expression, almost as though he had been waiting for the gibe. "Truthfully it doesn't matter if the traitor is one of us," Ben said.

The room began to raise their voices, but Rey raised a hand. "Listen," she said, and turned back to Ben.

"It doesn't matter because if we go over ways to find the traitor, or what we're going to do, the traitor can't do anything. We've already given the soldiers the command not to listen to any orders besides those that come from our own mouths, so what is the next step the traitor can take?" Ben asked.

"We'll let the traitor listen to us for now. When the time comes for punishment, and it will come, he won't be able to do anything else."

The room let out the breath it had been holding, and they began to go over the day's events.

Later, when the rest of the commanders filtered out, Rey and Ben stayed behind. Without speaking they tended to gravitate toward these short-lived moments, toward trying to find seconds of quiet.

Around them the tent bowed inward with the wind, and the shrinking room seemed to push them together.

"You're going down to the village?" Ben asked her, and for the first time that day Rey saw the muscles in his shoulders relax.

She nodded. "There's a few flaggers we need to talk to."

Being diplomatic didn't come naturally to her, but she was going to give the flaggers a choice between joining the alliance or leaving Kore for good. She still wore her saber, and her blaster was still in its holster.

But today was not the day for war.

"A long day, then," he murmured.

She nodded, and his fingers crept to the strand of hair sweeping across her cheek in the wind. He had been doing that a lot lately, brushing her hair away.

Rey smiled. She didn't mind.

"I'll see you later," she said and covered his hand just for a moment.

A passing touch. A constant bond. Then a soft goodbye.

* * *

Deep in the rubble of the destroyed street, buried beneath ashy hands and bloodstains, Rey could see the underlying emotion shared by all people who have lost hope. She saw fear in the bare rafters and brick, naked in the sunlight without the roofs.

She saw fear everywhere, but mostly she saw it on the faces of the villagers.

"Commander," a small boy said, with eyes wide. His voice shook, as though she could harm him. As though she would harm him.

It was a terrible thing not to be surprised, but this had already happened to her twice that day. Rey gave him a gentle smile and reached out a hand.

The child looked at the hand, and her face, and Rey knew he was wondering why she hadn't bent down to his level. But Rey had understood him, understood that he feared authority and thus needed to feel as though he had some authority of his own.

So she didn't bend down. She stood and reached out a hand, and smiled in the rubble.

"Commander?" The boy asked, and with a hand scraped with the wounds of youth, reached out to shake hers.

"No," she said. "Call me Rey."

Slowly, the fear trickled out of the boy's wide eyes and fell in rivers through the street. A smile in response. Progress. Trust. She would take it.

"You're strange," the boy said, and Rey laughed.

"And you're honest. A good quality. You'll make someone very proud one day."

The smile dropped from the boy's lips, and Rey recognized her mistake. This was one of the orphans.

"What's your name?" She asked, softer.

"Noah," responded the child.

"I'm an orphan too, Noah."

"But you're . . ."

"A commander?" Rey asked. "We're not all that different from civilians. Everybody has a story."

Memories flashed so vividly behind the boy's eyes Rey thought she could see them. "My mama told me stories. She told them to all the children. Now I think she's become an angel, like in one of her fairy tales."

"Hold on to those stories, Noah," Rey said. "Your past means everything."

"Did your parents tell you stories?"

We'll come back. Did that count?

Rey shook her head. "No. But, I still remember them, and I will remember them for the rest of my life."

Later, when the boy turned to go, she at first thought nothing of it when he kicked a piece of brick from his path. Then she looked closer and realized his foot hadn't touched the rubble.

She was still stunned when the radio at her hip crackled noisily, and she snapped out of her daze to pick it up.

"Come in, Rey."

Rey recognized that voice easily. "Solo," she said, and she could feel his smirk.

"I'm checking in," he said, voice crackly with static. "What's going on?"

She could have said many things, of how half of the street was now cleared of rubble, or how a group of doctors were volunteering to help the injured. She could have said many things, but instead she told him of the boy.

"I saw him," Rey said.

A pause. Through the bond she felt him understand.

She didn't need to say anything else, and she thanked the Maker for that, because there were ears everywhere. The bond and their mutual understanding of the other kept their conversation protected, and would always make the others curious.

"And?" He asked.

"You're right." The boy had the Force, and likely didn't even know it.

"Are there others?" Ben asked, after a beat.

"I don't know. I'll keep my eyes out." She paused for a moment. "What's going on there? Have the hackers found anything?"

He sighed. "Nothing. Two of the other commanders are in there right now, but the last shift found nothing."

"It's been days of this," Rey said.

"I know."

There was a shout in the distance, and Rey's head snapped up from the radio. "I've got to go," she said.

She waved Finn towards the commotion.

"Turning off," Ben responded, and the crackling stopped as the radio clicked off.

Rey slid the radio back on her hip and ran lightly over the rubble, following Finn through the street. "What's going on?" She asked.

When Finn grinned at her and raised a brow, she glared at him. "We still haven't talked about you and Solo," he said slyly.

"And what about you and Dameron?" She retorted, and Finn tried to hold back a smile.

"Later," Finn promised, and they faced another situation in the streets.

* * *

When Ben slid beside her at dinner and kissed her temple, Rey greeted him with a smile.

* * *

In her dreams that night, Rey was a teacher. She found the children who were connected to the Force and showed them both sides of it, the dark and the light, and the balance between it all. She taught them to feel everything, and because of that, she thought she failed them.

In her dreams, Noah was her student. He came with small hands and fearful eyes, and slowly he grew to trust her. He hung onto her every word, he practiced every day, and he immersed himself into balance itself.

Then, he grew up, and decided he couldn't live in the balance.

In her dreams, she failed him because he chose the dark. He rose up stronger and taller, grew older and thought himself wiser. She too aged, and lines deepened into her face.

When he finally killed, ruthlessly and meaninglessly, the frown of his betrayal sank into her pores and stayed there, painfully etched into her soul.

In her dreams, Noah stood above her as a grown man, with a saber of his own in his hand. Rey looked at him, and then at the space beside him, as though waiting for something.

No. Waiting for someone.

Ira appeared beside him, and in her brown eyes Rey saw the yellow jacket of the young girl she used to be. Rey stared at Ira, who did nothing when Noah came closer, ready to attack.He fought her, and then he killed her.

When Rey woke up and sprang from the bed and Ben's arms like a spider, she knew she was being irrational for many reasons. She had met the child once. She hadn't become a teacher. She couldn't possibly betray him.

She stood shaking and cold, barefoot and frozen on the floor. Through the small window in the side of the Falcon, moonlight flickered blue-gray on her feet. She stood in a river of silver, paralyzed with fear and embarrassed.

"Rey," came Ben's voice, husky with midnight.

"I'm fine," she responded, and closed her eyes to breathe.

"Come on," he said. "You'll freeze."

He was right, of course. The nights on Kore could be incredibly cold. For now, the bitterness of it was reminding her of what reality was true. She had spoken to Noah once. She couldn't hang onto his ability to use the Force.

Rey turned and slid into the blankets Ben held open.

She pulled close to him, until she could feel his heartbeat under his cheek, until his hand rested on her shoulder. Under her skin, she could feel him waiting.

"You'd think I would have learned my lesson by now," she said into his heartbeat.

"Your lesson?"

"In all the stories, this is when the heroine closes herself off to emotion."

Ben's finger's tapped lazily on her shoulder. "Well," he said, "didn't we already say this isn't a story?"

This isn't a romance.

Rey hummed. "Still."

"It's not wrong to care for people," Ben told her in the voice of someone who had learned that lesson the hard way, "even if you've barely met them."

"Don't they tell soldiers to be emotionless? To be ruthless and uncompromising to the mission?"

"That's a story too," Ben murmured. "How can anyone lead without compassion for their people?"

For a long time, Rey said nothing. Then: "I'm finding that my people are spread across the galaxy. I find them everywhere."

"Good," Ben said. "That means you're not a tyrant."

Rey sat up and looked him in the eyes.

"What?" He asked.

Slowly, Rey eased back into the embrace. "Nothing. Just, your mother told me that when this all started."

"I am her son," Ben said.

* * *

Morning came quickly, and with it Rey's duty to finding the traitor. She kissed Ben lightly on the cheek and left the small cot to pull on her boots and jacket. In the computer room, she sat in the dull monotony of a dozen sets of hands as they typed, and she kept searching for the way the traitor had intercepted the commander's accounts.

It was as though she was staring up at the white sky itself when she looked at her results. Every time, she came back with nothing. That day, the normally bright sunlight of Kore was filtered with a wide pale white, a prelude to the oncoming fall.

The sky represented the coming of a harvest that would be minuscule and hundreds of empty bellies growling for the destroyed crops. It represented the consequences of battle.

So when her search results continued to come up with nothing, and every program she wrote failed to do anything useful, it felt like the computer itself was the white sky, full of emptiness and nothingness and representative of failure.

The shifts in the computer room were four hours long, and six groups of programmers sat in the hard chairs each day. All twenty-four hours of each day for the past week the alliance had been searching, and still nothing. The traitor had left nothing. He didn't exist.

Rey leaned back in her chair and breathed, because a thought just occurred to her. How easy would it be for one of the programmers themselves to be the traitor? To volunteer in one of the shifts and get rid of any evidence, to cover all his tracks?

She looked around the room, listened to the dozens of fingers as they clacked on the keyboard, and she wondered. It would explain why it was taking so long for them to find anything.

Rey looked at the clock on the wall, which told her her shift was almost up. Only fifteen minuted left to do anything with. Hardly any time at all to search through old reports, but she began to look through the first actions of the programmers anyway. She searched the network's memory, and the minutes ticked by far too fast.

Five minutes.

Rey went back further in time, further in memory, until the very first shift. She had led the first shift herself, and she knew the faces of each member of her team. She searched the memory of that first shift, and scarcely had she begun to look when the clock on the wall beeped.

Time's up.

The door was opening, the other group of programmers coming in. Frustrated, Rey closed the programs and made way for the others to sit down.

"Find anything?" The commander who had walked in asked her.

She shook her head. Those in her group could hear their conversation, and if she was right, if the traitor truly was one of her own, she would have to be cautious with her words.

"Nothing."

That was why she was surprised, when two hours later, a message blared through the loudspeakers throughout camp and interrupted the meeting in one of the tents.

"The traitor has been found."

Ben met her eyes, having surely felt her confusion, and asked her an unspoken question. She shook her head. She didn't know. She didn't understand this. Were her instincts wrong?

The members of the meeting trailed from the tent and into the white-lit grass. Rey looked to the center of the tents, and her surprise only grew, because there, there on his knees with his hands cuffed behind him, there surrounded by soldiers, was Poe Dameron.

Of course, she knew immediately he was being framed, but what could she do about it without proof? Her crew of programmers stepped beside her, and she looked at them, sure more than ever that one of them was the true traitor.

"Are you crazy? Why would I join the flaggers?" Poe shouted.

The soldiers said nothing in response, and Finn burst from the crowd. "Let him go! He did nothing wrong!"

Rey saw Finn reach for his blaster and ran toward him before he did something he regretted. She grabbed his arms and he tried to shake her off, but she held him, drew him closer to safety and to the rest of the crowds.

"Let me go!" Finn said.

Rey's heart folded.

"I know," Rey said, and he looked at her. "I know it's not him," she said under her breath.

"Then why won't you-"

"Finn," she said, and watched him meaningfully.

He paused. His eyes flitted from her to Poe.

"I'll figure it out," she said. "I know it's not him. But I have no proof."

"Promise me," he said, eyes harsh and desperate.

"I promise."

AN: oohhhhh haha. Feedback?