For six months, the galaxy changed around her, but she was too busy to notice.

From morning until night, her days were packed with council meetings of various kinds, planning sessions, military exercises, troop inspections, official visits, and parades. She opened new shipyards and commissioned the first of the new Dreadnaughts, which would become mobile repair bays for the expanded Star Destroyer fleet, ensuring both flexibility and self-reliance. She toured weapons factories, armour manufacturing sites, uniform assembly lines, all staffed with properly paid employees from various systems across the alliance. She supervised Captain Matandari's redesign of the stormtrooper training programme, spent a lot of time in the drill yards and down in the hangar bay just talking to her staff.

She tried to demonstrate to anyone who might be watching that she wasn't a monster.

Rey chaired the alliance, which was still expanding after the initial push, set up a regular series of meetings with a standing agenda, and when she was sure it wouldn't fall over, rotated chairing the meetings around each of her allies in turn, giving them all a chance to sit on the throne. Once, just once, she sensed a familiar presence in the chamber, sought it out until she found Leia's eyes watching her, heavily disguised under a mask. The older woman gave her a nod, but whether it was acknowledgement or approval, Rey couldn't be sure. She didn't attempt to get in touch with the rest of the Resistance, and since their role was as good as redundant now, the tracking network had been shut down, but she thought about Finn often, and never without a feeling of guilt. Maybe if all her hopes failed, she'd speak to him again.

Captain Ocram's intelligence informed General Hux's military plans, which she took to the alliance for ratification. The alliance's complaints and demands for action were considered by the military council to be accepted or dismissed as required. It worked. The system might be creaky and slow most of the time, and prone to argument, but the number of insurgencies had dropped dramatically and pretty much everyone had stopped shooting at each other.

There was always a spare seat at the council table, which continued to be held in the office next door to hers, and she found herself wondering, at regular intervals, what he would have done when faced with the same decisions. She could no longer sense him, and there had been no intelligence reports of nasally-challenged, black-suited men stabbing people with lightsabers. Or, if there were, Captain Ocram had suppressed them. She thought she'd probably be able to feel it if he'd died. This meant that somewhere out there, Ben was living his life without her, probably still seething with resentment, maybe even plotting revenge.

She preferred to plan for the future instead of dwelling on the past, but sometimes in the middle of the night, she'd wake from a particularly vivid dream and find her hands scrabbling at her cheeks, struggling to remove a mask that wasn't there.

And then one afternoon, halfway through the arrangements to break a trade blockade on Villengard, something shifted. She broke off from the conversation, glanced around the room curiously to see what had changed.

'Something wrong, Supreme Leader?' Hux asked her politely. He was the only one who still insisted on title rather than name.

'No, I …' she trailed off, having completely lost the thread of the discussion. 'I just …'

Something was different, but she couldn't place exactly what it was. She crooked an eyebrow at Captain Ocram, but he responded with a confused stare; sensitive as he might be to the Force, this change hadn't affected him.

'Carry on. You were talking about supply lines?' That was the last thing she could remember.

'I was just explaining,' the new, keen general, who was no longer so new, but still keen, and whose name was almost entirely unpronounceable, continued. 'That we need to station Destroyers here, here, and another here because ...'

She felt it again, and her head jerked up automatically as she strove to listen. It wasn't a call exactly, nothing as specific, but she had a sense that someone, somewhere, was speaking her name. She took a pace away from the conference table, tilting her head to try to hear it better.

'Supreme Leader?' Hux was trying to attract her attention. 'Supreme Leader?'

The words coming out of his mouth sounded so wrong for an instant, so unfamiliar, that she shook her head to bat them away, struggling to focus on whatever message she was so close to receiving. They were all staring at her now. She put a hand out to forestall any questions, indicating for silence while she listened.

There was something, a whisper in the stars, a murmur across the galaxy and it spoke her name.

'It's time,' she confirmed with a nod.

'Time, Rey?' Newly-promoted Captain Vanya shook her head. 'Time for what?'

Rey grinned, a wild and a fierce grin, and the old exhilaration awoke inside her, capered through her veins. 'It's time I was leaving. You don't need me anymore. You haven't for a while.'

'Supreme Leader?'

'No. You don't need a Supreme Leader. In fact, I'd advise all of you never to appoint another Supreme Leader again. And don't any of you try to take on the position yourselves. You'll find that throne very uncomfortable.'

'You're leaving?' Major Breen sounded concerned. 'We can't manage the alliance without you.'

'Of course, you can, it's self-supporting. The alliance makes sure the military doesn't turn into a tyranny, and the military makes sure the alliance takes action. You balance each other out. You're the Republic and the Empire in one, the best of both, and I'm very proud of you. But you don't need me anymore.'

Hux frowned, 'We need a leader.'

She smiled at him. 'What is the purpose of the First Order, General?'

He quoted it back at her, 'It is the task of the First Order to remove the disorder from our own existence, so that civilisation may be returned to the stability that promotes progress.'

'Exactly. You've achieved all that already, and you know what? I'm a terrible leader, I never did have any idea what was supposed to come next. So it's over to you to find out. All of you together, the best of the dark side and the light. You're all Supreme Leaders now. The First Order is no more. You are the Second Order now. Good luck.'

'Where are you going?' Hux asked.

Her smile stretched even wider. 'Back to where I belong.'

'Jakku?'

She shrugged, turned her attention to Captain Ocram. 'Possibly. Do you know?'

He rolled a shoulder, self-deprecating. 'I might.'

She laughed, reached out, and squeezed his hand. 'Thank you, Menan. In the end, the pleasure was all mine.'

She had the black tunic off as soon as she was over the threshold of her own room, the trousers kicked away not long afterwards, and out of the wardrobe she selected her favourite item of clothing–a gift from the Jakku delegation, when they had come to join the alliance. They weren't quite her old clothes, but they made her feel like herself again.

She kept the leather boots though and the sword belt. After some thought, she also packed the Supreme Leader's dress, just in case anyone ever told her she was nothing again. Then she skipped down to the hangar to collect her command shuttle. It was the only one of its kind, the first light, long range craft to roll off the new First Order production line. It was also so white that if a stormtrooper stood in front of it, they disappeared.

A set of co-ordinates had already been plotted into the navigation system, and she fired the engines and blasted out of the hangar bay without a backwards look.

It was time to go home.