Rey did not show him her finished work before she sortied. He had to remind himself that that was exactly what he had asked of her; for them to be civil and productive in their interactions without getting all sentimental and overinvested in each other. It took some head, meet wall and calling himself schoolyard-level names to come to his senses, but he managed it eventually.

Then it was time for one of his least favorite parts of officer training: standing around on the bridge – or in this case, sitting around in the communications pit – and listening silently as others carried out his mission. That familiar mixture of boring and nerve-wracking, with the classic addition of having no control over what happened on the field, while what happened there might very well decide whether he and the people he was responsible for lived or died.

"Listen carefully and read the room," his mother told him, pointing out an unobtrusive spot for him to settle. "Let us handle this. Speak up if you think there's something we're overlooking, but not before."

He nodded and went where he was bid. One step at a time. The Resistance would only trust him if he gave them enough reasons to, and letting them use the information and advice he had contributed to this mission however they wanted would be the first reason.

It had been decided, when the Resistance last evacuated, that their new location would be kept from him. He'd plucked the information from the head of the simpleton who came up with that laser-brained idea even as the man had told it to him, but they hadn't needed to know that. Now, though, they booted up the galactic map and the location of the mountain base lit up in red for all to see; him included.

The Upsilon called in, confirmed that control had a read on its beacons, was cleared for departure, and disappeared from the map as it jumped to hyperspace. The Falcon, ditto. An endless four and a half hours passed, which no amount of telling himself that this was nothing, that if they hadn't fled into the Western Reaches he would have been sitting here all day, made any less of a chore.

One beacon came back to life. Then the other.

"Control, this is the Upsilon, do you copy," Poe's tinny voice came over the comms.

"This is control and we copy, Upsilon," his mother said.

"The Falcon and I have both reached the rendezvous point. No enemy signatures or hostile response detected."

"Roger that, Upsilon. You may proceed."

"Deploying probe droid now... and... she's on her way."

They waited another two hours for the droid on its tiny thrusters to navigate toward and through the gravity maze. He wished he had his mask. It would do nothing to conceal his body language, but at least when he wore it he could make all the faces he wanted without anybody noticing.

Or take a nap. A nap would be nice.

Poe kept up a sporadic stream of meaningless updates about the probe's readings. By the time there was anything worth listening to, he'd let his thoughts stray so far he barely noticed.

"– and one mid-sized freighter showing life signs, carrying machine components of some kind. They're disconnecting the fuel lines now. One good hit and it'll go up like a wad of powder-paper. Life-sign readings inside the station are minimal, as expected. So far, Ben's intel looks sound."

He raised his head and sat up straight.

"This looks good. I can do it. Permission to engage, General?"

"Permission granted," she said. She looked over her shoulder to smile at him. "Have at 'em, Poe."

Poe crowed. "Ellen, retreat to a safe distance. Look sharp, Falcon, I want you ready to move in on my mark."

The Falcon, unable to transmit without giving away its position to the First Order, made no verbal reply. But a visual code had been established beforehand, and Poe followed up moments later with, "Your acknowledgment is acknowledged, Falcon. Alright, here I go!"

And then, finally, action.

...or, more sitting and waiting, in his case. Now there was just a lot more to watch and listen to. The holo-map no longer showed much of the Western Reaches, but had narrowed its scope to the area surrounding the supply station. The red dot of the Upsilon could be seen winding and weaving its way through the dense cluster of gravity wells and spatial distortions that hid the station from sensors.

It occurred to him that, as thoroughly as the First Order had the area mapped out, the station's position was inherently unstable. The Resistance was going to blow it up today. But even if he hadn't given them these maps, even if they'd chosen a different target, sooner or later the cosmotopography would change and its safe haven in the eye of the storm would disappear. He had found the evacuation or relocation protocols for such an occurrence in the database. Everything was already in place for a safe, orderly retreat.

Today, though, the hostile red dot that was Poe moved further and more faintly through the blue-light lines on their pilfered map, until it disappeared completely from sensors, still multiple hair-pin turns away from the large rectangle representing the station. And that's when the real nerves started.

Ordinarily, Poe's voice would have come over the comms – grunting, yelling, the occasional actual message. "Gotcha! The manned freighter is down, control. No survivors," he imagined. And, "The first of the station's turrets is down." "Two down." "Shit, shit, shit! No, I'm fine, I'm okay, just need to remember the size of this shuttle, I'm – three down!"

By the Force, he hated that part. But he hated this information blackout more.

He clasped his hands, jiggled his foot, and tried to think professional thoughts.

Luckily, Poe made quick work of the station's meager defenses, allowing BB-8 to slice into the communications relays and reestablish contact. Poe's voice burst back to life across the comms just as he blew out the windows of the control center to stop station command from self-destructing. Cheers rose up on both sides of the line.

There would be no safe, orderly retreat from this outpost.

Scanning for life-forms, Poe reported; BB-8 working its astromech magic; the Falcon springing into action.

In the Resistance's control center, he used the Force to read the room and the comms both, because superstition got the better of him and he didn't trust this to go well if he didn't keep a close eye on both ends of the operation. While long-distance Force activity had never been his strong suit, with Snoke as a teacher he had learned a great deal about it nonetheless. Rey and Chewie's minds were faint, though distracting through their mere presence. Poe's consciousness was loud and stifling with purpose. But as Poe spoke, he caught a glimpse of a fleeting observation of his, an impression of negligible satisfaction, quickly set aside for the knowledge that there were more where these had come from:

An image of bodies being sucked out into space. Familiar black uniforms and white armor. Smoke and fire and flashes of transparisteel splintering and flying every which way as laser fire struck and the bubble of air it had kept contained decompressed, bursting into the void and spilling itself and its contents into nothingness like so much debris. Human debris. Faces he didn't know, but bearing minds he was intimately familiar with the meticulously sculpted shapes of, twisted grotesquely in their death throes.

His people. Dying.

He'd gotten plenty of his own troops killed in the past. The exploration missions had been death traps. Forming and leading the Knights of Ren had been a disaster from start to finish. He'd learned how expendable the lives he held in his hands were the hard way, by trying and failing to preserve them until he finally got it through his thick skull to prioritize the bigger picture. He had learned to live with this years ago.

And yet.

Traitor. Murderer. Monster.

(There was a hole in – )

Dammit. Dammit! Why couldn't anything ever be easy? Why did there always, always have to be something that settled in his stomach like a stone and filled it with the dreadful certainty that his weakness and failure and inadequacy were a foregone conclusion, which he could only dispel through a destructive show of strength, or by fighting some tangible substitute for the unseen foes crowding him, or –

He closed his eyes and reached into the Force, across the bridge formed by the comms, into the heart of what was happening on that faraway battlefield. He took hold of the icy nothingness of their deaths and the fire of the violence surrounding them, and tightened his mind's grip until the physical reality of it split and crumbled and fell away, and only the Force remained.

He was stuck in the control room, listening and watching from countless lightyears away. He could do nothing – nothing useful, nothing worthy, nothing adequate – with the agonizing Dark power that burned his bones to char and electrified his veins. But one day, he told himself, head down and eyes squeezed shut as he fought to breathe through the pain, these deaths would have meaning. Serve a purpose. Prove themselves righteous.

Stop whining and think of the bigger picture, he thought. Think of Mom. You will not fail. You cannot fail.

Burning the power up like this hurt as much as anything Snoke had ever done to him. Mom wouldn't approve. But taking their fates into himself was the only way he knew to do right by the men and women he had betrayed to stand by her side.

And the slaughter was only just getting started.

I-oOo-I

The plan he and Poe had concocted went off without a hitch. The supply station's personnel was subdued with no fatalities and only a few minor injuries on the part of the Resistance. There had been two freighters docked at the station; the one Poe blew up, crew and all, and a smaller one that – all the better for them – was disguised as a civilian vessel. It took the better part of the remaining day cycle and the next to move all the supplies to their own base. Their storage rooms were too small, but room was found or made in other parts of the bunker. They hauled over three TIE fighters at a time, two in the Falcon's tractor beam and one in the Upsilon's.

His – no, the station's crew was executed, and the station sabotaged to maneuver itself into the destructive clutches of gravity over the course of the next several standard days. It would look like a fatal malfunction.

He spent the waking hours of the operation sitting still and silent in a corner of the control room, chewing on the reality of his treason.

To say he was unhappy with how it affected him was an understatement. For years he had been infamous for his disinterest in any operation that did not involve the Force. It wasn't an attitude he had purposely set out to cultivate, but it wasn't exactly something Snoke had discouraged either. Ignoring what Hux and the others were doing had made his life easier in much the same way learning to see the bigger picture had. To suddenly find himself feeling so wretched over betraying the faceless, nameless grunts and pawns of the First Order was like a slap to the face.

His mother was safer now than she had been before. That was all that ought to matter.

(At least it wasn't as bad as leaving Skywalker's temple in flames, half of all he had known for so long dead and ruined amidst the swaying grass. It just went to show, he thought, that practice made everything easier.)

"Excellent work today. Stings, doesn't it?"

Late into the first night, he looked up. Caluan Ematt, the tall, white-haired, white-bearded old Rebel who took bets on him with his mother, nodded at the comms console across the room and took the seat beside him.

"It stings, listening to your people getting cut down. Perhaps more than you thought it would."

Your face is an open book, boy, he heard Snoke sneer over the chasm of a decade.

He pulled his face into a sneer of his own. "They're not my people anymore."

"But they were for a long time," Ematt said calmly. "Listen, son –"

"I'm not your son," he growled, throat tightening.

"It's a figure of speech."

"I don't care."

Ematt rolled his eyes. "Alright, listen, you snot-nosed brat. That better? After the war, I worked with a lot of defectors and surrendering commanders and Imperials who were released from custody. A lot of men and women who thought they'd been doing the right thing and either learned differently or simply had to come to terms with the fact that they'd lost. Only ever met a handful that didn't care about keeping their troops or comrades safe deep down, under the layers of banthashit they'd been trained to spew about proudly laying down their lives for the Empire. It's just not in our nature. You can pretend you don't care about yours anymore all you want, but anyone looking at you can tell that's a lie."

"What's your point?"

"People like you?" Ematt said, elbow on knee and leaning in, pointing. "Backstabbers and turncoats? They don't get to take back their choices. You try to return to the First Order, they'll kill you. You try to leave the Resistance, we'll kill you. I love the General, she deserves to get everything she wants to get out of rehabilitating you even after everything you've done to her, but I'll be damned if I let you do anything like that to her again. So you're not one of those snake-eyed psychopaths who don't care about anything or anyone. Good for you. Good for your mother. Having a heart at all is the first step. Having it in the right place is the second. Not letting the weight in your heart crush you once it starts to sink in what you've done, though, that's an entirely different matter. The first time is always the hardest, so maybe next time you'll think back on how you're feeling right now and laugh. But I'll warn you right now: you'd better find a way to deal with this –" Ematt gestured around the room. "– or you won't last. You'll end up like all those ex-Imps I knew who gave up and ate their blasters."

He couldn't get a read on the man's feelings or intentions. Ematt was shielding his mind like it was second nature to him.

"You don't know the first thing about me," he said, low and dangerous.

Ematt looked supremely unimpressed. "You hear more stories in a war than anywhere else, but they're all the same deep down inside."

"Or how long I'll last."

"Sure, brat, whatever you say. Listen..." Ematt sighed and leaned back in his chair, looking around the room and seeing the passage of generations more than anything else. "Unfortunately for you, you managed to kill almost the entire old guard before you defected. These kids, they've only ever known one side. They were either born after the Empire fell or they were too young while it stood to understand and remember it properly. And unlike the Empire, the First Order didn't grow from within the Republic. You guys are a shadow creeping in from the edge of known space, not their friends and neighbors and cousins and parents, taking in all the same information but coming away with a completely different message. They've never been faced with a society that's been put through a shredder and tasked with piecing it back together. They were too young to understand the work it took, and they don't think they'll ever have to.

Right now, these kids think they're too good to give a high-ranking defector, or one with actual blood on his hands, the time of day. They don't think you or anyone else like you will see another day of freedom once this war is won, or that people like you will ever live alongside them. Hell, maybe for them life will be that simple. Maybe, if we win, the First Order will crawl back into the hole it came from and never show its face again, or be wiped out to the last organic and droid, and they'll never have to find out that beating the enemy into submission is just the start, but having to live alongside them again lasts for the rest of your life. But it wasn't that easy for us, and it won't be for you."

Ematt pinned him with a look. He tried to push down any hint of a reaction that might be showing on his face.

This man he only knew from a yearly handshake was so sure he would live to see these fantasies play out. His mother was so sure he would live to see them play out. Her self-delusion he could understand, but Ematt's was baffling.

His mother wanted him to make amends for his wrongdoings by fighting bravely, and then transition to a long and happy life of peace along with everybody else, retire to Vashka in his old age, and be visited by a flock of children and grandchildren until he passed peacefully in his sleep.

It wasn't going to happen. He blew any chance of that when he was only nineteen years old. The universe wouldn't let him.

He would die on his knees or he would die fighting, one or the other. Which one only a matter of what his mood happened to be like when the day came. Even if he made it out of the war alive, he would be executed soon after. And even if he managed to escape justice, the law or the underworld would catch up to him one day.

Leia Organa may have enough sway within this Resistance to keep her son alive and free for the foreseeable future, but there was a reason she spent her time mucking around trying to build a private militia nowadays rather than commanding authority within the legal government. In battle, she was a leader and a warrior still. In peacetime, she was nothing but Darth Vader's disgraced daughter, a fanatic living on the fringes of society.

To most of the galaxy, his mother was barely a shadow of the freedom fighter and senator she had once been. The war against the First Order – if won – could repair a great deal of the damage done by the revelation of her parentage years ago. But as soon as everyone put two and two together and realized that not only Leia Organa's father was of the Dark Side, but also her son, whatever good will she had left to bank on would evaporate.

Even the Resistance barely took her seriously where he was concerned. If she tried to present his 'miraculous return' to the rest of the galaxy, she would be ruined forever.

Caluan Ematt, however, obviously wouldn't hear a word of that.

"Your mother – well, being your mother, obviously she has other plans for you," the old man said. "Your mother being Leia Organa, she might even pull them off. And unlike your fellow snot-noses here, I know all about the kind of future she has in mind, and what it might take to get there. So maybe don't dismiss my advice out of hand, hm?"

"And what would that advice be?" he asked tonelessly.

"Starting with the situation at hand?" Ematt said, and barked out a sudden, startling laugh. "What I always do is picture the moment the Stormtrooper who shot at my old tooka for rubbing his ankles decided to become the kind of guy who tries to kill some random citizen's pet for doing what pets do. Works wonders to remind me that I made the right choice becoming who I am, and they didn't."

Ematt stood up and clapped him on the shoulder. He tensed from head to toe.

"You made the right choice by coming here. Nobody is obligated to like you for it, but the Rebellion respects that. Better late than never, Ben. Just remember that. For Leia's sake and your own."

And the old Rebel walked away.

"But my Stormtroopers didn't make that choice," he thought to himself out loud.

Ematt turned. "What?"

He met the man's eyes.

"These aren't your Empire-employed volunteers. First Order Stormtroopers are brainwashed children. Their entire lives are painstakingly arranged to ensure they can't even conceive of such choices. Regimented down to the minute, down to every ounce of muscle or fat on their bodies, down to the exact movements they use to wash themselves. They –"

He cut himself off. His heart was racing.

"Right. I keep forgetting." Ematt shook his head. There was a whiff of ancient-boned weariness in the Force, but only fleetingly. For it to slip past this man's defenses, though, it had to be a powerful sentiment indeed. "You'll have to learn to ignore that too, son. If you make it out on the other side, maybe you'll get to advocate for them. But that won't work if you drive yourself over the edge worrying about them now."

"So, 'stop caring so much and all your problems will go away'? You sound like a Jedi," he said.

Ematt shrugged. "If that's what it takes to retire, sanity intact, I wouldn't knock it."

But Ben Solo and Kylo Ren both had been knocking it for as long as he could remember. He expected better of himself than a Jedi's apathy, even if it hurt more.

After all, what had a little more pain ever been to him?