Nightmares, he thinks, were the one thing he handled well. Mostly Ben would run to his mother when he was upset about something-- Han's habit of cracking jokes and trying to stir him out of his moods only ever made things worse-- but when he woke up in tears, haunted by the future or the past, a vision stirred up by the Force or borrowed from the sleeping mind of some neighbor or (though at the time they couldn't have known) a nightmare seeded bu Snoke, Han was always best at putting him back to sleep. He'd tell the same stories-- long-ago bar fights and battles, the calculated risk of the Kessel run, his voice low, his presence solid and reliable. Leia would chide him about those tales, but it worked. He couldn't understand the strange fragility of Ben's empathy, couldn't help him control the things he could do, but bad dreams? That, he could handle. No problem. He never minded getting up in the middle of the night.

Putting his other hand on his son's shoulder feels like the right thing to do, like completing a circuit.

What he did was everything he could do. It wasn't enough, maybe it couldn't have been enough. They failed Ben, maybe, but it wasn't due to a lack of love.

"We didn't know what else to do," he says gently.