garbageship | That's no moon... Wait, no, it's a moon.

Well, at least she's taking this seriously. He smiles faintly without meaning to, not even sure where to begin with this one. Trying to teach Ben to shoot without using his abilities is tricky enough, at least he understands them.

"In a minute." He comes closer again, eying her hands on the grip. "Take it back. Slow down, and hit that same spot again."

This is a stupid idea he's got, he wants to see if it'll still make the target if he jostles her elbow.

"The one on the ground?" Weren't they practicing with a moving target? But sure, okay, if that's what Han wants her to do.

Or does he? "Hey, what are you doing?!" Her shot veers wildly off course as he jostles her elbow.

Honestly, he's a little surprised she didn't make it anyway. So she's not entirely doing the Force thing. That's good, for his purposes.

"I can't tell how much is your aim and how much you're sensing." The tone is a bit apologetic, that's not exactly the nicest way to go about it but it's a little hard to tell. "Even with a blaster you'll want to use the force. I need to know you can shoot without it, too."

It's the opposite of the problem Luke had, at first. She's good-- instinctive, almost-- with her control, as long as she's focused, but he wants to know she can use her eyes just as well.

Rey frowns. "I'm not using it. I don't want to use it." She doesn't sound indignant or angry like she might have yesterday; she's confused. She's not his son, who can stop blaster fire midair by simply raising his hand. The times she's consciously used the force — to push Kylo Ren out of her mind and into his, to make the guard undo her restraints and leave the door open — it was an agonizing struggle. She did it out of desperation, because she had no other choice. She has no desire to exert that kind of effort for simple blaster practice ... she's not even sure that she could, with the stakes being so low.

"It's not so easy to just turn it off."

He'd point out that Ben is trying very hard to do just that, but he doesn't think that'd be conducive to her listening to anything else he's got to say.

"It's instinctive." Which... he wonders about, sometimes. Where she came from, whether someone hid her away on Jakku purposefully, whether she had some sort of guidance before then. Maybe it's just that the life she lead there demanded strict discipline. Maybe-- Maybe he'd better focus on shooting.

"Loosen up a little, you don't want to wrench your shoulder. Make sure you're not holding your breath."

Rey gives him a slightly disbelieving look at the "it's instinctive" part. If it was instinctive, wouldn't it have been easier? (Not taking into account the fact that if it's not instinctive, she really shouldn't have been able to do any of it at all.) If he had brought his son up, she simply would have argued that he's been trained to rely on his powers, while she didn't even know she had them until recently.

But Han doesn't bring that up, which is probably for the best.

"Loosen up, breathe, got it," she says. "Are you planning on knocking my elbow again?"

Well, it's the best answer he's got for how to explain the things she does. He'd ask Ben's thoughts, but the tenuous peace between the two of them usually depends on keeping as many bulkheads between them as possible and one pretending not to notice the other one exists. And he isn't sure his son would have any answers, anyway.

"Not planning on it." He shrugs, takes a step back. See? "Don't put all your focus on the target. Point it where you want, but try to feel the shot, not where it's going."

This is all guesswork to him, trying to deconstruct half-remembered things Luke and Obi-Wan once said and reverse them. It's maddening, because Han knows (if nothing else) how to shoot. Teaching it should be easy, right?

"...feel the shot." Rey frowns, trying to understand what he means by that. With a staff, that would make sense: feel the weight of the staff, its balance in your hands, the way and speed it moves, but a blaster? What's there to feel? You point and you shoot.

But she'll try. She puts her focus into her hand and her grip on the blaster, the way the breeze tries to push it. She can see how a stronger wind would send a shot astray if you didn't take it into account. She adjusts her aim accordingly and fires —

Any improvement, teacher?

You point, you shoot. The weight of it drags in your hand or falls back into your palm. The barrel has its own quirks; it leans, or it favors an angle. The world around you makes as much difference.

He turns to find the mark where she hit-- wide of the first, unnaturally stacked shots-- and nods approvingly.

"Another one." With any luck it'll be close but... naturally close.

Rey doesn't get why he's nodding approvingly. That last shot was terrible compared to her earlier ones, and she still doesn't feel the difference between using the force to help her shots and not.

But since he all he says is "Another one," she doesn't question his approval. She remembers how that previous shot felt, tries to understand the relationship between that feeling and how wide her shot went. Her next shot is ...

... only a marginal improvement. Her brows furrow and she is clearly Displeased. But Rey trusts him, and she has an iron will (usually. It's iron, not infallible). So instead of questioning him, she continues firing, shot after shot, taking time to try & figure out for herself what she's doing wrong, why she's still missing. It's how she taught herself basically everything she knows, really, since she didn't have a teacher. (She may need a little reminder that she doesn't have to figure everything out for herself.)

As she focuses on the task he steps back a little further, leaving her to it, more or less. Occasionally he'll interject, usually some variation of don't tense up since all in all she seems more rigid than not. Her accuracy isn't as good as it was when she wasn't working for it, but for a beginner it's more than acceptable.

Eventually she's hitting the same spot, or close enough, with regularity that satisfies his (arbitrary) judgment.

"You see the difference?"

"I can see it makes my aim worse," Rey says dryly. "But I don't understand why. I don't feel what's different about focusing on the target and focusing on the blaster." (It seems doing your best to repress your force abilities makes it very hard to tell when you're using them and when you're not ...)

"Pick a new spot, and shoot like you did the first time."

Someday maybe he'll figure out how to explain something to her.

"All right." Rey chooses a rock a few feet to the left of her previous target, lines her arm up and shoots. With her focus on the target, it's easy to judge the distance, determine the best position to fire. She can feel exactly where the rock is in relation to her — the way she always knows where her hand is, even when it's out of sight. The shots hit perfectly, and she turns back to Han.

"If I put all my attention in my arm, I lose my sense of the target," she says. Despite her phrasing, she clearly hasn't connected that "sense" of her target with her force-sensitivity. Her ability to sense where objects are in relation to her has been a part of her entire life; it's one of the skills that made her such a talented scavenger on Jakku. She could retrieve scrap from dangerous locations, climbing confidently where others wouldn't dare. It feels nothing like her experiences with the mind-fuckery side of the Force. "Shouldn't I be keeping my attention on it?"

That depends entirely on what she's trying to do. Han shakes his head.

"Shut your eyes," he suggests. "Do it again. Same spot."

And he doesn't answer her question. Rey gives him a bit of a Look for that, but she's an obedient student. She closes her eyes, aims where she thinks the rock is, and fires. When she opens her eyes, she sees that she hit just a little bit above her previous shot.

Even she realizes that's Not Normal.

"How did I do that?"

That's about what he expected. Whether she understands the difference, he doesn't know. But at least the results speak for themselves.

"The force is strong with you."

It feels so strange to say it.

"...how could that be the force?" Rey is struggling to wrap her mind around this whole thing. "It didn't feel anything like what I did on the starkiller. I wasn't doing anything at all!"

"It ain't always fireworks." Trying not to roll his eyes. Trying. He succeeds... for the moment.

"It's feeling, not seeing. I want you to know how to do both."

Don't roll your eyes at her; she didn't realize the force was real! She thought Luke Skywalker was a myth! And this is ... pretty mind-blowing. Since discovering she's force-sensitive, she assumed that this was something that had been latent inside her. Something that she's lived without her entire life, something that she could continue living without. The idea that she's actually been unconsciously making use of it her entire life changes everything.

"But I thought you had to train for years," she says. Never mind the fact that she managed to use the jedi mind trick on that stormtrooper without any training whatsoever.

"Don't ask me," he answers dryly, eyebrows raised. He's got his theories on the matter, on why she's able to do this when according to everything he knows it should take a hell of a lot of work. But even if he's wrong-- he doesn't think he's wrong, but he's not so sure he's right as to say anything-- someone has to have figured it out. There must have been some first force-sensitive person to figure it out, to found the Jedi order in the first place.

For all they know there are force-sensitives out there following some other path of their own devising.

"You ask too many questions. It's a lot easier doing something if you don't know it's impossible."

His last comment elicits a small twitch that could almost be a smile. Ivano Troade, one of the few people who had been kind to her on Jakku, used to say something very similar. And yet the scavenger had answered every single one of her questions.

Remembering Troade — she wishes she could say "mentor," but she didn't work for the scavenger long enough for that to apply — helps Rey ground her thoughts. She takes a deep breath.

"Right. So. I need to practice seeing, not feeling." A concrete objective, something simple and specific to do — she can work with that.

Hey! That feels like a success. There's something definitely approving, though why that's what gets through to her is anyone's guess.

"Right. Start with that, get the basics."

Same as what he's trying to teach Ben to do, actually.

Rey nods. "Right." She lines herself up, picks a target and keeps practicing. Nothing if not a dedicated student, she'll keep going until Han tells her to stop.

He leaves her to it, standing far enough away to watch her posture and also the trajectory of her shots. Blasters aren't so difficult, and the aim here is mainly proficiency. She doesn't need to be a sharpshooter, just competent.

It's tempting to keep her at this task, because this is something he understands. But he's been thinking on it and the extent to which she's been ignoring and misunderstanding her other abilities worries him as much (maybe more) as his son's tendency to overly rely on them.

He waits a while. Practicing anything has a sweet spot, in Han's experience; he wants her to hit her stride and stay there until she starts to tire of it, and then they can move on. Finally he nods again.

"Ready to try something different?"

That's no moon... Wait, no, it's a moon.

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