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

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?"

His timing is impeccable; Rey's arms are just beginning to complain about being held in the same position for so long, and a headache has just started to threaten the area near her neck. She lowers the blaster and shakes out her arms, bouncing on her toes to wake her whole body up.

"What do you have in mind?" she asks.

"The other thing." Not shooting. Force stuff. He nods at the scorched stones.

"Defense. With the lightsaber."

Nope, he's not qualified. Yeah, he'll try anyway. Maybe the odds are stacked against this working, but it's a well-known fact he never pays attention to them.

Rey stares at him. "You're not serious." She's been spending this entire trip basically avoiding where she hid that thing, and now he wants her to pull it out and practice with it? "It belongs to Luke."

"It hasn't been Luke's for a long time." He shrugs. "And-- look, I don't know what kind of stories you've heard. It's a weapon."

It's more than a weapon, but right now what she needs is less mysticism, more confidence. Han unbuckles the strap of his holster and pulls his blaster without looking, turning it in his broad hand and holding it out to her. No different than taking and shooting that would be.

Except he's not proposing shooting, so much as getting shot at.

The gesture of holding out his blaster puzzles her. "...am I shooting you while you defend yourself with a lightsaber?"

He can't help it, he rolls his eyes.

"I'm saying, someone else's weapon is just a weapon in your hands. You could shoot this same as yours." Though it's heavier, the premise is the same. It wouldn't fail because of unfamiliar fingers.

"Other way around." He pauses, holstering the weapon. "I'm not shooting with this."

That should be reassuring, right?

...very reassuring. "So what are you going to shoot at me with?" she asks. Though really, she's less concerned with the him shooting her part than she is with the lightsaber part. She trusts that Han isn't going to hurt her. She doesn't trust the lightsaber.

That lack of trust is exactly the problem he's seeking to remedy. If she comes out without blocking a single shot but comfortable swinging the saber, it'll be a good start.

"I've got one modified as low as I can get it. Won't do more than sting." Trust him on that, he tried it out. Never let it be said Han Solo isn't dedicated.

"My son agreed to demonstrate."

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