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

(He wouldn't have had to leave home to take up racing. Han prefers to fly but he knows his way around a speeder, and even if he'd worried he'd have been there at the sidelines, cheering. Solo men love a little danger.)

"If that was bigger--" he says, the approving tone and nod ought to finish it. "How do you feel?"

Like he's learning? Tired of running?

Well, one of them doesn't think that he's failing miserably. That's helpful.

"Like I wouldn't win in a fair blaster fight." This comes out as a statement of fact rather than an irritated pout. "Will you throw another?"

Winning the fight isn't always the purpose. That's probably good enough to gain some distance, and for the foreseeable future all of them are on the run. All in all this is going pretty well. Ben is game to give it another try, so why quit now?

He nods, takes in a deep breath. "Keep running. But slow down a little."

It's going well enough that he thinks he can keep pace and toss a few, one at a time. The movement's more important than the speed, and he doesn't want to be too far from the ship. Plus he hasn't got the stamina he used to, but he'd rather not admit to that part.

Gaining some distance would be a novel tactic. He fights until he accomplishes his goal, whether that goal is killing the enemy or something else; running away is not something he does.

Except now, apparently. Running from the First Order, running from Snoke. There are other things he's running from, too, but they aren't physical threats and he refuses to acknowledge that they even exist.

He nods and doesn't even make a snide comment about the old man looking tired. Shooting rocks is the most serious of business and serious business leaves no room for being snide. He takes off at a slower pace, determined to succeed at this exercise before stopping.

This is probably not a normal family bonding experience, but it does the trick anyway. Even a snide comment would probably come across as good-natured, under the circumstances.

Taking a sharp breath, he chases after, tossing one stone after another, hanging back just a little. It's hard to keep much of an eye on the proceedings when he's watching where he's going, but he trusts Ben to gauge his own success.

Running's not so bad.

It's perfectly normal. It's just like playing catch in the backyard, but with guns.

By the time Ben decides that he's done with this exercise, he has only managed to nick one rock. Most shots were close, though, and he's fairly confident in his ability to at least look like he knows what he's doing with a blaster. He stops, a little out of breath, and looks back at his father.

"That's enough." He runs a hand through his disheveled hair and lets the blaster hang at his side. "I won't master this today."

At least he can admit it.

Looking like he knows is more than half the battle. It's funny to think anyone would have to teach the Master of the Knights of Ren to look intimidating, but it's a question of the right sort of intimidation. Not fear me, just don't try me. It's a careful balance; he can't afford getting a reputation, but he needs to pass as the sort of man who might have one.

"You won't," he agrees. Han is more worn-down by the exertion, and he stoops a little, obviously breathing hard. He's not a young man, sometimes it's all too obvious. "But for a man who's never had to shoot that's not bad."

Mild praise, maybe, but there's a lot of genuine pride to back it up.

Don't try me has always gone without saying. Comes along with well-established fear. Ben could use a few lessons in not walking around like he expects everyone to bow to his whims.

Not that bad is going to have to be good enough, as much as it displeases him to be mediocre at something that he's making an attempt at. He gives his father a curious look and tilts his head. "Were you going to keep throwing rocks until you dropped?"

He just needs to learn to strike a balance between expecting everyone to bow to his whims and making it clear he doesn't plan to cater to theirs. No big deal. Just a total change in how he interacts with the world around him.

"I'm fine," he says gruffly. Admitting to his own weaknesses is not Han's favorite thing in the world. And really, he's out of breath but not that badly off.

(Worse, though, than he wants to say. There's a twinge in his side that seems new, until he realizes it's probably the rib he broke back on that job with Kitty.)

Bigger miracles have been pulled off. Recently, in fact.

"You're old." Not a cruel reply, but a blunt one. That isn't all of it, though; he's become very good at picking up weaknesses, with and without the force. "What else is it?"

It just seems a bit unlikely. Fortunately, Han Solo has never given a damn about the odds.

"You got it. I'm old." What did you think would happen over fifteen years, Ben? It's not only children that change. It's not like that's the only injury he's gotten in the course of a rather rough life... Just more recent than most.

"Just have to catch my breath."

"I didn't imagine you growing older," he says, and it's a perfectly stupid thing to say, but he didn't. He was still young enough to see his parents as these ageless figures who wouldn't change when his back was turned.

Absent context it does sound ridiculous; that's the nature of time, after all. Han straightens up, hand instinctively moving to rest above that twinge in his side. Of course he's gotten older. With how he left, Han assumes Ben didn't think of them at all. Not often, at least, or with much besides anger.

But he's gotten old. So has Ben. Even if you try, you can't always imagine it.

"Happens to the best of us," he murmurs. There's not much humor to the joke. He doesn't just mean growing old.

That assumption isn't far off base. Kylo Ren thought very little about where he came from for years (and occasionally killed people who saw fit to remind him). His life as Ben Solo froze in place. Everything else moved forward.

He sets his blaster down, still looking at his father. "What else changed?" He doesn't just mean growing old, either.

What didn't change? He lost a son. That's the sort of thing you don't just get over, even if lost doesn't mean dead. And for most purposes, anyway, that is what it meant; the First Order isn't the only group that benefits from keeping his identity secret.

"What do you want to know?"

He doesn't know where to begin.

He doesn't know where to begin, either. This is the first time he's stopped to think about what went on while he was submersed in the world of the First Order. It didn't even occur to him to ask his mother many questions about what has taken place in the last decade and a half.

"What happened to you?" It's a vague question. How did his parents react to losing Ben Solo? Leia implied that Han had made himself scarce; what was he doing in all of that time?

"After you left?"

It sounds like an accusation. He doesn't mean it as one, but it sounds like it. He shakes his head, slightly.

"We tried to track you down a while." He shrugs. "Spent longer and longer away, and when I came home..."

It had been different. Difficult. He never felt like he could get his feet under him, and there was little to talk about with Leia but their loss. Their grief; they blamed themselves so much they could hardly look at each other. It felt like that, anyway.

"So we went back to what we were good at. Few years back Ducain stole the Falcon, been looking for it since."

It all sounds so simple and neat, laid out like that. He's not sure he wants to put all the weight of their heartbreak on Ben.

"I didn't leave. You sent me away." That was an accusation, albeit one without much fire behind it. He knows that Han is talking about after that, and leaving doesn't even begin to encompass what happened then.

His father's grief in the present is undeniable and heavy. His mother's had been, as well. He's coming to accept that his actions had very real effects on them—something that he knew at some level, but rejected to keep the narrative he'd created for his early life intact. They loved him and they mourned him. They hadn't wanted him to go.

He's been lying to himself for a long time.

"You and Chewbacca went back to smuggling." Leia went back to fighting in the arena in which she was the most at home and Luke disappeared. He broke the entire family. "If you had found me, you wouldn't have liked what you found."

Losing him broke the family. Snoke taking him from them broke the family. That's the way Han looks at it; maybe it's as biased as Ben's own memories of the events.

"Maybe we shouldn't have."

He's thought it. Leia said as much, but it's different, saying it aloud himself. At the time he'd thought it, on and off, but Ben was so torn; it was too much for a boy, for anyone, to handle. Maybe he should've fought harder, but he didn't know what else to suggest.

"It was the hardest thing we ever did. If we hadn't thought it would help--"

And it was Luke, it wasn't as though they sent him off to some stranger. Luke had loved Ben as much as they did. There weren't better hands he could be in, they'd thought.

He can't think himself as someone who was taken. That makes him a victim, not someone who, when torn between opposing forces, sought refuge in the one that better suited him. There was Snoke, but Snoke's thoughts were so much a part of his early on that he can't identify where they end and his own begin.

Han regrets sending him away. He isn't lying, and his sincerity continues to challenge what Ben thought was true, just as it has since they reentered each other's lives.

"I don't remember hesitation on your part." Hadn't they been relieved to send him to Luke? He was a threat. They saw his affinity for the dark side. "I remember you being afraid of what I would do if I wasn't controlled."

"We needed you to believe it'd help." Of course the hesitation, the long conversations, the arguments for and against were out of sight. Ben was just a little boy, and it was bad enough he had to suffer the effects of his uncontrolled connection to the Force; they couldn't expect him to solve it without guidance, without support. "You loved Luke."

By now he's got his breath back. He takes a step closer, just because this doesn't feel like the kind of conversation that wants distance.

"Do you remember what it was like before you left? Bad dreams most nights, you couldn't walk by kids fighting without getting worked up yourself. Damn right we were afraid. Of what it'd do to you, if you couldn't get a handle on it."

It had been too much for anyone. Far too much for a child.

"I loved Luke." That's not something that he doubts, but repeating it makes it more immediate and not like a thing that was true too long ago to be relevant now. He'd had to distance himself from his attachment to his uncle. The end goal was to eliminate the last of the Jedi, and that was him. Everything had been building up to that.

Kylo Ren wouldn't have been able to do it. His hatred towards Luke hadn't been kindled as carefully as the hate he had for his father.

"I remember." He doesn't move closer even though there's a draw to do so. His father had been more patient than anyone might believe possible, especially where the nightmares were concerned. Those things are still true—bad dreams, getting worked up right along with others. More controlled, but still there and with no one to calm him down.

A lot of the things that he thinks he remembers don't support each other. It's not enough to be torn between the light side and the dark side anymore, apparently. Now his memories are going to unravel, too.

That makes him move. He steps closer and reaches out to put a hand on Han's shoulder, actively seeking that connection.

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.

His memories of those stories have fogged but they're still there, worn in by multiple retellings. They were good stories, most of them, and sometimes they would reappear as dreams and keep nightmares at bay. What mattered most, though, was that his father was there and telling them, whenever he really needed him. Ben had felt safe then. Leia was the one who could soothe and help him understand his emotions, but Han provided safety in the dark.

Safety in the dark. Is that why Snoke needed him to hate his father so violently—because the man was the embodiment of security when Ben was a child? Was killing him supposed to destroy all possibility of that safety returning?

"I believe you." The reply is slow and careful, like the words are difficult to say and impossibly fragile. This is a revelation.

Sometimes they were awful stories, but at least they always ended well. Already Ben has dredged up some of them; the game that won the Falcon, a perennial favorite of both of theirs, almost always guaranteed to have Ben nodding off before the final hand was played. So often it felt like there was so little he could do for their son, but they had that.

In spite of everything it had been so hard to send him away. Han had never like to think of it that way, not away; he was with family, it seemed like the safest place he could be. They truly hadn't seen any other option; couldn't ask Like to come to them, after all, not when he was trying to live his own life and rebuild the Jedi. Even before Ben turned there had been nights when they fought about him being gone, not blaming each other but themselves, bitter and lonely and worried. Maybe it's no wonder how they grew apart after.

Wordlessly he grabs Ben's other shoulder to pull him in for an embrace, something in him crumbling. Part of Han is desperate for forgiveness he can't ask after, for him and Leia both. For not doing better, somehow. For how things went. He's not sure what to call it, but Ben believing they tried their hardest is the first bit of salve on an old, still-raw wound.

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

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