For Rey

[startarebellion]

Training with Rey was one of Galen's favorite things to do. Using the Force had never been fun before, not like this. Yes there had been an element of pleasure when he had learned something new or accomplished a difficult task but it was rarely just because of a job well done. It was always tempered with the fact that he was glad it meant that Vader wasn't going to kill him.

Training with Rey wasn't like that at all. Mostly because Galen wasn't Vader and he was pretty sure that Rey knew he wasn't going to kill her if she failed. His strategy was more "let's try again" instead of threatening murder. It was, admittedly, a somewhat slower method but one that they both enjoyed. At times they were both learning together, exploring new areas of the Force that Galen's teachings hadn't really touched on, which was basically everything non-combat related.

Today though they were working on combat skills. Specifically they were working on defense. Rey had picked up everything he'd taught her quickly and as much as Galen would have liked to say that was because he was a talented teacher he knew that she was just innately gifted. Enough so that he didn't feel bad about surprising her now and then.

Once Rey had blindfolded herself, and Galen was satisfied that she really couldn't see, he stepped back from her and studied her. She was definitely ready for this, there was no reason for him to be worried or hesitate. That would be unfair to Rey and how hard she worked.

"So. The object of this lesson is... don't die," he said before pulling out a blaster and firing it at her.

Comments

[tobereckoned]

The problem with blaster fire was that Rey's instincts told her to dive out of the way rather than deflect it with her lightsaber. She heard it fire and she jumped, rolling away and then back up onto her feet, head cocked toward the faint whine of a blaster charging, of the exhaust. The lightsaber remained in her hand but turned off so she didn't have to listen over the hum of its blade.

"Just no playing dirty," she said, sarcastic behind the blindfold. As if anyone had ever learned anything by playing fair. As if anyone had ever played fair with them.

[startarebellion]

"Alright, fine," Galen said, slightly frustrated that she just rolled out of the way, but there was nothing wrong with doing that. If one person was shooting at you it was a perfectly reasonable response. But that's not what he was getting after here.

"No playing dirty," he added, even as he pulled out a second blaster. He justified it by figuring Rey could probably hear him drawing the weapon. "But those two diplomats that are behind you that you're supposed to protect? This time if you move their dead."

And with that, he fired again, this time with both blasters.

[tobereckoned]

Rey considered protesting since, first of all, the diplomats were imaginary and who in their right mind would assign her to protect them? But she knew that wasn't the point. The point was to be trained to react like a Jedi and not a scavenger. Scavengers were only beholden to themselves but Jedi might well have to protect diplomats. Maybe.

She could hear the draw of the second blaster and waited, lightsaber in hand but the blade not extended. It would put her reaction time to the test but she needed to be able to hear the bolts and she wouldn't be able to over the sound of the blade. As they fired, she used the nanoseconds to turn on her saber, swinging it in a wide arc.

[startarebellion]

"Stop using your other senses, Rey, use the Force," he chastised, seeing what she was doing. It wasn't that it was such a bad thing to do that but she should be able to rely completely on the Force for this sort of thing. As good as Rey was at picking all of this up sometimes the habits she already had caused her problems. They were very good habits that had kept her alive this long but she needed to unlearn them.

"You're never going to hear the sniper fire from hundreds of hard away."

[tobereckoned]

But her other senses were what had kept her alive, she wanted to protest. Then she reminded herself, once more, that she had to act like a Jedi, not a scavenger. She wasn't a scavenger anymore.

But the Force was so much harder to actually grasp sometimes. She'd gotten good at it when instincts kicked in, like when Poe's coffee had nearly spilled on her, but with the blindfold on it was too easy to imagine she was back on Jakku.

Jedi, not scavenger. She exhaled, tried to reach for that center inside herself, that pool of calm and raging power.

[startarebellion]

"That's it, find the center," he said, trying to make his voice as calm as possible. Meditation exercises definitely weren't his strong suit but he and Rey had practiced this sort of thing together enough that they were pretty good at helping the other person find the Force.

"It's just you and I here. No one is trying to hurt you but me," he reassured her before waiting a moment longer and then fired the blasters again.

[tobereckoned]

The funny thing was that it was reassuring. Rey was used to plenty of people trying to do her real harm, many of them at once with blasters, knives, or even just metal piping. In that respect, even fighting Kylo Ren had been a novelty; aside from his skill and lightsaber, he'd been her only opponent. She'd also hated him more.

The blasters fired and Rey reached out, trying to shield herself, her imaginary diplomats. She felt one blast sizzle past her ear but the second one hummed in midair.

"Did I...?" She braced for another shot.

[startarebellion]

"Only let one of them die? Yeah," Galen said, but his eyes were locked onto the blaster bolt that was frozen in mid air. That had been a very... interesting way to deal with that situation. It wasn't one that Galen would have thought of but Rey was creative with the Force, he had to give her that.

"And that's impressive, to catch a blaster bolt like that. How many do you think you can stop at once?" he asked, raising one of the blasters to ready another shot.

[tobereckoned]

"You'd think they would assign a more experienced Jedi if they're so important." She could feel the heat of the blaster bolt as it inched closer when she spoke, her concentration dropping a little. It had less to do with making the quip and more the realization of how she'd learned that trick.

"I...I saw it in someone's mind once," she said, humor draining out then.

[startarebellion]

Worried that she might get too distracted to handle the blaster bolt Galen reached out with the Force and pushed it to the side. Rey had already done the hard work so it was a relatively easy thing to do, especially since he was so used to working with the Force with her.

"Kyle Ren?" he asked as he walked over to her, not ready to continue just yet.

[tobereckoned]

"Kylo Ren," she said, exhaling heavily. Rey could hear Galen's steps as he approached and she let her stance relax, though her ear was still open just in case he thought they could train and talk at the same time. He'd tried to ransack her mind and she'd pushed back, found his fears and seen through his eyes. It had been sickening.

[startarebellion]

Kyle Ren, Kylo Ren, same thing. From everything Galen had heard about him he was a petulant child who played at being a Sith. The only problem was that meant he still hurt people, people like Poe and Rey.

"Rey, it's not your fault," he said, reaching out to place a hand on her arm. "You defended yourself."

[tobereckoned]

When he touched her arm, Rey relaxed and let herself pull the blindfold up her forehead. Training had, for the moment, lapsed. "I don't like the idea of doing things the way he did them," she said. "Ever since Poe said I shouldn't use the Force on people's minds. Not even a little." She'd thought about it so much since then, struggled with what was too much.

[startarebellion]

"Kylo Ren probably also drinks water to keep hydrated, you going to stop doing that?" Galen asked. It wasn't the same at all really but he thought it got his point across, or at least something close to his point. "And Imperials have killed people with fighters but I bet Poe still uses one. It doesn't have to be bad though. Here, give me your hand..."

Galen held up his own, fingers splayed apart so that if she was willing to she could interlock her fingers with his. This wasn't something he'd actually done before but he was pretty sure that it would be safe to do with Rey.

"I want to show you Proxy, my friend."

[tobereckoned]

"No, but..." Rey frowned and looked at Galen sidelong. He knew what she meant. "I don't want to use the Force the way he does. To hurt people." Galen knew that about her; it was something they'd talked about many times. She didn't know if she necessarily wanted to be a Jedi but she knew she wanted to be a good person, the opposite of the First Order.

"Okay." She reached out, twining their fingers. "Show me?"

[startarebellion]

"The Force, lightsabers, blasters, ships, even words can all be used to hurt people. It's the intention and purpose behind it that make it good or bad," Galen said softly, almost annoyed at himself for sounding so much like a Jedi. But the words were true and more than that he didn't want Rey hating herself or something she could do when he knew she was a good person.

"Alright, try to reach out to my mind," he told her, trying to ignore the little flutter he felt when she took his hand. "I'm going to think of a memory of Proxy for you to latch onto."

[tobereckoned]

Bit by bit, Rey had gotten used to noticing the Force of others as well as within herself. Everyone had it in small or large measures, its manifestations varying wildly in Darrow, but connecting with Galen through the Force was always a strange experience, simultaneously grounding and like getting a terrible static shock from the concentration of his abilities.

The memory was a peculiar one, obviously friendly but also weighted clearly with the droid's desire to kill Galen. That seemed, indeed to be very conflicted programming, but it was a statement a little later on that caught her memory.

"Vader's experiment?" she asked. She knew a little of Galen's history but had never heard him called anything like that.

[startarebellion]

"Vader trained me in secret," he said, gradually pulling out of the vision and reluctantly letting go of Rey's hand. He'd never touched someone else like that before and it was... nice. It was the sort of thing he could get used to, even if he shouldn't get used to it.

"I don't even know if the Emperor knew about me the entire time or not but I was supposed to be a secret to everyone. That was after the Emperor ordered him to kill me and he stuck a lightsaber in my back and threw me out into space. Then he had me patched back up in secret. I guess he told everyone I was his experiment."

[tobereckoned]

Rey's hand lingered in the air a moment, empty of Galen's touch, as if she expected him to hold her hand again. When he pulled back and lowered his hand, she reluctantly followed.

"That seems cruel, even for them," she said. Rey wondered then what would have happened if she'd accepted Kylo Ren's offer to be her teacher, if it would have been that hard, that cruel. Would it have molded her into that dark version of herself that she'd hated so much?

[startarebellion]

"The thing was... I wasn't even sure if it was cruel at the time. I thought it would maybe make me stronger," Galen admitted. It was almost pathetic but for a Sith, what almost killed you made you stronger, gave you more things to hate. It had definitely made him hate a lot more things, including Vader eventually.

"When I was ten I chained myself to a post and ordered Proxy to not feed me until I had completed my lightsaber. By that time I was... invested in the Sith philosophy."

[tobereckoned]

"You what?" Rey said, eyebrows knitting together. At that age, she'd starved plenty of times but that had never been by choice. She'd foregone food out of terrible necessity but never relinquished food for some kind of moral.

And not to be a Sith.

"You were indoctrinated," she guessed was more accurate.

[startarebellion]

"I thought it would force me to build my saber. Which it didn't, but I still learned a lot about myself and the Force from it," Galen said. Even now he had to admit that as brutal as Vader's training was it was highly effective. He'd taken on Jedi Masters which much more training and defeated them.

"And I probably was. All I really remember though was being terrified of failure and wanting him to be proud of me."

[tobereckoned]

"Was he?" Rey asked. Darth Vader's approval seemed to matter so much to so many people but Galen especially had reasons that someone like Kylo Ren didn't. The idea that he'd once been trained as a Jedi made it all that much worse, in Rey's estimation.

"I wish you didn't have to learn that way."

[startarebellion]

"No. Not anymore than you would be for a wrench working. You might be glad that it worked, but you're not really proud of it," Galen said. It was an incredibly hard truth to swallow and the first time he had ever admitted it out loud, which seemed to bring a different kind of pain.

"I don't know, it was effective. I defeated a lot of Jedi I probably wouldn't otherwise."

[tobereckoned]

She had expected that answer and thought she might take some vindication from it, some proof to feed to men like Kylo Ren. Instead, she only felt sad that someone like Galen had suffered so.

"I learned a lot about survival by almost starving or dehydrating to death," Rey said. "It was very effective. Doesn't mean I wish other people learned that way."

[startarebellion]

"True. And you'll notice I never tried to convince you to train that way," Galen said, giving her a small smile. Not that he would have ever suggested that Rey go without food for any reason but she knew that. Sometimes it was frustrating that he couldn't teach Rey the way he'd been taught, mostly because it meant a lesson or skill took longer to learn or develop but he never doubted that it was the right way. Or at least what they'd been figuring out together was a better way.

[tobereckoned]

"That's because you're a good man," Rey said, thinking he needed as much to hear it as she did to say it. What she knew of the Dark Side was that it offered simple answers to complicated things that could not be solved simply. Suffering made strength, denial made discipline, and so on. Rey had suffered because she had no choice and she knew that there was little improvement to be gained from it, at least for her.

"We'll do this without anyone starving or getting hurt just for its own sake."

[startarebellion]

"I'm trying to be," he said. Galen wasn't sure if he was quite there yet. He hadn't killed anyone since arriving at Darrow, which was probably the longest he'd ever gone since he could really remember. That being the standard for "good person" though wasn't very good.

"Can I- can I show you one more memory?" he asked, holding up his hand.

[tobereckoned]

Trying, Rey thought, was probably the most important step. It had been for her and for Finn and while she thought of herself as all right, working toward more, she thought that Finn was one of the best and kindest people she knew. And he'd been a Stormtrooper.

Taking his hand, Rey nodded to Galen. "Of course."

[startarebellion]

"It's of my father. Well, a hologram of my father. In the Jedi Temple," he said. Closing his eyes he curled his fingers around her hand and gave it a small squeeze to reassure himself. He'd never even talked about this with anyone else, let alone showed them. Taking a deep breath he cleared his mind and tried to remember the brief encounter.

That vision though brought on another, one he'd done his best to repress and forget. It was the last time he saw his father alive. All the anger, the helplessness, the fear, all of it came flooding back to him. Galen could feel the Dark Side reaching, grasping at him, promising to turn that pain into the power to do something about it.

"No," he whispered, gritting his teeth. He wouldn't give in, not this time, not ever again. He pushed back at the feelings, at the vision itself. Out of instinct he thought of something else, something to take his mind off of all the pain. Like he always did he thought about Rey; about a time when they just laid on top of the Falcon and stared up at the stars and he'd told her about all the worlds he thought she would like to visit. He thought about when she smiled at him and how that made him feel good, like he could do anything. He thought about when she'd done nothing more than just put her hand on his arm and told him he wasn't alone and that had meant everything in the world to him.

[tobereckoned]

Looking into those memories, Rey couldn't tell whose emotions she felt, Galen's or her own. She saw his father and felt the depth of the void when she tried to remember her own parents, the safety she'd found with people like Finn and Han. It blended together and she could feel so much of it through the both of them. The Force had affected so much of their own destinies and left them without answers at times.

Then his memory shifted and so did Rey's. It took her back to the corridor on Takodana, the one that lit up full of half-remembered pieces. Men surrounding her, one coming to grab her, his body going limp as it was speared through by a the unstable blade of a red lightsaber. She remembered a ship flying away from Jakku as she screamed and screamed not to be left behind.

Galen's fear, their pain, all of it twisted together and Rey wanted to break their grip but she couldn't. Everything happened too much, weighty with the memory of death until her mind was quiet. Or Galen's mind was quiet. She saw herself then, through his eyes, felt what he felt, smiled when he did.

The surprise of all of it left her wrenching back, breathing hard. "Did you...did you see...?"

[startarebellion]

Galen had never felt anything like this, being able to share memories and visions like that, all of the trauma and pain that Rey felt came flooding over him. To Galen those sorts of things were emotions that even if he didn't deal with them properly were familiar. The vision though seemed to have caught Rey off guard and the pain of it all slammed into her.

"I did," he told her, once they had pulled themselves out of the memories.

[tobereckoned]

"I'm sorry," she said, letting her legs fold under herself so that she could sit in the grass. "I'm sorry." It was hard to say where the words were aimed: the shock of all those powerful emotions or at Galen's childhood.

"How old were you?" Maybe it wasn't right to ask but he'd still been so small, maybe even smaller than when Rey had been left to fend for herself on Jakku.

[startarebellion]

"Hey, it's alright. I'm here, you're not alone," Galen said, kneeling down next to her. He hesitated for a moment before he leaned forward and pressed his forehead to Rey's, wanting her to know that she was connected, that someone was here and wasn't going to leave her. Galen would never leave Rey if he could help it.

"I don't know. Two, maybe three. I don't actually know how old I am. What about you?"

[tobereckoned]

She could feel him, not just in the skin to skin contact but in the Force. This close, it flowed through both of them so obviously that she wondered how she could ever have ignored its power.

"Four, maybe five," she said. "I don't remember any of my life before Jakku, except what you just saw."

[startarebellion]

Galen didn't think he could remember back much further than that really either, the only difference is that there wasn't any mystery in what his life was like before that, at least there hadn't been until he learned about his father. Rey must have so many questions, most of them were ones she probably didn't even know who could tell her the answers to.

"I'm sorry. I hope you get to find out one day. I can tell how... unpleasant that is for you."

[tobereckoned]

Rey dredged up enough humor to smile at him, shaking her head. "Unpleasant is about the nicest thing you could say about Jakku." She knew it wasn't really what he meant but deflecting a little helped pull her back into the present, responding, teasing, acting like the woman she was now instead of the scared child she'd been.

[startarebellion]

"Jakku, the Falcon... you've called some interesting places home," he said, giving her a small smile back. "Interesting" was also one of those things that was a nice way of putting it but he'd long since stopped being amazed at how crummy the Falcon was. It was home for Rey and because she liked it then Galen liked it too.

[tobereckoned]

"Interesting?" Rey asked, smiling at the hidden implications of his word choice. The Falcon was garbage; she'd known that a lot time. The difference was that it was her garbage (well, Han's too). It was garbage that flew and garbage that had kept Finn and Han Solo and Chewbacca in her life. That was what made it home.

"That's a very nice word."

[startarebellion]

"It's starting to grow on me," Galen said. Not that he spent a lot of time around the ship. He and Han rubbed each other the wrong way and while he could fly and do very basic repairs on things Rey could run circles around him on both things. There wasn't much of a point for him to be there to actually help. She didn't even need him to hand her things since she could do that with the Force.

"It makes me think of you."

[tobereckoned]

He was kind to the Falcon at least in part for her sake but Rey didn't mind. When Galen came by, they traded comments about the beat up old ship because the Falcon was due her fair share of teasing, as long as he stopped really meaning it.

Sitting there in the grass with Galen warm next to her, Rey felt suddenly heavy and tired. "Just this once, can we end training a little early?"

[startarebellion]

"Sure, I think that's a good idea," he said with a nod. They hadn't accomplished what he'd been hoping to but that was fine. They could learn that another day. What they did do felt far more significant and important than learning to deflect blaster bolts.

"I'd say that we earned it."