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The moment Padmé opened her eyes, she knew something was off.
Actually, it was before she even opened her eyes. She knew something was off by the sheer idea that she opened her eyes rather than had them jerked open in some reaction to an alarm going off, a scream, a shout, a wail, little hands knocking on her door, or her husband’s groaning that accompanied his thundering footsteps, with two sets of lighter thundering footsteps following behind him.
But today… She was awake on her own. In her own bed. In silence. Alone.
Padmé quickly turned herself over and stretched out with both her arms and legs in search of the warm skin that would normally be spilling into her side of the bed and felt… nothing.
She gripped the sheets in her hand and dragged herself across them to grab her phone before flopping back onto her back. It wasn’t even early. Or not early enough to expect to be alone and childless, snoozing away like it were years ago and she was on some kind of summer vacation.
Nothing good came from peaceful quiet in her house. That much was true long before they even had children. Hell, it wasn’t something she found comfort in when it was just her husband’s silence. The Skywalkers were not meant for a life where they weren’t free to be loud, expressive, and…
And this was too suspicious for her to stay in the bed a moment longer.
With all the energy she could round up in herself within the first five minutes of being awake, she stood up and shuffled across the floor to slide her feet into her slippers. A nagging feeling in her core told her that whatever mischief had prompted her children’s silence was also to blame for Anakin’s.
She hastily grabbed his robe off the back of their door—another unbelievable note to add to her collection of unlikely scenarios—and wrapped it around her body while she tucked her hair behind her ears.
“…Anakin?” she called out, taking a single, hesitant step into the hallway. “Luke? Leia?”
Nothing.
She’d even braced for it. When her husband watched the video feed from their security camera, she could already hear his laughter over seeing her waiting for them to jump out and startle her. She was positioned like someone had dropped her into a bad spy movie.
What the hell.
She made her way down the hall to her children’s room but only found it empty with two small beds perfectly made and no clothes strewn across the floor in ‘twin tornado’ style when dad was in charge of fashion.
Was it her birthday and she’d forgotten? Their anniversary? Mother’s Day?
All of her days blended together so well at times, it could have easily been and she would be none the wiser. Which would give an explanation. Anakin planned for her dad to get the kids. Perhaps Obi-Wan had volunteered. And then she could assume Anakin had gone out for breakfast that he was on his way home to bring her any second now. He would meet her while she was still in bed, gently shake her from her sleep, and feed her quarters of strawberry like she was still in college and he was desperate to impress her.
She pressed her palm against her forehead. Maybe she was still dreaming.
But if not that, then what was the explanation?
A soft thud stole her attention from beyond the walls of the room she was in. A thud she had memorized. The sound of her daughter’s two feet hitting the ground at the same moment when she slid free from a chair she perched herself on at breakfast. So, at least one other person in the house was alive and awake. But wherever Leia went, the men of the house were typically not far behind.
Padmé wandered her way back to her bedroom and, in the few moments she still had for plausible deniability, got dressed for the day. She threw her hair into a clip at the back of her head, chose the loosest lounge clothes she could find, and decided to figure out what the remaining Skywalkers were getting into.
She could’ve taken the remainder of the day and it wouldn’t have prepared her for the reality when she made it to the bottom of the stairs.
The three of them were all crowded around the center of the dining room table. Luke sat across from Anakin, with his elbows on his legs and his face propped up with his hands, and Leia sat between them, leaning forward too far for Padmé’s comfort while the chair wobbled. The three of them were fixated on some central object that she almost didn’t want to know about anymore. If their final stair didn’t have that horrible creak, she could turn around…
“Good morning, Mama,” Anakin said without so much as twitching in her direction.
“Morning Mama,” and another similar greeting with a yawn attached to it followed Anakin’s but not a single head turned.
“Good morning, all three of you. What… Exactly are you doing?”
“Winning,” Luke said confidently. “Leia lost already.”
The apparent truth of the matter snapped her daughter’s concentration as she hopped down from the chair again and ran over to hug Padmé’s legs.
“Mommy!”
“Leia!” Padmé lifted her up and tucked her against her hip. “What did you lose?”
“A game,” she said with a shrug. “But it's a dumb game.”
“Dumb ‘cause you lost!” Luke said. Anakin shook his head and Luke parroted the gesture.
Padmé brushed flyaways from her daughters face, smoothing a hand over her hair before kissing her forehead. “Does someone want to tell me about the game? Or…” She stepped closer, peering over her husband’s back in an attempt to see what occupied their attention. “Or why no one is actually looking at me this morning?”
“Can’t. Gotta focus,” Anakin said quickly. “You’re a distraction.”
“Oh, and I love you, too,” she replied with a scoff. “Fine. If no one wants to tell me then just forget I asked and I’ll take myself back to bed. And Leia can join me since she’s no longer playing.”
Leia’s face brightened, her hands tightening around the fabric of Padmé’s shirt. “Really? Can we stay there all day?”
“Maybe! Depends on how long whatever Daddy and Luke are doing lasts.” She carried Leia around to the fridge, grabbing the glass jar with her regular morning parfait in it. “For now, though… Guess you and me are just going to snuggle in and watch a movie.”
Leia cheered in her ear before wrapping her arms around her neck and squeezing tight. “Movies! Movies!”
“Of course! I was thinking we could rewatch Toy Story, or… Monsters—”
“Monsters, Inc?!” Luke shouted, immediately stealing her attention away from her daughter’s beaming smile when his fist hit the table softly. “I wanna watch, too!”
“Aha!” Anakin exclaimed with a snap of his fingers, pointing one at their son. “Dad wins again!”
Luke’s brow furrowed, his lip jutting out and quivering just enough to fool a bystander but not either of his parents. Especially not Padmé, someone who was beyond accustom to another Skywalker’s familiar pout.
“That’s not fair…” he grumbled, crossing his arms against his chest. “Mama ruined the game.”
Leia hummed in her ear, twisting to rest her face against Padmé’s shoulder while Padmé dug a spoon out of the drawer for her breakfast.
“Told you. Dumb game,” Leia murmured, under her breath and not helping the frustration in Luke’s features at all.
Anakin rolled his eyes, backing his chair away from the table and snatching Luke off the tabletop so quickly he squealed. “You two are just like Mama, I swear.”
She quirked an eyebrow. “And what does that mean, exactly?”
“It means…” he started, tucking Luke underneath his arm like a football. The both of them wandered over to her and Anakin dropped a kiss to the top of her head. “Not important. Just that I am the reigning champion in this house!”
“Of what?” she asked, exasperated. Moving the opposite direction from her husband and son back around the counter, she stopped by the edge of the table in total disbelief. “You have to be kidding me.”
In the center of the table, she now saw what had captured her entire family’s interest. And it only left her with more questions than answers. A large sheet of paper, with multi-colored swirls and other finger-painted blobs of color scattered across it, sat there, curling at the edges as if the paint weren’t quite dry.
“Do I even want to know?”
Leia shook her head before burying it against Padmé’s neck again. “Daddy can say!”
“Daddy?” she asked, turning back toward Anakin.
“We—I—wanted to give you a morning to rest, so… I invented a game! We all took turns painting something and I challenged these two to not look away until the paint was completely dry!”
Padmé snorted. Oh, it made sense now. What had made her so deeply suspicious was just his attempts at giving her peace. In the most ridiculous fashion ever, but that was her husband, after all.
“You challenged these two to stay focused on a single sheet of paper just to let me sleep? How did you manage that?”
“Well…”
“Tell her about the charms, Daddy!” Luke said, his head still facing the opposite direction.
“The charms?”
“Lucky Charms!”
Leia tapped a soft finger against her chest. “Daddy said if we won, we could have the charms.”
“And not the yucky pieces!” Luke said, backing up Leia’s telling of events.
“Really? Did he now? Just the marshmallows and none of the cereal?”
Anakin smiled sheepishly, a faint red brushing his cheeks. “But let’s not ignore the reason Dad would ever make such a promise! Really, we just wanted to do something nice for Mama. It was never really about the Lucky Charms! Isn’t that right, you two?”
“No!” they both exclaimed in unison, causing Padmé to burst into laughter. That was the most believable thing she’d seen or heard all morning.
“Well, even if you were alone in your efforts… I did appreciate it. Though waking up in a silent house was only comforting until I realized, then I just wondered what had happened to the three of you.”
Anakin turned Luke over in his arms to hold against his chest before strolling back over to her side. “Truth is… The game just lasted way longer than I expected. Underestimated how powerful those little marshmallows are.”
She nodded, lips pressed together to conceal her smile. “More and more, my day is returning to normal. I wouldn’t expect anything less. But… Now that the game is over, and both my babies seemed to have lost… Does anyone still want to watch a movie?”
Luke and Leia both squirmed from their places in their parents arms, small hands stretching into the air followed by a chorus of yes’s and pleases’s and me, me, me’s. Why not extend her lazy morning just a while longer? With her own sweet lucky charms surrounding her, too.