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“Jacen, Jaina and Anakin Solo! I’m only going to say this once,” Mom glares. “You don’t put frogs in people’s caf under any circumstances. Understand?”
“But, Mom, we -”
“Mom, we didn’t -”
“Mommy, you don’t -”
“Understand?”
“Yes, Mom,” they chorus, dejected, little shoulders dropping. “We understand.”
“Good,” she nods, her hands on her hips and a stern look on her face, even though Jasa swore he saw her giggle at Mr Horm’s quite horrified expression when the frog in his caf mug jumped. “Anyone want to explain to me why you did what you did?”
“We can’t tell you,” Jacen says seriously. “It’s too horrible.”
“Absolutely disgusting,” Jaina agrees.
“Desbicable,” Nik says, nodding along very solemnly.
“It’s called despicable,” Jasa rolls his eyes before Jaina can correct little Nik nicely.
“Oh yeah? If you’re so smart, why do you get bad marks at Basic? Huh? I have better marks than you do!”
“That’s because you’re younger than me!” cries Jasa, offended. “Jaya, tell ‘im he can’t compare himself to us because he’s younger and doing easier stuff at school!”
“He’s right, buddy,” Jaina grimaces when Nik’s lower lip wobbles. “You’ll see when you’re older, though.”
“I’m old enough, stop treating me like a little kid -”
“But you are a little kid, Anakin -”
“You take that back!”
“Children!” Mom cuts in. “Stop it with the bickering. You sound like your father!” - there’s a grin in there somewhere, Jaina can tell - “Now. One at a time. What happened?”
“You go first,” Jasa nudges her because she always goes first.
“Well,” Jaina starts, trying to sound very diplomatic and very adult-like, like Mom in the Senate. “What we did, Jasa, Nick ‘n me, it might seem a bit… uncalled for.”
“Really?” Mom raises an eyebrow, obviously unimpressed. “Do tell.”
“Well,” Jasa says, scratching the back of his neck. “As you might know, Mr Horm is a bituva…”
“Jerk!” Nik suggests, ever helpful.
“As I was saying,” Jaina shoots Nik a sharp look. “Mr Horm is an, uh… acquired taste sort of… person.”
Uncle Luke once said it about one politician or the other and she figures, if Uncle Luke got away with saying it, it must be an okay thing to say. She’s not sure what it means, not exactly or completely, but it sounded fancy and if she’s learned anything from politics, it’s that when you’re in trouble, you gotta use big words and confuse your opponent for long enough for you to run away. Or something.
“Acquired taste?” Mom repeats. “Alright. I understand that. Still, what possessed you to spike his caf with a living being?”
“Well,” says Jasa, sounding like he’s discovered a great big secret and is about to unveil it to them. “It’s actually a funny story.”
“Yeah,” Nik says. “We’ve been laughin’ ‘bout it the whole day, haven’t we?”
“Yeah,” Jaina says. “Come on Jasa, tell her.”
“No,” Jasa scrunches up his face. “I thought you would tell her.”
“No, you tell her.”
“No, you went first!”
“No, you obviously -”
“Kids -”
“He was bein’ a real meanie to Dad!” Nik bursts. “There, I said it.”
“He was?” Mom’s eyes grow impossibly soft, like she might’ve known but didn’t wanna believe it and now she looks sad, sad that they had to hear that. “What did he say?”
“Y’know,” Jasa shrugs. “The usual. That Dad’s no good, that he’s scruffy and ‘a dent in the crown of New Alderaani society’ or somethin’.”
“Excuse me?”
“Right?” Jaina agress. “So, what I wanted t’say to him was: ‘You don’t know my Dad! You don’t know what you’re talking about, you big old meanie!’”
“But… you didn’t.”
“Right,” Jasa confirms. “’N then Nik said we couldn’t just let him talk about our Dad that way. We had to do something.”
“Lucky for us,” Nik grins cheekily, the gaps in his teeth showing. “We had Lorn to help us out.”
“Lorn?” Mom blinks. “As in, the frog?”
Three voices: “Yes.”
“You spiked Horm’s caf with Lorn because he spoke badly about your father?”
Three voices: “Yes.”
“How’d you get the frog in the first place?”
“Well,” says Jaina. “You see, today we were at the pond with dad and…”
(Coruscant’s awfully hot in the summer, with all the tall buildings and the sun burning down on concrete Jaina always feels like her feet’ll sink into the ground. There’s no nature to be seen anywhere. There’s not much room to breathe on this planet at all and the air smells weird, like it’s dying or really sick, which makes Jaina miss Yavin and the jungle, the soft grass and mud and crystal clear water; Dad, she can tell, does too.
“Kids,” Dad said earlier. “Pack your beach bags. We’re goin’ swimming.”
They’ve been swimming before, in bigbig blue swimming pools that smelled like chemicals, but this, this is a pond in a sphere-thing - Jaina doesn’t remember what it’s actually called - so high up in the sky the speeders look like little animals crawling all over Coruscant. She’s never seen anything more, for the lack of better word, wizard than this and yeah, she’s excited. Afternoons with Dad are the best, even if he doesn’t braid her hair as well as Mom.
“Da-ad,” Nik calls, his floaties squeaking as he flails his arms. “Come here.”
“What is it, buddy?”
“Look,” Nik points at a tiny green creature sitting on a stone. “It’s so slimy and cool.”
“Ah,” Dad says wisely. “That’s a frog.”
The three of them let out a quiet ‘Whoa’. “You’ve never seen a frog before?”
“Yeah, we have!” Jasa says. “In school.”
Dad frowns like he wants to say That doesn’t count, because it really doesn’t, does it, and Dad’s been against living on Coruscant from the start anyway, so maybe if they could’ve stayed with Uncle Luke on Yavin seeing frogs would be a regular Thing. But Mom’s got her duties and Dad’s got his duties and they’ve got some friends here, so nothing’s as bad as it could be, theoretically, which is a word Mom uses.
“Alright,” he says. “I’ll get it for you. But you have to be real quiet so we don’t scare it away!”
“We promise,” Jasa whispers on the behalf of her and Nik, looking at his two siblings for confirmation.
Dad steps into the pond really carefully, on his tip-toes, and Jaina tries really hard not to giggle because Dad is the bestest, really, but he’s also really tall and big and larger than life, and is tip-toeing won’t make the frog notice him any less.
When Nik giggles, Dad turns around and dramatically presses a finger to his lips to shush him. He falls silent when Jasa clamps a hand over his mouth.
Dad really is the coolest, Jaina thinks, especially with an actual frog in his warm hands, a scar going down his tan knuckles where its head if peeking out, big round eyes looking right through them.
“Wizard!” Jasa gasps, inspecting the dark green creature with the long legs and shiny skin.
“Why is it so slimy?” Jaina wonders, scrunching up her face.
“So it doesn’t dry out in the heat,” Dad replies and squats down to their eye level. Dad knows things like that; Dad’s been to every corner of the galaxy, seen everything and everyone. Of course he’d know why frogs are slimy. “Wanna hold it?” he asks, offering them his hands.
“I wanna!” Nik volunteers. Dad passes it to him gingerly, looking very concentrated, and Nik lets out a quiet sigh.
“Be real careful with this frog,” Dad says and Jaina thinks that she never wants to let him down, ever. “It’s a living being. Don’t hurt it.”
Nik nods, taking Dad very seriously, and says: “Its name is Lorn.”
“Where’d you get that name from?” Jasa groans. “It’s horrible!”
“You’re horrible,” Nik glares at him. “He just looked like a Lorn.”
Dad grins, his eyes crinkling at the sides, and Jaina thinks there’s nothing better than seeing Dad smile that smile, the kind that lights up his entire face and makes him look like a little kid. “Alright, buddy. Lorn it is.”)
“Your father got you a frog and you took it home with you - without him knowing, I take it?” Mom crosses her arms over her chest and purses her lips.
Nik looks down guiltily. “I mean…”
“It was for the better, though!” Jasa jumps in. “Wasn’t it, Jaya?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess it was,” she admits. “We really showed that Horm guy!”
“Yeah, we did!” Nik puffs out his chest. “And all because of Lorn!”
Mom doesn’t really look mad anymore – she didn’t in the first place, now that Jaina thinks about it, at least not at them. “You shouldn’t have taken the frog from its home,” she says. “Frogs need moisture to survive. This was very irresponsible of you.”
“We didn’t mean to do anything bad,” Jaina says, shoulders sagging. “We just didn’t… know.”
“We’ll go to the pond after dinner and put Lorn back, alright?”
“Yes, Mom,” they chorus.
“Alright,” she repeats. “Horm talked badly about your father this evening?”
“Yeah,” Jasa says. “’N you always taught us to stand up to bullies but Dad wasn’t there to do it for himself, so we did it for him.”
(”My shirt is scratchy,” Nik pouts and tries to loosen the collar of the fancy dress shirt Mom likes so much. He’s whiny when he’s tired, but Jaina can’t really blame him.
“Mine too,” Dad says and it’s kind of comforting that he hates these dinner things as much as they do. “But sometimes you just gotta grit your teeth and sit through it. We’re here to support Mom, okay? We can go home after dessert.”
“After dessert?” Jasa groans. “But we’re only on the first course!”
Jaina squirms in her seat and Nik looks like he’s about to fall asleep in his soup.
“Look,” Dad sighs. “You guys be nice and sit here and I’ll go talk to Mom and see what I can do.”
He wipes his mouth on a napkin and apologizes to the people next to them, very politely, and leaves them sitting next to Mon Mothma, who is their favourite politician after Mom, which is an honour. Most politicians are rotten and stuffy, but Ms Mothma is cool. She’s got big plants and lots of shiny stuff in her office, plaques and awards and trophies for godknowswhat, but it’s cool.
Mr Horm, a great big man with beady eyes and thin hair that’s greased to one side of his skull, scoffs as soon as Dad’s out of earshot. “Idiotic man.”
“I’m sorry, did you say something?” Ms Mothma smiles tightly. Jaina frowns; she doesn’t like the tone Mr Horm is using at all.
“Who’s he callin’ an idiot?” Jasa whispers to her, but Jaina is barely paying attention to him.
“Oh not at all,” Horm replies, raising a glass at her. “Wonderful evening, tonight.”
“Yes,” Ms Mothma says slowly, eyes narrowing. “Indeed.”
“I don’t think they like each other,” her twin brother concludes quietly.
“Really?” Jaina rolls her eyes. “You’re real smart.”
“It’s just that I warned Her Majesty Organa,” Horm says sharply and everyone’s paying attention to him now. “Marrying this no good, sorry excuse of a man was a bad idea, is all. We of New Alderaan have worked very hard to preserve what’s left of our community. Inviting strangers such as him into it – he’s a dent in the fine crown of our society, Mothma,” the caf in his hand spills over as he gesticulates, leaves a stain on his sleeve. He swears under his breath and grabs for the nearest napkin, dabbing at his robe.
Ms Mothma gives him a wry smile. “They call it karma in some parts of the galaxy.”
“If you’d excuse me,” he says, eyeing her with something Jaina can only describe as hate. “I have more pressing matters to attest to.”
He gets out of his chair, throws his napkin onto the table in a manner that makes Jaina think that his Mom didn’t raise him very well and stomps away. Ms Mothma is sitting there, looking kind of torn between yelling and biting her tongue so hard it falls off, and Jasa looks like someone smacked him.
“Why would he say something like that about our Dad?” he asks quietly, like he’s verging on tears but not really, because he needs to be strong now and besides, this is silly, this Horm man doesn’t matter anyway, because Dad is the bestest and they all know it.
Nik, who was very sleepy before, looks wide awake now. “D’you – d’you remember when we said we’d help everyone in the galaxy?” he furrows his eyebrows.
“When we said nobody should ever get hurt.”
“Yeah,” says Jaina. “’course I remember.”
“I think,” Nik continues, looking alarmingly like their Mom when he’s speaking like this, all slow and calm, like there’s a storm brewing inside his head and he’s about to say something brilliant. “I think we should start with Dad, and I know just how to do it.”
He scoots down on his chair and digs around in his pocket; Jasa looks at her for a moment quizzically. Jaina shrugs her shoulders, mouthing ‘Don’t know’, and turns her attention back to Nik, who’s holding up – stang, is that – oh no, Mom’ll kill them if she finds out –
A croak comes from under the table.
“Nik!” Jasa exclaims, eyes wide and mouth agape. Several heads turn. “Nik,” he repeats, quieter, blush creeping up on his neck. “You brought him with you?”
“I thought Lorn deserved company,” Nik shrugs. “The pond seemed awful lonely, don’t you think?”
“Maybe Lorn has a family,” Jaina says. “Maybe there’s a whole family of Lorn’s out there! Maybe he has babies!”
“We’ll investigate,” says Jasa matter-of-factly. “But first – what does Lorn have anything to do with us defending Dad’s honour?”
“Defending Dad’s honour?” Jaina snorts. “Did you hear that in Aunt Mara’s holodramas?”
“No,” Jasa glares. “I, not like you, am an eductated person and –“
“Oh shut up,” Jaina rolls her eyes. Jasa’s about to say something – Jasa can’t ever shut up for the life of him – but she beats him to it: “Go on, Nik.”
“Right,” says the littlest of them. “I think we should, the three of us, put Lorn in Horm’s caf cup.”
“Why’d we do that?” Nik frowns. “Won’t Lorn get burned if we put him in caf?”
“Not if there’s no caf in the cup,” Jaina thinks out loud. “But how are we gonna get it outta the cup?”
Nik shrugs and raises his hands. “Don’t look at me.”
“Ms Mothma,” pipes Jasa out of the blue. “Would you do us a favour, please?”
She turns to look at him. She’s got the kind of blue eyes that look right through you, as though your secrets are now her secrets and that’s gotta be awfully useful when you’re someone like her; luckily, Jaina doesn’t have any secrets to begin with, because Mom is a great listener, so she thinks she’s safe.
“Alright, Jacen,” Ms Mothma sighs, reluctant. “What do you need?”
“Could you, er… dump Horm’s caf in the flower pot next to you?”
“Hm,” she hums. There’s a bit of a pause where she seems to be considering, but then she sets down her cup of tea, reaches over to her left and grabs Horm’s and empties its contents into the flower. “That’s quite a convenient flower pot, no?”
“It sure is!” Jasa grins and takes the cup in his hands.
Ms Mothma raises an eyebrow and looks around. “Not a word of this to your mother,” she says quietly and Jaina has to stifle a giggle.
“Cross my heart,” Jasa says gravely when Nik gently sets down Lorn into the cup and says: “Stay.”
They put the cup back in place and cover it with a napkin.
“Okay,” Nik says, already fidgeting in his seat. “What now?”
“We wait,” says Jasa decidedly.
“Yeah.”
“…Jaya?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m bored.”
“That’s nice.”
“Jaya!”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Nik giggles. “You totally fell for that!”
“No, I didn’t!” Jaina says hotly. “Shut up!”
“No, you shut up!”
“No, you –“
“They’re coming!” Jasa snaps. “Act normal.”
Jaina freezes in her seat and Nik bangs his knee against the table, which shakes all the cutlery and causes a fast approaching Horm to send them a dirty look. Mom and Dad aren’t trailing far behind him, Mom looking like the very definition of grace and poise and beautiful-ness, while Dad looks just plain awkward, which he always does at these events.
“Did I miss much?” Horm asks politely, even though he’s about as polite as a wild gundark, Jaina’ll tell you that much.
“Of course you didn’t,” Ms Mothma says, her tone so collected and calm Jaina wonders how she can ever pull it off. “We missed your delightful company too much to make conversation.”
Dad doesn’t snicker, but he looks like he wants to. Mom nudges him in the arm and Dad’s eyes widen, as if to say: What’d I do wrong?
Mom pats Jaina’s hair, kisses Nik’s head and Jasa’s cheek when she walks by to her seat and the smell of her perfume lingers in the air – it makes the three of them feel infinitely better.
Dad sits down next to Mom and smiles reassuringly at them.
Horm, on the other hand, looks unimpressed. “Oh Mon,” he says. “What would we do without you?”
Ms Mothma doesn’t reply, but Horm reaches for his mug and suddenly, right now, in this very moment, operation Frog Horm’s Caf seems like a really bad idea, because Mom and Dad are right there and space this Horm guy anyway, who cares about him, Mom will be so mad when she finds out they smuggled a frog out of a pond into a restaurant –
“Your opinion is almost as important to me as Mr Solo’s,” Horm continues. “Which is not at all.”
Mom’s face hardens and Dad’s eyebrow shoots up, his expression a mix between Jasa’s Mighty Eye-roll and Nik’s Offended Huff, and Horm’s hand, which moves in apparent slow motion but not really, grabs the mug in the same second that Lorn decides to croak and jump.
Horm shrieks, quite loudly, and Lorn jumps around the table that everyone’s abandoned at this point, because nobody ordered frog along with their fancy two-bite meal and slime doesn’t sound too appetizing, really, except Nik, who looks like the holidays came early.
Jaina thinks she saw Mom giggle out of the corner of her eye, thinks she saw Dad snort, but she’s not too sure; she hopes Mom isn’t mad. Nik is giggling though, loudly, Jasa’s face pressed into his shaking shoulder. Jaina can’t help herself; Horm is red in the face and standing on a chair, shrieking and nearly crying, and it’s all too funny not to laugh.
“Alright everyone,” a voice that sounds like Dad’s, because it is Dad’s, announces, cutting through the whispers and Horm’s exasperated screams. “Calm down! I have the frog!” he lifts his cupped hands, green head peeking out between his fingers. “You’re all safe. Everyone go back to your dinner. You can come down from your chair now, Mr Horm.”
Everyone lets out a collective breath of relief and Horm, face flushed, narrows his eyes at Dad.
“Thank you, Han,” Ms Mothma says and only now does Jaina realize they rudely interrupted a dinner she hosted. “This shows, as many other situations have before, that we’d be lost without you.”
Dad looks humbled and maybe a little bit sheepish and murmurs: “Thank you.”
Lorn croaks in his hands and Dad cracks a smile.
“Kids,” Mom says slowly, glaring at them. “Come with me.”
So worth it, Jaina shoots at Jasa, who cried from laughing. Through their Force-bond, Jasa giggles: I know. Did you see Mom laugh? I swear she did.)
“Standing up to bullies is something you definitely should do,” Mom states. “But not the way you guys did. I’m… disappointed.”
Nik sucks in a sharp breath and Jasa bites his lip and Jaina, Jaina thinks it wasn’t worth it after all.
“We’re sorry, Mommy,” she sighs. “We didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“You’ll apologize to Mr Horm,” Mom says decidedly and puts her hands back on her hips. “After I have a chat with him about the things he says about my family.”
“Hey, guys,” Dad interrupts. “We need to take this little guy back to the pond, don’t you agree?”
“Pond!” Nik repeats enthusiastically. “I wanna go swimmin’ again!”
“Alright,” Mom smiles. “We’ll go to the pond.”
“Are you coming with us?” Jasa asks. “We want you to come with us.”
“Yeah, Mom, please!” Jaina says.
“There’s no place I’d rather be,” Mom assures them. “But – I meant what I said. You guys’ll apologize and then we can leave.”
Come on, that’s -
“But Mom,” Jasa groans. “We don’t –“
“Guys,” Dad says sternly. “You’ll apologize.”
They sigh, the three of them, weirdly in sync. “Okay.”
Nik reaches his arms out to Dad. “Can I hold Lorn?”
“Sure,” he gives Lorn back to Nik and places a comforting hand on Jaina’s back. “C’mon now.”
There’ll be a hundred more Horm’s talking smack about Dad, Jaina thinks. There’ll always be someone with something bad to say, which she doesn’t like but has to accept sooner or later and, right now, she knows she’d get a hundred more frogs and a hundred more empty caf mugs to protect Dad from bad people.
“Daddy,” Jaina says quietly that evening when Mom and Dad are tucking them in. “Daddy, I love you.”
Dad smiles, warm and loving and Dad, presses a kiss to her forehead and says: “Love you too, babygirl.”