Chapter Text
The War had ended nearly a decade ago now. Anakin still gets nightmares. Phantom images of generals with too many arms and too little mercy quickly fade, though, as he’s woken by the sound of clattering dishes and bickering children. He tries to roll over and bury his nose in his wife’s neck to hold onto some semblance of peace for five more minutes, but he’s met with empty sheets. “Hngh,” he groans.
“Morning, Ani,” Padmé says from somewhere near the door. She feels all warm and giggly in the Force. His amazing beautiful wife. As always.
“Mmm.” He blinks his eyes open, before being blinded by stupid, too-bright Naboo sunlight. Stupid, utopian planet that his wife’s stupid, wonderful family just has to live on. “Why’re you th’re? Come’ere,” he mumbles, vaguely aware of making grabby hands for the wonderful, beautiful woman who somehow never dumped him, even after the really idiotic episode he had during the last days of the War.
He feels Padmé move towards him, and the prospect of wrapping his arms around her stunning, perfect waist is enough to get him to sit up. Padmé laughs when he plops his head comfortably in the dip of her hip and just closes his eyes again. “When did you become such a morning grump, Ani? You used to be running circles around Coruscant before the sun even rose.”
“You try sleepin’ all morning as the Force inten’d with Obi-Wan as your master.”
She scratches his scalp, laughing. If she wants him to get up this is absolutely the least effective way to do so. It just prompts him to mush his cheek even further against her hip bone, as if he could somehow absorb all her incredibleness through osmosis.
“Amuuuu!” he hears his son wail from the kitchen. His wife sighs fondly.
“Mama!” Leia yells, closer. Padmé turns to the voice, his daughter having stuck her head into the door. “You said you’d wake Dad! And Luke’s burned himself.”
“I’ll be right there, darling.”
“Why’re you s’posed to wake me?” Anakin asks.
“Leia’s learned of a tradition called ‘Father’s Day’ on Alderaan and insisted we do something special for you. The children are currently attempting to cook an Alderaani breakfast.”
“Wait ‘til they learn about Tatooine Amakashka,” he yawns.
“You get to deal with the tantrum when they learn you’ve withheld that one. Now you better get up before the house burns down.”
Anakin grumbles. “If it did, Leia’d find the fire extinguisher.”
Padmé scritches his neck, in that one, sensitive spot he is actually ticklish in. “I didn’t hear you say anything about Luke.”
Anakin snorts. “Your son would go up in flames along with the building.”
Padmé pokes him affectionately. “And your daughter will have set the fire.”
“Amu!” Luke’s yell comes again, along with the distinct sound of a pot clattering onto porcelain-tiled floors.
“Oh, dear,” Padmé sighs, and extricates herself from his arms to run cleanup on another one of his children’s botched kitchen experiments. Their twins were blessed with a great many talents; cooking was not one of them.
Then, suddenly, there’s another, smaller giggly presence approaching. He can feel his daughter’s mischievous grin. “Daaad!” his daughter sing-songs. “Come on! Breakfast is almost ready.”
He brushes his hair out of his barely-awake eyes to see Leia rummaging through his drawers.
“What’re you making?”
“That’s a surprise,” she says in that haughty tone she adopted some time around the time she started to speak that sounds like some terrifying amalgamation of Obi-Wan, Padmé, and Bail Organa all wrapped in one. She dives into his shirt drawer and resurfaces a moment later with just about the only white tunic he owns, exclaiming triumphantly, and then she’s bouncing over to his side. “Let’s go,” she commands, shoving the fabric into his face.
“Sweetheart, where did you even find this?”
“Bottom of your drawer.”
He sighs, patting her dear, energetic head. “It’s there for a reason.”
“If you don’t like it, you’ll be happier to take it off once we show you your real present.”
Anakin raises a brow. “Oh?”
“Get out of bed and find out,” she says smugly.
He groans exaggeratedly, only to make her giggle. “Fine, you’ve intrigued me,” he says, making to disentangle himself from the blankets and lets himself be pulled along by his daughter’s hand out to the living room. The dining room hasn’t been used for its intended purpose since they moved into this house and Anakin’s Jedi sensibilities kept derailing meals to the floor around the coffee table and by the time Padmé tried to teach their children how the people of Naboo dined, they were already used to the coffee table meals. They finally invested in a bigger, nicer table after that. It’s now set with a practically royal spread of dishes—he knows, because he’s dined with the Organas—though, they’re plated less sophistically and obviously not by a royal kitchen staff. But the whole array is brimming with so much happiness and affection that he wouldn’t have cared about that even if he did care about such things.
Leia leads him to his preferred spot around the table and tells him to, “Sit. We’ll be right there.”
Anakin nods gravely. “Of course.”
Leia runs off kitchen-bound and for a minute it’s all just affectionate bickering and giggling that Anakin basks in while trying to wake himself up enough to properly inspect the dishes. It’s not only Alderaanian; there’re some Naboo pastries that speak to their whole family’s sweet tooth and his favorite Tatooinian dish. He’s somewhat surprised because it involves crickets and a—what Padmé calls—‘unholy’ amount of spices that even after twelve years of marriage she’s still too squirmy to even try to touch and his children do not possess the skill to not accidentally add enough nutmeg or something to kill them all. Especially because he discovered sometime during the War that it’s even better with Mandalorian hot sauce. Padmé claims when she eats it, it burns all the sensory nerves in her mouth, nose and eyes for three days.
Then, Leia’s bounding back out. “Close your eyes,” she says, and he obeys. He hears a lot of shuffling and Leia whispering, “Don’t drop it,” and Luke replying louder and less discreetly, “I won’t.” Something is plopped in front of him, and he feels his children’s presences right next to him bubbling with excitement.
“Okay, open them,” Leia says.
He opens his eyes to a beautifully flimsi-wrapped package in front of him. The pretty, slightly wonky (but better than he could do) cursive on the millaflower-printed flimsi reads ‘For the best dad. Happy Father's Day, Leia.’ Luke’s name is scrawled less artistically next to hers.
He can’t help the “Aww,” that leaves his lips. “Thank you, akki-a,” he says, sending all the love down his bonds with his twins.
“Open it,” Leia says, rolling her eyes affectionately. He snorts, reminded that Obi-Wan’s admonishments about ‘manners’ have now fallen on two Skywalker generations of deaf ears.
He rips the paper, carefully avoiding the cursive, because yes, he is the kind of sentimental father who will hide that snippet in his pocket to frame and hang up later. His family don’t know what they’re missing out on. Inside is a soft, deep blue cotton tunic. He already plans on cherishing it forever when he pulls it out and sees the embroidery along the hem and cuffs. Constellations bridge the path between stars and planets labelled with delicate white lines; Tatooine’s twin suns, Alderaan, Naboo and planets he can only assume his children chose because they were cool. Jedha and Ilum, for two, decorate the sleeve cuffs, along with his own lightsaber on the right, and his master’s on the left over where his pulse points would be. Real subtle, kids, he thinks.
“Aunt Beru has been teaching me embroidery,” Leia declares proudly.
“And I picked the shirt,” Luke adds.
Anakin can’t help his grin. “I love it,” he says, wrapping his kids in a hug. Luke and Leia stiffen, peeved at having to share their father, but return it after a moment of bickering, which Anakin breaks up with a, “Letting go in three, two—” Before he reaches ‘one’, his children are competing to see who can break his ribs faster. He wheezes a laugh. “Save me, Padmé!” he calls.
His wife laughs. “Alright, kids. Let’s eat before the food gets cold.”
“Yeah,” Anakin agrees. “Or I’m taking all the Leiaralthini.”
Luke squawks indignantly at that. “Not if I get to it first.” He runs around the table to claim the serving spoon for the dish, while Leia plops down to Anakin’s right, the image of dignity. “A good Jedi shares his food,” she states, affecting Obi-Wan’s ‘Wise, All-Knowing Jedi Master’ tone. Sometimes he questions his decision to let her spend so much time with him.
“You should’ve seen Obi-Wan with the last bottle of hot sauce any time he was on campaign,” he whispers to his daughter conspiratorially.
Her eyes light up—he can see the mischief cooking behind them.
“I’m no Jedi yet,” Luke retorts, sticking out his tongue, as Padmé tries—and fails—to help him not spill his serving all over the table. “Aw, man,” he groans, seeing his mistake.
Leia giggles, but then promptly requires Anakin’s help not to flip her eggs onto the table while trying to place them perfectly on top of her fried rice. “Try the soufflé too!” she tells him. “Uncle Bail says the recipe is directly from his cook.”
“Well it must be amazing then,” he agrees. He’s been guilty of devouring the pastries on more than one occasion while visiting them on Alderaan. He takes one, and decides to grab a few more of the Alderaani dishes while he’s at it. Leia declares proudly that she was responsible for all of them (with a little help from Mama).
Padmé chuckles, mouthing, “A lot,” to him over their heads.
Anakin doesn’t lean over the table to kiss his beautiful, amazing wife silly. He pats Leia’s head. The soufflé and Alderaani toast are delicious, he decides, telling Leia as much. His daughter beams.
“So, when are we getting our lightsabers?” Leia asks innocently between bites.
Anakin guffaws. “So this whole operation was just a Bothan Horse to butter me up for your Gathering, huh?” he asks in mock-offense.
“We’re old enough now,” his daughter says sweetly.
Ar-Amu save him, she’s going to be a force to be reckoned with when she’s grown. The glint in her eye tells him she knows this.
“Let’s find you two some masters first,” he says.
The twins groan. “But that could take forever!” Luke objects.
“What temple would we even be training at?” Leia asks.
Anakin hadn’t really thought about it yet, too busy basking in the wonder of his amazing little family to realize they’d already turned old enough to start their own apprenticeships. “I don’t know,” he says. The Order had branched out back to abandoned and new branches all-together after the War, after realizing how precarious their existence solely on Coruscant had become. Now there were budding temples along several of the major trade routes; even a few Mid- and Outer-Rim strongholds. The options are practically infinite, compared to Anakin’s Padawan days. He’d probably have chosen somewhere warmer and less over-populated than Coruscant if he’d had the option back then.
“I think that’s a decision we should think about together. There are a lot of things to be considered,” Padmé says, ever the smart, reasonable voice. There’s a reason she’s the politician and not him. “For example, if you want to attend the Royal Academy of Alderaan, we should ask at the Alderaani branch, Leia.”
“That makes sense,” she concedes. “Can we think about that decision soon then?”
“Yeah!” Luke says. “I wanna be a Jedi!”
His wife laughs—Force, how he loves her laugh. “We’ll make the time,” she says.
Anakin grins. “Our kids are gonna be formidable.”
Leia grins—a mirror of his own smile—triumphantly. “I love Father’s Day.”