Disclaimer: Characters, places, etc., belong to Lucasfilm. Only the AU idea is mine.
Notes: Written for Darth Nickels over on LJ a while back; I've finally gotten around to posting it here. She wanted "a piece of fiction about all of Anakin and Padmé's babies." I...chose to interpret that creatively. Yeah, we'll go with that.
Fic Background: I think Polly probably wanted something funnier than this - sorry Polls! Instead you get stuck with my weird obsession with not!Jedi!Anakin and Padmé running a home for traumatized children.
Also, if you want a fluffier bunny ending to my fic "Clone Wars GI", this fic could easily be seen as a year-or-so-later epilogue to that fic. And the kids mentioned in this fic will probably be reappearing at some point, but I don't want to spoil anything. ;)
Fun Fact: Anakin and Padmé have about twenty kids in this fic, and Luke and Leia haven't even been born yet.

After the War

"Padmé," Anakin said mildly, not even bothering to open his eyes, "I think we're going to need a bigger house."

Padmé blinked at her husband lying carelessly sprawled on the grass. "A bigger house?" she asked, just to be sure she hadn't imagined that.

"Yes, that's right," he said cheerfully.

She let her gaze drift across the meadow and back to the lake house at Varykino. The house with its well-over fifty rooms, its full wait staff, and its two hangars.

"A bigger house," she repeated. "I see."

"Uh huh," Anakin murmured, still not opening his eyes. "Kitster says they're expecting another large group from Erebul in Theed within the week." He shrugged expressively. "We're running out of room."

Padmé sighed. It was true, unfortunately. And to think, she'd once harbored the subtle guilt that came with that all-too-often unused space. They'd certainly changed that.

Not that it was really possible to hold a party at Varykino anymore. But there were more important things.

Her thoughts were cut short by Liro's startled shout halfway across the meadow—which was finally enough to make Anakin open his eyes and prop himself up half-resting on his elbows—and by the almost simultaneous appearance of Janiv at her side.

He began with "Amu," and that was practically the only word she caught, the boy was speaking so fast. He seemed caught between urgency and excitement, and kept gesturing behind him across the field toward one of the shaaks, which seemed to be more than a little irritated by something. Shaaks didn't usually behave so wildly on their own. Padmé had a bad feeling about this.

Janiv was still learning Basic, and Padmé had only just begun to learn Huttese herself, but she hardly needed Anakin's translation to realize what was happening.

"He says Kuma's trying to ride the shaak," Anakin said with the wide grin of a supremely proud older sibling.

Padmé sighed and rubbed her temples. Sometimes she wondered if all war children were like this, of if she was just…blessed. "Anakin, tell him to—" she started, but her husband was already halfway across the meadow. She watched in dismay as he whooped and leapt onto the back of a second shaak, tearing across the meadow after Kuma. The boy was now lying almost flat across the shaak's back, his arms stretched as widely as possible, and Padmé didn't need to see him to know that he was grinning.

With another sigh she set off across the meadow, taking her time. Hopefully they would both be on the ground when she reached them.

But she wasn't really upset. Part of her thought she should be, but the level of lazy energy had been unusually high in Varykino over the past month. She'd sensed it building for quite some time, and if they could find an outlet in the shaaks romping through the meadow, so much the better. It had genuinely frightened her the first time Anakin attempted that stunt, but now… Well, compared to the bloody fight between Janiv and Cei last month, shaaks were really not so bad.

It was strange how her perspectives had changed. But she lived with the children of war. She lived in a world where each new child who came to them had to go through a weapons check, and more than half of them through a detox program as well. They had tutors for mathematics and the sciences and Basic, and art therapy programs with Palo, and Kitster's ever-popular theater program. In some ways it was like the Legislative Youth Program in which Padmé had grown up, with dormitory rooms and shared meals and activities and group discussions. But there was always something there to remind Padmé that the similarities were mainly superficial.

There was Anakin's nightly tea ritual, for one. In the beginning it was simply a habit of his—when he couldn't sleep, he made himself a pot of Tatooine tzai and sat up most of the night in the kitchen. At first Padmé had sat up with him, or sometimes Kitster had, but as it became a nightly occurrence, Anakin finally convinced them that there were some things he needed to work through on his own. Even then, Padmé didn't entirely believe him, but the sleepless nights were getting to her, and they certainly weren't healthy for the baby.

Kuma was the first one to join Anakin. Padmé didn't know when it began, but Anakin told her about it later. He said most nights they didn't talk much at all, but sometimes they would talk about the nightmares. Once they even compared scars. (Kuma won, and while Padmé was equally upset by that, she thought that Anakin might have been upset for the wrong reasons.)

The next time Padmé ventured out to the kitchen at 0300 hours, she found Anakin surrounded by nearly twenty children of varying ages and races, all of them sipping at tzai and listening to one of Kuma's more colorful scar stories.

The silence that fell like a thunderclap when she entered the room was enough to say what none of them, even Anakin, had ever actually had the courage to tell her. You had the Legislative Youth Program, the silence said. We are the children of war.

But then Liro gave her an almost embarrassed little smile and said, "Would you like some tzai?" And that was enough. She took the cup from the girl with a smile of her own and sat back for the rest of Kuma's story. If he made it just that much more dramatic now that she was here, well, that was all right.

And if trying to ride a shaak could make him laugh… Maybe it just meant that she'd been spending too much time with Anakin, but she couldn't see that it was anything worth being upset about.

Still, it was probably a good thing for all involved that Kuma and Anakin were both on the ground again by the time she reached them.

"Padmé, did you see?" Liro asked excitedly. "The shaak nearly trampled Kuma!"

"Yes, I saw," Padmé said in the stern voice she used on her nieces, but which never seemed to work on any of these children.

"Don't worry," Anakin added quickly, because he recognized that tone at least (even if it never worked on him, either). "I got him out of the way in time."

"You always do," she said with a sigh, and Anakin gave her a cocky grin in response.

She looked back and forth between them, the group of children with their scarred faces and arms and their laughing eyes and brilliant smiles, and Anakin who hadn't worn a lightsaber in over a year. There was something infectious in that lazy energy that never wholly disappeared in this group. In spite of herself, Padmé smiled.

"Yes," she said with a grin, "I suppose we are going to need a bigger house."