Author's Note: Created in a crucible of "American liberal watching too much CNN the past six months" and "a burning hatred for the way people argue Leia's ability to be both a mother and a power player in the New Republic". Set in the Legends universe, though a working knowledge of its horrible timeline is not necessary. Han's language is, predictably, terrible.
The entertainment area was a disaster. Broken remnants of toy X-wings littered the floor, one ottoman was tipped over and three small children were sprawled out on the couch, fast asleep and dead to the world. Han Solo took in the chaos, considered it with a critical eye and grinned.
Home.
It was still a strange concept, though it wasn't a new one. A home, a family: a wife and three kids. Strange. Really strange. The furthest thing from what he'd ever imagined he would want. The younger version of him would balk at all this responsibility, the roots he'd planted deep into this ugly Coruscant duracrete. Nowhere in his past was a scene that even remotely resembled the one he took in now. Domesticity and stability didn't exist as an orphan on the streets, or as an Imperial cadet. Or as a smuggler, a war hero, a general.
His grin widened as he bent down to pick up the broken toys: thinking of the kids, thinking of their mother. Leia had gotten a call thirty minutes ago, just after the kids had started settling down. He'd mock-glared at her and asked if Mon Mothma understood the sacred law of Leia-has-a-family-and-do-not-fucking-mess-with-her-boundaries. He'd mouthed the fucking part, of course, and Leia had winked at him, promising to answer the call and come back as soon as she could.
With an armload of broken toy parts, he smoothly navigated their warzone of an entertainment room, down the hallway and into the kitchen, dumping the pieces into the waste chute. He figured the kids wouldn't even realize the toys were gone if he got rid of them while they were asleep. Honestly, he was tempted to leave the hooligans out there; the idea of moving any of them into bed was just exhausting.
And then, too, he kind of liked the idea of ambushing his wife in her office and dragging her off to their bed as soon as possible.
Goal now firmly set, Han retraced his steps and walked past their sleeping children. Leia's home office was a benefit he'd come to appreciate after his initial anger at its necessity. He'd hated the idea that Leia would have to bring work home. He knew her tendency to take on too much responsibility and he considered it one of his most important jobs as her husband to make sure she let loose every once in awhile.
To be fair, the kids helped him with that job. Leia might be Minister of State of the New Republic, second-highest official of a galactic order behind Mon Mothma herself, but she was the world to her kids. And the four of them together were an unstoppable force when it came to their irresistible insanity at home. Leia didn't have a chance in hell of working herself to death with her husband and children on the same team.
He grinned again, reaching Leia's office door. He leaned around the doorjamb and peered inside, ready to cajole, seduce and annoy her out of the room. Probably in that exact order.
But he stopped short once he saw her.
Head in her hands, she was seated behind her desk, her comlink lying on the ground next to her chair. He couldn't see her face but the hunched set of her shoulders told him she was either crying or about to cry. He noted her bare feet, crossed and tucked beneath her. She looked small and... helpless, though Leia Organa Solo was never helpless.
His heart clenched. He bounded into the room, scanning the walls for anything amiss though he knew he wouldn't find any danger there. She looked up as she heard his footsteps; he could see tear tracks running down her face.
"What?" he demanded, coming to sit on his haunches beside her chair. His chest felt too tight, his breath rattling in his chest. "What's wrong?"
Leia looked down at him, her eyes tired and anxious. "I need to call Luke," she said, voice rough. "Or Chewie. One of them."
He ran a hand up one of her arms, holding her elbow. "Why?"
Leia took a deep breath and looked at the ceiling for a moment. "Because you and I need to go to the med center and we can't bring the kids."
"What's wrong?" he repeated, thinking med center, med center, med center?
She looked down at him and reached out to slide her thumb against the collar of his shirt. "Mon Mothma…. Her condition has worsened. She wants to enact the succession clause."
Han tried to ignore the chill that swept through him at her words. The Chief of State had been poisoned two months ago by Ambassador Furgan of Carida. Since then she'd been struggling to fully recover. Leia had mentioned that the older woman had been feeling stronger this week, a hopeful sign as the galaxy slowly shifted back into place after the chaos of the past year. But Han hadn't realized the severity of Mon Mothma's condition; he saw in Leia's eyes that perhaps she'd been overestimating it to herself and to him.
He squeezed her arm. "Shit," he said, though he knew it was a woefully inadequate response. "How bad is she?"
Leia shrugged. "She's conscious. That's all they'll tell me."
Han stood and pulled her into his arms. Without either of them wearing shoes she barely came up to his neck and Han's arms were long enough to wrap her up completely. He tucked her head beneath his chin and closed his eyes. He wasn't the galaxy's biggest fan of Mon Mothma—she'd looked down on his relationship with Leia since before it'd been a relationship— but he knew Leia had a different sort of friendship with her. And seeing Leia in any kind of distress was enough to make his blood run cold.
He held his wife for a long moment, trying his best not to panic when she started to sob quietly into his chest. "It's okay," he said, pressing his lips into her hair. "It'll be okay."
She shook her head. When she spoke, her voice was muffled by his shirt. "I thought I had more time to prepare. She wants me sworn in tonight."
Han's hand stopped mid-caress on her back. "Tonight?"
She looked up at him. Her eyes were bloodshot. "Tonight," she repeated. "And I'm terrified."
She didn't look terrified, but… well. Leia held a lot of things pretty close to the chest. There was a damn good reason it had taken him three years to crack that shell. In thirteen years of acquaintance, ten of those in a close, intimate relationship with her, he'd seen her admit to fear only twice. And both times had been because of a threat to someone she cared about.
But this wasn't the same. Terror to Leia wasn't simply the threat of bodily harm. And he knew her too well not to understand that while she feared for her mentor's health, there was an even larger specter that provoked her terror now.
When she said sworn in, she meant becoming the literal head of the New Republic.
"You don't have to do that. Not tonight," he said. He leaned back so he could look her in the eye. "Let's go see her and you can tell her to wait until morning."
But Leia was already shaking her head. "If she dies, or slips into a coma, or is otherwise incapacitated, we'll have a power vacuum at the highest levels of this government. Our military—"
"No one's gonna attack Coruscant tonight. The entire ninth fleet is stationed here right now, plus the CDF. You have some time."
She sighed, and pulled him to sit with her on her office divan. He put his hand on her knee, thinking that he might need the contact as much as she did. When she spoke again, her voice was hushed. "If she's dying, the only thing I can do for her now is to continue our work."
Han opened his mouth but couldn't find anything to say to that. Mon Mothma was every bit the zealot Leia was, but without the family to ground her. That would be her dying wish. Of course it would be.
"Damn," he mumbled, wrapping his other arm around her shoulders and pulling her bodily back toward him.
"Han," she mumbled into his shirt. "Can we do this? I mean, really: can we do this?"
He looked past the top of her head, at the bright paint of her office wall, the view out of the window. His stomach churned and he thought of their three young children, peacefully asleep in the next room.
Could they do this?
Part of him wanted to say, adamantly, no. They couldn't. He'd watched Mon Mothma in the years since the New Republic had officially elected her its first chief of state. He'd watched her oversee senate elections, travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. He'd seen her commit military forces into dangerous situations. He'd watched as the stress and anxiety of the job slowly wore her down.
And he flat-out didn't like the idea of Leia falling into that same pattern of self-sacrifice. He didn't want Leia so consumed with the New Republic that she forgot to live a normal life. He thought about Leia just after Yavin, her slavish devotion to the cause. How hollow she'd looked, how lost.
How alone.
And he compared it with the woman next to him now. The one that had embraced the maelstrom of family life in the same kind of shocked disbelief he had. His partner in everything, from bedtimes to dinner to sibling fights and everything between. The wife he hadn't realized he'd ever wanted. The woman who'd made the entire idea of home more than just a word other people used.
"Honestly," he said, "I have no idea."
She nodded. "The kids. You."
He jerked back and tried a glare. "Hey, now."
Leia gave him a watery smile and Han felt a little less unsettled. "Yes, you." She wiped the skin beneath her eyes. "Madame Chief of State has a security detail. Her own pilot. What would I need you for?"
He made a face. "Madame Chief of State should remember that her husband is a general on inactive reserve status and that he doesn't care much about security or pilots. He's got the job covered. Plus a couple others, too."
Leia's smile widened and then fell. "You'd be everywhere in the media. They'll drive you insane."
Yeah, that part was a little tough to swallow. He didn't want that. But—and this was the one thing that made him unsure if this was a terrible idea or not—was there a single fucking thing in this universe that he wouldn't do for Leia? For her health and happiness? For the fire that made her the ferocious woman he'd fallen in love with?
Really and truly: no. There wasn't. "I can take it. I'd be more concerned about the kids."
"Me, too," she agreed.
"Here's the question you haven't answered for me yet," he said, tightening his arms and kissing the top of her head. "Do you want to do this? Because it doesn't mean a damn thing if you don't."
She didn't answer for awhile, and he tried to imagine what was going through her head. Probably some mixture of duty and obligation and all those words that he found a little ugly. Leia had been raised on a steady diet of those words, and he knew she still operated in that headspace quite a bit. It was one of the things that drove him crazy and that he secretly admired about her.
"I do," she said. She lifted her head to look him in the eye. "Our work isn't done yet."
He nodded, suspecting that they were coming to the heart of the matter. "And so? Why do you look so guilty?"
"Why?" She gestured around them with a vague flick of her hand. "We're talking about our children's lives, Han. We're talking about all of you getting swept up in this because I have to go run the government." She laughed bitterly. "What kind of self-obsessed person does that to the people she loves?"
He dodged her flailing hand and then grabbed it, settling it down in her lap. "Sweetheart, you are many things but self-obsessed isn't one of 'em."
"You know what I mean."
"No, I really don't," he said. "Explain it to me."
She sighed. "I have so much I want to do. I want to make sure that all the people we've lost to get to this day didn't die in vain. I want to abolish slavery and hunt down every single person that even thought about subjugating another sentient creature for their own economic gain. I want to make sure the galaxy is a freer and more just place when I leave it than when I came into it. I want to make sure Alderaan's legacy is one of compassion and strength, and not as a dead, irrelevant world. And I don't want our children to think that the only family inheritance they got from me was Anakin Skywalker's weakness and fear."
He cocked an eyebrow at her, amused. "Yeah. Self-obsession is a bitch, isn't it?"
"But," she continued, ignoring his joke, "I also want to raise our children together. I want to have time with them, with you. I want a normal life, too. And that is simply too much to ask for, isn't it?"
"So? Who gives a fuck?" he asked, trying another grin. "It ain't about asking for it all. It's about doing what you think is right. Right?"
The corners of her mouth lifted.
Good sign.
He pressed his advantage. "We'll figure it out. We'll get you a thousand staffers who'll teach you how to delegate. Get that woman…. What's her name? The secretary that yelled at me that one time for being late to lunch?"
Another soft smile. "Graya," Leia said.
"Yeah. Her. Get her to do your schedule. She won't budge an inch and you're scared of her. It's perfect." He leaned in closer as she rolled her eyes. "It'll be tough but if this is what you want…."
He left the thought unfinished. He had reservations about this, had had reservations about it the moment Leia had first mentioned that it was a possibility. But those reservations weren't about Leia's ability to multitask.
His reservations were about the kids. And if that was her main worry, too, then he damn well knew that the two of them would figure it out. Luke had once told him that the reason he believed Han and Leia had gotten together in the first place was their shared inability to do things like normal people did them.
Which, yeah, Kid. Of course.
Leia and he were not normal people. He'd always known that. And they'd figure this out, too.
He leaned back from Leia, plastered a mock-serious glare at the top of her head. "If you're going anywhere, I'm the first pilot you call. Are we clear?"
Leia's head rose to look at him, lips turned up gently. She nodded her head in the direction of the entertainment area, where their three little monsters were asleep. "And them?"
He looked at her for a moment, thinking of Leia's fierce love for their kids, the way she understood them in different ways than he did. The interest she showed in their lives, the time she spent with them, the way she focused so intensely on them. He felt a deep ache in the center of his chest, trying to imagine Leia abandoning her children. Tried to visualize a Leia that would choose one or the other and not both.
And he couldn't do it.
"C'mon," he said, standing and steering her to the door of her office. Through the hallway they went, sidestepping toys and a discarded shoe. Han pulled her to the edge of the room where their sleeping children lay and stood behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders.
He leaned into her and whispered, "I think you would be the best example they could ever get. I think them seeing you working for the good guys, working to make a difference in the big, bad galaxy… I think that's important."
He slid his hands to her biceps, heard her exhale as she watched the kids, felt the strain in her body stretch her thin.
Finally her shoulders relaxed. She stepped backwards into his chest and he wrapped an arm across her collarbones, leaned his head on top of hers, grabbed her other hand with his. "We can do this," she murmured.
He closed his eyes, opened them, and nodded once.
"We can do this," he repeated.