It didn't take long for Dooku and Jango Fett to be convicted and imprisoned; the evidence against them was overwhelming. Anakin could tell that Padmé felt much better once they were behind bars, but he was still a nervous wreck. He'd always had a tendency to be a bit overprotective even on a good day (which wasn't helped by the fact that protecting Padmé had once literally been his career), but following this second attempt on her life, his protective instincts shot through the roof. Anakin barely left her side and made both their security teams triple check a room before she entered it; he could tell Padmé was getting annoyed with him, but he just couldn't help it. He had come so close to losing her and the twins that day, and he'd be damned if he let anything like that happen again. When he closed his eyes, he could still see her lying in the back of the car, pale and barely conscious as blood streamed from the gunshot wound in her shoulder.
Anakin was also beginning to realize just how much danger the twins could potentially be in once they were born, something that hadn't really sunk in until now. What if someone used them to threaten Padmé into doing something, or kidnapped them to get to her? He expressed his fears to Padmé, and he could tell they frightened her too but she was stubbornly pretending otherwise. She reminded him that the twins would be under constant supervision and would have members of their own security team stationed outside the nursery at all times. It wasn't like a kidnapper could break into the White House. As long as Anakin and Padmé refrained from bringing them out in public too much, they'd be fine. Anakin could only hope she was right.
Several weeks after the assassination attempt, Palpatine announced his own intentions to run in the upcoming election; he also condemned Dooku and expressed his relief that Padmé hadn't been seriously harmed, no doubt to make himself look good by behaving so charitably towards his longtime opponent and distancing himself from his longtime ally who'd just gone to jail for attempted murder. Then again, Anakin thought, Palpatine may have been Padmé's political opponent but that didn't mean he had any desire to see her dead. Maybe his sentiments were exaggerated to improve public image, but even so they were probably sincere at the root.
The wound in Padmé's shoulder gradually healed, though it was still sore for a while afterwards and she couldn't move her arm much (Anakin joked that now she knew how he felt). Once she was back on her feet, she continued working just as much as she always had, to Anakin's consternation. As her pregnancy progressed, she got more and more exhausted and needed more and more rest, but she wasn't making any changes in her sleeping habits or work schedule. Anakin knew she wouldn't be pleased if he suggested she start taking time off work—she'd always been stubborn and pregnancy was making her even more so—but as the weeks passed, he grimly acknowledged that there was nothing else for it and he'd have to say something to her.
"Can we talk for a minute?" he asked one night in November when Padmé had brought some paperwork back to their room to do before bed.
Padmé glanced up at him in surprise and nodded, setting her paperwork aside. "What's up?"
"Um…I was just thinking," he began a little nervously. "I think you should start taking your maternity leave soon, or at least cut back on work."
Padmé frowned at him. "Why? I'm only seven months," she pointed out. "I already promised the people I wasn't going on maternity leave until the last possible minute, I can't just up and stop working two months early."
"I know that, but the your health is more important—"
"Than the three hundred million people in this country?"
"To me, yes," Anakin replied rather tersely. "You've already been through a traumatic situation with the shooting and everything, you need to rest. All this stress isn't good for the babies. Kix said you should be taking it easy."
"I am taking it easy," Padmé shot back, frown deepening.
"Really? How many times have I had to drag you away from your desk because you skipped a meal to get work done? How many times have I walked into your office and found you asleep on top of your keyboard?" said Anakin. "Padmé, you're seven months pregnant with twins, you need to be getting enough sleep and having three square meals a day."
"I appreciate your concern," Padmé said, tone suggesting she didn't actually appreciate it at all, "but I'm sleeping and eating just fine, thank you. It's my decision how much I want to work, not yours."
"Actually, it is partially my decision, seeing as the babies are mine too," Anakin said, his annoyance growing. "I told you, I'm worried that you overworking yourself will negatively affect them. Why won't you just listen to me?"
"I don't know, maybe because you're not the boss of me," she snapped.
"I didn't say I was!"
"You're trying to order me around and dictate how much work I do!"
"I'm trying to take care of our children, but you won't let me!"
"God, you are such a drama queen!"
"No, I just think you should start caring about the twins a little more than you do right now!"
Anakin regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. Padmé's expression darkened, and she started nudging him over towards the door. "Well, I think you should sleep somewhere else tonight," she said frostily.
"Padmé, wait, I'm sorry—"
"Goodnight, Anakin," she said in a tone that brooked no argument, and she opened the door and all but shoved him outside before closing it behind her. Anakin heard the lock click shut, and he sighed and banged his head lightly on the wall.
"Everything okay?"
He looked up and saw that Ahsoka was walking towards him, looking concerned. Adi Gallia remained stationed at her post on the other end of the hall and gave him a polite nod before averting her eyes; she and Depa Billaba were the only agents who bothered to keep up formalities around Anakin since they were the only ones who hadn't once been his coworkers.
"I'm sleeping somewhere else tonight, apparently," Anakin said bitterly.
Ahsoka raised her eyebrows. "What did you do?"
"Why do you automatically assume it's my fault?"
"Because you're an idiot and it usually is. Well?"
"All I did was suggest she start working a little less for the twins' sake because she's stressed and not getting enough rest and it's bad for them."
"What else?" Ahsoka prodded.
"Uh…I may have also implied she didn't care about them as much as she should," Anakin mumbled.
Ahsoka sighed. "Skyguy, you dumbass."
"I didn't mean it, it just slipped out because I was mad!" he said defensively. "And I would've apologized but she kicked me out of the room before I got the chance."
"Well, I don't blame her," Ahsoka said, shaking her head in exasperation. "You'd better have a hell of an apology ready tomorrow morning."
"Trust me, I know that. But it's not all my fault, she got way more defensive than necessary," Anakin insisted. "I mean, it's totally a thing that pregnant women need to eliminate stress as much as possible. It's in all the pregnancy books, and Kix has told us so multiple times. I was in the right."
"Yeah, but the president is the biggest workaholic I've ever met and you should've taken that into account and phrased your concerns more gently," Ahsoka informed him. "You should've known she wasn't going to like you waltzing in there and telling her to stop working two months before her due date."
"I did know she wasn't going to like it, and I tried to be nice about it but she got annoyed right off the bat and then things just escalated. I don't even know how it happened, one minute we were having a civil discussion and then suddenly we were yelling." Anakin heaved a sigh as well. "I am so sick of pregnancy hormones, Ahsoka."
"Did you say that to her face?"
"Obviously not."
"Good, otherwise I'd give her my gun right now and let her shoot you with it."
Anakin cracked a smile despite himself. "I'm just worried about her, that's all," he said next. "I mean, with the shooting and everything…I'm just trying to make sure she and the twins are all happy and healthy."
"Being overprotective is never a good thing, even when it's coming from a place of love," Ahsoka said wisely. "I'm sure she's just as concerned about the twins' health as you are even if she isn't acting like a drama queen about it."
"I'm not a drama queen," Anakin muttered.
"You're the biggest drama queen on the planet. Anyway, I think you should let her cool down overnight and apologize tomorrow morning. Explain that you're not trying to control her, you're just worried about her because you love her," Ahsoka advised. "I'm sure she'll understand where you're coming from once she's had time to think everything over, and maybe she'll even come around about working less."
"I guess," Anakin said doubtfully. He bade her goodnight and headed to his old room upstairs out of habit, feeling wretched. He and Padmé had the occasional minor squabble like any couple did, but this was their first genuine argument since the days when Anakin was first recovering from the loss of his arm and had been especially short-tempered and irritable. Much like third-trimester-with-twins Padmé was now, not that he would have dared to say so to her face.
He spent ages planning out what to say in his apology, and when he finally did drift off, he slept fitfully. Early in the pregnancy Anakin would have a nightmare about something happening to Padmé or the twins every once in a great while, but they'd become a hundred times more frequent following the shooting. He dreamed he was back in the hospital, and the doctor came out and told him she was sorry but Padmé and the twins didn't make it, and then he was going into the hospital room and she was lying there cold and lifeless, and he felt only stillness under his hand when he rested it on her belly.
Anakin woke with a start, gasping and sweating, and he instinctively reached out for Padmé beside him only to be met with empty space and the memory of their argument. He sternly reminded himself that she and the twins were just fine and tried to calm himself down enough to go back to sleep, but he couldn't manage it. At last Anakin gave up and threw off the covers, then shuffled back downstairs still in his pajamas.
Ahsoka and Adi were still there, which he took to mean that he'd only been asleep for a few hours. They both looked surprised to see him. "What are you doing?" Ahsoka whispered, and Anakin just shrugged and knocked softly on the bedroom door.
Several long minutes passed and he was just about to go back upstairs when Padmé opened the door, her hair a rat's nest. "Anakin," she said, her tone too sleepy to really count as disapproving.
She reached up to rub the sleep from her eyes, and Anakin suddenly felt like an idiot. He'd just been berating her for not getting enough sleep, and now here he was waking her up in the middle of the night because he'd had a nightmare and couldn't handle it, as if he was a child. "Never mind," he muttered. "Sorry, I shouldn't have bothered you."
But Padmé continued to look at him, waiting for an explanation, and at last he elaborated. "Nightmare," he said, embarrassment creeping into his voice. "But it's stupid, I shouldn't have woken you up just for—"
"What about?" she asked.
Anakin shivered a little, missing the warmth of his bed, and crossed his arms (or tried to, but then realized he'd left his prosthesis upstairs). "Same as always," he said. "You and the twins dying that day."
Padmé gazed at him for a moment, and then she reached out and pulled him into her arms. Anakin let out a shaky breath and leaned into the embrace, already feeling soothed by merely her presence. He unconsciously dropped his hand to rub her belly, relaxing even more when he felt a kick after a minute or two.
"Come on, let's go to bed," Padmé murmured eventually, pulling away ever so slightly.
"I left my arm upstairs," Anakin said in a half-hearted attempt to remind her that she was angry with him and didn't want him sleeping with her.
"You can get it in the morning," she said, tugging him into the bedroom and shutting the door.
They both climbed into bed, and Anakin was relieved when Padmé snuggled up against him. Hopefully that meant she was no longer especially upset, but even so he started to say, "Padmé, I'm sorry about—"
"Shhh, we'll talk in the morning," she said, gentle but firm. "Let's just go to sleep, okay?"
"Okay," Anakin mumbled, already feeling himself starting to doze off as her warmth washed over him.
When he woke up for good the next morning, sunlight was streaming through the curtains and Padmé was still lying beside him, though she was awake. "What time is it?" he asked, stretching.
"A little after nine."
"Don't you have to be at a meeting or something?"
"I decided to take the day off," Padmé said simply.
"Oh," Anakin said, surprised. "You didn't have to do that."
"I wanted to. It's been a long time since we've spent time together, just the two of us, and I think we need to."
Anakin couldn't argue that, so he just gave her a hesitant smile and gently tucked a stray curl behind her ear. "I'm really, really sorry for what I said last night," he said softly. "I should never have said you didn't care about the twins enough, that was horrible. I know you care about them so much and that you're doing everything you can to be the best mom ever for them. It was just one of those things you say in the heat of the moment because you're angry. I swear to you, I didn't mean it at all."
Padmé returned his smile to show that he was forgiven. "And I'm sorry for being unreasonable," she replied. "You were right, I do need to start taking it easy and working less. I just didn't want to admit it, so I got defensive when you said so. I shouldn't have yelled at you."
"I shouldn't have tried to tell you what you can and can't do."
"You didn't, you were just sharing your opinion and I bit your head off."
Rather than thinking of another thing to blame himself for, Anakin said hopefully, "So…are we not mad at each other anymore?"
Padmé chuckled and kissed him on the nose. "No, we're not," she said, and he sighed in relief. "But I do have to say, I don't like when you get overprotective of me. I understand why you do because of the shooting and all, but it's kind of suffocating, having you worrying about me constantly like this."
"I know," Anakin said sheepishly. "I'm sorry. I'm trying to work on that, I really am, but I just—I love you so much, Padmé, and I'm so, so scared of losing you, and the twins. I mean, I literally have nightmares about it. You three are my entire world, and I have no idea what I would do if something happened to you."
"I get it. And I'm not going to lie, I've gotten a lot more scared about something happening to the twins too after the shooting," she confessed. "But we can't let our fears overwhelm us. You were saying last night I need to lower my stress levels, right? Well, so do you. We both need to relax and trust our security to do their jobs, and feel happy and excited about the twins instead of scared. We're about to be parents, Ani. This is supposed to be a happy time."
Anakin nodded in agreement. "You're right. I'll try not to be so on edge all the time."
"And I'll try not to work myself so hard," Padmé promised.
Anakin pecked her on the lips, then scooched down the bed a little so he could rest his head on her baby bump. He couldn't really hear anything, but he did feel a kick against his ear eventually and he laughed. "Hey, you two," he said, turning his head slightly to press a kiss on the spot where he'd felt the kick. "How are you doing in there?"
"They're glad Mommy and Daddy stopped arguing," Padmé said, smiling and resting her hand on her stomach next to his head.
"So am I," said Anakin. "I know we were only in a fight for, like, three hours, but it sucked and I hated it."
"Me too. Fighting with you is the worst." Padmé started absently playing with his hair, and he nuzzled into the touch. Letting go of his anxieties over her and the babies was easy to do when he felt as utterly content as he did in that moment.
"So what are we going to do today?" Anakin asked after several peaceful minutes.
"Hmm, good question. I am kind of feeling in the mood for some make-up sex," she suggested.
"Now that's what I call starting the day off with a bang," Anakin said, grinning as he looked up just in time to catch Padmé's eyeroll.
"Your puns are the worst," she said.
"They're not puns, they're dad jokes. I'm practicing."
"You'd better not tell any dad jokes about our sex life to the twins, they'll be traumatized."
"Yeah, I guess that's true," Anakin said, laughing. "Anyway, I'm totally down for make-up sex, and then maybe we can go through our name lists some more?"
"Oh, good idea, I keep meaning for us to do that," Padmé said. "And after that, how about we work on the nursery?" There were a dozen White House staff members who'd offered to decorate the nursery for them, but Padmé and Anakin had been adamant that they wanted to do the entire thing themselves. Thus far they'd painted the walls a soft shade of yellow and had set up the cribs, but otherwise the room was still pretty bare.
Anakin smiled and kissed her belly again. "Sounds like the makings of a perfect day."
True to her word, Padmé did gradually start lightening her workload during the last two months of her pregnancy. She didn't like it because it made her feel like she was admitting she couldn't do everything, like she wasn't capable enough, but Anakin reminded her time and again that she currently had two nearly full-grown babies inside her and it was perfectly reasonable for her to need more rest than she used to.
Nevertheless, Padmé was planning to continue working to some extent right up until the twins were born, which was why she was sitting in a cabinet meeting one morning in mid-January, thirty-seven weeks pregnant and sick of it. Her baby bump was huge, and she was constantly achy and exhausted and her back hurt and the twins kept kicking her and jumping up and down on her bladder while she was trying to sleep. Logically, Padmé knew she'd be even busier once they were actually born, but she couldn't help but wish they'd hurry up and get out of her body.
"You look like you're ready to pop," Satine said sympathetically as they waited for everyone to arrive.
Padmé groaned. "I feel ready to pop. I swear to God, if they're not born within the next week I'm going to the hospital and forcing them to induce labor," she said, and Satine laughed. The babies weren't actually due until the end of the month, but Kix and the pregnancy books had told them that twins were often born a few weeks early, so Padmé and Anakin were currently on high alert.
Her statement turned out to be incredibly ironic, seeing as she started feeling cramps not even ten minutes into the meeting. Padmé tried to ignore them at first, figuring it was more false contractions as her body practiced for labor, but as the minutes dragged on and the cramps only increased in intensity, she was forced to acknowledge with no small amount of panic that this might actually be the real thing.
"Padmé, are you all right?" Bail asked in concern when a particularly painful one made her grimace and clutch the edge of the table for support.
"Fine," Padmé lied. The meeting was only another forty-five minutes or so, she could make it through to the end. "Sorry, keep going."
Bail looked doubtful but obligingly continued what he'd been saying before. Padmé did her best to hide her pained winces as the meeting progressed, though if the frequent alarmed looks from her colleagues were anything to go by, she wasn't very successful.
"Are you sure you don't want to go see Kix?" Satine said when Padmé let out an audible whimper. "We can continue without you, it's not a problem."
"No, no, I'm fine," Padmé insisted stubbornly.
A few minutes later there was a knock on the door, and Anakin walked in. "Sorry to interrupt," he said before hurrying over to Padmé's end of the table and crouching down beside her.
"What are you doing here?" she hissed under her breath as the rest of the cabinet pretended not to be listening.
"Satine texted Obi-Wan who called Rex who told me that you're in labor?" Anakin said, looking anxious.
Padmé turned to glare at Satine, who shrugged innocently. "Look, the meeting's only another twenty minutes, I'll be fine," she said to Anakin.
"You mean you actually are in labor?!" he yelped, gaping at her. "What the hell are you doing still sitting here?"
"Oh, come on, it's not like the babies are going to pop out right this second, I have plenty of time."
"You absolutely do not, we're going to find Kix right now and then you're going to rest in our room until it's time to go to the hospital. And that's final, no arguing," Anakin said as she opened her mouth to protest. "Come on."
He grabbed Padmé's arm and tugged her out of her chair, and she reluctantly let him, gripping his hand and digging her nails into his skin when another contraction hit. She took a moment to recover, then turned to the cabinet. "I'm so sorry, but I think I'm in labor so I'm going to have to leave the meeting," she said. "Please keep going and feel free to call me if you need my input on anything."
"Please do not call her," Anakin said, pulling her towards the door.
"Unless it's an emergency."
"Please do not call her under any circumstances, not even for the damn apocalypse."
"We won't, I've got everything covered," Bail promised. "Good luck, Padmé!"
The others all echoed him as Anakin finally succeeded in dragging Padmé out the door. "I don't see why you couldn't have just let me stay another twenty minutes," she complained.
"All right, well, I'm sure your concentration levels weren't exactly at their best anyway seeing as you're literally in labor," Anakin pointed out.
Padmé huffed. "I was concentrating perfectly well."
"Yeah, okay." Anakin stopped walking and gripped her shoulders, looking seriously at her. "Repeat after me. I will not think about politics while I'm in labor, I will not stress myself out even more than necessary, I will allow myself time to recover before going back to work, and I will not overwork myself by trying to take care of two newborns and an entire country at the same time."
Padmé rolled her eyes but repeated his words. Looking satisfied, Anakin leaned in and gave her a peck on the lips. "Now, let's get you upstairs and settled in bed so we can wait for our babies to come, all right?"
"Okay."
Padmé awoke to the sight of Anakin sitting beside her hospital bed and cradling their newborn daughter in his arms, his eyes still swimming with tears, even now after…Padmé realized she didn't actually know how long it had been since the twins were born. "How long was I asleep?" she said blearily.
Anakin turned to look at her, smiling. "A few hours," he said. "I'm surprised you didn't sleep longer, actually, you must be exhausted."
Indeed, Padmé was still pretty exhausted, but she was too busy leaning over and taking their son out of his bassinet to notice or care. He made a few soft snuffling noises and blinked up at her with Anakin's blue eyes. Padmé felt her own eyes tear up again, and she bent down to plant a kiss on his tiny forehead, his tiny nose, his tiny cheeks.
When the twins had come into the world they'd been red-faced and wailing and covered in all sorts of substances whose identities Padmé would really rather not know, and they were the most beautiful things she'd ever seen. Now they were clean and quiet, and Padmé was just as overwhelmed with emotion as she had been immediately following their birth.
She glanced over and saw that though their son was awake, their daughter was sound asleep. "Have they been sleeping the whole time?" she asked.
Anakin shook his head. "They were both awake for a while, and then he fell asleep and then she fell asleep and then he woke back up. They must've made a pact in the womb to sleep in shifts so that they can make us get out of bed in the middle of the night when they cry as often as possible."
Padmé laughed and bounced the baby in her arms up and down, making him gurgle happily. "So," she said a minute later, "what are you thinking about names?"
"I still like the ones we picked out before, if you do," Anakin said.
Padmé looked back and forth between the twins, mulling it over and trying to decide whether the pre-picked names fit them or not. At last she smiled and nodded in agreement. "Luke and Leia Skywalker," she said. "Perfect."
They'd had a bit of trouble deciding which last name to use—Anakin had insisted they should do some sort of hyphenation, but Padmé had pointed out that using Amidala wouldn't make sense since that wasn't her real last name and using Naberrie wouldn't make sense since she herself no longer went by it. So eventually they'd settled on just Skywalker, which Padmé didn't mind at all (she'd had to reassure Anakin on that account countless times). Sola's husband and daughters had all taken the Naberrie name whereas Anakin and Shmi were the only Skywalkers left, so to Padmé it made sense to give the twins Anakin's name since her nieces already had hers.
And on a deeper level too, she was glad to give Anakin this. He'd had to give up the job he loved and become First Gentleman and spend his time doing things he didn't want to do and talking to people he couldn't stand, but he'd done it all with hardly a word of complaint because he loved Padmé. They lived in her world, not his, and probably would for the rest of their lives, so Padmé was proud to pass this one little piece of Anakin's identity onto the twins who would forever be known as President Amidala's children.
Padmé shifted Luke into one arm and turned to Anakin. "I want to hold Leia again."
"So you get to hog both of them at the same time? Not fair," he said, grinning.
"Well, you got them both all to yourself the whole time I was asleep, so…"
Anakin chuckled and carefully placed Leia into the crook of her free arm. She stirred a little but didn't wake up. Padmé gazed down at both twins in awe, hardly able to believe that they were hers, that she and Anakin had made them. She wondered what they'd look like when they grew up. Now they looked alike, but most babies did. Would they look alike as they got older? Or would one look like Anakin and one like her? Or would neither of them look especially like either parent? Luke did have Anakin's eyes, and Padmé remembered that before she'd fallen asleep she'd noticed Leia had brown eyes like her. Would their eye color be the only difference in their appearance, or would they look so dissimilar that people would be surprised they were twins?
Anakin scooched his chair closer to the hospital bed so that he could put his prosthetic arm around Padmé and use the other to cradle the twins with her. He rested his chin on her shoulder, and they both sat there smiling down at Luke and Leia for a while. "They're so beautiful," Padmé said softly.
Anakin hummed in agreement and kissed her on the cheek. "Just like their mother."
She blushed a little and laughed. "I'm sure I must look like a mess right now." It hadn't occurred to her to wonder what she looked like up until that point, and now she definitely didn't want to know.
"You don't look like a mess. You look like an angel."
"A sweaty gross angel with frizzy hair who's in extreme need of a shower."
"An angel, full stop."
Padmé smiled and watched as Luke let out a little yawn while Leia's arm flailed in her sleep. Anakin moved his left hand to trace over Leia's tiny fingers, then Luke's, with his much bigger one. The expression on his face, a mix of wonder and adoration, made Padmé feel like her heart was about to burst. "I love you so much, Ani," she said, a little choked up.
Anakin beamed at her and reached up to rest his hand on her cheek, then leaned in for a long, slow kiss. "I love you so much too."