One military-issue boot crossed the other in a swift, exuberant step; had the wearer not been of such a high rank and calibre, one could call it a skip. Should bravery grip anyone for long enough to make the observation, reconditioning or suspicious death would surely ensue.
Grand Marshal Orion Hux had, upon his first visit to the palace almost a year previous, required grudging instruction on how to reach the throne room from his Stygian counterpart but no longer: The journey to his wife's second most-frequented location could be made in the redhead's sleep. To that end, the time between the touchdown of his shuttle and his arrival in the vast hall proved to be minimal with familiarity and anticipation.
From the second he crossed the threshold, she (in all her darling Imperial glory) besieged his senses; despite the abundance of excitement coursing through his veins, practically carrying him with a bounce in his step towards his beloved. Dignity and pomp aside, Orion could not contain himself.
"Your Grace!"
"The court recognizes Grand Marshal Orion Hux." Ordinarily, the Emperor's (or in this case, the Empress') spouse's arrival would be announced with the given title of Imperial Consort. However, knowing his disdain for the title, Lucilla's request for his military title to be used in its place reigned supreme.
"Grand Marshal."She greeted with fond coyness (as if their marriage was neither common nor public knowledge) and a similar excitement as he took his routine knee but sprung from it almost as quickly; his path to her cleared in a bound. Taking his proud place at his wife's shoulder, the redhead lowered himself to claim her cheek with his lips but did not straighten once the kiss had landed.
"Little dove, you shouldn't be here." He simmeringly declared, his elated breath tickling the husk of her ear. "You should be resting, there are others who can do this."
"But this is my job, my love." Lucilla replied in her trademark gentility, bordering on patient insistence, but his concern inspired the pull of an endeared simper an undirected and automatic sequence, Orion swept Lilia from her mother's lap and into his own arms with the expected greetings of adoration that the infant did her best to reciprocate (they were working on it). "There are others who can do it, yes, but no one can do it like I can. Which is why I'm here, isn't it?"
"Yes, my darling." He placated, finally straightening to distribute Lilia's weight added to his own to protect his back. "But Doctor Craven said-"
"Is this going to be the way of things for the next eight and a half months? I am not hindered in any way, Orion. I don't need to rest, I'm perfectly capable of sitting here and-" Charmed by the roll of sapphire eyes and the protest he knew she would revert to, the Grand Marshal (still carefully guarding "his" daughter to his chest) absorbed the dignified gripe with playful scepticism; letting it run its course before he chimed in with his true concern.
"Are you telling me you're not hungry, Your Grace?"
That… That worked.
"You have no right to act like this."
Out of the two present (well, three but one did not quite possess the appropriate speech or vocabulary just yet to contribute), one of them had to present the voice of reason. By default, that someone was Leia.
Ren, pacing like a caged animal, did not answer; other than a frequent, random antagonized snarl, of course. Having relieved him of her granddaughter to the security of her own lap to protect her from vexation-driven whiplash, the older female dispassionately wondered if this would be the extent of her parental input now that Ben was back in her life and she in his. Such is the duty in parenting an adult as opposed to a child.
Blinding joy had (almost immediately, with little time to savour the news) given way to one of Kylo Ren's trademark tirades; so much for the seemingly transformative calm of fatherhood that his mother had observed since their tense reunion. Surely he couldn't be blamed though? How would anyone else feel? That was his child and yet, Lucilla refused him the confession of it.
Should Leia pity him? Try to comfort him? But what else had he expected, sleeping with a married woman (who, by all accounts, seemed to adore her husband and he her) who he clearly harboured something for only for it to sour? Perhaps sour implied that those feelings had been reciprocated at some point; other than a moment of desperate weakness and great upset, no such reciprocation had ever occurred.
Well… Perhaps he looked too deeply into it, Leia certainly thought so; reaching for an entitlement he had no right to. After all, the little Empress hadn't even spoken to him about it; the closed announcement (among a small, chosen few of confidantes, a few days after receiving the news herself) had been made from the enveloping, adoring arms of the Grand Marshal. And it made Ren's blood boil. He could (and did) understand such secrecy and deception with Lily; she had been oblivious to her paternity herself. Now she had no excuse.
"That's my child and she's parading it like it's his!"
"She's a married woman, Ben, you can't-"
"Both her kids are mine, she should be mine too!"
Furiously aggravated by being cheated out of acknowledgement and preference as the child's father (again), the title of Prince or Princess mattered not; not like it might have to vultures like Pryde. Leia, ever the patient Leia, in all her reasonability, did all in her power not to sigh; she did indulge in a roll of her eyes though.
"You don't know that it's yours." Unafraid of provoking the ebony hurricane in her midst (should it be possible), the General may have had to wait several years to be a present parent once more but already, she seemed to have it in hand; unlike Ben who still found himself reconciling the fact that his mother was part of his life again.
"I've heard what they say about him! She's never admitted it but why else would that night've happened and barely spoken to me since?! If she's so in love with him, like she's flaunting 'round the palace, why'd she do it?!" The sudden, spitting seize of temper saw Ren's boot (not military issue, unlike Hux's) collide with a light, wooden armchair of exorbitant price tag and rarity; sending it careening across the floorspace until it was grounded by the sofa. "She used me!"
"You're the first one to jump on anyone else for upsetting Lily!" Leia hissed, unappreciative of the beginnings of the trashing of her apartment; the apartment that she did appreciate, the apartment she was extremely lucky to have when a cell had been expected instead. On a more primal level, she was less appreciative of the whinge from the toddler she guarded; knowing her father's action to be the cause. The discomfort of the child in her lap centred as her main concern. After all, there was nothing she could do about Ben anymore, a mistake she would live with but also learn from and apply that to his daughter for as long as she could. Amazingly, the Lilia-focused reprimand worked.
"I don't need to know what happened." The Resistance General went on, irked but sensible, reabsorbing the infant to herself in a bid to bring her down from the hopefully avoidable meltdown; one pissed off child being enough. "It doesn't matter. What matters is that it did, and this is where we are. I've been in enough courts to know these things happen and I'm sure if you dig into the nitty-gritty of Palpatine's court, you'd find the same thing."
Once again, Ren (satisfied to continue his savage pacing but restrictive of taking his frustrations out on the furniture; for Lily's sake, if no one else's) and his last nerve opted to forgo the experience of a literal princess. Not just a princess, but an exceptionally clever, observant and intuitive individual. Perhaps Snoke was right: he had too much of his father in him.
"This isn't about court politics, this is about-!"
"And do you think that if you'd turned her down, she wouldn't've gone elsewhere?" As much as she may have preferred to stay out of her son's sex life and the lewd obsession that had led to the little girl playing with her grandmother's bracelet, Leia tried to implore him to sense. Sense, and the understanding of what he had become entangled with. It was not, despite his bullish rebuttals to the contrary, as simple as an extramarital affair. The Empress could do what she liked and with who she chose, even if she did not exercise it very often, disliked the idea of it or what limits she could morally push it to. To that end, unfortunately, Ben was correct: She had used him. But such is the Empress' prerogative, he had been the very one to defend so but he seemed to wrongly think that didn't include him.
"She's close to Tesk, he understands these things; it's his job to, his duty to. You think he would've hesitated if she asked him? And his discretion would've been second to-"
"I'm not Evelyn Tesk!"
Patience waning and maternal sympathy along with it, Leia took a steadying breath and immersed herself in her granddaughter's inky crown, inhaling it as sedation; a natural thing for a mother of any age to do. I'm wasting my time, my breath and my energy trying to get this through to him…
"You know how I know that, Ben? If Evelyn Tesk got the Empress pregnant on the sly, he'd keep his mouth shut and rub his hands together from the side-lines!" Not an unfair assessment, from what she'd been able to glean on the man so far; someone Poe spent a great deal of time with. As old stock of the previous Empire (even as young children being inducted by their own father), both the Tesk twins understood their roles so acutely that to be presented with such an opportunity would not only prove invaluable, but they would do anything to protect it. "But I think it looks better, should it ever come down to it in the future that those children are tested against each other, that they share a father. Especially since this one could be sickly like Lily was."
Maybe it was sinking in after all.
Pity roused again with Leia's thinning lips as her commiseration re-flared. Watching the sudden dent and subsequent crumble of a recently wrathful individual, brought down by fear for his children would do that to anyone, his own mother especially.
"That's just the way it is, Ben." She reasoned consolingly, loosening her grip on Lily as he turned on his heel to them; his tantrum subsiding into despair, his only comfort coming with cradling his daughter. "That's the way it is in an environment like this one, power comes with its drawbacks. You have to take the bad with the good."
"My birth mother was a senator when she found herself pregnant with Luke and I but with the landscape at the time, there would have been scandal if she admitted the father was a Jedi Knight. Even more if it was discovered they'd married in secret, it went against the Jedi code." Leia's aged gaze followed her only child's aimless wander until he decided to relieve his feet in a nearby armchair, clutching Lilia close as he rocked from side to side; a soothing gesture, for him, for his child, for both. Unsurprisingly, it plucked at Leia's heartstrings.
"This isn't new, Ben: these secrets in high places. All you can do is make the best of it for you and your children. Be there for them, protect them, be their shadow they can turn to. They'll thank you for it. I'm just sorry I didn't do it."
Lucilla lay but did not rest. How could she?
With her loving, loyal, unconscious husband tucked close beside her, none the wiser that the child she carried was not his? With his cheek resting adoringly upon the head of a slumbering child who was also not his; clutching her guardingly to his chest? With the stubble evolving into a tight, meticulously-groomed beard that he kept because she liked it? With the fuss he made of her already, despite only being a few weeks in and plenty that could still go wrong? It made for a wakeful Empress indeed.
And Ren… Maker, she worried about Ren.
The expectant ruler had caught a flash of thunder in his face and a whip of wind in his incensed exit; so immersed in the busy excitement of the revelation, she appeared to be the only one to notice but had neither seen nor heard anything since. Then again… she was the only one with any reason to cast him a glance.
I'm going to have to speak to him but… for the life of me, I don't know what I'll say… What I can say…
Guilt, converging on her from several different avenues, would not allow her to pass this unscathed; that much could be expected, but limiting the damage would be priority. Hell, if came to this child (boy or girl, it mattered not, despite their filthy rhetoric) being born and growing up to look like herself (like Lilia so far) without an utterance or admission of misplaced paternity, all the better. But that… That amounted to nothing more than wishful thinking.
Already sitting up in bed, Lucilla reached down and gently brushed a wayward, rusty strand from her husband's forehead; moving it to clear the way for a careful kiss from above. That ivory hand remained and adopted innumerable cherishing strokes of the fiery head that kept him from blending in.
I love you, my darling. This should not have happened but… here we are. If the universe is kind to us, you will never need to know, and your pride will remain intact. Proud that your wife was always faithful to you. Proud that your children carry your genes. Proud that your family are yours in every sense that they can be. I love you, Orion, and in loving you, sweetheart, I have to lie to you.