Humming. She felt them humming.

When she closed her eyes and cast her awareness into the center of her body, she didn't see anything, didn't hear anything. The sensation wasn't static enough to be an image or a sound. They were movement, the brush of displaced cells, new cells, against her own. They didn't move how she moved, their own particular energy thrumming among hers. They were visceral, these tiny points of life. Not as simple as their size, or their weight, or their genetics. They existed, explicable because they moved, not because they were but because they did.

They didn't breathe—not really, not the way she did. They didn't have awareness of themselves. But they moved: they fluttered, they hummed.

She imagined them like ions, charged particles flung into the restless infinity of time and space. Their kinetic signatures were the only way she knew they existed. She couldn't see them, she couldn't hear them. But, yes. They were there. Two spinning, charged, humming things.

Alive and growing. Not part of her and still, yes, part of her.

She opened her eyes. The bedroom was dark, cool, quiet. The threads of the sheets around her were soft against her skin. Han's breath rustled her hair against her neck, his forearm wrapped loosely around the skin of her stomach. He held her as he slept, a loose embrace, and Leia was so desperately in need of his comfort at a time like this because… because…. She was pregnant.

She closed her eyes again, searching.

It was like going down a staircase in pitch blackness, pressing one foot to the next stair in a tentative effort not to cascade down. Slowly, slowly. Sidestep. Misstep. Try again. Her senses were spread wide, her whole self open. She could feel the beat of her own heart, the blood rush through her veins, the air push into her lungs. She tried another step, a deeper step, skipping one and jumping into the dark air with the hope of landing on the next stair. Faith, maybe, that she would find the landing without seeing where she was going.

Humming.

Her heart squeezed and her eyes opened.

"Han," she breathed. "Han. Wake up."

The arm thrown over her stomach pressed into her skin and his nose bumped into the crown of her head. "We're okay. Go back to sleep," he muttered.

Her free arm wrapped around the one that held her and she pressed her fingers between his. "Wake up," she said, a little louder. "Please."

He groaned but pushed away from her, stretching his long legs between hers as she turned around. "What's going on?" he asked. "You okay?"

His voice was so full of exhaustion, heavy and sluggish, that she hesitated. What exactly was she going to say to him? What she'd felt wasn't even remotely within his grasp to understand. If this was female intuition—mother's intuition, oh god—or the Force...

She looked at him, his sleepy green-gray eyes steady and half-lidded as he scooted closer to her. Down, too, so that their heads were even on her pillow. She watched him, the beloved line of his jaw, the broken edge of his nose, the scar tearing through his chin.

She watched him blink. He was so close to her that she could see the pinch of muscle as his eyelid closed, caught the bright reveal of green-gray as it opened again. She thought of energy, of ions. Of movement and humming. The pressure of new cells against hers, distinctive because they weren't only hers. The movement felt different, had an urgency to the thrum that seemed… not foreign, but new….

"I'm pregnant," she said.

Stillness. Green-gray wide open. Not a breath.

She hung on a precipice, trusting that the next stair was there. Vulnerable, susceptible. She was wide, wide open. They'd talked about this, even planned for it in some respect. But nothing—nothing!—had prepared her for the intense, white-hot sense of possession she already felt. They thrummed. They moved. Distinctive, not because they were half-hers, but because they were also half-his.

Oh, but…. He'd found his voice. "Really?" he said, sitting up, weight on his hands, looking down on her with sleepy mania in his eyes. "Really?"

She nodded.

He lifted a hand, pressed his palm against the side of her head. "You're sure? You took a test?"

Leia leaned into his hand, trying to decide if she was imagining the excitement in his eyes. "Not yet. I'll go to the medcenter tomorrow. But I—Han, I…."

"You know?" he asked.

She nodded again, watched his eyes slide to the side. Leia let him think, trying without success to tamp down her bubbling joy. All the worry about her biological legacy, about her work and what it might do to a defenseless child—children!—didn't suddenly fade. The anxiety about her fitness to be a mother was real, absolute.

But she had faith. She'd grown in the years since Endor, broadened her scope and tried to take in the larger picture. She'd tried. It was difficult and she'd struggled. And sometime between the hatred of her genetics and building a new government, she'd decided to let the chips fall where they may.

She was so blissfully happy about this. Terrified, of course, oh god, terrified. But these little charged particles existed, and all she could do was marvel at their movement, independent of her or Han.

Han's eyes met hers. He opened his mouth, shut it again. She hung on the precipice, waiting, trusting.

And then he smiled so brilliantly that her chest cracked wide open, faith restored.

"A kid," he said, leaning in and pressing his lips to hers. Leia ran her fingers through his hair, thinking kids, Han, kids, but wanting to let her husband have a moment for this joy alone. She'd get the test done tomorrow, and she would reveal that little detail later. Han deserved time to process one thing at a time.

He moved the hand on her head down to her stomach, pressing softly, like he was afraid he would hurt his child. Leia couldn't help but smile wider at his care. She laid her hand on top of his, just above the humming, and looked up. "Are you okay?" she whispered.

His life hadn't prepared him well for this, she knew. And he was bound to have his moments of self-doubt; he had no benchmark for how to deal with children.

But he lived up to her faith, without fail. Always.

He smiled at her now, hesitant, but standing on the edge of happiness. He wouldn't jump off that last stair tonight, she knew. This would be a slow burn for him. But he was a faithful man at the very center of his being, faithful in his own capability, in her, in their combined ability to handle what was thrown at them.

So she was not surprised when he kissed her again and said, with deep resonance and a brightness to his eyes that she remembered from their wedding, "You kidding, Worship? I'm on cloud nine."