Chapter 12 · The Galaxy Can Wait

By the time Leia reached her office, the day had acquired that false, metallic quiet that came after too much noise.

The Senate complex was still alive around her. Of course it was. The building did not care that one of its senators had just been told her life had altered in a way no committee could amend, defer, or send back for procedural review. Doors opened and closed. Aides crossed intersections with the determined speed of people carrying other people’s urgency. Somewhere down the hall, a delegation from the Corellian Trade Commission was arguing with security about access badges as if bureaucracy itself were a personal insult invented for them that morning.

Leia walked through it all with one hand curled around the strap of her satchel and the other held carefully at her side, because every time it moved toward her abdomen she felt as though the gesture made the secret visible.

Her office had not changed.

That was unreasonable, and yet she resented it.

The desk still held three datapads in priority order, each one marked with a different level of crisis by C-3PO’s fussy little color system. The tactical briefing from Mon’s office still glowed faintly on the wall screen. Han’s jacket, which he had left there two nights before after insisting he had not left it there and accusing the entire senatorial staff of conducting a campaign against his outerwear, hung over the back of the visitor chair with the informal arrogance of a man who could make even a government office look temporarily less governed.

Leia stopped in the doorway and looked at it.

Han.

The name no longer came alone.

That was the thing.

It came with the memory of his hand at her shoulder when she returned too late, with his voice in the kitchen pretending not to be worried, with the way he could make impatience sound like affection and affection sound like complaint because anything more direct embarrassed him unless they were alone and even then, sometimes, unless the lights were low. It came with the Falcon’s engine hum, Chewie’s great rolling laugh, the smell of old metal and oil and worn leather, all the impossible domesticity they had built out of things that had once been escape routes.

And now this.

Leia crossed the office and set her satchel on the desk.

For several seconds she did nothing else.

Then, because apparently she had survived war, torture, planetary destruction, rebellion, government formation, and an interrogation with Grand Admiral Thrawn only to be defeated by the act of leaving work early, she began collecting things with unnecessary precision.

Datapad one: delegated to Mon’s staff.

Datapad two: redirected to reconstruction subcommittee.

Datapad three: absolutely not urgent despite Threepio’s use of red.

She shut down the wall screen. The tactical map vanished, leaving the office briefly reflected in the dark surface: desk, chair, jacket, Leia standing too still in the middle of all of it.

She picked up Han’s jacket.

It was heavier than it looked. Or perhaps everything felt heavier now because she had begun measuring weight differently.

For a moment she pressed the fabric between her fingers.

Then the door chimed.

Leia closed her eyes.

“Come in.”

The door opened to reveal Mon Mothma with two aides behind her, both holding datapads and both wearing the carefully neutral expressions of people who had been told to follow the Chancellor and then discovered the Chancellor had chosen an unscheduled detour.

Mon looked at Leia once.

Only once.

Then she turned to the aides.

“Wait outside.”

“Chancellor, the Defense Appropriations—”

“Will still be appropriating in two minutes.”

The aide wisely stopped.

The door closed behind Mon, leaving the office suddenly smaller, quieter, and much harder to lie in.

Mon took in the shut-down screen, the gathered datapads, the satchel, Han’s jacket in Leia’s hands, and Leia herself.

“Leia,” she said. “Is everything all right?”

Leia almost said yes.

She had said yes in worse circumstances and meant less by it. She had said yes while bleeding, while grieving, while evacuating bases under bombardment, while standing in rooms where everyone looked at her because she was the person least allowed to break. Yes was useful. Yes moved things forward. Yes kept other people from stopping to ask questions no one had time to answer.

This time, absurdly, yes was true.

Not complete.

But true.

“Yes,” she said.

Mon’s expression did not change, but her eyes softened by a fraction.

Leia let out a breath.

“Actually… yes. I think I am.”

The aides outside were muffled by the door. Somewhere beyond them, the Senate continued to exist. Thrawn remained in custody. Kallus was hopefully being threatened into sleep by Dr. Seln. Antilles would receive his transcript. Mon had another session, then another after that, and probably three private crises waiting behind the public one.

Leia stood in the middle of her office with Han’s jacket in her hands and felt, for one impossible second, that none of that could reach her unless she allowed it.

Mon stepped farther inside.

“What happened?”

Leia looked down at the jacket, then back up.

“I’m pregnant.”

The words were smaller than she expected.

Mon went still.

Not shocked. Mon Mothma did not receive news like a person who had forgotten the world could change. But the entire quality of her stillness altered, the Chancellor receding just enough for the woman beneath to look at Leia with something older, warmer, and infinitely more dangerous to Leia’s composure than surprise would have been.

“Oh, Leia.”

There was no politics in it.

That was what nearly undid her.

Leia laughed once, very softly, and not quite steadily.

“I know.”

“Does Han know?”

“Not yet.”

“Then why are you still here?”

Leia looked around the office, as if the answer might be hiding in one of the shut-down screens.

“There are things—”

“There are always things.”

“Mon.”

“No.” Mon crossed the room and took one of the datapads from the desk, glanced at the header, and put it firmly back down as though it had personally disappointed her. “There was supposed to be life after the war. We did not build all this so that joy would have to request scheduling clearance.”

Leia swallowed.

Mon’s voice gentled.

“Go home.”

“I was going to.”

“Good.”

“I should leave instructions.”

“You already have.”

“There is the emergency committee.”

“I will tell them you were ordered to rest after medical review.”

“That is not entirely false.”

Mon gave her the faintest smile.

“I have built governments on less.”

For a moment they simply looked at each other, two women who had spent too many years turning personal loss into public function, standing in an office that smelled faintly of caf, paper, and old war.

Then Mon came closer and, with rare informality, took Leia’s hand.

“I am very happy for you,” she said.

Leia’s throat tightened.

“Thank you.”

“And I am serious. Leave.”

“Yes, Chancellor.”

“That was not from the Chancellor.”

Leia looked at her.

Mon squeezed her hand once.

“Then from someone who remembers what we were fighting for.”

Leia nodded.

She did not trust herself to answer.

Mon released her, stepped back, and by the time the door opened again she had already put the Chancellor back on like a cloak. The aides straightened at once.

“Senator Organa is leaving for medical rest,” Mon said as she passed them. “Her urgent files are to be routed through my office for the remainder of the day.”

One aide blinked.

“All of them, Chancellor?”

Mon looked at him.

He looked down.

“All of them. Yes, Chancellor.”

Leia almost smiled.

Then she put Han’s jacket over her arm, took her satchel, and left before the building could remember how to keep her.

Her apartment was not far by official transport, but the trip felt longer than usual because she had nothing to do with her hands.

That was not true, strictly speaking. She had a comlink. She had her satchel. She had three messages she refused to answer and one she kept opening and closing without sending.

Han.

Calling him should have been simple.

It was not.

Leia sat in the back of the transport with Coruscant’s late light sliding pale across the window, and stared at his contact code as if it were an encrypted Imperial file. Her thumb hovered over the command. Once. Twice.

Then she pressed it before she could turn courage into deliberation and deliberation into delay.

The line crackled.

“Yeah?”

Noise behind him. Metal. Voices. Someone laughing too loudly. A distant, familiar Wookiee rumble that made something in Leia’s chest loosen before Han had even said another word.

“Where are you?”

There was a pause.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether this is my wife asking or Senator Organa.”

Leia closed her eyes.

“My wife would probably be charmed by my answer.”

“Han.”

“Hangar.”

“Of course you are.”

“Hey, I said hangar, not trouble.”

“That distinction has never survived contact with you.”

“Unfair. Mostly.”

Behind him, someone shouted something about a stabilizer coupling. Han shouted back without moving away from the comlink.

“No, not that one, the other one. If you strip that bolt, I’m making you explain it to Chewie.”

Leia listened to his voice, to the life around him, to the ordinary chaos of pilots and machinery and the Falcon existing in the world, and suddenly knew she could not tell him through a comlink.

Not this.

Not with static between them.

“Stay there,” she said.

The noise on his end seemed to recede.

“Leia?”

“Just stay there.”

His voice changed. Not much. Enough.

“You okay?”

Leia looked down at her hand, resting over nothing and everything.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

A beat.

“Should I be worried?”

She breathed out.

“No.”

“That was not convincing.”

“It was honest.”

“Those are different things with you.”

“Stay there, Han.”

This time he did not joke.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

The hangar smelled like fuel, hot metal, and the Falcon.

Leia had never been sure how a ship could have its own scent so completely, but the Falcon did: old leather, scorched wiring, machine oil, dust from too many worlds, and that faint ozone bite that meant something somewhere was either overcharged, recently repaired, or about to become Han’s problem. The sound hit her before the sight did. Voices clustered around an open maintenance bay. A small group of pilots in mixed New Republic flight gear stood near a portable schematic display while Han gestured at it with the irritated authority of a man explaining something simple to people who had made the mistake of being wrong in front of his ship.

Chewie saw her first.

Of course he did.

He was half inside an access panel near the Falcon’s landing strut, one massive arm buried up to the elbow in machinery that looked entirely too delicate to survive his affection. His head lifted before Leia had fully crossed the threshold, and his attention locked on her with immediate, absolute warmth.

He withdrew from the panel with a grunt, shook one hand free of a coil of loose cabling, and crossed the hangar toward her in three long strides.

Leia barely had time to set Han’s jacket more securely over her arm before Chewie reached her.

He rumbled a greeting, low and pleased, and bent to gather her into the kind of embrace that had, over the years, become less a greeting than a form of weather: sudden, enveloping, warm, and entirely impossible to resist unless one had made peace with offending a Wookiee.

Leia let herself be folded into it.

For a moment there was only the familiar weight of him, the smell of engine grease and warm fur, the deep vibration of his greeting passing through her chest. It was absurd, perhaps, that this was what undid the last of her careful composure after Seln’s quiet room, Mon’s hand on hers, the transport ride, the comlink call, all the places where she had managed to hold the news inside herself like something too new to expose to air.

But Chewie was family.

And he had not asked her for a report, or a decision, or a strategy.

He had simply seen her and been glad.

Leia closed her eyes against his shoulder.

Then, before she could decide not to, she whispered, “Chewie.”

He answered softly, still holding her.

“I need to tell you something before Han gets here.”

Chewie went still then.

Not because he knew.

Because he heard her voice.

Leia drew back just enough to look up at him. His great hands remained at her shoulders, careful now, his expression shifting from welcome into concern so quickly that it made her smile despite the sudden pressure in her throat.

“I’m all right,” she said first, because with this family that had to be said before almost anything else. “I’m all right. It’s good.”

Chewie gave a low, questioning rumble.

Leia’s hand moved to her abdomen.

This time she let it.

“I’m pregnant.”

For one suspended second, Chewie did not move at all.

Then his eyes widened.

The sound he made shook half the hangar.

Leia had just enough time to say, “Chewie—” before he swept her up.

Not roughly. Never roughly. But with the absolute, uncontainable joy of someone whose body had reached celebration before his judgment had finished reviewing the situation. One moment Leia’s boots were on the floor; the next she was in Chewie’s arms, lifted against his chest as he turned once, twice, three times, laughing in great, rolling Wookiee bursts that filled the hangar and bounced off the Falcon’s hull like engine thunder.

“Chewie!” Leia gasped, and then, helplessly, laughed.

Several pilots turned.

One mechanic dropped a tool.

Someone near the schematic display said, “Is that good or bad?”

Han stopped mid-sentence.

Chewie spun another half-turn, still roaring with delight, and Leia clutched at his fur with one hand and Han’s jacket with the other, laughing so hard the sound came out breathless and almost shocked, because after the Senate, after Seln’s quiet room, after Thrawn and Kallus and Mon’s too-gentle understanding, joy this loud felt almost illegal.

“Put me down,” she managed. “Chewie, put me down before Han thinks you’ve finally lost patience with me.”

Chewie barked something ecstatic and entirely unrepentant, but he did set her carefully back on her feet, both massive hands remaining at her shoulders as though he had remembered, belatedly and with visible horror, that spinning newly pregnant humans might require some moderation.

Leia steadied herself, still laughing.

Across the hangar, Han abandoned the pilot briefing without so much as finishing his sentence.

“All right,” he called, already walking toward them. “What did I miss?”

Chewie drew in a breath.

Leia caught his wrist.

“No.”

Chewie looked down at her, affronted.

“No,” she repeated, breathless, smiling despite herself. “I am telling him.”

Chewie made a low, urgent sound that clearly argued for his right as first-informed family member to participate in the announcement.

“You can celebrate after.”

He rumbled.

“You are already celebrating.”

“What are we celebrating?” Han asked, clueless.

Another rumble, more insistent.

Leia pointed at him.

“Quietly.”

Chewie’s expression suggested that she had asked him to betray several centuries of Wookiee tradition.

Han reached them, frowning now, though the corners of his mouth were fighting the expression and losing.

“Okay,” he said, looking from Leia’s flushed face to Chewie’s barely contained trembling joy, then to the pilots pretending not to listen. “What am I missing?”

Leia turned toward him.

For one absurd second, after all of it, the words failed her.

They had been simple in Seln’s consultation room. Terrifying, but simple. They had been possible in Mon’s office, where the Chancellor had turned the news gently in her hands and given it back to her as something that belonged to life rather than crisis. They had even been easy with Chewie, whispered into fur and warmth before joy had seized him by the heart and spun them both into the middle of the hangar.

But Han was standing in front of her now, grease on one wrist, concern sharpening through the remains of his grin, and suddenly every rehearsed sentence seemed too formal, too fragile, too distant from the ridiculous, impossible truth of him.

“Leia?” he asked, softer.

She took his hand.

That changed him immediately. The grin vanished. So did the performance of irritation. Han Solo, who could face down a bounty hunter with a bad hand of sabacc and worse odds, looked at her hand around his and went very still.

“I’m all right,” she said first.

His eyes narrowed. “That’s usually what you say before telling me something that makes me less all right.”

“It’s good.”

Behind her, Chewie made a strangled, impatient sound.

Leia did not turn. “Quiet.”

Han looked over her shoulder. “Was that at me or him?”

“Him.”

Chewie rumbled, offended.

Leia tightened her fingers around Han’s.

Then she said it.

“I’m pregnant.”

The hangar did not go silent.

Not really.

Somewhere behind them, a compressor cycled on. A hydrospanner clattered against the deck. The Falcon’s old systems hummed overhead, indifferent and eternal.

But Han heard nothing.

Leia saw it happen.

The words reached him, and for a moment they seemed to pass through every defense he had ever built without meeting resistance because none of those defenses had been designed for this. His mouth opened slightly. Closed. His gaze dropped, not all the way to her abdomen, not at first, as if he did not quite dare follow the sentence to its physical conclusion. Then he looked back at her face, searching for confirmation he already had, hope rising so fast it looked almost like fear.

“You’re—”

“Yes.”

“We’re—”

“Yes.”

“There’s—”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

Chewie made a triumphant roar.

Before Han could recover even one useful word, the Wookiee seized him.

“Hey—!”

Chewie wrapped both arms around him and hauled him off his feet in an embrace so enthusiastic that Han’s boots left the floor and his protest vanished into a crushed, breathless sound somewhere against Chewie’s shoulder.

Around them, the hangar went on being a hangar. A mechanic cursed softly inside an open panel. Someone called for a torque calibrator near the aft lift. The pilots Han had abandoned returned, with varying degrees of discipline, to the schematic display and the argument waiting there, because in a place built around ships, noise, grease, and emergencies, one Wookiee roaring over something private was not unusual enough to stop the work for long.

Chewie barked a cascade of delighted Shyriiwook directly into Han’s ear.

Han flailed one arm.

“Yeah, yeah, I got it—Chewie—can’t breathe—buddy—”

Leia laughed then.

She could not help it.

Han, suspended in a Wookiee embrace and wearing the stunned expression of a man whose future had just expanded faster than hyperspace, managed to turn his head enough to look at her.

The look undid the laughter almost at once.

Chewie, perhaps noticing that Han had gone very quiet for reasons no longer related to oxygen, set him down.

Han landed badly, caught himself, and immediately had to peel one of Chewie’s massive hands off his shoulder.

“Okay,” he said, breathless. “Okay. Happy. We’re all happy. Great. Let go.”

Chewie rumbled warmly and did not.

Han twisted enough to free his other arm.

“Chewie.”

Another rumble.

“I need to kiss my wife.”

Chewie released him at once.

With dignity.

Mostly.

Han crossed the last step between them so quickly that Leia barely had time to breathe before his hands were on her face and his mouth was on hers.

The kiss was not careful at first.

It was relief, shock, joy, fear, all of it coming through him at once because Han had never been graceful with feelings that mattered too much. Then it softened, his hands gentling at her cheeks, his forehead resting against hers when he drew back just far enough to breathe.

“Really?” he whispered.

Leia smiled, and this time the tear that slipped free did not feel like something she needed to hide.

“Really.”

Han looked down then.

At last.

His hand moved slowly, asking before touching even without words.

Leia nodded.

He set his palm over her abdomen with such careful wonder that the whole hangar, the pilots, Chewie, the Falcon, the New Republic, all of it seemed to fall away around the small space beneath his hand.

There was nothing there to feel.

Nothing but fabric and warmth and the ordinary rise of her breath.

Everything there anyway.

Han swallowed.

“Hey,” he said, very softly.

Chewie made a sound behind them that was suspiciously wet.

Han did not look away from Leia.

“Hi,” he corrected, as if the first word had not been good enough for their child and the second probably was not either.

Leia laughed through the tears.

“You have time to work on it.”

“Good,” Han said, voice rough. “Because I think I just forgot every language I know.”

Chewie rumbled.

Han pointed at him without turning.

“Do not say Shyriiwook counts. I am under pressure.”

Leia leaned into him, and he folded around her as if the world had abruptly narrowed to the exact shape of holding her safely.

Outside the hangar, the New Republic continued its long, uncertain argument with history.

Thrawn remained in custody.

Kallus was either asleep or losing an argument with Dr. Seln, which Leia counted as close enough.

Somewhere, files were being copied for lawyers, committees were being convened, rumors were multiplying, and the galaxy, inconsiderate as ever, refused to stop becoming complicated.

But inside the shadow of the Falcon, Han held her as though the future had just become something fragile enough to touch, Chewie stood beside them rumbling joy into the air like a promise, and Leia, for once, did not reach for the next crisis.

For a few minutes, she let the galaxy wait.