oh my god I just read a post that was like “fuck this nonsense send MACE WINDU back in time to unfuck the prequels!!” and now I will never, ever be satisfied until I find the 300k version of that fic, ever. I NEED THIS FIC LIKE I NEED AIR. WHY IS THIS FIC NOT ALREADY IN MY HANDS??

Padme lives. She runs. -- Leia is growing in fits and spurts, eating greedily and crying loudly. She stays in a sling on Padme’s chest when they move, Luke held snug in a sling around Obi Wan’s. Luke gets a whole head of thick brown hair while Leia’s is still patchy and bald, but he never matches his sister’s powerful lungs. When Padme had been sitting in her high senatorial apartment on Corsucant, holding Anakin’s sweaty hand, she had never imagined she’d be murmuring desperately soothing noises to her fussy daughter while she shot around a corner at stormtroopers, while R2D2 meddles with a ship’s blast doors behind her. Luke starts teething on a hot jungle planet where they hunker down for three weeks, sleeping in an abandoned old temple and catching the local wildlife for dinner. Leia takes her first steps in the belly of a Corellian freighter they’ve stowed away on. She wobbles between Padme’s outstretched hands and Obi Wan’s knees and boxes of smuggled luxuries. When she falls down, Obi Wan surges forward, heart in his throat, but Leia laughs.

He’d known how some of the men are with younglings—known from Waxer and Boil how sharply those attachments can form with little ones. Hell, the men were raised to be protective, so much so that Obi-Wan has often wondered if their protective drive was not written into their very atoms, some intrinsic part of their DNA. It wasn’t something Obi-Wan had ever questioned. He’d thought he had understood the scope of it. In reality, he hadn’t understood a thing. Not until Kamino. Or: Not all that dive from cliffs make a running head start. Sometimes, the Fall is only a natural progression.

Obi-Wan stared at the newcomer standing tense in the corner. Dark smoke curled around the other padawan’s boot like the tail of a lothcat. With a huff, Obi-Wan disengaged his own lightsaber and clipped it to his belt, bowing in greeting. “Hello, Padawan Antilles.” OR Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi makes a friend and the universe changes for the better.

The door slams closed again the second Fox clears the threshold. The street crowd has largely fallen back into its normal rhythm, everyone moved on from the disruption. Which just leaves Fox, and the kid. Great.