Anakin Skywalker searched the crowd that had gathered around him to congratulate him for his daring rescue of the Chancellor. The face he most wanted to see was absent. As he half listened to the praise he was receiving he worried why his beloved wife had not come to welcome him home.

As soon as he could, he made his escape and went straight to his wife's apartment. Upon arriving he got the surprise of his life. In the months he had been away, his wife had grown to truly Hutt sized proportions.

"What happened to you? You're so Huge!" Anakin blurted out, wincing at the pained look that crossed his wife's face. He was going to be paying for that comment for a very long time.

"Isn't it wonderful Ani? I'm going to have a baby." Padme sighed before going back to her meal that consisted of take-out from several restaurants across Coruscant.

"A baby?" Anakin said wincing as he watched his wife add some sort of pickled vegetable to one of Dex's famous shakes, which in his mind was pure sacrilege.

"Well, it might be twins since those run in the family." Padme said as she slurped down the concoction. " A few of my more distant cousins on my mother's side have been known to have triplets as well. I didn't ask the medical droid because I wanted to be surprised."

Anakin felt ready to faint. Twins, or possibly even Triplets? Discovering he was going to be a father had been shocking enough that it had taken him a while to process it, but this...Well, at least he had a couple months to get used to the idea.

Doing his best not to look as panicked as he felt, he smiled, waded his way through numerous empty take-out boxes, embraced as much of his wife as he could get his arms around, and told her that she had just made him the happiest man in the universe. This clearly had been the proper response, because he wasn't relegated to the couch that evening for calling his darling wife huge.

&!&!&

In the med-center on Polis Massa, Obi-Wan sat there blinking and staring as the babies just kept coming. After the arrival of the fourth, the only thing he could think was HOLY SHIT. The arrivals of the fifth, sixth and seventh children barely registered. Padme stayed alive just long enough to name them. Obi-Wan didn't blame her for dying. If he had that many children at once, he would've died too.

While Yoda agreed that scattering the Skywalker children across the galaxy would be impractical as it would quite easily be possible to lose track of one or more of them, he decided that putting all their eggs in one basket would be unwise. It was decided that Senator Organa would take the three girls, leaving Kenobi to bring all four boys to Anakin's step-father's farm on Tatooine.

When Padme's remains were sent back to Naboo for burial, it was decided that the official story would be that she and her unborn twins - no need to let any conspiracy theorists know that there might be more children to look for - had been killed by an exotic intestinal parasite that had been known to trick medical scanners into giving a false negative during a search for parasites. It had something to do with the unique electro-magnetic field they emitted. Usually these parasites were caught by human doctors who knew something was off despite what the scanner said - mainly due to the fact that their patients tended to become rather massively bloated in a few short months -, but medical droids always failed to spot these odd animals that reached mind-boggling lengths until the autopsy. Padme had relied entirely on a medical droid during her pregnancy, making the story somewhat feasible.

&!&!&

Owen Lars awoke a couple of hours before dawn to a strange screeching and caterwauling sound that he had never heard before. Grabbing his blaster, he made his way to the front door of his home where the noise was coming from. When he opened the door, he found a very frazzled Obi-Wan Kenobi trying to sneak away after leaving four baskets and a note on the doorstep. The contents of said baskets were proving to the galaxy at large that despite their early births, their lungs were just fine.

&!&!&

Queen Breha Antilles Organa looked down into the baskets that her husband had set before her. Because she was unable to carry a child to term, adoption was one of the few options left to her. She had spoken with her husband Bail several times about the possibility of adopting a daughter. She hadn't expected him to adopt three without consulting her though.

She smiled as she looked into the baskets. The three girls looked like baby angels.

Bail's shoulders slumped in relief. Breha wasn't yelling at him, which was a good sign. She'd yelled at him for days after he'd gotten a red open cockpit two seated speeder rather than the more practical looking one that they had gone to look at when they were pricing speeders for use on Coruscant. Adopting a set of "triplets" that were in actuality three of a set of septuplets (he still didn't know how Knight Skywalker and Senator Amidala managed that one) without consulting his wife was a higher magnitude of stupid.

One of the babies started crying, breaking the spell that the sleeping infants had cast over his wife. Two seconds later, the sound of the infant's wails was drowned out by Breha's yelling.

(**^**)

Edited Sept. 3 2010