Leia had not been prepared for the amount of laundry she would do during the war. They were two weeks into their journey to Bespin - a hopefully safe port where they would hopefully meet a friend of Han's who hopefully would help them make repairs to the hyperdrive. They were doing a lot of hoping...and a lot of laundry. Despite their attempts to keep their water usage to a minimum so as not to overload the water recycling unit, they'd discovered they quickly ran out of clean clothes. 

In fact Leia had discovered that her locker emptied surprisingly quickly and she suspected it had something to do with the shape draped in blankets behind her. Allya had recently reached a size that allowed her to wear Leia's clothes quite comfortably, circumstances which led to her currently wearing a long sleeved thermal shirt with Hoth insignia on it. Until two weeks ago she'd been wearing it under her snowsuit. The pile of blankets moved towards her, shifting to reveal Allya herself, grinning. 

"I scared Dad," she announced. "I jumped out of the blankets and yelled and he jumped and went 'fuck- Al!' It was great!"

Leia frowned. "Didn't he tell you to stop saying 'fuck'?"

Allya made an uncoordinated shrugging motion while shoving her blankets into the washer. "I mean I guess, but like you guys still say it. I know you try and save it for when you think I can't hear you..."

"That’s because it’s an adult word, Al. That's why we don't say it around you. It isn’t appropriate." She passed Allya the detergent and waited for her to close the unit before she started the cycle. 

"I'm eight, though. Isn't that adult enough?" Allya finally argued, following Leia as she made to leave the fresher. 

Before Leia could respond she found herself bumping into Han, his hands already grasping her shoulders to steady her. "No, it's not," he directed his response over her shoulder at his daughter. 

Allya stuck her tongue out at him but quickly slid past them and took off out into the corridor. He shook his head but he was grinning as he pressed a kiss to the crown of Leia's head. 

"Is she wearing your shirt?"

"She is. At some point your child has decided to 'borrow' clothes from other people."

"Wonder where she got that idea," he mused, pointedly running his hands down her arms. "It's not like there's someone aboard stealing my clothes that she could observe." 

Leia snuggled deeper into the - stolen - sweatshirt she wore. "You like it."

"I do, Your Worship." He wrapped his arms around her waist, "too much." He kissed her softly.

"Solo," she hissed, pulling back, "your daughter is down the hall." 

He leaned in again, "I know that."

"Dad! Can I have monster nuggets for lunch?" 

Leia broke away from the kiss with a laugh at the shouted interruption, tucking her face against his neck. 

"If you eat them all now you won't have any until we get to Bespin...and it's gonna be a long time!" 

"But I want some!"

"Leia," he murmured. "It's going to be a long couple of weeks, still. Even worse if we run out of eight year old approved foods." 

This time, she kissed him. "It wouldn't be us if it were easy, love."

“What did I do to deserve you, Sweetheart?”

Down the hall, Leia could hear Allya chattering away, interspersed with Chewie’s soft rumbles as he, presumably, helped her to make her lunch. Behind she and Han, the washer continued in it’s cycle and there was a pile of clean laundry on their bunk. There were two and a half weeks left to Bespin. In spite of all this, Leia lingered in his embrace, content to stay as long as he would hold her, all the way to Bespin or even beyond if only he would stay right here, right now. If she hadn’t been prepared for the laundry then she certainly hadn’t been prepared to fall in love, least of all with a smuggler with insatiable wanderlust, a wookie copilot and a spunky daughter. But she had, and not even four and a half weeks trapped aboard the Falcon could change it. 

___

A quick disclaimer: I don’t really know what size the average eight year old is but I figure Allya is gonna be really tall like Han, anyway. Therefore, it makes sense that she quickly reaches, and overtakes, Leia’s size. (poor Leia) 

Happy (late) Birthday @fishmalzan! Love you lots and lots my dude!

The night after the Battle of Yavin, Han dreams, of his past and future.

Post war, Allya sees their new apartment for the first time. I realized I hadn’t actually posted very much with Allya actually in it so please enjoy a piece I’ve been hanging on to for a while. Thanks to @jedifish81 for being my fic enabler and reading legit everything I write. Title from Imagine Dragons’ On Top of the World.

"It’s all mine?”

Her dad nodded.

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“And we’re gonna live here with mom?”

A nod.

“And Uncle Chewie?”

“When he’s not on Kashyyyk with his own family.”

“And Luke?” Her dad laughed at that. “No, he wanted his own place.”

Curiosity satisfied, Allya stepped farther into the room. Dad had told her she was allowed to pick her room and she had surveyed the bedrooms, excited, but not entirely sure how she should decide. Her room on the Falcon was hers purely by virtue of its existence. She hadn’t chosen it but there wasn’t much to choose. Unless she wanted the bunk over the table, which, quite frankly, she didn’t.

Her dad said she was learning vocabulary from Leia. Which was probably true, her dad had never said ‘quite frankly’ in his whole life.

“We’ll have to get you a bed and stuff. Some drawers of some sort, a desk, maybe - Hey Al, you want your own desk?” She glanced up, realizing too late she had completely zoned out on him. “A desk?”

“Yeah, sure. I mean you can still do stuff at the table or whatever, if you want. But I figure in a few years you’re gonna decide you hate me so you’ll need somewhere to do your homework and your...teen stuff.”

“Teen stuff?”

“You know, that typical teen stuff? Daydreaming about cute - people? Hyperspace calculations? Bomb making?”

“Dad,” she cut in. “I’m not gonna hate you.”

“Can I get that in writing?” he teased.

Allya made a face. “No.” She turned back to look over the room again, then quickly turned back to her dad.

“Would you let me make a bomb in here?” “Not by yourself,” he said quickly.

“Can I get that in writing?”

Grinning, he leaned against the door frame. “Not hardly.”

“Dammit,” she laughed.

He raised his eyebrows at her. “Come on Al, could you at least try on the language?”

“I will when you will,” she challenged.

When he finally sleeps after the battle of Yavin he dreams of Talliah. 

It has been - so long since he dreamt of her, he’s not even completely sure he dreamt of her when she was alive, she seems so distant to him now he has to remind himself she was real sometimes. 

He wakes in the early hours of the morning, unsure how much sleep he’s had, sure that Talliah is next to him. When he finds nothing but his own rumpled sheets he’s confused, disoriented - 

Was she real?

- he finds himself in the doorway of Allya’s room, not really sure how he got there, but he had to be sure. 

Allya sleeps, curled around a stuffed toy, the blanket Malla made her undisturbed, she was a still sleeper. Reassured and more aware of himself - Allya was fine and asleep in her bed, Talliah had been real, not just a ghost made to haunt him - he crawls back into bed. He’s only just closed his eyes and -

- and his mother is there, tracing her fingers over his palm, smiling. 

“You will know love, Han.”

The image twists, his mother replaced with a figure he doesn’t know - “You will know pain, unimaginable -”

He hears laughter, turns and finds Lando and Talliah. Lando leans in but Talliah turns away, alerted to his presence, and smiles, moving towards him - 

“Han!”

- behind her Lando’s face falls before he raises his head to meet Han’s eyes, face dark with anger. 

“You killed her,” he says. 

And like that, Talliah evaporates under his outstretched fingers. 

“You killed her!” Lando repeats, volume rising. 

“Gods, I love you.”

He turns and there is - the princess? - lying in the mussed up sheets of his bunk, grinning. 

“Your worship?” he asks, confused, incredulous, trying to step closer, but he doesn’t made it before-

“Dad!” 

Allya is rushing towards him, grown and dressed in - is she graduating? 

“Congratulations, General Solo-” 

Allya is replaced with a doctor who immediately becomes a different doctor, one he vageuly recognizes and -

“Congratulations, sir-”

He’s holding Allya, the day she was born and -

He’s still looking at Allya but older now, tucked into a hospital bed next to the Princess, grinning as she peers over Leia’s shoulder at a baby. The Princess looks up at him, smiling-

A man in uniform stares him down. 

“You don’t deserve her.”

The man is replaced by a kinder looking one -

“Take care of her.”

Malla, holding the Princess’ shoulders -

“Take care of him.”

His mother, pressing her pendant into his hand -

“You have to run, Han.”

Chewie, furious and roaring at him -

“Now is not the time to run, Cub!”

Suddenly Talliah is in his face, shaking him and he hears her voice more clearly than he’s heard it since she died -

“Wake. Up. Han.”

Some quick post fic thoughts with Sass: this may not fit into the Allya verse in the long run, I’ve never settled on the question of Han’s force sensitivity in this verse and this is essentially a vision. However this does hint at things that are planned as well as things that I’ve already begun to address (Lando’s anger over Talliah’s death, even tho he won’t find out for another three years). 

As always I’m willing to answer questions, even if it’s “what does this mean” because God knows if this verse will ever be finished!

Me: you know I’ve never really written Han with his kids

@jedifish81 yelling at me through the Force, probably: Allya au!!

Ok, Han definitely learns to read a little later than most kids do, afterall as long as he can read signs he’s good. He doesn’t need books. When Allya is born books slip right on by. She needs clothes and a safety seat, not books. 

When she’s two, reality sets in. She’s learning corellian and basic and shyriiwook and Han realizes she doesn’t know how to read. (He also realizes how little he knows about educating children.) He starts teaching her to read slowly over the next few years and they read books together. They read the space equivalent of Junie B. Jones, which Chewie finds hilarious. Han swears he’s not at all invested but he knows the plot of every book by heart. Once, when he found one they hadn’t read yet he put off all the repairs he had planned to do that day and they read the whole thing. 

As Allya gets older they start their own private book club, of sorts, they pick out books, read them and then swap. (Leia teases Han about some of the selections she finds him reading, “really Han, teenage princesses again?”)

Post war, when Han and Leia have kids, Allya insists they be inducted properly and drags out her collection of books from her early childhood. This becomes a family book club and they read everything from YA romance, sweeping dramas, half a dozen classics, one political thriller (before the genre is banned by family vote for being too political and not at all thrilling), a handful of family appropriate books claiming to be about Han and Leia, as many mystery books as they can find, a few Stephen King-esqe horror books (before they become Han and Allya’s thing only) and dozens of books chosen for a cool cover and a decent description. 

This was meant to be a six sentance Sunday I swear. More Allya verse, this time even farther back to the trip to Yavin. A fun un-betaed, undisclosed surprise for all involved @jedifish81, @grimmgoblin, @graciecatfamilyband. Title from Bastille’s Pompeii because I listen to a lot of Bastille when I write. 

A diversion backwards in the timeline to just over a year after Yavin. Again, shoutouts to my local favs who make this fic happen at all; @jedifish81 my fic enabler, @graciecatfamilyband who listens to my ramblings when I’m trying to articulate a point and @grimmgoblin who I began this au for a million years ago. Love you all, thanks for making me drag this kicking and screaming out of my fic graveyard.