“Sorry!” Allana’s voice preceded her into the room as she edged in, back first, and pushed the door open with her hip, arms full with the purse she hadn’t bothered to sling back over her shoulder, the coat she hadn’t put on yet, the usual disarray of almost making it out the door before realizing you’ve forgotten something. “I was just going to leave—“ she cut off suddenly as she turned to face the room she had entered and saw her grandfather sitting in the chair in front of her. “—just, um, going to leave these for Anakin but they wouldn’t fit in the mailbox so, you know, I figured I’d bring them up here. I sort of thought I’d find him or grandma in here,” she finished a bit sheepishly, holding up a couple of Anakin’s shirts that had remained lost after the brief prank war that had erupted during the power-swap a few weeks ago. She’d just remembered these two had been stashed in a tree outside the complex and brought them over, intending to shove them in the mailbox before encountering the aforementioned lack of space and heading upstairs instead. Now, however, she sort of wished she’d just left them hanging from the doorknob or something.
Back home Han Solo was probably the person she’d say she was closest to, maybe even more so than Leia who was necessarily distanced from her granddaughter by the necessity of imposing discipline during lessons and being the naturally reticent member of the family. Back home Allana’s grandfather had been the only stable paternal figure she’d ever known, the person to tell her endless bedtime stories as a child, to teach her to use a blaster as a teenager, and someone she both admired and felt completely comfortable around. Here, however, he was from a time before he’d had children, much less a granddaughter, and she had no idea if he even knew that in her time he had helped raise her. It had been easier to avoid him than to deal with the lack of recognition that hurt her in Leia no matter how hard her grandmother tried (though she was still glad she was here of course, a source of calm, someone she could trust implicitly).
Avoiding someone was, of course, made more difficult when you barged into a room where they were sitting minding their own business and nursing a kitten. Wait, Allana thought, head tilting slightly to the left as she actually took in the scene in front of her for the first time, nursing a kitten? She knew her grandfather wasn’t as hardened as he tried to make everyone believe, no one knew that better than the girl he had lectured about space fish, but it was still a funny image and she bit her lip to keep from laughing.