Chapter Text
Luke loved his grandmother very much. He loved her more than anything. Shmi Skywalker was everything a little boy could hope a grandmother to be. She was gentle and kind and funny. She seemed to have an answer for everything, even if it was to admit that she didn’t know something; but she could still make very good guesses and she always knew just how to make him feel better.
Shmi loved Luke too, very much, and she was always watching over him.
Luke remembered once attempting to express his love for his grandmother to Aunt Beru, when he had been very young, only for his aunt to look very confused.
“Your grandmother would have loved you very much, Luke,” Aunt Beru had agreed. “Gran Shmi passed away long before you were born, but I like to believe that she’s still watching over us too. ...Did you uncle tell you about your grandmother?”
Luke had also been very confused. He had pointed, insistent.
“Gran Shmi is right there!”
And, for a moment, to Beru Whitesun’s eyes, Shmi Skywalker had been there.
Gran Shmi had smiled.
Aunt Beru had dropped the milk in surprise.
~
Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru had many whispered discussions after that day. Owen Lars, who had not spoken to his young nephew about his grandmother, had been disbelievingly concerned until he too caught a glimpse of the ghost of Shmi Skywalker.
After that, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru had realized that they needed to explain some things to their nephew before he revealed himself. But their explanation left Luke with many more questions than answers Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru were left with more questions than answers too. They only barely knew more about this than Luke.
There was… a gift of sorts… in the Skywalker line, Uncle Owen explained slowly, a gift to see invisible creatures and people who weren’t alive anymore. Luke’s grandmother had this gift. Luke’s father’s had it. Now it seemed that Luke had their power too.
But Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru couldn’t remember Shmi Skywalker ever making a ghost visible to them. Shmi Skywalker had not liked to draw attention to her abilities.
All Luke could tell his aunt and uncle was that he’d wanted Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen to see his grandmother too, and then it had happened. He couldn’t tell them when he had first seen Gran Shmi. It felt as though his grandmother had always been there, in the background, watching over him and listening with a smile all his life. She was around even now more than she’d been before, Luke thought, but that might be because he didn’t remember being a baby.
This didn’t make Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru feel better, Luke could tell, even though they both assured him that they had loved his grandmother very much and were glad to know that she was still watching over their little family.
Luke wasn’t clear on when he decided this, but soon after he became sure that Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru were nervous because they couldn’t see Gran Shmi. He thought that they must not like not being able to talk to her. So, he concluded, everything would be much better for everyone if everyone could see Shmi Skywalker all the time. She was as real as anyone else, so it was only fair that everyone else be able to see her.
And, from then on, everyone could.
~
Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru were very surprised to have Gran Shmi living with them again, but Luke remembered them being very happy to speak to her again. They told Luke that he didn’t need to make sure they could see Gran Shmi all the time, but Luke didn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to see Gran Shmi all the time. His grandmother was lovely and she laughed at all his antics.
Luke remembered the first time that Gran Shmi had picked something up: a model ship that had fallen on the floor. He didn’t notice it at the time because she had picked it up and returned it to him, as a caretaker did, and he had gone back to acting out an adventure. Luke had never noticed that Gran Shmi hadn’t picked anything up before.
Ghosts drifted through everything, he knew, but Gran Shmi wasn’t like other ghosts.
What Luke really remembered of that moment was how Uncle Owen had dropped his food and how it had spilled all over Aunt Beru’s favorite chair. Uncle Owen should have gotten in big trouble, because it had stained something awful, but Aunt Beru hadn’t been mad at all after hearing that Gran Shmi could pick things up now.
After having been told so many times to be very careful around that chair, Luke had thought it very unfair Uncle Owen hadn’t gotten in trouble
~
“She’s Luke’s father’s sister,” Aunt Beru explained to everyone who asked after the new woman living in their house. “Shmi’s daughter from before she married Cliegg Lars.”
Tatooine’s communities were small places sometimes, so soon everyone around knew that Owen Lars’ stepsister had come to live at the Lars farm. She was… an odd woman, everyone said. Shmi Skywalker, named for her mother before her, didn’t talk much and didn’t say much when she did. She kept close to the farm and her family. She stayed distant from strangers.
“Looks a lot like her mother,” one of their neighbors said to Aunt Beru.
“A strong resemblance,” Aunt Beru agreed.
Memories tended to be very long or very short around these parts of Tatooine. Some memories started long and then became very short by communal agreement.
More than a few in their community remembered how the late Cliegg Lars, Owen’s father, had brought a slave woman home to his farm. There had been a great deal of talk when Cliegg had freed, hired, and then eventually married Shmi Skywalker. People talked because that was what they did, not all of them respectfully, but more than a few of them had similar histories themselves. Not every mother on Tatooine was allowed to keep their children, everyone knew well, so the appearance of a long-lost daughter was an odd but not impossible miracle.
People spun the story of Owen Lars’ lost stepsister mostly by themselves. All Aunt Beru had to do was smile politely and let themselves spin themselves to an agreeable stop about the second Shmi Skywalker.
~
Luke loved his grandmother very much.
Shmi Skywalker was everything a little boy could hope a grandmother to be. As he grew, she always had more to tell him. It seemed like her smiles only grew brighter, her eyes only grew warmer, and her voice was stronger every day. As Luke grew up, Gran Shmi took Luke’s small hand in her and gently taught him about the strange worlds beneath and beside their own.
She didn’t know what made ghosts and spirits, or what made the Skywalkers able to see them. She could only warn him how a person could live with such strange things.
Gran Shmi taught him about the trickster spirits that played in the sunbeams, danced around pits, and tumbled off their rooftops. They were mischievous but not usually dangerous; they were always good for games when Luke had the time. They generally loved being caught and shot at, unlike the womprats, and could be very hard to hit.
Gran Shmi taught him about the massive, wandering spirits that roamed the desert. The tall, lost beings sang strange songs in the wastes. They often kept to their lonely horizons, but sometimes they might drift closer, as though hoping to finally find whatever they were looking for, if a young boy tried to sing along to their passing cries. As Luke grew older, he grew better at tricking them, and all his family scolded him for baiting them, but Luke thought many of them enjoyed the attempt at company - and the ones that didn’t could never manage to catch him.
It sometimes took Gran Shmi a long time to remember the things she had to teach him, but Luke questioned her determinedly as his own horizons broadened. Before a trip to the spaceport, he had never known that there were spirits beyond the local ones on Tatooine, and he couldn’t believe that Gran Shmi had forgotten to talk about them!
Gran Shmi also taught him about ghosts.
There were several different kinds of ghosts, but they all seemed to be variations on echoes of people. There were haunted reflections that went through the motions of their lives even in death. There were wistful shades that followed the people they had loved in life… and vengeful shadows waiting to confront the people they had hated.
Gran Shmi compared ghosts to footsteps in the sand. Ghosts were people who had been people, a long time ago, whose lives had left traces in the world and who often slowly faded away in the constant turn of sand.
Spirits were more like animals or feelings taken shape.
Most ghosts that Luke met were weak, distant, and unaware beings who didn’t have very interesting things to say. A lot of ghosts drifted through people and walls as though they weren’t even there. Even the ghosts that were aware of things didn’t seem to have much memory for anything else. Some ghosts could only speak a handful of phrases, again and again, like reflections of refugees. None of them were the same, but…
None of them were anything like his Gran Shmi. She was special.
~
Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru had told Luke very little of his father. Luke got the impression that they didn’t think very highly of Anakin Skywalker. Uncle Owen’s grumbling suggested that Luke’s uncle didn’t approve of Luke’s father leaving Tatooine at a very young age, becoming a cargo pilot, and then dying, which made sense because Uncle Owen would never leave the farm and his family like that.
Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru were never disrespectful when they spoke of Luke’s father, exactly, because he was family, but they clearly thought Anakin Skywalker would have been much better off if he’d come home much sooner.
Personally, Luke didn’t blame his father for any of those things. Well, sometimes he blamed his father a little for taking off and then dying on him, but Luke also sometimes thought that he’d also take any chance to leave this sandy piece of nowhere behind him. Even a cargo pilot got to see more of the stars than a farm boy, especially a farm boy stranded on the farthest planet from any sort of bright center of the universe.
Luckily, Luke had Gran Shmi, and there was little Gran Shmi loved to talk about more than her son. Gran Shmi loved Owen and Beru and Luke, of course, but her son held a special place. Her Ani was her favorite person in the world.
Anakin Skywalker, Luke had already known, had been born a slave. There were some people around these parts who liked nothing more than reminding Luke that he was the son of a freed slave who was the son of a freed slave.
Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru had told him that Anakin Skywalker had been freed and gone to walk the stars, which helped some, but Gran Shmi’s stories helped more. Luke hadn’t known that Anakin Skywalker had also been a skilled mechanic and a clever mischief-maker and a brilliant pilot. He hadn’t known that Anakin Skywalker had been furiously good and determinedly kind. Shmi had been so proud of her little boy.
Such stories Gran Shmi told him of Anakin Skywalker’s adventures!
Luke came to imagine that such a brave boy - a boy who was in many ways just like him - had grown up to be much more than just a cargo pilot who had died in the Clone Wars. The Anakin that Gran Shmi told him about wouldn’t have been content not to help people! He would have helped slaves and prisoners and refugees hide and escape! He would have brought food and water to people in need! He would have snuck important things past the bad guys and carried special messages and done everything that he could to help people.
After all, Gran Shmi had told him such amazing stories about his young father helping his friends, fellow slaves, and even spirits and ghosts! Luke tried to do the same thing where he could, sneaking around his family’s watchful eyes, because it made him proud to follow in his father and grandmother’s footsteps. The boy Ani, who had helped ghosts find their peace, had surely become a man who had lived to help people.
Luke shared his imaginings with Gran Shmi when he was the same age that his father had been when Anakin had been freed. He had been having many thoughts about one day being as brave as he wanted to imagine his father had been.
Luke didn’t know what to do when his grandmother, instead of her usual indulgent smile, frowned. Gran Shmi thought very deeply and looked increasingly confused for it.
“...Gran?” Luke said hesitantly.
“I…” Gran Shmi began.
“Didn’t you ever hear from him again? You must know something!”
Gran Shmi looked so uncertain. Luke could almost hear her thinking and willed her to find whatever memories she was looking for her, so that she could tell him what he wanted to hear. He wanted nothing more than for his stories to be true.
“He… he went away… to help people,” Gran Shmi remembered slowly, as though discovering this for herself. “Yes, he...he did. My Ani went with the man… the tall man… to have a chance at a better life. He was going to become… to become a…”
“A cargo pilot?” Luke prompted.
Gran Shmi looked at him, still frowning, and whispered, “I can’t recall.”
Luke didn’t know what to say to this. Gran Shmi forgot things sometimes - sometimes she forgot even really important things - but she had loved her son more than anyone. How could Gran Shmi forget that Anakin Skywalker gone off and become a cargo pilot?
It occurred to Luke, in this moment, that he didn’t know how his father had been freed.
“Gran Shmi, how was my father freed?”
He knew how his grandmother had been freed and how she had later chosen to marry Gran Cliegg. He even knew that his Gran Shmi had died because of the Sand People, which was why they never talked about the Sand People around her. But Luke didn’t know how his father had died or even how young Anakin Skywalker had first been freed. It seemed strange that no one had ever told him.
“There was a tall man,” Gran Shmi said, after a great deal more painful thought and silence. “A tall man came from space and needed our help. There was… a bet… and a race.”
“A race?” Luke repeated eagerly.
Shmi stared off into nothing. “Ani won,” she whispered. “He won.”
She remembered nothing else that night.
~
Luke liked flying, he liked racing, and nobody thought it was strange when Luke started asking more questions about racing. Specifically: podracing. Gran Shmi had mentioned a few times before that her Ani had been determined to be a podracer. Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru didn’t care much for flying and they didn’t gamble, so they couldn’t tell him much, but Luke had friends and those friends had guardians and friends of their own.
Memories could be long on Tatooine, depending on who you were and what you were asking after. Some few people still remembered the Boonta Eve Classic all those years ago, the first big podrace in memory where a human had won. A ten-year-old human slave even! Anakin Skywalker, yes, that had been his name. Some people in Mos Espa still remembered Anakin Skywalker, the podracer boy, if very vaguely nowadays.
Luke asked his Gran Shmi about it, if this was the race that Anakin had won to be freed. Gran Shmi stared at him for a long moment, before she smiled with such delight that Luke didn’t know if he’d ever seen the like on her before.
“He built it himself,” she said. “He built the pod himself. It took him so long.”
Luke smiled back and settled in to hear the real story of Anakin Skywalker and the Boonta Eve Classic. Gran Shmi told him how Anakin had done it to help people, about how Watto (a name that had appeared in many a story before) hadn’t wanted to take the bet, and about how Shmi hadn’t wanted to let her Ani do something so dangerous but had wanted him to be freed more than anything. She told Luke about Selbulba the cheater and Ani the winner. It felt like the culmination of every story he had ever heard about Anakin Skywalker and Luke was on the edge of his seat for every detail now returning to his Gran Shmi.
The people he’d helped had freed Anakin, as promised, and taken him on as… as an apprentice, Gran Shmi remembered. They hadn’t had enough money to take Gran Shmi with them too, but she had felt Anakin had been far more important. She couldn’t have taken such a chance away from her son, so she had stayed behind and let the tall man take her son away to the stars.
And there the story ended… and it wasn’t the ending Luke realized that he had been hoping for. He’d known it ended there, because he knew how Gran Shmi’s story went on from there, but still Luke had hoped for something better than never seeing each other again.
Luke was now older than his father had been and still wanted to go to the stars, but… now that he thought about it… he couldn’t imagine leaving his Gran Shmi and Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru behind forever. Yes, he’d choose to go be a pilot too, to help people, and to leave this dusty old rock far, far behind him. But… forever? He’d miss his family before long. With a handful of years under his belt, the concept of forever stretched further ahead of Luke than it ever had before.
“Didn’t he ever visit?” Luke asked hopefully. “Didn’t he ever send a message?”
Gran Shmi frowned, confused.
“Gran Shmi, he must have come back!” Luke insisted desperately. “He had to meet Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, didn’t he? He must have come back for you at least once!”
“...Once,” Gran Shmi agreed, thinking very deeply. “He came back once… all grown.”
“Yeah?”
“...I can’t recall more than that, Luke.”
“How can you forget that?” Luke demanded, not for the first time deeply frustrated with his Gran Shmi’s limited memories. Of all the people to forget things about! His grandmother was supposed to know everything about his father! How was there always so much that was beyond them both?
“I… I don’t know,” Gran Shmi said, lost.
~
Luke confronted his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru about this. Now that the story had stitched together, he knew that Anakin Skywalker must have come back at least once to have met Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. Uncle Owen had only ever told him that his father had left Tatooine, never saying anything about Anakin Skywalker coming back.
Luke knew that they knew something. He knew for certain when Aunt Beru gave Uncle Owen one of her looks and said, “He was always going to find out eventually, Owen. He has too much Skywalker in him not to see the truth of it. He deserves to know.”
Uncle Owen sighed heavily and relayed, briefly, the story of Shmi Skywalker’s death. It was one of the things they didn’t talk about in this house, not in detail, to avoid upsetting Luke’s grandmother. Luke only knew enough not to talk about it.
Gran Shmi had been taken by Sand People and, as the weeks went by without her, they had all rued the fact that none of them had her gift. Just as they were giving up all hope, Anakin Skywalker had come to them, returning for the first time in ten years. Somehow, Anakin had heard that his mother was in danger and he had immediately set out to find her. Gran Cliegg, Uncle Owen, and Aunt Beru (before she had been his aunt) had been left alone with the offworlder woman whom Anakin had been traveling with and possibly escorting somewhere.
Later, Anakin Skywalker had returned again, dusted in smoke and grief, carrying his mother’s dead body. All Anakin had been able to tell them was that he had been too late to save her.
Gran Cliegg never had the chance to ask anything more. Uncle Owen was never given the chance to know his stepbrother or to grieve with him. Anakin and the offworlder woman had left nearly immediately. Soon after, the Clone Wars broke out, and Anakin Skywalker was never again seen by the Lars farm.
“The only one Anakin knew here was his mother,” Uncle Owen said gruffly, wiping away a thin teartrack, “and your Gran Shmi was the only one who knew him. He didn’t have any reason to stay after she died.”
But you were family! Luke could have said.
But what about me? Where do I come into this? Luke could have asked.
“...But why didn’t Gran Shmi remember that?”
Aunt Beru came around the table and put her arms around him. “It was a terrible thing, Luke, and a bad memory for everyone. Sometimes… we forget the painful things, because it hurts too much to remember them. We all loved your Gran Shmi so much and we wanted to remember her when she was happy.”
Uncle Owen nodded. “Be gentle with your Gran Shmi,” he said. “She’s… different. She’s special and she’s family, but… she’s still a ghost, Luke.”
Luke nodded and sniffled, wiping at his face with his sleeve. He leaned into his Aunt Beru and let Uncle Owen put a hand on his shoulder, and he remembered that his grandmother, whom he loved so very much, was dead.
~
“Aunt Beru, who was the woman with my father?”
Luke and Aunt Beru were doing the mending again, while Uncle Owen, whose eyes were having more and more trouble with small details, was making supper. Gran Shmi, who was the best mechanic of all of them, was busy fixing one of the outer fences after some trickster spirits had taunted a canyon beast into roaming far from its usual prowl.
Luke had come to accept that there were strange gaps in the things that Gran Shmi knew and things that his grandmother didn’t want to remember, like how she’d died or how she’d been left behind while her son was freed. But Luke couldn’t stop thinking about the offworlder woman his father had been travelling with.
Aunt Beru looked at him steadily. “I don’t know, Luke. I didn’t know her long.”
“You must know something about her. What was her name?”
Aunt Beru paused in her mending and thought back. “She called herself Padmé,” she said finally, certainly. “She gave no other name. She was a short woman, slight, with pale skin and soft hands. She spoke like she knew she was important, with an Inner-Rim accent, and her clothes might have cost more than anything on the farm. But she was polite… and kindly… and she said she grieved with us like she meant it.”
“Who was she?”
“I don’t know, Luke. We never saw her again.”
~
It took meeting more spirits and ghosts. It took more years passing. It took Luke growing older and wiser, into more of a young man than a boy, for Luke to realize that other ghosts actually were like his Gran Shmi.
Or rather: that his Gran Shmi was like them.
Gran Shmi hadn’t always been the way she was now, as different as she was now. Now, his grandmother was just another member of the family, a little odd, but as real as him or Uncle Owen or Aunt Beru. She asked after their days and listened kindly, then she had her own thoughts and had gone about her own day for them to ask after too.
Even Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru seemed to forget sometimes that Gran Shmi was a ghost. They startled sometimes when Shmi drifted through a piece of a furniture again or a wall, which she did far less than she used to do. Gran Shmi was more solid than she used to be. Sometimes, it seemed like even Gran Shmi forget that she could be anything else. Sometimes, it seemed like she forgot she was dead too.
Luke hadn’t realized this before because Gran Shmi had been growing with him. A very little boy hadn’t needed anything more than a grandmother who loved him. A young man who had begun to question the universe… needed a real person to answer him.
Gran Shmi remembered more now. Not just about her own past, but about new things and new happenings. She was more present, less frequently lost in the past. Gran Shmi felt easier, reacted faster, and talked longer. She learned and thought and grew. She was so real that it was very easy for Luke to forget, for a time, that his beloved grandmother was a dead woman.
But she didn’t age. She didn’t always remember. She didn’t always feel… real.
Luke loved her anyway, but now he began to remember too.
~
Sometimes, there were still bad days, where Gran Shmi forgot that Luke’s father had been a pilot on a freighter or even that Anakin was dead. These were the days when she was very distant, prone to getting swept away in the feelings of the reflective ghosts and spirits around her, enough to forget that her beloved son was dead.
Gran Shmi would speak of her Ani as though he was still out there somewhere. She would look out at the horizon as though she would find him there eventually.
She always looked so sad when they reminded her of the truth. On the very bad days, Gran Shmi would get upset enough to fall to pieces. Even though he knew better about his father, Luke often put off telling her the truth about Anakin Skywalker. It seemed kinder to let her believe that her son would come back to them someday.
~
“Gran Shmi,” Luke said, on a good day. “Did you ever meet a woman named Padmé?”
“...Yes, I met a young girl named Padmé once,” Gran Shmi answered, while she was fixing one of the farm’s generators. “Only fourteen,” she said thoughtfully, becoming more confident as she spoke. “She came with the tall man who took my Ani away. She needed help.”
“What was she like?”
Luke listened with growing excitement as his grandmother described a girl very like the offworlder woman Aunt Beru had described. He was delighted when Gran Shmi laughingly recounted how Anakin had thought the girl was an angel from space - one of those beautiful alien spirits that occasionally touched down on Tatooine’s sands before taking off for the stars again - because she was so different, so soft and pretty.
Ten years apart, Luke thought, the boy named Ani had left with this girl, then returned a decade later with her still by his side. Luke wondered who she had been to his father with dreadful excitement.
Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru had never told him anything about his other parent, because they had never known them. Luke had been delivered to the Lars farm as an orphaned newborn by one of his father’s friends. Luke had clung to his Gran Shmi’s stories of his father and considered his other parent to be a more impossible secret, lost to him in the same way of his father’s death and life among the stars.
“Gran Shmi, do you think she could have been my mother?” Luke asked.
“I don’t know, Luke.”
~
Gran Shmi, Aunt Beru, and Uncle Owen all gave the same answers: they didn’t know. The unknown-girl-turned-unknown-woman called Padmé might have been his mother, but they couldn’t say for sure. They had all known her so briefly, only in passing.
But Luke… Luke knew.
The name felt right in his mouth, in his dreams, and in his heart. He couldn’t say why, but he knew it in the same way that he knew the songs of wandering spirits on the horizon were lost and lonely. He knew it the same way he could see cries for vengeance, forgiveness, or freedom in the eyes of the ghosts around him. He knew it in the same way that he felt wild seas and lush green and a thousand other wonders he’d never seen; they were like scents drifting behind the alien spirits that came in with the ships that never stayed.
Luke was the son of Anakin, who was the son of Shmi, and all Skywalkers had a gift to know things ordinary people had no way of knowing.
So, one day, Luke climbed the stairs and crept out of his house to watch the suns set over the Dune Sea. He whispered to them what he felt he knew. He told the wind and the clouds and the sands, the deserts as a whole, and himself - and he listened to see if it sounded like the truth. He looked up at the sky where the stars hadn’t yet appeared to him.
“Anakin and Padmé,” he said. “I’ll find you someday.”
Even if only their ghosts.