Work Text:
Shmi grew up a slave on a world that had died centuries ago. Skywalker is a slave’s name, and she learned to wear it from a young age. Bleeding in the sand, she learned to wear it.
Sometimes, in her dreams, she half-remembered the words of a lullaby in a language she didn’t understand. Sometimes, she remembered mornings too cool to have been Tatooine’s. She wakes, reaching for the already fading memories, but it is no use. Her past began on Tatooine, and the only mother she remembers are the old women of the slave quarters, teaching her to silence her tears.
The Republic had learned to look away from beings like Shmi and worlds like Tatooine, but the Force never did. The Force had its favorites, of course. It loved Anakin Skywalker, its only child. But the love of the Force was rarely kind.
Shmi had belonged to Gardulla the Hutt for three years when she found out she was pregnant. She was used to missing cycles due to malnutrition, to constant aches and pains from many sources. But she knew. Somehow, Shmi knew. She didn’t cry, but she did lie there in the slave quarters, unable to sleep, wondering how it could have happened. She remembered every man who’d ever had her. But there was no father.
She hid her pregnancy for nearly seven months before Gardulla’s majordomo found out. She was punished, of course. But one thing you can say for Hutts is that they think in the long term. Shmi was allowed to keep her child. A healthy human child would fetch Gardulla more profit than it cost, eventually.
Shmi stifled her screams and wept when the midwife delivered her son in the slave quarters, but this time no one shushed her tears.
He was the only gift the Force ever gave Shmi Skywalker.
She named him Anakin, which in the secret language of the slaves of Tatooine, meant one who becomes free. It was the first of many gifts Shmi would give her son.
There was one thing Shmi could not give her son, though she wanted to give it to him more than she valued her own life. But, no matter what she sacrificed, the life of a slave does not work like that. She could be kind, she could be good, and she could teach her son to be kind and good, too. But she couldn't protect him from the tracker and the bomb that Gardulla's men had put under his skin before he could walk. She could not give him freedom. The Jedi, Qui-Gon Jinn, gave it to him. Or "won" it for him. But Shmi did not protest, even as she watched her son race again with her heart in her throat. The Jedi was the best chance of freedom Ani had.
She did not protest the way Qui-Gon looked at Ani, sometimes, quietly amazed. Like somewhere within her nine year old son, there was an answer to a question Qui-Gon hadn’t even thought to ask.
After she lets him take her son with him, Shmi waits until she can no longer see them before she turns back to the house and lets herself cry. She weeps until she can no longer stand it. Wiping away tears, she thinks, waste of water, what a waste of water. She will not let herself weep again. Her son is going to a better place. She knows it, the same way she knows when Watto is in a bad mood or when a man in the marketplace is looking to rob her.
The next day, Watto is what one could call sympathetic. He’s still angry about losing Ani in a bet—Gods, she thinks, even if it freed Ani, he really did it, he bet away her son. Watto is a cruel being, but even he is not cruel enough to take his anger about this out on her. Or, perhaps he was simply too busy being hungover and miserable about the money he lost the previous night.
Still, there is no worse punishment to give her than what has already been done. He doesn’t send her on errands or rent her labor to local farmers that day. She works on broken droids in the shop silently, thinking about how she taught her son this, what a curious, smart boy he is—and she does not cry.
The Force does not give her this knowledge, but Shmi knows that she will see her son again.