Chapter Text
Shmi Skywalker rose before the suns each morning.
The homestead was cool and quiet, only the sound of Cliegg's soft breathing and the twinkle of the wind chimes reached her.
She did not have to be up this early, breakfast was routinely in a couple of hours and the farm’s morning rounds did not have to be completed for hours. However, old habits were not so quickly broken and Shmi would be lying if she said she did not enjoy her own private mornings. That early, the skies seemed to stretch out just for her.
Today, Shmi tinkered on C3PO, the poor droid’s casing was very unsuited to the humidity and his joints creaked and stiffened when the sandstorms hit.
“How do you feel now C3PO?”
“As well as I can, my lady.”
She ran her hands over her tools once again before tightening another bolt.
“My goodness, I think it is getting even hotter this year. I don’t think I can stand it again.”
Shmi chuckled, “We go through this every year C3PO. We’ll be ok, don’t you worry.”
“If you say so, but I really am only a protocol droid.”
Shmi smiled and remembered how Anakin sneaked away tools for weeks when he thought she wasn’t looking, how she had caught him up past his bedtime with grease staining his pyjamas.
“Don’t undervalue yourself C3PO. Anyone would be lucky to have you to help them out."
It's early for food but Owen is up when she enters the kitchen.
“Everything ok?”
“Of course,” The pan is already in his hand and he turns around briefly. “I didn’t sleep so well.”
“Anything the matter?”
He shrugs, “I think a storm might be coming.”
Many shops in Tatooine sold appliances claiming to be able to predict a sandstorm; scanners and flying aerials. Some look to the animals, some look to the skies. But nothing in Shmi’s life has been as accurate as the thrumming in Owen’s or her bones.
“How many days?” He asked with a smile.
“Two and a half days.”
“I bet three and a third.”
“Are you two at it again?”
It had become a game quickly, to see who could get closest but it never failed to spook Cliegg.
“Bacon?” Owen asked innocently.
Cliegg grumbled but set the table and Shmi poured out the last of the muja juice for them to drink.
"Now that you're back on your feet, we can get back on the morning rounds."
"My favourite."
"Don't tell me you haven't missed the dunes in the morning." Cliegg teased and Owen rolled his eyes.
"It's been so nice and cool in here."
"You'll have to wear your good hat then." Shmi intercepted with a grin.
Owen shot her a dark look. Within the last few years, the hat had been a source of embarrassment for the teenager. It had ended up screwed in odd places around the homestead, and wampas had "stolen it".
"You don't-"
"Want to get sun burnt I know I know."
Shmi smiled and they ate their breakfast in the kind of quiet comfort only brought about by meal time.
Later, when the plates were clean and the dishes were done, Shmi left the house. Some mornings she alternated between this and glass blowing, a hobby accidentally found but meticulously kept. She had made charms for the family and the wind chimes outside and there was something freeing about having a hobby that was not for usefulness.
This morning, she traced the perimeter and before she reached the herd Shmi knew the eldest, Nia, was expecting. Although the banthas recognise her from miles away by now, she steps slowly and quietly.
“Happy to see me?” She murmured and ran her hand through thick fur as Nia snorted. “Look at you.”
Judging by the light in the sky, Shmi still had time, so she sat, coarse sand under her fingertips. A bantha, still young but not young enough that she remembered his birth, nudged her and she patted his nose. Eventually he settled and Shmi had a lapful of bantha.
“I’ve been thinking about Anakin more lately,” she confessed, “selfish thoughts mainly, about how he might be with me if they had come later.”
The bantha in her lap just stares at her with deep eyes.
“I know, there is little to be done now. Owen’s flu has passed though, we were so worried but he’s up and about now which has been a relief, especially for Cliegg. I'll bring him next time I visit you."
Shmi let her eyes close for a while, allowing her mind to stretch to every grain of sand around her.
Sometimes, she imagined Anakin doing the same. A fleeting, unrealistic thought since he had always been such a restless boy despite his attentiveness. However, she felt closer to the desert and the dunes around her so, if she was being hopeful, that made her closer to him too.
The calf stirred and Shmi opened her eyes. Their hooves pawed at the sand and the eldest were pacing.
Nia nudged her, insistent now.
Not insistent. Warning her.
The herd did not leave immediately but the sense of wrongness, like a clock missing a chime, began to permeate the air.
Perhaps it was a storm, but Owen had predicted three more days and they would have known if it was sooner. They should have known.
It was the same sort of pulling in her bones though, the same hold a storm took of her.
Shmi muttered her goodbyes and the banthas retreated.
She shuddered. It went right to her marrow: a catch in her throat, pit in her stomach, tightness in her eyes kind of feeling.
Shmi could see it now, the storm engulfing her. Sand in her eyes, in her ears, in her mouth.
She would not panic, fear was a free fall. She would not freeze at the thought of a sandstorm.
She had to be steady.
There was an old story, old enough that no one knew where it came from and how it ended changed with every iteration.
The tale goes that a traveller gets trapped in a sandstorm, tired and weary from walking. He walks for hours, until the day is indistinguishable from the night and the suns lose their differences from the moons.
When the storm ends, the traveller is but metres from his doorsteps and has been walking in circles.
Shmi breathed in and out and put one foot in front of another. The skies were still clear. The suns had not climbed too high.
There was never any merit in trying to recognise the dunes. The desert is not your guide, you are your guide.
The tugging twisted even as she kept walking. First the bantha herd and now a thread tied to her ankle pulling at her; it was a sign.
The sand came before she could blink.
It was not a storm, storms were slow and roaring. You knew they were coming, even if there was nothing you could do, the desert would shift.
This was not a storm, it was a swarm
Great tendrils of it were whipping around her and the dunes disappeared behind the sheath of churning sand. The force of it swept her hair back and forth and they moved like hornets seething and biting in the air. If she had to guess she would call it a whirlwind but nothing tethered it, it only surged and surged.
She clenched her eyes shut.
It had come from nowhere, she thought desperately. It could be swallowing the whole desert.
Maybe this was what the mouth of a krayt dragon felt like.
Yet by luck, or some other miracle she realised it had not touched her. It surrounded her, that Shmi was sure of, but the only sign of it engulfing her were a few grains of sand stuck to her eyelashes.
She summoned the courage to open her eyes and the swarm had not quietened but she laughed breathlessly, pressing a shaking hand to her mouth.
Shmi was in the very eye of it.
The thundering began just past her shoulders. It barely brushed against her arms and even the sand she stood on was still.
She reached out and tried to touch the edge of it, yet the grains ran past her finger just out of reach. Even as she placed the palm of her hand to the circling wall it swam past the lines in her hand but no nearer.
Shmi tried more of her body, her shoulder grazing the tumult, shuffling her feet and leaning backwards but still, it moved around her. Her elbow juts out in an attempt to catch it off guard. Her foot kicks forward yet no sand filters into her boot.
She couldn't see the sky through all the sand.
She remembered the traveller, who walked for so long for it all to be so futile. Shmi was nothing if not patient and she would outlast the dunes themselves if she had to. She would endure.
So she knelt.
Shmi looked to the sand in front of her and waited, hands tucked in her lap.
And she waited.
She focused far away, past the clammer of the swarm and past the growing ache in her knees. When her eyes grew tired, Shmi closed them and focused on her breath - that was all that mattered, she told herself.
She would persevere.
Shmi would never be able to pinpoint how long she had spent still in the eye of the storm but eventually, her eyes opened again. The great pillars of sand were still around her, slower now, buzzing with anticipation, but to her left a path had unfolded.
The walls of sand, now outstretched even further in the distance, still thrummed with movement but the sound had changed. Instead of a tireless roaring it had quietened to a curious murmuring.
It was such a strange thought that Shmi was immediately taken aback. She could not track where it had come from in her mind but it seemed like this strange labyrinth, tearing itself apart and stitching itself together with every second was waiting for her.
So she stood up.
Her joints were stiff but she didn't care. All that mattered was that the sky was above her again and there was a path. A path that felt like hers.
Shmi would think of the questions later. The explanation for a storm that wasn't a storm and warnings that weren't warnings. Now, she put one foot in front of the other and began to walk.
The sand began to crumble away. The towering walls of sand fell gradually: grain by grain. Nothing surged or seethed, nothing churned or coiled.
The swarm became rivulets, barely grazing above the desert floor as she walked.
Shmi reached the familiar silhouette of the homestead and a lump rose to her throat. She wondered how far the swarm had spread but there was no sign of damage anywhere; just a faint discolouration on the walls.
As if recognising that she was nearly home, her feet began to ache and Shmi stopped outside the house.
Cliegg must have seen the storm coming and taken down the wind chimes, she thought, because the lazy afternoon lacked their twinkling.
"Shmi?"
It wasn't the voice that surprised her since, it was the voice that asked her what she wanted for breakfast and complained about his overlarge sunhat. Shmi didn't miss the catch in it though nor its odd hopefulness.
What surprised her was that Shmi could hear a child crying inside the homestead. Like any child's wails, it was high and reedy so carried easily through the air.
That was what made her turn around so quickly.
Yet when she did, she saw the wavering of Owen's lip and the lines under his eyes. All teenagers grew in leaps and bounds of course but this was not the Owen she had left. Not by years.
"Owen?"
His hand clutched at his chest, mouth slack.
The child still cried.