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The lines around her eyes and mouth have become deeper than the cracks and valleys of Tatooine when she births a son in the slave quarters of Gradulla the Hutt. There is a desert storm raging outside; the metal is screaming as sand is thrown harder and harder against the walls until even she is worried that the thin aluminium will erode against the fury of the desert.
It is fortunate, that the howling desert marks her pain, where a peaceful silent night, broken by her screams may have brought down the fury of Gradulla. Even after her child is born, the desert continues to rage until she knows that he has been born into a world aware of the dangers of the galaxy.
The child is so very small, even for a slave-born child but with powerful lungs that greedily take in oxygen and let a deafening cry into the world that make her heart ache with longing and relief, and terror and doubt. She watches through half-lidden eyes as the birth assistant cleans the blood and birth from her son with Terrakni sap, wraps a worn shawl around his tiny body and places him in her waiting arms. She is a mother, and though these thoughts have plagued her for so many months, she tightens her arms and wonders how she will care for her very own child when she does not even truly own the very milk in her breast to feed him.
Shmi gifts him with the only thing she has, her name, Skywalker, and pours all her love and despair and hope into it. She traces the nub of his nose with her fingertips and calls him Anakin, curling protectively around his frail body in this fragment of life that is dedicated to peace. The desert is angry and joyous and enraged outside, but inside she wonders at his pale golden hair, if it is something that came from the parents she cannot recall.
When the desert dies down in the early airs of the morning, there is a pounding on their door, and she tries not to make a sound when Anakin screams and Gradulla officially gains a new slave, guaranteed by a transmitted buried deep under the muscle in his hip. Instead, she swings the shawl across her breast, kisses her child across his brow and begins to work.
Gradulla is pleased at the birth the child; though whether because he is, to Depuran, the very shape of profit, or because his lovely blond hair and sweet face are promising another, sicker, form of gain. She is lucky in many ways; her former master, Pi-Lippa had taught her more technical skills than most allowed slaves to learn and Gradulla had brought her for these, rather than for the curve of her hips or plumpness of her lips. She hopes more than once that Anakin will inherit all her worst physical features, and only keep her mind and endurance.
She is also lucky that her small golden child is a quiet child; he makes soft noises that reassure her heart when he is still, and his impossibly tiny hands glide over the seams of her rough tunic with the first tendrils of warmth that are not unwanted. He is a smart child; knowing when to be quiet to avoid the thrashings and anger and ire of the Depuran, but smart enough to make soft sounds at just the right moment to melt the heart of a market trader into offering just a little better deal.
Shmi can sling her tiny oddly quiet child around her while she works the books; she can calculate technical expenditures while she sings soft lullabies. She speaks in harsh Huttese while she works, negotiates in Basic in the marketplace, whistles in droidspeak binary when repairing trousers and boots and shawls, drills Anakin in Bocce while gathering Poonten grass for their beds and sings the song of the Riya-chelik, the freedom trail, in lilting Amatakka.
As soon as Anakin is ready, she shows him how to survive in the desert. She stalks across the Jundland Wastes while Anakin toddles after her on tiny feet, and she teaches him how to harvest a black melon. She cracks the outer shell against the harsh rocks and breaks her fingernails prying apart the outer shell to reach the milk within. She takes a swig of the sour juice, and ignores the curdling and heavy urge to throw-up and hands it to Anakin with hard eyes.
She doesn’t stop until he can harvest a melon without spilling a drop, until he can swallow the liquid and clam his lips shut. He hates and hates this, and hates and hates why, but he slides his impossibly small hand inside her own and her resolve strengthens.
He is so small, and so precious, and there is no room for this on Tatooine. She needs to know that if Gradulla sold him tomorrow, he would remember how to survive. She needs to know that if he ever had the chance to be free, he would stalk deep into the desert and be as enduring as the very bedrock.
She teaches him how to dig for the edible newly sprouting roots of the cacta bush, how to peel away the foul but nutritious husks of the desert sage from the poisonous pods. She teaches him how to cut the stem of a funnel plant and tie a water skin around the end to harvest the water until the plant dies, and how dry the flower to eat.
She teaches him how to harvest Wild H’Kak beans and how to brew them into an orange coloured tea that soothes cramps, and teaches him how to spread its numbing pulp over the bloody knuckles they gain harvesting sour hubba gourds from the highest rock recesses. She teaches him how to make traps and catch gorgs in the sewers and how to roast them in Manak leaves, how to butcher a womp rat cleanly and fry short-leg spiders until crisp.
She opens her door at night and secrets in slaves with painful bruises, broken bones and bloody coughs. Together they work into the night, peeling off the tough, chewy bark of the ginsu plant, picking tarfa leaves from sharply thorned shrubs and carefully pulling kaktru flowers from the cactus and drying it out in the sun. Shmi Skywalker teaches her son how to make ointments to heal infected cuts, balm to heal chapped lips and broken skin, how to make tonics that cure burning bladder infections and how to use Terrakni needles to sew close long gashes in skin. No one can survive alone, and this knowledge is important enough to steal him away from the comfort of his dreams.
Whenever they are finished, she lines up old dented Caf tins, glass Barium Fizz bottles and plastic packages of rations that have long-since been cleared of their original contents and refilled with new items a dozen times over, so Anakin can count through their meagre stocks with his tiny fingers and call out warnings on low ingredients while she boils dried desert sage husks and familiar fragrant herbs and spices, chops nuts and strips seeds from their pods. He is still very small, but determined to help her; she leaves the finished products on their low table and quizzes him before he labels their medicines in his wonky Aurebesh letters.
“This one has H’Kak paste and funnel flower oil?” He asks, sniffing at the medicine inside an old can bearing the faded words ‘Original! Fizzy Glub’ and brightening at his mother’s nod.
“What can you use it for?”
“Bruises and hurt muscles,” Anakin stopped; his brow twisted as he thought so loudly, “But Twi’lek can’t have it? And- Rodian kids can get sick if they eat it.”
She runs her fingers through his soft hair and serves him a precious cup of Tzai in a chipped clay mug but walks out into the darkest of night with her gentle son and shows him how to catch rock beetles, cave beetles, flat bugs and star-bugs with their bare hands, and how to use their fists to grind them into a lumpy beetle broth that Anakin eats with an expression of too-deep gratitude for such a small child.
Together they plant traps for sandmaggots, and in the morning they share its offal amongst the slave quarters, because the flesh is poison, and receive greens and soypro in thanks. They help press Cactus Pulque and are given a whole waterskin full and precious Haroun flour in return. Though he sways in his seat, she guides his hands into rolling soft balls of Spicy Ahrisa and carefully measuring out a small amount of their precious cactus pulque into the flour until they can wrap the dough in thick desert leaves and bake it in the burning ground. She sings in low Amatakka until Anakin knows of bartering, charity, and the taste of Spicy Ahrisa and Sweet Haroun bread on his tongue.
Until Anakin knows that Tatooine is more than lumpy ground beetles, sour milk and endless medicine for misery.
Her hands bear rough ageing, fading skin when Anakin is sent off to die in a Pod-Race because their luck has ended and Gradulla has grown vicious in her failing crimes. She dutifully plucks a new Terrakni needle from the enduring cactus while Anakin sleeps his last night in her bed. The hollow needle is still seeping the same disease-killing sap they had cleaned his once new face with, when she crushes driss pods, tezirett seeds and dust-bugs into dull brown powder, ready to be tattooed into her skin.
Shmi Skywalker cuts her lips on the sharp edge of the needle and blows through the needle hollow until all the sap inside has emerged into the mass of pigments. She mixes sap with pigments into a thin russet paste before sucking it up and spitting the foul taste from her mouth. The stain persists, coating the centre of her lip softly and the ends of her front teeth with a shape that all slaves know as an act of desperation. She mutters words of hope in Amatakka under the lights of the moons and inks talismans into her skin in abstract forms. Her fingers invoke The Mighty One for protection through trouble-to-be-had, invoking the Sky-walker for guile and Ar-Amu for strength in grief.
In the morning there are no words to be had that can be expressed better than the way her fingers can spell out love through the locks of Anakin’s hair. They eat from chipped plates, of warm Lamta that express multitudes of sentiments that language cannot, and she refills Anakin’s mug with more blue milk than he has ever been allowed. Still she worries in Amatakka, in Basic, beeps at him in droidspeak until he giggles and hugs her and promises that he will return home to her in childlike incomprehensibility of the finality of death.
Instead of a broken heart, she sweeps her son into her hold as he waves his arms and swears that next time he’ll finish the race, next time he’ll win, and she shakes and shakes because he is three.
Instead of a broken body she gets a Toydarian slave owner who doesn’t seem half as cruel as Gradulla, and a son who shakes as wildly as the desert storm of his birth; who had flown as fast as the rapid sands and yearned for more and more.
Instead she pulls Anakin onto her hip and they spend few precious credits on sweet deb-debs, Pika and Falotil fruit in the busy market, heading back to their new home with Watto. She sits in a home of her very own, instead of slave dorms, with a lapful of her tiny child covered in gooey sweet fruit juices, who moves his arm like the wind moves the desert. The home is cool, and bigger than anything she had ever thought she’d be allowed, with small moisture vaporator just big enough to grow mushrooms around the casing. They have few possessions, but after Watto releases them for the night they forage through the desert with active fingers, and Anakin streaks into the world with keener eyes than she does, returning with the start of a tiny garden for their pantry and small piles of foraged wild foods to tuck away in case Watto is crueller than his apathy first seems.
There are podpoppers, chokies, pallies, bloddles, and bristlemellon plants tucked into cool dark corners, and a lump sits in her throat as Shmi takes in the growing food that will one day ensure she and her son will have something to fall back on.
That night she takes the bright vermillion deb-debs Anakin had tucked into her palms; she rolls the spiky skin over her skin and hums the melody of the Riya-chelik while she wraps the fruits in the worn shawl once wrapped around her son. While Anakin slumbers she fingers the hope and prayer that she inked into her skin, and walks until she reaches a chelik-ta and leaves the bundle of fruits behind in the sand as deepest appreciation for prayers answered.
The lines around her eyes and mouth have become deeper than the cracks and valleys of Tatooine when her golden-haired child brings home two Jedi to the sound of a desert storm brewing in the distance. Their home is sturdier and the only sound is a far-away flutter of wind and stirring sand, but she knows the language of the desert is calling Anakin away once more, calling him to towards freedom. She feeds these Jedi her Haroun bread, Lamta and Spicy Ahrisa and somehow knows that this is one of the last meals she will ever eat with Anakin by her side.
There is little need for knowing where to harvest black melons, or crush bugs into broth in the splendour of the Jedi, but Anakin was born in the strength of the desert winds and his very bones know how to survive and how to thrive. Shmi Skywalker has gifted him with the only things she has, her love, her strength and her name, and that is why she pushes him to leave behind the Haroun breads, the Lamta and the Spicy Ahrisa, but to remember the lumpy ground beetles and sour milk.
Anakin is nine when he is free and she weeps and weeps in joy, and feels her new Jedi companions grow uncomfortable in her heart ache; her longing and relief, and terror and doubt. She pours all her love and despair and hope into her words and traces his cheeks with her fingertips curling protectively around his frail body in this fragment of life that is dedicated to freedom.
“Now, be brave, and don't look back, Don't look back.”