"Sh… sh-sh… shase."
Shmi frowned slightly and looked over her son's shoulder.
"Where did you just read?" Anakin pointed at the datapad.
"That's chase, love. See, that's a cherek, not a shen."
"Right, no dots."
"Exactly. Keep on, then."
Shmi had won a lot of fights with Watto, but when it came to school, she hadn't even bothered. "What's the point?" he would have laughed, and maybe he was right. Anakin had an innate understanding of machines and good people skills. From his mother he'd learned inventory. Watto himself had taught him basic mathematics. There were precious few other skills a slave of Anakin's position needed to know, and Watto would sooner cut off his own wings than waste money on something as superfluous as school.
Strangely enough, Anakin had felt much the same the first time Shmi had set The Standard Guide to Moisture Farming, Vol. 3 in front of him.
"You'll find this fairly boring once you can actually understand it, but it'll be good to practice on until then," she said, then added, "It was a gift."
Anakin frowned. "I still don't get why I have to do this. I can't read Huttese or Tal either."
"Maybe we'll get to those at some point, but the majority of the galaxy speaks Basic so this comes first." She didn't see the need to mention that she couldn't read said languages either.
"What's the point, though, Mom? When am I ever going to use this?"
Shmi sighed and leaned back in her chair, rubbing her wrist, just above the fading copper armlet. Her constant companion. A rare wind rustled the hanging laundry outside and suddenly she was not in Mos Espa, not with her son whose origins were such a mystery, but with another elusive young man in the purple tents of Mos Entha kirnavale. During those hot nights, between making love and laughing and telling false futures, she'd read to him. Not the stirring poetry of Kazan and Im'radil that he read in return, but the first formations of her osks and peths, committing the Aurebesh symbols to sound for the first time.
"Ani," she said, "I first learned to read when I was nineteen, and I can count on one hand how many times it's been helpful since then. I'm not going to lie to you. But my greatest hope is that someday you might need to know it. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
Anakin, a child who had seen too much, nodded, all at once resolute.