this is a disclaimer.
AN: Childbirth, slavery and implied child prostitution in this one. "to kratisto", to the strongest, was reportedly what Alexander the Great replied when asked whom his Empire should go to after his death.
kratisto
Anakin Skywalker is born in a battle, and nine years later his mother will wonder if maybe that was a sign in and of itself: the darkened hold of the slave transport, the smell of sweat and blood and human waste, the sound of the blasters that almost drowned out her own cries of pain. She fights her own battle that day, a fight within a fight for his life as the Tusken raid draws on and the slaves sob in fear or sit, silent, unmoving, too dead inside to care if they reach Gardulla or are torn apart by the Sand People.
Shmi swaddles him as best she can in cloth torn from her own skirt. She'd birthed him on the filthy floor, and the dirt cakes his limbs and clings to him – as does her blood. Slaves are not permitted weapons, but she reaches through the bars and is able to take a knife off a dead guard for long enough to cut her son's umbilical cord before his colleagues arrive, the Tuskens slaughtered or driven off.
The guards wrench him away from her when they reach their destination, forcing her to stumble on her weak, shaking legs into the presence of her new master. They carry Anakin as carelessly as if he were a stuffed rag doll.
Shmi has no strength to be angry anymore.
Gardulla is at least pleased her child is a boy. This particular Hutt has little use for girls, for the market niche she has carved out for herself caters to other tastes.
"You'd best hope he grows up pretty!"
Shmi wonders if she should hope he grows up at all, with that in his future. Then she silently berates herself for the thought. Where there's life there's hope, someone told her once, and she isn't sure she agrees about hope but she does know about the little things: sunrises, the occasional bath, having enough to eat, a moment of laughter shared with a friend.
Even slaves have those moments. So, too, will her little boy. She holds him close in the darkness of their new quarters, struggling to stay awake while he nurses at her breast, and whenever her eyelids fall she thinks she can see him, little flashes of his life: a laughing boy, a fierce young man.
He will not look like her, she thinks distantly. He will not have her coarse black hair, her nose, her jaw, her dark, solemn eyes.
Anakin will have hair the colour of the sand dunes he was born among and eyes like the desert sky Shmi glimpsed through the bars above her head as he slipped from her body and began to cry.
Anakin will look like a Skywalker.