Disclaimer:
All things Star Wars belong to Lucasfilm.
At the Homestead
by ami-padme
(ami_padme@yahoo.com)
Chapter 1
Beru stared out at the farm from the safety of the house, wide-eyed and
trembling. It had never been
threatening or frightening to her before, but it certainly was now.
This was her home – this small piece of the desert that belonged to the Lars
family – and it had been for quite some time now. Up until today, it had been a place that offered nothing but
familiar comforts and a sense of security.
That was why she had always laughed off Owen's protective impulses toward
her. He was sweet, in his own gruff
way, but she had always thought that his worries about her traveling to
Anchorhead alone, or her being outside at all after a certain point at night –
even with the farm's security screen on! – were senseless. She had lived on Tatooine her entire life,
and had been in Mos Eisley for years, mostly on her own. Owen's worries, especially here on the farm,
here in their house, seemed unnecessary.
Still, she thought it was a lovely thing to have someone looking out for
her that way.
It had been nice…quaint, almost.
Until Shmi disappeared.
Now it seemed her familiar home had been snatched from her, and a totally alien
setting was dropped in its place. She
stood at the same front door she had gone through countless times, and wondered
what Shmi had thought when she walked out of it this morning. She stared at the vaporators, which she had
helped maintain on a daily basis for so long, and wondered if Shmi had seen the
Tuskens coming as she turned away from them, her mushrooms gathered in her
basket.
Cliegg had found that basket overturned on the ground when they ran out to see
what the commotion was. He held onto it
while he stared at the Tusken sandstorm moving into the horizon, already far
out of weapons range. They had attacked
in near silence, but once they were safely away, their bellows and shouts had
echoed throughout the farm.
Cliegg and Owen had left soon after that, and Beru sat alone, at the homestead,
watching the horizon and waiting for their return. The suns had barely peeked above the skyline when Shmi had been
taken. Beru had since watched them
rise, and fall. She didn't want to
think about how late it was now. She
only knew that it was pitch-black out, and the darkness and shadows were
dancing all over the farm and inside the hovel, playing tricks on her eyes
everywhere they looked.
She was annoyed at herself. She wasn't
a child, scared of ghosts that she knew didn't exist. She had to stop being afraid.
Shmi didn't have the luxury of sitting in her house, biding her
time. She had been taken by real
demons, and Beru knew that Shmi would not cower before them.
Beru took a deep breath to strengthen her resolve, and felt a little
better. She could –
A sudden, loud beeping noise blared out from the near the front door and her
heart almost stopped.
Beru leaned against the doorframe with hand on her chest, trying to breathe
past the lightheadedness of her fright.
The sound continued.
It was just a warning signal. That's
all it was.
She turned, still leaning against the door, and looked at the nearby monitor,
already knowing what she would find.
The temperature had dropped precipitously this evening and the
vaporators were still functioning under the afternoon settings. The filters didn't respond well to cool
temperatures, and even less so to high winds.
The system was telling her to go cover the filters and shut the
vaporators down. She should have done
it earlier, but somehow, during her desperate watch of horizon, time had simply
gotten away from her.
She could see that the perimeter lights were on, but they weren't nearly bright
enough to make her feel safe. Even with
the security screen running.
But she had to go. If she didn't, the
filters would be brittle and cracked by morning, and they were expensive to
replace, in addition to the days of moisture harvesting they would lose in the
meantime.
Beru made up her mind, and ran back into the room she shared with Owen before
she could change it. Everything was a
mess. Owen had rifled through their
closet and trunks early in the morning, looking for weapons, travel lamps,
tracking sensors…anything that would be useful for their hastily put-together
rescue mission.
She stepped over their things on the floor, and went to a trunk to grab one of
her heavy shawls. She tossed it on
their bed and sat beside it as she struggled to pull on a pair of boots. Then she clumsily pulled her hair up into a
bun on the top of her head. She was
soon out the front door, trying to draw the shawl around her as she went.
The chill from the winds was even colder than she had anticipated, and she
shivered with her first steps up the stairs and out into the farm. Her shawl was whipped off one of her
shoulders, and the sand kicked up in her face.
She ignored it, sprinting to the nearest vaporator as fast as her legs could
carry her.
Beru opened the main control panel and let her trembling fingers move over the
buttons that would shut the filter down, listening to the vaporator groan
softly as it turned off. She closed it
back up, reached above her head, and opened the compartment where the filter
was housed. With a good tug, the
protective cover came down over it.
Her hair was falling out of place and being blown into her eyes, and her shawl was
falling off her shoulders again. She
tugged and pulled irritably at both, feeling more and more anxious.
Anxious about what? The Tuskens? They had their hands full somewhere else,
with Owen and Cliegg and the rest of the settlement.
She realized, bitterly, that she was probably safer here tonight than she ever
had been before.
She fixed the filter on the second vaporator more quickly than the first, and
moved onto the next one. Her thoughts
raced as she went – she couldn't stop thinking about what was happening with
the rescue party.
Owen had left to get help from their neighbors before Cliegg was able to bring
himself back inside and put Shmi's basket down. The farmers had discussed the Tusken situation a week earlier – a
tribe had been spotted outside the settlement, closer than any had been in
nearly a year. The hope had been that
they'd stay on the outskirts, and then move on. In the last few days, evidence of the tribe had almost
disappeared…people had begun to relax.
But even if the Tuskens had been all over the settlement, Beru still wouldn't
have believed that they could make it all the way onto their farm, take
Shmi, and run. They were getting faster
and deadlier as time went by. The
family hadn't been prepared.
The shock of the abduction rattled every farm, and nearly all of them were
represented in the group that gathered with the Larses barely an hour
later. Thirty men made the largest
group Beru had seen go out on any ride.
They had left in a rush after a brief planning discussion.
Third vaporator done. Beru kept moving,
and was soon accessing the control panel on the fourth.
Why hadn't they come back yet?
No fight with the Tuskens was a simple or short affair, and she knew it. And perhaps the tribe had simply gotten
further away from the farm than she assumed.
If they had taken Shmi without stopping to wreak havoc on anyone else,
they could have covered a fairly large distance in a short time.
Owen and Cliegg simply had further to go in coming back. That's why they were taking so long.
The fifth vaporator wasn't responding to her shut down command. Beru jabbed at the controls repeatedly, and
then simply brought her fist down on the panel. Nothing. Finally, she
started shutting down all the systems, one at a time. It was a lengthy process, but was the best way to get around a
stuck command.
Shmi had shown her the trick some time ago, right after Beru had started seeing
Owen. It was one of the many ways Shmi
had managed to slip her into the everyday activities on the farm, without
directly saying anything about her and Owen winding up together. Shmi had seen that they would, long before
either of them came to that conclusion.
She had welcomed Beru into the Lars family with open arms, and that
wasn't something Beru was going to forget.
Once Cliegg and Owen brought her back, Beru would be able to take care of her,
as a way to return the favor for everything Shmi had done for her. And then, things would eventually get back
to normal.
Beru continued to shut down the individual systems, and was beginning to think
she should just skip it and do the rest of the vaporators. She could come back to this one later. She still trembled from the winds, and
standing here waiting for the systems to respond was beginning to drive her
mad. She angrily pushed her hair away
from her head, and tried again to complete a total shut down. It didn't work.
It was then that she picked up a sound, something other than the wind and the
sand and the vaporators. She looked out
past the house, to the point on the horizon where she had been staring most of
the day.
Joy leapt up in her heart as she ran toward it – the sound of an engine, of
their speeder. They had turned off the
perimeter screen remotely…she could just make them out now. They were back!
The vaporators were completely forgotten.
Her shawl finally fell off her shoulders and she left it in the
sand. She saw Owen driving, with Cliegg
sitting in the back.
Beru ran for several seconds more, waving wildly at Owen, before she realized
that she couldn't see anyone else in the speeder.
Where was Shmi?
Coldness spiked through her, and it had nothing to do with the chilly
temperatures or the wind. Owen had
spotted her, and changed course and slowed down to meet her. She could now see his panicked, ashen
face. There was blood on his clothes,
and his arm was injured. She thought
Cliegg might be unconscious, lying there in the back seat.
"Owen!" she cried, running along the side of the speeder before it
had come to a stop. "What's happened? What –"
"Jump in!" he yelled.
"I've got to get him back to the house, now!"
Beru did as he said, almost without thinking.
She grabbed the speeder and pulled herself in, and Owen gunned it the
rest of the way back to the main house.
"Owen, I –"
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Cliegg, and the rest of the sentence died
on her lips.
His leg was gone.
He was lying across the back seat unconscious, as she had noticed before. But now she could see that his left leg was
missing, cut off somewhere on his thigh.
There seemed to be blood all over the seat and the floor…his leg had
been tied up with clothing of some kind, but it was doing a poor job of
stopping the flow from his open wound.
Owen was talking to her, but she couldn't turn the words into anything that
made sense. She felt dizzy.
The speeder lurched to a stop, and Owen suddenly grabbed her arm, turning her
away from his father, and forcing her to look at him instead.
"Beru, I need your help!"
She nodded. He let go and jumped out of
the speeder. He reached back in to pull
his father out, and began carrying him inside.
He called back over his shoulder, "I didn't have anything with me
to stop the bleeding, otherwise I would have taken him all the way into
town. We need to get a tourniquet on
him, and go. We have to find a
surgeon!"
Beru pushed herself through the house, following Owen as they went into Cliegg
and Shmi's room. Owen lowered his
father onto the bed. She was already
digging through their medical supplies, trying to find something that would
work.
"What do we do?" Owen was asking frantically. "I don't think I can treat something
like this…he can't keep bleeding this way.
He'll never make it to Mos Eisley."
"We shouldn't go into town, Owen." Beru dropped a roll of cloth and a set of binders next to Cliegg
on the bed. "Yatta is a good
medic. We can get to his farm much more
quickly and –"
"Yatta's dead," Owen said brusquely.
"There's no one nearby who can help us. Can you fix a tourniquet?"
Beru blinked at him in horror, wondering what actually had happened out
there. Yet there was no time to hear
the story. "I think so," she
said, taking the binders and cloths and wrapping them around Cliegg's
thigh. The sight and feel of the blood
– red and slippery and sticky – was making her ill. But she knew that Cliegg was going to die unless she made the
tourniquet tight enough. Owen wasn't in
good enough shape to help her, though he tried, holding and twisting where she
asked him to. Finally, she wrapped a
new layer of gauze over everything, and stood back to examine it.
Some blood was still seeping through, but the flow had slowed down
considerably. She hoped it would hold –
and that if it did hold, it would be enough to last Cliegg the trip.
"We'd better hurry. Do you know of
any surgeons in Anchorhead?" she asked.
"He moved to Mos Eisley. We really
do have to go all the way out there."
"Okay," she whispered. Then,
on a sudden and overwhelming impulse, she grabbed him into a fierce hug. She wanted to hold him and be grateful that
he was all right, just for a second.
He hugged her back and winced, then pulled away. He gathered his father in his arms again, his face stretched with
pain.
"You're hurt, Owen," Beru said, touching the wound on his arm. "I should –"
"No time. Let's go."
She ran ahead of him out of the house, and climbed into the driver's seat in
the speeder. Owen lifted his father
into the back and jumped in the passenger seat beside her. Beru pulled away from the house and the farm
as fast as she could make the speeder go.
They rode in silence for several minutes.
Eventually, she glanced at him.
"Owen…what happened to Shmi?"
He was staring out of the speeder, watching the landscape change as they passed
it by. She turned away, thinking that
he wasn't able to answer.
Finally, he said softly, "I don't know."
They didn't speak again until they reached Mos Eisley.