A/N: In spite of this being nonsense...mostly, I am really excited about this. Stay tuned for slow updates and more nonsense about the Force.
Shmi was not born on Tatooine. She knows this much. She thinks she remembers the green forests and blue oceans of her home planet, but she can't be sure it isn't just a dream –a dream like the kind, unweathered faces she imagines her parents having, or a dream like the Force and the stars. Shmi knows she wasn't born on Tatooine, but she does not know any other life.
She was brought here –ripped away from her parents and her life –when she was small (she cannot remember how old she was; no one cares how old a slave is until they are too old to work) and brought to work on a moisture farm controlled by the Hutts, because her hands were small enough to reach into tight, narrow spaces between the machinery, and slave labor, she is told time and time again, is cheaper than droids. The work is hard and Shmi is lonely. None of the children speak to each other –many of them, Shmi included, can't speak Basic, and they are beaten for being stupid. (Shmi learns, of course, eventually. Shmi learns Huttese and Basic and handful of other languages well enough to get by. By the time she is an adult, Shmi can only remember a phrase or two in her own language.)
Some of the grown-ups who work on the moisture farm take special care of the children –doing what they can to keep them safe. They sneak them extra rations and clean their wounds, patch up their clothes. They tell them stories about the stars. About their suns who loved Tatooine too much and dried up all the water, about the Force maintaining life on Tatooine because Tatooine was the center of the galaxy. They tell stories about the Jedi, brave warriors of the Force. One night, an old slave tells the children by firelight that a Jedi will be born on Tatooine; she says that he will free the slaves.
"How do you know?" Shmi whispers into the dark.
The old woman hums in response. The old woman hums all the time. When she is mending clothes and when she is sleeping. When she is perfectly still and silent she hums soothingly, thoughtfully. "I see it in the stars," the old woman tells her slowly. "And in the Force."
"You can see the Force?" asks another one of the children. He's a little older than Shmi. He shines when he speaks. "I thought only Jedi can see the Force."
The old woman hums again. "No," she says. "We all can. We are all connected. The Jedi just more so."
A little girl with white blonde hair and sunburnt cheeks pipes up. "What about the one who will free us? Will he feel the Force?"
"He will be the Force," the old woman tells the children.
Shmi wonders what it would feel like to be the Force. What such a person would like.
"Will they be a person?" she wonders aloud.
"Do you mean will they be human?" the woman hums. "It's hard to say. Many Jedi are, but the greatest Jedi of all time is rumored to have great big ears, and have claws, and stand two feet tall!" The children gasp.
Shmi shakes her head. "Will he be alive?" she asks.
The old woman laughs. "Oh," she coos. "Of course he'll be alive! He'll be born, a baby, grow up, free the slaves! He has to be alive!"
Shmi think it's all a myth by the time she's sixteen and they sell her to do housework for a man who smuggles for the Hutts. She is not suited to do housework (she is not suited to be a slave at all –that's what they tell the man they sell her to, too much spirit, too much hope to ever really be compliant), and she is restless, but he takes her on his starship with him so she can maintain that. Shmi prefers that –the bigness and nothingness of hyperspace, how the stars seem to call her name –to his dusty house on Tatooine, and he is kind enough. She only stays with him for one standard year before he sells her again, but she visits other planets and sees the stars. She wants to see them all, one day.
The man laughs at her the one time she tells him. "It's impossible," he says. "There are billions and billions of planets in the galaxy."
When Shmi is approaching thirty, she works in Gardulla the Hutt's household repairing droids some of the time and as a house servant when Gardulla is on planet. During the harvest, she works on her moisture farms, like she did when she was a child. She does not believe in the old stories. She does not want to see the stars. She does not love Tatooine or her suns. She does not love the galaxy. She is kind to the younglings who work alongside her, but she is resolved to never have children, to never bring a child into a world where they will be a slave.
And yet, in spite of herself, Shmi still dreams about the Force, about a child who frees the salves, about a push and pull in the galaxy, about stars dying and being born in the same instant; a famine strikes one planet just as another has its most fruitful harvest.
Shmi dreams about balance.
She dreams about the child most of all. He has bright blue eyes and golden hair, out of place on Tatooine. He looks at Shmi and blinks. "Mama?" he says quietly. How old is this boy? Nine or ten, maybe. Twenty? Perhaps older? Older than Shmi? Her heart leaps when she sees him and she reaches a hand out to touch his cheek. "One day, I'm gonna visit every planet in the galaxy," he whispers, turning his strange, ageless face towards the stars.
Shmi smiles. "You will be the first to do it," Shmi whispers, her fingers still brushing the boy's cheek. "My sky-walker."
Shmi knows the moment she opens her eyes that she is pregnant. She knows that her child, the boy from her dreams, is the Chosen One, the one who will free Tatooine. She looks up at her suns and does not mourn for the galaxy, does not see cruelty everywhere she looks. She sees love and kindness in Mos Espa, and for the first time in years, Shmi looks to the stars and hopes for the future.
Anakin is born in the dead of night during the dry season. He is delivered on a moisture farm –where Shmi was helping with repairs during the off season –by farmhands and droids. In the last year, there has been no shortage of questions about her son. Will she keep it? Who is the father? They want to know if she was raped, if the father knows about his child. They want to know if Shmi is all right, what she will do once the child is born.
Shmi has no answers, no father, no clue. He friends grow tired of her answers about the Force, but her best friend, Hatore, who believes in Shmi and the Force, turns to her one day, during the harvest, tinkering with the machinery, her eyes shining. "Oh Shmi," she croons. "What shall you name him?"
Shmi, at last, has an answer.
"Anakin," she tells Hatore. "Anakin Skywalker." Hatore, who was born into slavery, nods. Daydancer is the name she was given before her mother knew if she would survive infancy. Hatore is the name she was given when she lived to see her third birthday. But Shmi knows Anakin will live, and that he will walk among the stars.
"Anakin," Hatore echoes. "He's a miracle."
"Anakin," Shmi croons the night Anakin is born. He screams and screams, and Shmi worries that he will wake the Hutts and they will take him –kill him–before she has held him in her arms. He worry drowns out her pain, and Anakin screams louder still, squirming in Hatore's arms. Writhing, screaming, tears making tracks on his filthy, bloody face, Shmi thinks he looks like a wild thing–and nothing like her. Hatore cleans Anakin, cuts his umbilical cord, wraps him in loose, rough fabric. She hands him to Shmi and in the instant before he lands in her arms, Shmi panics. Anakin is hers and the galaxy is cruel. She is responsible for the life and happiness of a silly, squirming, fragile looking thing, with arms that are as long as he is, and eyes that take up his whole face. And he is not hers. He is Gardulla's and the Galaxy's and the Force's.
Shmi stops panicking once she feels Anakin's weight in her arms. He is warm, heavy enough against her breast. He does not cry in Shmi's arms, he does not squirm. Anakin looks up at Shmi, blinking slowly, like he's trying to memorize her face, and for first time she can remember, Shmi is at peace.
"Anakin," she weeps. She strokes his cheek with on hesitant finger. Anakin, though Shmi knows he is too young to have the musculature to do so, smiles.