Her arm should be bare. Beru's arm should be bare.
I am Anakin Skywalker
Soulmarks are a rare thing in the galaxy, most that do carry them are proud, Beru is not. Her entire life is predestined for her to meet her mark, robbing her of any semblance of free will. An existence as nothing more but a puppet, she thinks.
Beru is fourteen when she can't take it anymore.
She sinks her nails into her flesh and keeps on scratching at those those words until they bleed, until she cannot see them anymore. Beru has to wear a wrapping around her arms for weeks but she doesn't care. Owen says it's the happiest he has seen her in months.
"Are you excited to take this off?" Beru's father asks and smiles at her when he begins to take the construct apart.
Beru's entire family is spread out through the small kitchen and once again she feels guilty.
She shifts her eyes and nods.
She had told them that it was an unfortunate accident with a womprat, she can't tell them the truth they would think her to be crazy. Instead she sits there silent and waits.
I am Anakin Skywalker
The words cling to her scars, hugging them as if they were lovers. They torment her with every flex of a muscle, with every breath she takes, reminding her that she'll never be free.
"What is it, Beru? Why are you crying?"
"Oh, it is nothing don't you worry." Her hands tremble as she struggles keep herself from grabbing the closest kitchen knife and carving the words out of her flesh.
"Is it the scars?" her mother asks. Beru's younger brother winces empathically when he gets to eye her arm. Their older sister elbows him in the chest and places a warm cup of tea in Beru's hands with a soft smile. It smells like home.
"Yes. The scars," she lies and blows the steam off her tea.
When Beru is seventeen Shmi accidentally sees her words.
Beru flees before Owen's stepmother can talk to her. The next day Beru doesn't come to Owen's and neither does she on the next. She ignores his messages.
Two weeks have passed when her mother tells her to make herself useful and sends her to the kitchen.
Her older sister is already there cutting vegetables and looking as disgruntled as Beru is feeling.
"Hey, Erina. Mom said I should help you, well more like forced me to but you know how she is," Beru grumbles. Erina only sighs and waves her over.
"Can you lend me a hair-tie? I don't want to walk back down again just for one," Beru asks her sister as she is pulling the sleeves of her blue shirt up to her bicep.
Erina takes one of her ties off from her left wrist and wordlessly hands it over to her before turning back to the cutting board. Suddenly she lifts her head again and at last addresses her younger sister with obvious annoyance.
"Beru, don't just stand there! You go and put those," she gestures to the mountain of already cut vegetables on another board in front of her," In the big pot over there. Not the small one, the big one! Got it?"
Beru nods and takes the board Erina has already prepared, it's a bit wobbly but manageable, she thinks.
She walks to the stove and looks for any kind of utensil to use so that she can push all of the pieces in it at once. Nothing there. Her hand would have to make do. She lifts the lid with her right hand, placing it on the closest kitchen aisle, then she uses the same hand to shove he vegetables into the pot.
When the final piece has been dropped into the water Beru lets her hand keep on hovering above the steam. It's nice and warm nothing like the scorching heat outside underneath the blazing desert suns. She swishes her hand through it once and then again, trying to form shapes out of the steam. She giggles.
Before she knows what she is doing Beru is dipping her right arm into the boiling pot of water until it meets her sleeves. It takes her five second to realize what she is doing and she screams.
Owen is the first one to visit her at the doctor's besides her family. He cries even more than Beru's mother did. If she didn't know better, Beru could almost think he was the injured one.
"It's alright, Owen, it is just a, uh, flesh wound."
"If that's a flesh wound to you then I don't want to know what you actually consider to be a grave injury!" he laughs and puts a hand on her left, uninjured, arm.
It doesn't take long for them to get together again.
Only Owen's lips soothe the pain that claws at her heart whenever she sees her scarred arm. She can't tell him. So she lies whenever he asks her to tell her story, the story of those angry red lines woven into her flesh. Each time it hurts a bit less to hide the truth.
Beru is twenty and a red betrothal necklace is dangling from her neck when Shmi finally breaches the topic of Beru's mark.
"I am sorry."
A sudden voice from behind her almost sends Beru spiraling forward, the vase she was holding barely staying clutched in her hands. The movement pushes the sand on the vase's surface into her sensitive hand, eliciting a pained wince from her.
"Suns! Shmi, you almost gave me a heart attack!"
"Here let me take this."
Shmi puts the vase on a nearby table and pats the bits of sand clinging to her clothes off before stepping closer to Beru again.
"I realized that I never told you that I am sorry about everything that happened three years ago." Shmi sighs. "I should not have looked, then this..." She eyes Beru's right hand and takes a step closer. "Might not have happened."
"It's been years, Shmi and I've- I've never been angry. Least of all at you. My arm is my own fault, not yours or Anakin's, it is my mistake. But thank you for not telling Owen. I-"
The sleeve of her shirt has ridden up, exposing the angry red marks that go up from her hand towards the entire length of her arm.
Beru immediately pulls it down again. But she does allow Shmi to hug her, she doesn't even hide her tears.
She's twenty two when Shmi is taken by sandpeople and Cliegg loses his leg.
Suddenly the farm is as ghostly as the dune sea, lifeless and dark.
Her limbs grow heavier with every day since Shmi's disappearance, then her heart and then her mind, until finally she doesn't leave the house anymore. Sometimes a scorching pain envelops her with every step she takes - Sometimes she hears Shmi screaming inside of her head.
Her hand is itching again, the rest of the arm is most likely soon to follow.
"Owen can you get me-"
Owen and Cliegg both look up at her from their game of sabaac. The bet was the last piece of blue milk cheesecake she had baked earlier that day - it was the first time she has seen either of them excited in weeks.
There is a matte grey tone that has overtaken Cliegg since Shmi's disappearance, it is worrying Beru. They don't have the money for a prosthesis, just the hoverchair alone cost them a fortune, it is the sad reality.
"Forget it, it was unimportant." Cliegg needed her creams more than she does.
Sometimes Beru wishes she had just cut the arm off instead.
"Master Cliegg! Master Owen!" C3PO called loudly from somewhere outside.
"What does that droid want this time?" Cliegg grumbles.
"Don't bully him, Cliegg! You are too old for that kind of behaviour," Beru teases and stands up.
They rush up to the courtyard from where voices sound, Cliegg lagging behind Owen and Beru.
A young man and a woman stand next to the excited the C3PO who was wildly gesturing to them. They look to be about her age. The man is tall, taller than Owen even, and towering over his female companion and making the small immaculately dressed woman seem even smaller. They don't look like they belong, a cautious voice in the back of her head whispers and she fears for the worst. If they are Hutt enforcers-
"Might I present two important visitors?" the droid boast and the tension in her shoulders eases.
"I'm Anakin Skywalker," the man said.
She crumbles, the foundations breaking down until all that's left is a silent scream.
"Anakin?" Owen's eyes go wide. "Anakin!"
Beru raises her left hand from her side and bites down on it until the taste of copper is invites her mouth.
She won't say them.
She won't say.
She won't.
She.
"Anakin the Jedi."
Anguish.
For a second but yet an eternity he glances at her, his blue eyes as deep as she imagines any ocean to be, then he looks back towards Owen, ignoring her. His right hand is trembling at it's wrist almost as if he too felt that pull and all she wants to do is hide.
Instead she flexes her own right, trying to relieve an itch she knows is never going to go away. She hopes neither of the two visitors see the scars.
"Owen Lars. This is my girlfriend, Beru. I had a feeling you might show up."
"Is my mother here?"
She wants to tell him that no, his mother is being tortured by Tuskens at the very minute, that he needs to save his mother... but she can't. No sound leaves her throat and so she stands there in silence waiting for someone, for anyone, to tell him.
She feels as if this is a dream, all of her nightmares come to life.
Cliegg is the harbinger of the news.
They step into the cool insides of the homestead and Beru shivers, she doesn't know why.
With every word waves of anger and grief so deeply foreign to her that they could not be her own, flicker over Beru. Yet as soon as it comes it disappears again, leaving the taste of ash behind.
"I'm going to find my mother."
Anakin says with the same conviction as if he had said he is going to breathe. Beru believes him. Shmi is alive.
Shmi is alive - it pulsates through her veins with every heartbeat.
She watches Owen and Anakin, then Padmé step outside to Owen's bike. After taking one last look at Cliegg who is shedding angry tears, Beru follows as well.
When Padmé steps away from the embrace and back into the homestead, Beru rushes out of the shadows towards Anakin, who'd already mounted the bike.
"Here." She throws a carefully wrapped package at him. He catches it easily, eyeing her as he takes a peak underneath a loose part of wrapping. It's the piece of blue cheesecake Beru had saved up from dinner.
"It's not for you," she begins, suddenly feeling too open and very much hesitant. "Give it to Shmi when you find her, she'll be hungry."
"I will."
They don't say goodbye and they don't hug but when she feels something tugging a her mind, reaching for her, she reaches right back.
He brings back a corpse and leaves behind a village of dead Tuskens in his wake. When he and Padmé´ and even the droid are gone and all that's left behind of Shmi Skywalker is a gravestone and a grieving family, Beru wonders if Anakin tried to destroy his mark as well.
-I-am-Anakin-Skywalker-
Though she cannot see them, buried beneath layers of scars lie his words on her flesh, forever on her skin. They burn.
On the night he comes back to take her, Beru dreams of dying stars.
An: I read the AoC novelization again and thought 'huh why not put Anakin and Beru together in a fanfic once again?' And so i did. Here is the anti-soulmate soulmate au that nobody asked for!
Let me know your thoughts if you want to :)
