Story written for Legends Family Week 2020 on tumblr.

Day 1: Tatooine

The Planet of Skywalkers

Shmi

The old cargo ship belonging to the slavers shimmied and shook violently when it entered the planetary atmosphere. Shmi was sitting on the cold floor huddled with the other slaves for protection, but she was still thrown around by the turbulences. Her heart was in her throat, beating anxiously as she shivered. In the dark cargo bay she really thought they were going to crash, burn in the atmosphere and die... But the ship only skidded and plopped on the ground without grace. Shmi breathed out. They were still alive.

Then the bay door opened and she was blinded by the bright light of two scorching suns blazing down on the planet in the middle of a day.

Shoved and poked with cattle prods by her captors, Shmi stumbled out of the ship, shielding her eyes from the glare. She and her fellow slaves were loaded on a transport which zoomed through the desert. They were sold in bulk to Gardulla the Hutt, as she would learn later.

When Shmi's eyes stopped watering and got used to the brightness, she looked around in dismay. The planet was nothing but an arid desert, desolate and unhospitable, no shade or water or a patch of green in sight, only yellows, oranges, and whites of sand and stone. With a regretful pang Shmi thought of the lively, bountiful fields and forests of her homeworld. How she missed them! She should never have left.

Shmi looked up, futilely hoping for a Republic ship coming in for rescue, guns blazing, but help wasn't going to come. She was forever lost to her old life. Only the infinite blue of the clear sky reminded her of the deep oceans of her home.

Shmi took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. Tatooine was just another place, it wasn't ideal or even just friendly, but if people were able to survive and thrive, then she would learn to do the same. Shmi believed she had enough skill and wits to adapt, and even though her body was shackled by cruel masters, her mind would always be that of a free woman. What she didn't lack in was motivation.

She touched her still flat belly in a protective gesture. There was a very little, very special life growing inside and she would protect it with everything she got.

Anakin

Anakin hated Tatooine. It was a miserable, sandy dustball, rife with slavery and savages, home to the worst kinds of scum. His mother died because of it.

But in reality, he hated himself more. He was the Chosen One, he was supposed to do more, be more and yet, even with all that Jedi training and power he was just as powerless and helpless as he'd been as a child slave. He couldn't change anything, he couldn't free all the slaves, he couldn't save his mother.

It was that damn planet. He wouldn't put a foot on it ever again.

And yet, Tatooine was still the only place in the galaxy he'd ever really felt warm and loved. Space was cold, Coruscant was cold, Jedi Temple was cold. Only at Padmé's side he'd found that warmth again and he clung to it desperately.

He'd never give it up. Never.

Padmé

When she got stranded on Tatooine, a desperate queen on the run, she put on her brave face, but on the inside she was so scared and doubtful. This lawless and cruel planet opened her young naïve eyes to the injustice and suffering happening in the wider galaxy. Seeing it for herself, the rampant slavery, the exploitation of others for the sake of your own self-interest, all of it was the main reason behind Padmé's decision to accept her appointment as the Senator of the Chommell sector after her second term as the queen was finished. She firmly believed that she could push for reforms from above, make a real change for the people. It was Republic's responsibility to uphold the humanitarian principles it was built on.

She had many things to thank Tatooine for—not only inspiring her political career, but also giving her Anakin, the man she loved and married, the father of her children. It wasn't a beautiful, or pleasant, or safe planet, on the opposite—it was ugly, abrasive, and dangerous, but without it, Padmé's life would have been drastically different, and probably for the worse. She didn't regret landing on that planet.

Owen and Beru

They were born and raised on Tatooine. They knew the planet's whims and moods inside and out, could pick up on the slightest hint of moisture in the dry air, felt the coming of sandstorms in their bones. They led honest, hardworking lives, farming the acres of desert for drops of the purest, life-giving water. The planet was hazardous, but only for those unprepared or stupid enough to challenge it. Owen and Beru knew how to survive.

They were Tatooinians. They saw desiccated bantha carcasses left by a krayt and the human bones bleaching on the sun, they experienced Tusken attacks, they walked through the slave market in the spaceport. But Tatooine wasn't just a planet of death and pain, it had its own harsh beauty. They found it every day in the breathtaking sight of the binary sunset, in the desert rose Owen had given Beru for their anniversary, in the young bantha calves frolicking in the desert.

Owen and Beru witnessed the literal worst and the absolute best of their planet. And they chose to love it.

Tatooine was their home and that was enough for them.

Han and Leia

It sometimes boggled their minds that Tatooine could be the homeworld of the best, sweetest people they knew—Luke, Gavin Darklighter, Tahiri Veila, yet at the same time it housed the foulest being known as Jabba the Hutt and his vile court. For a long time the planet was a place to fear and avoid at all costs. Jabba's bounty on Han's head grew and getting anywhere close to his lair was inviting all the bounty hunters in the sector to swarm and capture the smuggler.

Then Han was frozen in carbonite and brought to Jabba anyway, so Leia and the rest of their friends staged the rescue operation. Sadly, despite all the planning, they only managed to prevail and defeat Jabba thanks to luck, though Luke would argue in his mystic Jedi way that it was really the Force's work. Han was just counting his lucky stars while Leia was sighing with relief. Both of them weren't sad to see Tatooine disappear in the Falcon's viewport when the ship jumped into the hyperspace.

To their own surprise, they returned to the planet on an undercover mission for the New Republic. It was an adventure to remember—they met some very troublesome Squibs, learned about the podracing triumph of Darth Vader from back when he'd been still a little Anakin, found Leia's grandmother's diary. That Sithspawn of a planet almost killed them again, but it stopped being a place to detest and fear.

For Leia, Tatooine didn't represent shackles and humiliation she'd suffered through in Jabba's palace anymore. She found her freedom there—freedom from the past haunting her, from her fear of Darth Vader, from her deep terror of the dark future if she had children that could follow in his footsteps. On Tatooine, Leia finally made peace with and accepted Anakin Skywalker, her father. On Tatooine she came to truly believe that it's not your blood, but your choices that really matter. On Tatooine, she found the courage to look to the future and live her life without any regrets.

Han and Leia had no love lost for the planet, but they were thankful to it. Tatooine changed something fundamental for both of them. No longer they could think of it in only negative terms when it was the place where they had made some beautiful memories too.

What's most important—thanks to their adventure on the desert planet they agreed to become parents and their children were the most amazing thing that had ever happened to them in their lives. That was reason enough for Han to forgive Tatooine for Jabba and his bounty hunters.

Leia was also quite sure that Jaina and Jacen were conceived on this fateful planet with two suns. She sometimes wondered if the twin suns could have somehow caused a twin pregnancy. Science had no proof for such a thing, but the longer Leia lived and studied the Force, the more she realized that some things escaped the mundane understanding.

There was a reason to have faith. And she chose to believe.

Mara

To Mara, the name Tatooine brought a bitter taste of failure. For months she obsessively pored over her memories of the infiltration of Jabba's palace as a dancer named Arica. She considered the mission from every angle, she thought of every other option imaginable, she ran dozens of simulations in her mind. But no matter how many times she recreated the events, she couldn't change what had actually happened.

Her Master had ordered her to kill Luke Skywalker and for the first time in her life, she had failed him. As if the shame and humiliation wasn't enough punishment that she had to endure, she was haunted by the knowledge that had she killed Skywalker, her Master would have lived and she could have continued her prestigious life as his Hand.

Instead, Luke Skywalker lived and the Emperor died. Mara was left with nothing and became nothing overnight.

Painstakingly, she rebuilt her life and herself by working for Karrde, but that bitterness stayed with her. As a smuggler, she never made deliveries to that cursed dusty planet.

On Myrkr, Skywalker said that had she been at the Great Pit of Carkoon, she would have succeeded in her mission. Would have, could have, should have.

She kriffing didn't.

In the years that followed, Mara's life changed in ways most unexpected—she freed herself from the last command of her Master, she became a Jedi, she even fell in love with and married Luke—but her opinion of Tatooine remained the same. Only the bitterness passed as she came to view her failure to kill Luke as a blessing in disguise.

Tatooine was still a miserable tenth-rate little planet and in Mara's opinion its only redeeming quality was being the homeworld of her husband. Without it, she'd have to think of another nickname for Luke and Farmboy had such a nice ring to it.

Jaina

She'd only ever been to Tatooine in her childhood fantasies, traveling around the desert with the little lost bantha from her favourite bedtime story and having awesome adventures. Uncle Luke had quite a few stories about his life there too. But as much as Jaina enjoyed them, she would never want to move in on Tatooine. She was meant for greater things. There was just no reason for her to ever visit the planet.

Jaina stayed away from Tatooine and Tatooine stayed away from Jaina and they were just fine.

Jacen

Unlike his sister, Jacen had a brief occasion to see Tatooine during the Yuuzhan Vong war. He and his father were investigating the Peace Brigade, an organization collaborating with the invaders, selling out others to save their own skins.

Tatooine was nothing special—just another desolate, remote, desert world like many others. After the visit all he could do was shrug his shoulders and say he'd been there. That was all.

Anakin

The youngest of the three Solo siblings was curious about Tatooine. He wanted to see Mos Eisley, the place where his father met Uncle Luke, but instead of a fun sightseeing trip, his only excursion to Tatooine turned into another one of his life-threatening adventures.

Despite his family's history with the planet, to Anakin Tatooine, most of all, meant the homeworld of his best friend Tahiri. When Tahiri agreed to face her Tusken tribe's survival trial in the desert in order to learn about her parents and to save the life of Sliven, the man who had adopted her, Anakin quieted his protests. Hell or high water, he chose to stand by his friend's side. He didn't want to lose Tahiri to this planet and so he had to go with her.

They spent seven hellish days in the desert, battling dangerous animals and dehydration, but there was more to Tatooine than deadly danger. Anakin managed to befriend a group of Jawas by fixing their sandcrawler. He and Tahiri also used the Force together to call her bantha, Bangor, to come help them find the way back to the tribe.

Anakin came back from Tatooine to the Jedi Academy dehydrated, sunburnt, and bruised, carrying infected wounds from when a krayt dragon had clawed him, but in the end he didn't regret accompanying Tahiri to her homeworld. If there was anything he'd learned there, it was that individual power in the Force wasn't as important as the strength of their friendship and having compassion for all living beings. They were all bound together as one by the Force and those connections were what truly mattered.

To Anakin, Tatooine always remained a place that had given him a valuable learning experience, and for that he was thankful.

But he wasn't going to come back.

Luke

For nineteen whole years, Tatooine was his home. The scorching desert, the narrow canyons, the cloudless skies were all he knew. His uncle taught him everything about moisture farming, how to squeeze out the last molecule of water from the dry air, how to repair the vaporators and shoot the overgrown vermin. Luke was raised to eventually take over the Lars farm.

The Force had different ideas.

As far as he remembered, Luke always wanted to leave Tatooine and reach for the stars. He longed to see strange, new worlds, and to fly among the stars, just like his father. But reality was nothing like his daydreams. He was forced to leave, as a fugitive from the Empire, on a mission to rescue a princess.

The rest was history.

After the horrifying death of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, Luke honestly didn't expect to ever return to Tatooine. And yet, he kept coming back to the planet. The first time was to save Han from Jabba's grubby hands, but there were more of those visits over the years, as if Tatooine was pulling him back with its gravitational force even from parsecs away.

Luke saw the stars, returned his father to the light, defeated the Empire and countless other enemies, rebuilt the Jedi Order, married a great woman and had a son—and then before he knew it, he was an old man, much older than Uncle Owen when he'd died. More often than not, Luke's mind kept wandering back to those carefree days of his youth and to his Uncle as he kept busy teaching classes at the Jedi Temple.

Then Han died. It was a quiet, peaceful passing, in his favourite armchair watching evening news with a glass of good Corellian brandy. Leia was inconsolable. Luke helped her with organizing the funeral, but soon after, she also passed on, joining her husband in the Force. Her body was found comfortably curled up on the bed in the captain's cabin on the Falcon.

After the second funeral, Luke realized that he was the last one. All his old friends were gone, he'd said his last goodbye to Mara years ago, and with the deaths of Han and Leia, he had no one. Ben was busy with his own life and family and the Jedi Order didn't need Luke to run it anymore.

It was time.

Luke said goodbye to his son, daughter-in-law and a little grandson. Then he lifted his pack on his shoulder and strode to the hangar bay. He took his old X-wing, an ancient but well-maintained machine, but he left Artoo with Ben. Luke wouldn't need an astromech where he was going. Droids couldn't survive long in the desert, the sand always got under the casing and damaged the inner mechanisms until they broke down.

Tatooine welcomed him with unbearable heat. It washed over his craggy face and filled him with power the moment he opened the canopy. Luke took a deep breath and got out of his starfighter. He landed at his uncle's homestead. It had been burned by the Empire in the attack all those years ago and since then it had been looted by Tuskens and devastated by elements.

Luke rolled up his sleeves. He had a lot of work to do.

After restoring the homestead to a livable condition, Luke threw himself earnestly into moisture farming. He found unexpected pleasure in simple, daily tasks of cleaning, fixing the vaporators, and caring for the plants in his aunt's small garden space. He sold the water he collected and bought himself a pair of banthas, so he had blue milk to drink for variety. He traded with Jawas for parts whenever their sandcrawler stopped by. And when Tuskens came to attack him, a moisture farmer living on his own, he didn't even reach for the lightsaber hidden in his drawer. Instead, he scared them away with a Fallanassi illusion. They didn't try attacking again.

After a long day of work on the farm, Luke usually watched the suns setting and meditated. He did the same at sunrise to start his day. He would never be just a simple farmer, he was still a Jedi Master and he sought a deep communion in the Force, not just during meditation but at all hours of the day.

When Luke figured it out, it was time for him to go. He looked at the suns rising for the last time and let go of the crude matter that was his body. It was like falling asleep and when he woke up, he was with Mara. She kissed him softly on the lips in welcome.

"Took you long enough, Farmboy," she told him with a smirk.

Luke saw them all—his family, his friends, his teachers—they were already there.

At last, he came home.

Ben

Tatooine was unknown to him, a distant idea of his father's childhood home. His mom liked to poke fun at dad's farming roots. To Ben, the stories of a hot desert world and a daily struggle to get the vaporators working while defending the farm from Tuskens and wild beasts were as good as fairytales. Tatooine was this abstract, fantastical place that didn't really exist. Ben lived among skyscrapers of Coruscant, in the halls of Jedi Temples, on board spaceships. That was his reality.

And then his father went back to Tatooine for retirement.

Ben was busy with his duties as a Jedi Knight, with relocating the Order to Ossus, with his own family. He tried to keep in touch with his old dad, but they didn't speak as often as he would've liked. Through the flickering holographic image, Ben only saw the simple furniture and walls of his dad's dwelling, so even with that connection, the planet remained foreign to him.

The first time Ben set foot on Tatooine was after his father had died.

He felt Luke's passing through the Force. In his mind, his father's presence had always shone like a star, distant but bright. It had been growing dimmer, but on their last communication Luke had seemed completely fine, a spry and able old Jedi Master, so Ben hadn't made much of it. It had to be just the years wearing down on his father, he'd explained it away so he wouldn't worry.

And then Luke was gone, his gentle light snuffed out like a candle.

Ben landed on Tatooine full of grief and regrets. The Jedi had held a service in Luke's memory as was their tradition. However, there had been no body to bury. Luke, like his masters before him, had learned the secrets of the Force and when he'd passed on, his body had disappeared. He became one with the Force completely.

However, he left behind one distraught son. Only when it was too late, Ben wished he'd visited earlier. Maybe he could've done something to help or at least he would have had the chance to say goodbye. Luke should have been the one to show him around Tatooine, now he couldn't look at the planet with anything but resentment. It took his father away from him. Luke wasted the last years of his life on this sandy rock, instead of spending them with his family.

Ben walked through the empty Lars homestead, trying to feel the remnants of his father's presence. He gathered Luke's meagre belongings—when he found an old holo of his child self, maybe five or six years old, smiling cheerfully with both of his parents, Ben sobbed all over it—but there were no messages left for him.

Having finished the packing, Ben stood in the middle of the room, sad and contemplative. His dad was really gone and while Ben believed that he was in a better place, together with mom, he still wished to talk to him one last time.

"Dad, why didn't you say anything?" Ben asked out loud. "Why did you have to die here alone?"

The wind outside picked up and rattled the walls.

…Ben… it seemed to carry the whisper of his name.

"Dad?!" Ben exclaimed, looking around, expecting a ghost to jump out at him at any second. "Is that you?" he asked hopefully.

The wind blew again. Go, Ben… goodbye, my son… I will be with you, always…

"Dad…" Ben choked up, overcome with emotion. He had struggled to understand his father's death, but finally he realized there was no big profound reason for it. It was just the way of life. His father had died naturally and peacefully, in his sleep. Luke, consciously or not, like many members of other species, had come to the place he spent his youth in to die.

Ben rubbed his reddened eyes. "Goodbye, dad," he said. His father's spirit may have not materialized, but Ben believed his word. Luke would never lie to him. He would watch over him with mom.

With his heart feeling lighter, Ben said goodbye to Tatooine too.

Tatooine

Tatooine was only one planet, not different from hundreds of other desert planets in the galaxy. For millennia it flew on the same, unchanging orbit around the two suns. It was just an old, sandy rock that couldn't care less about goings on of the few minuscule living beings scurrying on its surface.

But Tatooine was also a very rich ecosystem, consisting exactly of those living beings. The hardy plants, the tough animals, and the clever sentients all formed mutual connections. It wasn't just a simple food chain, eat and be eaten, because to survive the unforgiving climate, they needed to depend on one another. The people farmed water and cultivated plants and kept domesticated animals. Life had to support other life to exist on this harsh planet.

And then there was the Force, the mystical field that surrounded all and bound it together. Tatooine belonged to it through its inhabitants too, just a small stitch in the galaxy-wide tapestry of life, but a surprisingly important one.

However, the Force made no mistakes. It tied the fates of the Chosen One and his family with this insignificant planet for a reason. Over the years, the Skywalkers time and again found themselves returning to Tatooine. The planet molded them, tested them, changed them as the Force willed it.

But the effect was mutual—just as Tatooine influenced the Skywalkers with its challenges, the Skywalkers influenced Tatooine with their actions. Whether it was little Anakin Skywalker winning a pod race as a first human contestant in history, then his children destroying the tyranny of Jabba the Hutt, or Shmi and Owen and Beru simply showing their kindness to friends and strangers alike, in ways big and small, the Skywalkers changed Tatooine.

And through his strong connection to the planet, Luke Skywalker's spirit watched over next generations of his descendants coming to his homeworld as their guardian and a guide.

To Skywalkers, Tatooine wasn't just any other planet—it was their origin and their destination, a cage and a dream, a trial and a teacher, life and death.

Tatooine was a part of their legacy.

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AN: Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this story! I haven't written anything for SW in years, so this was fun to write. I thought about adding Legacy characters like Cade, but I'm not very familiar with them.

Which part was your favourite? Please share your thoughts in a review :)

Happy Legends Family Week and may the Force be with you!