A/N: This feels very short to me, but here it is, and Anakin is a very adorable baby just trust me on this.
Shmi is working on the vaporators under the heat of the Tatooine's twin suns, when the other mechanic stops what he's doing and wipes his brow, letting out a soft laugh.
"Shmi," he says. Shmi looks up from her work and wipes her greasy hands on her skirt. "Isn't that your little boy?" Shmi's heart skips a beat, but she turns around to see Anakin toddling towards her, very slowly, stumbling every few steps. He's about fifty yards away when he falls, and at first he tries to push himself back up, but he makes eye contact with Shmi and starts to cry instead, sticking his sandy hand in his mouth.
"Ani," Shmi coos, leaving the vaporators behind her. She crouches down next to him. He must have snuck away from the woman who was supposed to be watching the children, wearing nothing but the coarse pants given to the slave children. It was a far enough walk for Shmi, and Anakin…
This is the first time Shmi has seen Anakin walk anywhere. Even a few steps. In the last few weeks, he has been pulling himself up, but not taking any steps. Shmi is wary of letting Anakin start to walk. The longer Anakin waits to learn to walk, the longer the Hutts wait to put Anakin to work, to find something for him to do. Lucky there's only Shmi and the other mechanic out here in the middle of the dessert right now.
Shmi brushes some sand off of Anakin's face and takes his hands out of his mouth. "What are you doing out here, Ani?" His face is bright pink from the sun and the heat and there are tears in his eyes.
"Mama, hurts," he tells her sticking his hands right back in his mouth.
Shmi sighs and picks Anakin up. He takes his hands out of his mouth to wrap them around Shmi's neck. She carries him back to where she is working on the vaporators, sets him back in the sand. "I'm sorry, Ani," she tells him, and she means it. His cheeks aren't just red from his walk in the dessert, she realizes, and Shmi can almost feel a sharp pain at the back of her own mouth where she's sure Anakin's molars are coming in. "I can't do anything for you now." But she kisses his jaw where she thinks the pain is, and he smiles, grabs her face and kisses her back. "Watch Mama work," Shmi says, standing up, turning back to vaporators. She can feel Anakin's eyes on her back, intent and smiling, as Shmi makes the vaporator sing back to life.
"Mama," he chirps. Mama is Anakin's favorite word, and even though he knows what Shmi has been assured is a normal amount for children his age, he never says a thing to Shmi without addressing her first. Mama, Mama, Mama. "You did it!" he says. Shmi turns to him, his puffy cheeks, his sun-bleached hair, eyes staring past her at the machinery. She sits in the sand across from him. Close enough that she could pick him up from here. A few steps for Anakin's little legs.
"Would you like to see how?" Shmi asks him. Anakin laughs and pushes himself up to his feet, a little unstable and taking three hesitant steps towards his mother before falling back down on his bottom. He's still another step away from Shmi, and she wonders for a moment if she should give it up for now, but before she can move, Anakin pushes himself up again, and takes the last step towards Shmi, hands outstretched. He falls, this time in her lap, hands reaching up to touch Shmi's face. He's beaming, laughing.
"Mama, Mama, Mama."
Shmi laughs with him, taking his hands gently off her face, turning him around so he can see the vaporator. He's much too young, much too focused on lifting and dropping Shmi's hands, for any of this to do him any real good, but Shmi walks him through how to do regular tune-ups on all the equipment on a moisture farm. Anakin gurgles along with her, like he's listening, and though Shmi knows he's probably not, probably not doing anything more than copying the sound of her voice, she entertains the thought for a moment that this all means something to him. He fixed the mobile Shmi tried to make him when he was much younger than this, after all, or at least he seemed to. This could be something else Shmi could give to him. Something he could make of himself, if he ever got off of this awful planet. If he ever escaped slavery.
The other mechanic, a slave named Match, walks over to them. He has a sun-hardened face, creased with the years, a lifetime, of slavery. Shmi thinks she remembers learning that he was born here, on Tatooine, like many of the Hutts slaves. Like Anakin. He smiles softly at Anakin, who smiles hesitantly back.
"I don't believe I've had the pleasure," Match rasps in his unmistakable Outer Rim accent.
"This is Anakin," Shmi says. Her accent still has traces of the home she left behind, the one she can't remember, and of years and years speaking Huttese before she learned a word in Basic. "It's okay, Ani. Match is our friend. Say hello."
"Mama," Anakin says instead, clutching onto the fabric of Shmi's skirt.
"Shy?" Match wonders, still not looking at Shmi, but at Anakin.
"Sometimes, yes," Shmi answers. Anakin looks between the two of them, seems to remember his tooth, and grabs Shmi's skirt tighter. "Right now, he's just cranky."
"Oh?" Match says. Anakin is starting to fuss, pulling on Shmi's skirt insistently.
"Yes," Shmi says. "He's teething." Anakin, right on cue sticks his hand back into his mouth, and reaches his other hand up, smacking Shmi in the face trying to show her where he hurt. Match laughs. Of all the things to see in the desert, this is, by far, the most extraordinary in its mundanity.
"I watched him walk all the way over here from the slave quarters," he says. "You seem surprised."
"Yes," Shmi says, pushing Anakin's hand out of her face. "I…I haven't seen him walk before. It's the first time, and to walk so far…" Something heavy sinks into Shmi's stomach, something cold and heavy and irreversible. "I missed his first steps." She says it to herself, a whisper, a moment she will never get back. So much of his life, taken from both of them already, to miss this…Anakin won't mind. Anakin will probably never know. But Shmi minds. Shmi minds more than she thought she would.
"Don't take it too hard," Match says quietly. "He walked to see you."
Shmi looks up to see his eyes watching Anakin, almost hungry for such a small pleasure as a small child to sit in his lap, think the world, the galaxy, the whole universe of him. She wonders if he has children, and what happened to them. There's only Anakin, and one little girl about seven now, and a very young baby, left on the moisture farm in terms of children. Shmi doesn't know what the Hutts do with the children when they're old enough to sell, but she knows that Gardulla doesn't like to have them around. More trouble than their worth, especially on Tatooine, when surviving until the age of five is a miracle, to ten, a challenge. Anything could have happened to Match's children. Anything could happen to Anakin.
"Don't let the Hutts see him walking so soon," Match says in low voice. Low enough to rattle the earth. "They'll put him to work before he's two years old." He straightens up, and gives Anakin another smile. He offers Shmi a hand up, and she takes it gratefully, and they start the trek back to the slave quarters.
"He can protect himself," Shmi says, and though Match seems skeptical, he doesn't ask. Like most slaves on Tatooine, he believes in the Force, in the coming of a chosen one, who will lead the slaves all to freedom, that the Force sometimes looks out for special children born under Tatooine's moons, like Anakin. The days are so long on Tatooine that a child born at night, with all the moons full, like Anakin was, is rare enough. Shmi thought she left those myths behind her a long time ago, but Anakin, her miracle, is here and healthy, and not as skinny as the other slave children –though he certainly eats less –and he's walking and talking and he's vibrant. Anakin is so vibrant that he can make the suns look dim, and if Shmi isn't careful when she looks at him, she feels she could go blind. The other slaves see it too, and the Hutts. They all know her son is special. Match takes another look at Anakin perched on Shmi's hip an smiles to himself.
"All the same," he mutters under Anakin's babbling –talking about, or maybe to, the vaporators as they disappear behind them. "You wouldn't want anything to put out that light."
A/N: The next chapter should be up soon, definitely before the end of June, and I will not be working on any of the other fics that you may see are still both long and incomplete until this is finished. Chapters should be posted more quickly because of this arrangement, and also because I just finished the semester, so even with summer classes and work, I should still be posting a chapter every three or four weeks. Thanks you guys!