Chapter Text
The battle on top of Jabba’s ship wasn’t as bad as Shmi was expecting, but it wasn’t won by any means yet. A blond man with a green laser sword seemed to be leading the charge, and up until she and Leia arrived, was the only one confronting Jabba’s goons head-on. The rest of their friends—and it shocked Shmi to see they were truly only a handful of people—had secured their escape vehicle.
The blond man in black didn’t question Shmi’s presence as he engaged in a fight. “Get the gun!” he screamed, and the woman in gold didn’t hesitate to leap towards it. “Point it at the deck!”
In the absence of any instruction for her, Shmi picked up a blaster from the floor and shot at the last of Jabba’s guys trying to stop the woman. The blond man didn’t spare her a glance, but he directed his efforts to those she didn’t manage to get. Once the last guard fell, the blond man grabbed one of the ropes hanging from the awning and beckoned her closer as he called to his friend, “Come on!”
The woman in gold immediately responded to his call, jumping from the gun platform and straight into his extended arm. “Hold on to her,” the blond man told Shmi, who held on tightly as the man fired the gun with a kick in the right place and swung them into their escape vehicle.
Red sparks flew behind them. Jabba’s ship, and everyone else on it, was turning to pieces as it was blowing up in flames.
“Let’s go,” he said, “and don’t forget the droids.”
“Right away,” answered another man, one dressed as one of Jabba’s guards. Their original plant, Shmi guessed.
The rest of the way to their ship seemed like a blur in Shmi’s mind, accompanied by a buzz in her ears. The wookie had given her his seat, but that was the only thing she could remember. The adrenaline was finally catching up to her, and it was one hell of a fall.
Dead, she repeated to herself, Jabba’s dead and I’m not.
A soft hand on her shoulder woke Shmi from her reverie. It was the woman in gold.
“Hey,” she said softly, “is there anywhere you need us to drop you?”
Shmi shook her head in reflex before she caught herself. “My son,” she said. “I don’t know where he is. We were in Mos Espa before…” the woman let her trail off, but Shmi found herself wanting to finish her sentence, “before I woke up here. There was a… a storm and it… I was unconscious…”
“We can leave you in Mos Espa if you want,” the blond man offered her kindly, “or you can come with us. You and your son.”
“He’s a slave too,” she choked up.
“He doesn’t have to be,” he said, with the same certainty the woman had had when she told Shmi she wouldn’t blow up.
Tears welled up in Shmi’s eyes. “Thank you.”
“Let’s get you inside,” the woman said as they walked up the ramp of their ship. “My name is Leia Organa. That’s Chewbacca—” she pointed at the wookie “—the guy dressed like a guard is Lando Calrissian, the one who’s half-blind is Han Solo—”
“I can see just fine!” he interjected before missing a doorway entirely and slamming onto a wall.
“And I’m Luke Skywalker,” the blond man said, ushering inside the astromech they had lost in the commotion and the golden protocol droid that had been translating for Jabba, his blue eyes suddenly turning familiar. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Shmi’s throat closed up with a gasp and for the first time since her son was born, tears streaked down her face freely. One hand clutched her chest, right above her heart, while the other clutched her companion by the arm to steady herself. Her prayer, fresh in her mind still, gave her a lucidity she couldn’t recall ever experiencing before. It was unbelievable; it was impossible; it might be a dream come true.
“I’m Shmi Skywalker,” she rasped. “My son is Anakin Skywalker. Do you know us?”
Luke’s face spasmed at her words. Luke’s friends gave various noises of surprise to contrast his silent shock, but she didn’t turn to see if their faces had half the horror as his.
“How?” he wondered at last, hovering over her, almost as if afraid to touch her. Shmi had trouble finding her voice, so Luke repeated, “How is this possible?”
“I… I wished I could see Anakin’s children free and the slavers dead. I thought nothing was listening. I thought no one was listening.”
Slowly, Luke took her from Leia’s arms with a feather-like grip around her wrists. Shmi let herself be led by her grandson into a hug.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” he said. It was supposed to feel like a sentence, but Shmi only beamed through her tears.
“And yet I get to meet you. How fortunate I am.” At her words, Luke squeezed her middle with only a fraction of the strength he had displayed earlier, and Shmi burrowed her head into the crook of his neck with all her might.
“My father… he’s…” Luke choked on his words, unable to finish the sentence. Shmi felt her stomach drop.
“Was he free?”
A beat of silence, before Luke murmured, lips close to the back of her head, “I don’t know.”
“He’s just a kid,” she sobbed, and she felt the arms around her tighten, grounding her, “he was just asleep. He was worried about being sick and not being able to work. He… he doesn’t… he didn’t even…”
Fate was cruel, she decided, and so was whatever great force had sent her here. At least, before, standing in a kitchen that didn’t belong to her, she could have kept her dim hope of freedom. She could have kept pretending they would manage to get away, that Anakin would get to know safety, even if not peace. The slavers would face justice, she now knew, but not before Anakin was well under the sands, returned to them, and that knowledge was almost more than she could bear. It was unfair.
Luke let her clutch to him and kept her upright, despite the wobbling of his own knees. He did this until Shmi regained her strength and her tears dried. Whatever had happened to her son, Shmi was comforted to know Anakin had been able to leave this one piece of him in the world.
“Hey,” said Leia softly. “We need to lift off. Luke…”
When Luke disentangled himself from Shmi, he turned fondly to look at Leia. “How did you…”
“I know you, Luke. It’s all right. We'll take care of Shmi.”
“What are you talking about?” Shmi asked. “Are you going somewhere?”
“I’m sorry,” Luke apologized. “I promised my Jedi Master that I would return after I saved my friends, and now I have. I’ve been gone long enough. Perhaps… he’ll even be able to answer why you are here. His connection with the Force is strong. He might know something.” He grabbed her shoulders and gave them a light squeeze. Shmi tried to find it as comforting as he meant it to be. “You’ll be safe with Leia.”
Luke gave Shmi another hug before doing the same to Leia, Han, Chewbacca, and C-3PO, and disappearing into the cockpit to give Lando a quick goodbye too.
“Please take care,” he said to Leia, but the words seemed to be spoken to the whole room.
Han waved him away. “We’ll be fine, kid. Now, go knock out your sensei with your light stick.”
R2-D2 whooped enthusiastically at those words in binary as he whirled behind Luke. Shmi got the impression the droid liked to mess with Luke’s Jedi teacher and found it hard to comprehend the concept entirely. The offhanded way Luke had alluded to being a Jedi was inconceivable to her. Jedi were figures of grand stories, of saviors larger than life itself, with mystical powers that defied logic, reason, and even plausibility. To think her own blood would have the power to become one…
Absently, she remembered her son, Luke’s father, and how even at such a young age he was capable of unbelievable things. Sometimes, Shmi knew, those things defied logic, reason, and even plausibility.
Anakin could predict Watto’s mood days before it soured. Anakin always knew where to find the most valuable parts in the junkyard. Anakin would even start to assemble or repair exactly the kind of merchandise customers would commission weeks after he had fine-tuned it. Without yet noticing, he had started picking up thoughts from Shmi’s own head and replying to them aloud, as if continuing a conversation. For all of this, Anakin was not even 7 years of age.
Anakin was special. He was unlike most children. He was simply unlike any child Shmi had ever met. She had attributed it to his unconventional conception, one that still baffled her to this day, but perhaps there was another reason behind it—perhaps Anakin was put into this universe to wield Jedi powers, and he had passed them right onto his son.
The ride to their destination was smooth but cold. Leia had had to lend Shmi one of her heavier coats to make her stop shivering and had decided to keep her company on the lounge. For several hours, she had been explaining the galaxy Shmi had found herself in.
“...and he was taken out by the explosion of the same superweapon he had commanded. I believe only Vader survived, and it’s because he’s impossible to kill.”
“Even the most powerful people can die, Leia,” Shmi said, thinking back on Jabba being choked with his own golden chains.
Leia sighed. “Hopefully one day. Him and the Emperor both.”
“I still can’t believe Luke blew it up with one shot,” Shmi gushed.
“He is a Jedi,” Leia reminded her.
“And his father? Do you know what happened to Anakin? What became of him?”
“Anakin Skywalker,” interrupted Han as he strutted into the main hold, “was the best Jedi to ever Jedi, lady. The Hero With No Fear, they called him, and with good reason! He recaptured more planets from Separatist control than most Jedi combined. One time he fought against the Separatist Count Dooku, won, and flew half of their ship safely into the planet after Grievous blew it up! Whenever a regular Jedi—if there’s such a thing—didn’t cut it, the Senate would send General Skywalker to save the day.”
Leia cocked her head, unimpressed. “Can you even see enough to walk on your own?”
“I got here just fine, Your Worshipfulness. Scoot a little now, would you? I’m going to fall. Where was I—oh, right. You must be proud, Mrs Skywalker, your son was a hero.”
“Did… did you ever see him?”
“Not—not in person, no,” Han stammered. “We didn’t frequent the same circles, with him being a Jedi and me being—a kid, but it was always all over the Holonet. There was this one time when he saved Coruscant from a beast as tall as one of its buildings and—”
“Oh, that cannot be true,” Leia laughed in disbelief. “How would a creature like that ever get there?”
“Beats me, but I know what I saw.”
“I’m sure, laserbrain. My dad told me that during the war…”
It was too much. Shmi didn’t even know how to process her son becoming not only a Jedi but an acclaimed hero, before both Han and Leia started bringing up the incredible feats that her Ani did, how many people he saved, how daring his strategies were, how decisive his victories tended to be… It was simply too much, and there was always something else.
“And how—” Shmi took a ragged breath “—how old was he?”
Han paused his retelling of Anakin’s most popular videos in the Holonet to think.
“Early twenties, I think, at most. Not sure that was public information. As far as most people were concerned, the most important thing was how he was gonna win us the war.”
“He was… young.”
Han sighed empathically. “Yeah, I’m sorry. He was barely into adulthood when the galaxy all but gave him the responsibility to win the war. It was… a mess, I can see that now.”
Leia moved closer and hugged Shmi from the side. Shmi crossed her arm against her middle, taking hold of Leia’s hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. We got carried away. For us, he’s this big hero of legend but for you… he’s more than that.”
“It’s not every day you come across someone who doesn’t know about General Skywalker, especially these days. You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone in the Rebel Alliance that doesn’t like him.”
“Speaking of that,” Leia says, “since when are you an Anakin Skywalker fan? You’ve never talked about him like that. You only mention him when Luke mentions him first.”
“Yeah, well, he was powerful like crazy, but that didn’t end up helping him any, did it?” he bit back. “For all his Jedi powers and many, many victories, he still died. He was impressive, but he was not invincible. What’s there to say?”
“Han!”
“I—sorry.” He stood abruptly and made his way out of the lounge.
“Where are you going?” Leia yelled after him.
“To get a drink!”