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Looking back it feels like Luke must have spent half his childhood in the hot courtyards of other Anchorhead houses, playing by himself and hearing screams through closed doors. Songs, too, and prayers, and stories—the rhythmic cant of old folktales and the joyful hush of gossip—and all the ordinary noises that went along with a delivery. And then, after hours and hours, the thready cries of a newborn.
When Luke is too young to be left alone and too small to help Uncle Owen with the vaporators, Aunt Beru has to bring him along to births. As the midwife she’d stay for the usual two days after, getting things set up nice for whichever sisters and aunts and neighbors would be coming by to help for the lying-in. Sometimes Uncle Owen comes to fetch Luke before the two days is up, with a little water or milk for the new parents if they can spare it.
But more often it’s too far or Uncle Owen’s too busy and so Luke stays, an extra pair of hands to help around the place. He learns young to make himself useful. He can fetch rags, watch for Tuskens, keep an eye on the other littler kids around the homestead, brew endless tea in the big gleaming samovar that sits in every kitchen once he’s tall enough to work a stove.
There are Beru’s blends—the strong spiced one to speed labor and bring on contractions, the mild medicinal one to slow bleeding, the near-syrupy dark one to keep the helpers awake. Sometimes someone will have a little caff, bought from offworld traders, and Luke’ll boil that up too. In a different pot, though, because it turns all the other tea bitter if it goes in the samovar.
They say your senses hold on to memories better than your brain. Years later and millions and millions of space-cold miles away, with the wet heat of steam on the backs of his hands, the low warmth of a hot cup under his palms (even if the mug is plastoid instead of clay, even if the tea is the weak mess hall blend that tastes like the bottom of an urn no matter how fresh, even if it’s already going cold—) Luke is back where he started.
+
Luke is seven the first time Beru takes him along to the slave quarter at Mos Eisley. Beru and Owen fight about it beforehand; Luke can hear them. They’re neither of them loud people, but sound carries through the vents at the homestead.
“It ain’t safe for him there,” says Owen.
“Isn’t safe to be a Skywalker anywhere on Tatooine, Lars,” says Beru. Uncle Owen huffs in response. “He should know. He should have known already. Not knowing doesn’t make him safer and neither does being young.”
Uncle Owen grumbles something too low for Luke to hear.
Luke knows Tatooine is dangerous. He knows not to go out into the Dune Sea and not to talk to strangers or Tuskens even if he recognizes the Tuskens so they don’t count as strangers, and not to stick his hand in every hole he sees, damn it, because that’s how you get a hand bit off by a goddamn womp rat according to Uncle Owen. Luke has heard it all before, from Uncle Owen.
“It’s what Ma Shmi would have wanted,” says Aunt Beru, and so Luke gets to go to Mos Eisley.
They get there at double-noon, which is already strange. Luke normally isn’t allowed out when both suns are high because he has skin like the inside of a baby eopie’s mouth and Uncle Owen isn’t planning to go bankrupt trying to keep him in sunblock, says Uncle Owen. But he’s clinging to Aunt Beru’s hand as she parks the speeder, wrapped up in his poncho and his sunhat and an extra scarf that Uncle Owen bundled up and put in his lap as they were leaving. He still got a little sunburn on the back of his neck during the ride, but he won’t tell Uncle Owen about it.
The streets of Mos Eisley are scorched white under the suns, and no one is out. The heat feels like it’s coming from every direction at once, so strong it’s almost hard to breathe, and it smells like dust and garbage and the inside of the septic pit on the freehold. As far as Luke can tell everybody with a brain is inside and asleep.
Aunt Beru holds his hand tight and leads him through a maze of oven-hot alleyways to a courtyard full of hanging laundry and dilapidated speeder parts, houses stacked like sandcastles on top of each other. Everywhere is quiet, though Luke can tell there’s people tucked in every crevice and corner. More people than Luke’s ever been around, people that feel like they’re hiding. But Aunt Beru knows where she’s going even with no one to ask, and she pulls Luke to a stop at the bottom of a flight of worn down stairs.
“Almost there. Anybody outside the room asks,” Aunt Beru says, serious as a canyon flood, “your name is Luke Lars. But don’t you go giving them a reason to be curious, you hear me? Stay put where I put you.”
Luke is not good at staying put. But he nods fiercely anyway, because he can tell something important is happening. The air feels itchy and tense. Luke is not a baby anymore so he won’t cry, but when he was littler he probably would have.
“Alright, Melon. You be polite, too. No nosy questions, no poking around. Remember your manners.”
“I know , Aunt Beru. I’m not dumb ,” he whines.
“No you are not,” she says, and leans down to press a firm kiss to the top of his head through the canvas of his sunhat. “Let’s go.”
Beru leads him to a doorway that looks like every other doorway around here, except for the low hum of voices inside and the man sitting on the ground outside with his head tucked between his knees.
It’s a Twi’lek with dusty purple skin and a threadbare scarf over his lekku. He’s talking to himself in a quiet voice, shaky hands clasped over the back of his neck. Probably, Luke thinks, because he’s sunsick. There’s no shade during double-noon, and it’s a dumb time to be outside. Aunt Beru is going to be mad if she has to leave the mother and baby to give this wermo electrolytes.
But when Aunt Beru greets him she has a smile in her voice. “Hi there. Got your comm.”
“Ma Whitesun!” he says. He scrambles to stand up, brushing dust off his back. Luke is confused. On the freehold they always call Aunt Beru Ma Lars. Ma Whitesun was Aunt Beru’s own ma who taught her all about babies before she died; Luke had met her when he was just a little kid and she was even smaller and louder than Aunt Beru. Also she wore lots of kohl around her eyes. It would be hard to get them confused, even if you didn’t know that Ma Whitesun died already.
But Aunt Beru just nods. “I’m sure I won’t be able to convince you to get inside,” she says.
“It’s bad luck,” the father says with a big shiny smile. One of his eyeteeth is missing. “I’m having an easier time than her no matter where I’m sitting.”
“Fair enough. At least go find an awning to stick your head under.”
“Yes ma’am,” the father says, and Aunt Beru grabs Luke’s shoulder and steers him inside. It’s dark, and cooler than outside but not as cold as inside on the homestead, and also full of silent stranger women who nod at Aunt Beru all at once. The house is nervous and the mother is breathing hard on the other side of a blanket hung from the ceiling, not even in her own room with a door, and Luke feels like he’s getting in trouble even though he hasn’t done anything yet.
“Her waters broke yet?” asks Aunt Beru. She doesn’t introduce herself, like she already knows all these people.
The oldest lady, a Twi’lek grandmother with the deep wrinkles you get from squinting into the suns, angles her chin at a bowl in the corner.
“Good,” says Aunt Beru.
“Hi,” says Luke. “I’m Luke.” Nobody in here even knows his name, which is weird.
“My nephew,” Aunt Beru says, her hand hot on his shoulder. “His father was a Skywalker.”
“You said we weren’t allowed to tell them that,” Luke squawks. The grandmother snorts, and Aunt Beru laughs full out and pushes him towards the knot of quiet ladies.
“The rules are for you, not me. Go make yourself useful,” Aunt Beru says before she ducks herself behind the blanket to see to the mother, and Luke knows how to make himself useful. A girl with a face full of scars like she got hit by a million little pebbles in a sandstorm hands him some yarn to wind, and he winds it.
Except it’s warm and hushed in the room and it smells like sweat and tea, and Luke goes dozy. He falls a little bit asleep on a cushion with his tangle of yarn, which is why he doesn’t ask why nobody’s talking, or why the baby’s dad won’t come in, or why Aunt Beru asks in the lowest voice Luke’s ever heard her use if they’re going to register the birth or why the mother sobs a little bit when she says yes. He’s heard Aunt Beru ask all the questions for the Registrar’s forms so many times he could probably do the forms himself and he only learned how to read not that long ago, but then he falls back asleep and forgets to ask.
And when he wakes up, the room is cold like the suns have already set and the baby is born and the women are quiet with relief. And Beru helps the mother take the bowl with the waters in it and pour it out on the doorstep like usual, but they say different words over it than Luke’s heard before. Blessings for freedom instead of abundance, delivered in a whisper.
And he gets to see the baby and touch him very gently on a little mottled squish-mark between his baby eyes, and he tells the mama that he’s pretty like he always does.
+
“Could a droid do what you do?” Luke asks Aunt Beru once, at lunchtime when it’s just the two of them because Uncle Owen is out puttering on the back forty.
“Sure,” she says. “But a droid never will, out here.”
“What’s that mean,” says Luke, who’s pretty sure a droid can do anything.
She gives him a look and shoves the dish of dumplings his way. “They got med-droids that deliver babies all the time in the Core. But even a droid’s not perfect. Just might be easier to keep clean, I guess.”
Luke likes droids. He gets along with them well, spent more time with Owen’s beat-up old agri-droid than he did with other sentient kids for half of his childhood before A4 broke down beyond repair.
“How do you know, huh?” Luke asks, thinking of how A4 started to get a bit weird and creative over the years. A4 probably could have delivered a baby, though it would maybe have involved more vaporator parts than usual. It’s not like the average Tatooine birth ever involves zero vaporator parts.
Aunt Beru sucks her teeth the same way Uncle Owen does and squints up into the sunlight washing over the table. “Well, Melon, a droid delivered you. And it didn’t go so good for your mother.”
“Oh,” says Luke.
Aunt Beru reaches over the table and grabs his hand hard, and Luke allows himself to be grabbed. Beru has whitewash speckled on her knuckles because she was patching up the kitchen wall before lunch, and she has dirt under her nails because before the kitchen wall she was repotting some of the plants she keeps in the courtyard. Luke likes droids but he knows Aunt Beru’s hands better than anyone’s. Aunt Beru has the trustworthiest hands in the galaxy, he thinks, and he wishes his mother had known them.
+
Luke can recalibrate a vaporator, take a speeder down to parts and build it back up faster, make up a batch of burn salve as good as any kid raised on the freehold. But Beru also teaches him how to stop bleeding, encourage milk to come in, soothe a colicky newborn, make the hearty porridge that’s good for new mothers to eat. Probably Beru ought to have had a daughter to teach all these things to, but she’s just got Luke.
The first time Luke actually goes in the room for a birth, he’s thirteen. He’s half curious and half brimming with dread, but Aunt Beru says he’s got to and the mother, Biggs’s second oldest sister having her third baby with the Tosche kid, says it’s fine by her.
Luke makes it an hour before he faints. When he comes to with his feet on a pillow and a sharp-smelling rag under his nose, the Tosche kid is laughing so hard they have to let go of Biggs’s sister’s hand to steady themselves on the wall.
“It’s not everyone’s calling,” says Aunt Beru, also just about pissing herself with laughter, and that’s that.
+
Luke speaks Binary and Huttese, and Basic with an accent he doesn’t know is embarrassing until he gets laughed at by a spacer at Tosche Station and realizes that, actually, he would like to go somewhere else. Tatooine has a magnet pull like no other planet, and it’s hard as hells to get away.
But leaving is in his blood, after all. His father was a freedman and a pilot, and he died with more than just Tatooine sand on his boots, and nobody will ever tell Luke anything about him. He doesn’t have a grave Luke can sit by or a holo Luke can look at. But Luke has seen new fathers holding their babies, tired young Tatooine men with sand ground into the creases of their knuckles looking down at their babies with love and terror all at once, and he can picture—something. A faceless man holding a little blonde-headed baby, even though Beru told him he was bald until he was half a year old.
Luke asks about his parents sometimes, when Uncle Owen’s in a mood where the question won’t just make him grumble and mutter and leave the room.
About Luke’s mother, he says, “She didn’t know one end of a vaporator from the other. Wasn’t much use, poor kid. But she tried her best, listened well enough.”
That’s the highest praise Owen will give an offworlder. Owen’s cardinal sin is uselessness, followed by lack of effort and failure to listen to Owen’s instructions.
About Luke’s father, Owen says, “Ma Shmi did her best, I guess. But he left when he was real young.”
That’s damning.
The older he gets, the more he can read the elisions around the topic of his parents. Tatooinians are good at silences. There’s a grade of gracious, knowing silence wrapped around some things that happen on the freehold, like when somebody’s brand-new long-lost cousin walks out of the Wastes and onto a homestead. The shaking hands and healing wounds where one might have chipped a detonator out of one’s bone—things about which Tatooinians do not speak. That’s not the silence that Luke’s father gets.
Luke fills in the blanks eventually. Anakin Skywalker must have been some shithead spice jockey, deep in debt, too wrapped up in spacer mistakes to come back and help Ma Shmi and everyone else who knew him in the quarter, too dumb not to get some delicate offworlder pregnant.
But if Luke leaves, when Luke leaves, he’ll do better. Maybe he’ll come back.
+
“Babies don’t wait for a good year,” Beru tells him once while they’re sitting in the courtyard after moonrise sifting grit out of an enormous pile of sidi beans. This is Beru’s style: get his hands busy and his feet still, and give him some things to think on. Maybe later Luke’ll figure out why she brought it up, or he won’t. But he’ll remember the lesson.
“Babies come when they come, no matter if the harvest is going to be good or if there’s unfriendly Tuskens around or if the Hutts are raising taxes.”
Luke, who knew how to stop a baby from coming before he even knew exactly how he might be involved in starting that process, is confused. “What about the tea you give people? Or, uh—pulling out, or whatever.”
Aunt Beru grins, flicking a pebble out into the dark. “That wasn’t a quiz, Melon. But I’m glad you remember your options.”
The air is cooling fast even as a blush burns up Luke’s face. But he does remember. For any number of reasons, Luke is almost certainly never going to get anyone pregnant.
“Things happen. That’s the beginning and the end of it. Sometimes someone’s too busy to be careful, or they are careful and it doesn’t work, or they’re not given a choice one way or another.”
Luke stays quiet, digs his hands into the beans. They were payment for the delivery of an infant in Mos Espa, no father hovering on the rooftop or the courtyard outside.
“Nothing’s certain with a baby. I’ve never lost a parent, and no doubt that’s a blessing. But I’ve lost babies. All you can do is try, even when trying’s not enough, and do what you can to make sure it’s nobody’s fault.”
Aunt Beru’s hair is coming out of its braids, and her shoulders are sloped. She might, Luke realizes, be old. She’s probably twice as old as Luke’s mother ever got to be.
Luke looks up at the stars and thinks.
+
The last delivery Luke ever attends on Tatooine, though he doesn’t know at the time that it’ll be the last, he’s nearly seventeen. The comm for Aunt Beru comes early in the morning. A Kitster Banai’s wife has gone into labor in the Flats in Mos Eisley, the kind of tangled slum where the recently-freed tend to end up if they can’t get out to the freehold or offworld. Luke is volunteered as chauffeur for Beru and Biggs’ littlest sister Jopie, who Beru took on as apprentice a few months back. Uncle Owen doesn’t want them going alone before the suns are up and he doesn’t want them leaving the speeder in a neighborhood like that, so Luke slithers out of bed to convey the midwives across the desert.
They pull into Mos Eisley just after the first sun clears the horizon, and the Flats is awake. Anyone who’s smart gets their hard work over with before both suns are up, and the people of the Flats are not stupid. The air, still cool, is smokey from breakfast cookfires. Luke parks the speeder outside the Banai house, resolutely ignoring the stormtrooper and the Hutt enforcer patrolling at opposite ends of the street while Beru shakes Jopie awake.
Aunt Beru kisses him on the cheek and shoves him away. “I’ll go check on how things are progressing and come tell you when about we’ll need a ride back to the freehold, yeah?” she says. That’s a lie, she’ll send Jopie.
The father is in the alley behind the house smoking something hand-rolled and fragrant. Even in the soft colorless light of single-sunrise Luke can tell he’s dark haired and tired and handsome. Luke bobs his head in a hello, and the father waves him over.
“You Ma Whitesun’s boy?” he asks.
“Yessir, her nephew. Luke.”
The father nods. “Thanks for coming.”
Luke leans against the wall and pulls out his own cigarra. “Feeling alright?”
If Beru knew he was out here smoking, she’d go after him with the rifle she uses to take potshots at the womp rats. For the waste of credits, the waste of good healthy lungs, and most of all the waste of time. But it’s good for somebody to keep an eye on the fathers, is what Luke would tell her. And Luke is pretty sure he likes older men, is what he’s telling himself.
“Don’t matter how many times you do this, standing out here never gets easier,” says the father.
“That’s what I hear,” says Luke. But it’s bad luck among Tatooine slaves to be in the same house as the father for the birth, no matter who the father is. And they aren’t in the quarter anymore but that kind of thing still matters to a man like this, with the neck of his tunic shifting to show a knotted detonator scar on his collarbone.
“But all three of ‘em so far have been freeborn, and I want them to have that freeborn luck,” the father says.
“My dad wasn’t there when I was born, and I’ve always been lucky.” Best thing Luke’s father ever did was pass on the freeborn luck, though at this point Luke figures it wasn’t intentional. He’s not, at this point, a hundred percent certain that his father knew he was going to exist.
The father laughs. “Your dad was the luckiest fucker I ever knew.”
Luke nearly drops his cig. “You knew him? Anakin Skywalker?”
“Shit yeah, we grew up together. Figured Ma Whitesun would have told you that, but maybe she didn’t know. She’s a little older, cause I think her and her ma were out on the freehold by the time Ani left.”
It’s rude and immature but Luke can’t possibly listen to this man unravel a network of Mos Eisley almost-relations right now. “What was he like?”
“Blond.”
“Ha,” says Luke, not laughing.
The father shrugs and exhales smoke. “We were kids. I was younger than my oldest is now, when Ani got offworld. He was funny, fast runner, good podracer. Shit kids care about.”
“Podracing?”
“Damn, did nobody ever tell you? That’s how he got out. Came first place at Boonta Eve and some offworlder sleemo won enough credits off the upset to take him with when he left.”
“Yeah, well.” Luke stubs his cigarra out on the wall behind him. He’s too nauseous to smoke. “Leaving didn’t do him a whole lot of good, I guess. He’s dead and I’m right here where he started.”
“Not quite where he started, huh?” The father raises his eyebrows. Luke hunches, ashamed. He’s been scolded often enough for ungratefulness, impatience, foolishness, ignorance of consequences. He knows, really, that he’s no better than his own father. It’s in the water that brought him into the world.
“Some folks get far enough out, they don’t come back. But at least he left you with good people, yeah? He knew enough to do that.”
Luke tosses the cigarra, gone cold in his hand, into a trash heap at the other end of the alley. The sharp pink light of the second sun pours over the lip of the roof and pools on the dust at the Luke’s feet. Around the front, Jopie is calling for him.
“Good luck,” Luke tells the father, and goes out into the cascading morning sun.