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It takes Owen and Beru a little less than an hour to make it to Mos Eisley to pick up supplies for the next few months. Owen parks outside the market in the Old Quarter, searching for a stall or a shop that sells black market med supplies and bacta for three times the price they should be, but with his father’s wounds festering, left fallow and uncleaned in his grief after Mom’s death, Owen’s prepared to barter the scoundrel pawning off them off down as much as he’s able. Beru’s got two bags, each slung across a shoulder, middling sized but roomy enough to pick up food they can’t grow themselves at the farm, while Owen’s got two others. It was easier when they had the Threepio to do the majority of the heavy lifting, but they hadn’t heard a peep out of his stepbrother or the Naboo woman, Padmé Naberrie, since they’d run off after some Jedi, Benobi or other, and absconded with the farm’s only stable hand.
“It will be faster if we split up,” she tells him, as they shuffle around the marketplace. She’s right, but after Mom, Owen’s reluctant to let her out of his sight, even in Mos Eisley, far away from the raiders. Owen, too, knows from the few times he’s made the trip to Mos Eisley with Beru since they met in Anchorhead that the Whitesun’s are known around here. Beru’s more familiar with Mos Eisley than Owen, having grown up on a moisture farm close to the city, but she’s still the descendant of freed slaves, and Owen knows there are some around these parts that will swindle her for that.
“Suppose so,” he says, and holds her close. Together, they walk through the market, the oppressively hot air bearing down relentlessly. There’s no cooling units in the open air market, so there’s no relief from the twin suns. Owen’s used to the weather, true enough, since moisture farming meant long days out in the elements, but he’s not used to the smell of a hundred or so lifeforms sweating together, carrying a putrid smell of body odor, roasted scavenger animals, and fuel uplifted with the hot breeze.
After a half-hour or so browsing, Owen grits his teeth as he hands his meagre funds over to the Weequay seller of the bacta infusion his father needs to heal. Two stalls away, Beru appears to be haggling down a Dug selling off-world, imported flour, the kind she only affords after a particularly good yearly yield. Her father’s doing better than the Lars, and he sends her a small pittance. Though she’d offered to use it for repairs, after Anakin got it into his head to fix everything in their farm, the need for it had lessened. Owen couldn’t help but be grudgingly grateful to his surly stepbrother for that.
Pocketing his necessary, but extorted gains, Owen makes his way to Beru. “I need a drink,” he mutters, low enough so that only she hears, and not the second Dug hawking Ardees next to the one counting the money Beru offers. He’d rather go to a relatively low-priced cantina, with a cooling unit, then idle around out in the open air market avoiding desperate sellers.
“Chalmun’s is close enough,” Beru replies. She slips her right arm through his, and leads him towards down the street till they enter a dimly lit bar, crowded with locals and outlanders, and a single bartender. As soon as they enter, a man shouting in Bocce shoves a Rodian into the wall. Beru easily sidesteps the heated encounter, but Owen scowls. He shoves his way through the crowd, shoulders bumping with several patrons, knowing that Beru has her eyes on their bags, her hands holding the ones she’s carrying firmly shut. The live music is jarring and off-key, sounding rather like the sound of a dying sand spider with ten times the ear-splitting shrieks.
Finally, at the edge of the bar, Owen waits for the bartender to notice them, and watches an old man feed a crouched sand cat, triangle ears pointed upward in contentment, that’s mewling mournfully on the bar. She seems to be making her rounds through the patrons, her small paws nimbly jumping over arms, and her big eyes fixing on her prey with an unceasing gaze.
Beru pets the top of the cat’s head, murmuring praise and endearments, while Owen grits his teeth and taps his foot, impatient to drink and leave. He’s not left his father alone for more than an hour or so since the accident, and he can feel his skin crawling with impatience and anticipation. This is ridiculous , he thinks, and sighs, his back aching from weeks of single-handed farm work.
For fucks sake, Anakin , he curses, as he reaches back to rub a particularly sore muscle. Couldn’t have left me the damn droid .
His stepbrother had certainly not been the bright ray of sunshine their mother had nostalgically remembered. Owen digs his fingers into the muscle, and thinks about the distant, serious young man who’d disappeared as quickly as he’d come, with nary a word the entire time. Beru’d spent the first few days after the funeral wondering if they should use the contact info the rich woman had left them, but Owen had hushed her around the mourning Cliegg. His father was already hurting enough, why give him hope of holding onto some small part of Shmi only for Jedi Anakin not to respond.
The Jedi don’t allow attachments , the woman had said. Though those two had seemed pretty damned attached. Lot more attached than it seems Anakin was willing to be to his stepfamily, his mother’s kin , Owen ponders, angry at the recent memory.
“--heard they had a whole bunch of Jedi trapped on Geonosis. Heard it was a massacre ,” a Klatooinian three lifeforms to the left of Owen says in a loud voice. He’s bent down, talking to a Twi’lek dressed in scantily clad clothes, with a smarmy grin. The woman gives him a bland, practiced smile, but he doesn’t appear to notice. Owen shifts, his shoulders tense, and he focuses on the word Jedi . Next to him, Beru quiets her attempts at cuddling with the sand cat, and she moves closer, listening too.
“Wasn’t Benobi on Geonosis?” he asks her, voice low. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches her nod.
Massacre .
Jedi .
Anakin .
Beru’s eyes grow wide, and they both turn to stare at one another, even as the bartender comes up and demands their order. Numbly, Owen asks for two Yatooni Boskas, and tries to block out the sound of the terrible band, the illicit deals, and the outbreaking fisticuffs. The Klatoonian continues, “I’ve even acquired some of their lightsabers. Rare items. Make me millions on the black market.”
“Balderdash,” a Zabrak, outfitted with heavy armour, responds to the Klatoonian. “ You don’t have any lightsabers.” The Klatoonian puffs in response, and soon enough, another fight breaks out. As the bartender returns with Owen and Beru’s drinks, the Klatoonian is catapulted over the bar, knocking into the bartender, and upending their drinks onto the sticky floor.
“For fucks sake,” Owen, the bartender, and even the dazed Klatoonian say, simultaneously.
“Lets just go,” Owen says to Beru, and doesn’t wait for her response. He’s too focused on getting out of here, away from the crowd of posturing, violent smugglers and bounty hunters, back to the street, where he’d seen a few scattered newsnet terminals for pay attached to a shop. He’s not sure how much they cost, and as soon as they pop back out into the blazing sunlight and hot air, he asks Beru to count their coin.
He skirts around speeders, thieves, and four angry scurriers, before they find an empty newsnet terminal. The price is ridiculously high , probably two bags of flour and an offworld fruit’s worth, but Beru doesn’t protest when Owen shoves the rest of the money into the machine. Her face is stark white, her eyes fixed on the screen, waiting with a jaw clenched as tight as Owen’s own for the news to pop up.
There are a few more local articles from the last week on the HoloNews infocache, but after a few minutes, Owen finds a video clip labelled GEONOSIS ATTACK: LARGE BAND OF REPUBLIC JEDI UNLAWFULLY INVADE SEPERATIST STATE WITH LARGE CLONE ARMY. The harried newscaster relates a story about a seemingly ‘peaceful’ negotiation between the charismatic seperatist leader, Count Dooku, and a senator, Padmé Amidala, that was ‘interrupted by the Jedi.’ There’s mention of a ‘rightful execution of three invaders’ onto Geonosisian soil, of which Anakin’s friend seems to be linked, and then a scattered report of the battle. Owen manages to piece together enough—the Republic has gone to war with the Seperatist Alliance, and has been for several weeks.
“Do you think he’s alright?” Beru asks, voice breaking. Owen can’t answer, can’t speak. He doesn’t even know how to begin thinking about telling his father that Shmi’s son might be dead.
As dead as she is.
Just as he goes to answer, the newscaster turns excited. A holoimage from a random tabloid, blown up and somewhat distorted, pops up on the side of the screen, and Owen freezes, exhales, and relaxes. It’s Padmé , clearly, exiting a ship, with Threepio , and then a hooded, familiar young man behind her.
Anakin’s alive , he thinks with relief. The newscaster informs them that, “the embroiled Senator Amidala’s returned to Coruscant from Naboo with a ‘suspiciously close’ Jedi bodyguard.”
Beru rests her head on his shoulder, and then their time runs out. Silently, they make their way to their speeder, and then on to home.
Months later, Owen begrudgingly makes his way back to Mos Eisley after leaving Beru with her mother and sister at the Whitesun moisture farm. He’s meeting up with one of the freedom runners, Kitser Banai, who’s been working with the Whitesuns to help escaped slaves make it offworld for a few years now. He’s a freed slave, too; Owen remembers seeing his mother hug the teenager the last time they’d met up, him with a bruised and thin Twi’lek child trailing behind him, on their way to the desert for the underground ship runs paid off smugglers graciously helped with.
It’s a dangerous business, but one the Whitesun’s have been participating in for two generations. Owen remembers hearing a tale of one Whitesun, Beru’s great uncle, being caught by Gardulla the Hutt and publicly whipped and executed in the podracing arena of Mos Espa, long before Owen was born.
Owen’s still a bit awed by the bravery of the Whitesun family to stick to freeing slaves, even after the scrutiny of the Hutts and other slaves had been turned towards them. The risks they took were immense, but they never spoke of stopping. They’d even created a trail of moisture farms in secret that slaves who managed to dig out their tracking chips could hide out at, without fear of crossing the desert without food or water.
So far, they’d kept under the radar with one or two escapees a year, but Owen worried for them, nonetheless.
Owen parks his speeder, and avoids the market, not wanting to smell or deal with the miscreants loitering in this cesspit city. Instead, he makes his way to a shop owned by an old handwoven cloth woman, Mi’rai Dunerunner. She’s more expensive than the tailor in Anchorhead, where Cliegg used to buy them clothes before Shmi arrived, but Owen had insisted Beru deserved a nice wedding dress. She’s a wonderful, hardworking woman who knows how to do without, and there will be plenty of that ahead. This year with only him and his father gone and buried next to Shmi had been difficult, the yield poor and the money slow. Still, even though a lot of the other moisture farmers consider the idea of a commissioned wedding dress frivolous, Owen can’t help but think of his mother, Shmi, clad only in the garments she’d come with after being granted freedom as her wedding gown.
He wants—no, he needs —Beru to have this.
Even if it took the money they’d been saving up to send a letter to Anakin and the fee for the newsnet terminal to hear more about the Galactic Army of the Republic and the so-called ‘Clone Wars.’
It takes a few minutes to locate Dunerunner Duds. Odd name , he thinks, but makes quick work of picking up the gown and paying the pruned-skinned woman who must have been hanging around Tatooine when the last rainfall occurred.
Then, he sighs, rubs his eyes, and mutters to no one, “I need a drink.”
Chalmun’s is just as crowded as it was the last time Owen had the misfortune to step foot through its permacrete doors. There is a large group of Trandoshan bounty hunters huddled around one table, and several other bounty hunters at other tables. There’s also some Weequays by the bar, covered in dirt, and dressed like pirates. Owen sits as far away from them as he can, and waits for Kitster to arrive. The bartender gets him his Ardees, and Owen sips, and keeps his gaze firmly fixed on the bar and not the patrons.
The live music hasn’t improved any in the last few months.
It might even be the same shitty band.
The minutes trickle on, and the pirates grow increasingly rowdier, swaying in their seats and singing lewd, bawdy space shanties about a Jedi that falls in love with a pirate and forsakes her code for a life of crime on the run. One pirate jumps up onto the bar, his arms aloft dramatically. Foam and liquid splash as he moves, dripping onto his companion’s helmets.
“Listen up,” he says, words slurring around the last syllables. He’s got dark hair and a commanding presence, as each of his fellow drunks look up at his request. “I dedicate this drink, and that lovely song, to my Jedi best friends, Kenobi and Skywalker!”
“To Kenobi and Skywalker!” all his drunk crew echoes back.
Owen blinks, and turns on his heel to look at the group. The rest of the bar, too, is suddenly alert. Near the back, a green skinned Rodian slams his drink down on the table he’s sitting at.
“Anakin Skywalker?” someone asks, and for a second Owen thinks it's him , but no, it’s the Rodian in the back. “The slave boy that Jabba made that Jedi pay for?” Owen’s stomach swoops, and curdles dangerously around the Ardees he’s consumed. He swivels his head to look at the table that, he suddenly realizes, is filled with bounty hunters he recognizes from seeing them in Mos Eisley making deals with known Hutt underlings. The Rodian’s name is Greedy, or something similar, Owen recalls, and he’s been trying to make a name for himself for ages. Owen watches him turn to someone at his table and exclaim, loudly, “Wasn’t it Kenobi?”
Owen feels dread, and anger, and he thinks, she lied , before he corrects himself, more due to her obvious ignorance than anything else, and wonders whether or not she even knew that the Jedi had paid for his stepbrother .
That must be why Anakin left suddenly for Benobi , Owen thought, as his thoughts turn dark. His drink threatens to come back up, and he pushes the last dregs in the mug away. The Weequay half-flops, half-stomps, off the bar to confront the Rodian, who's getting into an argument with another man about podracing and the Boonta Eve, when Anakin made Tatooinian history as the only human to ever win a podrace.
“Listen, my good squid, Kenobi is an honorable Jedi! Jedi don’t own. Have you ever met any of them? They live a dreadfully empty lifestyle. Monk aesthetic and the like,” the man says insistently, waving his arms about in a circle as if to indicate the question is for the room. “No?” he continues, after no one answers. His left hand rests on his blaster and his crew, stumbling but alert, move to flank him. “I have . And I assure you, your falsehoods are unappreciated.” He waves his hand towards the Rodian. “Besides, that kid is too belligerent.”
He ends the last statement with a head butt. The cantina, as usual, turns to a fight.
Owen growls, rolls his eyes, curses Benobi and the gods , and Kitster for making him wait in this sarlacc-spawned pit, swears at a few brawlers, and goes to wait by the door. If he leans against the pourstone walls for support as he waits, drowning out the clang of the scuffle behind him, it's no one’s business but his own. The suns beat down oppressively as Owen grips his intended’s dress close to his chest, fingers digging into the soft fabric.
Softer than he’s ever felt.
He runs his left hand roughly through his hair, pulling at the strands as it comes back down to hold the dress. For a long, foolish moment he wonders if he can return it, if Beru would understand, if he can somehow find paper and postage and funds and remember the comcode info and address for Padmé Naberrie even though he left it in a drawer buried under all of his mother’s things.
He sighs. It won’t matter anyway. Even if he tells her, what can she do? If the Jedi own his stepbrother, it's unlikely she can free him. Especially with their damn war raging across the Galaxy and decimating planets and star systems. No, Owen realizes, as his eyes close to escape the glare of the suns, then open again, there is nothing to be done.
He spots Kitster in the distance, a hood obscuring the top of his head.
At least Mom will never know , he thinks, and neither will Beru, not today, not before our wedding, that will break her heart , before he drags himself away from the wall, and follows Kitster back into the rowdy cantina.
After the hardship of the next harvest, with Owen having to wrestle the vaporators precious water deposits by himself, Owen nixes the idea of going up to Mos Eisley again. “We can’t afford the fuel,” he tells Beru, sad and frustrated. “At this rate, if we don’t hire hands next harvest, we might go under.”
The first year’s been tough. Owen remembers his father’s stories from childhood, how Cliegg had snuck on board a transport ship off planet in Mos Eisley over forty years ago and met an off-world woman, Owen’s birth mother, before bringing her back to the farm, to Tatooine, when the guilt of up and leaving his parents to their troubles had hit him too hard upon the death of his wife. Owen barely remembered his grandparents; he’d been too young when his grandmother succumbed to The Sickness, kept quarantined in his quarters and the workshop by his father, not even seeing her burned then buried in the sand. His grandfather’d taken ill, too, a year later, and Cliegg spent many a day wondering all his life when The Sickness would strike them again.
In the end, it hadn’t been The Sickness, but grief. Some days, Owen wonders if his father didn’t have the right idea, to just give up. The days when the vaporators had barely a drop of water between them, when the twin suns beating down on his brow and the back of his neck left it a burned, angry red, peeling off in flakes and rampant itchiness. When he watched Beru struggle to cook and clean and help him with the harvest, her face growing thinner by day, her eyes circled by dark exhaustion, and her hair tied into a half-hazard bun rather than the carefully arranged braids of the before period.
The farm’s lonely, now, with each day Owen spends out by himself, no one to turn to to vent or complain. His father’s familiar presence burned and buried in the same grave as his wife’s. It was shrouded, too, with more loss, the two times Beru had hoped for a child, only for the bleeding to come harder and stronger than before. In his darker moments, Owen thinks about the Sand People with hate and anger. Thinks about the Jedi, too, and what they stole from them before they even knew there was anything to lose.
Mostly, he thinks about the Republic, and their war and their hunger to hold onto their power, rather than let systems just fall away. They’re making him fight in that damn war, Owen thinks, in the moments where he wants to be angry for this phantom stepbrother he knows only from snatches of conversation and snippets of Shmi’s memory, and this war is just going to swallow up more and more people .
“My brother’ll be by Anchorhead to pick up some parts,” Beru tells him over a plate of mushrooms and blue cheese. “He might know of some way to find hired help. Maybe we can—”
“No loans,” Owen replies firmly. “We won’t be making any deals with the Hutts.”
Things weren’t so desperate he’d consider that .
Two days later, Owen and Beru fill up the speeder with what’s left of their fuel. He attaches the sidecar, for supplies, and they head out towards Anchorhead. They leave before the suns are even peeking up over the horizon, the stars their only guide, and Beru clutches him tightly around the waist as he makes his way across the dunes. The glare of the yellow light as the suns dawn hits him just as they pull into the old mining settlement, and he quickly finds somewhere to park, near to a cantina, with an attached newsnet terminal. There’s a queue, lifeforms milling about, catching up as they wait for the person in front of them to finish, standing as close as a hair’s breadth of one another.
Owen sighs, and gets in line with Beru. Her brother’s a late riser, so they have the time , if barely the funds for this. Still, the need for news of the war, rumors, or just even crumbs that allude to his stepbrother, has been growing the closer the anniversary of Shmi’s death gets. The memories pop up, and with it a type of duty to her memory to clutch on to an imagined kinship with her birth son. Beru, too, feels it, to a lesser degree, but sometimes she’ll joke that they should “com Anakin, maybe he can fix everything that’s broke in here.”
They share half a pallie between them as they wait, and make small talk with the couple in front of them hoping to hear news about their sister stuck in the spaceways near Mandalore. Finally, it’s their turn. Owen’s not sure what he’s looking for when he shoves the funds into the machine, so forcefully he almost loses some to the sand as it almost misses the slot, before the machine powers on. They scroll through a couple of articles on the Holonet infocache, then Beru gasps. “What the—?” she says, and points one trembling finger to the headline.
Owen reads: RAMPAGING BEAST FAILS SEPERATIST ALLIANCE WHEN HE DOESN’T SWALLOW SUPREME CHANCELLOR SHEEV PALPATINE!
Huh, Owen thinks, as he blinks, rereads the words aloud to Beru, and mourns what may have been had only the rampaging beast succeeded. “—the beast, shamefully abducted from its natural habitat, sources say, set about correcting the great wrong done to it by looking for the nearest source of food: Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine, and potentially for afters, the rest of the so-called Senate.”
The Daily Holo article continued listing various bits of suspected property damage, casualty numbers. “An insider source from within the scientific division revealed to Volpex Chimes that morally bankrupt Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine attempted to harvest the durable scales from the lifeform of probable sentience to build new armour and weapons for the Galactic Army of the Republic.”
He trails off, sharing a look with Beru that’s filled with disgust at the actions of the Chancellor, a man who, by all accounts, is suspect at best and downright corrupt and power hungry at worst. He’s even made open deals with the Hutts .
They read off the rest, ending with “The Daily Holo is sad to report the unfortunate and untimely demise of this venerable beast, who appears to have gotten the closest, though sadly failed all the same, to riding the Galaxy of Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine. The Confederacy of Independent Systems hopes to recruit more of its noble kind, and as always, turn to the Daily Holo for all your war updates!”
Their time runs out just as they finish up, and with a long, stuttered breath, Beru says, “Well—think Anakin was involved in that?”
Owen thinks about the stories Shmi told about young Ani’s shenanigans, luck, and habit of landing in the middle of trouble. “No,” he answers, without believing a word coming out of his mouth. “Jedi probably had him off planet.”
Beru shoots him a skeptical look, and honestly, he wouldn’t be surprised if he sees a caricature holoprint of his stepbrother on a calendar fighting off a gigantic, ravaging beast with his bare hands in a few months time. Owen shakes his head, grabs Beru’s hand, and goes to wait by the speeder until her brother eventually decides to make his lazy way to Anchorhead.
Peli Motto is a loud, abrasive, over-charger, but she’s one of the few mechanics in Mos Eisley Owen trusts to have the parts to fix his crapped out speeder. It spurts and sputters, and gurgles, as he and Beru drag-push it towards the hanger bay, cursing up a storm. “What did you do to it?” Peli calls out from her office. Only the tops of her springy curls are visible over the desk. “Crash it into a japor tree? It sounds like it's coming out the back of a krayt dragon!”
Beru sighs, and pulls her wayward hair back into its bun. Outside, the wind picks up all the speed the speeder lacked on the way here. There’s a crowd milling about in the hanger while pit droids bustle about, fixing speeders and a YT-model freighter. They appear to be playing sabacc, for all its worth, as the cards have a hard time staying on the table, and not from the usual cheating smugglers get up to.
“Disuse,” Beru answers, as Peli comes out to the hall to greet them. She’s got a datapad in her hand, and a bandana pulling her unruly hair away from her face. There’s bits of sweat clinging to her neck, and oil staining her clothes. “We think.”
Peli gives it a once over. Owen leans against the wall and crosses his arms, the heel of his right boot scruffing the sand dusted floor. “Ehhh, just start using it more,” she replies, gruffly, as she bends to check out its undercarriage. There’s a grating, then scraping sound as she tinkers with something, then pops back up. “Or invest in an eopie. You’ll get a few years out of it before it craps out on you.”
“We’ll get on that,” Owen replies sarcastically. “Just as soon as thieves bring back the rain.” The second year had been better , but by the absolute bare minimum, and Owen had barely enough money to keep Beru’s eleven-year-old nephew, Liddle, on as his hand.
Peli shrugs. “I’ll see what I can do.” Then, she yells, “Droids, get over here!” and hustles Owen and Beru out into the hanger. The wind picks up sand and pelts it towards them as they go out into the open air, and Beru unfurls the scarf around her neck to cover her mouth, while Owen does the same. He eyes the smugglers, who appear unbothered, supplying pithy bits of commentary over their cards. “No,” he overhears Peli say, presumably to a pit droid. “I’m running a business here, not a charity.” A beat, then, “Fine, lower it by twenty-five.”
Owen kicks the wall with the back of his foot. Beru lays her head against his shoulder, and they try not to draw too much attention to themselves from the other customers. Still, with nothing to occupy his mind, Owen can’t help but be drawn into their conversation.
“Zygerria? Heard the Republic army came in and pulled it all out from under them,” a man with a curly, thin mustache that turns towards his large nose, says. There’s a small stream running down the sides of his cheeks and over into his collar. Ruefully, Owen wonders if sweat can be purified into drinkable water.
His opponent, a man with heavy boots that cling to his calves with blotches of saturation, jostles the table. “The Republic? Since when do they care about the slave trade?” He punctuates his statement with a miming gesture to indicate Tatooine, and Owen agrees. The Republic have consistently shown they don’t give one fuck about slavery in the Outer Rim. “Thought they were too busy fighting the war to keep all those fancy Core people in fine clothes and gleaming palaces.”
Owen shifts, as Beru makes a small, inquiring noise underneath her breath, and he knows she’s just as tuned in to the conversation. He holds her close and pretends to whisper into her ear so they don’t appear too interested. She turns her head towards him so that she’s not looking directly at the group.
“Think it was that General? Kenobi?” the first man turns to a Trandoshan for confirmation, who grunts. Owen tenses, as the mustached man continues, “Yeah, I heard he went in and brought General Skywalker with him.”
Owen’s spine snaps straight, and Beru’s gasp is muffled by his tunic. Fucking Benobi , he thinks, and then his mind is going through what little he knows about Zygerria, because they’ve been a bit of a dead empire and the Hutt’s vile presence on Tatooine takes precedence in his mind. It’s not much, not more than what he knows about the Hutts, which is their indiscriminate trade profiting from the degradation of lifeforms all across the Outer Rim.
The wind hums, blocking the conversation for the long, ceaseless moments it took for the groan and whine of sand sweeping around the pit to quiet to a less noticeable vibration. Peli curses, running into view as the wind picks up one of her pit droids for a half-second or two, before she returns to her office with an impressive litany of swears that would make even the most seasoned pirates, hustlers, and spice dealers blush. The smugglers have kept up their conversation in the meanwhile, and Owen tries to focus past the blood rushing through his ears, Beru’s uneven breathing, and the floating sand screech accompaniment. It hits his skin every so often, irritatingly, as irritating as the conversation.
He manages to gather bits and pieces during the lulls of background noise. The Zygerrians, to his utter lack of surprise, had been rebuilding their slave trade with the support of the Seperatist Alliance for some time now. Probably decades, if not over a century, Owen concludes. The abduction of an entire village of Togruta from the Expansion Region had caught the attention of the Republic, and they’d sent in General Kenobi and General Skywalker, for an indistinct amount of time, before the population had been found on Kadavo.
An indistinct amount of time. Owen feels the tension in his shoulders and spine tighten impossibly more, while Beru’s biting her lip hard enough to draw blood. His teeth are grit so hard he’s sure one of them may crack, and he can’t afford a dentist known for his liberal application of malpractice, so a good old-fashioned tooth extraction with a piece of string and a vaporator will have to do the trick if he fucks them up. All he can picture if Shmi’s son, this sullen and reserved man he barely knows, let alone comprehends, once again in the armpit of slavery because the man who bought him told him to go there . The desire to know the particulars of the mission war with the desire to push it away, not to dwell on it. The more he tries not to think about it, the more he pictures nameless, faceless Zygerrians with whips and chains and detonators. He resolves to find Padmé’s buried comcode the second they get back to the farm.
Beru shakes in his arms.
The smugglers continue as the wind picks up, in Bocce now, and he can’t understand a word of that, but he hears the laughter travel with the breeze, just as Peli comes out to join them. “I’ll fix it for a pint of Ardees and thirty wupiupi.”
“Deal,” Beru says, quickly, eager to leave the pit. “We’ll swing by later to take you out.”
Peli waves a dismissive hand. “Yeah, yeah, get. I need to deal with those sleemos.” Without another word, she stalks over to the smugglers, and Owen and Beru quickly make themselves scarce. As soon as they are outside, sans speeder and swept in a gale of billowy sand, they breathe in, out, then in again, but each time feels like gravel scraping down the entirety of his throat. They don’t talk, not here where anyone can hear and report it back to the Hutts; instead, she grabs his hand tight, and they walk to the cantina to wait out the incoming storm.
No one wants to stand too close to the fire as it grows in the stillness of the night. The Republic’s war has been raging for almost four years now, and the local moisture farms have gathered for the biggest piece of information regarding the mess since some probably disgruntled worker bombed the Jedi temple months back. Owen sits on one of the blankets placed around the fire in a circle, surrounded by all the moisture farming families within distance, and kicks the sand. Beru’s inside with the other women, no doubt micromanaging their kitchen with the wisdom of her culinary expertise and one semester of schooling.
“An Empire,” Osak Ahot says, numb. They’re new, renters of a moisture farm owned by the land baron, Huff Darklighter, an unpleasant man born with the soul of a Hutt, in Owen’s opinion. Osak’s repeated the word four times, but Owen’s still can’t wrap his head around it beyond the ringing vindication of: Sheev Palpatine was a morally corrupt politician all along . Osak bounces his curly-haired toddler on his knee, while the little girl attempts to chew on his neck bandana. “Do you think they’ll come out here?”
“What for? They’ll profit just the same dealing business with the Hutts they did before,” Ja’ryd Crell replies. He spits disdainfully onto the sand, and doesn’t cringe at the irritated looks the rest of them give him. Owen barely pays heed to the man on most days, and he doesn’t want to now. His mind is playing on a loop, swinging round back to Anakin is dead everytime he tries to convince himself that Anakin is alive , with occasional moments of should I try calling the senator again? Surely she’s fine? Then, just as abruptly, he remembers the disconnected tone of a unanswered call after the rumors of Zygerria, and then his thoughts swirl and coalesce around everyone is dead, Dad, Mom, Anakin, his rich partner who didn’t know anything about anything , but yet that corrupt Chancellor prevails. Owen’s lived too long on Tatooine to believe in children’s tales about hope beating the odds and good people living good lives, but that doesn’t make reality easier to bear.
“—and the Jedi were involved. Imagine that? The holo was saying they tried to incite an insurrection! The Se—” Ja’ryd continues, waving his arm about, blowing the smoke into their faces, gaining speed with his enthusiasm.
“Is it still the Senate? Is it even a democracy?” Sam Brunk, Beru’s sister’s husband, asks, a tad bit naively. Scornfully, Owen wonders if that even matters.
“No,” Tellico Bezzard answers. “It’s an empire . Isn't that like, King Hutt times a million?” He’s got rings of exhausted circles around his eyes, running on fumes and little sleep. His wife’s back home, not up to traveling with the new babe. Beru had come back from visiting them with a mournful look in her eyes. She’d been quiet for days afterwards, pondering on their problems, and Owen wanted nothing more than for her to hold their child in her arms.
Tufty Marstrap scoffs, and runs a hand through his flat red hair. His skin is as red as his hair from failing to ever apply sunscreen or protective gear. He’s on the verge of losing his own moisture farm. Last Owen heard, he’d been seen lamenting at a cantina in Anchorhead talking about “packing it all in and giving up the ghost.” Privately, Beru had told him that the Hutts were using the moisture farm as collateral for the Marstap’s mounting debt, which was rather generous of a Hutt. Their two-year-old daughter, Camie, was running around the outskirts of their circle trying to catch insects flitting about in the sky with a screeching battle cry. Behind her, Janek Sunber stumbles on an upturned root, and begins to sniffle, and Laze Loneozner runs over to play “nurse droid” to his fellow toddler.
Owen thinks about how lucky she is to still be free.
Next to him, Eiven Pierce mutters as much. His wife’s a freed woman, but he’d gone nearly destitute trying to free her with the help of the Whitesuns. Beru had been present at their little girl’s birth, right before the first miscarriage. They hadn’t been by to see Jennica since.
Around the campfire, as they wait for the women to come out from the Loneozner’s homestead with mounds of prepared dough and cubes of blue-milk cheese, Mullet Sunber loudly begins a debate about the perfidy of the Jedi Order to turn against their government, while Owen starts to look around, realizing, abruptly and completely without intention, that his stepbrother doesn’t fit this scene. Even when he hoped that Anakin would stay, he’d never thought about the actual Anakin .
He couldn’t, because he’d never gotten the chance to know him.
Now, he never would.
Every moment seemed stuck on the edge of surreality. Here, in the Outer Rim, life went on. They’d not been touched by the Clone Wars, just as they’d not been touched by the Republic’s anti-slavery laws or an ounce of the Jedi’s so-called peacekeeping efforts. Nothing had changed, except that everything inexplicably had. The air, cold with the three moons and the nighttime cover, felt saturated with anticipation.
The wind howled with the sound of a thousand trapped souls.
On the way home, the suns beginning to dawn, bellies full with the generosity of their neighbors, Beru and Owen discussed Shmi’s headstone. It felt wrong to put Anakin’s name when they weren’t sure he was dead, yet equally unfathomable to not lay Shmi’s son to rest. “I wonder if the senator will have a memorial or a funeral for him,” Beru says, as they near their homestead. “If she’s still around. She seemed to love him very much.”
“No,” Owen says, more sure of these words than he rightfully should be. “The Jedi are traitors to that man. She’ll not be able to afford the scrutiny.”
They probably weren’t married. The Jedi lived remote lives. Detached , is what she’d told them, long ago when there’d been no real hope of Anakin bringing Shmi back alive. And that wasn’t even to speak of the rumors about Jabba’s Palace. They’ll have gotten nothing together at all really. Just like the rest of us.
Ruefully, Owen thinks that now they’d definitely never be getting back the droid.
As the farm comes into view, Owen sputters to a stop, his body tense. There’s a man standing outside, the hood of his brown cloak pulled over his head, shielding his face from view. He’s arms are up, cradled against his chest. In the light, Owen catches sight of movement. The fabric is wriggling, and then—
A small fist.
Beru gasps, steps forward, but Owen holds his arm out, motioning for the stranger to stay back. “Who are you?” he asks, hand on the blaster he’s always carrying, wishing he had a hold of his hammer to bash the man’s brains in if he proves a threat.
“Owen and Beru Lars?” the man inquires, in a posh sort of accent. Not Outer Rim at all. “My name is Obi Wan Kenobi, and this—” The man, Benobi , Owen realizes with a start, his eyes wide, his fingers tightening around the hilt, “—is Anakin Skywalker’s son, Luke.”