Anonymous asked:
notbecauseofvictories answered:
“Er…” is how most of the members of the Senate greet her these days. Not “Hello, Jedi Mistress Skywalker” or “How was the traffic, Jedi Mistress Skywalker?” or “Would you like to sit, Jedi Mistress Skywalker? Lugging around that eight-pound gestating human must be murder on your lower back.”
Just the “er”, their eyes and mouth going as wide as Shmi’s backside has become. While she understands why they don’t ask outright—“how does a celibate Jedi Master become so monstrously pregnant?” is hardly good manners—she’s not sure she’d consider blatant staring an improvement. She’s gotten very used to simply ignoring it, and helping herself to the nearest seat.
She’s also gotten used to telling people the child is Master Windu’s. Mostly because she enjoys the way Mace sets his jaw and stares determinedly over her shoulder whenever he feels compelled to discuss “the intimate secrets of her womanhood.”
His words.
(“The living Force,” Qui-Gon had said in awe-struck tones, when she told him about the strange, heated dreams she’d been having (a man who was not a man, but the galaxy entire, a boy with her eyes, but power she’d dreamed not of) and the sudden spark of life within her womb. “You are mother to the living Force.”
She could not believe this man was the closest she had to a true friend. He was then looking down at her flat stomach like it was the eleventh wonder of the galaxy—if she gave him another moment, she was unsettlingly sure he would reach out and touch it.
“Oh, for—fuck off,” she had said, and let him trail after her through the halls of the Temple, nattering about whatever mystical Force nonsense he had been into in those days.
Shmi needed better friends.)
Shmi gives birth in the midst of a firefight, because what is her life without complication? Unduli is the one to cut the cord as Eeth Koth guards their flank—her lightsaber cuts too close, the heat brushing over Shmi’s belly. The baby screams even more viciously at the feeling, a hacking, full-bodied scream, and Shmi thinks, this? I struggled for nine hours to birth this red-faced noisy thing?
When she reaches out with the Force—habit, by this point, as instinctual as a handshake, a bow—she chokes on a gasp, unable to breathe under the pounding wave of lovelovelove. She has never been the world entire to anyone, and here is this babe in her arms, red and screaming and absolutely, earth-shatteringly dependent. It will not live without her. She is everything it knows. Everything it loves. When she leaves the whole galaxy will be darkness and nothing, and it will die.
(Eeth Koth stands, absolutely still, as one by one the soldiers with their blasters drop dead in the field. Just behind him, Shmi Skywalker is singing her son a lullaby her mother once sang to her. Their bodies fall with the lilt of the melody.)
“What’s his name?” Unduli asks hesitantly, on the transport back to Coruscant.
“Anakin,” Shmi says. “On my planet, there are stories of giants called the Anakim. None could kill them but the gods. I wish that for my son.”
She can hear the echoes of their thoughts—warning, worry, fondness, exasperation—in the Force, but nothing is said aloud. Her son is called Anakin, and no one dares pry him from her arms.
The only one of the Jedi Council allowed to hold her son is Mace Windu. Not because of the joke—the joke stopped being amusing after the first time she said “your son” and held Anakin out to him, when Mace looked down at the child in his arms and Shmi thought shit, I’m never getting my baby back now.
No, Mace Windu is the only one allowed to hold Anakin because all the rest voted that she turn him over to the creche, or be stripped of her Mastery. Attachment is not the Jedi way, after all.
Shmi does not often think of the Force as a sentient being, even if she has strange, out-of-focus memories of a man who was also the galaxy thrusting between her thighs. But when Master Yoda rises to deliver their verdict, the gravity drops out. Of all of Coruscant. For three minutes, the whole planet is twisted inside out, screaming as one.
Mistress Skywalker is allowed to keep her son.
“The living Force—”
“Get out of my godsdamn rooms, Qui-Gon,” she says fondly, mussing his hair until he officially declares surrender. He spends the rest of the evening quiet, cradling Anakin in the crook of his arm.
*screeches and flails because this is Fucking Gorgeous*
t00thpasteface
