Night on Tatooine felt like a furnace door finally shut. Heat bled off the dunes in slow breaths; the stars came on in handfuls, then by the thousands. Mike—inside a boy's small, sand‑scuffed body—stumbled through it with a torn homespun tunic flapping around his knees and grit in his teeth.
His legs were too short. His feet were tough as leather and still not tough enough. Every few steps his head swam; the world went soft at the edges; then it snapped back and the same thought was waiting for him—this ain't Earth, champ.
He lifted his hands because he still didn't quite believe them. Small. Pale. Callused where a child had learned levers and throttles. When the wind cut across the flats, he heard it whistle through bent metal somewhere—wreckage talking to itself.
"Gg—goddamn," he muttered, voice high and raw with sand. The lisp hadn't stayed on Earth; it came along for the ride. "I'm a wwhite boy on a ddesert rock."
He walked because there was nothing else to do. The night air tasted like hot pennies and old dust. Moisture vaporators—pale needles—ticked and sighed out on the flats. Far off a bantha lowed, a long, lonely horn note. Jawas' eyes bobbed in the dark like cautious fireflies and then blinked away. Twice he froze at a ridge silhouette that might have been a Tusken or might have been his imagination turning a rock into a rifle.
By the time the hardpack track widened to the staging flats where daytime crowds cheered engines and dying dreams, dawn's first rumor was just a paler smudge over the horizon. The grandstand sat empty, black ribs against the stars. He put a hand on a post to steady himself, dry‑swallowed, and tried to aim his brain at the simple business of not falling down.
A single engine whine cut the quiet—thin and urgent, coming fast. A battered two‑seater skiff hit the flats in a plume of dust and slewed toward him. The driver leaned into the throttle like she'd been leaning into life all her days. Even in the low light she looked younger than he remembered from the movies—hair bound up, a scarf at her throat, eyes bright and red‑rimmed from crying and wind.
"Anakin!" she shouted, voice cracking. She braked so hard the skiff fishtailed, killed the engine with a slap, and vaulted off while it still rocked. Sand sprayed his shins. Arms, warm and shaking, wrapped around him before his brain could make a decision.
He didn't fight it. He couldn't. A small body buried its face in a work‑tough shoulder and the adult inside that body tried to breathe.
"Mom," he said, testing the word like a bridge. It held. "M—m—Mom."
She said it again like she could patch the world by repetition. "Anakin. Anakin."
Her hands mapped him—temples, ribs, the spot at the back of the neck where mothers check for fever. "I thought—Watto wouldn't let me go—then he heard you crashed and he said 'take it, take it, you're no use to me if you're useless with worry'—and—oh, Ani, no more races. Ever. Do you hear me? No more."
"Yy—yeah," he said, dizzy with relief and absurdity. "No more."
She pulled back to look at him: young, but with the strength that comes from hauling parts and haggling with men who talk over you. "You're shaking," she said. "Come. Home."
He climbed into the skiff. She drove like the desert was a partner who required respect. The engine's note settled into a traveling hum; wind cut their words to pieces. The horizon pinked. Vaporators stood like a forest of needles. They passed a Jawa sandcrawler asleep on its treads, a mountain that had decided to nap. A lone dewback lifted its head and watched them pass with ancient disinterest.
Mos Espa rose where the flats knuckled into low hills—domes and courtyards half dug into the earth, alleys threaded with shadows. Even at night it moved: a Rodian clicking his teeth at a stall; a Twi'lek in a headscarf rolling up a canopy; a Dug swearing at a cooler that had died when the sun did. Micro‑drones buzzed like lazy gnats. A vendor flipped flatbread on a griddle; the smell of char and spice cut the dust. The sky above the city was wrong in every direction—constellations Mike had never met and a pale second moon staring like an extra eye.
He caught himself staring at everything: the way light pooled under door arches; the way sand made its way into every hinge; the little blue strip of a moisture recycler's status light in a doorway. His heart hammered in a boy's chest. His hands gripped a skiff rail polished by a different boy's years.
They slid into a narrow lane and nosed up to a junk shop whose sign creaked even when there was no wind—winged emblem, piles of scrap stacked like shrines on either side. Inside, heat had learned to live with the smell of solder and old oil. Watto was nowhere—either asleep or out; the absence felt like a small, temporary kindness.
Shmi—Mom, his brain corrected, slow and grateful—ushered him past the counter into the back: a partitioned alcove the size of a bedroom if bedrooms were also closets and kitchens. A clay water jug sweated on a low table. A coil burner sat under a dented pot. Two sleeping pallets lay side by side under a patched thermal blanket; a third roll sat ready on a shelf in case someone had to be sick on the floor.
She moved like she had done this in the dark more times than anyone should. Pot on. Heat up. A handful of grains and something like lentils into water with a pinch of salt. A square of pressed spice crumbled in, turning the steam into something that smelled almost like home if your home had been poor and honest. She poured blue milk into a cup and pushed it into his hands. "Drink," she said. "Slow."
He did, because this body remembered how. The blue milk was colder than the night and thicker than he expected; it thudded into the hollow in his belly and made a promise: not all your needs are complicated.
She tore flatbread and pressed a piece into his palm. "Eat. You're still pale." Her fingers shook. Her voice did not.
"It's ggood," he said around it. "Weird. But good."
"It's food," she said, and that was love here.
The stew thickened into something humble and kind. He ate until the ache in his hands dulled and the roar in his head knocked itself down to a grumble. She made the room into order while he chewed—set his broken tunic aside, found a clean shirt from a crate, checked his scraped knees with a thumb's authority.
"You scared me," she said softly, finally, when there were no more helpful tasks to thieve words from her mouth.
"I know." He meant it in two lifetimes.
"No more racing," she said, and the plea lived under the rule.
"Yyes, m—Mom."
The pallet was thin. The blanket smelled like sun and metal dust. She lay down and patted the place beside her because this was how you slept when space was dear and grief had put teeth in the dark. He slid under the blanket and the boy's body did what boys' bodies do—gave up. Exhaustion found him. The ceiling's cracks made a star map he didn't know; the hum of a sleeping compressor made a lullaby that did not care who you had been yesterday.
He stared at the wrong stars and thought of Brownsville hallways and a mother he had not saved and a promise he had not made in time. He looked at the profile on the pillow beside him—softer than he remembered from the screen, younger, not yet worn to the rope—and he made the promise now.
I ain't leaving you, he told the ceiling (and God, and anyone else listening). Not this time. I don't care what the Force got planned. I don't care what prophecy wants. I'm gonna keep you safe.
"Gg—goodnight," he whispered, because the body needed to say something before it slept.
Outside, Mos Espa went on muttering to itself. Somewhere a Jawa bartered in a dream. Somewhere a moisture fan clicked and clicked and then decided once more to work. The desert took a breath.
He closed his eyes and let this new gravity hold him.