What if Anakin was born a twin? Or, my personal headcanon for who Rey’s parents are:
Watto wants to keep the boy - he will be useful around the shop one day - but the girl is worth money now. He sells her along with a new engine to a trader who’s ship broke down at the port. The trader’s wife wanted a baby now and he wanted the help later. He pays gold.
(Shmi tries to kill Watto. Screaming and clawing at him. If it wasn’t for the other child clutched to her chest she would have killed him then let them kill her. She still wonders if she made the right choice.)
They take the girl away. Shmi never speaks of her again. (Although when Anakin sees Padme he thinks she must be an angel because sometimes - very late at night - Shmi will tell him about them. How they have brown hair and the most beautiful eyes. Eyes that you can see the whole world reflected in. His mother always has a sad look on her face when she tells him about angels. Then the strangers come and take him away and he thinks he understands.)
The girl grows up with too much fire in her to be a slave. Even one who is almost (always only almost) a daughter. Her anger laces her words and her words become more. Slaves don’t carry lightsabers (Slaves don’t carry any kind of weapon but she makes daggers out of scrap metal and hides them in her sash, in her braids. When she is caught she is beaten.) but no one can strip her of her words or her anger.
When the slave revolt begins she in the the middle of it. When she is captured they sew her mouth shut. She tears out the stitches and smiles through the blood. They call her General and the word in their language that means monster. She smiles a bloody smile at that.
When a jedi comes to her planet talking about destiny, and dreams, and saving her, she laughs. It’s not a pretty laugh. She steals his sword and a daughter from him then takes his head for a trophy.
Her daughter is a different kind of woman. She wants more from life than to follow in her mother’s footsteps as the warlord of a backcountry city on a backcountry planet. She runs away to find a destiny. She travels. She pretends her words are just words, that she doesn't just know things, that anyone can run in the dark and never once trip over a stone. She is afraid to believe anything else.
She has adventures. She sees the the good in people and when she does fight it’s because she’s trying to make things right that are wrong. Somehow she keeps a ray of sunshine in her heart and lets it guide her. Eventually she meets a man (he’s one of the ones who probably doesn't have as much good left in him as she wants to see.)
Destiny is a tricky thing. It has a way of twisting itself around you and taking far more than you bargained for. When she holds her daughter, her ray of sunshine, for the first time she knows. Her mother’s words that are more than words and her bloody smile, the electricity in her own veins that sometimes feels so great she fears it will burn her alive. She knows.
It’s a hard planet where she leaves her daughter (with a couple who she believes to be kind) but no harder than the one she was born on. She kisses Ray on the forehead and tells her to follow the light.
She hopes she will return. She hopes her daughter will remain. Neither of these things will happen but things will still be as they should be.
