Coruscant
The 1313
The more we get together, together, together
The more we get together, the happier we’ll be
Where your friends are my friends and my friends are your friends
The music was grating, to say the least, all simple melodies and unremarkable child choruses; but despite the mild irritation it offered, the joy it brought the toddler in the back seat was far more palatable than the screeching that would replace its absence. And so it was that young father Jemas came to tolerate the noise as the lesser of two evils.
He even found himself singing along periodically, an autopilot daze while his speeder coasted up to the traffic light, the glow transitioning from yellow to red. Jemas watched idly as a few pedestrians passed before of his viewport
“The more we get together, the happier we’ll be”
Jemas looked out his left window just in time to see a Trandoshan smash through it with the butt of a blaster pistol. Shocked, Jemas grabbed at the assailant’s arm, trying to prevent him from unlocking the doors while slamming his foot on the gas. He stopped, however, to avoid running over those using the crosswalk. They turned, curious as to the commotion, but said nothing upon receiving their answer, continuing on with their personal business. Jemas’ sliding door rolled open and a rodian and a human climbed in to take a seat on both sides of the carseat. The toddler started to cry as the human pressed a vibroblade to his throat, shouting to Jemas to,
“Let him the kark in. And turn that crap off.”
“Okay, okay -- ,” Jemas complied, killing the soundsystem and putting his hands in the air. The trandoshan pistol-whipped him, ripped open the door, and shoved Jemas over into the passenger seat, his gun still trained on the unfortunate father.
“Take whatever you want…I won’t tell anybody, just take whatever you want.”
The toddler screamed.
The trandoshan said something, and the other two laughed. The light turned green, and off they went, only to stop a few feet down the road to place the wailing toddler on the curb. Then, just like that, the group disappeared into the 1313 to have their fun with their new human and his accompanying vehicle.
The speeder would be recovered within a week, wrecked into a lightpole, and then deliberately set ablaze.
Jemas, however, would remain missing until one fateful afternoon when the superintendent to an otherwise un-noteworthy housing project finally went to investigate why the water he and his patrons had been drinking had been coming out black.
Just one more Man in the Refrigerator in testament to this city’s sinking depravity.
And of the toddler?
Well, what usually happens to the people who slip through the cracks of this city?
Benedict peered at the sobbing, carseat-bound toddler and lit up a cigarette. There was a set of decals in the speeder’s back window; stick figures of a family.
A mommy, a daddy, a baby boy…
…and
his big sister.
Avalore was in town. Not his sister, but
the other one. And Coruscant, she was teasing him with the information.
Benedict realized the crying had winded down, and he glanced to check on the kid. The kid sniffled sorrowfully and looked back, the acceptance in his eyes that his tears would flood this sector before they did a damn bit of good.
There are times when I can’t look Coruscant in the face anymore.
The Trenchcoat Man nodded and lifted the boy up by his carseat handle and stepped out into the traffic without looking both ways. There was the honking and slamming of brakes, but, despite a few near-misses, miraculously no contact made, and he disappeared into an alleyway on the other side of the street.
I remember when we first met: Me, brains pickled in hormones and bloody psilocybin. She, irresistible and all tarted up in lights and promise, listening to the best music I’d ever heard in me life. She got me into a lot trouble, but it was always worth it, yeah? We had fun togevver. Even reckoned I loved her, I did. And Coruscant, she loved me back. She loved all of us.
That was before her heart went dark, a few bad lovers spoiling the batch. She’s different now. She uses people….’till there ain’t nothin’ left.
Waterproof canvas draped over the concrete corridor, offering the illusion of a ceiling to protect against the occasional sewage leaks that would rain down from the uppercity above, and presenting the whole bit with all the charm of a child’s playhouse covered in human excrement. The homeless denizens crowded along the edges of these newly made halls as if it were some cracked-out flophouse, sleeping away the day and their varying psychoses, and occasionally getting up to collect the “rain water” into tins that they would boil into something faintly drinkable.
Yeah, I see the orphanages, the social welfare offices, clogging up the streetsides so business can’t. Who’d want to buy anyfing these people made anyway? It’s a jobs-program economy running on back-patting and “It’s not your fault, luv”’s, everyone eager to help one anovver between the hours of 10 and 4, but never a minute after because there’s bugger-all for overtime and “Bollocks, they just keep coming, don’tchaknow”.
The toddler was oddly quiet amidst all the coughing and snoring and swearing and tears, and made not a peep as Benedict passed through to tuck into an alleyway that almost definitely wasn’t there before, fingers tracing upon walls with “Eat the Rich” spraypainted in Glow-in-the-Dark Red.
Kark it all. Maybe we’re all just born rotten. Maybe there’s a finite amount of happiness in the universe and there’s no bloody saving anyfing without somefing else getting proper karked right over.
The Silver Heart orphanage struggled to keep its lights on, but with generous donations from the likes of Hion the Herglic and philanthropists the galaxy-over, it somehow managed despite the 1313’s effort to drown the humble establishment in a sea of unwanted progeny. The facility acted almost as more of a homeless shelter, or a hostel, providing temporary lodging from street rats who would quickly find the poor place unable to provide, and would return to the School of Hard Knocks. The proprietor was gracious, though clearly exhausted – the middle-aged woman prodding her eyeball with her finger to stay awake during what appeared to be an all-night shift. Optimism shined beneath her ice like the corpse of a figure skater, assuring the Guttermage that the citizens upstairs actually wanted babies.
Or maybe I’m just old, like – and she hasn’t changed at all.
But then why is it everyfing just seems so nasty now?
But Benedict saw her. Saw all of them. The little ones in the corner, with the glassy-eyed stares and the herpes around the fringes of their mouths, who shied away violently from the big Bothan teenager who looked way too happy to be alive. The old woman caught Benedict’s gaze and sighed, defeated. No one person could adopt them all.
Maybe it’s me that dunnit. Maybe I just can’t stomach all this poodooe anymore.
“How do you save anybody?,” I ask her, “What good is any of this?”
And she just shakes her head, broken as anyone else.
Benedict and the kid departed Silver Heart, passing invisibly through the crowd beneath a similarly invisible holonews broadcast, running with 24-hour war coverage from its central perch in the city square.
"Tonight on the Galactic News Network: your very pregnant bartender is smoking and you’ve yet to say a karking thing," the Guttermage scoffed to the toddler.
A block or three down the way, he had descended into now defunct public transit tunnels, the main station now occupied by a commune of young gutterspunx, of which Benedict was easily the oldest guy there. It was a crowd that once worshipped him, the man viewed as the last bastion of a dying movement; the youth’s connection to a profound truth, a glimpse at a better world. But in the end, the leadership they craved never came. Now all he was was a trenchcoat and a liar. Now all they did was survive. Benedict walked by a young woman with a pink asymmetrical haircut, sitting in the half-lotus on a blanket, organizing jars of mashed fruit. He dropped off carseat kid in front of her.
She reckons this is the way the world is now. I’m having a harder time denying it.
“What? No. We can’t take another one! We barely have enough to go around as is!” She complained at him, but her grievance was really with God.
“Well, hell, Gaz, I reckon he’ll just have to bloody die, then,” Benedict spat, hopping off the platform into the tracks.
Coruscant used to be so lovely.
Gaz resigned with a sigh. They would succeed themselves to death.
And I used to be so young.
The transit tunnel remained dark, the traditional green wall sconces that fed into the ethereal “Subway” absent as Coruscant appeared to bar him access to his dominion. Benedict muttered incoherently, grinding his most recent cigarette against the wall.
“Aw, you’re not talking to me, petal? Even hiding me graffiti -- You used to get so antsy when I marked you as mine…,” Benedict chided, removing a brown paper bag from his coat pocket and uncrumbling it into something more recognizable. In his other hand, he produced a can of Ancient Sith Evil Black spraypaint.
“This new bloke must’ve got you wrapped around his little finger…Nevermind, luv,” he rambled on, shaking the can.
“My fingers can always do it better.”
Benedict proceeded to spray the paint into the paper bag, then quickly placed his mouth over the opening, huffing the fumes. Ancient Sith Evil Black stained his mouth, and as he attempted to wipe it away, he merely transformed it into a black handprint over his lips and cheek. His eyes went bloodshot, his lids twitched, and, spasming like an epileptic, he dropped to his knees, growling an incantation.
“Speak to me, O Coruscant. From the maggots of Empire that gestate in your womb, to the tears I drink from your shower drains – I consume your flesh, your blood. Let your putrescent impurity join my gross matter…”
He fell short of inspiration and improvised with song lyrics.
“Chew your meat for you. Pass it back and forth in a passionate kiss. Sloppy lips to lips, I’m your vitamins…”
The green sconces went alight, the vacant halls illuminated to reveal the primal urban graffiti. He could feel it from down here, he could see the whole thing. Every city street like capillaries, glowing with the blood of speeder lights and neon – every pedestrian step, a heartbeat…
“Just show me where it hurts, petal.”
…and a swelling around the unfortunate [member="Avalore Eden"] who just didn’t belong.
