Coruscant:
The 1313
The apartment complex had a secret name. Back when when the 1313 was Coruscant’s premier tier, it was known as the Sunreach Suites. It didn’t quite achieve its solar aspirations, but it’s Icarusian statement of intent did its job to inspire, and the young, upwardly mobile queued up to be one of its paying residents and a member of the burgeoning community. These days, however, it doesn’t really have a name, the sign long deteriorated and repurposed as housing material by those who couldn’t cover the Slumlord’s toll, and the doors were shielded in steel bars, transforming neighbors into something more akin to fellow inmates.
The Trenchcoat Man rapped gently upon the bars. Before long, it was answered by a woman with long grey hair.
“Diana.”
“Let me get my cigarettes,” she said, letting him into her apartment and disappearing into the back.
You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but Diana used to be a right firebrand in her day. Hardline feminist politics, Society of Cutting-Up Men, the whole bit, and, of course, that stone butch haircut the most offensive shade of syphilis-piss green you’ve ever karking seen. She was too old to be a Spunk, mind, but she kept us rotten little bastards about to preach at, to impress upon. To see her fight translate, mutate, ruddy well explode in the escape velocity of a new generation. She kept us proper genderless, freelove, let us shag in her apartment, the lot of it…Until Wicked Toby tracked in the HIV, and the Athlete’s Foot, and the five buzzkilling months of watching him slowly being eaten alive by yellow mold.
He pushed back a veil of hanging beads, let them clap upon each other with the false expectation that the rest of her house would be in anyway decorated to exhibit further idiosyncracy.
She fancied herself a journalist, she did, and she was going to write the story that blew the whole lid off this patriarchal shakedown and make the galaxy wake the kark up to the evolutionary wrong turn we’d taken, etcetera, etcetera, et-bloody-cetera.
It wasn’t.
Once upon a time, we were all cheeky teenagers who would live forever to save the galaxy, but then we all got hooked on junk and died.
It was more or less the way it was the last time he’d been here. Dust on the holovision, yet bedding material on a tired blue sofa. He ran his fingers along its crisp edges, tracing a path to the shelves where pictures resided. Family. A baby. Exgirlfriends. A frozen testimony that Diana had, indeed, seen better days. A little pink squishy thing for the teething sat before them all.
Diana got it the hardest. We always figured it was because she felt Coruscant the most, waded in its dreadful shallows, mourned every casual death, all to proper saturate herself in it to tell that cathartic story that would not only reach people, but shake them in a way they couldn’t just forget during another two season binge of The Marzullo Clan. Then again, maybe she just always wanted an excuse to put the sodding fing off until tomorrow, like.
Benedict looked up to find Diana, now robed, standing in her bedroom. She had been watching him.
We’re never quite who we hoped we’d be, and it’s always our own karking fault, ennit?
“You feeling sorry for me, boy?,” she asked, seemingly passive to the notion that it might evoke a response.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, luv.” Benedict half-smiled, playing on the bittersweet.
Her hair was the first bit to go, then her politics. Her teeth. The apartment. Her sexual preference. Trading trixes for fixes, till by the grace of statistics, some punter finally knocked her up.
The two lit up, ashing directly onto the floor, because, who really cares anymore.
“So, to what do I owe the pleasure…”, she went to say his name, but stopped, remembering what happened last time, how it terrified her….
”er…hm?”
“Was in the neighborhood, is all. Reckoned I'd pop-in, see how me old china’s fairing in this weary world, if you’ve got enough of your medicine, like…” He was about as subtle as a freight train, these days.
“…Do you, dear heart?”
“Yeah? You don’t seem to stop by as much, now that we’re under new management,” She, of course, was referring to the conquering by the One Sith. She, of course, ignored his question.
“Not that I can blame you. All the droids marching around, collecting the bums, shipping them off the mining colonies. Reads like vintage sci-fi.”
Swore it all off. Got her apartment back. Her hair. Said she was gonna do right by the kid, like. Make the cash to get out of here. Do it straight. No more shaking fings up. The kid was going to go to school. The kid was going to get a proper job, with organic hair, and, please, oh, please, oh, please make her life worth anyfing at all.
“Look, I heard you crying from your window. Kark’s sake, I’m sure the whole sodding block did, yeah?”
She sat silent for a moment, and Benedict swore he could hear the cigarette paper burn.
Please, just anyfing…I can’t karking do this anymore. I karking can’t. I tried, I tried to dress it up…His nibs King of the sodding Gutters, but there’s piss-all cool or true or glorious about any of this.
“I don’t like to take them. It makes me forget her.”
I can’t do it. They never stop crying. It just never stops, they never stop. It never ends. Please just karking kill me. Just karking kill me. Just kill me.
The silence closed in upon them again. He wasn’t good with this territory. It was too real, too delicate.
“Well, maybe that’s best, petal, right? Did you forget what happened last time?," he half-laughed, pathetically.
"You don’t want me to have to pry you off the linoleum of some 1214 sleezejoint again, right?”
Diana would relapse, and before it was all over, she’d sell her three year old daughter to Cartel Slavers for just enough to get her through a weekend.
She wiped the tears forming at the corners of her eyes, laughing. Sort of.
“I’m such a mess.”
These days, she’s traded one addiction for another. A kark-off ton of painkillers, slightly more legit, but no less illegal in this dosage. I help out where I can, despite her protest.
“Of course, you are, petal. You’ve your thumb on the pulse. You feel it all, like a raw nerve,” he tried his best not to sound patronizing.
“You have to be sensitive, like. It’s what makes you such a bloody important writer. You have to do it, luv -- Tell the galaxy what's on down here, right yeah.”
She laughed again. Sort of.
“Nobody reads any of it. I don’t know why I bother anymore.”
And there’s a part of me that knows that if she didn’t protest, if I couldn’t watch her suffering, I’d rag her every bloody day of her life until she finally topped herself.
“I know what you mean – Who wants to get down and dirty in the poodooe of real journalism when everyone would rather just skim a listicle of ropo memes asking for hamburgers?”
“I do.” A faint glimmer of the old Diana, winking through the haze.
“Heh.”
And I really don’t know what kind of bloke that makes me.
Before departing, Benedict placed a pillbottle of painkillers on her coffee table, probably enough to get her through the next two months, provided she rationed them properly. He’d try to swing by before then, but there’s a war on, and it’s not as though the galaxy is never wont for suffering. Lighting the cigarette between his lips, he took a deep inhale, followed by a sigh of smoke, and descended deeper into the city.
And maybe she does finally write that article. And maybe it rouses some Rebellion, or Jedi fact-finder group, or Imperial mandatory rehabilitation program, sod-it-who-karking-cares. And they’ll shuffle the kids into orphanages, and conjure up some make-work for the mad and addicted, and maybe, just maybe, get the rats out of the barrows. They’ll publish reports of decreased crime rates, and increased employment, and everyfing’ll be hunky-dory for a couple months before the war’s back on and the money’s run-out.
…down, down, into 999, where a skraal attempted to stab him in the back, but was startled to find that, with
Thick Rags, he never even drew his knife. Benedict kicked him in his mousy-balls, and continued lower.
And in the end, they’ll find it’s cheaper to build a whole new planet on top of the old one, and just bury its unresolved problems like some bloody childhood trauma.
Down, down, into where 468 gave into the weight of the city above and crashed down upon 467 and 466, killing countless of the invisible population, while the people on the top posted memes about the silly sorta-earthquake with ironic messages of “never forget”…
Because the truth is, mate, there just ain’t no saving Coruscant. Twilight of civilization, it is. The heat death at the end of the universe. This is the wall to all our accomplishments, as drafted by the Celestials. The only way out is to Evolve. But none of us are gonna see that next step, are we?. We can’t. So, get your tag on it somewhere. Sign it. Make it remember you. Tell everyone you were here while you ruddy well can.
…down, down to the ground, where the buried ocean glows an irradiated green, and people live on makeshift boats and in toppled houses, speaking in broken Basic about Le Cirque, De Bayou, and the Bogeyman. The guttermage stopped in on an orphanage, or something like it, and made moths of cigarette ash for the children with eyes loose in skin set upon socketless skulls, blind, and poisoned by pollution, but still, no less happy that somebody was finally playing with them…
And maybe the next lot of doomed tossers to have a go at this whole fing will find your name and marvel at how us savages could reach so high while still being so bloody dense. And they’d be right to. We are going to fail ourselves. We’re going to fail each other. And that’s karking it.
Because we don’t know how to have it any other way.
…down into the translucent yellow jaws of the giant tapeworm that stretched into the bowels of the planet, where city-planners had once dealt with success by going subterranean, before they realized just how finite a resource such as space really was….
Met an Aing-ti once. Said to me, in that clever way that they do, that I weren’t neither light nor dark, but Indigo.
…and there, in the belly of that leviathan that was buried so deep, yet still never quite hit bottom, Benedict stood at the end, alone, save for the ghosts that herded behind him, their ethereal eyes fixed in betrayal and contempt,
Buggered if I know what that means. Karked if I care.
… and cried until he vomited.
