Coruscant never slept.
Its towers clawed at the stars while its underbelly groaned in shadows. High above, senators debated justice in ivory chambers surrounded by polished glass. Down below, the story was different. Lights flickered over rusted durasteel. The air smelled of oil, ion fumes, and forgotten dreams. Here, in the lower sectors—level 1313—Coruscant was less like a city and more like a deep wound that never fully healed.
And this was where I belonged.
Not because I had to.
Because I chose to.
I worked as a mechanic—quiet, precise, invisible. I knew how to keep things running that shouldn't be running anymore. Repulsorlifts, sanitation processors, street-tier vending modules, worn-out droids scavenged from alleys—if it sparked, leaked, or stalled, I could fix it.
Lived in the back room of a repulsor shop owned by an old Twi'lek named Resh. He didn't ask questions, and I didn't offer answers. That was the deal. I had a cot, my tools, and a half-working fan that squeaked every three seconds. But it was mine.
Just another face in the crowd.
That's how I liked it.
Because I wasn't just a mechanic.
I was Force-sensitive.
---
I heard the Force before I ever understood it.
Not in the way Jedi describe it, with grand metaphors or binding philosophies. I never read the books or watched the holos in training halls. I didn't need a robe or a creed to tell me what I already felt. The Force was simply there—around me, inside me, humming like a low frequency just under reality.
It spoke in emotions. In air shifts. In the twitch of a broken wire before it arced. In the silence between words when people lied. In the pulse of a planet that never knew stillness.
I was five when I first noticed it.
Eight when I began to follow it.
Ten when I learned to ignore it—because that was safer.
By the time I was twelve, I had trained myself to become silent in the Force. No meditation, no master. Just instinct and necessity. It started with isolation—emotional, mental. I could dim myself, like a dying ember. Later I could feel when others were nearby. I didn't know who or what they were—but the Force would react. Like two ripples colliding on the surface of a pool.
I learned to flatten my ripple.
To hide. To vanish.
But some nights—when sleep came lightly and the city above sank into silence—the Force would stir again.
Not loudly. Not with light.
Just… breath.
Like something ancient exhaling through the cracks in the dark.
I never read the word. Never heard it spoken. But the whisper came anyway.
"Sith."
Hissed like wind over a broken seal. Like a name the galaxy forgot but the Force remembered.
They called it myth.
But I felt it—like hunger without mouth, old as starlight.
I never told anyone. I didn't need to.
The Force remembered for me.
---
Once, when I was twenty, a Jedi walked right past me.
It was in a lower market square—one of the rare times they came down this far. He was young, a Jedi knight. Robes too clean. Eyes scanning. I could feel his presence before I saw him—like a pressure drop in the air. His awareness extended outward like a searchlight.
But I was invisible. I made myself invisible.
And he passed right by. Never paused.
Never turned.
I knew then what I had done. What I could do.
---
The Jedi would call it fear. A reluctance to embrace the Light. The Sith might call it cowardice or wasted potential.
I call it peace.
No wars. No orders. No lightsabers humming in the dark.
Just me. And the machines I fix.
---
There are moments, between shifts, when I go up to the rooftop of the shop. It's not much—just a slab of duracrete with a rusted access ladder and a half-functional vent fan. But it's the closest I get to sky. And it's quiet there.
Sometimes I sit with my legs dangling over the edge, drinking the city in. All the neon glow, the tangled lanes of speeders, the vibration of a million conversations layered into the air like static.
And the Force.
Coruscant is saturated with it. Not clean or pure. Complex. Heavy. Woven from so many lives that it's impossible to untangle one thread from another. Up above—closer to the Senate and the Temple—the Force feels light, distant, controlled. But here in the depths, it's raw and tangled. It buzzes with need and pain and instinct.
I don't reach for it. I don't push it or pull it. I just listen.
That's all I've ever done.
And for me, that's been enough.
---
5 Years Earlier
I was fifteen when the plague came.
It swept through Level 1313 fast. One week people were coughing. The next, entire corridors were locked down. Med-droids were stretched too thin. Emergency aid from the upper levels never arrived. We heard rumors that the virus mutated from a biolab accident—maybe even something the Republic tried to suppress.
Didn't matter to us. All we knew was people were dying.
My parents tried to protect me. We sealed ourselves in our apartment above a parts exchange stall. But it wasn't enough. They got sick first. Then I did.
I don't remember much from that stretch of days. Fever. Shaking. The way my skin burned even though the room was cold. My mother's voice turned to a whisper. My father stopped answering when I called his name.
The last thing I remember clearly was lying on the floor, coughing up blood, barely able to breathe.
And then—silence.
The kind of silence you hear when everything else is gone.
But I didn't die.
The Force didn't save me in any miraculous way. No glowing light. No intervention. Just a persistent thread—pulling me back from the edge. It kept my heart beating. It slowed the infection just enough. It kept me alive.
Barely.
---
After the plague burned through, no one came to clean up.
The Republic declared the area quarantined. Level sealed off. Resources were redirected. I dug graves. Burned contaminated clothes.
I scavenged food from vendor machines. Ate ration paste meant for droids. Slept in a maintenance crawlway for weeks. My skin didn't heal right. I still have the scars.
But I lived.
And eventually, I found something else worth living for.
---
I found the droid behind a junk vendor's stall, half-buried beneath collapsed crates and torn tarps. At first I thought it was just scrap. A broken recon unit, maybe. But something about it caught my attention. It was small—spherical, scarred, the metal casing dented and scorched. One of the optics was shattered, the repulsorlift module barely clinging to its mounting ring.
It was an Arakyd Industries Mark IV—an old industrial survey droid used for hazardous zone scanning and maintenance inspections. Most had been phased out, but a few still floated around the lower levels, repurposed or stripped.
I felt drawn to it.
Not because it was valuable—it wasn't. Not because I wanted a project.
It just felt… unfinished.
Like it was waiting for someone.
---
I spent weeks repairing it.
Took it to my previous makeshift corner in an abandoned repair bay that no one visited anymore. Power was spotty, but I had tools. I cannibalized parts from other dead droids, even took stabilizer rings from a broken toy glider. At one point, I had to rewire its motivator core with scrap capacitor coils meant for a vending unit.
But every time I touched it, the Force hummed. Not loudly. Just a pulse.
Like the droid wanted to come back.
I didn't program it with personality—didn't have the hardware or skill. But something else took hold. As I worked, I began to sense intention behind its silence. I caught myself talking to it when I got frustrated.
It never answered.
But it listened.
---
The night it powered on, I remember everything.
The room was dark. Rain pounded the metal ceiling. I was adjusting the last sensor ring when its internal light flickered on. Then a soft whine as the hover drive spun up—unstable, but working.
It chirped once. Low and curious.
Then again. Like a question.
I froze.
I didn't know what to say.
So I just laughed.
It was the first time I'd laughed in months.
---
I named him Marbs.
Short for "Marble," kind of. But also because he was small, round, and rolled more than he hovered. His shell was mismatched—a patchwork of metals and wires. He stood about the size of a human head, though his lens assembly made him look perpetually alert. His repulsors weren't strong, but they worked. Mostly. He still preferred rolling.
He followed me around the shop. Observed everything I did. Helped when he could—though sometimes I think he just got in the way to feel involved. When I'd lose a wrench, he'd roll over and nudge it toward me like a scolding parent.
I never installed behavior routines like that.
He just… learned.
Or maybe he remembered.
---
Over time, I came to depend on him.
Not just for work. For company. For silence that wasn't empty. In a city like Coruscant, loneliness is louder than noise. Marbs helped fill that gap.
At night, when I sat on the rooftop, he'd rest beside me—lenses dim, barely active. Sometimes he'd emit soft tones, like he was humming to himself. Or maybe to me.
He never judged. Never asked questions.
Just was.
---
The upper city still forgets we exist down here. Jedi and senators chase their destinies in towers above. The Republic debates law and policy. The galaxy spins forward on its own momentum.
And I stay here. Hidden. Alive.
I fix things. Keep my head down. Let the Force flow through me—but only as much as I need to. The rest, I keep buried.
I don't want to be found.
I don't want to be recruited.
I don't want to be used.
This life, this rhythm—
It's enough.