The one and only good thing about living in the lower levels of Coruscant was that people minded their own business. That was something you greatly appreciated, especially when the Empire was always looking for people like you.

You had been on the run since the Empire took over eight years ago when you were eleven. You still saw that night almost every night in your dreams. The night Ankain tore through all the other padawons. You’d made it out, but your master had sacrificed her life to give you time to escape. After that it was a genocide of all the Jedi and anyone found with the force.

The only reason you’d survived was because you’d fled to the lower levels of the city where after a few months of living on the streets you made an unlikely friend.

Riddoc.

He was your polar opposite in every single way. You remembered when you first met him. He was your age, mean, hungry, with a nasty scar on his cheek and a shaved head dressed in tattered dark robes. And most importantly, he had the force.

You’d been side by side since, trying to live in the hell hole of a city. As you grew Riddoc shared his story with you.

He’d been raised in a Sith temple with his twin sister to one day be Sith Lords. But after the fall of the republic Darth Sudious decided he no longer needed them with Darth Vader as his new pupil. Riddoc’s sister had been killed, but he’d managed to get into a cargo ship that brought him to Coruscant.

The relationship was complicated. The two of you were diametrically opposed in almost everything. The dark and the light. You tried to keep all of the Jedi ways of life, the beliefs of being good and just, helping others even when it wasn’t good for you.

Riddoc still held some Sith beliefs and was bitter and mean to everyone but you, always ready for a fight. You couldn’t blame him for his anger with what happened with his sister. He was shaped by what happened to him, hardened. He hated the Sith, but he didn’t think the Jedi were any better. He didn’t understand how they could be representing peace with lightsabers in hand. How they were supposed to love everyone but were never allowed to love or have a family.

But you needed each other to survive, you balanced each other, you couldn’t trust anyone else. So for the past eight years you’d relied on each other.

You had gotten by doing odd jobs where nobody asked questions and got a crappy hole in the wall place to live. But at least you were living.

You walk the normal rout home after a job, keeping your head down as you pass Storm Troopers.

You duck through some alleyways, past some people in a could have smoke passing around needles, and finally stop at your apartment. The door slides open and you finally push back your hood.

Riddoc was inside, back from his job. You take in the familiar sight of him. The healed scar along his cheek, firm line of his nose and jaw, dark eyes and darker hair, broad shoulders at ease which meant his job went well.