Buckets: A Star Wars Story

3. Dorn

Aurek saved my life in more ways than one that day on Mimban.

They sat me down in the walker and took off with me like some guardian angels from the Unknown Regions. Aurek was from Coruscant. Besh, his co-pilot and partner in crime, was from Kuat. Osk, the third troublemaker in this party, was from Dantooine. They made up the bulk of the walker crew, and I got pretty well acquainted with them on what felt like the endless ride to our new campsite.

I stayed quiet most of the ride there and let them do all the talking. It didn't take me long before I realized who the boss was. Aurek was essentially in charge following the death of his own commanding officer, but it was also just flatly obvious that the guy was the head of the group regardless. He had that sort of natural charisma that most decent leaders have, and Besh and Osk seemed to just naturally follow him. I quickly became one of those followers.

The Devout Followers of the Mighty Aurek sounds like some bizarre cult (and that's what I think I may call us from now on, really), but it was, in essence, what we were. In my case, it was less initially by free will and more along the lines of a lost loth-cat with nowhere else to go.

My squad had been massacred. The ones who weren't dead were too wounded to do much, and out of all of us, it was me and three other troopers who were still fit enough to fight. Command wasn't pleased, and they shoved us where they could since attempting to replenish an entire squad was going to be too much effort when valuable troopers were slowly being needed elsewhere. All I know is that Aurek must have taken a liking to me, because the next thing I knew, I got assigned to his walker squad, then found myself officially part of the 224th.

"Hey," he had remarked as we sat together after my assignment was made official, "you could have gotten screwed and sent under that Veers guy. Hear about what all he did on Culroon? Literal suicide mission but he somehow survived."

"Suicide missions are sounding pretty great if they get me out of the kriffing mud," I had replied, and you would have sworn I said something genuinely funny because Aurek laughed so hard he actually snorted.

"Seconded," Besh had called form the cockpit as Osk gave a maniacal little laugh from beside Aurek while he worked on one of the leg actuators.

We didn't have much to laugh about on Mimban, really. Any time, and I literally mean any time, something nearly funny happened we found ourselves rolling around the floor of the walker. It was some sort of bizarre therapy. If you didn't want to be chronically depressed, it's what you had to do.

Officers sank to his hips in the mud? Laugh at him.

Shiny tripped and dropped all of the DLT-19s in the mud (yours included)? Laugh at them.

Osk slammed his head into the low clearance doorframe for the third time that week? Ask him if he's alright when he comes to and then laugh at his expense.

It's actually strange to think about because those weeks I never felt too shaken up about what happened to my squad. I had sort of blocked it out by that point. Hell, it isn't until now when I look back on it that I'm really put off by what happened. I think it was my way of coping. I had no way off of Mimban. I had no one left from my squad that got me like Kando, Twitch, and Blondie had. I didn't know Aurek well enough then to open up to him, either, so I guess my lizard brain decided to just clamp down and pretend that nothing happened. Easier to feign indifference to the whole thing if you genuinely felt nothing, I suppose.

*

I came into the name Dorn around a month into the whole mess. I had gone for a long time with just "Sixty-Five" as a nickname when Aurek finally heaved a long sigh over our field rations and turned to me, "You need a new name, Sixty-Five. The one you've got is dumb."