Buckets: A Star Wars Story

11. Trooper - Pt. II

Christophsis was a bit of a legend in its own right. It had been the site of a major campaign during The Clone Wars, and now it was, once again, a major offensive in the Galactic Civil War. We never get stationed anywhere nice, as I'm sure you can tell.

However, I couldn't tell you much about what went on the first few days we were there because I couldn't hold my DLT. I was forced into medical bed rest because I was incapable of putting all of my armor on, and when I finally managed to do it, I went to hoist my DLT and nearly shattered all windows on the ship with the sheer decibel level of my scream.

The first words out of my mouth?

"What? No, no. I can... I can do the op, just... Just let me get this thing up...." All of it coming out in a pained, strained, pathetic whimper of a whisper as I sat there crouched over my DLT with tears in my eyes. All I saw out of the corner of my eye was Dokaas rolling his own and walking back into his medical bay with the door sliding shut behind him.

Thesh wasn't having it. Neither, to my surprise and heartbreaking sense of betrayal, was Aurek. I had never felt so betrayed in my whole life as I was when he agreed with Thesh. Usually, Aurek was always the opposite of my impulse control. He was the impulse. This time, he pushed me back down onto the bed as I firmly protested through the searing pain in my shoulder that I was indeed capable of going out to fight. As our medical droid confirmed for me, I was suffering from an unhealthy amount of torn muscles in my shot shoulder and needed the bed rest.

My pride needed the healing more than anything after being forced to sit a mission out, I think. I had watched Kando get shot four or five times during our time on Mimban, and never once did I ever see him take time to sit in bed. It was infuriating. Peek helped me pass the time. He tended to get left behind a lot to run data back to Inraas, so while I was trapped, he and I sat there and chatted. Dokaas was bad company for the most part. He was so absorbed in his graphs and charts that aside from his occasional question inquiring into the state of my shoulder and whether I was having any muscle spasms, he barely spoke to me.

"Where are you from, Doctor?" I finally asked him one day.

He looked up at me in surprise form one of his charts and furrowed his brow at me, "Champala. The capital, Tidros, to be exact. Why?"

"Curiosity. How did you get into medicine?"

That topic seemed to be of greater interest to him because he gave a nostalgic smile at the question, "Ah, I was always a good student in biology and physiology. Trauma fascinated me. The unfixable fascinated me. I strove to show that no wound is untreatable, no damage irreparable. Surgery was the only logical evolution of this interest."

"Makes sense."

"What of you, Sergeant? What caused you to take up soldiering?"

"Necessity." I didn't know how much more he wanted to hear, but despite how he was focused on his charts, he did seem to be listening. "I was an orphan from Corellia. I could either join the army or become a criminal. I preferred the first option. That, and I suppose I felt like I owed the Empire."

"Self-improvement is never bad despite what some people may tell you. They like to call us selfish for seeking out betterment for ourselves," Dokaas replied as his eyes skimmed over the datapads before he passed them off to his droid. "The Empire hates us, Toh. They will never accept you, Toh. Fools. The Empire will not accept them because they do not demand to be accepted, because they do not show their strengths and gifts at their fullest. The Republic encouraged lazy complacency – acceptance without question. I was accepted because I am good at what I do, because I can mend the broken bodies of their soldiers and let them fight again in ways that no other person can do. They accepted you into the army because you owed them and kept you because have martial prowess and, if what Director Dorne has said, several natural gifts that set you apart."