Buckets: A Star Wars Story

30. Guardian

You wake up one morning and realize that you're not quite sure why you're still here.

Your heart's racing, your hands are clammy, you're dripping in sweat, and suddenly you can't remember why you're alive or if there's a reason you're breathing when so many much better people aren't. You reach out to look for a blaster when the smallest little sound makes you stop.

A little girl's laugh.

Every morning when I felt that way, she'd show up before she'd go off to school. She'd jump into my room with her big brown eyes and toothy grin and run to me, throwing her arms around my waist while Brea waited patiently nearby, "Bye-bye, Dorn!" she'd say in a way that only a child could, and when they'd both leave, I'd break down. One day, I just put the blaster away and didn't look at it again until now.

Shenna saved my life so many times that I don't know how I'd ever repay her. She always did it without knowing, and that's the part that I'll never forget.

How can you explain your death to a little girl?

You can't. She had already lost her father. I was the only male figure in her life that could even attempt to stand-in for Thesh. I had promised him that.

So, you keep going.

And I did for nearly nineteen years because that little girl was expecting me back at the end of every day so she could show me her schoolwork, all the pictures she made.

So I could help her study for her exams.

So I could teach her how to fly her speeder and fix it too.

So I could teach her how to shoot a blaster better than any man she would ever know.

So we could sit in my study while I graded papers and talk until her mother shouted at her to go to sleep.

I never told her everything about what had transpired. All she knew was that her father was one of the bravest men I ever knew, that I had friends that weren't bad men, and that I fought in the war. She knows I'm a former Imperial, but she doesn't know all I did. I keep it that way on purpose. There are some things I'd prefer she didn't know.

I live in a tiny apartment next to theirs. She visits me all the time now. I think she spends more time with me than she does at home. She always asks me questions about her father, probing me to tell her more than I think Brea does, but I don't. Thesh wouldn't want her to remember him the way he was the last time I saw him. I leave the details to her mother, who always whispers to me on nights where we're both remembering Thesh that she's not sure if there would ever be a good time.

Maybe not, I always reply, but the girl will need to learn someday.

*

I looked at myself in the mirror. I couldn't wear any uniforms now. I wasn't in the Republic military, so their uniforms were off-limits, and then there was the fact that wearing an Imperial one was close to a call for public execution. So, there I stood, garbed in black from head to toe. I called it my mourning attire, and I wore it almost every single day.

Black tunic, black pants, black boots - the only thing that wasn't black was my hair. It had been auburn once when I was younger. Now, it had streaks of silver running through it. The way I kept it pushed back made the contrast between the two colors all the more noticeable. The hairs at my temples were almost entirely silver now, though. I was getting old. I had lines at the corners of my eyes now, too. Probably more from stress than anything else, I figured by that point. I had the dark grey Imperial eyes, too, whose light had dimmed down ages ago. They belonged to someone three times my age.

More than once, the high cheeks and eyes I possessed made me wonder who my father was. Was he some Imperial officer whose one-night stand with a slave girl produced me? Did they fall in love? Would he even remember her if he was asked? Was he even alive? I had a thousand questions that I never really wanted answers to, but they were there in the back of my mind every single moment I looked in that mirror, staring into the eyes of a man that the younger me would barely even recognize. I don't think I would have known myself now if I was still eighteen fresh off of Mimban.

Yet I get dressed, I go to the academy, I teach, I grade exams, I tutor my students, I go home, I eat dinner with Brea and Shenna, and I go to sleep. I deal with the nightmares as they come. I wake up screaming in the middle of the night, I go to sleep crying, and I wake up exhausted, but there are people that count on me. There's Shenna, my students, Brea, and it keeps me going, keeps me sane in its own little way.

Yet there is still that part of me that says, in spite of everything, that if the Empire ever called me back, if she ever opened her arms and welcomed me into the fold, that I would run back to her embrace in a heartbeat. This Republic isn't home. It isn't what saved me at my worst. It kept me alive because I could give it an advantage, because I knew things about its most hated enemy. The Empire had saved me when I had nothing to give but myself. I owed her everything. Everyone I had known who survived, who knew what we had done, what I had seen, went to the Unknown Regions that day and left me behind. Living in a world where your friends' deaths are celebrated, where the fall of everything you bled and suffered for was a holiday, where you watch brilliant cadets get second-class treatment because their families wore grey instead of tan, isn't life at all.

It's agony.

So, I look at that set of coordinates on my desk as I finish my tale and bid a quiet farewell to a world which won't miss me much. No matter what I do, I'm still an Imperial in the eyes of the Republic. No amount of good work will change their minds.

If that is what they believe me to be, then why should I try to prove them wrong? There's a place for people like me, for the Old Guard who know just how pathetic the Remnants truly are.

And that's where I plan to be.

Peek, I need you to promise me that, no matter what happens, you won't tell Brea and Shenna where I've gone.

And Shenna, if you're the one who hears this...

Stars, I'm sorry. Maybe someday I'll find something I can tell you will make you understand. For now, my apologies will have to be enough.