Dorn: A Star Wars Story

45. Loyalists

I had drifted off into a sleep at some point. My mind was swimming with old memories as I felt my body being carted from one place to another, dim voices spoke at the edges of my hearing, my name barely discernible through the fog of exhaustion and sickness that fell over my body like a fog.

Show me what formed you, some voice whispers from somewhere deep inside of my mind. 

Show me what makes you you.

A memory came back to me. A little orphan on Corellia. The Empire had taken over the planet and was working on securing the different shipbuilding depots. I was part of a group of kids that had crowded around to watch the speeders come in and the transports full of Stormtroopers. I hadn't ever seen so many soldiers in my life. Long after most of my friends had left, I was still sitting on a crate watching them - a boy of ten, all skin and bones and knobby knees. Nobody knew who my father was. Or my mother. Not even me.

There was an officer there, a tall man with brown hair kept under his cap. He wore a chest piece over his armor and dark leather gloves with polished black boots. Troopers would look over at me from time to time and wave, and I would excitedly wave back. I didn't want anything, really. Just to watch the ships.

The officer kept seeing the troopers wave, and eventually he looked over his shoulder and saw me sitting there on the crate, swinging my legs back and forth as I watched another old Venator pull in overhead to receive some maintenance. He walked over to me, and I remember stopping my legs and holding my breath. Some of the officers liked to run us off, and I was convinced that I was going to be no different.

"Hello there, son," he spoke with a good-natured smile as he knelt down. "What're you doing over here?" He was Corellian, just like me. And a Colonel, though I hadn't known it at the time. A man of importance, not a street rat like me.

"Watching the ships," I was scared to say anything else, but I felt the man looking me over. His eyes stopped at my collarbones, sticking out from lack of food, and then on my sunken cheeks. There was something on his face. Anger, maybe, but not at me. Somehow, I knew that. 

That flash of anger turned to a gentle smile as he stood up and turned away for a moment returning with a metal plate of food. It wasn't great, but I didn't care. I wolfed the whole thing down. It was the first time I had eaten in three whole days. "Well," he had smiled, "stay as long as you'd like, but be sure to be off by nightfall. This place closes when the sun goes down. Do you like the ships?"

I nodded enthusiastically as I had swallowed the burning food, "I want to fly one when I grow up!"

"When you're old enough, you can join the Navy," he had smiled at me and reached out to give my head a friendly rub. "Someday, I hope to see you flying up there with the best of us, eh?"

I remembered dreaming of it, of flying those ships, and one day, when I turned twelve, I decided that I had enough of living on the streets. Cadets could enlist at thirteen for long term, extended training, so I lied. I was never hungry again...

---

The next thing that I remembered was waking up in the infirmary hooked up to a series of monitors and feeling like I had slept for weeks. I passed my hand over my eyes and tried my best to blink away the fog over my vision and pushed myself up onto my elbows, surprised with the sheer weight of my own body. I sat up as a medical droid began beeping, a signal for the doctor, I guessed, because Dokaas came into the room looking, to my amazement, actually concerned. 

"General, is everything alright? When Peek arrived, you were barely conscious, dehydrated, and running a ghastly fever. What happened down there?"

"I don't even know, Dokaas. Really," I pushed myself up with a grunt. My limbs felt heavy, but not nearly as bad as when I had gotten on the transport with Peel. Now it felt just like I had recovered from a fever and my body was catching back up. "I need to..."