Dorn: A Star Wars Story

1. Instructor

-10 ABY, 5 Years After the Battle of Jakku-

There comes a point in your life when you start to ask yourself if everything you ever did was worth it after a while. You wake up in the morning and force yourself up out of your bed and into the world with a weary sigh and dark circles around your eyes from nearly sleepless nights. You haul yourself into the fresher and look at yourself in the mirror and wonder who the husk of a man with no light in his eyes looking back at you is, and for a brief second you wonder if you made the right choice when you surrendered or maybe... maybe it would have been better to slam yourself into a lightsaber or put a blaster bolt through your bucket and just let it all end.

Why did you make it out when none of your friends did?

It's a question that sits in the back of your mind and tells you in a mocking voice that you shouldn't have been the one standing there, watching water drip down your cheeks and nose. It should have been hundreds of other men better than you, but then you hear their voices in your mind clearer than anything else. You know that they wouldn't want you thinking this way, that their lives meant less to them than yours because that's how you felt about them, and when you look down at that blaster, as tempting as it is, you look away and decide to slog it out another day.

It helped when I had Brea and Shenna there with me. It gave me a sense of normalcy in a world that, to me, had gone completely out of its gourd. I didn't know quite what to do with myself, even when it came to the new assigned job Venn had been so generous to give me. I had a... well, a family, for the first time in my little life, and it felt... good, I think.

There wasn't much in my life that I genuinely looked back on and felt guilt over the way I did in the years following Jakku, and the time I spent teaching in the academies felt like the biggest betrayal I could have given my squadmates.

Once upon a time, I had sworn to uphold the laws and order of the Empire. Now, I was teaching the future of the men who had killed my comrades wholesale.

You want to know what it feels like to be a sellout? Be me.

You wake up in the morning and wonder what keeps you going. I wake up and look over at my old holos of my squadmates and question why I didn't just take the easy way out and end it on Jakku while I had the chance. Instead, I decided to survive. It was probably the hardest and arguably the worst decision that I ever made, looking back on it. Yet it was also strangely the best decision. I don't have any real regrets about any of it.

My days of teaching were rewarding in their own way, but not because I enjoyed teaching Republic pups how to hold blasters and how to plan assaults. No, I had my own reasons. I may not have had the Empire backing me, but there was something else.

I did, however, have a handful of students that made the monotony in my life somewhat bearable when it came to the teaching aspect. I was placed in charge of educating ex-Imperial cadets, and the comfort of the rigid standards of the old academies made me happy. It felt normal in a world where nothing made sense and I felt like a traitor to my own people.

Freis, Randd, and Jag were among my three best students, and honestly, I had never seen a group of harder working cadets than I had them. Naturally, they came from imperial academies and long, proud, Imperial lineages with generations of dedicated military service under their belts. It gave them an incentive to push to be the bast, and the result was its own reward.

Elara Freis came from a Coruscanti family of naval officers who died on Jakku. I likely saw her parents' ISD crash into the planets surface when Rax sacrificed so much of our fleet for nothing. She was bright and friendly, a true team player in all aspects, and I had faith that she would become an incredible deck officer given the chance.