*Notes: I issued a challenge to myself recently because I kept putting off writing the stories that were n my head. My challenge was to write at least one short-short story every day and to base them on a list of randomly generated words. I started with twenty five words and the idea that for the first month every story would be related to Rogue Squadron. I have been posting them daily on Archive of Our Own, but thought that I would start publishing them here as well. I know that not all of them are so great, but I am happy with several of them and the challenge is working to get me writing every day. So please be kind, as they may show the rust on my writing, but I do not want to give this up.*
Acceptable
Acceptable. He always hated that word; he was acceptable, his efforts were acceptable. The word was the bane of his early performance reviews when he was at the Academy, and no matter how much improvement he showed, they still called him 'merely acceptable'.
To hear the same word from someone, a superior officer, in the Rebellion made him blanch white and stammer his first response. "How was saving lives, minimizing loss, and completing a mission merely acceptable? I don't know how much more you want from me."
When all he got was a shrug in return he dropped it, but didn't forget it. He was good at what he did; flying missions, ground missions, whatever was asked of him he had done. Occasionally he may have crashed, and he was not the only one to do that, but so far he was still alive and he was the only one who had those mistakes pointed out to him over and over again. He joked about it himself sometimes, trying to dispel that little bitterness at being seen as less than his fellows.
Maybe that was what acceptable had come to mean for him; he was in the company of the elite and had done as much as any of them, but somehow while their individual accomplishments were listed and acknowledged, it was his faults that were always brought up instead. He worked with men and women that he considered to be his friends, and in some were his best friends, and yet he felt as though they never quite saw or understood him.
It had been said many times that pilots had the biggest egos, and he didn't doubt that for a second. They all wanted acknowledgment for their skills and talents, their daring feats during missions, and ideas that saved the day and lives. Was it so bad that he wanted the same as all of the rest, and not to been deemed merely acceptable in comparison? He had thought that all he had ever wanted out of life was to fly, but maybe he wanted to be seen as special as well.
Just once he would like to feel as though he were the best at something, even if it were only in the opinion of one other person. He wanted the gold star and an exceeds expectations on his next review, even if the attempt killed him, because he couldn't live with acceptable any longer.