Ninthmonth 1100

It took some weeks for the reality of Alderaan's destruction to sink in. When it did, it hit hard. I missed my grandmother and my home every hour I was awake, and I woke from dreams of home with my face wet with tears. I cut myself off, set a foggy barrier between myself and the rest of the universe. I was a shadow, a ghost. Once, packing in the hold, I cut my hand and was surprised to see myself bleeding. It was almost a relief to feel real pain, to distract me from the cold ache that I carried always behind my breastbone. After my hand was out of bacta wrap and had stopped stinging like hell every time I moved it, I missed the pain. So I would take my belt knife and press it against the inside of my arm until the blood flowed.

One evening, Ari entered the galley where I was chopping vegetables for stew. I dropped the cook's knife guiltily, tugging down my left sleeve.

"There's blood on your arm-how did you manage to cut yourself up there?"

A crismson stain was blossoming on the white gauzine of my sleeve. Before I could stop him, Ari had twitched it back to my elbow, exposing my entire forearm. Across its soft inside surface were a dozen narrow scars, both half-healed and fresh.

"How the hell-?" Ari exclaimed. I jerked away, and stuck my arm under the gush of the cold-water sprigot.

"I'm fine!" I snapped.

"Did you do that to-to yourself?" Ari asked, horrified.

"Leave me alone!" I snarled, my voice catching. Ari gasped; I had grabbed the knife off the counter at some point, and was waving it under his nose. He took a couple of steps backwards, and brought up against the refridge unit. There was a breathless silence as Ari and I stared fearfully at each other.

"You're bleeding on the floor, Keit," he whispered at last. I looked from the knife in my hand to my bloody arm, and shuddered. Ari, gaining confidence, moved forward a little.

"Give me the knife, Keitin. Good girl-just leave it there."

He lifted the galley medkit from its slot in the wall, and started tending to my arm.

"Don't you think the Alliance loses enough blood to the Empire without this sort of thing?" he said, spreading bacta gel on my arm. "Don't you think we have a better use for this?"

I stared down at the floor, ashamed.

"I don't know why I do it, Ari. I-I want to go home!"

"Don't we all."

He fastened the sterile dressing onto my cut and put his arms round me.

"Don't ever do anything that stupid again, Keitin. Please. We're all that's left now, you and I..."

Perhaps it was that blatant appeal to my emotions that did the trick, but I never did.

Twelvethmonth 1100

Our first Life Day after Alderaan was spent kicking our heels in an obscure spaceport, wafting for a consignment. We were both thoroughly miserable. The spaceport was full of revellers celebrating the holiday, but the grieving in Swift was palpable. I came from having a good cry in my cabin to find Ari flicking morosely through Swift's music database. He found the Ryla just as I entered.

"We danced that at little Chama's Naming," I told him. "She would have been almost a yearold now-crawling about and trying to stand."

"Blast them!" Ari said viciously. He stood and held out his hands to me. "We'll dance it again, Keit, dance it for all the babies and for the downfall of their damned Empire!"

And so we danced, wordlessy, the whirling, swinging traditional dance of Aldera. When the track ended, Ari pulled me against him, and I leaned my head on his chest. We stayed that way for a long time. Then Ari gave a brief sigh and said, "Let's go out and see if we can't have some fun. I'll go mad stuck in here."

"'Fun' wouldn't involve alcohol, would it? Because we can't-it's too dangerous, considering what we know."

He tugged one of my curls.

"No, my little captain, it won't. Don't worry, we'll think of something."

We crept out of Swift feeling like a pair of ten-year-olds skiving school. We found a shop that hired out decrepit swoop bikes, and went for a ride.

"Six punti to an Imperial credit it breaks down," I said, prodding the bike.

"Whatever happened to being optimistic?"

"I am being optimistic-this way, if it does break down I'll be better off than I was."

As it happened, it didn't break down. We sped through the streets, flying dangerously close to revelling pedestrians, soaring round corners, laughing and whooping like maniacs. I am sure people thought that we were drunk, and indeed it was a way of drowning our sorrows in a speed-induced exhilaration. We wandered back to Swift afterwards, arm in arm.

"Feel better?" Ari asked. I glanced up at him shyly and nodded. "Yeah, me too."

Looking back, that was when I fell in love with him. It was almost inevitable that I did so. He was invariably kind, eternally optimistic despite what we had suffered, funny-and handsome. At eighteen perhaps that has more of an influence than it ought.

I wasn't unhappy, not at first, even though Ari showed no sign of reciprocating my feelings. In the close proximity of Swift, he could not have avoided me if he wished to. It was enough for me to see him every day, to hear his voice. I would concoct elaborate schemes to touch his hand without raising suspicion. This diet of glimpses and dreams was enough to keep my passion alive. I could love with very little encouragement. And I got very little. Ari was apparently oblivous and unresponsive to my infatuation for him.

That was a good time, on the whole. Our lives consisted of periods of boredom interspersed with nerve-wracking missions, but our idealism and young nerve carried us through. Sometimes, it was even fun.

Slowly, our grief healed. It helped that we were constantly on the move, with little time to brood over our loss. We followed our orders from star to star, system to system, part of the great galactic web of support for the rebel Alliance. Swift, with her small size and her speed, was of most use for fast trips with a small payload. We heard little of the military's success or otherwise against the Imperium, just rumours, spacers' talk. If we had been part of the raids on Imperial supplies and facilities, we would have seen more, but the thought of Ari swayed me against volunteering for anything too dangerous.