I tumbled, ankle twisting painfully underneath me into the deep mud.  The cloudy sky overhead reverberated with the sound of the tunder that accompanied my fall. The rain pounding down from the dark swirled clouds had long since soaked my grey sweatsuit through, the one refreshing clarity of slogging through mudpits on a Saturday at one am.  Grudgingly, watery mud dripping from my wire thin, short cropped copper hair, I pulled myself up from the mud and thrust my good leg underneath me.  I limped along, dragging my injured foot behind as other trainees dashed by
beside me, dreading the wall climb I would have to preform next.
     It was days like these I wished that I had listened to Kratas Winters and gone home to Jyp 15 when I had the chance.  My whole body, particularly my fast swelling ankle, ached as I climbed into
the open fresher later. The mud caked onto my shoulders and neck rinsed quickly away under the pounding warm water. But even now, my favorite part of the day was silent torture when I lifted my good foot to clean the thick mud from between my toes. My twisted ankle throbbed as my full body weight came to bear on it. I bit back an outcry, no longer able to hold it in when I slipped and smacked my head on the hard concrete floor. I began to tremble as I heard someone ask from the next shower stall if I was okay.  I turned toward the voice, aching to see Leigeus smiling at me tenderly as he always had. I was greeted by a pair of ice blue eyes and a sopping wet mop of dirty blonde hair. The young man was leaning on the divider between our two shower stalls. He smiled at me and said. "Looks like you just got yourself a nasty lump on the head to go with that swollen ankle."
    I groaned at the truth in his words and stood up. I had long ago gotten used to the men trainees staring at me in the showers. Most of them had left girlfriends behind on their homeworlds and hadn't seen a good looking woman in months. I wasn't surprised that they would be giving me (even with my fairly muscular build and hiddeous haircut) a once over.
    The man in the stall next to me looked intently at my ankle. "I'd take an ankle like that to medical tonight." he said.
    "If I get this bacta doused I'll miss morning classes tomorrow." I gritted, trying not to cry from pain as I shifted my weight to my bad foot again to see how much it could take.
    "You airhead. Get it fixed our you're gonna fail semester." the man snapped.
    "What's your name? I'll make sure you get leave from your morning classes tomorrow."
    "Daala Duchonovy." I replied as I shut off the water and limped from the shower stall. "Just how do you think you're gonna get me class leave?"
    "Leiutenant Commander Durico Chavin." He replied. "I run things in your division Ms. Duchunovy. I am, as of now ordering you to fix that foot before you get back on that field."
    I straightened, grabbing a towel from the rack. "My apoligies for the lack of respect sir." I said, wrapping the warm fuzzy robe around my torso.
    "Don't mind it. You didn't know I had rank." he said. "Now I want to see you in medical tomorrow morning, understood.
    I saluted sharply, with a quick,"Yes sir.." Then I cried out as my elbow came crashing into the solid metal of the towel rack.
"I'd get that looked at too." Durico smiled and then left me alone in the shower room.

    That was one of my many memorable moments on Carida. I met with Durico again but that wasn't why I wrote about that time I met him. I mentioned his ordering me to go to medical because if he hadn't ordered me too I would have been too stubborn to go have gone and thus wouldn't have had
any reason to be in the medcenter at three am the next day (unable to sleep becasuse of the pain of my ankle) when I first became involved in the most tragic friendship of my life.....

    I was limping around the medcenter looking for someone to talk to while the nurse at reception prepared a bacta submersion for my foot. Most of the people there were severely injured and unconcious, dependent on the machines that seemed to be circling around their beds like young velkers, ready to dive and destroy the second the person died.
    I was about to give up. It would take fifteen minutes to prepare the bacta and another forty-five minutes for it to settle and there was no one to keep company. Just as the circling velker called boredom was about to swoop in on me I heard a painful groan from a curtain to my left. I stopped short at the noise and limped over to the blue sheet hanging in my way. I heard the cry again, a little louder this time but painfully weak. I quietly found a fold in the curtain and pulled it aside. I looked in on a young woman.  She wasn't much older than me. She was slouched tiredly on a bed, breathing
weakly. Sweat ran small rivers down her blue tinged face. She was gasping, her face horrified at something her body was doing to her, gropping helplessly on the nightstand for something she couldn't find. I looked to floor.
    The asthma aid lying there immediately caught my attention. I grabbed it from the floor and pressed into into her mouth, pushing down violently hard on the trigger button the next time I heard her gasp. I did this at least five times before she began to recover.
    As I pulled the device back from her she began crying. Her liquid brown eyes overflowed with tears. "They've all forgotten about me." she sobbed. "The doctor hasn't been here in hours."
    "I'll get the nurse." I said, beginning to back away.
    "No!" She clutched my hand. "Please don't leave!"
    I reluctantly sat down on the side of her bed, pressing the small red button on the bed frame I was sure was to call the nurse.
    "You look so tired." I said, grabbing a cloth from the edge of the sink.
    "I am." She panted. As I stroked over her forehead with the cloth, she wrenched my hand in her grip, lurching foreward in bed with a painfully loud shout.
    I almost asked her what was wrong. Then I bumped against her with my elbow, noticing quickly how stupidly I had overlooked the round form of her stomach.  She had just calmed down from the contraction when the reception nurse came rushing in through the curtain.
    "What the...?!" She exclaimed, pushing the curtain away. "How long have you been here?" She immediately asked.
    "Since yesterday afternoon." the girl choked, wrenching my hand again.
    "When was the last time the doctor saw you?" the nurse asked, frantically pulling up the tucked sheets at the end of the bed.
    "I don't remember." The girl groaned.
    "What's your name?"
    "Aurora..."
    The nurse turned to me and snapped. "What did she look like when you found her?"
    "She was having an asthma attack." I replied. "I heard her gasping and I came in.  Her aid was on the floor, she never would have found it."
    "I assume you gave her a dose or two?"
    I nodded. "Five sprays."
    "God damn doctors." the nurse growled.
    Aurora, still holding my hand, screamed and lurched foreward.
    "I'm afraid you have to go." The nurse ordered, folding back Aurora's knees and fixing me with a grateful look.
    I limped off to the other side of the curtain and sat down on a bench a few feet away. I caught a few wisps of a tense conversation between the nurse and Aurora but that was really all I could make out until I heard a baby screaming. The nurse came out and grabbed a few blankets a couple minutes later. She stopped and looked at me.
    "Thanks for noticing her." She said with an acknowledging nod. "You can talk to her until your bacta treatment is ready if you want. She needs a bit of comfort right now. She's giving that baby up for adoption."
    I stood up a nodded to the nurse, mumbling 'your welcome' I didn't talk to Aurora as much that day as I wondered how she could possibly give up her child. As a young girl I had had my share of being given away but I couldn't imagine being on the other end of that bargain, giving up my own child to a stranger.
    When the nurse came in and said my bacta treatment was ready. Aurora grabbed hold of my arm. She looked me in the eyes and I could just see her pain, particularly when the nurse took the baby from her arms. It was the last time Aurora ever saw her son. She stayed in medical for a long time but every time I had an injury I visted her. And every time she seemed a little more happy.
    I learned that she had been involved sometime ago with a young stormtrooper trainee. When she had first gotten pregnant he had promised to stand by her but when he was given rank he blew her off like a tumbleweed in a dust storm.  Her ultra-religious family had disowned her becasue of the pregnancy and with no where to turn she had been forced to give up her child.  I was soon to realize however that the erethral happiness that had seemed to befall her on my last visit was only because of the knowledge that she would never have to feel her pain again........
    The next time I came to see Aurora they were closing her casket. She had slashed her wrists, length wise, not across, and bled to death in the night.
    Suicide.
    I went to her funeral, my whole division did, but when we were offered time to speak about her life I was the only one who went up to talk. As it turned out I was the only person on all Cardia who had truely known her....

    After Aurora's funeral was when I met again with Durico Chavin. I was feeling bad about Aurora's death and he was in a rut because he had been demoted for mouthing off to a superior, then put back into basic training for work with his people skills after hitting that same superior in the mouth.
He invited me to have a boxing match with him so we could both punch out some anger.
    He was and admirable opponent and I... well, to make a long story short, I kicked his butt. I had him pinned to the mat with one foot and I was dangling my boxing glove from it's arm string, gently bumping him in the face with it, when my division leader came in. Leiutenant Sitro took one look at me and him and laughed.
    "What's the deal letting her win, Chavin?" he asked.
    "'Let' her win!?" Durico moaned. "If I had 'let' her do anything she would have broken every bone in my body by now!" (I'm not making myself look good here. He really said that.)
    Sitro snorted. "What a wimp you are."
    I asked him if he wanted to take me on. He said yes, of course.  He was also stupid enough to leave his leg area wide open and I whipped his feet out from underneath him and pinned him down with neck and thigh pressure points in first round. He finally gave up when I pounded out one of his front teeth. He was bleeding from the nose when he left.
    Durico had watched the whole thing.  He came over and said to me, "I've never seen any woman kick butt like that since my sister dumped her last boyfriend."
    I laughed and asked what division he was in.
    He was being transfered into my training classes the following week so I made sure to keep up my first impression for him.
    I outdid myself at the training exercises, putting 90% of my mind on my tasks, keeping up appearances for Durico.  It took me a while to realize however that I was doing it because I liked him.  I still missed Leigeus, alot, but when you are locked in a military encampment that's totally crawling with attractive men just your age what would you expect a lonely seventeen year old to do? I am a human being you know...
    I guess you could call Durico my first boyfriend. I loved Leigeus but Durico was a whole new thing. I barely knew anything at all about him where as I knew everything possible about Leigeus. I knew him too well.  I found it much more fun to learn something totally new about Durico every
day than to have the same old conversations with a man who had lived with me most of his life.
Durico was fun. And the most fun came after I learned that I loved him....

    I hid my giddy smile, trying vainly to hide my limp. My foot was killing me. I still hadn't figured out what I'd done to it but it was killing me just the same. I had memorized the names of the four men I was with that night. There was, Rico, who was closest on my left, Jessi, farthest on my right, Fendrin, farthest on my left and of course Durico who had me by the arm.
    It was an unbelieveable elation to be with them that night. I got alot of taunts and jeering comments for being a woman and this was the perfect opportunity to make friends out of the men. Maybe now I'd get some respect.  I thought being invited to drinks with Durico and his guy friends was the best thing that could possibly have happened to me...
    We picked a table in the back that night, right underneath a weird spiral staircase. A bartender droid zipped up to us almost the second we sat down.
    "Orders?" it asked cheerfully.
    "More perky then usual." Rico muttered. "Must be payday." Quiet laughter passed about the table. I rocked back in my chair, testing how much direct pressure my throbbing foot could handle, and waited for the others to order.
    Durico choughed. "Ladies first." he said.
    I jumped, "Oh. Okay, I'll have....Crypton Ale over ice."
    "Crypton?" Jessi asked. "That stuff's awful strong, sure you want it?"
    "Call me adventurous." I said crossing my arms over my chest, knowing full well that they would find it impressive that I might be able stomach the stuff, which I could and had been able to since I was six.
    Durico smiled at me. This endevour had been his suggestion and I knew he was sure I would impress them too.
    The others ordered the same thing I did except Durico who intelligently ordered his favorite, a tall Miquira. When the droid came back with the drinks the others sipped nervously at their Crypton Ale, trying not to make faces at the strong brandy. I drank mine down in two gulps and ordered
another. Finally Rico gave up, "How do you drink that stuff?" he groaned pushing his cup away. "It's awful."
    I laughed, grabbing his cup and chugging it down. "I used to drink this stuff with my father when I was little. He would let me have sips of it whenever he had some. I grew up liking it. I think I liked it even better because he liked  it. My mom died when I was born so Dad was all I had left. He... died when I was eight.
    I confiscated a drink from another bartender droid, sipped it. "Ugh, Spiced Hapan. Anybody want it?" Three hands went up. I gave it to Jessi and grabbed two more for Rico and Fendrin.
    "I told you she was a good pickpocket." Durico smiled. They all laughed.
    I gulped my third glass of ale and sat back. I kicked the table with my sore foot. "Ow!" I yelped clutching my ankle. My drink crashed to the floor, turning several heads.
    "Hey. What did you do?" Fendrin asked, standing up and coming around the table.
    "Nothing. M-my foot's been sore. I kicked the table." I replied through clenched teeth. I rubbed my ankle gingerly.
    "Let me see." Durico said, lifting my foot into his lap. He pressed the side of my foot.
    "Ow! Don't!" I howled.
    "I guess I don't need to ask if that hurts." He tapped my ankle. I whipped my foot back, cluching it tightly, leg bent up on the chair.
    "Oh, that's broken, Daala." he said.
    "How long has it been like that?" Fendrin asked.
    "I dunno. A day or so." I lied. It had been killing me for longer then a week but if Durico knew that he would take me back to base camp and I might never get another chance to impress his friends.
    "How long?" Durico asked seriously. I had forgotten how easily he could read my expressions.
    "Week or so." I corrected myself, sighing.
    "Week or so!?!" he cried. "Come on. We're going to have to cut this short." He grabbed my arm and helped me up. "Sorry, guys we'll do this another time."
    He draped my arm across his neck and dragged me out of the bar into the cool fall night. I didn't care if they saw my limp now. Everything was ruined already.
    "What did you do that for!" I cried, turning on him the instant we were out of ear shot of the building. I pulled away angrily, glaring.
    "I'll never get another chance like that!"
    "Why didn't you tell me you were hurt!?!" he countered. "I could have rescheduled this! You could have come with us next time!"
    "Injury is a stupid reason to postpone something." I said stubbornly, stamping my good foot and turning away. Whipping me around Durico clenched my wrist and wrapped an arm around me, holding me against him anything but gently. He glared down at me with his dark eyes. Tears sprang to the edges of my vision as he spoke.
    "Look. I don't care if those four in there never see you again, I just want you not hurt. If you never see them again, and you will believe me, good riddance! You have your own friends in the divison right? Why can't you stick around with them! What's so great about my friends anyway!?"
    "You don't get it." I moaned. "No one around here respects me. If I don't get into some friendships with some of the guys here I'll never be respected. I'm already ridiculed for being a woman, the least I can do is make some friends of the guys."
    "Is that what this is about?" he asked, astonished. I said nothing, knowing he would read me. "Oh Daala," he crooned, hugging me close against him, this time gently, stroking my short cropped hair, twining his fingers in my once long wiry locks. I pulled myslef into the embrace, crying as he held me.
    "There's no reason for this. You have a guy friend." he said, "Aren't I your friend?"
    I looked up at him, the wind whipping across my face. Loose tears drew wet trails down my cheeks. "Yeah."
    "So there you go." he whispered. He leaned down and kissed me. I remember being able to hear my own heart pounding when he pulled me up close. I didn't really mind though, stroking my fingers through his thick blond hair. His mouth moved from my lips, gently brushing across my cheek bone, nuzzling my throat. I mummbled something to him (I actually don't remember what I said) and put my arms around him as he moved his face down my neck, tenderly stroking my back. He met my lips again and just kissed me for the longest time. When we parted we stood there silently, just staring into one another's eyes. "Come on." Durico said finally. "Let's take you home."

    The whole rest of that year was really a blur beyond being in love with Durico. He became the sole reason I even woke up in the morning.  We snuck across campus to one another's bunk houses just to talk before morning classes.
    I became the only female member ever of the secret Carida Haters Club, an orginization of recruits who wanted to go home but were too proud to admit it. They got together at the campus bar once a week to gripe about their commanding officers. It was pretty fun being the only girl.  Everybody knew I was Durico's lady but so many people made passes at me it wasn't even funny. I became very good at elolquently brushing people off although I had to deck a couple of guys before they got the picture.
    Durico was one of the best men in my life, needless to say my time with him was a first true romance.

    But at years end I had to say good-bye to him. For good....

    Our entire division was split up into four person teams for the week long mountain trek, to test our surivival skills. I was on a team with Durico, this man who called himself Chap and Durico's friend Fedrin.

    The first three days went off smoothly, everything going as planned. We were right where we should have been on the course, near the peak of a steep mountain.

    I remember vividly how it all happened. We were edging along a ledge, me in the lead when I heard rocks break behind me. Durico screamed and I spun around just in time to see him slip and crash fifty feet down the rock face, bashed around like a rag doll.
    By the time Chap, Fedrin and I got a hold of his support rope and pulled him back up he was bleeding to death.

    We set up camp the second we got off the ridge and tried to stop the bleeding but he was dying. Fedrin stayed with him in the tent most of the night but he woke me up at four in the morning and said Durico wanted to talk to me. I knew the second he said that that Durico wouldn't live to see the next sunrise...

    Honestly, I'd tell you what he said to me but I swore him it would never be heard beyond that tent that day. The only thing I'm allowed to tell you is that I knew when he died he really had loved me and to tell you what he asked me to do.
    He told me to get out of Cardia. Make high rank, because I deserved it, and never, ever regret what I did to get there.

    Well I tell you the regret thing doesn't exactly qualify. There are tons of things I regret in my life.

    But Durico wasn't one of them.....