I don't want to give the wrong impression about me; Oola was not the first beautiful woman to cross my path. Nor had she even been the most recent. And as much as I had enjoyed her company, our time together had been exceptionally brief. So why couldn't I put her out of my mind?
It might sound strange, but I almost regretted not being there to see her die. No, it wouldn't have been within my power to save her. That much I knew. And it would have tortured my very soul to watch such a needless execution helplessly. But at least then I'd have closure. Instead, all I had were rumors and scattered tidbits from third-hand accounts, and each one differed from the others.
Some had said that she was defiant until the end, that she stared death right in the eye and never blinked. They said she willingly chose her mortal demise to preserve her honor and free her eternal spirit from the Hutt's cruel entrapment. Others told a very different tale, that she broke in her final moments and pleaded with Jabba for her life. They said she died begging, finally offering herself in any way her master could see fit, as long as it would save her from the maw of the Rancor.
I didn't know which to believe. Neither seemed very much like the girl I'd come to know. But then again I hadn't had the time to know her very well, much to my regret. So I couldn't say with confidence that either version didn't happen exactly the way they said it did. But no matter how many times I heard the story told, and no matter what other details varied, there was one thing that always remained the same. Everyone agreed that she was, in fact, very dead.
Almost everyone, that is.
"How much of the gel did you use on her?"
"What does it matter?" I asked with a roll of my eyes, as I downed the rest of my drink. "I patched her up and a day later a Rancor chomped her to bits. That's life for you."
"Do you know what Tannok gel does? Do you know why it's effective in accelerating the healing process?"
"I haven't the slightest idea, and honestly, would you mind? She's dead, Nolan. I'm having a hard enough time accepting that fact without you badgering me about all these details that really just don't matter now."
My tone was harsher with my friend than he deserved. I could easily have blamed it on the drink and Nolan wouldn't have batted an eye, but I didn't. Life always had been a struggle but I wasn't the sort to make excuses for my behavior. I prided myself on being a man who owned his actions above all else. But that had gotten much more difficult ever since… ever since the Palace, of course.
"I know you're upset. Hell, who wouldn't be? A pretty girl like that deserves a better fate. But that really is my point, Arik. You didn't see her die."
"There are many things that I do not witness which nonetheless occur most definitely. Tell me, have you ever even seen a Rancor? I have. It's not an experience I hope to repeat. Oola had many fine qualities but few of them would have served her well in an encounter with a beast like that. She's gone."
"Tannok gel, Arik. That's the key."
My irritation hit critical; not coincidentally, so had my blood alcohol level. "Either you're going to start making more sense or I'm going to throw up on you. Choose carefully."
"Tannok gel. It-it soaks into the tissue and it stays there. It can remain active, and effective, for up to two or three years in some cases. Two or three years! It stimulates cell regeneration better and for longer than any other known substance."
"I saw it close a flesh wound, a deep one, in about six seconds flat. That doesn't change the fact that she was mauled by a Rancor, Nolan. Trust me. There's no coming back from that."
"I don't think you're hearing me. All this happened, what, three months ago? Arik, it's still in her. Wherever she is, the Tannok gel is still in her. And it's still working."
"It can't possibly bring her back from the dead."
"That's just it. She wouldn't be dead."
I grew suddenly silent. Nolan wasn't kidding; he'd always been a joker at heart but even he had his limits. And I'd never seen him so adamant before. "I know you want to see me snap out of this funk. Believe me, so do I. But false hope is the last thing I need now. It's only going to make it that much harder to let go."
"If you used as much of the gel as you told me you did-"
"I covered her from head to toe. She had gashes all over her body."
"Then it's possible. And if she is alive, there's only one place she could be."
Amidst my burgeoning hope, I released a terrible, weary sigh. I had no doubt that Nolan was right about that last detail. "Yeah. Deep in what used to be Jabba's Palace. Inside…" I shook my head hard, "Inside a dead Rancor."
It wouldn't have mattered if she'd been a million light years away, at the bottom of some distant and unfathomable ocean, in the heart of a star, or even in the center of the former seat of Imperial power itself. If Oola was indeed alive, then she needed me without a doubt. I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I had let even a ghost of a chance of saving her slip through my grasp. Still, I couldn't for a second allow myself to believe that I'd find in that dank, dark pit anything more than a very dead Rancor corpse and within it, sadly, the last remains of my dear Oola. In these dark times, hope was as often an enemy as it was a friend.
Nolan had no reason to join me in my quest, which any sane man would have rightly regarded as a suicide mission. But we'd been through too much together for either one of us to ever abandon the other. In truth, the loyalty we felt for one another made more sense to me than what I felt for Oola, who I had only met once. Regardless, I would have gone to the far corners of the galaxy for either one of them. For one, I already had; for the other, whether she still lived or not, I was about to. My mind was made up.
I didn't waver in my decision, not once in the arduous, daunting approach to what had become, for me, the most nightmarish place in the galaxy. The Palace had been a living hell before, when at least there was Jabba, who, for all his cruelty and decadence, did command a strange sense of order amongst a rabble that would otherwise have devolved into rampant chaos. In his absence, it had become all that and worse. Every debauchery imaginable had been rumored since the dissolution of Jabba's court. The night Nolan and I arrived, all appeared quiet. But I knew better than to take such appearances at face value. We proceeded cautiously.
Entering through the front door would have been courting death itself. We went in through a hidden entrance to the east, which I'd been shown as part of my smuggling duties. Jabba hadn't trusted his associates with knowledge of all his underhanded dealings, nor should he have; crates of highly lethal bio-toxins weren't something you generally wanted the more devious courtiers to know about, let alone have access to. My trustworthy face, relatively youthful good looks and sterling reputation had earned me the privilege of ferrying that filth across the stars for him. That the evil slug lord had perished before he'd had the opportunity to use his newly acquired weapons, or sell them to those who would have, did help to ease my conscience. And now I would use the knowledge I'd obtained in the process to save an innocent life. Despite myself, I was almost turning into an optimist, or as close an approximation of one as I was likely to get. But there was still a long way to go. Next, we had to enter the pit.
"Man, what the hell!" Nolan exclaimed, waving his hand back in forth in front of his nose. "Does it smell like that 'cause it's dead?"
"Sure, I bet it smelled just like gumdrops and roses when it was alive," I said with a smirk.
The massive metal door that had crushed the Rancor's skull from above hadn't been raised back into its open position, but the creature's behemoth body had created enough of a gap between the edge of the door and the floor for us to pass through. Even though the beast was most evidently dead, I hesitated to approach it any nearer than necessary. This hideous thing that towered over me was, in all likelihood, what had taken poor Oola's life from her. And it was, in death, still lethal; its size was such that even a portion of its body could crush us, should any amount of the decaying corpse suddenly become dislodged. From top to bottom, it was a creation of pure, unbridled malevolence. Besides, Nolan was right; its odor was difficult to bear.
"Quick! Quick! Come look at this!" Nolan called to me. I rushed to where he stood.
There was a large chunk of flesh missing from the Rancor's side. It had either been sliced away by something that was no longer in evidence or had, for some reason unknown, decomposed more swiftly than the rest of the body. But I could see what had excited my friend about it. It had been cut right about where the stomach cavity ought to be.
"So tell me, this is your mission," Nolan said a tad nervously, "which one of us gets the honor of going in first?"
As I pondered the unpleasant prospect of climbing into the torn-open stomach of a months-dead Rancor corpse, an all together different thought occurred to me; in all honesty, I arrived at it solely as the result of a desperate desire for any reason to make the ugly task ahead of me an unnecessary one. Luck was on my side, for once. The edges of the incision appeared as if they had been pushed, not pulled, out. From within.
My ear caught a faint noise just then in the background; I held my own breath and hushed Nolan so I could pinpoint its source. It was the sound of labored breathing, and it was coming from behind us.
I turned around sharply and there she was. Covered in dried blood and mucus, huddled on the ground in a corner, shivering with such intensity that I feared her bones would shatter before my eyes; but she was unmistakably alive. Oola was alive.
But she wasn't going to stay that way for very long judging by the looks of things. Most of the blood was her own. She had massive contusions all over her body. Her legs were broken and twisted into macabre shapes; she couldn't possibly stand. She was so thin I could almost see right through her; even her lekku seemed about half as thick as when I had seen her last. And yet she was the most beautiful sight I had ever laid eyes upon.
The shock pulled itself from my bones and I was ready to embrace the girl as I had wanted to, but couldn't, months before. But she was far from up to it now. She'd noticed me, but I couldn't tell if she'd recognized me. She hadn't reacted with noticeable fear or reticence, but even if she had felt such things, what could she have done to show them in her present state?
The much-vaunted Tannok gel had kept the precious spark of life from fleeing her broken flesh, but if I hadn't come for her, all that would have meant was a much slower, more agonizing death that would have stretched on and on over the course of who knows how many long months or years. It had already put her through three months of torment. Every day and night spent with constant agony pulsing through her body from her head all the way down to her twisted, broken toes. And in a way, I had been responsible for every second of it.
"We have to save her, Nolan," I told my friend with a lump in my throat. "This… all of this suffering. It can't have been for nothing."
"We'll save her, my friend. That's what we came for."
Exercising extreme caution and care, we moved her out of the ruins of the Palace and into my waiting ship. It took us hours to get there; I carried her myself, with her arms weakly wrapped around me as they instinctively searched for support. I did not want to risk doing more harm to her by moving too quickly and in my haste causing or exacerbating further injury.
Time was not presently pressing upon us. I'd realized the moment I'd sighted her that it would take months, if not years before she recovered; if she recovered at all. Nolan, my more optimistic and mature companion, had none of my doubts. I found myself wishing that I still shared the strength of his beliefs, but the harshness of life had stripped it from me ages ago. What little faith I had left in this universe was now inexorably tied to the fate of the young woman I presently held cradled in my arms. If Oola lived, so might I. If she did not, my own survival might well be called into question.
The first thing I gave her aboard my ship was a fast-acting painkiller. I pumped into her as much of it as she could sustain. It helped to ease her right away; her delicate eyes flashed with relief when she tasted its sweet deliverance. It was then that I thought I saw the first signs of recognition set in, but I told myself I was just seeing what I wanted to see. She was still too far gone; I had a long ways to go to bring her back. Since I knew of no trustworthy medic within range, I treated her, broken bones and all, myself, with only occasional assistance from Nolan, who had less experience than I did in attending to the heavily injured.
Fortunately, the Tannok gel had prevented much more than superficial damage, agonizing though it had been for her. None of it was internal, aside from her leg fractures. I could handle it all myself. Once her bones had been set, her wounds cleaned and dressed, and the excess blood and mucus washed away from her once-more vibrant green skin, I exchanged her leash, collar, headpiece and blood-soaked, ragged clothes for more comfortable sleepwear, my own, for lack of anything more suitable, and left her to her much-needed rest. Then I said a silent prayer to whatever unseen forces governed this galaxy, to protect my poor beleaguered Oola, who had gone through greater hell and survived more nightmarish torment than most beings twice or even three times her young age. It had to end.
She slept for days. Nolan urged me to let her be, and leave her undisturbed in her bed, reminding me every so often of his unwavering faith in her ability to survive, as well as her desperate need to regain any semblance of her former strength. I agreed with his reasoning if not his certainty, but on more than one occasion I sneaked into her room to feel her pulse and confirm for myself that she was, indeed, still alive. By the third day, I was checking on her so frequently that it no longer made sense to leave her side. I ate, read, even slept beside her, listening only to the steady rhythm of her heartbeat in her chest, which grew louder by the hour.
On the fourth day, she awoke. On the fifth day, she ate the meal I had prepared for her and allowed me to apply another treatment of the gel, which was still acting to speed her recovery. On the sixth day, she at last called for me aloud.
"Why…" she said, her voice raspy but determined.
"Why?" I repeated her intonations precisely. I probably sounded like an idiot; I was too happy just to hear her voice to pay any mind to what I was saying.
"Why… am I alive?"
"Oh, w-well," I stuttered badly. "There's this gel, you see, it's very powerful and…" I trailed off. It wasn't what she wanted to hear. I took a deep breath and held it a moment or two longer than usual before letting it out. After all this time, I owed myself an explanation every bit as much as I owed it to her. "I just didn't want to believe that I lived in a universe that would allow such a horrible fate to befall someone as undeserving of it as yourself."
"I am grateful for all you've done. But saving me… won't end suffering. Others will still die."
"I know," I said dourly, in pained resignation. "But I'm not sorry, not for anything I went through to bring you here. You're alive, you're free, and you'll be safe now. And that… that's good enough for me."
Looking sheepishly away, Oola continued, "In the pit, I wanted to die. I tried to end the pain... but now, I am glad I could not." Shame spread most regretfully across her lovely cheeks.
I beamed my warmest smile toward her to let her know that I understood, and would not hold it or anything else against her. The past was behind us both, and it was all for the better. "You just forget all of that now. You have one job ahead of you, and that's getting healthy again. I can't have a lame Twi'lek girl laying about my ship all day. We've got to get you walking on your own, and put some meat on those bones. Make you whole again. It'll take time, but you'll get there. You'll get there, alright."
"And when I do… you'll be with me?" For the first time, she smiled so widely that I could see her teeth. The girl was not one to waste time with subtlety.
"So… you do remember me, then?" I asked, my eyebrow sharply raised.
"I could hardly forget. You gave me reason to live."
"We have that in common," I said softly, gently stroking her left head-tail to comfort her. "And yes, I most certainly will be with you, for as long as you'll have me. Until then, rest well, dear Oola. You'll need all of your strength soon enough," I finished with a knowing grin, before kissing her fully on the lips with passion where she lay. It was about time I had the chance to return that favor.
It had been a long time since I had reason to anticipate the arrival of the coming days, rather than dread what they would bring with them. That was her gift to me; perhaps less obvious than the one I'd given to her, but certainly no less meaningful. The universe that I'd spent my entire life condemning had allowed two lost souls to save one another. No matter what was to follow, and there was surely still a long and winding road ahead of us, I would never again forget what we had, together, proven possible.