I could only imagine the endless, terrifying nightmares that her time as Jabba's slave girl had left within poor Oola, and that was precisely the problem. She wouldn't talk about them, and I feared the damage they could do if she kept them locked inside. I had only been in the Palace a short while myself and had still left shaken, determined to avoid any further entanglements with the Hutt crime lord whatever the cost. And I had been fortunate enough to walk out the front door. Oola, on the other hand, had been violated, suffered unspeakable abuse and torture, only to be tossed aside, discarded and left for dead, facing down the maw of the monstrous Rancor beast while a crowd of onlookers gawked in anticipation of a cruel blood sport and its excruciating pain and death.
Pain would surely come but, unbeknownst to her murderous former master or his many vile associates, death would not, in no small part due to the intervention, in varieties both planned-for and otherwise, of my own meager efforts. I had saved her life, a fact for which we both had reason to be grateful, and in the months that had followed the majority of the outward injuries she'd sustained had healed in spectacular fashion. It seemed to me that the time was right for us both to move forward, and leave the anguish of the past where it belonged; where it could do no more lasting harm to either of us. But even though I was hardly without my own trauma, I knew it wasn't my place to ask that of Oola; not after all she'd been through. Such horror rarely complied with anyone's desire to forget, ignore or be rid of it. The nightmares were not done with her yet.
The worst of them came about when you'd expect, in the middle of the night. It was the movement of her lekku that always served to alert me to her distress, as she'd taken to sleeping with at least one of her long, slender head-tails coiled tightly around my arm for security and comfort, two things I only wished I could provide more of to the troubled former slave girl. When fear struck in her subconscious, her appendages reflexively constricted and cut off blood flow to the lower half of my extremities, sharply enough to rouse me from my slumber. Then I'd come around to the sound of her murmuring words of obvious discomfort and alarm in her native language, or was it the Hutt's? Sometimes the episode would end there, and we'd both fall, with great relief, back into our well-earned rest. But on other occasions it would escalate until her whole body was trembling, her sleeping face contorted into a heart-wrenching mask of cold dread, and at those times all that I could do was pull her close and hope that whatever security and comfort she derived from our connection would be enough to get her through the night.
"It seemed like a bad one this time," I offered gently over breakfast, the morning after one such eventful evening. "Anything you'd like to talk about with me?"
Oola shook her head wordlessly and her lekku twitched as she kept eating, not looking up from the bowl of colorful fruit slices in front of her. Since she knew full well that I couldn't read her lekku sign-language, she tended to use it whenever she wanted me to feel satisfied that she hadn't ignored me, but didn't want me to know the specifics of what was on her mind. It very rarely did that trick effectively.
"If there's anything I can do to help..."
"You can't." She cut me off emphatically. Perhaps realizing and regretting her own harsh abruptness, she momentarily granted me the warmth of her smile, though it was purely for my benefit and absolutely nothing more. "But I'm thankful that you want to."
"There are no more scary monsters, you know," I said, releasing a pent-up and frustrated sigh. "Jabba, the Rancor... they're all dead and gone, and you're still here."
"I'm still here," she repeated in a hushed, singsong tone that betrayed her lack of confidence.
With nothing left that seemed appropriate to add, I grudgingly accepted my own relative powerlessness, rose from my seat and began gathering the used plates and utensils, until my ear again caught the soft timbre of her voice, little louder than a whisper this time. I stopped to listen attentively. "In the dream... I fell into the pit again. It was cold and dark, and smelled of blood. I was alone, and scared. I could hear the voices from the crowd above. Watching me. Waiting. The door was opening... it was coming for me. I could see the light reflected from its claws, and its teeth. I couldn't run, couldn't hide. I couldn't..." her voice gave out suddenly, choked by raw emotion. She swallowed hard and forced herself on. "You weren't there to save me, Arik."
"That does sound awfully inconsiderate of me," I said wryly, though not without ample empathy.
"I thought so too," she replied, with mock sincerity.
She moved then to stand and, as had become our custom, I reached over to hand her the walking stick that, combined with the leg brace she wore around her afflicted right limb, allowed her movement that her own still-recovering body presently denied her. Months after the treatments had begun and well after her most obvious wounds had finished healing, it wasn't clear exactly what problem remained. She was still too skittish to venture anywhere a trained medic might be found and my own diagnosing tools were limited. I suspected, and feared, some form of nerve damage. Despite her reluctance to give me a detailed account of her encounter with the Rancor, it was evident that her legs had born the brunt of its jaws' crushing force, and her movements inside and outside of its body had prevented any significant amount of healing until I had found her and brought her aboard my ship. That she was still mobile at all was something of a minor miracle, though I would never say so aloud. One thing I did know was that, in the long-term, that wasn't going to be enough.
"I was a dancer. A good one," she said, with great sadness and regret dripping from her voice. "Now what am I?"
"You're alive," I answered quickly. The pained look she gave me in response assured me that, right there and then, that wasn't going to be enough either.
In the beginning, though, it had been. Back when I'd first found her with Nolan, and nursed her to health aboard my ship. I hadn't given much thought to anything more than keeping her alive. If the poor little Twi'lek girl had perished, every hope I had left would have been lost with her, but we pulled her through and I thought that would make everything alright again. Her being alive had given me the chance I'd needed to make sense of the universe, for myself and for her as well. But the Oola I'd pulled out of that accursed pit wasn't the same girl I'd met months before in Jabba's Palace. She couldn't have been, and deep down I knew it. Her body was alive but her spirit had been crushed, and it was only a matter of time before the weight of that loss caught up to her. She had been a dancer, accustomed to evoking the sensual melding of spirit and form in one elegant whole. It was a skill that had made her attractive as a slave, and to the evil Jabba in particular. And if he had succeeded in taking it from her forever, I feared that all my hopes for her future might yet prove to be in vain after all.
But Oola had a stubborn streak a parsec wide. In a way, it was a quality I'd grown to admire about her, the impressive strength of her will in the face of any amount of adversity, though I hadn't yet found the right way or time to tell her so. It also meant that even when both her own body and myself were telling her, in the strongest possible terms, to take things slow, wait for her legs to continue to heal, and not push herself dangerously into challenges she wasn't yet ready to meet, Oola was still going to do exactly what she wanted to do, when she wanted to do it. And what she wanted was to dance.
I found her sprawled on the floor in the main cabin, wedged between one of the passenger seats and the rusty control panel jutting out from the wall. The deck plan of my ship, small and intended largely for cargo transport, would hardly have provided an optimal dance floor even if she had been in perfect shape. And, of course, she wasn't. Her leg brace had predictably failed to meet the requirements necessary to perform her fluid, freeform physical expression and she had landed with a thud in a graceless heap, tearing the fabric of her brand-new, flowing black dress, and her soft emerald skin beneath it, on the sharp metal edge of a poorly placed support beam. I arrived just in time to see her trying and failing to hide all evidence of her injury from me, in a futile attempt to at least preserve her battered pride and dignity. I decided I might as well let her hold on to that much, and allowed her to abandon the pretense on her own terms before I dampened the corner of a towel from a nearby rack to wash away the blood running down her leg.
"Not to cast judgment where it isn't warranted, but it does seem like I'm always patching you up from one bloody thing or another," I said, as playfully as I could manage. "I'd be more careful if I were you, I don't have any more of that gel and you seem to have burned through what I gave you before and after the Rancor pit. Keeping you in one piece is harder than I would have guessed."
"Aren't you going to add 'I told you so'?" she chirped weakly, wincing from the pain as I finished cleaning her latest in a long line of cuts.
"Does that sound like something I'd say?"
"...no, I suppose not," she admitted begrudgingly.
I could tell immediately that she wasn't about to be standing up any time soon. Letting either the leg brace and walking stick, or myself, support her so soon after she had so showily failed to support herself would have meant an unacceptable injury to her pride, and neither of us wanted that. So I resigned myself to merely sitting on the floor beside her, taking up all the room that was left in the cramped space where she'd fallen. As if to make sure there'd be a place for me, Oola tucked her knees into her stomach, drew her lekku nearer to her frame and curled into a tight ball, which I delicately draped my arm around and pulled close to me.
"I think I was meant to die in that Rancor pit," she said in a faintly defensive tone, as if she knew what sort of a response it would draw from me and wanted to preemptively blunt the impact. When all she received was what had become my characteristically weary sigh, she pressed on undeterred. "You didn't know that the medicine you gave me would keep me alive. You didn't know I'd be in a situation where I'd need to be kept alive in the first place. When you came to the Rancor pit with your friend, did you even expect to find me at all?"
"No, I didn't," I admitted, though the tremble in my voice laid plain how uneasy it made me to do so. She looked at me like she'd expected me to lie and tell her what I thought she wanted to hear, and was quietly grateful for the less desirable but more authentic truth. "Saving you was a long shot from the start. I can't claim to be your hero. I had no master plan for a daring rescue. When I left Jabba's Palace, I did so never expecting to return. And I left you there. I left you with that monster, knowing the danger you were in, because there was nothing else I could do. I didn't know that I would ever have the power to save you, and if things had happened any differently than they did, I almost surely wouldn't have."
"Jabba would have killed you if you'd tried to save me then," she said soothingly, granting me more of an excuse for my past self than she seemed willing to extend to herself most of the time. "I'd never blame you for what you couldn't do."
"The truth is that I got lucky, plain and simple. We both did. There are a million little things that could have happened to keep you from being with me, right here and right now," I squeezed her shoulder comfortingly, a gesture that she seemed to appreciate in spite of her dour mood. "But here you are, nonetheless."
"But if it was to be my fate, and you stood in the way of that..."
"Oola, my dear," I said, already trying to sound more confident in what I was about to tell her than I really was, "if there is such a thing as fate, if there is a grand design to the cosmos, I don't think it has any time at all for people like you and me." And as I sat, uncomfortably and rather pathetically, on the chilly, metal floor beside her, myself a human former smuggler now distinctly unemployed, and she, a Twi'lek former slave dancer who couldn't presently make her way across the room on her own two feet, it struck me as a difficult argument to refute. Oola, for her part, didn't so much as try. "I honestly don't think fate cares what becomes of us, one way or another. Maybe it's all in our own hands now."
"You really think I'll dance again?" she asked a moment later, with a tinge of hope just beginning to emerge from the depths of her voice, longing for any reason to feel reassured and empowered.
"Yes, I do."
"You have such faith in the universe now?"
"No, I don't think I do," I mused contentedly, more to myself than to the pretty Twi'lek girl listening to my every word. Though I had surely come a long way from the forlorn cynic I once had been, in the moment I decided it didn't feel quite right to embrace the opposite path so entirely, even if it wasn't solely for my own sake. One thing, however, did feel right, in every way possible. "I have faith in you."
"That's the least believable thing you've said yet," she scoffed, in a half-hearted tone that thankfully made clear how little she truly meant it. Her voice became much more genuine as she added "Thank you," and leaned her head against my shoulder.
Knowing that in her willfulness Oola might very well choose to remain on the floor for the rest of the day rather than ask for the help she needed to stand back up, and as I was beginning to feel a troublesome numbness spreading in my own legs from the way I was forced to contort them in the cramped space we were occupying, I wrapped my arms tenderly around her and stood, lifting her bodily into the air with me. I took gratifying note that her weight had increased dramatically since I had first carried her, in her sickly and stricken state, out of the Rancor pit several months before. Holding her then, my heart had ached, as I could only feel her slipping away from me. Now she felt like a whole, complete person again, and I resolutely refused to believe that she could possibly be anything but.
"I make you worry about me a lot, don't I?" Oola asked meekly as I slid her into the co-pilot's chair in the cockpit, and took my own seat in the pilot's position directly to her left. "I'm sorry for that. It must be terribly exhausting for you."
"It's only natural, I think. When you love someone, and you know that they're hurting," I said, perhaps unexpectedly plainly, judging by the wide-eyed look she soon donned. It faded quickly into a more contented expression than I had seen from her in quite some time. "You were right, you know? What you said over breakfast. I can't take the pain away from you. I can't make it so you never suffered, were never abused or mistreated. No matter how much I want to. Those nightmares are a part of you now, and maybe they always will be. But we have more in common than you know. And all I can do is keep us moving forward, together. Hopefully... in the right direction."
"Let's steer clear of Tatooine for a while," she joked, with an all-too-rare actual smile shining through the shell of her outer gloom. "I've had my fill of Hutts and sand, at least."
"I think we can manage that," I replied, reaching over to clasp her hand in mine, before turning my attention back to the all-enveloping inky blackness just beyond the cockpit view. "For now, why don't we just sit back and... look at some stars?" All told, there were far worse ways to while away an afternoon.
It was a few months later when I finally saw Oola dance for the very first time. It dawned on me only then that I had never actually seen her perform in Jabba's Palace, for which I decided I was eternally grateful. I didn't want my earliest memories of her graceful, sensual movements to have come from a time when her spirit had been broken and bound to the Hutt crime lord, her every twist and twirl restricted and held hostage by the sinister collar and leash he'd cruelly kept around her neck. Instead, my first glimpses of the young Twi'lek woman's extraordinary art form came at its most elegantly free and released, as she kicked and skipped her way effortlessly around every chair, crate and control station my rust bucket of a ship could throw into her path, coming to a perfectly timed halt only when she noticed that she had, at last, caught my attention.
"It doesn't hurt anymore," she said, her smile brimming wide and her lungs nearly out of air.
"I can see that," I said, not making much of an effort to disguise how pleased I was for her. Despite what I had said to her months prior, part of me debated letting loose some variation of "I told you so," as I felt very much entitled to any kind of validation for the hard work I'd done all this time in holding to a hopeful outlook, as best as I could manage, for the sake of the girl who I deeply cared for, and who had looked to me for guidance. But that desire came and went from my mind, and all that made it out was "You look amazing, Oola." And she did.
"Come, Arik. Dance with me."
Before I had even time to register her invitation, she grabbed me tightly by the hand, entwining her delicate fingers with mine, and dragged me after her into the most open part of the cabin. It would be an incredible understatement to say that my form was far less nimble and agile than hers, and in her unbounded enthusiasm her mind and soul were soon overcome by the rhythm her body so fluently cultivated, barely paying any thought to the lumbering dead weight she was lugging with her in tow. But in those few fleeting moments when her unfettered essence and joy of life leapt, with some amount of difficulty, from her being into mine, I felt a freedom and bliss I had never known before. It was enchanting and intoxicating, and it made all the months and years of struggle and strife completely worthwhile in but an instant.
And then it, along with myself, all came tumbling down, as my clumsy legs awkwardly collided with one another and sent me flying face-first into the deck. Oola, fortunately, reacted in a split second and tightened her hold on my arm just enough to allow for a gentler, face-up landing.
"I may have given you the wrong impression about me," I said, lying back with my head on the floor, wheezing, and suffering no small amount of embarrassment. "I believe that many things are possible. But I'm afraid I will never be much of a dancer."
"Arik, my love," Oola said, beaming from her head-tails to her toes with glee. "We are going to have to do something about that."
"You have such faith in the universe now?" I asked with a knowing grin.
"I don't know, actually. I'm still figuring that out, I think," she responded in a decidedly playful manner, pulling me forward until I sat upright, and close enough for her to plant a loving kiss tenderly upon my lips. "But I do have faith in you." And in the end, I could ask for nothing more.