When He Dreams

Zaalbar often has bad dreams. They haunt him endlessly. He fears falling asleep most nights, and spends long hours staring the city in the face as Mission sleeps curled in his lap. He strokes her cheek with one long claw and sometimes he sings quietly, but he rarely ever sleeps. When he does manage, once every two nights or so, it’s always short and fraught with terrible nightmares. Usually he can shake himself out of it, but sometimes Mission has to get up and hide until it’s over.

He can never truly remember what he has dreamed. He never really tries. It isn’t in his nature to dwell on things that aren’t real. Reality is agony enough for him. He doesn’t understand the stuff that dreams are made of, therefore they do not matter.

It is early winter on Taris. The frost on the walkways has prevented Mission and Zaalbar from sleeping in the street. They had to rent a hotel room, which zapped most of their credits immediately. Zaalbar lies on the ground (beds hardly suit him), and Mission curls up against his chest, fully dressed. She prefers to be cocooned in his warmth, and he prefers to guard her with his body; when Mission sleeps, things are momentarily the way they should be. Because when Mission is wrapped up inside of Zaalbar, protected by his enormous bulk and powerful arms, nothing can hurt her – nothing can hurt his cub. Except for him.

Most nights Zaalbar does not sleep. He doesn’t sleep because he hates to dream. But tonight is his third night awake, and tonight the darkness decides to swallow him. The world goes numb and then blank, except for a gentle pressure, a subtle wetness against his abdomen where Mission sleeps, where she pushes against him with all of her might, trying to force herself inside of him, into his very being: she pushes, biting, and now softening. Something buzzes in his ear, like wind through blades of grass, as the moons of Taris swing along the edges of the sky, children racing along the horizon. And when he wakes, Mission lays still; each bit of her has been softened by the force of his hug. As he had dreamed, he had crushed her, and she is dead. Something black seeps from the corner of her pretty mouth; her head is still full, still horribly Mission, and then her body seems to slope, seems to mix within itself, and the legs emerge from that tangle just as they have always been. Her face is slightly swollen, pale around the eyes which bulge and stare blankly. Her little purple tongue pokes out between her teeth. She looks almost as though she could be laughing, but that isn’t so. She hasn’t laughed in a long time.

He studies her for hours. He pokes her bloated face. He pets her lekku, which feel weirdly flat under his paw. He is afraid to touch her body – it shifts beneath the skin like a sack full of broken glass.

His cub is dead. The failure squeezes his mind like a vise. Perhaps there is a moment then when the last bits of his precious sanity, the pieces that Mission has kept alive, break away and float into space, but he doesn’t feel it. It doesn’t hurt. Teeth stare out from under his mustache; a Wookiee grin. The world gives an experimental shift sideways, tilting like a ship on the ocean. Suddenly Zaalbar tastes blood – he has bitten himself – and he understands. The world is too cold, too small, and he is simply too big for it. He scoops his child up in his arms, how light she is, how peaceful when she sleeps, and takes her into the street. The morning is still new. The air is moist and shimmering as he stands along the railing, testing his balance. And the world is hushed, with sleep and unobservant reality, as he plunges down to the point of gravity below and dreams no more.

-fin