What the Eye Doesn’t See…9

Time seemed to stop while his words took root in my brain. Somewhere in the great over all scheme of things in the universe a tiny piece of an enormous puzzle slid neatly into its rightful place. I wanted to throw the lightsaber away and bury myself in his arms as I had done as a child. Tell him I was sorry and rewind time so that none of this had ever happened. He had been right; some secrets should never be spoken. This new piece of news had shaken me to the core. I should have backed down, but instead I let my anger step forward and speak for me. I wasn’t a little girl any more and I wasn’t sure I knew who this man was that I had called uncle and loved dearly for as long as I could remember.

“Think or know?” I asked, when he didn’t answer I pushed the lightsaber even harder.

“Lei’lei, you’re hurting me.” He said quietly.

I didn’t budge and we were at a sort of impasse. My own fury was now mixed with confusion and sorrow. The conflict of needing to trust him and knowing that he had been withholding information made me uncertain. His terrible calm made me sad and the sadness drowned the anger. Tears welled up in my eyes and I blinked them away. This man was my family and suddenly I didn’t know what to do, or what I had even been thinking. I had wanted answers and I had let my anger speak through me but now bereft of the fury that had driven my action in the first place I was just bewildered. He watched the play of emotions dance across my face. I had never been good at hiding anything from him and now was no exception. In a move so elegant and swift, I never even saw it coming; he flipped out of my grip, put me flat on my back then not only got to his own feet but had pulled me to mine and had disarmed me with surprising gentleness.

He looked at the lightsaber in his hands for a long, tense moment and then he tossed it on the bed. Then he turned his attention to me. I looked for some sort of anger in his eyes but saw none, only a guarded compassion. The gentle caress of his hand on my face was so unexpected and so tender that it brought another batch tears to my eyes. I had to stifle an unwanted whimper with my hand. He made a small ‘hmm’ sound, brushed the tears away with the fingertips of the hand that had stroked my cheek and shook his head.

“I think I would like a cup of tea now. How about you, little lei’lei?” he asked and before I could answer he left the cabin to find the galley.

By the time I had calmed myself down enough that I could join him, he had found the small galley, put the kettle on to boil and dug out some tea. As I watched him it sank in, I had just physically attacked one of the few people in my life who had never done me harm and the flush of shame that shot through me was almost unbearable. I could no more stop the shakes than I could the dreadful sense that I had let him down, disappointed him. I had let my fury rule me. Guilt wracked through me and I felt awful.

“Zte’sa, I’m sorry I…” I began but he abruptly held up his hand to stop me from speaking.

“Sit down.” He said gesturing to the small dining table. I did as he asked and watched while he made tea, poured two cups and sat down across from me. I took the cup he offered and waited for him to speak.

“How did you find out?” he asked after what seemed a very long silence.

I told him about finding the locket and the holodisk.

“So you went back.” He said. It wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway.

“Yes.”

There was a lengthy silence and then he nodded. “The lightsaber?” he asked.

“It was in the same drawer. It was a practice weapon, it has no real memories.” I said.

He just stared at his own cup thoughtfully and said nothing for a moment that seemed to last forever. “You let anger move you too much, you know.” He chided. “That’s not a good path to walk and I think you are better than that.”

Once again I felt shame, mingled with anger but I swallowed them both down. “You never answered my question.” I fenced back, avoiding the topic he had just brought up. “Do you just think or do you know that Jyrki is your son and why did you never tell me?”

He took a slow sip from his tea and watched my face. “I think.” He said, “I don’t know for certain.” He added. “I didn’t tell you because it’s none of your business.”

I felt annoyance stir in my gut and frowned. “None of my business? Jyrki Andando is trying to kill me. I think it is my business to know that he plays an ever bigger part in my family than I had known about before.”

He sighed. “It’s complicated.”

“Oh for Sarlacc’s sake, Zte’sa, everything is complicated!” I exploded, slapping the table with the flat of my hand making the cups rattle. “For once, will you just tell me the truth?”

“I have never lied to you.” His eyes were hard as he spoke.

“No you haven’t,” I conceded slumping back in the chair, “but you omit things and that’s just as bad.”

He watched me for a very long moment and then nodded slowly. “Long before you were born, while there was still some semblance of peace in the Galaxy, I was often hired as a sort of body guard. While it’s not my main profession, I am very good at it. My services do not come cheap so it wasn’t a job I did often. Shortly before the Clone wars broke out I was asked to take care of a young woman who came from a very wealthy family and who was under threat of being kidnapped. As far as jobs went it should have been easy but it wasn’t. It became very complicated very quickly because of the underground connections her father had with some very shady organizations. What was supposed to be a simple transport from one planet to another turned into a serious chase halfway across the galaxy with me and my charge crash landing on some forsaken planet at the edge of the Outer Rim.” He paused to sip his tea. “I was used to roughing it, but she was a bit of a spoiled princess who had never done a day’s work in her life so the trek we had to make in order to find away off the planet was very trying. I don’t think I had ever heard anyone complain so much in my life.” He smiled slightly at the memory.

“But as the days wore on she began to change, toughen up a bit, and accept the situation at hand. After that we began to get to know one another. She talked about her life and in the end I actually felt sorry for her. Being the daughter of this man I had been hired by could not have been easy. He was not a kind man, you understand and his expectations of her were high. She told me that the reason for this particular journey was not a happy one. She was almost glad we had crashed. She told me that she was on her way to be married, an arranged marriage that would join two of the most powerful syndicate families together. She didn’t know the man who was to be her husband and she was afraid. The reason we had been chased and shot at was a third feuding family had not wanted this marriage to take place, fearing a shift in the power base. Bloody stupid, really.” He looked at me and I nodded that I was listening.

“She spoke about this situation with a certain humour. She knew that in her father’s eyes she was a bargaining tool nothing more. There was no love in this family. I suppose that given the circumstances what happened next was normal but I still have a hard time forgiving myself for it. I lost my objectivity and let emotion get in the way of the job at hand. She was pretty, intelligent and we had gone through a fairly traumatic experience together. In this situation the only thing I had to offer her was physical comfort. While it would be an honest assessment to say she initiated it, it takes two to continue and I did so willingly.” He stopped, realizing he was trying to skirt the subject and then looked at me directly. “To be blunt, lei’lei, we had sex with each other. It was stupid and completely inappropriate but at the time neither of us was thinking with a clear head. When we were rescued two days later we both decided and swore to never speak of what happened. I think she was embarrassed and I was grateful she didn’t want to discuss the indiscretion which could have cost us both our lives. Once we reached the original destination we parted ways. I never saw her again.”

“Some years later, I was contacted by her father who said that he had more work for me, a delivery. He was never a man to mince words and he got right to the point. His daughter and her husband had been killed but they had had a child, a boy named Jyrki, who had been taken from them when he was just a baby to be trained as a Jedi. Now he wanted the boy to know who his parents had been. I agreed to deliver the locket and the message but before I left he told me one more thing that made my blood run cold. While no one had questioned Jyrki’s parentage at the time of his birth, after the death of his parents it was revealed that the son in law, due to a previously unknown medical problem would have been unable to father a child. I think the hope was that Jyrki would be dismissed as a successor to the families’ fortunes. Her father had then come to the conclusion that the child could only have been from one other man, me, but he had no way to prove this absolutely.”

I sighed. “So, you don’t know for sure?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I had hoped that the information I had taken from the Jedi temple would have given me a DNA sample to test against but it didn’t.”

“You don’t even know if this man was telling you the truth about Jyrki?”

“No, but it is hard to disregard. The timing of his birth, when she and I were together, the fact that she was married almost within the hour of her return to the family and I am guessing, had no chance to be unfaithful after the union, among a myriad of other things….” He shrugged. “The evidence is fairly in favour of me being his biological father.”

“Jyrki doesn’t look anything like you.” I said, picturing his black hair and icy blue eyes in my head.

“No, he doesn’t but he does bear a great resemblance to my mother. She had black hair and the same colour eyes. I get my looks from my father’s side of the family where the white hair genes are dominant.”

“Does he know?”

“No and there is no reason he should. He knows next to nothing about his family, just what was passed along to him. That they were good people and they loved him.”

I looked at him. I didn’t know what to think. Then another little piece of puzzle fell into place. “You’re the reason he came to work at the docking bay, aren’t you?”

He nodded. “He contacted me asking for my help. I was the one person he felt he could trust. He said he needed a place to live, a job, somewhere quiet where he could just escape the rest of the galaxy. Vader was still hunting the last of the Jedi and he was running scared. I knew more about him that he realised and I felt that with his mechanic skills your father could use him. I also knew that he was force sensitive and had some training. It was my hope he would help you come to terms with your gifts. I had no idea how messy it would all get.”

I buried my head in my hands. “Papa knew?”

He shook his head. “No. All I told Kit was that he was a decent mechanic; the rest I felt was up to Jyrki to discuss if he chose to.” He paused. “The Zabraki have a saying, what the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve, and I felt it in this case to be apt. The less Kit and you all knew about him the better it would be if the Empire caught up with him. Your father would have just worried about things that had not happened yet and which he had no control over.” He said. “I had no idea how things would turn out, that Jyrki would go off the deep end over you.”

“You know he’s quite mad, right?” I said angrily.

My uncle didn’t answer right away. “He’s angry and not thinking terribly clearly but I don’t believe he’s insane.”

“He thinks I betrayed him, Zte’sa, and he’s punishing me for it”

“I know.”

I shook my head. “This is why you don’t want to kill him, isn’t it?”

“I would prefer not to be placed in a position where I might have to take the life of a young man who may be my son, but by the same token, lei’lei; I swore a blood oath to protect you.”

I barked a laugh. “That places you in a pretty precarious position then. What will you do if you have to choose?”

“I hope I never have to find out and I am hoping he can be reasoned with if I ever do catch up with him.”

“Reasoned with? He kidnapped me and tried to break me with torture and drugs! He broke in and destroyed my home. He snuck into the palace and set incendiary devices to blow up. No one can find him, or catch him. He’s stalking me and I don’t have a clue why, except he has a real problem with the Empire, which I can understand but I don’t understand his problem with me. He has no idea what reason is any more, he hates me.”

My uncle frowned and shook his head. “No, hate is not the problem.” He said quietly. “That he loves you, lei’lei, is the problem.”

I nearly choked on my tea. “Love? If that’s love he has an awfully strange way of showing it.”

He nodded. “I know but the line between love and obsession is very fine. Somewhere along the line he crossed it.”

“Why did you never tell me you knew him?” I asked.

“Because it is a very personal issue and you didn’t need to know. It changes nothing.” He said coldly. The tone of his voice was hard. It said stop pushing.

I didn’t want to argue with him. For a long pause I said nothing but then I asked. “Did you love her?”

He shook his head. “No.” he said honestly.

“You slept with her though.”

“Sex and love are not the same things, lei’lei.”

He waited, watching me as if he were expecting me to ask further questions about this topic but I just nodded. The look on my face told him I knew a little more about that subject now than the last time we had seen each other. I was certain he would have asked but the jump alarm sounded letting me know we were coming out of hyperspace. We made our way back to the cockpit. I didn’t argue when he strapped into the co pilot’s chair. The stars began their backwards slide into normal space. I grinned at the sight; I never tired of it even if it meant sliding into the unknown. I hoped what ever was waiting for us was at least friendly.