TITLE: In the Blink of an Eye
By Jemmiah
Author's Note: The character of Samla/Lilith is used in the Jemmiah Chronicles with the permission of Lilith Demodae. My continuing thanks to her!
"I killed him."
Jake had been over it time and time again in his head, repeating it so many times that the words almost lost their sense of enormity. He'd killed somebody. Actually put a blaster to their back…squeezed the trigger…smelled the burning flesh as the energy charge had shuddered through the body. He'd done that. Watched as the corpse fell to the floor in a lifeless slump, eyes staring upturned in unrepentant defiance.
He'd killed someone.
"Don't beat yourself up over it." Samla Jivinan's voice was both ascerbic and strained, rendered taut with emotion. In the past she had learned to keep her true feelings hidden. Now she began to see how out of practice she was at doing just that. "He was worthless slime. I've wiped more delightful specimens off my boots; don't bother wasting your feelings on scum like that. The galaxy won't miss him. Not after what he's done…"
The threatened knot in Samla's voice tightened inextricably, disabling any further speech. There was no point in comforting her husband, who was a good man at heart, with the notion that he'd performed a public service for which the galaxy would have awarded him a medal. Even during his less than reputable days as a freighter captain with a ship for hire Jake was not the kind of person who felt at ease waving a blaster at people. All for show, he claimed. When it came to bluffing Jake Jivinan was an expert. He had more bluster than a full-scale hurricane.
"I did it without a moment of hesitation." Jake looked down at his hands as if they were coated with indelible gore. "Doesn't that worry you?"
"You did what you had to do!" Samla snapped back. "He would have killed her - and you - if you hadn't got him first. Just think about that for a second." The tall woman's hazel eyes bore into him with the power of a vibro blade. "And then there would be nobody around to tell the tale. Not you, not Jemmiah…"
She stopped herself dead, not able to bring herself to say what she was thinking. It was a fruitless exercise of course: one sideways glance at her husband told her he already knew what she'd been about to say.
"Do you…do you think they'll find the boy?" He asked, trying not to think of one of his own children in the same situation. Missing, possibly abducted, or worse…
"We can only hope." Her words didn't seem to inspire much confidence. "Depends on what those CorSec guys are saying, doesn't it?"
"I doubt it's good news." Jake found himself saying outloud. "It never is…not when they show up in pairs."
Samla automatically thinned her lips to form two fine lines. They'd had to be mighty careful in giving their side of the story to CorSec: leaving out the obviously damning fact that Jake had managed to blast the villain of the piece in the back, and the fact that the pair of them had dumped the low-life grease-stain where he wasn't likely to be found…for a time, at least. Even if they'd told the truth, CorSec tended to take a dim view of murder.
They preferred to do that leave that kind of thing to their investigation team.
"Look, there's nothing we can do right now except stick to our story and hope that everything somehow turns out alight…"
"Alright?" Jake's eyebrows almost broke orbit. "Your friend gets knocked on the head, abducted and her kid is listed as missing presumed murdered and you think things will turn out alright? I had you down as an optimist, sweetheart, but that takes the proverbial cake!"
"We don't know he's been murdered." Samla reminded him, feeling her fingers tightening automatically around the heart-shaped locket in which the image of her own son and daughter were contained. "But if I find out that anything…if something has happened…" She swallowed back her own hot, bitter tears. Oh, to be a hardened smuggler again! All the time when she had lived that precarious existence there remained buried deep inside her a softer, protective, feminine side to her nature that was so utterly at-odds to her Lilith Demodae persona. Now, when she most needed to become Lilith again, the necessary firmness had gone.
"What, you gonna dig him up so you can kill him some more?" Hissed Jake under his breath.
"Will you shush about killing that kriffer!" Samla growled at him, causing her husband to take an involuntary step backwards. "You want everyone to know?"
"I just can't believe that I did it!"
"Look!" Samla drew herself to her maximum, imposing height, suddenly business-like. "Linus Leaford was a psychopath! I haven't a clue how he got out of prison - frankly it wouldn't surprise me if the CSS just opened the cell and waved him out - but he was one dancer short of a Hutt's harem!" She made a violent stabbing gesture at the side of her head. "First Jonas, then Welks…you would have been next! And I know," she hooked her arm slowly through his own, pulling Jake slowly towards her side so that she might find some much needed support, "that what you did disgusted you. But if you hadn't then the Jedi temple would have been getting bits of Jemmy shipped back to them a piece at a time…literally. I'm proud of you: yes, it's true! Don't look at me like that." Samla silenced him, placing a finger against his lips. "It might be wrong to feel pride in murder. But that animal should have been put down years ago. Now, I don't want to talk about this again. Not ever in our lifetime together. Is that understood?"
Jake found himself nodding numbly. There wasn't much else he could do.
Linus of course had been an animal, from what Jemmy had managed to tell him systematically murdering all her husband's friends and associates one by one until she'd come to realise the target was most probably herself and her son. Jake had, through his own irregular contact with his Jedi friend Kurtas Kizzen, a limited understanding of how the force worked but never until that moment had he appreciated exactly the importance destiny played. If he hadn't decided to take that last, secret transport job so that he and his family could afford that new apartment Samla had been eyeing…if he had turned down that rather dubious if well-paying job of carrying a newly acquired slave…if he hadn't realised that the slave in question had turned out to be Jemmiah…
In his mind he could replay the whole scene once again in slow motion. Recognising the unconscious prisoner. Agreeing to take them to the planet Jantau. Watching Leaford let down his guard in momentary relief…
The blaster going off in his own hand.
Perhaps Samla was right. Who would miss such a piece of filth? With CorSec already investigating the attack on Jemmiah, the unsolved case of her husband's death and now the presumed murder of little Han it didn't look as if there was much point in spending time thinking on the likes of the late Linus Leaford.
Kessel take the devil; it felt good to be able to say the 'late' Linus Leaford!
Fate it seemed had played a major part in Jemmy's rescue. Perhaps fate would be kind to her son.
"Useless bunch, CorSec." Samla harrumphed, wrapping her arm around her husband's waist. "Couldn't find an meteor in an asteroid field. What good they're gonna be to Jemmy I don't know. Of course their excuse for their incompetence is that it took so long for Jemmy to be fit enough to answer them that they completely lost any trail they had of the poor kid…makes you think, doesn't it. One minute you're here and the next, who knows? It all happened in the blink of an eye."
"Perhaps that Jedi fellow can help." Jake nodded over to the hallway, watching the pensive figure in the brown robe waiting patiently at the foot of the stairs. "That must be why he's here, right?"
Samla ran a weary hand through her strawberry blonde hair. "Obi-Wan? He's usually here when there's a crisis in Jemmiah's life. Don't ask me how he knows: he just does. Must be that Jedi thing, I guess." She glanced around the hallway. "No sign of that apprentice of his. I'll bet he had his nose put out of joint, being told to stay behind whilst his master got to catch up on old times…"
"Surely this Jedi can find little Han?" Jake whispered, feeling inexplicably certain that Obi-Wan had somehow heard every word he had said.
His thoughts were cut to ribbons by what he could only have described as a shriek that seemed to fill every corner of the room, almost inhuman in its ability to shake and un-nerve. Jake felt his heart pounding wildly in his throat. It was the kind of sound that only a wounded creature might make: one that went on and on and on, laden with torturous pain and palpable, red-hot grief.
"What was that?" Jake nervously licked at his lips.
Samla watched the ultra-calm and un-flustered figure of the Jedi Knight walk up the stairs towards the sound of the continuing terrible noise. A pity, she thought wryly, that now he had become a man worthy, in her own opinion, of Jemmy he should have taken it upon himself to train a padawan, thus as good as ending their involvement. Things never worked out the way they were expected.
"That," Samla said in a deathly quiet voice, "is the sound of a mother who has been told she's not going to see her child again."