CHAPTER TEN: APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEIVING

Jaina had the mother of all headaches when she finally regained consciousness. Her head felt like it would split open from the constant pounding. When her eyes managed to adjust to the poor lighting in the room, she realized she was lying on her side on a cold stone floor. It took several tries before her body listened to her simple command and allowed her to sit up. She groaned as she hauled her body into a sitting position. Her muscles felt like they had been twisted every which way and then thrown back into her body inside out.

"How do you feel?" A voice asked.

She turned - but not too quickly - and found Lex sitting nearby.

"Considering I was blasted with half a dozen stun bolts, I feel pretty good," she remarked sarcastically, rubbing one of her painfully sore shoulders.

"You're going to need your strength if we're going to get out of here,"

"Have they come to check on us yet?"

Lex shook her head, then said, "at least not since I regained consciousness,"

Slowly, Jaina got to her feet and walked towards the door. She placed both her hands on it, searching for any sort of mechanism or release. What she did find was a tiny metal panel near the floor. She reached down into her sock and pulled out the pocketknife she kept strapped to her ankle situations just like this.

"Did you find a way out?" Lex asked, coming over to stand behind her.

"Maybe," Jaina answered, taking the knife and using it to unscrew the metal panel. "But for all I know this is the panel that controls the lighting in the room or the oxygen for that matter,"

"What do you have against Zekk?"

"You mean besides the fact that he gets on my last nerve?" Jaina said, without looking at her. She busied herself with examining the connected wires that were now exposed with metal plating gone.

"He does have that affect on people on occasion," Lex conceded.

"Now, let me ask you a question," Jaina said, turning away from her task for a moment. "How do you know Zekk?" The question had been on her mind for some time now, and now seemed to be as good a time as any to ask it.

"I met him nearly a year ago," she began, "in a Yuuzhan Vong prisoner camp. I had been there for a few weeks, when he showed up. The Yuuzhan Vong were marching us through a field. I was carrying a load of villips when I tripped and fell. The guard took out his amphistaff and was going to hit me with it, when someone started shouting at him. It was Zekk. Of course, I didn't know who he was at the time. All I knew was he had probably just saved my life. The Yuuzhan Vong beat him for his disobedience and forgot about my punishment.

"After what he did, I felt I owed him something. I helped him heal and he promised me that if I trusted him we would get out of there. He knew I was force sensitive and I think he thought that meant he could trust me. I've never met anyone who just automatically trusted me, no questions asked.

"We did escape - just barely. We thought about freeing some of the other slaves, but the risks were too high that they would end up selling us out to the Vong. Zekk wanted to bring me the Jedi Academy but I told him I didn't want to be a Jedi. I said I didn't want to get involved with the war. I could tell he was disappointed, but he gave up on trying to convince me to come with him. When these people here captured me, I knew I had to tell someone. Zekk had told me so much about Luke Skywalker, I felt I could go to him with this. A few days ago was the first time I had seen Zekk since we parted ways back on Ord Mantell."

Jaina sat there, staring at Lex. Her work on the panel was temporarily forgotten. Her feelings were a cross between shock and absolute horror. Zekk, a Yuuzhan Vong prisoner? The thought alone seemed unreal. Surely, if it were true he would have said something.

Lex seemed to pick up on this, for she said, "he didn't want you to find out what happened to him. He didn't want you to forgive him because you felt sorry for him," she explained to her. "He told me a lot about you and his past as a Dark Jedi,"

Jaina sat there in silence for what seemed like minutes, still having a lot of difficulty wrapping her brain around the idea. "All this time... what he must have went through and to not tell anyone,"

Zekk had been a slave to the Vong and he had kept it from her and everyone else. When she thought about it, she wondered why that surprised her. Their relationship had ended on less than favourable terms. She was unable to let go of her anger for him leaving her again and had, against her better judgement at the time, turned to Ganner, hoping to forget about Zekk completely.

If only she had known...

Things might have turned out different for them, or then again they might have ended up the same. But from the moment Zekk had come back in he life, she had been too angry to care about any suffering he may have endured. Her line of thinking had been nothing he could have gone through could even compare to the heartache and pain she had suffered.

And now, all she could think of was how he had to go through it alone because she had been too selfish to get passed her own feelings.

Suddenly, Zekk's past mistakes did not seem nearly as awful as her own.

The interior of the Falcon was dark, save for the one light Anakin could see peeking through a slightly ajar door belonging to one of the cabin rooms. When he strained his ears enough, he could hear the odd sniffle coming from inside. When he reached the cabin door, he knocked gently before opening it, even though he knew she would have sensed his approach long before that.

She looked up at him long enough that he could her eyes were red and puffy, making it look like she had been crying for some time.

"Go away," she said, though there was no conviction in her voice that made Anakin believe she actually wanted him to leave.

He made his way over to the edge of the bunk and sat down. He didn't try to break the silence. When Tahiri was ready she would talk to him. Trying to force her to open up to him would be worse then trying to force a bantha to move in the direction you wanted it to go.

"I'm so stupid," she sobbed. "I can't believe I came here expecting to find my father,"

"Erik Veila isn't your father?"

"He is, but he isn't," she tried to explain to him. "I went to see him and told him who I was,"

"What happened?" He asked gently.

"His wife and kids showed up. No wonder he gave up on looking for me. He's got two kids to replace me with,"

Anakin shifted closer to her and wrapped her in a tight embrace that she refused at first. "You were right," she sniffed. "I had this idea in my head that he would have good reasons for staying away from me all these years." She wiped her eyes and looked up at him. "Do you think he was right to forget about me because he thought he would never find me? I mean you can only look for your lost child for so long before you have to give up and move on, right?"

He didn't have an answer for that.

"I don't know, Tahiri," he replied, gently running his fingers through her hair. "I don't know,"

Neither did she.

Light years away on Borleais, a wave of emptiness ripped through Jaina Solo so suddenly and so forcibly that she was brought to her knees. She felt Lex come to her side, asking her what was wrong, but she couldn't answer her. She couldn't begin to explain the gaping hole she felt growing inside her.

He was gone.