Chapter Three

Two weeks rolled by with record speed after Tyber was found bleeding to death in the park. Simba and his family – Vitani especially – found themselves astonished by his rate of recovery. Given the severity of his wounds, they expected him to be out of commission for at least a month. Even so, Tyber had become increasingly... depressed. Withdrawn. Aloof. Vitani speculated that whatever happened to him had begun to take it's toll on him. She wanted to get him to open up, but feared approaching the subject. But, as she suspected, she was the only one he trusted. He hardly spoke to the others. Even Simba was afraid of the lightsaber-wielding man, now on his feet again far sooner than was expected.

It was on the two week anniversary of Tyber's arrival that Vitani got an answer to some of her questions. And that answer sickened her. Ironically, Simba – the king who feared Tyber the most – was the one who broke the silence, during the evening meal.

Tyber absentmindedly nibbled on his food, whereas the rest of the family was already halfway through with theirs. "Tyber," Simba spoke, breaking the deafening silence, "I've been meaning to ask... is there anyone we could get in contact with, let them know you're okay?" This garnered an immediate response, as Tyber's eyes flushed red and he looked slowly up at Simba.

"You want me gone," he hissed.

"No, he just wants to know if there's someone we can talk to, let them know you're alright," Nala clarified.

"And someone who might know what happened to you," Vitani added.

On hearing Vitani's voice, Tyber's eyes flushed blue again, and his gaze sank back down to his food. With a slow shake of his head, he said softly, "No... there isn't anyone. Not for me... Not anymore."

"What do you mean, not any..." Nala began to ask, stopping midsentence as comprehension dawned. "Did... did they disown you?" she asked softly.

Tyber again shook his head. "No... they didn't get the chance. They never got the chance," he said, his tone heavily melancholic.

Vitani put a hand over his. "What happened to them?" she almost whispered to him. Tyber didn't respond, closing his eyes as a single tear fell. He stayed this way for a long while, as though unable to bring himself to answer.

"We won't force you to say anything before you're ready," Kiara assured Tyber.

"But we can't help if we don't know what the problem is," Kovu put in.

"Kovu!" Nala scolded.

"Trouble is, Nala, he's right," Tyber said. He opened his watering eyes, and they kept shifting from blue to red and back. "The only ones who would have cared that I'm alive were my family," he said, his voice shaking, "And they... they're..."

Simba caught on immediately. "... Dead," he surmised.

Tyber nodded. "Dead... Killed in an explosion. Killed the night I arrived here," he affirmed.

Vitani was shocked. She had an answer to a question that had burned bright ever since Tyber arrived – the question of what happened to him that gave him nightmares and left him in such a severely injured state. But, while some questions were still unanswered, Vitani restrained herself from asking further. It must have been very hard for him to speak about that, especially considering it was still a relatively fresh memory.

"But... if you were transported here from the site of the explosion... how do you know none of your family survived?" Nala asked. Wrong move.

Tyber leapt up from his seat and shouted, "I saw them die!" His voice reverberated around the foyer. "I was there! I saw that blast with my own eyes! They were all grouped so close to the blast, it would have killed them instantly! Sheer luck I was thrown through the window with the blast!"

Vitani put herself between Tyber and Nala. She didn't want to hurt Tyber, but she didn't want him to hurt anyone. There was a long, uncomfortable pause, before Tyber finally turned and walked to Vitani's domicile. "What was that?" Kovu asked in astonishment.

"That was Vitani protecting mom from-" Kiara started.

"Not that," Kovu corrected her.

"Agreed," Simba said, staring Nala down. "What were you thinking, Nala? We'd pried enough from him as it was!"

"I just wanted him to consider the possibility that some of his family survived," Nala said defensively.

"But you weren't there," Kovu said.

"Do you want me to feel any worse about this than I already do?!" Nala snapped.

"Enough!" Simba roared. Silence settled over the room. When Simba spoke again, his voice was calm, reassuring, and soft: "Nala, I don't blame you for trying to open his mind up to such a possibility, but we don't yet know enough about Tyber to make any kind of suppositions." His gaze shifted to Vitani. "And I appreciate you getting him to back down; he clearly trusts you, even if he doesn't trust the rest of us. Regardless, I think you and Nala should go apologize to him."

"Agreed," Nala stated. She and Vitani both headed for Vitani's domicile, where they headed for Tyber's room and found him sitting on the bed, forearms resting in his lap, head hung low. He made no gesture he was aware of them. Vitani and Nala slowly approached him, Vitani sitting to his left, Nala to his right. Nary a word was spoken for a good three minutes.

"Tyber, I know what you must be thinking, right now," Vitani told him. "But Simba's not angry. Not at you. If anything, he scolded Nala when you left."

"Simba and I both feel I owe you an apology," Nala added in. "In the Royal Family, we have a rule: Never dig into our members' past unless they are ready to talk about it. The confrontations get... emotional, and for that, I am sorry." Tyber didn't respond – as far as Vitani could tell, he didn't even twitch. Nala was about to get up and leave when he finally spoke,

"I shouldn't have lashed out. Not at you." He paused to sniffle. "Nearly thirty years, and I still can't control my anger – more so now than before."

"Controlled or not, you had every reason to be angry with me – I was digging in something of you I knew nothing about," Nala consoled Tyber.

"It's not an excuse to yell at you like that," Tyber said. "You didn't deserve that."

"What Nala is saying is that we may not condone the way you reacted, but we understand why," Vitani said. She reached over, picking Tyber's head up to bring it so she could look him in the eyes, which were blue again. "We're not going to ask you of anything else that happened the night you came here – it would seem... wrong of us, somehow, after what happened tonight. But we want to help you, and as Kovu said, we can't help if we don't know what the problem is."

"If you ever want to talk... we are here for you," Nala told him.

"And if you ever need a shoulder to cry on, you can always cry on mine," Vitani added. Unexpectedly, she pulled Tyber into a gentle hug, one that Nala joined in on, and for a moment, Vitani could swear he came close to crying.

/ \\\\\

While Nala and Vitani saw to Tyber, Simba got a call to come to the lab, and he got the impression from the lab head's tone that he discovered something very disturbing. He and Kovu wordlessly marched down there, where they met the lab head.

"Your Majesty," the head greeted Simba, bowing low.

"Good to see you, again, Dia," Kovu commented. "How are the kids?"

"They're fine," Dia said. "Solomon said his first word this morning."

"Touching, but I imagine that's not why you brought us down here. What do you have, Dia?" Simba asked.

Dia sighed heavily. "First thing I wanted to ask – that man that Vitani rescued, has he told you of what happened to him?"

"He said he and his family were caught in an explosion," Kovu replied, "He was the only survivor."

"Well, that fits what we've discovered," Dia stated. He indicated the metal shards and glass shards arrayed on the table. "The glass shards were from a window – you know that. But these..." he indicated the metal shards. "... these are part of why I called you down here. These are military-grade shrapnel shards."

"Shrapnel...? Then..." Kovu began.

"... Someone tried to kill him," Simba concluded.

"Someone with access to military-grade explosives," Dia affirmed. "Such explosives would never be allowed for civilian use, so whoever tried to off your friend must have friends in high places – or knows how to improvise such explosives."

Kovu looked to Simba, asking, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I am if you're thinking we may want to have a word with the Human government, try and find this man," Simba agreed. "It might give Tyber some peace if we catch him."

"Maybe, but I don't know if just catching him would be enough for Tyber," Kovu said. "He may want more than that."

"Then we'll hope your sister can stay his wrath," Simba responded. "What I want to know... is why they tried to kill him?"

"That's not the only interesting thing we found," Dia said. "Take a look at this," Dia lead Simba and Kovu over to a lab station with a microscope. Simba looked through it, and was greeted by the sight of microscopic robots in a blood sample.

"What am I looking at, Dia?" Simba asked.

"That, my king, is the scariest part – I believe what you're looking at is a form of Nanotechnology. Every blood sample from your friend we've seen has thousands of those machines in them," Dia answered. "Those machines have a hundred times the coding of normal organic cells, DNA, you name it. It's the most heavily-coded machine I've ever seen. We think that those things would have kept your friend alive even inches from death; anything that penetrates the body – chemical, biological, technological... anything foreign – is attacked by those things. They were still disassembling the glass shards and shrapnel when we examined them."

"Incredible!" Kovu remarked. "Such a resilience would be-"

"Tyber is a friend, Kovu – not a science project," Simba said sternly, looking up from the microscope. "We will not treat him like a tool."

"I wasn't saying we should," Kovu responded indignantly. "I was just saying, if our Lionesses had resilience like that, they'd be nearly unstoppable."

"If I may, Prince Kovu... King Simba is right; this kind of technology is too volatile to let get out," Dia suggested. "For now, I'd advise we keep this between us."

"I concur," Simba agreed. "I will not have Tyber driven away because someone in the Pridelands thought of him as a weapon or tool instead of a person."

"So what do we do?" Kovu inquired.

"We'll figure that out bit by bit," Simba replied. He began walking out of the lab, and outside, once they were out of earshot of the lab techs, Kovu spoke again.

"You realize what this means," he said.

"Explain," Simba requested.

"Tyber said that his family was killed in an explosion, one he barely survived," Kovu explained. "The lab tech now told us that someone tried to kill Tyber. Compare the notes, and you realize that Tyber's family didn't just die..."

"... They were murdered," Simba finished, drawing the conclusion from Kovu. He remembered how Nala speculated about Tyber having nightmares, and how Vitani suspected he saw someone in them – the "bastard". "Do you think Tyber knows who did it?"

"I imagine that, if he didn't, he wouldn't have nightmares about him," Kovu said.

"Well, we're not gonna ask him now – as I said earlier, we've pried enough from him," Simba maintained.

"Still, if he knows who tried to kill him, why wouldn't he tell us?" Kovu asked.

"Why, indeed," Simba agreed. As they got back into the foyer of the royal family's domicile area, they were greeted by Nala. "Is he alright?" Simba asked.

"I think we got our message across," Nala answered. "But he was just as apologetic as I was."

"Where's Vitani?" Kovu inquired.

"She's still in there with him – something about a hobby he wanted to show her," Nala responded.

"A hobby?" Simba repeated as he crossed his arms. "What hobby?"

"I think he called it 'modding', but I haven't the slightest clue what that is," Nala said.

"How did hobbies come up?" Kovu asked.

"I asked him," Nala responded matter-of-factly. "He said he mods his games, which requires a degree of facility with computer coding and knowledge of how a given game's code works."

"So he can program computers... an interesting hobby," Simba commented.

"Will they be alright alone?" Kovu queried.

"You've seen how he is around Vitani, Kovu," Nala replied. "He could have thrown her aside when he lashed out at me, but he didn't. He wouldn't."

"She has a point, Kovu," Simba agreed. "But regardless, Nala... the situation has become much more complicated."

Nala frowned. "How so?" she inquired.

Simba inhaled, and began to recount what he'd learned in the lab, starting with the discovery that the metal shards pulled from Tyber's chest were military-grade shrapnel, then the discovery of the nano-probes in his blood, then Kovu's realization that Tyber's family had been murdered by the very man that tried to kill him, and culminating with Simba's intention to speak to the human government to try and find the one responsible for the tragedy that had befallen Tyber. When he finished, Nala hefted a sigh.

"So tragic... to lose one's family to a murderer like that," she said.

"So what do we do from here?" Kovu asked.

"We leave him and Vitani alone," Simba said. "He's in good hands with her... and we've put him through enough tonight." With that, Simba, Nala and Kovu all retired for the night.