7.
Riddick: Remembering
He'd held her hand for the first time shortly after they'd left that desolate, unnamed planet. She'd come up into the cockpit and taken the seat next to his, he remembered. He'd been impressed by how brave she was.
At the time, he'd been trying to figure out what to do with the two of them, and not liking any of the options. He'd been at war, internally. There was a pitched battle between his old, hard, ruthless instincts honed by years on the run, and this new thing that Carolyn had left inside him.
It was a piece of her. She'd gotten inside him somehow and had left a sharp fragment of herself embedded in him when she was torn out of his grasp. It was like the bit of his shiv that had been left in Johns' back. He could feel it, pressing against his sleeping moral center, jolting it at odd moments.
He knew he should just ghost both of them and move on, but every time his mind began to turn in that direction, the shiv-that-was-Carolyn sliced at him again. So he was surprised when this crazy-brave little chit, with more guts than sense, sat down next to him and gave voice to some of his very own thoughts.
"Lotta questions, whoever we run into," she told him. "Could even be a merc ship."
She paused, watching his face to see his response. He made his expression stay deadpan. No point in intimidating her until he'd heard what she wanted.
After a few seconds she shrugged. "So what the hell do we tell them about you?" she asked expectantly.
No pleas. No demands. No attempts to fuck with him. It took him by surprise and silenced the voice of the predator inside him. The kid was telling him it was his call, that she'd follow his lead.
"Tell 'em Riddick's dead," he suggested. She nodded, fixing the thought in her mind. "He died somewhere on that planet," he mused.
It wasn't the complete truth, of course, but it felt like truth. The man who'd taken off from the planet was definitely not the same one who'd kicked his way out of his cryo-tube after the crash.
That's when he'd reached out and taken her small hand in his. They'd fallen asleep soon after, side by side in the cockpit, hand in hand, while Imam caught up on his prayers behind them. He'd had the funny feeling that she belonged to him even then. Not just to him, but with him. Part of a matched set.
He'd ended up telling them about how he'd almost left them behind, and had been surprised by the equanimity with which they took it. He'd expected histrionics from Jack, at least, but she'd shrugged philosophically, commenting that Fry had almost done something similar, but that both of them had come back in the end.
"'Almost did' doesn't count," she'd said with a funny smile. Imam later remarked, while Jack slept, that the girl had managed to take centuries of ethical expounding and condense it into a single, simple phrase.
She'd been the one to come up with his cover story, too. He'd already planned to claim that he was Johns, but she'd embellished it, proposing a back-story that would give them protection if he was ever caught in his lie.
They'd never met Johns, she suggested. Riddick had killed him and assumed his identity immediately after the crash. If anyone ever tried to accuse them of aiding and abetting a known felon, they could claim that they'd been under the impression that they were helping a cop. It was a brilliant idea, he'd reflected. No jury on any planet would send a mild-mannered cleric or a cute teenage girl to jail for being scammed, after all. Even Imam had agreed to be party to the lie.
By the time a prospecting ship picked them up, he'd heard her life story and knew that she'd be better off staying with him than Imam. She was deeply fond of the holy man, but he figured it wouldn't be more than a month before she bailed on him to continue her nomadic life among the stars. She had a surprising amount of wanderlust in her for one so young.
She was a nice kid, though, and he realized that he worried about her. On her own it was only a matter of time before she got herself eaten alive and for some reason he couldn't let that happen. Not unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life with a shiv-that-was-Jack slicing him alongside the shiv-that-was-Carolyn.
He'd taken her with him and kept her as safe as possible, until the day she'd been snatched out of his hands by Lieutenant Fucking Jarvis and his Elite Special Forces shock troops. That last moment was indelibly burned in his mind. He would never forget the sight of her on her knees, clutching desperately at the gory wound in her abdomen, eyes glazing over with shock as the airlock door closed in his face.
He'd been completely numb for more than a month until he learned she'd survived. Taking her back had been his mission ever since.
Now, finally, he had her.
He held onto her tightly until her tears subsided. He didn't bother saying a word. What he felt coming off of her wasn't pain but the cessation of it and he knew that he was already giving her exactly what she needed.
When the tears finally ebbed and he felt her relax in his arms, he spoke at last. "Hungry?"
He felt her nod against his chest.
"You up for breakfast?"
She sat back, wiping her face. There was growing joy in the smile she gave him. "Hell, yeah. I've missed our breakfasts."
He grinned back at her, pleased. "Me too."
8.
Jack: The Best Meal of the Day
"Is that really all you have?" Riddick asked, gesturing at her meager pack.
Jack swung her legs out of her bed and began searching the floor for her shoes. "Yeah, well, I used to have a lot of stuff but I sold most of it while I was on New Ecuador. I planned to do a little shopping at Seti Station before we left... jerk."
She heard his snort of laughter and rejoiced inwardly.
"What the fuck did you do with my shoes, anyway?"
"They're by your dresser." He reached down and snagged them for her, handing them over. "You always use such foul language?"
"Shit no, Riddick, I'm a proper fuckin' lady."
"So I see," he chuckled. She followed him out of the bedroom and over to the food prep unit. It was a pretty good model, she noticed. Ought to produce some tasty meals.
"You've got some snazzy equipment," she commented as he began punching buttons.
"Always have," he smirked without looking up. She pretended not to get his meaning. God, she'd missed his sense of humor. Life had been bleak without him there to make fun of it.
"Well, it's nice to know my standard of living's gone up a little. You wouldn't believe the crap I've been eating for the last few months."
"Sure I would," he chuckled. "I've eaten loads worse, kid."
"Oh yeah? Like what?" she challenged. She knew it was true but it had been too long since he'd told her a story. She had this intense urge to roll the last four years back, knock them out of existence. At this moment, her greatest desire was to lose herself in one of his wild, harrowing tales about life on the run.
"You want me to tell you about the most disgusting things I've ever eaten? Over breakfast? Did they replace your intestines with Teflon, Jack?"
For the first time, ever, a reference to her injuries actually made her laugh. He watched her with an odd smile on his face.
"I have missed that sound," he told her.
She wiped at her eyes, suddenly feeling serious. "I've missed having reasons to laugh."
Riddick stepped over to her and crushed her in a swift, fierce hug. They stayed in the embrace, unmoving, until a tone from the food prep machine informed them that breakfast was ready at last.
He released her and pulled out two plates of steaming food, carrying them to the small table. He'd coded in all of her old favorites, she realized with a pang. Scrambled eggs, sausage, grilled pineapple... This was going to be the very best breakfast she'd ever had, she suddenly knew.
At first they ate in complete silence. Jack couldn't decide which part was better, the food or the company, and she couldn't take her eyes off of him. He seemed to be having the same problem, she noticed.
"I warn you," he told her between bites, "most of our meals aren't going to be this good. I just wanted to start things off nice."
"Well I appreciate it," she answered, grinning. "So where are we headed?"
"Gotta drop off a few crates on Troubadour, do a little job there. We'll be there in about a week, and we'll be staying probably ten days." He shrugged, pouring himself some juice.
"A 'little job' takes ten days?" The Riddick she remembered handled "little jobs" in minutes.
"No, but getting you healed up will."
She wasn't at all sure what he meant by that. "Huh?"
"There's a good Regen clinic there," he explained. "I already signed you up. There's something you should know. They lied to you. You've never had a hormonal regulation implant. They only removed one of your ovaries and the other one's been working just fine."
"Those fucking bastards!"
Riddick nodded, watching her closely. "They could have arranged to have your uterus regenerated any time they felt like paying for it. Probably woulda done it if you'd agreed to sell me out, too. Doesn't matter. I can afford it. Kinda figure I owe it to you, anyway. It was my shitheaded mistake that got you plugged in the first place."
Jack sat back for a moment, no longer eating, no longer even seeing Riddick. It was all real, she realized. For the last four years, as her body changed and became more feminine, she'd felt as if it had been taken from her, as if it had become a stranger. She'd always assumed that the artificial regulator was the source of her hips and breasts and the other subtle changes she'd undergone. She'd even contemplated the possibility that the government had deliberately chosen to endow her with a hooker's body because that was what they intended her to become.
But it was natural. It was all real. It was hers!
"Wow," she whispered after a moment.
Riddick smiled and returned to eating his food.
"Shit, that means I'm gonna start bleeding again, doesn't it?"
"Bet you haven't missed that," he chuckled.
"I'll bet you haven't missed it either," she retorted.
"You'd win. You always did turn into a bitch right before you started--" His voice was cut off as a heaping spoonful of scrambled eggs hit his face.
"Asshole," she smirked.
He wiped the eggs off of his face, a feral smile appearing, and then lunged around the table. "Bet you're still ticklish!"
He won again; she was.