Ghost

Title: Ghost
Author: Kerri
Characters: Riddick, Jack, Vaako, and several OMC.
Pairings: Riddick/Jack
Rating: Mature
Archive: With permission only.
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended. I'm just using them for my own perverted sense of fun.

Feed back: Sure thing! Feedback is always helpful.

Summary: Can a small moment in time really change your future?

Authors note: I’ve been writing fan fics for the last five or six years, but this is my first venture into the world of Riddick. I've always agreed on the whole Kyra isn't Jack train, and this is my version of it. I hope you all enjoy.


1. Riddick.

Five years ago, I escaped a planet that was as animalistic as I am. Five years ago, I took two people off that planet with me. A holy man, who was looking for New Mecca. And her. Jack… Jackie… a girl, pretending to be a boy… just trying to survive.

The Hunter-Gratzner had crashed on a desolate wasteland. T2. Three suns… man, did they burn. Until, that is, the light went out, and something far worse than me came out to play. Ravenous nocturnal creatures that picked us off one at a time, until all that remained were the three of us. We escaped that planet in a broken-down skiff, only to realize we were dead anyway - there was no water on board with us.

We were picked up four days later. I was half-dead; the hole in my leg was infected and festering. Imam was muttering deliriously about his dead charges and about how the devil was within Jack, which was why she was bleeding - sins of the woman and all that shit.

And little Jack was unconscious, lying in between my legs and slipping further away from me with every breath she took. She was scared to close her eyes, but they slid shut anyway, and all I could do was watch her. Nightmares plagued her mind; images of what had happened to our dwindled numbers. Images of razor-sharp teeth snapping at her in the dark. She pressed closer and closer, until she wound up curled up against me.

“Where can I get eyes like that?”

Dark green eyes that were clouded over with fear; they were blind to my attempts to wake her, once she fell into darkness. However, something else was working against us too, and it wasn’t until later that I found out what. But I could smell it on her skin… taste it in the tears that slid down pale cheeks and across my fingers.

Her scent, both blood and fear, seeped into my skin until it became all I could smell. But underneath the blood and fear, was her skin; cinnamon and pepper and youth, and it filled my brain and curled up inside of me. She smelled… warm. It’s the only way I can describe her scent - it was spicy and warm.

Carolyn had been torn from my grasp on that planet; taken by what had hunted us. The look on her face before she was swallowed by darkness woke something in me. And that something held Jack close; tried to keep her dreams at bay. Carolyn was dead - Jack wasn’t gonna be. Fuck that.

The animal inside snarled and snapped every time Jack whimpered. It had only fallen silent once in this strange ride and that was when Carolyn was swallowed by the darkness. Now, it was straining at the leash and snarling at Imam every time he said it was his God’s will if Jack lived or not.

Hell no. I didn’t want to think about her dying… not now. So, I spoke to her in hushed tones, and she seemed to calm when I did. I told her about what I could see outside the windows and when that got boring, I shared some of my more interesting escapes with her.

It was a salvaging crew that picked us up in those ghost lanes; they pulled us into their ship, and the crew was waiting at the docking bay when the ramp slid down at the back of the skiff. All that echoed in the silence were shocked gasps.

Imam was lying on his side and staring at his prayer beads as they slowly clicked over one at a time. His face was gray, his voice no more than a whisper. Me, sitting upright in the shadows, with my eyes glowing in a predatory fashion, and Jack lying between my thighs.

Jack… Jackie girl… her pants were crusted with mud and blood, both red and blue, and her skin was waxy as she breathed shallowly. Her head rested on my right thigh, and she was curled up against me as close as she could get. When they saw us, they could only stare - I had the fingers of my right hand pressed against the thready beat of her pulse in her throat and a shiv tapping my left thigh as they stepped closer to us in the near darkness.

“Can you trust us to put the knife down?”

“I trust no one…”

It was then that an older man stepped into the gloom and raised a gun in my direction. He gave me no warning; he just pulled the trigger. I growled when I felt the sting of a dart, and pulled it out of my throat with a grunt. He lowered the gun and stepped slowly towards me, even as I struck out weakly with the shiv. Lack of food, lack of water, and the loss of blood combined, and I snarled softly as he simply knocked the shiv out of my hand, and knelt at my side.

His fingers touched Jack’s throat as my own hand fell away, and the animal inside howled as he plucked her from my now useless grasp and hurried away with her in his arms as I slowly slid sideways across the wall and hit the floor with a bone jarring thud.

Hands roughly inserting a drip line into the back of my hand. The animal howled even as I snarled again, but the glint of a hypodermic still flashed, and then it all went black for me. I was out for two days, while they fought the infection in my body and fixed the hole in my leg.

I woke to semi darkness; to the beeps and pops of medical machines that pumped medicine through my veins, and kept me in the land of the living. The man who had shot me with the dart was standing over me. He didn’t even blink when my hand shot off the bed and wrapped around his throat. He just raised a sardonic eyebrow and waited.

I had to swallow several times before my throat would work, and I could only rasp out Jack’s name. The man stepped aside, and gestured to the bed behind him. He said his name was Darien, and his voice was soft and melodious as he grasped my arms and helped me to my feet. Jack was lying on her back, and covered with a sheet, her skin pale and clammy as a machine helped her breathe.

“Who drugged her?”

Turns out Johns had shot a large quantity of the same shit he was using into her body just before I'd killed him, to make using her as bait easier. It didn’t help that she was as young as she was. Darien spoke quietly; Jack had been fighting the Morphine in her system all along.

While on the planet, fear and adrenalin had counteracted the drugs, but once we were on that skiff, they hit her with the force of a blast gun at close range. Another day on that skiff, and they would have found her dead in my arms. His words made me want to kill Johns all over again.

Darien had sat with her and spoken quietly, and Jack had answered every question he had asked. She had no choice - he was a fucking Psych Doc, and he knew how to get the answers he needed. But she hadn’t given me up. My identity was safe for now. He called me Rick, because Jack had called out for a Rick… or a Riddick - if one chose to look beyond the slurring of her drug induced words - and that’s who I became.

We were stuck on that ship for a further two and a half months. Slow-assed piece of shit it was. I couldn’t leave Jack’s side - every time I did, her screams would echo through the belly of the ship and bring people running from all directions. Still blinded by the Morphine in her blood, she would lash out violently if approached by anyone but Darien or myself.

So I slept in the medibay, locking all but Darien out; I watched as she fought a war with the poison in her blood and then slowly began to win. Little Jack, whose head was as bald as mine was when she boarded the ship, began to heal from the inside out. Her hair began to grow back; the color of rich chocolate, and shot through with gold. It was thick and soft under my fingers.

I would wake each day to find my body aching from sitting in a chair by her bed, my face buried in her neck, while breathing in her scent. Her fingers would be linked with mine; hers delicate, my own much larger. While I would blink and try to wake up, the animal inside purred and stretched.

I had to remind myself time and time again about the razor's edge I was dancing on, but with Jack trapped in her dreams, I found I couldn’t leave her side. Darien figured her to be about twelve or thirteen, and I knew that I had over ten years of life on her.

She woke three weeks after we had been picked up by the ship. It was the hesitant touch of her fingers on my face that woke me, and I jerked awake and grabbed her hand; I saw trust and the silver of my own eyes was reflected back at me from green depths that had seen too much, too soon.

A woman named Yolanda along with Darien, had cut her clothes away while I had been on another table with a hole in my damn leg, and they had examined her closely. Darien would later admit to me that they thought the blood between her thighs had come from me raping her.

That earned him a punch to the face and a broken nose, the look of disgust on my face answer enough for him. Yeah, I’m a killer, but a rapist? Hell no. A pedophile? Even fucking worse. I’d cut my own dick off before I fucked a kid.

Yolanda gave Jack a pair of shorts and a tee shirt to sleep in, while the rest of the crew scrounged up some other clothes for her to wear. Jack - who was silent and still twitching as she fought the addiction she now had, thanks to Johns.

The two of us were moved down to the crew’s quarters where Imam now greeted Jack with open arms. Seems his God had given him an epiphany, and he realized she could be a part of his family, too. Not a replacement, but a gift. His God sure worked in fucked-up ways.

Her dreams were still wracked with nightmares, and her screams in the middle of the night woke everyone for the first few days after our move. That changed on the fourth day, though. I have always been a light sleeper, and I woke up the minute her feet touched the floor. She tiptoed out of the room she shared with Yolanda, and next door to the one I shared with Darien.

I watched her through lowered eyelashes as she shut the door behind her, and tiptoed to the side of my bed. She bit her lip as she stared down at me, and I wondered if she had balls enough to do it. She took a deep breath and tugged back the sheet that covered me, and then crawled into bed beside me. Turned her back to me, settled in against my side, arranged the pillow a bit, and then curled up and closed her eyes.

This mere slip of a girl had closed her eyes and turned her back on a man who had more blood staining his hands than she could fathom. Her breathing was light, so I decided to test how strong her trust in me was. I rolled over, slung a heavy arm across her waist, and bodily dragged her closer to me.

Again, she surprised me. She simply sighed softly, wiggled back further against me, and went to sleep, her fingertips dancing lightly across the back of my hand. Complete and utter trust. Something no one else had ever had in me before. But she did.

I woke when Darien did, and I watched the expressions that flittered across his face as he stared down at a sleeping Jack. When he cornered me in the mess hall later that morning, I could only laugh softly as he asked me what the hell was going on. Fucked if I knew, but what was I supposed to do? Fucking Carolyn - she had left something in me when she was torn from my grasp in the rain, and now I was left wondering what had happened to the stone-cold killer who had crashed on that planet.

“Riddick’s dead - he died somewhere on that planet.”

My words came back to haunt me in spectacular fucking fashion. Jack had curled up inside me, and she was hanging on with a strength that shocked me. In the week that followed her first night in my bed, it became a regular occurrence. She would wake from a nightmare, muffling her screams in her pillows. Then she would sneak out of her room and into to my own, where she would slip into bed with me, and curl up against my side until her shaking subsided.

I would wake at dawn as she slipped out of my bed, and she would hurry for her shower before the rest of the crew woke up. No one said anything to her for a bit, until Yolanda finally asked her why. I was standing in the shadows near by, and her answer is what changed our relationship permanently.

“I hate the dark… but I know I can face it if… if Rick’s in it.”

“Do you know him, Jack?”

“I know him well enough to know that the dark isn’t as scary with him there.”

“He’s older than you…”

“I’m not fucking him, Yolanda! Jesus! Like he’d look at a kid. Give him a little more credit than that. He saved my life. I feel safe with him.”

“Do you know who he really is?”

That caused my eyebrows to shoot up into where my hairline would have been if I had one, and I could only watch as Jack’s eyes narrowed, and she stepped closer to Yolanda.

“Yeah… question is, though - do you?”

“Only Darien and I know… Darien was once what Riddick is… everyone starts out as something else. His secret is safe.”

Jack had raised a sardonic eyebrow and laughed softly.

“Riddick? Riddick’s dead. He died on that planet. Rick saved me. And I feel safe with him.”

Later that night, as I headed for bed I paused by Jack’s shoulder, where she was reading in the mess hall.

“I’m goin’ to bed, kid.”

She looked up at me, and I shrugged a shoulder.

“You comin’ or what?”

Wide green eyes staring up at me in shock, and then a small smile crossed her face. She slept in the following morning, and I questioned my actions as she slept with her fingers tangled in my own. I wasn’t used to being around people, but being around her?

I had to be going soft - I liked waking to the feel of her fingers on my hand, or the soft hair, that was still growing, tickling my nose. The easy trust she had in me, which I knew was hard coming for her. Don’t ask me how I knew, because fucked if I know; I just did.

I figured she would follow me around like a little shadow, but she didn’t. She read a lot, and she spent a fair amount of time with the pilot of this hunk of junk. His name was Bear, and he was built like a brick shithouse. I looked dwarfed next to him.

Six foot six tall, and with arms like tree trunks, he pointed out the controls on the ship and the navigation system. Jack, being the proverbial sponge she was, soaked it all up. That was all right by me - Darien gave me a way of earning some credits, and keeping myself busy on the slow-assed journey to Helion.

I helped salvage for the remainder of our trip. Squirreled away every credit I earned doing that backbreaking work. And spent the nights half-asleep, with a kid who was growing up in front of me, asleep in my arms. Fuck… soft is too tame a word for what was happening in my head.

I knew I had to let Jack go, the closer we got to Helion. I couldn’t take her with me, and I sure as shit couldn’t hang around. But in all of my life, I never would have foreseen what would happen to her when I did leave. We landed on Helion, and we parted ways with Darien and his crew as we made our way to New Mecca.

Imam and I spoke quietly. He knew what I was going to do, and he whole-heartedly approved of it. While he was thankful that I had taken him off that planet, he didn’t trust me. Smart man. So I quietly went about gaining passage for myself. I stayed on Helion for three days.

The night I left, Jack slept silently by my side. The neck of her tee shirt hung down off her shoulder, and I found myself staring at the smooth skin under my fingertips as I ran them across her skin. Memorizing how she smelled and how she looked, curled so trustingly at my side.

I felt something inside of me that I hadn’t felt since Carolyn’s death. The frown that crossed my face would have scared any other man as I rubbed the heel of my hand against my chest. But not Jack. I knew the moment she woke; I felt it in the change of her breathing.

She rolled over to face me, and leaned up on her elbow. A crinkle appeared between her own eyebrows, and she reached up in the dim light and smoothed her thumb across my brow. The feeling inside of me got worse, and then she spoke quietly.

“Riddick? What’s wrong?”

Guilt. That’s what I felt. And it burnt inside of me like acid. I forced myself to lie - told her it was nothing, and to go back to sleep. So she did. And in the silence of the night, I left without another word. Shipped out, and disappeared.

Five years… five years of hiding. Then the Mercs came. I knew they would. One point five million credits… damn. Toombs was a sly son of a bitch, and when he told me what planet was hunting me, I knew. I could smell the guilt and fear that poured from Imam when I finally made my way back to that pristine planet. To the light…

He had revealed my location, so they could ask me to take up a fight that wasn’t my own. I laughed at that - no way, no how. Then he dropped the bomb, that made the guilt return tenfold, and sent me on a wild mission half way across the galaxy.

“So, you will leave us to our fate, just like you did her.”

Damn Holy Man, hit me in the one place that hurts, why don’tcha. I stood frozen in the window, my lower lip caught between my teeth. Green eyes flashed in my mind, and I prayed for his sake, that it wasn't Jack he was talking about.

“You mentioned.... her.”

I glanced over my shoulder at Imam, who had the good grace to look away. Seems I wasn’t the only one feeling guilty.

“She, uh... She went looking for you. People died. She went to prison. I ... I don't remember where. But it was a world so hot you could not survive on the surface.”

Crematoria. Young Jack. I closed my eyes, and tried to imagine what she had done - what she had become, to be sent to a slam like that. Fuck, I hadn’t even been sent there, and I know what I had done in the past. I had left her here to keep her safe from that world… safe from my world… safe from becoming like me.

“She thought of you as her older brother. She worshipped you.”

Holy Man just wasn’t going to quit though, was he? I finally turned to face him, and let a little of my anger out. Guilt, anger… and something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Fear. Jack… what the fuck had happened?

“You were supposed to watch her.”

Imam’s head snapped up, and he spoke angrily. The truth… finally…

“She never forgave you... for leaving just when she needed you most.”

Now that fucking stung like a bitch. Denial is a bitter pill to swallow, and it took me a moment to force the words out of my throat.

“Needed me for what, Holy Man? To teach her how to kill and to run and to be hunted like an animal? Why did she need me, when she had you?”

Imam’s guilt was a salty tang in the air, and when I spoke next, it was more snarl than anything else.

“What the fuck did you do?”

“A man asked for her hand in marriage… I agreed… she ran… he went after her with some men… she killed them, and then ran again. She was hunted down and sent to prison… if I had known… if I had foreseen it… I would never have had agreed to the bride price he offered…”

I could only close my eyes as I spoke, while trying not to picture Jack being hunted down like an animal.

“So you slaved her out… sold her to the highest bidder. How old was she?”

Imam spoke quietly.

“Fifteen. I thought it might make her settle down some... make her happy... if only I had known... ”

I swear on everything I know, if the shit that went down next hadn’t happened, I would have gutted him like a pig. But as it was, he died when the Necromongers landed and started throwing their weight around. Sick fucks, those ones. I got a free ride to Crematoria, courtesy of Toombs, and it was there that I came face to face with my past.

Little Jack wasn’t so little no more - and she was an animal named Kyra. Something was eating me on the inside though, even as I helped get her out of there. Something wasn’t right. It continued to eat away at me, even as I fought the head cockhead of the Necromongers and killed him.

He had throw Kyra upon a spike, and now she lay dying at my feet. This had always been my worst fear - that she would die because of me. Little Jack… the scent of her blood teased me as I cradled the back of her neck in my hand, and dragged in a deep breath.

In the moments that followed, dark green eyes flashed in my mind again. Even as I stared down at her, a new breed of fear, anger and guilt swam inside of me, eclipsing anything else I had ever felt where Jack was concerned. When I could finally speak, it was quietly, even though the animal inside me was screaming.

“Are you with me, Kyra?”

It was the third time I had asked her this in an hour, and she opened up light green eyes and coughed. I watched as a thin line of blood ran from between pale lips, and fought the urge to scream in her face.

“I was always with you. I was,” she vowed tearfully, staring up at me as I clenched my jaw.

I licked my lips, and gave her a careful shake when her eyes started to close. She looked up at me, and again, I spoke quietly.

“Kyra… where’s Jack?”

Her eyes widened, and I gave a sardonic chuckle even as she started to speak.

“Don’t lie to me, little girl… I know her blood… you might have her memories, Kyra, but you're not her… blood never lies, and I was soaked in hers for days. Where is she?”

Kyra laughed softly then, and spoke flatly.

“Right where you left her, Riddick. You knew before I bled though… what gave it away?”

“The fact you got a few things wrong - I won't ask again, Kyra... where is she?”

Kyra coughed again, and then smiled coldly.

“You left her behind once before, Riddick… now you’ve left her in an unguarded prison… chained up in the Boss’s private rooms… for the last two days…”

Kyra laughed again softly, and shook her head even as her eyes glazed over with death.

“Some savior you turned out to be….”

I let Kyra go as she fled in death’s embrace, and sat back on the chair behind me. My hand shook as I dragged it down my face as the full reality of what had happened settled on my shoulders and in my mind. Yet between my fingers, I watched as the Necromongers knelt at my feet, and my words came quietly.

“You keep what you kill…”

Vaako… the commander with the Mohawk rose when I did, and I could only stare at him for a moment, before I snapped out my first command.

“Get me back to that fuckin' shithole… now.”

"But... the Underverse, Lord Marshal..."

I narrowed my eyes, and spoke with quiet menace.

"The Underverse can wait - she can't. I won't."

Vaako nodded, and I slumped back down onto the throne I had killed for. Running a hand over my head, I closed my eyes, and clenched my jaw. If I had believed in God then, I would have prayed. I can’t help but wonder, though; was I about to pay for the sins of my past with Jack's blood? Or worse - her life?