He Didn't Come

It had been a few days since Jack caught up to him, and Riddick was still adjusting. He was happy, though, which was more than a little surprising. It was nice to have someone around who accepted him as he was, someone who didn’t fear or hate him. She was an amazing girl. He had respect for her. He knew she had to have been through some serious shit, yet she was courageous as all hell. Her escapade with Herman and the merc proved to Riddick that she had serious mettle. Any thirteen-year-old girl that would hijack a transport and chase after him in deep space was either nuts, or just as stubborn as Riddick himself.

She was so brave, so tough. And yet, though it was rare, sometimes her façade would slip and she appeared to be what she truly was: a traumatized child living on the run with a hit man.

Riddick did his best not to scare her too badly with his world. The last thing he wanted Jack to do was turn into his clone. He didn’t foresee that becoming a real problem, though. After she killed the merc, she didn’t speak about it once. Riddick supposed that she thought talking about it would make her seem weak, and she was hell-bent on being as strong as Riddick himself. It worried him. She was just a kid; she shouldn’t deal with such a burden on her own.

Finally, after retrieving a couple of sandwiches from the tiny refridge, he asked her about it.

“I’m fine,” she replied, sounding surprise at the question—but the surprise seemed forced to Riddick.

He looked at her sternly. “Don’t lie to me, kid. Spill.”

Jack shrugged, setting down her sandwich. “Really, I’m fine. Nothing much to say about it, that’s all. Merc’s dead. Big deal.”

He rolled his eyes in the dim light. “Don’t bullshit me. You killed him.” He caught the slight wince as he drove home the words. Aha, so she wasn’t the nonchalant bitch she tried to be. “You’re not a big bad murderer like me. You’ve lived some shit, yeah, but nothing can prepare you for your first kill.”

“Well, what about your first kill?” she challenged. “You saw mine. I don’t know shit about yours. Why don’t you tell me, if you’re so into honesty about feelings?”

The smirk she had on her face grated on his nerves, so he evaded the question. “Nothing much to much to say about it. I was fifteen. This guy was giving me shit about something I supposedly stole from him—he was right, by the way—and I took a metal trash can lid and started beating the shit out of him. He died the next day. Head injuries. I was never caught, so why bother about it?”

Jack shot him a triumphant look. “You see? No big deal. You’re not my shrink, Riddick.”

Riddick took another big bite of his sandwich, chewed thoughtfully, and said, “I just wanted to make sure you were okay, that’s all.”

Sarcastically she fired at him, “Aww, worried about me?”

“Someone’s got to,” he shot back. “You sure as hell won’t worry about yourself.”

Jack blinked, with genuine surprise on her face this time. He wondered if anyone had ever told her that they cared enough about her to actually worry over her.

Her tough-guy face reappeared and she asked carelessly, “What’s the point of worrying? Shit happens anyway, so why stress over it? When something goes wrong, I deal with it. When it’s over, it’s over and I move on.”

Riddick identified with her logic. It was the same essential reasoning he applied to his own life. He knew that if he pushed it with her, she’d push right back, into places he had absolutely no desire to go poking around in. But still….

“Well, if you need to talk about it, I’m here, okay? It’s not like I don’t have experience, after all.”

Jack grinned at the joke, and they both laughed. This is nice, Riddick thought. I haven’t had anyone to laugh with like this in... well, ever.


~*~


Dear Imam,

I am safe. I’m sorry for ditching you like that. I just couldn’t stay. I can’t live the life you want me to live. I know that I probably hurt you when I split after promising to stay, but I knew that if you thought I’d leave, you wouldn’t have let me out of your sight. You only want what’s best for me, and that means a whole lot to me. I don’t have a good reason that you will accept, so I won’t try to make any excuses for leaving. I’ll try to keep in touch.

Jack

“What do you think?”

Riddick nodded. “Works for me.”

Jack heaved a sigh and commanded the computer to send the message. “You’re sure this can’t be traced? I mean, if you get caught because of me….”

Riddick said, “Won’t happen. Trust me. I rerouted the server, so the letter will get sent to satellites in three different systems before it even reaches Ichar. Imam’s satcomm should receive it in a few days.”

Jack nodded and suppressed a yawn.

“You tired, kid?” She shook her head and Riddick shrugged. “Okay.” He didn’t see any point in ordering her to bed. He had no desire to parent her. He just wanted… friendship? Maybe.

She dropped off an hour later, and Riddick contemplated carrying her to the couch. He could always let her sleep, all curled up in the copilot’s seat. Nah—she’d probably slept in weird places most of her life. She deserved to sleep in a real bed, or as close to a bed as she had at the moment. The tiny bunk was his.

He quietly scooped her up into his thick arms, but as soon as he touched her, she woke up. “Don’t touch me, don’t fucking touch me! Stay away from me!” she screamed. Riddick was startled, to say the least. She went on, “Get the fuck off me. Don’t touch me! No!”

He shook her, less gently than he intended, and said, “Wake up, kid, wake up! Jack!”

Her eyed snapped open and she stared at him without seeing who he was.

“Jack, it’s just me. You’re okay. You’re safe.”

In a couple of seconds recognition slowly crept into her eyes, but in those couple of seconds, Riddick identified pure terror.

Jack threw her arms around him and burst into tears.

Riddick awkwardly stroked her prickly head, seeking in vain to comfort her. “It’s okay, I’ve got you. You hear me? I’ve got you. Shh.”

Her tears quickly disappeared and her tough mask slid into place. “Sorry. Killer dream.” Riddick heard the shakiness of her voice that she was trying to suppress with no luck.

He said, “Yeah, I’ll bet. All I did was touch you and you went psycho. You okay?”

Swiftly, too swiftly, she answered, “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m going to bed, all right?” Without waiting for his answer, she stood and stretched, making a too-obvious show of utter exhaustion.

Knowing it was an act, he acquiesced doubtfully. He didn’t know what else he could do. “If you’re sure you’re all right….”

“Oh yeah, no big deal. I get ‘em all the time. I’m used to them.”

Riddick suppressed a snort. No one ever gets used to nightmares. Eyeing her thoughtfully, he said, “I haven’t ever heard you scream like that.”

“Well, you’ve never touched me while I was sleeping.”

True enough. She normally went to couch when she got tired and rose whenever she wanted. Riddick was a quiet man, and he kept the lights dimmed constantly. Though he never woke her, neither had he ever made contact with her while she was asleep.

“Remind me never to do that again.”

Jack grinned. Again, it seemed forced. “Will do.”

~*~

When Riddick woke Jack up, she had been having a flashback from her time with Charles. After blackmailing her into compliance when she made the mistake of trying to pick his pocket, she found that he was nothing but a pimp for little girls. He ran the equivalent of a brothel, but every girl there was underage. Most were younger than fourteen. It made sense to her, in a sad kind of way. She was whoring; she finally joined the family business.

Charles would drug the girls if they didn’t cooperate, and Jack was drugged from the beginning. She had no intention of being anyone’s sex toy ever again. She’d dealt with that from Seth and Jason; she wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. Consequently, Charles drugged her as soon as she balked at her first 'customer.'

That went on for several months, and eventually she just clocked out. She disconnected her mind from her body and stopped fighting. She would just lie there passively while getting fucked three ways from Sunday.

By the time she was twelve, Charles was using her himself. He liked them passive, and Jack’s new meekness really turned off her old 'customers.' So she became someone else’s exclusive sex toy. So what? Sex was all she was good for. It was all she knew, and she accepted her place. Those twelve months working for Charles totally warped her personality. She became nothing but a mute robot, and the remainder of that year passed in a dissociated blur.

Cops raided one day. No one knew who tipped them off, but it didn’t matter. Social Services packed up all the girls and shipped them out to foster homes or detox centers. Some of the girls had become addicted to the drugs Charles pumped into their bodies. Jack was sent to a mental hospital.

Her thirteenth birthday approached, and as it did she gradually came back to herself. Whatever part of her that switched off got switched back on over the course of her psychiatric deprogramming. It heralded anger management problems (i.e. fights), random bouts of extreme depression, and intense post-traumatic-stress flashbacks that plagued her in the form of nightmares. Her shrinks muttered about progress and rehabilitation, not that it mattered to her. Once she realized that she was still alive, all she cared about was protecting herself and keeping the upper hand in any situation that came her way. Her personality came back, but her heart remained locked up somewhere. She wasn’t all that eager to set it free.

She unwillingly began to feel comfortable at the hospital, and to trust that she would stay safe there. No one could hurt her there. Everyone was damaged, just like her.

When she overheard a shrink talking to her social worker about releasing her to a foster home, she suppressed the anger for a few days. She needed time to think of a plan, so she pretended like everything was fine.

The betrayal at the hands of someone else, yet again, only reinforced her attitude of ‘kill or be killed.’ She couldn’t trust anyone. She would always be moved around, wouldn’t she? She would always be at the hands of someone else, doing someone else’s bidding, and being a victim, unless she did something about it on her own. As soon as she had a chance, she split. Since she was doing oh-so-much better, they were hardly watching her at all. Fools. The hospital was overcrowded and under-funded, so it made sense that the staff would devote all of their attention to the real problem cases. It was easy enough to run away. She simply walked off during some free time down in the yard. She escaped through a hole in the fence that none of the janitors had bothered to mend yet, spread her legs a couple of times for that Owens guy during their refueling stop, and boom. He agreed to program a cryo-locker for her and sneak her onboard when everyone else was still in cryo. She disguised herself as a boy once her passage was assured—her whoring days were over—and the rest, as they say, was history.

She hated dreaming. Not that the waking world was that much better, of course. Jack forced her past out of her mind and waited to fall asleep, and into the arms of another nightmare.