He Didn't Come

Riddick noticed the cuts on her arm a few days after the nightmare incident, when her long sleeves rode up a bit as she was stretching. They looked very old, and may have been from the ship, so he didn’t mention it to her. He kept an eye on her for another week or so, but she seemed all right otherwise, so he dismissed it. A far more pressing concern was the girl’s mood swings. She could go from bubbly thirteen-year-old to mute specter in a second flat. When she got like that, she was just… distant. She was still present mentally, just not all there. He didn’t know what to make of it. She was happy, then ready to kill something, then exhausted, then hyper, then in the depths of some powerful, unfathomable depression, then happy again.

Worst of all were her silent spells. He remembered one from the skiff. It had worried him, though he would never admit it. She was just lying there, and her eyes were so far away. Riddick recognized the look and wanted to see what she was remembering, but he knew from long experience what happened when you interrupted a flashback.

She usually had no problem with physical contact. In fact, she seemed to crave it. She was impossible to predict at first, but gradually Riddick learned her moods and rhythms. He learned when she was volatile and when she was depressed, when she needed to be reassured and when he needed to give her space, and how best to handle each situation as it arose.

Asking her about is got him nowhere, of course. She would look haunted, but vehemently deny that there was anything wrong with her. While Riddick knew better, he also knew not to push it. When she was herself, she was great to be around. He was finding that he absolutely adored her. It made no sense to him. He was Riddick. He wasn’t supposed to have emotion, right? He didn’t understand why Jack affected him the way she did. All he knew was that it wasn’t going away anytime soon.

Three weeks into their time together, new cuts appeared on her arms. Her long sleeves hid them for the most part, but the first time one rode up, he saw fresh red lacerations winking evilly from her pale skin. Riddick didn’t hesitate when he saw her new cuts. He grabbed her and literally tore the sleeve of her left arm right off of her grey shirt.

“Hey!” she yelped. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Riddick didn’t answer as he noted the five deep cuts on the underside of her arm. They looked very recent, no more than a day old. At least one would need stitches. It was too near to the bend of her elbow to heal cleanly.

“Jesus, Jack, you got something you want to explain to me?” he growled, fury masking his overwhelming concern for the girl. Then he ordered, “Take it off.”

“What, my shirt?” she asked incredulously. “You can’t be serious.”

“Off! The pants, too. Got to check your legs. You have any track marks that I should know about? What else are you hiding, kid?” Riddick didn’t give her a chance to respond or comply with his demand. He just dragged her over to the locker that had the medikit stored inside and literally ripped her shirt right off her body.

He didn't consider her past, and the reason for her problems. He didn't think about all the ways she had been abused. If he had, he probably wouldn't have been quite so drastic. He would have thought things through a bit more. Ripping her shirt off probably terrified her, but he wasn't thinking about that. He was pissed.

There were more cuts on her other arm. He shoved her to the ground, not even trying to be gentle, and took out a suture kit and some bandages. “Where’s the fucking antiseptic?” he growled, pawing through the contents of the medikit.

Jack looked away, towards the floor, and slumped as she sat. She was going into one of her deep depressive states, where she barely moved and never spoke. Riddick wasn't going to stand for it anymore. She was trying to shut him out.

Riddick roared, “Jack!” She jumped, and life came back into her eyes. “What kind of shit are you playing with, kid?” he asked tersely as he sutured her cuts. “You better fucking explain this to me.”

She shrugged listlessly. “It’s just something I do sometimes. It keeps me… sane.”

“Sane?” Riddick snorted in disgust. “Yeah, self-mutilation is the pinnacle of sanity. Why do you do it, Jack?”

She didn’t answer at first, and Riddick waited for her to gather her thoughts. He understood that she was distraught, but he hadn't anticipated a problem like this. She had to have been through so much. What kind of a life had this girl lived?

In a moment she began speaking. “They didn’t find the cuts at the hospital. They wanted to ship me out because I started talking again. They said that I was improving.” She gave a wry, self-deprecating smile. “I just found a different way to deal.”

“Deal with what?” Riddick asked, keeping the urgency out of his voice by sheer force of will.

“Everything.”

Riddick wasn’t satisfied. Choosing his words carefully, he asked, “Why were you in the hospital?”

Speaking very slowly, she answered, “You know how moody I am? Well, before that I used to go all quiet. Like, not all here. Sometimes I still get that way,”

Riddick nodded as he dabbed antiseptic on another cut, thinking about how she clocked out on the skiff, and again on their rescue ship.

“When they found me I was like that all the time. After a couple of months away from Charles I started talking again. You know my freak-outs, when you wake me up and stuff? I got those then, but all the time. Eventually I found a way to control them.”

“How?”

She gestured to her arms with a jerk of her head, avoiding his gaze. Her voice hadn’t shifted from the same low monotone that she used when she was depressed.

“Who is Charles?” Riddick asked finally. After a bit of careful verbal prodding, her story came out in bits and pieces, in small phrases uttered in that damned monotone voice.

“When I cut, whatever’s wrong just kind of… goes away.”

It was the endorphin rush of the pain combined with the distraction of something else to focus on that allowed her to escape whatever hell she was reliving at that given moment. She didn’t know that. Riddick completely understood what it did, though. It kept her in the here and the now, which was all that mattered to her. Riddick accepted that, but there had to be a better method of self-control than cutting with a secondhand shiv.

Later that night, he finally got the kid was tucked away safely on her couch with her arms properly bandaged. In the process of doctoring her up, he noticed older scars. She hadn’t cut her legs, though. Ultimately, he hadn't made her take off her pants. That was going too far, and he knew it. He did, however, make her roll them up as far as they would go. He knew that there could very well have been some on her upper thighs, but hey, he did the best he could.

Riddick couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d told him about her time with Charles. Her trust meant a lot more to him, now that he knew her circumstances. But what had led her to the pervert? She’d only told him of her time as a child prostitute, not what brought her to it.

Those cuts… those scars… God. What sick God gave children that kind of life? She had been through some awful shit. It would take something seriously intense for someone as strong as Jack to slip so far, but she had definitely found the one thing that would tip her over. Hell, it would tip anyone over. She was in that silent dream-world for several months? What the hell went on in her head while she was there?

On impulse, Riddick moved to the computer, off to the side of the main console. He intended to dredge up her history, but realized that he didn’t even know her last name. He heard her telling Imam that she boarded in New Germany. He’d start there.

He typed, ‘New Germany Social Services.’ The computer thought for a moment before bringing up the main database. In the search bar, he typed, ‘foster care.’ He scrolled through the resulting list, bypassing informational web sheets. Finally he selected a link that looked promising: adoption listings.

He knew that unless there was a living guardian somewhere in the galaxy, every child put into care in Ichar was immediately placed up for adoption. She was thirteen now, so she was eleven or twelve when the shit with her pimp started. He selected the appropriate date and scanned, with no results. He regressed further and further, yielding no results, until she would have been about six. The names of the children placed up for adoption that year popped up, and he scrolled through them. He wasn’t positive that Jack was her real name. For all he knew she was still lying about that, though he doubted it. Since it was all he had to go on, he tapped on the single link labeled Jacqueline.

The information added up right away. Young girl, born on a space station that orbited New Germany, placed into the care of the government of New Germany at six years old. Placed in a group home with ten other children. Remained there until she was nine, before disappearing the same day as one of the other kids turned eighteen and left. Was found at twelve in an illegal brothel. Sent for psychiatric treatment. Ran away from the hospital at thirteen.

And is now traveling in the company of a dangerous contract killer, Riddick mused. Ironic.There were so many gaps in the story. He dug further into the website’s archives and found documentation from the time when she was first placed in government care. There was statement from the man who found her, as well as picture of the six-year-old child.

Mother a prostitute, father unknown. Cared for by her older sister for two years, also a prostitute. Sister disappeared. Jack was placed in custody as soon as she was discovered.

When planetside, she was enrolled in school. Early IQ tests showed that she was very bright. She didn’t have any discipline referrals. She was actually a model child until she disappeared.

He hacked into the restricted files and dredged up her medical records. When she was found, she was completely dissociated from reality. She would eat and sleep and use the restroom, but the rest of the time she would be curled into a protective ball and not react to a thing that went on around her. She wouldn’t talk or make eye contact. There was nothing.

She turned thirteen. She began improving. She finally began responding to her environment. She knew who she was and where she was. She remembered everything that happened to her during those trances, she just didn’t react to any of it. The reports said that she had been fully aware the entire time. She just turned reality off for a while.

Her spells apparently began soon after she snapped out of per permanent trance. They appeared to be some kind of post-traumatic-stress flashback. Though surprising in their violent intensity, they gradually grew less and less frequent. She was doing well, and discussion of a release date and foster placement began. Then she disappeared again.

The kid had definitely been through some shit. As for that three-year gap in her existence, Riddick suspected that it was even worse than her documentation indicated.

Piecing together what she had told him about Charles with what he learned from her files, he wasn’t surprised at the dissociated state she had been in. Used as a fucking prostitute at eleven, raped repeatedly, finally becoming her boss’s concubine? At twelve? Shit. If he was able to track him down, that Charles fucker was as good as dead.