In Consequence

TWO


That night, he could hear her rolling around and thrashing on her makeshift bed. He was a light sleeper by nature, and her first whimper had him fully alert with a wicked shiv in one hand. He absorbed his environment quickly, and almost as soon as he registered his surroundings, he realized that the sounds were coming from the floor.

He put his shiv away and stepped silently to the ground. Making sure he was unnoticeable, he stepped over to his girl and watched her as she tossed and turned. She was having a nightmare.

Her hands flew to the collar around her throat. Riddick's impassive scowl merely deepened. He could see tears trickling down from the creases of her closed eyelids, and her incomprehensible muttering suddenly formed words.

“Riddick, no… no, no, get it off me, no!” She continued tugging vainly on the collar. Riddick supposed he should go and… comfort her. He didn’t realize that she was this afraid of him. He had been purposely intimidating at her house, and in the hours that followed, to be sure she knew her place. She needed to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, which one of them was in charge. Apparently he had driven the point home more firmly than he thought.

As he considered these options, he didn’t move. He just stood there and watched as her nightmare grew to a tearful peak. “Let me the fuck go!” she screamed, sitting up all of a sudden. Inside Riddick’s gut lurched, but he remained outwardly impassive. Not letting her know she had startled him, indeed, not even letting her know he was there, he remained standing in the darkness. It wasn’t as though there were any windows in the room, and, like always, he’d left the lights completely off all over the ship.

He knew that Jack was engulfed in a blackness that was so impenetrable, it had to add to her fear more than anything else. He contemplated turning on the lights to low, but cast the idea aside almost as soon as he thought of it. To let her know that he was standing over her and watching her as she slept wouldn’t exactly endear him to her.

He wondered why he cared. He supposed the ‘why’ didn’t matter all that much anyway. The fact was that he had claimed this girl as his slave, and he had to deal with the repercussions, whatever they might happen to be.

Jack rose to her feet. What did she think she was doing? He stepped back as she walked toward him—no, to the door. He had been standing in front of the door, and she wanted out for some reason. He followed her, being sure to step as silently as though he were tailing a mark. The last thing she needed was to hear him stalking her in the darkness. He kept his breath low and even, his steps measured, and his muscles loosely ready to move as quickly as might be necessary.

He watched as she slipped into the head. Instead of the expected sound of her peeing, however, he heard her retch.

After a few minutes, the toilet flushed and the sink ran. Should he reveal himself to her? No… best not to let her know that he’d been following at all.

It was a good thing that the lights were programmed to respond to his voice only. It wouldn’t do for Jack to leave the head light on and see his bed empty when she re-approached his room.

To his surprise, she meandered toward the center of the main cabin. What in all the worlds was this girl up to?

She sat in a seat that lined the hull. He could see tears staining her delicately stubborn cheeks and jawbone. He understood why she was crying, but he wished that she wasn’t as afraid as she was. In the same instant, he wondered why he cared.

“You’re such a bastard, Riddick,” Jack whispered in the darkness, wrapping her arms around herself tensely.

He started and stared at her. How the hell had she known he was there? He remained silent, waiting to see what she would say next.

“Why? Why did you do this to me?” she went on, angrily wiping her cheeks with a fist. “Oh, Imam, why did he do this to me? Allah, God, whoever the fuck you are, why? I don’t deserve this.”

She leaned back against the cold metal wall and continued her whispered conversation with herself in the dark. It was evident to Riddick now that she, in truth, didn’t know he was there. He took this fact as a blessing and listened, trying to get inside his girl’s head. There was no way she would let him in of her own volition now.

“I know that I don’t pray much,” she went on, eyes thrust up toward the blackened ceiling of the cabin. “I understand why you would ignore me, but I just want an answer. What good can possibly come of this? Imam always said that nothing happens without a reason. What’s the reason here? What’s the point of me being a prisoner?”

She curled up in the seat with her head on an armrest. “I’m so scared…” she said. “Just, please, don’t let him hurt me. I can’t promise to try and do what he wants…. I can’t let him win like that. But please, please don’t let me provoke him into really hurting me. I‘m stuck here, God, and I don’t know what to do.”

Riddick’s mind was whirling as she fell asleep next to him, never realizing that he bore witness to her whole soul-bearing session with the Sick Fuck on high. Reflecting back on how he handled her claiming, he could see where he would have done better to be a bit… gentler. But he didn’t know how to be gentle! He was a psycho, a murderer. He accepted that part of himself long ago. As he’d said to her, he killed people for a living, and he enjoyed the fuck out of it. Rough and coarse was all he knew how to be.

Wait a minute. Who was the Master here, anyway? All right, maybe he could try and be less intimidating, but it was still his ship and she wore his collar, damn it.

Still… still, she stuck in his mind during the past four years for a reason. What that reason was, he couldn’t say. If he was the type of man to believe in fate, he would have said that they were meant to be together. He didn’t believe in fate, though. He believed that it was every man’s responsibility to control his own life as much as possible. It was the only way to stay on top of things.

~*~

Jack didn’t know how she got back to her little pallet on Riddick’s bedroom floor. She supposed she must have woken up and made her own way back. Surely if Riddick had discovered her, he would have woken her up, ragingly pissed. It wasn’t against the rules for her to leave his room, as far as she knew, but somehow she figured that Riddick wouldn’t have liked her walking around unsupervised.

What was so damn wonderful about her that made Riddick want to claim her the way he had? She didn’t get it. She was just Jack. She was nothing special.

She tried to force herself back to sleep. Riddick didn’t seem to be up yet. What time was it, anyway? Of course, night or day, it wouldn’t have mattered. There was no morning sunrise for her. No more attempts at serenity, with Imam bustling around in the house fixing breakfast for them both. All gone.

She fought the tears and tried to put things in perspective. It wouldn’t do a bit of good for her to get stuck in a depressed funk. She didn’t see just how something good could come from her captivity, but it wouldn’t help to just sink in her mind and give up. She had to keep fighting. She couldn’t let him win that easily.

She snuggled down into the warm blankets on her mattress. The fact that he had given Jack her own space helped set her somewhat at ease. That was one of her main fears—that he would launch right into something sexual.

It was a viable fear, and she knew it. She was far from ugly, and in this situation, a situation in which she had no power, in which she was at his mercy—why wouldn’t he want to take advantage of that fact? It wasn’t like she could trust him, after all. And he did say he wanted to fuck her.

The vibrations coming from the ship’s drive room were somewhat soothing. She rolled onto her back and sighed. She would worry more later. She was still so sleepy, and her whole body ached for some reason.

~*~

Riddick turned the lights to low for when Jack woke up. He didn’t ever like to admit a potential mistake, but he was starting to have second thoughts about the whole thing.

He thought that he would want her completely helpless. He thought that he wanted her weak, as weak as she made him feel. But no—all of his planning was backfiring. He got her, all right, but at what cost?

He didn’t know what he wanted from her. That was his biggest problem right there. He simply didn’t know. He did know, however, that her fear hurt him more than he cared to admit.

Riddick didn’t know how to reconcile the conflicting parts of his mind. On the one hand, he wanted Jack. Needed her. She was part of him, a part that he had denied for four years. On the other hand, all he knew how to do was be cruel. He didn’t know a thing about kindness. He didn’t know about humanity.

Fry, through taunting him, had inadvertently tried to show him a window to that humanity, but she was torn from his world like everything else before he could truly grasp what she meant. And then this girl, this fucking girl, had to insinuate herself in between each imperceptible crack in his walls. She made him weak.

He figured that it was the least he could do to return the favor.

But he hated her fear. He didn’t know if he wanted her to trust him. Hell, he didn’t even know if he wanted her to simply smile at him.

If he had known that claiming this girl would lead to so much inner turmoil, he would have never returned to New Mecca. Ever. But he had, and he was stuck with the consequences of his actions—namely, stuck with a seventeen-year-old girl who hated and feared him by turns.

Fuck.