He Didn't Come

“Lights,” Jack called as she entered her apartment. The voice-activated lights didn’t activate. “Lights. Lights on, you piece of shit!” Of course, the lights kindly deigned not to respond.

“Perfect,” she muttered, tossing her sling purse on the small card table she used in lieu of a dining room set.

She took off her shoes and threw them in the corner. One of the dangerous heels left a dent in the wall, a loving companion to all the other dents she’d accumulated in the past few months.

“Been working at Nero’s long?”

At the familiar rumble, she froze. It wasn’t possible.

“About three months,” she answered carefully, looking all around her. She knew that as blind as she was in the darkness that shrouded her apartment, if the owner of that voice, with that dagger-like intensity, was who she thought it was, he could follow her as plainly as… well, as plainly as any pair of shined eyes. Hell, he could probably hear her heartbeat if he tried hard enough.

“Not a very nice place. Crowded. Hot.”

“Well, they were the only ones hiring when I got here.” She kept her voice calm, but not without effort.

Her unwelcome visitor rose silently and approached her from behind. She sensed the movement and tensed up, drew her shiv, and whirled around just as he reached out a hand to touch her shoulder. Jack’s blade hovered inches from his neck, but his rested against her collarbone. She hadn’t even felt him move.

“Get that fucking thing off my neck,” she ordered through gritted teeth.

“It’s nice to see you too, Jack.”

“I’m serious. Put it away.”

“Put yours away first,” the intruder countered.

“No.”

He asked in a reasonable tone, “Why not? I’m stronger and faster than you, and I have the bigger blade.”

"And you’re also in my apartment, uninvited. Move the fucking shiv.”

It was gone as swiftly as it had appeared. Jack concealed hers as well, and she sighed. “What are you doing here, Riddick?”

He feigned hurt with sarcasm and gusto. “Didn’t you miss me?”

“Don’t you even start with me.”

All mockery gone, he said seriously, “Jack, I never meant to leave you there.”

“Uh-huh.” She walked into her bedroom and reemerged wearing a pair of low-hanging sweatpants and a shirt with comfortably-long sleeves.

“I mean it. I didn’t have a choice.”

Her voice held venom she hadn’t intended to impart—quite. “Bullshit.”

“You don’t even want to know what happened?” he asked, returning to light mockery.

“What happened to the lights?”

“I set them to respond to my voice only.”

Jack groaned. “Damn you, Riddick! Fix them.”

She recognized the stubbornness in his voice. “Not until you sit down and at least try to listen.”

Jack snorted. “Fat fucking chance. Go get laid or something. I don’t want or need you here.” She was lying through her teeth, of course. For the most part, her inner self was leaping around and singing in a joyfully deranged voice because he was back. There was another part of her, however, that could do nothing but remember how it felt when he ditched her. Torn between the two opposing emotions, Jack nestled into her favorite form of non-violent defense: a quick, scathing tongue.

Riddick, however, appeared to have other ideas. “I think you need to listen to what I have to say.”

She felt some of her finely crafted façade slip when she yelled at him, “Just fix the fucking lights and get out of here!” She gasped when he picked her up with ease and threw her on the molding couch. She glared indignantly as he towered above her.

“You listen here, little girl. I went through hell to find you, so you just sit there, shut up, and listen. I came here to explain and even apologize, but don’t push it. Slam isn’t the best environment for promoting anger management and social skills, and mine are a little rusty.” At her shocked face, he nodded. “That’s right. There were mercs on D7, and after I saved your ass by hiding you in the closet, one of the mercs drugged me and shipped me off to Prison Moon. I was there for five years before I could escape. The whole time I was worrying about you. Five years is a long time when you can’t do anything but worry.”

Jack put aside her shock and tried to grasp her quickly fading rage. She reached for it almost desperately and retorted, “Yeah, five years is a really long time to wait, too.” If she couldn’t maintain her anger, then Riddick would win. She couldn’t let him know how she really felt. “I was sixteen or so when I realized you weren’t coming back. I only tried to run away the first three years, so I guess I had it way better than you did.”

Harsh sarcasm crept into her voice, and she relished it. Riddick began to answer, but she cut him off. “What was I supposed to think, Riddick? I waited and waited, and eventually I fell asleep. The next morning, a janitor found me. One, two, three, I’m in Chapel Hall. It was a girl’s-only home, though, so I wasn’t raped or anything. Thanks so much for caring.”

“Jack, it wasn’t like there was anything I could do about it while I was in slam!”

“You weren’t there! You promised me you’d always be there for me. I trusted you!” Jack stood and got right in his face- well, as much as she could, anyway. He was a full head-and-shoulder taller than she was. “You weren’t there. But you know what? I found out that I didn’t need you after all. I kept training, I kept working out. I learned to make my own shivs. I can take care of myself, thanks. I can take care of myself just fine.”

“So I saw,” Riddick murmured quietly.

Jack opened her mouth to go on another well-earned tirade, but his words caught her off-guard. “Huh?”

“I saw how you handled that guy outside. I followed you home from Nero’s. You didn’t do half bad.”

She flushed from his praise, but remembered that she was supposed to be mad at him. That wiped the smile from her face instantly.

~*~

Now that he had her attention, Riddick kept speaking. Sitting down on the couch, he said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. It took me five years to get out. If I could have escaped earlier, believe me, I would have come for you. You’re right, though. You did all right without me. Don’t know why I spent five whole years wondering if you were alive or dead. Wondering if you’d gone back into your silent psychosis shit. You know. Stuff like that. Not knowing where you were, how you were doing, what happened to you. Five years of being terrified that when I got out, you’d hate me.”

He knew she’d melt when he said that. “I don’t hate you,” she whispered. “I never hated you.” She sat next to him with her head bowed. “I didn’t know. I thought you ditched me.”

Riddick’s voice got softer. “Why would you think that? I wanted to see you the whole time I was gone. I missed you. I was wondering who was protecting you.”

“I figured that something happened, but that you’d be back. I waited for you to get me out of Chapel Hall for three years. But eventually, I stopped hoping. Imam said he hadn’t heard from you. I thought you’d dropped us both.”

“Oh, Jack….” Riddick stopped when he felt his throat beginning to close, an unfamiliar sensation to say the least. Big bad murderers don’t cry, damn it! He changed the subject. “Where is the old man, anyway? Why didn’t you go live with him like I told you to?”

“They put me in the system in Donli when they found me. He wasn’t my legal guardian, so they refused to grant custody. We kept in touch, though. I was gonna come live with him…” her voice trailed off.

“What happened?”

“He couldn’t afford passage, so I busted my ass for a sponsorship. It worked. I had a free ticket to Ichar Prime, departing on my eighteenth birthday. The day I was supposed to leave, though, Mrs. Simmons….” She bit off a sob.

Riddick said in a flat voice, suppressing any emotion, “Go on.”

“She told me that he was hit by a car and killed. I was supposed to go live with him and go to the community college, but that didn’t work, obviously. I came anyway, though. It was either get here somehow or work in a mineral mine my whole life.”

The holy man was dead. Riddick absorbed this news quietly. He would deal with his own feelings on the matter later. Right then, he needed to focus on Jack. He watched her eyes glisten with months of unshed tears, and admired the way she kept herself in check. She’d grown up to be a beautiful young woman. Her hair was a dark blonde, and cut to just past her shoulders. Her bangs were long. They continuously fell in her face, which Riddick found blatantly, and surprisingly, sexy.

He hadn’t known what to expect when he finally caught up with her. She had been a scrawny kid with scarred arms and a couple of inches worth of hair when he last saw her. Now she was a tall, slender young woman whose even features had somehow rearranged themselves on her face in the last five years to reveal a sharp beauty. Her inner ferocity had taken root and blossomed into a full-blown wildness, evident in her eyes and words. She was all that he dreamed she would grow to be, and more. She was strong and brave, to live alone in that part of New Mecca.

And she was also his little sister, for all practical purposes. He tried to shove the immediate attraction from his mind.

Riddick admired the muscle definition of her arms that he could see through the material of her shirt. The material clung to her lithe body, and he was trying not to hope that beneath her anger, she was aware of him in more ways than one. The hero-worship complex she had on him at first had faded, once she began to deal with her past. It had actually been a relief to Riddick. It meant that he could focus on helping her, without puppy love- or the non-sexual equivalent- getting in the way of her recovery. Now, however, she was fully grown and trying to hate him.

It wasn’t working, and they both knew it. He felt the same fierce protectiveness he’d always felt for her, and he could tell that she was wrestling with her own emotions on his return.

Riddick asked heavily, “So, you got to the third tier, got a job bartending, got an efficiency apartment with shitty security-“

“You’d have gotten in here no matter what,” she interjected, laughing lightly.

He shrugged. “Yeah, I know. Anyway. So… what now? You stay here?”

“Where else am I gonna go?”

“What kind of life you plan on living here, kid? Young woman, no education, living in a slum? You can keep bartending, I guess, but for how long? You’re temper’s way too hot to let you keep that job at Nero’s for much longer. Look at what almost happened tonight.”

Jack shot him an evil glare. “I’m fine.”

Riddick laughed. “I know you’re fine. That guy almost wasn’t, though.”

At the mention of the greasy prick staring up at her from the concrete, she smirked before bursting into a peal of laughter. “Yeah… I kind of took him by surprise, didn’t I?”

“Just a little. I was impressed. Who’d you get to teach you?”

“Teach me what?” Jack wanted to know.

“You know, to sense when you’re being pursued. To move that quickly. To take down a guy twice your size.” To be like me.

“Oh, that. I just practiced. I remembered everything you taught me. I also got a lot of data discs from Chap’s library.”

Riddick asked, “Chap?”

“Chapel Hall,” she explained.

“Oh. What kind of discs?”

She smiled. She still had a beautiful smile, he noticed. Her lips became suddenly enticing. He imagined briefly what it would be like to taste them, but immediately pictured her reaction. She’d been a victim her entire life, prey to sick, sick men. He would never join them. Little sister! Little sister! He was her protector, not her love interest, of all things. Despite her easy manner, her quick rage from only minutes before was fresh in his mind. She was still as volatile as ever. He wanted her to trust him again.

Somehow, he didn’t think that coming on to her would be the best way to facilitate that trust.

In answer to his question, Jack smiled devilishly. “Old war vids and martial arts films.”

Eyes narrowed, yet curious, Riddick asked, “How can vids replace what I can teach you?”

She answered him flippantly, “Big macho men killing people. Sound familiar, Riddick?”

He threw her a dirty look, which he knew she couldn’t see. “Sounds nothing like me. I’ve got skill. I’ve got finesse. And for another thing, I’m also real. Those vids were made hundreds of years ago back on Earth. It was all done with stuntmen and special effects. This is all genuine, here,” he said, gesturing to himself. She can’t see, idiot, he thought. “Lights to low.”

She flashed him a grateful smile. “Thank you.” Seeing some scars on his arms, she gasped in horror, “What the hell! Riddick, were you…?!”

“Huh?” he asked, puzzled. Following her gaze, he saw that she was staring at the relatively fresh scars on his upper arms. Now that he looked at them from her perspective, he could see that they looked somewhat similar to one or two of her really deep cuts from when she was thirteen. It vaguely amused him that she suspected him of cutting. He was thankful she couldn’t see the big one on his chest.

“There were some guys there who thought they were some hot shit. Their ‘leader’ was a real billy badass, you know?” Jack nodded, and he continued, “So they kept giving me shit, and giving me shit, and finally, they jumped me. There were three of them, and two were in my face. I was dealing with them, and the third one- a really little guy- came at me from behind with a big-ass razor.” Riddick chuckled. “He was a fast little fuck, I’ll give him that much.”

Jack asked, “But what did you do to him?”

Riddick answered, shrugging. “What do I always do?”

“You… oh.” She looked slightly startled, but only nodded. He knew that she was perfectly aware of who and what he was, and she needed to get reacquainted with the facts of his life.