Jack

Disclaimer: I own nothing… dammit… but I wouldn't mind a bit of Vin! All characters belong to someone other than me, except for those I use as filler.

Just a little Jack POV following their escape from the planet. I don't know yet whether or not I'll post the subsequent chapters… depends on the response I guess! Oh… this is like… my cherry popper fic, if you know what I mean…

Chapter 1 - Escape

Paris had no idea how wrong he was when he said those words to me about my parents, or how much he hurt me. True, I did seem to be travelling alone and in the guise of a boy (although Paris was already fodder for the darkness beasts before that little secret was revealed…. I wonder what he would have thought of me then?). But everyone has secrets. Y'see, I was not travelling alone when I boarded the Hunter-Gratzna. Yes, I was masquerading as a male, and yes, my cryo-chamber was not located anywhere near that of my companion. We had planned it that way. People are always quick to make malicious judgments about grown men travelling with little girls who call them "Daddy"…. even when it's legitimate. It was just simpler this way, and it certainly wasn't the first time we'd pulled off this minor hoax.

Papa and I had been regularly travelling as Father and Son since he rescued me at the age of four from my Mother, his wife, whom he married about a year after I was born. Despite our early separation, I remember my Mother very clearly. Pain tends to imprint itself sharply on the memory of the very young. Papa really had no clue how to care for a child, much less a girl-child. His first attempts at combing my hair were laughable. I can remember walking beside him along the beach on Riviera IV wearing nothing but a skirt pulled up to my armpits. I was seven or eight at the time. It was a couple years later, when his job as a colony geologist started to require intense travel that we decided I become "Jack" on a fulltime basis. It got us through checkpoints faster, despite our dissimilar last names. It had always been fun for me to be Jack, and it was what allowed me to remain with Papa, no matter what. When I hit puberty and things became a little more difficult to conceal, we thought we would give Jack a decent burial and let me be a girl. Our first attempt was a complete disaster resulting in a missed flight and about 6 hours for Papa in an interrogation room thanks to some nosy ship hand with a dirty mind. That night, Papa came back to our room with an athletic bandage and tossed it at me with a "sorry kid." The next morning I breezed onboard another ship with bound breasts and with nary a second glance in my direction.

From then on, I was always Jack in public. We traveled all the time. New colonies were popping up like pimples on a prom date and all of them needed the services of an expert geologist. We changed homes faster then Imam changes underpants. No joke. Most of my life was spent in cryo-sleep. At the time of the Hunter-Gratzna crash I was a full nineteen standard Earth years, having truly lived and experienced maybe fourteen of them, leaving me somewhat immature for my 'age.' Yeah. Cryo-sleep can be a bitch sometimes.

Papa and I always had a backup plan in case of our being separated from each other. He made me memorize trade routes, account numbers, names and addresses of a few trusted folks just in case. Accidents are pretty commonplace on space runs. The fate of the HG was certainly no extraordinary thing (planet of eclipse loving beasties aside). Crashes happened all the time. Shit, the HG wasn't even my first crash! It was, however, the first one I walked away from without Papa.

Papa. Even thinking his name now hurts more than anything. The entire time on that fuckin' planet I had to hold myself in. When Zeke was digging the death pits, before he became lunchmeat, he and Paris spent an awful lot of time talking about Johns and Riddick. They clearly admired Johns for his strength and his 'discipline.' Must be pretty nice to be able to get yourself centered with the help of a hypo, doncha think? Riddick's self-control, to them, was that of an animal. Patience and restraint as a direct result of an enhanced survival instinct, breaking out into bursts of crazed energy as needed. Whatever. All I know is the way it happened for me, waking up moments after the crash to discover I was trapped inside a jammed cryo-chamber, 100 thoughts running through my mind all at once, the most persistent one being "get through this!"

So I did. Not perfectly, not gracefully, not even with strength. But I wasn't dead.

Part of me wanted to believe that Papa would be proud. I had followed his advice to the letter. "Jack, my girl," he would say, "when you're caught in a situation you can't control, always try to get as close as you can to the strongest person there. You just might come out on top." He was always telling me shit like that… little lessons in life designed to make me stronger, smarter, more capable of survival then a puny little runt like me ever really had the honest chance of being. So I played it safe. I remained Jack, I remained young, and I played weak. That got me under Shazza's wing in the beginning, which was just fine with me. Being in the background always gave me a clearer view of the territory. When Zeke killed that man, I had the most horrifying fleeting perception that he was Papa…. he wasn't, but it still helped the realism of my reaction. Frightened, brave child, lost and with no one. Not entirely too far from the truth.

It certainly didn't take me long to pin Riddick as my only way off that friggin rock. A little teasing banter moderated by a clueless Fry, the subsequent 'hero worship' emulation… just to show I cared. These were simply small ways of getting him to notice me… of getting him to perceive my implied worth. I don't know if any of this would have worked if it hadn't have been for Fry in the end, but it certainly got me out from under that monster in the boneyard. A Father's lessons well learned. Shit, if I've interpreted things correctly, it may even have saved me from that hyped-up slag of a Johns.

I still don't know how Riddick figured out I wasn't a boy. Well.. I do know, but the thought of him being able to smell my blood is disturbing on too many levels. Now he's the one bleeding, piloting the skiff beside me with an intensity that frightens Imam a little and, frankly, excites me. I know he's dangerous. I know most people would call me a fool, but I'm planning to stick by his side as long as he'll allow. Stick with the shark like a lamprey, Jack… and so on. Dear Papa.

Imam's prayers, an incessant background hum for hours now, have stopped. Turning around, I see that he has fallen asleep, curled up in a ball. I have to smile… he twitches a little in his sleep like a puppy lost in a dream, and I wonder if he too is still somewhere on that planet. The quirky, contrary part of my brain perks up with… "damn, girl! If Imam and Riddick both left part of themselves back on that planet, maybe you're the only real survivor!" But even as I think it, I know it isn't true. No one left that place whole.

A spasm of sharp pain grips my gut. My chest constricts and my throat tightens involuntarily. Intense concentration is the only thing that allows me to maintain a modicum of control over my features. If Riddick is as perceptive as I'm guessing he is, though, my short breaths and altered pulse rate won't escape his notice. I'll just have to hope that he's distracted enough by the effort of piloting and controlling his own pain. Is he mourning Fry, I wonder? Johns perhaps? I couldn't help but let out a little snort of amusement at that thought.

Riddick glances my direction. "Y'ok kid?" He looked pale. I wondered vaguely just how much blood he'd lost.

"Yeah. I'm fine. You aren't looking that hot."

"Izzat so…" He wasn't being sarcastic though… thoughtful actually. Just how long had it been since someone had cared enough to notice whether he was doing ok?

"Why don't you set this junkheap to auto and let me clean your wounds a bit. We wouldn't want them to get infected, and god only knows what kind of shit those bastards had on their claws." Please say yes, please say yes… give me something to do with my hands to make my mind stop working in overdrive, at least for a moment.

Riddick sighed and shifted uneasily in his seat. "I'll be fine."

"Dammit, Riddick! Accept someone else's help for a single fuckin' time in your life!

He jumped a little at that. Damn. He must have been tired. I got out of my seat and went to the rear of the skiff where Riddick had stashed some water when he had prepped the ship the first time, the time he might have left us behind. Grabbing the water and quietly stealing one of Imam's many shawls to tear into bandages, I made my way back to Riddick. "Turn around."

Surprisingly, he obeyed, looking down at me with those wonderfully fathomless eyes as I knelt at his feet and started to gently peel blood soaked fabric from his legs. "Do you know what you're doing, Jack?" Somehow, his question seemed to imply more then it probably meant. Hidden in the words and the tone were both fear and longing. I recognized this, because those concealed desires were familiar to me, when I dared admit them to myself. I looked at him solemnly. I looked into his eyes, searching for the piece of myself I suspected I might find within them…

"Yes."

As he leaned back into his seat, finally relaxing and submitting himself to my touch and my care, I knew that, at least for a while, I would have to save my grief for Papa. It didn't matter. I knew he'd keep.

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