Talos 4:
The storm clouds, swirling angrily in the sky, threatened to douse the beach with a cold penetrative rain. The temperature dropping several degrees since she sat down on the cold stone wall, left her wondering how hard it would rain once the clouds could hold no more moisture.
Inhaling deeply, she ran her fingers through her newly cropped black hair enjoying the cooling breeze as it caressed her skin and calmed the animal inside her. She removed her shades and blinked allowing the salty spray to soothe her tired irritated eyes and listened to the sounds of the sea.
Booming peels of thunder crackled in the distance as a darkened figure crept silently towards her carrying something glinting in the deepening sky.
She scrunched up her nose and rolled her eyes disapprovingly as she scoffed at the attempt at stealth. "You should know better than that Layne."
The tall figure dressed in black stopped dead in his tracks and began to laugh, a deep low chuckle that caused her to smile. "Had to try little sister."
She rolled her eyes and shook her head as she held her sunglasses in her hand, "I may be blind, but my other senses work just fine."
Wrinkling her nose he said with a lopsided grin, "Apparently."
"You need a shower. Did you just get back from Baba Salim's?"
"Yes." He answered coming up to sit beside her. He watched as her sightless gray eyes stared out into the surf.
Next to her beside her mechanic's boots and socks was a collapsible white cane and when he sat she was playing with the hem of her shirt. "Did you want something Layne?"
"Just wondering if you're OK." He told her plainly. It was a bad day all around for everyone and she was always the most affected by the ominous anniversary. He scooted towards her, his broad shoulders nearly as big as her father's and his face as gentle and loving as their mother's. She inhaled again and let deep vibrations his voice caused in her eardrums to calm her.
Inside she was a torrent of rage. She wanted nothing more than to explode. Hate and fear ran through her bloodstream and she hated those feelings more than anything except what she got from everyone else that day, pity.
"I'm okay." She said sighing sadly. "It happened a long time ago. You can't change the past."
He placed his hand on hers and sighed as well both looking into the surf trying to cope with the loss…
The school bell rang as Rafe and her sister Yasmine were standing in their uniforms waiting to go to science lab. Among the fifteen other students Yasmine was always the center of attention. Even at nine she was beautiful. Looking nothing like her sister Raphaella, she had the eyes of all the others and captivated them with her laugh and outgoing personality.
Rafe, stood in line, her long black hair braided down her back, her backpack perched on her right arm while her twin laughed at a joke one of her friends had made.
Letting her mind drift, Rafe felt a sudden change in the air, something wasn't right. She looked up just in time to see a dozen armed guards come running down the hallway pulse weapons at the ready.
"Up against the fucken wall." A deep voiced man said shooting both teachers and four students in the hallway running towards her and her sister.
She couldn't stop staring. She remembered the way he moved his head, the smell of his body and the sound of his voice. His arms had tattoos on them and she memorized every detail, just like her father had taught her to do.
"Get down." she said grabbing her sister by the hand.
Students began running which Rafe knew from the daily lessons with her father, was a big mistake. Stay down when the dying starts Rafe, you'll live longer kid. He had told her… The gunman who had frightened her so much looked at her for a second and smiled, a smug knowing smile and she vowed if she lived he would feel the shiv she'd make deep in his back.
His gun went up and shot towards them and her eyes instinctively closed as she pulled Yasmine towards her and grimaced when she felt the sudden wetness and smelled blood.
"NO!" she choked but no sound came out. She gasped realizing the worst. Terrified she felt the hand in hers go limp and her heart began to pound knowing her sister had gotten hit. When she opened her eyes she saw Yasmine slumped against the wall….
Rafe's throat burned as the tears threatened to fall. Her eyes continued to stare into the murderer's as he blew her a kiss. She was covered in sticky blood and her hands fisted at her sides gave him a terrifying picture. "What are you looking at?" he growled staring back at her.
A dead man. She contended silently.
"Find the Riddick girls. They're worth more to me alive." He shouted looking at the other students. He had no idea he just killed half his payday.
Her face never forgot how his eyes darted towards the dead girls then through the crowd scanning it for his payday or the horror when an hour later after no one gave her up, the explosions by the security forces through the large windows behind him.
Speaking in Arabic, Rafe heard the gunmen harried and disorganized, frantic to find them. Then, as she sat huddled near the window against the body of her dead sister, praying for rescue, she looked up just in time to see a large flash grenade explode just over her head.
Windows above her blew apart and the last image she saw before the brilliant light and the pain in her head was the leader fleeing through a side door.
"Stop blaming yourself for not being there." She told her brother when she sensed his hand tensing in hers as he looked at her. He had been at home nursing his injuries from a more than brutal training session with his father and Baba Salim the day before. "She died quick, that's the way we all should go."
He laughed and told her she sounded just like their father. She smiled and took that as a compliment.
"It was seven years ago. I learned to accept it. Stop treating me like I'm gonna break." She told him keeping to herself the memories that had surfaced giving her the recollection of why the school had been attacked.
Fucken Mercs… she thought.
"It's hard Rafe." He told her looking straight ahead. She turned towards him and touched his cheek, her beautiful face looking at him with white sightless eyes.
"I know big brother. I know." She said putting her glasses back on and grabbing her boots. She walked extending her cane and left him wondering in silence how she got through the day and how he couldn't.
Dr. Raphaella Janis stood in the hallway of Jack and Riddick's beach house looking grave. Not only had she had to confirm the death of one of the twins, but the maiming of the other.
"I'm going to kill those motherfuckers one at a time." Riddick roared. Jack held him back as Kalifa and Salim brought Rafe back bloodied and silent.
His anguished cries of pain echoed throughout the large fortified beach house as her screams of pain abruptly ended causing her father already devastated by the death of one child, to fall to his knees in despair weeping uncontrollably. No one dared call him weak at that moment, Salim especially, knowing that pain all too well.
It took nearly an hour for Janis to rouse their daughter to full consciousness. The shock of her sister's murder and the massacre of the twenty students around her was so traumatic that she just sat silent, a heavy triage bandage covering her face.
It was so hard to be strong and Janis knew that she the only one that could have withstood the rage long enough to identify Yasmine. Choking down bitter tears she walked out of the room wiping her clean hands on a towel and walking to her friends, a sad look on her face.
"Janis give me good news." Jack pleaded her face tear stained as she ran her fingers through her hair.
Riddick stood behind her, holding her in a protective embrace his jaw set in a hard line, silent and grave.
"Good news is that Rafe is mostly unharmed, physically." She said and the relief was instantaneous.
"Mostly?" Riddick snarled speaking up louder than she would have liked to hear. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
He had Jack by the waist and rested his chin on her shoulder feeling as if he was going to die inside. Everyone including Janis felt so acutely ripped apart at the loss, and even with Layne at their side standing silent and grave, having watched his father fall apart and saying nothing, wanted the worst to have spared her.
That was never going to happen, not with the injuries that she sustained.
"Riddick. They used flash grenades, through that window we found her by. It killed three…men… and she bore the brunt of the pyro. The explosion was too close to her."
Jack tensed in Riddick's arms. "What are you saying?"
"The cuts and lacerations I can heal, but her eyes are something else." She said pausing to try and fortify herself for the rage they held so tenuously inside. "She's blind Jack. The grenade's pyro fried her lenses."
Riddick sat in the pilot's chair and rubbed his face in frustration. In the dimness of the bridge he growled remembering that day like it was yesterday. He remembered how strong Jack had been, how strong Layne had been, how he tried to keep it together but after seeing the mess they made of his little girl and what they did to his other little girl, he lost it.
He looked down at his knuckles and remembered how he put his hand through the wall and kept punching it until Kalifa and Salim had to pull him away, how his arm ached and felt leadened at his sides and how his eyes and throat burned with pain and sorrow and how he wanted to let the animal take over and raze everything in sight.
"My son," Salim had said running into the gym where he and Jack had been working out. Immediately he knew something was VERY wrong. "There has been another attack. They have taken the school. There are fatalities."
The color drained from Jack's face and he remembered grabbing her hand and running to a waiting car.
Riddick's chest felt tight and he hated that feeling. Images flooded his mind.
He remembered watching Jack run to their daughter's side and the relief seeing Rafe alive. Then he watched as Jack began to scream when Rafe, bloodied with the blood of her sister all over her and a bandage around her head covering the cuts on her face, shaking with unsurpassable grief.
"Rafe?" she said frantically touching her, "it's mommy, where's Yasmine?"
But Rafe said nothing just sat there quiet and still.
Time slowed for him when the medic attending to her injuries pointed towards the sheets that held the ones that didn't make it.
The cry that came out of his wife's mouth mimicked what he felt inside. Riddick's hands fisted at his sides. He hated the anniversary of the massacre,
"Here's her file." Riddick growled standing in a posh office on Talos Prime.
A dark skinned man sat behind a desk looking at the thick folder. After almost an hour the doctor finally spoke. "This last scan is good. Her optic nerves are intact. Generally they do not regenerate."
He remembered wanting to laugh out loud thanking his mother and father for giving him Furyan DNA.
"So," he gruffed trying not to get his hopes up. "Can you help her?"
"It'll be expensive." He contended looking down at the scans and putting them up to the light, the optic scans specifically.
Riddick didn't care what it cost.
"Have you ever heard of a surgical shine?" the doctor asked looking at Riddick sitting back with his goggles on.
Riddick started to laugh, loudly and unrestrained,the irony so acute he could have cut it with a knife. Suddenly the man behind the desk became nervous. Then Riddick took off his glasses and smirked at him.
"I guess you have then." He stammered.
Suddenly serious he spoke, "Will she see again?"
Closing the file and patting it. "Yes, but as you know it will be painful."
"Do it." he growled standing up. "Seven years is enough punishment. No one should have to live in the dark."
Riddick stood and shook hi hand and took the file. His face, unreadable remembered his first days in total darkness.
"I'll be there in a week, at this hotel under the name of Grove."
Riddick sat punching in the landing coordinates and sighed pushing down the gut wrenching sense of pain and loss. No one should ever have to bury a child. He tried to tell himself that he had to let it go, that his other children and his wife were still alive and that they needed him, but on that day, it was damn hard.
"Soon kid, soon." He promised aloud as he saw his home come into view and the clouds swirling in the distance.
2
Jack Riddick sat with her knees up listening to the rain. The steady stream had all but soaked her legs and bare feet and she seemed to be numb to the slight chill in the air. She'd been sitting on their private balcony for the majority of the afternoon crying. The sky was mirroring her mood and her face, long since dry from her tears, looked tired and weary.
"You're face sprung a leak." A deep gravely voice crooned from the door behind her.
Riddick. She sighed relieved that he was finally home. She hated being alone on this day of days.
Still looking out into the increasing twilight, she replied. "Didn't notice."
Riddick hated this day more than any other because it seemed like the entire family fell apart. Yasmine's death hit them as hard as it did the other families mostly because it was revealed that some of the insurgents escaped. More so since Riddick knew that something more was underneath the surface.
At the time, a semi civil war, more turf war than anything else had come to Talos 4. Riddick and Jack had known a sort of honeymoon-like life, the beach, the kids, her garden, the life they had talked about so often. Since that day on the beach, when he put his face against her stomach and talked to the girls laughing and carrying on like a man in love, he had shoved forcefully the thoughts that pulled at him.
When was it going to all crumble around you? You don't deserve her, she's too beautiful, too amazing, too lovely for a monster like you…
Bliss lasted ten whole years. Then his nightmare came true. One day he had two beautiful girls who adored him and made him so proud, then in a brief second, he had lost one the other marred forever with the darkness that he couldn't stand.
He had done as much digging as he could about whoever could have been behind the massacre, vowed he'd live long enough to kill them one at a time slowly succumbing to the monster once again, then make it up to his daughter, because she survived.
He removed his goggles and enjoyed the dimming light. He was home, and home was where he belonged.
Home was where he was loved.
Home was Jack.
"This is always my favorite time of day." He said kneeling down in front of her and wrapping his arms around her. "You're cold."
"Missed you big guy." She said inhaling his scent and sighing like a cat lapping up the finest creme. "You just get back?"
"Dropped my coat on the bed and came straight to you, just like I said I would." He said pulling her into his lap. "He looked at her file."
She nuzzled his neck and smiled when he growled in response to her touch. She still looked seventeen and no where near old enough to have a grown son and daughter. Furyan DNA was amazing. They looked no older, and were just as strong.
For every five years Kalifa and Anne aged, Jack and Riddick aged one. She looked as spunky and sexy as she did when he pulled her into his lap on her 17th birthday and damn if he didn't want her now…
Mm. Damn Jack… he said smiling, knowing soon she'd know just how happy he was to see her. He could never get over essence de Jack, or that damn fine ass.
Even after almost eighteen years, she still felt like a horny teenager when he'd touch her. He chuckled realizing that she was just as happy.
"Missed you too Jack." He said groaning against her playfully. "You smell good enough to eat."
Stroking her back, soothing her, she spoke in a voice he hated to hear. It was the defeated, sorrow filled tired voice he'd come to recognize. It didn't happen often and always on that day. "Can he help her?"
He hoped that one day he would replace that voice with joy again. He purred because he felt her breath on his neck. He never got enough of that, even when he'd been with her and only her for all those years.
All those years. Damn I'm a lucky fuck! he thought to himself as he smiled.
"Mm, Jack." he said seductively eying the door."Yes, and no."
She stood up confused. "I don't understand. That was the whole point of you leaving. Did he tell you he can do it, or not? She can't take another disappointment."
He laughed getting up. He was still in his traveling clothes, black jeans, vintage Earth, black wife beater with long sleeves, and his medallion around his neck. Whenever they were separated she would give it to him, to remind him she waited for him when he got back.
Being with Jack, he always would tell her you can't forget. But it made their separation easier to handle, at least for her and sometimes for him. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her until she pulled back disoriented and wanting. "Remember her favorite question?"
The memory of watching a seven year old Rafe and Riddick made her smile, her hand flying up to her thoroughly kissed lips.
Sitting on his lap while he played with her long braids, she would pull off his goggles and stare into his silvery shined eyes. She would cock her head inquisitively and marvel and how they glowed in the twilight and how he would seem more animal than human. It seemed to calm him to see her so unafraid of him that way, not wearing the contact lenses that made him look like everyone else.
To her he was special… and that he loved most about her. She was like Jack, she accepted both sides, the human and animal and considered it normal.
Daddy?
Yeah squirt?
She always started the conversation off that way, always smiling and staring at his eyes.
Where can I get eyes like that?
You gotta kill a few people…
He would always laugh remembering Jack asking him the question, bald and inquisitive on the skiff.
I can do that…
You don't wanna do that squirt.
He would look at Rafe, trusting and so open looking at him willing to do anything to be like him. He would wag a finger and scowl telling her it wasn't a good thing to kill people.
That's why you train everyday?
Yeah kid.
Can I train like that so I can kill people?
No.
Why not?
You are too beautiful to kill people.
He would see her blush, feel the flush in her skin cause she sat so close to him when they would go through this mantra together.
Mommy's beautiful, she killed people.
They tried to kill her.
Then teach me so I can keep them from killing you.
(pauses) Okay, but you don't need eyes like that to learn.
I love you Daddy.
Love you too squirt.
That conversation was repeated so often it became a little private kind ofthing between the two of them, bringing them closer, even after Yasmine's death. There came a time even later on when she was too big tofit on his lap where she would taunt him on the mat, and he'd let her know that even as fast as she was he'd still kick her ass.
But every timethey wentthrough it, he knew that this coverastion had it's purpose,he was keeping her from falling inward, like he had when he found her mother. He was giving her the tools she'd need to survive.
The memory of the dialog Jack had with him on T2 had been a bedtime story from as early on as the cradle and Jack smiled. Their thing was so precious to watch that often she'd stand in the darkness and observe them. "Your kidding."
"No," he said walking her inside, never once releasing her from his arms. "He's coming in a week. We'll need Sasha and Janis to be ready."
"You realize," she said sitting him on the edge of their huge bed, "you'll have to train her all over again."
He did and that was something he looked forward to. She was a good student, better than even her brother, fueled by an unconscious desire to never be weak. She was fast, and deadly with a shiv. She could use her other senses better than he ever expected.
"She'll do fine Jack." He said as she pulled his shirt over his head. "He says she'll see, and that's all I care about. Damn baby, hungry already?" he quipped kissing her neck.
Seeing her lover after a week apart and looking at his muscles so tight and hard made her arousal all the more enjoyable.
"Voracious, I crave meat and baby you're it. You be the judge there, you." she said lifting the long white and blue skirt up her thighs while his hands went after his favorite part of her anatomy.
"You smell good. I love that scent on you." he told her pulling her against his arousal and groaned when she grinded against him. Mine…
The scent he was referring to was his own on her, marking her. She buried her face in his chest and nuzzled him growling against his throat, the one thing he craved more than anything. She was his, and he loved her so much that when she did that after a long absence, he would melt and submit to her every time.
"You are wrapped around my little finger there big guy, you are sooo predictable." She moaned as his arms snaked around her waist as he pulled her onto her back. "You're easy."
"Don't tell anyone. I've got a rep to protect." He said with a lopsided smile.
"So you think this could be it?" she said as hope swelled inside her. He moved a stray hair out of her face before he kissed her cheek lovingly. "God, I never thought we'd ever see this day come."
His lips played with hers in a soft sensual exchange of affectionate kisses. "Me either. Now I just have to convince squirt that this is thereal thing." He told her trying not to get his hopes up too much.
They had so many false alarms and he could understand her not wanting to give Rafe false hope. In the past, the false alarms had been so painful and he didn't want her to hurt anymore than necessary. "Love you Jack."
"Love you too big guy." She said tugging at his belt and winking mischievously. "Now, looking at you right about now, someone is wearing too many clothes."
"I can fix that." He told her pulling her top off and diving into those perfectly tone breasts.
"Bet you can." She said giggling like a teenager.