Heaven Freezes, Hell Closes

By Dejah Thoris

Chapter Six: Phaidor's Tale

I still think of what she gave up for me. Her life stolen away. Needless and in vain. Given for a killer. I might not be what they paint me as, but I'm no saint.

A street thug turned professional killer. The nightmares are still a plague, haunting, intense. Chipping away at my hard earned sanity. I struggle through each night with the screams of so many echoing painfully in my head.

Sweat beading. Tears welling. It's a never-ending cycle that tears at me from within, bringing back that moment when her life was ripped from my fingers; pulled from my hands. To watch someone die for you. To make the ultimate sacrifice for you. I wasn't worth it. Ever. Not for me.

It should never be for me, but it always ends up that way. God's cruel trick, maybe. I took so many lives, so now it is my fate to have the lives I cherish taken from me.

How many senseless deaths before it ends? I ask that one bitter question over and over of myself. It's become a sinister mantra, pounding a painful, repetitive beat into my mind and soul.

Sigma 3 took a kid and made him a man. A bad one. The worst kind. In an environment of killers, thieves, rapists, the worst of the worst, I became a man. But there was more to the surplus population than the worst of the worst. There was the best of the best. And the normal guys, with normal families and normal kids waiting for them in some distant location.

Slaving away in the desert heat under the tyrannical glare of the Company's worst, I helped beat the drum that drove them to work in the confining and dangerous mines.

Standing by and watching the deaths of many, now I am to be punished in the same way. For the first time, it's my heart crying.

#

Stunned. Good word for the expression decorating Phaidor's face as Riddick's news was driven home.

Riddick smirked and shook his head slowly, laughing quietly under his breath. He approached her slowly, deliberate, rasping the palm of his hand over his scalp slowly. Riddick wasn't entertaining gentlemanly thoughts of sleeping alone. He wanted Phaidor. He hadn't made a secret of that. Judging from the way she'd reacted on the elevator to his kiss, she wanted him just as badly.

Her green eyes were slightly narrowed, jaw clenched tightly. She looked like she was expecting an all out assault. He didn't want to disappoint her.

A noticeable shiver coursed through her as he stepped into her space, tilting his head slightly to the left, studying her. He slid a rough fingertip along the firm line of her jaw, the callused pad rasping along her smooth flesh. She swallowed hard, sucking a trembling breath between her lips and he dipped his head, inhaling her scent, touching her with just the one finger now trailing down her arm.

"Uh, Riddick..." Phaidor's words drifted away, unheard, as Riddick leaned close, shifting nearer so his chest was against her breasts.

"What are you doing, Riddick?" Phaidor questioned quietly. He could hear her heart pounding like a drum. Its tempo matched his own.

He lifted his rough hand to her throat, tracing a random pattern on her flesh before sliding his fingers around to cup the side of her neck, his thumb moving slowly back and forth across her fluttering pulse.

"You're a bright lady, Phaidor. Why are you asking questions you already know the answer to?"

A quick sequence of unidentifiable emotions rushed over her still features before she locked a strangely cold gaze on his. The deep fjord green of her eyes had all the heat of Retsuje's freezing surface, and Riddick felt a strange numbness grasp his heart and squeeze. His thumb stilled.

Keeping her eyes locked with his, Phaidor reached up and wrapped her fingers around Riddick's hand where it rested on her throat. She pulled it away from her skin and then released it, and he let it drop to his side.

"I will take the couch," she murmured, her voice a soft burr of sound as she took first one, then two steps back from him.

He watched her turn slowly on her booted heal and head down the hall toward the bedroom. Confused by her sudden attitude change, he followed her.

Phaidor was taking an extra blanket and two of the pillows off the queen sized bed when he glanced through the doorway. She didn't look at Riddick as she passed him on her way back to the sofa. She quickly made her makeshift bed, stripped down to her long underwear, and climbed in.

Riddick felt thoroughly dismissed and wondered why. Everything had been going fine, and then she'd retreated into a neat little shell that didn't seem to have any room for him.

Was she playing hard to get? He doubted it. Looked more like attack and defend to him. And he was attacking. All her defenses had shot up. Odd, considering her reaction to him in the elevator. His instincts told him to drop it, but she'd stirred his curiosity now.

Later, he told himself as he stepped into the bedroom. He left the door open as he peeled off his own extra layers then crawled onto the large bed. The sheets were cold and he was more thankful for his long underwear than he'd expected.

Riddick had been counting on company to keep the bed warm.

#

Riddick awoke in the dark. Except for the strip lights in the floor marking the doorway to the hall and the bathroom the darkness was complete.

Listening carefully, his sensitive ears picked up the rustle of blankets and clothing from the living room. Phaidor, perhaps as restless as he was. She was a mystery, and he'd always been tempted by an enigma.

Unable to repress his curiosity, Riddick slid out of the bed, his bare feet making no noise on the thick carpeting. Retsuje might be a freezing wasteland above ground, but the mining company that operated its stations knew that if you wanted to keep the kind of people that did the work necessary to mine pulsate-falade you treated them right. Riddick was pleased this station was exactly as S2, complete with heated floors.

Despite that luxury, the apartment was slightly chilled, bringing to mind that they probably kept the heat on low for unoccupied units and that neither he nor Phaidor had adjusted it when they came in.

In the living room, Phaidor was sitting upright on the couch, leaning against the back, eyes closed as if she'd sat up and then dozed off in the middle of a thought.

"Are you cold?"

She gave a start at the sound of his voice and he knew he'd been right about her dozing off. Her gaze was wary, revealed by automatic lights that had flickered on discreetly and low to the floor around the room. She bent her head and leaned against the back of the couch.

"Always," she whispered, quiet enough that another person might not have heard her.

Riddick's hearing was keen, however, and he questioned her quietly. "Why?"

"It is a long story," she replied, and her voice was weary, sounding burdened by painful memories.

Riddick walked towards Phaidor as he answered. "You going anywhere?"

A pained sigh came from her and he picked up the shake of her vibrantly red head. "No. I suppose I am not."

Riddick sat beside her on the couch and leaned back into its padded depths. "Then tell me why you're always cold," he prodded.

The silence stretched between them, but it was not a cold gulf of separation. It was the silence of contemplation and memory. When finally she began to speak her voice was taut with anger. Riddick suddenly realized there was a deep, dark rage within Phaidor that she kept locked up for only herself.

"I was sixteen when I finally got away from my father. Too much pain there. Lorna is such a beautiful place, I didn't want to leave. But if I didn't, I knew he would kill me. I had to go.

"I stayed on-world but moved to another city many miles away. It was much like my hometown. I was almost happy there. For four years things were fine, and I lived. But when I was twenty, I was coming home from work, and three men confronted me. They were armed and I couldn't fight them without getting killed. I hoped that if I cooperated, gave them what they wanted, they would leave me alone. But they did not want my bag, my wallet, my comm...

"It was during the cold months, and the ground was frozen. So cold..." she went silent for a moment, shivered, continued in a voice devoid of emotion. "They dragged me to that cold ground and ripped away my clothes before they took turns at me. For hours they used me, and in my mind I went somewhere else. I was left for dead like that; on the ground and beaten.

"I crawled home and slept for three days on the kitchen floor. When I awoke much of the pain had faded. The signs were there, but I was separate from it. I left the following standard week. I'd seen too much evil there. Lorna was no longer beautiful to me. I haven't stayed in any one place for more than a few months. I was on Friara as long as I was due to a lack of funds and opportunity."

She turned to him in the dark and he felt the power of her gaze even though her face was in shadows. "They looked at me like a dog would look at a bitch in heat. They took me the same way. The look in their eyes as they did it. I will never trust a man that has that look in his eyes."

Phaidor turned her face away once more, staring at something only she could see. "Go to bed, Riddick. Leave me be in my own nightmares. I do not need you to look at me as you did and help me to remember. I already cannot forget."

The boiling anger in Riddick swelled and he reached out to grab her arm, his grip harsh.

"I've told you I don't tolerate hurting children. I also don't rape women. Every woman I've been with went willing. I've never raped a woman before, and you won't be the one I start with," he gritted out, his anger at Phaidor's rapists translating into his action and words.

"You are hurting me," she whispered, green eyes expressionless in the dark.

Riddick released her immediately, moving off the couch. He stood perfectly still before her, arms crossed over his chest.

The silence stretched between them, Phaidor watching him with wary confusion.

He finally spoke, breaking the tense silence. "I want you, Phaidor. I've made no secrets about that. But I won't force you to do anything. Shit, you can even have the bed. Go to sleep."

He waited for her to slide of the couch then watched her slowly retreat toward the bedroom. Before she'd left his sight, he swung around so that he was laying on the couch, the blankets rumpled beneath him.

Lost in his own thoughts, he was surprised to hear Phaidor's voice from the shadows of the hallway.

"Riddick. Come to bed."