19. Disturbed

Jack tossed a pebble into the stream, watching as the splash traveled with the current before disappearing. She tossed in a handful of rocks and watched the separate splashes all wash away together.

There was an odd twisting in her chest as she thought about Brand, so close yet so far away. She even knew what direction, a mere ten miles southwest, but she made no move to head that way. It would be too much of a risk. If she were caught, it would blow Gin and Riddick's cover and who knew what would happen then. So she just sat at the edge of the stream, throwing one pebble after another into the water.

The comforting weight of her shiv pressed against her hip from its hiding place in her pocket, and she pulled it out. She'd sharpened part of the top of the blade so it was angled for stabbing and slicing on both edges. The grip needed to be narrowed a bit more, so she pulled the whetstone from her other pocket and set to work, rubbing the smooth stone over the steel in long measured movements.

Each glide of stone on steel comforted Jack. She remembered sitting in Riddick's shitty prowler, cross-legged on the floor as he carefully shaped the shiv in his hands. He lifted his head and bestowed her with a rare smile, his jaguar eyes almost warm.

"Paying attention, kid?" he'd questioned.

Of course she had been. Everything he did fascinated her. The way he moved, the way he breathed, the way his hands could manipulate any material that would hold an edge into a weapon of accuracy and deathly balance.

Jack reached down and touched the slight bulge in her boot where the shiv he'd made her rested. The grip was small and curved with soft grooves that cradled the fingers of whoever held it. And only she had held it, and she could still see the smile on Riddick's face when he'd handed her the small weapon. The edge so sharp it would shave the hairs right off your head, it had been perfectly balanced and shaped for her hand.

"Thank you, Riddick," a naive and gullible Jack had whispered, believing the gift meant something more than what it had. She'd thought it meant Riddick wanted her around. Thought it meant he wouldn't leave her.

The smile on Riddick's face had been genuine and warm as he'd handed her a sheath that would secure the handmade blade to her ankle and inside her boot. She'd strapped the shiv into place and he'd rocked back on his heels, hands clasped behind his back, regarding her in a manner she suddenly realized was the basis of her own defensive pose. "You're welcome, Jack."

Disturbed by the memories, Jack shook them away and let her hand fall away from the bulge in her boot, returning to the shiv she was making. It was sharp, but still a crude imitation of the blades Riddick so carefully crafted. She knew it would take her many years and lots of practice before she could produce a knife of the same quality, or even of quality close to what he could do.

The shiv was a little larger than the one Riddick had made her and not nearly as fluid in its design. A frown of concentration drew Jack's brows together as she started narrowing down what would become the shiv's grip. It still didn't feel quite right, so she started in on the finger grooves, using the rounded edge of the whetstone to carve out niches for her fingers.

"Someday..." she muttered. "Be just as good as Riddick."

Jack spent the next four hours with her back against a tree, her boots a few inches from the bubbling surface of the stream. The grip of her shiv was starting to come together. She had it just the right thickness, finally, and the first finger groove was finished.

Jaw clenched from hours of concentration and her head throbbing mildly from staring at an object so close to her face for too long, Jack almost missed the sound of footsteps approaching from the direction of Gin's ship.

Riddick, she noted. He was quiet, but only out of habit. He wasn't trying, and she could tell by the heavier tread that the feet were much too large to be Gin's.

"Jack." His deep voice rumbled across her nerve endings.

Analyzing her feelings, Jack remained silent. The tree stood between them still, so she quickly pocketed her shiv and whetstone, not wanting him to see them for some reason. Not sure if she was angry, happy, frustrated, or any of the many other emotions she often found herself experiencing in his presence, Jack sighed and allowed her chin to drop to her chest.

"Yeah, Riddick?"

She heard him step closer, rounding the tree to stand over her. Jack leaned her head back against the trunk and stared up at Riddick. A slight breeze threaded through the three-quarter inch long hair covering her scalp.

The big man and the petite teen regarded each other in silence for a long moment, neither willing to step forward with a comment that might turn things in a new direction, for better or worse.

Riddick finally scrounged up the balls to utter a comment Jack felt was decidedly lame. "Your hair is getting longer," he said gruffly.

Jack wondered if it was a compliment, and if it was, what the correct response should be. Going for an explanation of the obvious, she shrugged. "Hair still grows in cryo."

Silence stretched out, taut and uncomfortable for another length of time. Jack considered standing up and walking away from Riddick, but changed her mind when she saw a look of genuine... genuine something cross his features. Something that looked like a cross between confusion, pain, and maybe even loneliness. He pulled off his goggles and rubbed the bridge of his nose, as if trying to alleviate some monster sized headache.

"Can we try this again?" he asked suddenly, pulling his goggles back over his eyes.

Almost daring to hope he meant what she thought he meant, Jack narrowed her eyes slightly. "Try what again?" she questioned suspiciously.

He made an all-encompassing motion with one large hand. "This," he repeated. "You, me. Us. Can we try again?"

Stuffing hope into a back corner in her heart, Jack slowly slid up the length of the tree until she was standing. "Us?" She shoved her hands in her pockets and rocked back on her heels, tipping her chin up so she could gaze at him from beneath her lashes.

Riddick clasped his hands behind his back and clenched his jaw, shifting his weight back. If anyone could have seen them at that moment, the resemblance in their stances would have been immediately identified. He cocked his head to the side, and Jack could tell by the set of his eyebrows that his eyes had narrowed beneath the mirrored lenses of his spectrum goggles.

"Ain't gonna make this easy for me, are you." It wasn't a question.

Wanting to even out the playing field a bit, Jack quickly pulled her goggles down over her eyes then stuffed her hand back in her jeans pocket. "Nope."

"Gonna make me spell it out?"

"Yup."

"Fine."

"Glad we understand each other."

"Do we?"

The question took Jack a little by surprise. She considered her answer for a quiet moment, head tilted in a manner that perfectly mimicked Riddick's. "I thought we did, once. Seems like long ago."

"You were right. We did understand each other," he replied quietly, sincerity and a strange tang of loss evident in those few words.

The restrained anger and hurt at being left behind, yet again, finally exploded from Jack. She burst forward until she was standing scant inches from Riddick's broad chest. "Then why the hell did you leave me, you fucking bastard!" she screamed in his face. Mustering all her pain into a tight ball of energy and courage, she shoved Riddick, the motion sudden and just hard enough to cause him to take two quick steps back. "Why? Why? Why?" she ranted. Reckless, Jack swung, expecting, almost hoping, that Riddick would deflect the blow and send her sprawling with a retaliatory strike of his own. It would remind her why she hated him so much. Help her forget that once she'd have died for him. She'd have killed for him. She'd have caught bullets in her teeth... But he didn't, and the blow connected, solid and hard. Hard enough to crack a normal person's jaw.

The audible sound of Riddick's teeth snapping together as his head jerked from the punch seemed to drain all the mind-numbing ferocity of Jack's emotions right from her body. She wondered numbly if they'd been all that was keeping her going over the past year as she felt her legs turn to putty. Then she was on her knees, hands fisted in the grass and head bent low. "Why?" she whispered again.

Jack hadn't realized that silence could be deafening until that moment. That moment when her delicate balance on the edge of tightly reigned control finally tilted, throwing her off her axis to careen wildly into a mess of wilted expectations, fried emotions, and lost innocence. The only sound was that of the local fauna chirruping in the branches above and the wind blowing through the trees.

When Riddick kneeled before her, Jack didn't bother to look up. She tensed herself, awaiting the shuddering pain that would accompany the blow he was about to deal her. Praying it would knock her unconscious so she could slip into oblivion and dream none of this ever happened.

Dream her parents hadn't died, that her foster parents hadn't abused her in too many ways to count, and that her adventure to rescue the daring Richard B. Riddick from a Company transport hadn't crashed and burned, literally and figuratively. That her hero hadn't left her alone, just as everyone before and after him had.

A shudder wracked her slim form when the blow she was waiting for finally came, but instead it was a caress of callused fingers beneath her chin, tilting her gaze up to Riddick's. She watched him with a mixture of longing, confusion, and suspicion.

When Riddick reached out and pulled her goggles away from her eyes, Jack swallowed hard, her breathing a little ragged. "I never should have left you," he whispered. "Say we can try again, Jack."

The relief that flooded through her was immediate, almost painful in its intensity. "Riddick," she sobbed, and collapsed gratefully into the waiting embrace of the man, called a monster, that was the hero of one little girl.