DISCLAIMERS!!! YOU MUST READ THESE FIRST

Title: Jack B. Badd Part Seven: Pieces of Me Left Along the Way
Author: Daryn
Fandom: Pitch Black
Pairing: Jack/Riddick (eventually)
Rating: PG-13 for a few curse words
Email: daryn@jackisaboy.zzn.com
Series/Sequel: This is part seven in the saga of Jack
Web Page:
Disclaimer: I don't own any of this, but damn I wish I did.
Warnings: Jack is a boy. Read 'Disclaimers' page for more info
Notes: Jack's POV. This is the story of Jack's life with emphasis on his experiences on the planet in Pitch Black. There is no sex, yet. Eventually Jack and Riddick will get groovy though.
Summary: Years later Jack narrates, in summary, the next full year of his time spent with Riddick.

"My new towel. I got a new towel today. It smells like cookie dough. I use it to wipe away the water – the water that can never really wash away the dirt in my soul, only the dirt on my body. The towel is green and…"

"Stop! No more! I can't take it!"

I grinned over the top of the poetry reader as Riddick writhed in his seat. We were on a transport heading toward the tropical vacation planet where we were set to stay for a week in celebration of our mutual 'birthday' – the one-year anniversary of our departure from Earth Four Alpha.

Riddick froze in a stance of deadpan severity. "You know I can't take this modern poetry. If you'd wanted someone who was…"

I darted forward, covered his mouth and dramatically shouted "No! Don't speak sir Richard! For the king shall surely see us and throw his… dirty green towel down to devour us!"

We were in an unusually cheerful mood just then. The year that had followed my night of torment and decision had been filled with danger, tears, fears, and every other emotion I can think of.

I had been going through a sort of puberty and a half. I hadn't quite finished my first puberty when I threw my body headfirst into a second and drastically different one.

On top of the physical changes I was going through, as well as the ensuing emotional ones, was the challenge of living with Riddick and our dangerous work.

It's not even important where we ended up on our first journey. What matters is that, thanks to Miss M, Riddick was able to get some small jobs on the fringes of what I suppose can only be called 'the underworld.'

Of course that all sounds very melodramatic and more like the fantasies of an impressionable youth than reality. But let's remember who's writing this, shall we?

Our first gigs were small smuggling jobs. Thanks to Riddick we got a good reputation and bigger, better jobs found their way to us. I say 'us' but it was really all Riddick. Pretty much.

I had certainly lost my taste for witnessing death and so he went alone on all hits. I couldn't even watch the violent vids for the first six months or so. I remember shortly after our first gig I had sat down to watch an old horror vid and just ended up traumatized. I walked around with my jaw on the floor for the rest of that evening. I had to ease my way back into my old detachment from the vids.

I did go along on a few hits, whenever Riddick needed another person along for whatever reason. I've blocked those times from my mind pretty efficiently though I occasionally come close to remembering them – vague impressions of pleas and blood.

I was actually glad when our jobs were hits or just to go and scare people. I think those served as good outlets for Riddick and whatever he needed to work out.

I got so I could tell when it had been too long since the last hit. He would get really quiet and he talked differently. He would put on his goggles more.

I never brought it up during these times but one time I asked him if he ever felt like killing me. He made a joke like "Only when you leave the seat down" but then I told him to answer me seriously. He just gazed into my eyes. And I mean just that – no words, just a neutral gaze.

I don't' know what they answer was, but… I'm still alive.

But for the most part we just smuggled contraband from place to place. We took all kinds of different drugs to various places. Riddick never let me touch the stuff and as far as I know he never touched any of it either.

Of course it was more than not messing up the amounts in transit. When I suggested we have a little party one time, he said "Someday you can do as much of this stuff as you want. But if you do it now, with so much here, you're liable to get addicted."

We took booze to the planets that had implemented Prohibition policies. We transported merchandise. There were planets that had little or no organic food and had to pay insanely high prices for fruits and vegetables. We helped them out by offering the same goods at half the price (still twice their worth).

The only thing Riddick would absolutely not participate in was the slave trade. Any time a deal smacked of slavers or a client came across as overtly pro-slaver, Riddick would walk away.

There was one job we were on where we walked out and it almost got us killed.

I had gone with Riddick to negotiate the terms of sale for some supplies or other. While Riddick was talking terms, a group of creepy space monkeys (mechanics) cornered me and I hate to think what might have happened it I hadn't managed to shout 'Hey' before they covered my moth.

Riddick got us out of there safely, armed only with a pair of shivs.

After that incident, I stayed on the ship while he arranged work until his reputation was better established. Then it was cool for me to go with him again. As a celebratory gift, I got a pair of shivs of my own, followed by about a week of shiv training.

We both kept our hair extremely short. Riddick shaved his head about once a week and I kept mine to a short buzz though for a few months I tried out a crew cut. In any case, no one ever questioned my right to be in on his deals. They probably figured that if I wasn't his kid I was definitely the heir apparent.

It took three months for the pills to really start their work in earnest. The first thing to happen was a crazy surge in body hair growth.

My voice didn't drop until month five. It was all squeaky for a while and I tried to talk as much as I could because every time my voice cracked, Riddick would start laughing and I loved it when he did that.

At about the eighth month I started to get some patchy, rough facial hair. I had been occasionally shaving off my face fuzz (all girls get it really) before then but I remember the morning that I walked into the bathroom and announced that I was ready to really shave. Riddick laughed right out loud right there.

Of course the way it goes with facial hair, I couldn't even grow a convincing fringe of beard for at least two or three years after that.

What I haven't mentioned yet is that my face broke out after only the first month. So all these wonders were matched on the downside with acne. I had thought that nothing would be harder for me to handle than being a girl when I knew that I was a boy, but being a boy with horrific acne wasn't exactly fun.

And that's not even mentioning the weight gain. Well, it wasn't really very much and I had been pretty scrawny to begin with. Besides, it was mostly just muscles bulking up. But of course the haze of adolescence clouded my eyes and all I saw in the mirror was a huge, fat, pimpled blob.

I spent a lot time that first year locked away in my cabin. Riddick insisted that I enroll in telecourses to get my school certificate. There was no discussion on this point. Once he had secured contacts that could set him up with official papers for me, he sat me down at the terminal and said, "You're doing school or you're getting out at the next stop."

I tried to talk to him about school once or twice but he basically gave me a sarcastic reply to the effect of it being his obligation to give me opportunities that he didn't have.

There were good things about the telecourses. I got subscribed to lists for kids who traveled with their families and had to do their courses on the nets.

It was nice to get to know some of them – other kids who had some small idea of what my life was like. Of course I made up my own story differently every time.

I was enrolled in the courses as John ('Jack') Bryson Cassidy. I had wanted to register as Jack B. Badd again but when I told Riddick that it was the name I used for the Hunter Gratzner flight, he shot it down.

It's not that we were paranoid of being found or hunted. The general agreement in the news vids was that Riddick had died on the Planet too. They had a lot of research going on there. I occasionally looked around for news stories but I never brought it up with Riddick.

I didn't want to forget the people I had met there, but I really wanted to forget what had happened to them. I preferred to imagine them off living their own lives in another system, like Imam or Peter.

I even began to half-consciously scan the streets sometimes when we'd land just to see if I could glimpse a face that I could convince myself was Shazza, or Paris.

Anyway, Riddick and I mostly kept to ourselves that first year. Living with another person makes for a strange, dynamic environment. I could never figure Riddick out and I don't know what on earth he thought of me at this point.

We sometimes watched vids together. We had our little fights of course but they were ultimately friendly in nature (like 'your feet smell, go put on your shoes').

I think a key to our getting along as well as we did was that I was with Riddick of my own free will and he let me stick around either because he wanted me there or didn't really mind.

So after a year my body had almost stabilized. At least, the changed had stopped being abrupt and fast and begun to level out. My acne had subsided for the most part and I felt a bit better about myself.

Riddick and I decided to designate the anniversary our departure from Earth Alpha Four as our mutual birthday. I had decided to start out as fourteen and Riddick had decided to not tell me the age he had decided on.

So on our fifteenth and unknown birthday (respectively), Riddick surprised me with the tropical vacation.

"If you don't like modern poetry so much you shouldn't make me take the modern poetry class," I said amiably as I fell back into my seat on the transport.

"You're only taking that class so you can torture me with that stuff," Riddick shot back, smiling.

"You know it, baby," I winked at him and pretended to be absorbed in the reader.

After about a minute of that I put down the reader, checked my watch irritably, rolled my eyes and playfully kicked Riddick's shoe.

"If you ask if we're there yet you'll get a beating," Riddick cautioned me.

"What's the first thing you want to do when we get there?" I asked, pretending I hadn't heard him.

Riddick shrugged and pulled down his goggles. "Hit the beach I guess."

I sat up, excited. "Have you ever been to a beach before?"

Riddick looked away and answered "Not a fun one."

I nodded. Riddick got like that when making references to his experience in the Wailing Wars on Tangier Six. We tended to avoid jobs in the Tangier system.

"I've never been to a real beach before," I chattered, to distract him if he was thinking about bad things. "But my caremother a long time ago – she came from an ocean planet I think and she liked to watch vids of beaches and stuff. I've always wanted to go to a real beach though. I'm so excited!" I bounced a little on the seat.

Riddick looked at me and asked, "Are you thinking about growing your hair out?"

I raised an eyebrow. "How DOES your mind work, Richard" I said, shaking my head, "Umm… I don't know. I hadn't really thought about it I guess."

Well that was a lie, I had obviously thought a lot about my hair and how I wanted to wear it. My general plan at that point had been to keep shaving it until I had decided what to do.

"What color is your hair?" He asked in a bland tone that I'm pretty sure he always used when asking about colors (something he didn't tend to do much since I picked up on that tone and tried to mention colors of things as much as I could, to spare him having to ask).

"Oh, gosh, it's light brown. Pretty light really, a bit reddish in the sun. At least it always was before. I could grow it out I think. At least a bit."

He had caught me off guard there but I felt flattered that he had cared enough, for whatever reason, to ask about my hair.

For about the thousandth time on that trip I wished that there were a window of some kind in our part of the transport.

I picked up my poetry reader and flipped through a few pages. I stopped on the poem that I actually liked. It was called 'Emblem' and was about symbolism. At the time and even now I'm embarrassed to say that I liked it. Modern poetry at the time was really embarrassingly bad.

"You're doing pretty good in school then?" Riddick asked. I looked up. He never asked about school. A small back section of my brain began to churn. This wasn't normal. Was he going to leave me on the planet?

I didn't think he would, but I knew better than count on anything when it came to Riddick. He could be reliable 99% of the time and then hit you with a 1% that would kill someone who wasn't prepared.

Thankfully, at least to that point, I had always been prepared, as with the time when I didn't know where he went when we stopped on Earth Four Alpha.

I was used to people coming in and out of my life and I was certainly used to coming in and out of other people's lives.

But maybe he was only asking because he realized that he hadn't really asked before. I shrugged.

"Yeah, I get pretty good marks. I like most of the stuff I have to do. I'm not super into this poetry thing but I guess it's not that bad."

Riddick seemed like he was about to say something more, but just then the landing lights began to blink and we had to strap in for what I remember as the smoothest landing ever.

As I stepped through the door, from the darkness of the transport to the unreal yellow, green and blue brilliance of the tropical paradise, I shivered. The bright sun reminded me of another planet.

I felt like I was stepping off the edge of a cliff and that I would fall headfirst into… into what? I had no idea.

But the smell of the ocean… the smell of the ocean made me feel like maybe whatever I was heading into wouldn't be as bad as I feared.