Chapter 11 - Old Scars
The game progressed quietly, both concentrating on the pieces in front of them. Strangely enough, it was Riddick who broke the silence. He didn't really like the sound of his own voice, but he liked listening to other people. He'd always liked the way Jack had prattled on about things. Even if what she was saying held no interest for him, he liked hearing her talking. "You're more quiet than I remember."
Jack smiled, though she didn't look up from the board. "That's funny, I was just thinking that you were exactly as close mouthed as I remembered."
Shrugging slightly, he sacrificed one of his pieces, hiding the edge of a smile as she took the bait. "Well, I came here to hear about you, not listen to the sound of my own voice."
Frowning, a small line creasing her brow as she concentrated, Jack chewed contemplatively on her full, lower lip. "The story of my life is pretty boring actually. You already know the most exciting part."
Purposefully moving his queen's bishop into harm's way, he looked up at her. She had beautiful hair, hanging loose and long over her shoulders and curling at her waist, it looked soft. Probably dark blonde or light brown, he found himself trying to call up a memory of those colors but nearly twenty years without real color hadn't left him with much of a point of reference. He wondered how long it had taken her to grow it back out. Last time he'd seen her she'd been nearly as bald as he was. "Indulge an old man's curiosity," he said with a sardonic twist to his lips, "I know why you were pretending to be a boy, but why were you running away?" He could tell from the way she tensed that she didn't want to talk about it, but at the same time he knew she would.
"You're not an old man," she said, not looking up at him. He wasn't old. He could never be old. Sure there were a lot of years between them, but who was counting? Apparently he was. That thought was somewhat depressing. *He still thinks of me as a little kid.*
"I'm old enough to be your dad," he reminded her, and himself, of the eighteen year age difference between them. *Keep reminding yourself of that. This is 'little' Jack. The kid with the hero-worship complex. And there are plenty of other women on the station you can indulge yourself with, so there's no need to mess with a sweet kid like her.*
A frown still on her face, Jack looked up at Riddick. Did he really want to know this stuff? It seemed like ancient history now, but it still hurt a little. Old scars of what she thought of as her life before HG. It was strange that when so many other people had lost their lives on that godforsaken planet, she'd actually acquired a new one. "But you aren't my Dad," she said with conviction. "I was running away from my Dad." *I never wanted to run away from you,* she said silently to herself.
He'd figured she must have been running from something or someone. She'd seemed so lost he couldn't imagine that she was running toward anything. He just nodded, not pushing her or pressing her for more information, she would tell him whatever she wanted him to know. Moving another piece on the board, he waited.
Jack had waited for a reaction, waited for him to prompt her for more, that's what everyone did, at least anyone who she had opened up to. But he didn't. He just waited for her to tell him what she wanted to. Even Imam had ended up getting the information out of her, though he was a lot more subtle about it than most people. The fact that Riddick didn't press her made her want to tell him. She would have told him anyway, would have told him thirteen years ago if he'd asked. For whatever reason, she wanted him to know.
Pulling a throw off the back of the couch, she wrapped it around her shoulders and pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging her legs. "When I was four, my mother and father were arrested for selling drugs on the Mars colony. The authorities managed to find out that my grandmother lived on a farm planet in the Pleiades sector," she looked up at him, his full attention now on her. It was a little disconcerting so she looked away, focusing instead on the fish swimming in the tank. "So they sent me to live with her. It was nice, a little boring because there weren't that many kids there my age, but she was nice to me." A smile touched her lips as she remembered her grandmother. She had been a formidable woman, strong, and she'd worked hard, but she had always been good to Jack.
"She called me her little pixie," Jack laughed and looked back at Riddick. "I so do not look like my grandmother, I take more after my mother I suppose," her smile faded as she remembered the frail woman who she had last seen when she was four years old. "My parents were sent to a penal colony and my mother died while she was there."
Taking a deep breath, she blew it out. "Do you really want to hear this stuff?"
"Only what you want to tell me." Riddick watched her as she spoke, she suddenly seemed very much like the scared child he'd once known half a lifetime ago. It was a little touching, and a little strange.
Taking another deep breath, Jack continued. "My grandmother died when I was eight. I think she was killed in an accident, but they never really would tell me what happened." She shrugged. "I guess they figured a kid wouldn't understand. Anyway, I was all ready to go live with these people who had a boy my age, they were nice and I played with him all the time. But before I could go to them my dad shows up to take me away. I don't know if he escaped or what, but he takes me off with him before I could even say goodbye."
The breath she took this time was shaky. "He took me to this planet, I don't even know for sure where it was, but we were in this big city and he was dealing again. He used me for a runner, I used to make drops for him. We would move around from place to place and he managed to keep us under the law's radar. I really don't remember much about him before I was taken away from him and my mother, and I don't remember if he used before, but after we were there for a while he started using. He would get so mean when he was spiking. I can't remember the first time he hit me, but after a while it just kind of became an everyday thing. I guess I got used to it."
She shrugged, shaking off the feeling that she got, the terror she would feel whenever her dad would come in yelling. How she would crawl under her bed and hide in the dark, hoping he'd forget she was there. He never did. "One time, when I was twelve, he beat me so bad I couldn't get out of bed for a week. I didn't go to school anyway, so no one came looking for me." She shuddered as she remembered it. "I was peeing and spitting up blood, I couldn't move, I swear I thought I was going to die." She combed her fingers back through her hair. "When I could walk again, I took all the money I could find and ran. I cut my hair and I jumped onto a freighter that was headed out away from the planet. I didn't even know where it was going and I didn't care."
*Shit. I thought I had a fucked up childhood.* The people at the state-run home he'd spent the first 18 years of his life in hardly ever even touched the kids, let alone beat them. He'd been thrown into their equivalent of solitary confinement more than once, but he could only remember a few times when anyone had hit him, and that was usually because he'd hit them first. And it wasn't like they were people who were supposed to love you anyway, they got paid to take care of the kids, not like your dad. He found himself wishing he could find Mr. Phillips and show him what it felt like to have someone beat the shit out of him and see how he liked it. *No wonder she chose me as someone to look up to. Look what she had as a point of reference.*
She sighed heavily. "I ended up on the HG and the rest you know." She smiled at him, a self depreciating smile. "I guess at first I wanted to be like you. Fight back, take no shit," she said, answering his unasked question. "I really wanted to be tough. Then after all the bad stuff started, I just knew that I'd be safe with you, and after we got off the planet I wanted to go with you because I figured that no one would be able to hurt me if you were there protecting me." She shrugged.
He cocked his head to the side, knowing he hadn't asked the question. "You were so trusting," he said quietly, knowing he never really truly had done anything to earn that trust. That's what had made it that much more precious. But he found that he needed to tell her the truth, all these years she thought he'd gone back to get her and Imam out of that cave where he'd left them, he hadn't told her that it had been Carolyn that had made him go back. Her and the guilt that had started eating at him when he pictured Jack being torn apart and eaten by those things. "Bad judgment on your part."
Dropping her knees so that she was sitting Indian style, she pulled the blanket closer around her. "I don't think it was bad judgment. I'm here today, aren't I? I wouldn't be if you hadn't saved me. Twice."
A small voice told him he'd never earned any of it, he'd never earned the faith she placed in him. *Shut the fuck up, Jimminy,* he thought, *what can it hurt to let the kid go on thinking I'm some kind of hero?* But he found he wanted her to know the truth. He looked her in the eyes, shaking his head. "I don't even know why I fought that alien off. One minute I was heading toward the skiff with the cells and the next I was standing over the dead body with blood all over me." He sighed heavily, rubbing a hand over his scalp. "And as for the skiff, I was going to leave you all there to die. I even had the damn skiff fired up and ready to go. If it hadn't been for Carolyn pushing me to go back, I wouldn't have." He waited for the reaction, the look of betrayal to cross her face, but amazingly enough it never did. She just gave him an enigmatic smile that made him feel things that confused the hell out of him.
"I know," Jack said simply, smiling at Riddick, glad to finally have him tell her.
"You know?" he asked, incredulously, "how the fuck do you know?" Then he realized, "the holy-man told you."
She just shook her head. "No. You did. Or, actually, you told Imam." She smiled at the look on his face. "You really should check to make sure a kid is actually asleep before you start talking about 'big people' stuff." She couldn't help but laugh.
He stared at her, amazed almost to the point of speechlessness. "You knew all along. And you wanted to come with me anyway?" The truth made her faith and trust in him even more poignant, even more precious to him. "You are not the brightest crayon in the box, are you?" he joked.
"You just say the sweetest things," she joked back, laughing as she started to study the chessboard again. "Riddick, Carolyn weighed all of about 113lbs soaking wet, she wasn't armed, she didn't have anything to hold over you." Jack smiled at him, as if she was revealing some long hidden secret. "You came because you wanted to, not because she made you. Carolyn was just an excuse for you to do the right thing. You needed one then."
Riddick growled, not even realizing he'd done it. "This isn't analyze Richard B. Riddick night," he said as he countered her last move, now readying his playing pieces for the kill. "We're supposed to be talking about you. Was Imam good to you?" Riddick already knew the answer to that one, but he wanted to get the conversation back on track, which was on Jack and off him.
"Imam was great, a much better father than the one I'd been born to." She moved her queen back so that she could more easily defend her king. "I had a very safe and very boring life with him." She smiled as she remembered back to her early days with Imam. "After Imam wheedled the information about my past out of me, he decided I'd never have to go back to Dad again. He took us to New Sydney and he got a job working at one of the research and development facilities there. He's really a fantastic engineer, and he took really good care of me. I did my share of the rebellious youth thing, and I was a complete pain in the ass during my early teens. But I found out, once I let myself settle in, that I really liked school and I really liked being with Imam. We had our ups and downs just like any other family, but he was always content to let me be the person 'I was destined to be'," she quirked her fingers into quotation marks as she repeated Imam's words to her, laughing. "I love Imam." She looked at him from under the fringe of her lashes, hiding a small smile behind the curtain of her hair. "So, after about a year I found it in my heart to forgive you for abandoning me to a life of safety, boredom, and homework."
"That's generous of you," he said sarcastically. Moving his rook forward, he smiled at her, a predatory smile. "I hope you'll forgive me for checkmate."
The game progressed quietly, both concentrating on the pieces in front of them. Strangely enough, it was Riddick who broke the silence. He didn't really like the sound of his own voice, but he liked listening to other people. He'd always liked the way Jack had prattled on about things. Even if what she was saying held no interest for him, he liked hearing her talking. "You're more quiet than I remember."
Jack smiled, though she didn't look up from the board. "That's funny, I was just thinking that you were exactly as close mouthed as I remembered."
Shrugging slightly, he sacrificed one of his pieces, hiding the edge of a smile as she took the bait. "Well, I came here to hear about you, not listen to the sound of my own voice."
Frowning, a small line creasing her brow as she concentrated, Jack chewed contemplatively on her full, lower lip. "The story of my life is pretty boring actually. You already know the most exciting part."
Purposefully moving his queen's bishop into harm's way, he looked up at her. She had beautiful hair, hanging loose and long over her shoulders and curling at her waist, it looked soft. Probably dark blonde or light brown, he found himself trying to call up a memory of those colors but nearly twenty years without real color hadn't left him with much of a point of reference. He wondered how long it had taken her to grow it back out. Last time he'd seen her she'd been nearly as bald as he was. "Indulge an old man's curiosity," he said with a sardonic twist to his lips, "I know why you were pretending to be a boy, but why were you running away?" He could tell from the way she tensed that she didn't want to talk about it, but at the same time he knew she would.
"You're not an old man," she said, not looking up at him. He wasn't old. He could never be old. Sure there were a lot of years between them, but who was counting? Apparently he was. That thought was somewhat depressing. *He still thinks of me as a little kid.*
"I'm old enough to be your dad," he reminded her, and himself, of the eighteen year age difference between them. *Keep reminding yourself of that. This is 'little' Jack. The kid with the hero-worship complex. And there are plenty of other women on the station you can indulge yourself with, so there's no need to mess with a sweet kid like her.*
A frown still on her face, Jack looked up at Riddick. Did he really want to know this stuff? It seemed like ancient history now, but it still hurt a little. Old scars of what she thought of as her life before HG. It was strange that when so many other people had lost their lives on that godforsaken planet, she'd actually acquired a new one. "But you aren't my Dad," she said with conviction. "I was running away from my Dad." *I never wanted to run away from you,* she said silently to herself.
He'd figured she must have been running from something or someone. She'd seemed so lost he couldn't imagine that she was running toward anything. He just nodded, not pushing her or pressing her for more information, she would tell him whatever she wanted him to know. Moving another piece on the board, he waited.
Jack had waited for a reaction, waited for him to prompt her for more, that's what everyone did, at least anyone who she had opened up to. But he didn't. He just waited for her to tell him what she wanted to. Even Imam had ended up getting the information out of her, though he was a lot more subtle about it than most people. The fact that Riddick didn't press her made her want to tell him. She would have told him anyway, would have told him thirteen years ago if he'd asked. For whatever reason, she wanted him to know.
Pulling a throw off the back of the couch, she wrapped it around her shoulders and pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging her legs. "When I was four, my mother and father were arrested for selling drugs on the Mars colony. The authorities managed to find out that my grandmother lived on a farm planet in the Pleiades sector," she looked up at him, his full attention now on her. It was a little disconcerting so she looked away, focusing instead on the fish swimming in the tank. "So they sent me to live with her. It was nice, a little boring because there weren't that many kids there my age, but she was nice to me." A smile touched her lips as she remembered her grandmother. She had been a formidable woman, strong, and she'd worked hard, but she had always been good to Jack.
"She called me her little pixie," Jack laughed and looked back at Riddick. "I so do not look like my grandmother, I take more after my mother I suppose," her smile faded as she remembered the frail woman who she had last seen when she was four years old. "My parents were sent to a penal colony and my mother died while she was there."
Taking a deep breath, she blew it out. "Do you really want to hear this stuff?"
"Only what you want to tell me." Riddick watched her as she spoke, she suddenly seemed very much like the scared child he'd once known half a lifetime ago. It was a little touching, and a little strange.
Taking another deep breath, Jack continued. "My grandmother died when I was eight. I think she was killed in an accident, but they never really would tell me what happened." She shrugged. "I guess they figured a kid wouldn't understand. Anyway, I was all ready to go live with these people who had a boy my age, they were nice and I played with him all the time. But before I could go to them my dad shows up to take me away. I don't know if he escaped or what, but he takes me off with him before I could even say goodbye."
The breath she took this time was shaky. "He took me to this planet, I don't even know for sure where it was, but we were in this big city and he was dealing again. He used me for a runner, I used to make drops for him. We would move around from place to place and he managed to keep us under the law's radar. I really don't remember much about him before I was taken away from him and my mother, and I don't remember if he used before, but after we were there for a while he started using. He would get so mean when he was spiking. I can't remember the first time he hit me, but after a while it just kind of became an everyday thing. I guess I got used to it."
She shrugged, shaking off the feeling that she got, the terror she would feel whenever her dad would come in yelling. How she would crawl under her bed and hide in the dark, hoping he'd forget she was there. He never did. "One time, when I was twelve, he beat me so bad I couldn't get out of bed for a week. I didn't go to school anyway, so no one came looking for me." She shuddered as she remembered it. "I was peeing and spitting up blood, I couldn't move, I swear I thought I was going to die." She combed her fingers back through her hair. "When I could walk again, I took all the money I could find and ran. I cut my hair and I jumped onto a freighter that was headed out away from the planet. I didn't even know where it was going and I didn't care."
*Shit. I thought I had a fucked up childhood.* The people at the state-run home he'd spent the first 18 years of his life in hardly ever even touched the kids, let alone beat them. He'd been thrown into their equivalent of solitary confinement more than once, but he could only remember a few times when anyone had hit him, and that was usually because he'd hit them first. And it wasn't like they were people who were supposed to love you anyway, they got paid to take care of the kids, not like your dad. He found himself wishing he could find Mr. Phillips and show him what it felt like to have someone beat the shit out of him and see how he liked it. *No wonder she chose me as someone to look up to. Look what she had as a point of reference.*
She sighed heavily. "I ended up on the HG and the rest you know." She smiled at him, a self depreciating smile. "I guess at first I wanted to be like you. Fight back, take no shit," she said, answering his unasked question. "I really wanted to be tough. Then after all the bad stuff started, I just knew that I'd be safe with you, and after we got off the planet I wanted to go with you because I figured that no one would be able to hurt me if you were there protecting me." She shrugged.
He cocked his head to the side, knowing he hadn't asked the question. "You were so trusting," he said quietly, knowing he never really truly had done anything to earn that trust. That's what had made it that much more precious. But he found that he needed to tell her the truth, all these years she thought he'd gone back to get her and Imam out of that cave where he'd left them, he hadn't told her that it had been Carolyn that had made him go back. Her and the guilt that had started eating at him when he pictured Jack being torn apart and eaten by those things. "Bad judgment on your part."
Dropping her knees so that she was sitting Indian style, she pulled the blanket closer around her. "I don't think it was bad judgment. I'm here today, aren't I? I wouldn't be if you hadn't saved me. Twice."
A small voice told him he'd never earned any of it, he'd never earned the faith she placed in him. *Shut the fuck up, Jimminy,* he thought, *what can it hurt to let the kid go on thinking I'm some kind of hero?* But he found he wanted her to know the truth. He looked her in the eyes, shaking his head. "I don't even know why I fought that alien off. One minute I was heading toward the skiff with the cells and the next I was standing over the dead body with blood all over me." He sighed heavily, rubbing a hand over his scalp. "And as for the skiff, I was going to leave you all there to die. I even had the damn skiff fired up and ready to go. If it hadn't been for Carolyn pushing me to go back, I wouldn't have." He waited for the reaction, the look of betrayal to cross her face, but amazingly enough it never did. She just gave him an enigmatic smile that made him feel things that confused the hell out of him.
"I know," Jack said simply, smiling at Riddick, glad to finally have him tell her.
"You know?" he asked, incredulously, "how the fuck do you know?" Then he realized, "the holy-man told you."
She just shook her head. "No. You did. Or, actually, you told Imam." She smiled at the look on his face. "You really should check to make sure a kid is actually asleep before you start talking about 'big people' stuff." She couldn't help but laugh.
He stared at her, amazed almost to the point of speechlessness. "You knew all along. And you wanted to come with me anyway?" The truth made her faith and trust in him even more poignant, even more precious to him. "You are not the brightest crayon in the box, are you?" he joked.
"You just say the sweetest things," she joked back, laughing as she started to study the chessboard again. "Riddick, Carolyn weighed all of about 113lbs soaking wet, she wasn't armed, she didn't have anything to hold over you." Jack smiled at him, as if she was revealing some long hidden secret. "You came because you wanted to, not because she made you. Carolyn was just an excuse for you to do the right thing. You needed one then."
Riddick growled, not even realizing he'd done it. "This isn't analyze Richard B. Riddick night," he said as he countered her last move, now readying his playing pieces for the kill. "We're supposed to be talking about you. Was Imam good to you?" Riddick already knew the answer to that one, but he wanted to get the conversation back on track, which was on Jack and off him.
"Imam was great, a much better father than the one I'd been born to." She moved her queen back so that she could more easily defend her king. "I had a very safe and very boring life with him." She smiled as she remembered back to her early days with Imam. "After Imam wheedled the information about my past out of me, he decided I'd never have to go back to Dad again. He took us to New Sydney and he got a job working at one of the research and development facilities there. He's really a fantastic engineer, and he took really good care of me. I did my share of the rebellious youth thing, and I was a complete pain in the ass during my early teens. But I found out, once I let myself settle in, that I really liked school and I really liked being with Imam. We had our ups and downs just like any other family, but he was always content to let me be the person 'I was destined to be'," she quirked her fingers into quotation marks as she repeated Imam's words to her, laughing. "I love Imam." She looked at him from under the fringe of her lashes, hiding a small smile behind the curtain of her hair. "So, after about a year I found it in my heart to forgive you for abandoning me to a life of safety, boredom, and homework."
"That's generous of you," he said sarcastically. Moving his rook forward, he smiled at her, a predatory smile. "I hope you'll forgive me for checkmate."