A/N: This is where the story earns its rating. Descriptions of gang rape and its aftermath will ensue for the next several chapters, not graphic but (if I've written correctly) emotionally intense. If this bothers you or you feel you might be triggered by these themes, I would advise you to stop reading now.
The hallways were quiet so early in the morning, and especially in the areas surrounding the infirmary. It had helped, a little, that they'd completely thrown the fight in the end. They knew each other too well by now, and neither of them had any sort of advantage in cleverness. Riddick's advantage of sheer strength was matched by Fantine's dexterity, speed, and her willingness to make ruthless advantage of physics. They'd discussed it the night before, what would happen if it went on and it didn't look like either of them was going to win. It had come down to a coin toss.
He smiled a little, remembering how she'd teased him. Would it hurt his masculine pride, she'd asked, losing to a tiny woman like her? He'd responded, and responded truthfully, that any hurt her sex would do to his ego was balanced by the fact that she was a damn good fighter and a worthy adversary. She'd made some crack about syllables and ice, leading to more teasing and playfully aggressive sex afterwards. But it was still true. Apart from their bed (or wall, or closet) activities, he found himself more and more slipping into a mindest wherein she was just one of the guys.
At least that seemed to be the prevailing opinion in the Slam. There had been little backlash from her unmasking, although people had been noticeably tense when she'd walked up and matter-of-factly laid the whole Riddick-Fantine fight at the feet of those loosely organizing the pit fights. They hadn't wanted to deal with her as both a woman and a fighter. True to her own style and grace, she'd left them no choice. The ordinary nature of the fight seemed to calm them down; Riddick had actually shown more skin than she had, wearing his usual muscle shirt and trous, she in her sweats. Just another night in the ring.
No backlash. Maybe no one had recognized her, or maybe they just cared less than everyone had worried about. Either way, it was something of a relief.
They'd have to come up with a new drama now. Some new secret, something else to pass the time. He was a little startled to realize that he'd missed the intrigue of keeping her secret, the constant excitement of it. Was he starting to become that desperate for mental stimulation that even that kind of simple game was exciting? He wondered if it should worry him. It never had before, but then he'd never done a lot of things before. Maybe he should worry. Maybe it was just the nature of the Slam.
And then a few moment's later he wondered, laconically, why he'd even bothered worrying. It wasn't anything big, just something in the attitude of the guards, their stance or faces that told him something was going on in the supposed men's canteen. Something big, maybe, or maybe just some daily amusement. He was bored enough and still awake that he decided to take a look.
The guards glanced at each other as he went past. For a second he almost thought they were going to stop him. Odd.
There was, as he'd expected, a crowd of people in the canteen. At first he couldn't see what was going on, couldn't hear above the raucous and encouraging cries. There was the smell of sweat and sex in the air, telling his instincts before his mind was able to put words to actions. He knew what was going on, and it figured. There was one of them a week, just about. The only question this time was who.
It took him longer than he would have expected to push his way past the crowd and into a position where he could see what the hell was going on. He was getting more than his usual share of fearful looks, which should have told him something from the outset. The expression on the canteen guards' face should have told him something. Their presence certainly had; the only canteen that had any regular guard was the women's, except when something highly illegal was going on in any of the others. All the signals were adding up to something, and he was just able to put it together enough to know that his mind didn't want to think about whatever it was.
Riddick couldn't see her at first. The giant currently taking his turn had practically covered her entire body with his, heaving and making grunting little piggish noises. Someone tapped the man on the shoulder; someone else asked Riddick if he wanted a turn. He turned to look at the man, his face gone slack, and whoever it was shrank away so fast that Riddick didn't even get a good look at him.
The giant pulled out, pushed off, not even bothering to pull up his pants. He looked around at the assemblage of hostile, dull-eyed inmates, wondering why everyone had gone so quiet.
"So, who was ne—"
Riddick was on top of the man and pounding his head into the metal table before he'd even remembered crossing the intervening ten feet. The first few seconds of violence were a blur, and when he realized the man had stopped moving he continued to pound his head into the table anyway, what the hell. The giant had been (even taller than Riddick) on his girl, his woman, and there was just no excuse for that sort of behavior. Someone pulled him off.
"Look, man, I know you're --"
The next man didn't fare as well, either. By this time, though, Riddick had regained enough of his senses to be able to fight tactically, and he had the table affording some kind of meager protection at his back. And he always carried a shiv or two in a pocket. No artistry, no ceremony, he stabbed at arms, shoulders, legs, throats, whatever he could reach. The other hand punched, gouged, squeezed. After the first few minutes he'd managed to clear a wide berth around himself.
"What the hell are you doing?" one man screamed. But he was bleeding profusely from a hole in his shoulder, so he didn't matter much. The other one, the one who looked as though he still had a spark or two of intelligence and who was hanging back, waiting for an opening. He was more trouble.
"Come on, man," he said in the tones of someone who's trying to be reasonable to a madman, "Is she really worth it? I mean, come on. She's not that good."
She. Oh right. The point of this whole exercise, the focus of the conflict was still there. He spared a glance at her, then buried his blade to the hilt in the throat of the man who'd tried to take advantage of the momentary distraction. It bought him a few extra minutes and an extra foot, total, of radius.
Fantine St. Germain... and he finally remembered where he'd heard the name before, too. Of all the times... she had curled up around herself on the bench, trying to make herself as small as possible. There was no awareness in her eyes, only that thousand-mile stare... he'd seen it in the eyes of other people sometimes, helping out the Doc in the infirmary. The fragments of her clothing... there wasn't much left, only rags... were clutched around her in white-knuckle fists as though they could protect her. She was the most pitiful sight he had seen in the Ursa Luna Slam, all the more so because it was so at odds with the woman he knew. Two different women, they had to be. Two different creatures.
He made no threats. He didn't have to; his reputation and the fact that it looked as though he'd killed at least three men already spoke louder than any threats he could make. Two more were on the ground and suspiciously unmoving. It was enough to earn him the time to pick her up in the crook of one arm, awkwardly. The other still held the shiv low and ready for use.
"Move."
They moved. They didn't have a choice, not with the silver-eyed demon in front of them. He had all the advantages at that point: intimidation, sight awareness, strength and skill. For all that he was encumbered by a cringing wreck of a woman he was still badder and better than any of them, and they knew it.
The guards were gone by the time he got out of the room. Some extra sense they'd developed by working in the Slam had told them it was time to leave. To scramble back to whatever hidey hole they lived in when they weren't guarding the women's canteen, the exits, or the other few places that the guards actually bothered to stand post.
Riddick put the shiv away without even bothering to clean it and shifted her to a more comfortable position, cradled in his arms. She didn't seem to notice he was there.
He hadn't meant to start running, but he found himself going full-tilt along the corridors. At least I can see flickered through his mind and was gone before he'd turned the next corner. His feet knew the way to the infirmary better than his head did at the moment. He found himself kicking and pounding at the door, although not shouting. He didn't know why he wasn't shouting. He didn't even know why he was making such noise.
"All right, all right, I'm..."
Doc Weller took one look at them both and pushed through the main infirmary room, leading Riddick towards the back. It was supposed to be a quarantine room but so few people in the Slam came down with anything really contagious that the Doc tended to sleep there when things were really busy. He gestured for Riddick to lay her down on the bed, which the murderer did, with a gentle touch that surprised even him.
Once she was on the bed and officially in the Doc's care he found he could breathe again. He could think. It was a relief.
"What happened?"
Riddick opened his mouth to tell him and found he couldn't. He'd killed more people than he could conveniently count and he couldn't say one simple four-letter word.
But the Doc wasn't talking to him. "Fantine..." He was talking to her, gently, carefully, even as he examined her with brisk thoroughness. "What happened?"
For some reason that angered Riddick almost more than finding the mass of men on top of his woman. "What the fuck do you think happened? She was fucking raped!"
It came out before he thought about it. Now they were all forced to confront the reality of the situation. Doc Weller didn't look at all surprised, perturbed, or even changed by the word. For some reason Riddick thought he should have been. Fantine only curled up tighter, and that was more terrifying than any screaming or raging could have been. She should have been outraged, furious, fighting. She wasn't. It was unnatural, and it made him afraid. He hated being unreasonably afraid.
"Richard..." No one ever called him that. "Why don't you sit down."
He did. It struck him then, and late, that he should have been expecting this. Come to think of it he had been expecting this from the moment she'd been unmasked. Had been worried about it, actually. But he hadn't thought of that particular cause for this particular effect until just then. And if (it came on the heels of that thought like a chill of cold water down the back) he was that shaken up about what had happened, how was Fantine dealing with it? Not very well, from the look of it.
He watched the doctor examine her. She was more beaten up than he'd noticed in the heat of the moment, and then running to the infirmary. He couldn't even remember why he'd run to the infirmary; what did he know about rape? He didn't commit it, there were enough willing women around in any place he'd been to that he didn't need to, and why bother anyway? And he'd never been close enough to a woman that she'd confide in him about a rape experience. The few rape victims he'd known hadn't survived...
That thought was pushed away as quickly as it surfaced. No point in dwelling on the past.
Except it resurfaced despite his best efforts, and in worrying forms. Would Fantine survive the attack? Part of him scoffed at the notion that she would do anything other than go back and kill her attackers in some brutal and dramatic fashion. Part of him reminded him in gibbering sentence fragments how fragile she looked in the harsh light of the doctor's office (at least it was harsh to his eyes). Mostly he just stared, numb. He understood rape, the need for it, but only on a detached level. Now it had come to someone he knew, someone he thought of as his, and he found himself needing to understand so much more, and he couldn't.
She was talking now. Clinical, detached, she was describing what had happened as though she was a speaking computer reciting a bit of history. Her eyes never wavered from the thousand-yard stare.
"All right..." Doc Weller said finally, gently. "All right, Fantine. That's enough."
She fell silent almost immediately, unmoving.
"Is she going to be okay?" he blurted out, not entirely sure whether or not it was a stupid question. Physically, she didn't look as though she'd taken any damage she wouldn't recover from, eventually. Hell, she'd looked worse after one of the pit fights. Everything else... Riddick didn't know rape trauma, but he was all too aware of internal, emotional scarring. She looked like she was going to have to develop a whole lot of it. And in a hurry. It wasn't, after all, as though they were going to pardon her offenses and ship her out of the Slam just because she was raped. That sort of thing went on there all the time. And once you started becoming a victim, Riddick knew, you could never really stop.
"I don't know," the Doc sighed. "Honestly, I don't know. I think a lot of that will depend on..."
Riddick had stopped listening at I don't know. Doc Weller saw that, and trailed off. Fantine had curled up on herself again and was scratching at her arms with her nails, as though she wanted to tear her skin off. He made a strangled noise. "Doc... make her stop..." He didn't want to watch this. He was 6'2", two-twenty pounds of muscle and mean, and he couldn't watch a tiny woman whimper and writhe in the aftereffects of rape. It would have been humiliating if it hadn't been so immediate. Doc Weller just looked at him until finally Riddick remembered that he was bigger and stronger than she was. He practically leaped over, pinned her arms to her side, and she started to scream.
"Not like that!" the Doc slapped him on the arm, hard enough that it stung. Riddick had already let her go after she started screaming, though.
"What? What the hell do I do?"
Doc Weller gave him a look of mingled disgust and resignation, pulling the screaming wreck of the woman he'd known once into his arms and soothing her like a child. She stopped screaming, but she didn't seem to recognize who he was or where she was, or that she was out of danger.
"I can't keep this up forever, you know," the Doc informed him. "I need to get semen samples and match them against..." There was more technical stuff, mostly having to do with exams he needed to conduct. Riddick only half heard what the Doc was saying. He was trying to think of something useful he could do, anything, and coming up short. And then the Doc was slapping him and he reacted out of instinct, grabbing the man's wrist. "Riddick!"
"What?!"
"Take care of her while I conduct the exams."
Riddick stared at the Doc stupidly until the other man turned away to get his instruments. He didn't know how to proceed; he didn't even know how to begin. One hand reached out almost of its own accord, touching her arm. She felt ice cold.
"Dammit." Doc Weller grabbed Riddick by the arm and tugged him to a corner of the room. His voice was low, funereal. "I need your help, Riddick. And I need you to snap out of whatever fog you're in. She needs your help. If it bothers you to be comforting, don't think of it as comfort. Think of it as giving her an anchor to pull her way back to this world. Think of it as post-traumatic stress disorder if it makes you feel better, but think of it instead of thinking of your own shock that this happened. You knew it was likely, you even warned her of it. Now it's happened, I need your help to help her deal with it. I need you to be together for her, because I'm going to be poking and prodding her and bringing back the memories she's trying very hard to suppress right now. I'm going to be dragging her back into that hell you and I can only visit in nightmares, and I need you to remind her that there is a way out."
It made sense. He clung to the logic with all the ferocity of a trapped tiger, running the words over and over again in his mind until they made sense in plain English. Riddick nodded.
"Good." The Doc made some sort of disgusted noise and turned back to his instruments. "Rutting bastards." Riddick froze in mid-step, startled by the hatred in the doctor's voice. "Nothing better to do than hurt, maim, or kill each other. No sense of their own pride or identity, no way to be a man other than to force their manhood on someone else. Stupid, bloody bastards."
"Doc...?" he made the one syllable a question.
"You've seen their handiwork, Riddick. You've been in here often enough. Who do you think half the victims are?" He shook his head. "Never mind. Just ... mind her."
She was scratching at her arms again, alternating between clutching her rags further around herself and trying to peel her skin from her body. There were words there, too, but she was babbling in her native Aquiline, of which Riddick could only approximate the accent and a few choice curses. He wondered what she was saying. He had the feeling it was essential, important, and he was missing it.
Maybe Doc Weller spoke her language. Maybe he could translate later. He sat on the bed behind Fantine and pulled her into his arms, trying to pretend it was just another night in the Slam. He wasn't sure what kind of exams the doctor would need, he hadn't been paying attention, but he thought he had a pretty good idea anyway. As much as the doctor had been berating him, Riddick wasn't exactly a stranger to the seamier side of prison life. "Hey..." he found himself speaking, awkward. "Hey. It's ok. It's just me. Just the Doc. It's just me."
Doc looked about as grim as he'd ever seen the man, leaning forward. Riddick didn't want to see this, and tucked his head down to Fantine's shoulder without the slightest hint of shame. Almost as an afterthought he slid to one side and pulled her gently to his shoulder, so she wouldn't have to see it either. It was almost enough. She did scream, and she writhed and kicked as much as she could, but he was just plain bigger than she was. He tried to make it an embrace and not a restraint, but he just wasn't sure how much of her remembered that he was Riddick, familiar, friend, and not one of the faceless attackers.
The first part was bad enough. It was over after an excruciatingly long set of minutes, and Riddick actually relaxed. And then the Doc started to turn her and he didn't want to see this, didn't even want to be in the same room. His eyes, already squinted, closed tight. A tear or two of his own joined the flood streaming down Fantine's cheeks.
"It's over, Riddick," the Doc said finally from somewhere a long ways away and down a tunnel filled with water. "It's all over, you two."
"Thanks..." He wasn't sure what he was thanking Weller for.
The Doc was watching them both for a little while as he put his tools away. Even curled as he was almost all the way around Fantine, Riddick could feel the other man's eyes on his back. He wasn't looking over his shoulder, though. He'd pulled her into his arms and wrapped around her as though trying to make up for his inability to protect her earlier. Fragments of earlier conversations came back to haunt him: teasing, laughing, easy talk. She wasn't even talking now, or at least she wasn't talking to anyone in the room. And it was his fault, really. He'd dropped his guard, he'd seen it coming and he hadn't done a damn thing to stop it. Animal instinct, everything in him told him, shame, shame on you. He'd failed to protect what was his. He'd failed to protect her.
"Riddick."
The Doc was talking again. He had to listen. "What."
Weller palmed open the bathroom door. "Get her into the shower. She wants to get clean, that's why she's scratching herself like she was. I'll get something for her to put on after, but you get her into the shower and help her scrub down. Don't let her break the skin, but don't be surprised if she's in there till she turns pink. And whatever you do, don't let her alone. She needs to remember that not all big strong men are attackers, and she needs to remember..." he seemed to change what he was going to say in mid- sentence, "...that the world isn't all nightmares and sharp edges. That there is still tenderness and care."
In any other situation the use of the word 'tenderness' as applied to Richard Riddick would have been laughable. It didn't seem funny anymore.