It was four a.m. when Dannie stumbled in the front door of her home. Riddick had been asleep on the couch, partly because he didn't have a room of his own, and partly because he was waiting for Dannie and fell asleep right there on the couch. Dannie was in so much pain and she was completely exhausted that she had forgot that Riddick was in her home and that he might have been asleep at this time of the morning. The sudden movement in the house woke Riddick up, and he found Dannie laying on the floor, blood coming out of her mouth, and bruises all over her face.

"I knew I should have gone with you tonight. Why didn't I go with you?" he said to an unconscious Dannie. Riddick picked her up and put her on the couch and frantically searched around for a med kit. When he finally found it under the medicine cabinet in the hallway outside her bedroom, Riddick returned to her and started cleaning and bandaging her up. "Dannie everything is going to be alright. I'm here, I'll take care of you. Daddy's here."

cough "If you know what's good for you, you'll back up, let me up, and never call yourself that again in my presence." Riddick was just relieved that she wasn't going to die, that he did what she said, but stopped her before she got too far away, "I'll talk to you after you've had some sleep. Good morning." Dannie walked off to her room, and Riddick laid back down on the couch and conked out.

On her way to her room, Dannie noticed what time it was, four thirty a.m., and realized that she wasn't going to get any sleep tonight. She had class to teach this morning, someone to beat up for not showing up last night at the fight, and she'd have to find a way to get passed Riddick before she could get to work.

She decided that since sleep was off the menu, she was going to have to make some of her special coffee. She knew it took at least an hour to brew, and about fifteen minutes to prepare, but she had to get ready for work, and be there in about two hours. Normally, she would have just called the chief and told him that she needed the day off so she could heal, but there was no way she was going to stick around to talk to Riddick today. So as the old saying goes, "Desperate times, call for desperate measures.", and this was as desperate a time as any.

The "coffee" is a mixture of three drops of pure adrenaline, which you can buy on the streets like you would Speed or any other kind of narcotics, but it isn't as pure, or you can get it from private labs that use it for research, it costs more, but it is a better quality, bold coffee, an extra shot of caffeine from ground up caffeine pills, a syringe full of liquid morphine, ground up pain pills for other parts of the body, all of which you can get as a deal from the labs when you buy the adrenaline. You mix the ground up pills in with the coffee grounds and the other liquids in with the water, all of which are odorless and tasteless, so all you taste is the coffee. If the pills aren't ground up as fine as the coffee, than the "coffee" has a grainy taste so you put in your favorite flavored creamer and a ton of sugar to cut down on the taste. You take it with aspirin the first cup to help get the process started, and then at least every three hours to keep up with the pain. If you take it every hour, on the hour, than you'll never be tired or in any kind of pain, but it's not recommended. It has a way of really fucking up with a person's system. Taken every two hours, will keep you from feeling any pain, but you do run the risk of attempting to fall asleep.

Dannie was able to get everything prepared in her room so she didn't disturb Riddick, but she was afraid that the noise from the coffee maker would wake him up, or worse, the smell of coffee brewing would. If Riddick were to smell the coffee and wake up he might want some, and this stuff in the hands of a person who has either never had any, or has no reason to be taking the type of medication that she put in there, could very easily have a heart attack from the extra adrenaline alone and die. But at least he wouldn't feel any pain when it happened.

She put the "coffee" on to brew and went to get ready for work. The first thing she did was hop in the shower. Sure the hot water felt great, but she was afraid to allow herself to relax too much and fall asleep, then Riddick would drink some of the coffee and she would have another dead parent and no bounty money.

When she got out of the shower, she could tell that it was almost finished, and that Riddick was still asleep on the couch, so she went about her business getting ready as best as her aching body would allow. It took her forever to finally get dressed, socks were the worst part of the whole ordeal, all that fucking bending. She emerged from her room to go get her shoes when she heard the coffee maker stop. She wasn't thinking that Riddick might have woken up within the last fifteen minutes, so when she looked up and saw Riddick in the kitchen about to take a sip of coffee she scared them both when she burst out, "No, dad! Don't!" She ran over and grabbed the cup out of his hands before it hit his lips.

He looked at her in shock and asked, "What did you say?" "I said, No. Don't." "No you called me dad. Admit it." She gave him a death glare and said, "Don't be so sure. I don't even like it when someone else calls you my father. What the fuck makes you think I would call you dad?" "I don't know, but I heard you say it."

She poured his cup back into the pot, poured the pot into her thermos, and added the creamer and sugar. "Hey. That was my cup!" "No this was all for me. Not you. You can make your own later." "Make my own! You have enough there for an entire army to have two cups each. Why do you need so much coffee?" "I didn't get any sleep last night or this morning as you well know, and I don't like the coffee that they have at the station. Anyways, I don't have to explain myself to you. You are staying in my home.", she went over to the couch and put on her shoes, "I have to get to work."

Dannie stormed out of the house and slammed the door behind her. She got into her car, and drove to work barely acknowledging stop signs, and other cars on the roads. She made it there in record time with ten minutes to spare before her first class of the morning. She decided to take the most spread out dosage possible, every three hours, so she wouldn't seem different to any of her classes.

Her morning classes went by without any problems. Most of the class was either too tired to notice if anything was wrong with her and the others were too preoccupied with their up coming shifts to care one way or another. She had a break for lunch where she expected to see Derick, but he never showed up. The afternoon classes were always harder for her, she had just eaten and she was getting ready to go home, but today there was another problem. After lunch, the chief had called her into his office and they had a rather long chat about some things, but it was confidential, so when Derick cornered her on the way to the classroom, she couldn't tell him. When he showed up for class, she was so tired, all of her coffee was gone, and beginning to fell every bit of pain in her body, plus she continued to think about what had happened just before the class had started that she couldn't focus on what she was doing and Derick nearly knocked her out.

Derick catches her by surprise after she emerges from the chief's office and throws her up against the wall. He gets up into her face and says as forcefully without yelling as he can, "So what did you and the chief talk about?" "Nothing." "Then why are you sacred of me?" "I'm not scared, especially of you." He puts his hands on her hips and allows them to roam down to her ass, "Then why is your breathing getting harder?" "Because I am uncomfortable in this position, and you being this close is cutting off the air supply right here. Please move."

Dannie put her hands on his chest to try to move him away from her, but he closed the distance between them even more. Derick was beginning to act like a jealous boyfriend, which he definitely was not. Dannie was starting to feel like the nineteen year old she was. She knew that Derick was at least twenty six and he knew more about how to excite and scare a woman by just the way he acted. He leaned down into her neck and whispered in her ear, "If you were talking about nothing, then why did I hear my name mentioned a couple of times?"

Before she could get a word out, Derick started sucking on her neck and squeezing her ass. "We were just talking about how easy I've been going on you.", Derick stopped, "He wants me to stop going easier on you than everyone else. He thinks there is something going on between us. I told him there was nothing, and that if it seemed like I was going easier on you than everyone else, I didn't mean to and I would stop. See, I told we weren't talking about anything." Dannie pushed him back and walked into the class.

After the episode in class, Dannie cancelled the last class of the day and went home to get some sleep. She was exhausted and in an immense amount of pain, so Derick drove her home. By the time he got her home, she had already passed out so he carried her into the house, to her room, and passed Riddick. When Derick put her down, Riddick noticed the new bruises forming on her face and immediately blamed Derick for it. Not that he wasn't right in doing so, but he was just quick to judge him because Derick is a merck and Riddick hates all mercks.

"I never want to see you near my daughter again, you scum sucking merck." "I wouldn't talk about Dannie like that if I were you. If see finds…" Riddick grabbed him by his neck, shoved him up against a near by wall, and said, "What did you say?" "Well, you called me a scum sucking merck, and just before all of this happened, I was sucking on her neck and she was loving every minute, so I would watch what you say." Riddick tightened his grip on Derick's neck and lifted him into the air. "And if she hadn't pissed me off as much as she had, I wouldn't have had to beat her up so much, but she did crack a few ribs on me as payment, so I guess we're even. If she weren't unconscious, I might be in there right now, fucking her brains out. What do you think about that?" Derick said through gasps of air.

"There's no way in hell she'll have anything to do with you once she knows that your a merck." "What makes you think that she doesn't already know that I am?", Derick looked into Riddick's silver eyes almost sadistically, "She's known since you showed up that night. She knows that my crew and I are going to haul your ass in for the best price possible, and she wants to help take you down."

Riddick was going to break his neck right then and there, but Dannie regained consciousness and called out for Derick. He allowed Derick to go over to her, but stayed right outside the door to make sure that he didn't try anything.

Dannie didn't leave that night and neither did Derick, so Riddick posted himself right outside her door the entire night and even called Kyra for backup just in case he felt tired. The room stayed quite all night and all the next morning. Kyra had made some breakfast for all of them, Dannie's favorite, scrambled eggs, sausage, toast, and pancakes. Both Kyra and Riddick ate, and when noon rolled around and Dannie and Derick still hadn't come out of her room, Riddick opened the door, walked into the room, and yelled out, "What the fucking hell is going on here!"