Now though Riddick was in cryo, He wasn't really IN cryo. His thoughts were still active and he watched Shaen as she came in each day (or what he supposed was each day) and checked on them. She would stare for hours at his tube, as if she knew that he wasn't really asleep.
One day, Shaen actually came into the room and turned off Riddick's cryo tube, causing him to completely awaken. When asked why, she'd responded that she'd thought that he'd want "a break from sitting in that fucking thing". Riddick had promptly hit Shaen in the arm somewhat lightly and reprimanded her for cussing.
"Look, the last thing we need is for you to become some shit-mouthed teenager." He'd told her, shortly before she'd left the ship with him in tow.
They were docked in a scarcely populated planet so that they could refuel and so that Shaen could get something else to occupy her mind. They'd walked through the docking bay and into the city and visited the few shops and stalls that were there, talking the entire time. Riddick would ask her questions about her abilities, training, her life up till this point, and Shaen would answer with the shortest, to-the-point answers that she could think of. She'd told Riddick her life story…or at least as much of it as she could remember. Shaen, in turn, would ask "Richard" about his life, how he became to be what he was now, where he met Jack and other such things. Riddick answered only the questions that he thought needed to be answered and left the others either unanswered or he'd avoid them by asking Shaen another question.
"Why don't you sleep when you're in cryo?" Shaen asked, picking up an assortment of computer chips and sorting through them. She already had her next project in mind and mentally had made a checklist of things to get so she could start making it.
"Habit. Once you've had a life like mine you never let your guard down. I never completely let myself go into cryo." Riddick answered. Now it was his turn to ask a question. "Why do you continue to blame yourself for Mercuri's death?"
Shaen paused what she was doing briefly and then went back to getting the right chips.
"Who says I do?" She asked, without looking up. Finally, she gathered up about ten chips and paid for them before sticking them in her pocket and walking back to the ship.
"You turn that simulation on every other day. You must've gone through it at least fifty times already." Riddick told her, following the girl back into the docking bay.
"Sixty three. But I still could've done something to prevent her death." Shaen said a bit coldly.
"No you couldn't have." Riddick contradicted her.
"Yes I could've!" She screamed. "In every one of those simulations, in every possible tactic, there was a flaw on my part. She'd still be alive if I had just taken down that bastard when I had the chance!" Without another word, and with tears stinging at her eyes, Shaen ran onto the ship and locked herself in her room.
Riddick, not being one of the men that could deal with an emotional person, much less an emotional female, stood in the threshold of the ship for a moment, debating whether or not he should bother her. He fought with himself, telling the beast in him that she needed time, while it argued that she needed to stop being weak and get over it. Finally he decided to do what he used to do when Jack got emotional.
"Shaen…" Riddick called softly through the door. He could hear the girl crying softly and telling herself that she needed to stop being weak. "Open the door."
"Uh…give me a minute." She answered in a somewhat hoarse voice. Shaen wiped her eyes, reversed the ball cap that she'd found on her bed and resumed looking like a boy. She'd even gone so far as to wrap her chest with gauze to stop her lanky form from revealing her true gender. When she opened the door, the tears were gone and she didn't even look as if she'd been crying. The only evidence that anything had upset her at all was the small trail of moisture running from her tear duct off of her chin.
"Come here a minute." Riddick said. He took her by the hand, which he noted now had cut off biker gloves on it, and led her back into the city.
"Where are we going?" Shaen asked. She looked around her in slight confusion as Riddick guided her towards an abandoned store in the city. It was tall enough that if you fell off of it without someone to catch you or something to cushion the fall, you'd hurt yourself. But it was only a one story store.
"Climb up there and turn your back to me." Riddick said and pointed to the roof of the store. Shaen looked perplexed but climbed up to the roof using the fire escape. When she was standing with her back to Riddick he took a step backwards. "Do you trust me?" He asked.
"What?" Shaen asked, turning around slightly.
"Turn back around and answer the question. Do you trust me?" Riddick stood there, waiting for her answer. She'd had almost the same reaction as Jack had when he'd first done this to her.
Shaen turned around and hesitated a moment before saying, "Yeah. I trust you."
"Then close your eyes and let yourself fall backwards off of the building." Riddick told her.
"You're crazy." She mumbled before closing her eyes and slowly letting herself fall from the roof. During the short free fall, Shaen was rushed with a strange mix of emotions. She landed softly but securely in Riddick's arms and he set her down before asking,
"What did you feel when you were falling?" He watched her ponder the question, perhaps trying to find the right word for the feeling.
"Fear at first, before falling. Adrenaline, as I started to fall. Euphoria, while in the free fall. And then…Security and trust, when you caught me." She finally said.
"Feel better now? The first step to recovery is to trust the people you turned to for help. I knew Mercuri very well; she wouldn't have wanted you to blame yourself for her death." Riddick said, taking the smaller girl's hand and walking back to the ship. He kept in the shadows, just in case someone was looking for them.
"Actually I do feel better…thanks." Shaen said. She was afraid at first that Riddick would've let her fall and hurt herself, but she was somewhat amazed when he'd actually caught her. It was the first time she'd trusted someone with her well being since her so called friends had messed with her invention and caused her to be slightly crazy. They had, in effect, also made her concentrate on making everything that she did as flawless as possible. That's what caused her to break down when Mercuri had died. She hadn't thought it out, merely acted on her primal instinct. The same instinct that told her that Jack and Riddick could be trusted. It was almost like something inside of her could sense that they had primal instincts as well. She was snapped out of her thoughts by the hissing of a ship door. When she looked around, she realized that they were back in the ship and that Riddick had turned the dial to close the hatch.
"Why are you dressed like that?" He asked from the captain's chair. Riddick sat with the lights dimmed to almost complete darkness and had his feet crossed on the smooth metal of the control panel.
"Like what?" Shaen questioned. She walked to the center of the control room and pulled herself into the titanium storage shelf above the co-pilot's chair. She lay there, looking over at Riddick, who had a slightly amused smirk on his face.
"Like a boy." He turned to look at her and raised an eyebrow upon seeing her lounging on the storage shelf. "You do know that's for storage, right?"
"Yeah. I just like high places." She paused and said, "It's easier to pass myself off as a boy anyway…and it's easier for people to accept someone like me if they thought me to be a boy." She explained, looking him. Shaen rolled onto her back and rotated her head so that she could still watch his reactions. This motion caused her hat to fall off and her long hair to come cascading over the edges of the shelf like a crimson waterfall.
"It'll be a bit hard for people to accept you as a boy if you stop wearing baggy clothes or they see that." Riddick mused and pointed at the crimson curtain of hair.
"Alright, so I cut off my hair. I've already got the baggy shirt problem under control." Shaen's small hand reached over and gathered up her long hair and she brought it around to her face to look at it before sighing.
Riddick removed his goggles and flicked the lights off, causing his vision to solarize everything. The cold inanimate objects showed up as blackness with a purple outline, while the shelf that Shaen was resting on radiated more of a hot pinkish outline from where the girl's body heat had seeped through. Riddick's eyes finally looked over at Shaen. Her miniature form radiated more heat from her torso than it had before. Instead of radiating only in blues, which was odd for someone anyways, she radiated in the original shades of blue for her arms legs, neck and head, but now her torso was shades of red, orange, and yellow. Almost like a small fire.
"Shaen, how many shirts are you wearing." Riddick asked, hoping that that was the cause and it wasn't the fact that she'd wrapped her chest or something like that.
"Two." Shaen responded, sliding off of the shelf and walking towards the gym again.
"Take the gauze off of your chest. You'll damage yourself doing that." Riddick called.
"Doing what?" She questioned innocently. Curious as to how he knew she'd wrapped her chest to hide her appearance, Shaen absentmindedly fiddled with the edge of the gauze. She walked into the gym and was about to play around with a training course that she'd completed billions of times before when Riddick was suddenly right next to her.
"Wrapping your chest to pass yourself off as a boy." Riddick answered. He slid one hand over the back Shaen's shirt and found the edge of the gauze, which he purposefully but playfully tugged on. "That's going to damage your chest in the long run." He told her before stepping to her left with his arms crossed. "What'cha doing?" Riddick asked, looking over her shoulder at the panel with the list of courses on it.
"I dunno. Something to occupy the mind I suppose." Shaen said. She pushed Riddick's warning about damaging her chest out of her mind as she tapped the scroll button and went to the second page of the list. Her fingers played with the holographic touch panel for a couple of seconds before she chose one titled, "Slaughter Fest 3." She played around with the settings and was about to hit the initiate button when Riddick said,
"Take the gauze off first." He shooed Shaen out of the Gym and into the bathroom. While she was inside, he went back to the Gym and upped the player total. Now they were both going to go through a completely different simulation. He'd purposely changed the course as well, to see how well she'd react to an attack if she were unprepared.
When Shaen got back into the gym and the door shut with a quiet swooshing noise, she had only a few seconds to look towards Riddick before they were plunged into complete darkness and several bots came out from the ceiling, walls and other places. The door locked and Shaen's primal instincts flashed and her sight changed from normal to her night vision…or the equivalent of Riddick's shined eyes.