A/N : This is a ONE-SHOT, so there's nothing else after this.
BLUE
The walls were blue. They were not the pale happy-go-lucky 'the sky is like a sapphire' kind of blue and they were not that calm clear ocean blue. This blue was as deep and dark as the sky at midnight, like a fresh bruise against the pale tan of the sandstone that lay beneath the paint.
This was, of course, not the way the walls truly appeared to Riddick's eyes. To him the world was a violet stained photo-negative, but he knew the color, he'd seen the tins the paint had come in. He stood just inside the door, staring at the wall. After a moment he raised a hand and traced his fingers across edge of the wall, noting the uneven coating the paint had created over the stone.
In his mind's eye he could see her, crouching on the floor a few feet away with a roller, trying to get the spaces closest to the ground. She looked up, smiling with flecks of paint on her skin and in her hair, and the memory faded.
Riddick drew his hand away from the wall, clenching it slowly into a fist. For a moment he closed his eyes, taking in a steady breath to keep himself from breaking something. He caught her scent, that faint trace of vanilla, an invisible mark upon the room that she'd made solely her own.
He opened his eyes and saw her sitting with her back against the edge of the bed, one of her notebooks open in her lap. Her wavy hair was in a bit of a mess and she was chewing on the end of her pencil, eyes flying wide when she'd seen him standing there. She'd hastily set it aside on the floor to follow him down to breakfast.
It was still there, still lying on the rug where she had left it three days before, the pencil set on top.
Riddick stared at it now, almost unaware of his movements as he crossed the few feet from the door and picked the spiral bound notebook up from the floor. He held it for a moment, just looking at the dark blue cardboard cover and the little number '3' in permanent marker on the upper left hand corner.
In his mind he knew he shouldn't be looking at it, that he really should have never ventured into her room at all. But he'd found himself walking up those stairs just the same.
Three days and there was no trace, no trail, nothing to indicate whether or not she was even alive. He hadn't slept, eaten, or gone to work. In all those hours he'd just searched, as did the holy man and his new wife.
Riddick slowly opened the notebook, letting it fall onto the first page to see her handwriting, small and neat, scrawled across the lined paper. The date was from some four months before, noted in the right top corner of the page. He stared at it, watching her write it there inside his head, then snapped it shut again.
Jack was gone.