Hey all, here's chapter 17, am a little hyper at the moment it's really late at night I've only had 5 hours sleep in the last 48 hours and am waiting for a call back about a job while listening to Five Iron Frenzy. Major hyperness...lol.

Anyway, please, please, please, please, please, please review this story and would it be really sad to plug the other PB story that I've started. It's called 'The Fall' and it's R rated like this one but do check it out. Anyway do review, I love to hear what you have to say and enjoy this chapter.

Goodbye from your hyper, five iron frenzy singing writer.

Kayla

Chapter 17: Digging Through The Past.

"There are a couple of things that you might like to look at if you are sure that you don't want to sleep any more tonight."

"You're not going to push the issue Riddick?" Jack sat on the edge of the bed and pocked him in the side. He raised an eyebrow and caught her hand before she could retract it.

"I'm not going to try and make you sleep tonight Jack." Riddick shrugged.

"Let go of my hand!" Jack poked him in the ribs again but with her other hand and it too was soon caught and he flipped her onto her back with ease. She looked at him with a frown on her face and he looked impassively back at her.

"That was not smart Jack." He said seriously.

"I'm known for doing stupid things. I've been doing them all of my life." She shrugged but her eyes widened in surprise when he started tickling her with one hand, the other still preoccupied with holding both of her hands above her head and keeping them out of action.

Jack probably hadn't laughed so hard or been in so much pain for quite a while. The muscles in her stomach and side ached from laughing; her arms were tired from struggling. Tear tracks made their way down her cheeks, her breath was quick and sporadic and new laughter flowed out of her mouth every time that other hand moved, even if it wasn't anywhere close to her body.

Finally, she closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing instead. Refusing flatly to anticipate the next move of those fingers. She twitched a few times and heard the sound of his light chuckles but he suddenly seemed to have lost interest in their little game of cat and mouse.

His hand released hers and she felt his weight lift off the bed and heard the sound of his feet against the floor. She left herself lay there a while longer with her eyes shut, trying to work out what he was doing just by listening. It was a game she used to play when she was a teenager; she had lain around for hours when Riddick hadn't been around listening with her eyes closed, trying to interpret the sounds around her. She figured that it might come in handy one day and she prided herself in being pretty good at it too.

There was the opening and closing of a metal door, hands against tough or even rough fabric, soft thuds like padded weight hitting the ground. The sound of tiny particles bouncing off the floor, the sound of the metal door being closed again, a zipper being pulled back.

"What is it Riddick?" She finally opened her eyes, rolled over and sat up so that she was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed. He didn't answer her, just deposited one of the three bags that she had seen him load onto the sand buggy earlier on the floor by the bed.

Jack got off the bed and sat down on the floor in front of the bag as Riddick sat another one of them on the table and sat down himself, pushing the flaps of the already opened bag wider. There was a deep frown on his face and she couldn't help but wonder what was with the bags in the first place.

To be honest, she wasn't quite sure what to make of the bag; it was old, non-descript, totally average and very day. She pulled the zipper back and opened the bag. On top she found herself looking at a long sleeved teenaged boy's t-shit, the fabric slightly warn and small holes just above the cuffs where she used to stick her thumbs through, it had been a security thing, she had a big jumper back at home with holes in the cuffs that she wore when she was feeling like a tub of ice cream and a soppy movie.

"God," She whispered as she pulled the shirt and a pair of jeans that went with them out of the bag. It had been her only other set of clothes when the social work people had put her on The Hunter-Gratzner, dressed and pretending to be a boy not to mention as angry as hell.

The day that they had come to pick her up from her parent's home, where a neighbor was looking after her, they had given her that bag and told her only to take what fit inside it. She had been assured that the rest of the things her parents had left her, along with the house, would be sold and the money put into a bank account, everything that was sold would be approved by her one living relative, an aunt dieing of cancer, the rest would be put in storage. She had quite the inheritance waiting for her if she ever decided to go back and claim it.

Jack even at fifteen hadn't been a fool; she had packed the bare necessities for herself and then packed mainly her parent's valuables. There were a few sentimental items along with all of her mother's jewellery in a hand made box, a number of other little things that her parents had treasured. Letters her father had written her and her mother when he had been away on business, her mother's three journals, fat with memories and tied together with ribbon. There was a family photo album, a few credit chips and paper credits and an old oak gun box with her father's small handgun.

"How did you get these?" Jack whispered and looked at Riddick who was happily going through a bag of odd shaped boxes that he had laid out on the table. He looked at her after he had put the last of the boxes on the table and deposited the bag on the floor.

"I wanted to get a few of my things back from Johns. I thought that you might want your things back too." His eyes scanned the floor around her; she couldn't tell if he was interested in what was there or just feeling plan nosey. There was something in Riddick that needed to know everything all the time; it had bothered her for a while before she had learned how to deal with it. "Doesn't look like much of it is yours though."

"Most of it is my parent's valuables and some sentimental shit that I probably couldn't have kept for long after I'd split from care." She shrugged, opening her mother's jewellery box and pulling out certain items and examining them closely like she had done as a child. She could remember laying on her mother's bed with her looking at all the different pieces and having her mother explain how she had gotten them and from who.

Her mother's assortment of rings, all silver or white gold were strung onto a silver chain along with the rose gold that her mother had insisted on for her parent's wedding bands. Jack's fingers sorted through them, fingering the cold, warn, smooth metals and was even surprised to find that a good number of them fit her fingers now.

She restrung them carefully and set them on top of the black long sleeved t-shirt before sorting through the rest of the jewellery. The last time she had seen those necklaces, pendants, earrings and bracelets, she had just lost her parents, she had shed tears over those items.

Methodically, she sifted through her past, not reading the letters from her father or her mother's journals but letting her fingers hover over the folded pages and lovingly warn covers. She let her fingers play with the carefully chosen and tied ribbon but didn't pull the ends to open them.

She collected the credit chips and paper credits together and sealed them in a small plastic bag. She would take care of them at another time. Now she needed to focus on the rest, clear the memories that were bring dredged up from the past.

Everything was handled with care and looked at, most of the time silly memories coming to her head like when she pulled out her father's carefully folded old Lameir Wolves hat and she remembered the way that he had used to come in after a hard day of work and put it on before he even had his suit off. His dad had given it to him on his twentieth birthday. She flicked through the photo album, wondering for a moment if Riddick would even be able to recognize the girl that she knew had been her. She looked so happy, so feminine. There were even photographs of her in skirts and dresses, two items of clothing she was pretty sure that Riddick had never even seen her in.

Jack traced the lines of her mother's face with a finger from where she stared out of the page. Imagined her walking through the door and sitting down on the floor next to her, taking her chin in her hand and examining what her daughter looked like grown up. Would she say how much she reminded her of herself? Jack pushed the question aside, it didn't matter, her mother was dead, she would never be anything like her mother. Her mother had been gentile, a homemaker, totally focused on her family and friends. Jack was a loner, she got people killed and only knew how to protect herself, she had no time to make a family of her own and wasn't sure if she had the desire either.

Eventually, even the photo album, along with everything else found its way back into the bag, except for the box, which held her father's old handgun. She remembered when he had brought that box home under his arm; she couldn't have been much older then seven. Her mother had thrown the biggest fit of her life, she had never seen her parents fight like that before and she remembered being terrified by it. Her father had won that fight; the idea that it might one day save her daughter's life was enough to silence her mother in the end.

It turned out in the end that that gun had saved her life. The stupid fucker that come into the house looking for revenge for one thing or another, waving a gun around hadn't expected her father to be there with a gun, he hadn't even expected him to know how to use it. Her father had shot the man, shot to kill and hit him too but not before he had shot her mother in the head and peppered her father with the rest of the clip.

Jack had watched the whole thing, running from her hiding place, where her father had told her to stay, to the top of the stairs when she heard the first gun shot. She had seen the vacant expression pass across her mother's face as the bullet passed through her brain, heard the groans of pain that her father made when he was hit. The gunman just hit the floor after the clip was empty, his dieing eyes watching her as she moved to her father's side.

"You're my girl. Be strong for daddy." Her father had said to her, even mustering a smile as his body shook and she looked at him with fear on her face. He had died in her arms before the ambulance had even gotten there. The man who had killed her parents had lived for three days before the decision was made to switch off his life support.

The gun was the last thing to be examined but it was also being looked at in a totally different way to then the rest of the items. She took it out, very aware that the last time she had held it she hadn't known what to do with it, and looked over it carefully until she was happy that it was still in good working order. She shouldn't see why it wouldn't have been. It had been protected in it's box deep in the bag for years. Time hadn't had a chance to touch it.

"What do you think?" Riddick asked.

"The gun will work fine again." She whispered, still reeling from her memories. "The rest, I dunno, I could sell it off I guess, put it away somewhere. I wouldn't know what to do with half of those things anymore. My life is so different now from what it was then." Jack put the gun back in its box and closed the lid. "Those things were the trappings of a life I wouldn't fit into anymore."

"What were you going to do with that stuff anyway? Not exactly what I would call practical for foster care." Jack gritted her teeth at the tone he used. It sounded like he was mocking her again and she didn't like it in the least. It wasn't like he was a mind reader, he didn't know what had been passing through her head, he didn't even know how her parents died, she had never told him.

"I would never have made it to my first foster placement. I would never have made it.." Her voice trailed off into nowhere, her hands were shaking slightly in anger as she set the box next to the bag. What right did he have to mock her? Even as she asked herself the question, she knew it wasn't him that she was really mad at.

"Jack?"

"Don't say another fucking word!" She zipped up the bag and stood up, grabbing a hooded sweatshirt and pulling it over her head.

"Jack?"

"I would have runaway first, flogged off her jewellery," A tear made its way down her cheek as she remembered her interrupted plans. "I had a friend for two years between twelve and fourteen. Emily was a foster kid. She had it rough too, half the time she didn't want to go home. She finally got moved away, I only heard from her once after that, six months later. She was abused for two years and only after that did she end up with decent folk." Jack bit her lip. "When my parents died, I swore that what happened to Emily wouldn't happen to me. I wasn't going to put up with abuse for a couple of years before finding somewhere I could be happy, so keep your damn scorn to yourself. I was prepared to run and run I would have. I was always good at running Riddick, I just never wanted to run from you."

"It might not have been that bad Jack. It might have been hell of a lot better then what you ended up with."

"Might have been hell of a lot worse." She glared at him. "Don't get all high and mighty on me Riddick. I don't want to hear it. I was happy enough with you, I don't think anyone would have prepared me better for what was to come in my life."

"You don't have to sell that stuff Jack."

"I have no use for that kinda shit. I don't get dressed up and go to garden parties and cocktail parties. I play with guns and party at clubs that people like my mother would never have set foot in. She was ten times better then...It doesn't matter now anyway. I don't dig through my past because of these fucking feelings. These memories are nothing but poison Riddick, I'm going to bed."

---

James Bradley walked into the bar at the space dock on New Mecca, the main first stop for people coming and leaving the planet. That day he had sacrificed his normal crisp and near uniform appearance for faded jeans and a t-shirt with a baseball cap pulled down hiding his eyes. It was a place he didn't particularly want to be but he had a man to track down and New Mecca had been his last known destination, the place that he was meant to have set up home.

In his hunt for Riddick, Jack had become a central interest. The girl was his most solid connection to the murderer. She would end up becoming his lure he was more then sure. But for James Bradley to be able to get the girl to help him, voluntarily or not, he need to know more about her. That included knowing about the people from her past and this person from her past was particularly interesting, this person from her past knew Riddick also, not as well as her, but knew him nonetheless.

He looked like most of the other patrons spending their hard earned credits in the bar that night. Only he wasn't like the rest, he was there for information on Jacquelyn Stewart from a man who claimed to know almost everything there was to know about her. The whole idea creeped him out a little since he was sure that neither she nor Riddick knew of the man's existence but he would serve his purpose.

"Can I get you anything sir?" The barmen walked over to him, wiping his hands on a cloth attached to his belt.

"Scotch on the rocks." Bradley answered him and watched as he scooped ice into a glass and poured the golden brown alcohol.

"Anything else for you at the moment sir?" He was asked as the drink was set down in front of him and he handed over the credits that it cost. Bradley sipped and shook his head letting his mind wonder back to his hunt.

The hunt was never far from his mind but then as far as he was concerned the hunt should never be far from any good merc's mind. It was the hunt that made James Bradley's life exciting, worth living and this was just another stage of it, another thing for his mind to wonder over and digest. His mind was never idle.

He let his mind wonder over the way that Jack had behaved and cross-referenced it with what he knew of her life with Riddick and about the convict himself. She hadn't been all that forthcoming with any information, she had been blunt and rude, she had shown hatred toward him and mercs in general, yeah, that fit in with what he would expect from someone who had been raised by the universes' most wanted criminal. The only thing that he couldn't work out was what the convict would have wanted with the girl.

Riddick was known for many types of murders and there always seemed to be a reason behind them but never in his criminal life had Riddick killed a child or women, just like he had never raped or pillaged like most other criminals of his stature had. Had he finally been sick and tired of having to pay for fucks and would Jack be the woman that she was now if that had been the case

Riddick had done quite a job on that particular teenager when he had gotten his hands on her and he had turned her into quite the adult because of it.

Poor little Jack, James Bradley mused the tone that his mind used was mocking; she wouldn't have understood what had hit her when Riddick entered her life. As he sipped on his beverage he wondered at her first reactions toward the man who would later become her guardian and teacher. Fear and loathing turning to trust, love even?

No other merc seemed to have gone after the holy man. They didn't seem to think that he knew anything of value; they had always gone after the girl. But Imam was as much a port of the girl's mystery as the girl was of Riddick's. But they knew that the holy man was as likely to tell them nothing as he was to tell them anything about the time on the dark planet and he would be sure never to talk about Jack, after all, it was he whom had abandoned her but then, he now had a family of his own with two young children. Jack would have been a part of a past that Imam would have been trying to put behind him.

But no other merc was quite like James Bradley.

Two hours later a tall stringy man walked into the bar, his too pale eyes scanning the room till they came to rest on Bradley. The two men nodded to each other and Bradley summoned another drink as the pale-eyed man drew near and sat down on the stool next to him.

"Mr. Bradley?" The tall skinny man asked, he was nothing to look at with lank hair and sallow skin, he leaned up against the top of the bar resting his chin on his palm, those eyes looking at him with curiosity.

"Depends on who wants to know." James Bradley was the type of man who had made more enemies then he had friends. In his time as a merc he had even had a few hits put out on him. He didn't even trust his informants.

"You wanted some information."

"Do you have my information?" James Bradley asked, testing, always testing.

"You were looking for information on one Miss Jackie Stewart, twenty-two. She was trained by Riddick, a nasty piece of shit but nice to look at, around five foot seven inches tall, dark brown hair, green eyes. A passenger of The Hunter-Gratzner and currently the pilot of The Aurora." The sallow skinned man answered him and looked around the bar out of pale eyes that seemed nervous.

"Perhaps we should get a booth." James Bradley grinned beckoning for the waiter as his pressed a hundred credit note into the lank man's hand. "What are you drinking?"

----

Jack lay awake next to Riddick, staring at the ceiling almost positive that he was still awake also. She wanted to roll over, to curl up and be closer to him. She wanted to feel comforted, to forget her distant past and replace it was the time when she was with him and let that act solely as her past, that time hadn't been as painful.

There was so much she wanted when it came to Riddick, high up on that list being love, acceptance and answers.

She could just see the conversation turning sour on her as she worked to get the answers she craved. The answers she craved about what Carolyn had done that changed him so deeply or how much she had had to do with the change that had happened in him. She wanted to understand what it was about her that made her un-expendable when she had believe that she was for all those years, it wasn't like she was anything out of the ordinary and she knew it.

"Why aren't you sleeping?"

"I thought you said you weren't going to push the issue."

"It was you who wanted to go back to sleep Jack." His voice rumbled through the darkness.

"What color were your eyes, before you had them shined I mean?" Jack asked.

"Brown. Why?"

"I bet they caught a lot of attention." She rolled away from him and clutched her pillow in a way that he found was characteristic these days.

"Not as much as the shine does." He shifted slight, closer, just a fraction but still closer. "You worried about more nightmares?"

"Nightmares happen Riddick." She answered. "Why won't you ever talk about what happened with Carolyn?"

"There's nothing to tell because nothing happened. There's no point talking about a non-event." He was curt.

"Yeah, it was such a non-event that it changed you completely." She said, her voice seeped in sarcasm. "You'd think that you're whole damned life was a total non-event the way you don't talk about it."

"A lot of it was a non-event. Given up for dead as a baby, foster care, the rangers, the murders, Slam City and my escape from salm." He answered, his tone a little more even then before but still cold. A shiver ran down her spine that he couldn't help but notice.

"I start these conversations with the best intentions and then I end up taking chucks." She rolled over so she was looking at him and he pulled her a little closer in a one armed embrace. "Riddick, I just want to understand everything, I want to know everything there is to know and asking the questions is the only way I know of doing that."

"I know. You always did want to know everything."

"I'm not that same fifteen year old anymore Riddick."

"Trust me, I am very aware of that fact."