AN: This is an AU fix-it fic and romance I wrote during the Rough Trade July 2020 Sentinel Challenge. I'm keeping Fry alive (with a few other people) and shipping Carolyn Fry/Riddick. I'm also adding in the Sentinel Trope (Sentinels with enhanced physical senses and Guides with empathy who bond together as lovers and tribal protectors with a bit of soulmates thrown in). The events in this cover the first movie, but from Fry's POV and with romance and more survival. Dialog in this story is a combination of original, paraphrased, and quoted directly from the movie depending on my needs in a scene. I hope you enjoy it!
Not For Me
By Indygodusk
Chapter 1
They say that during cryo-sleep, everything shuts down between one blink and the next—everything but your most primitive, animal side.
Carolyn Fry didn't know if that was true for Mundanes, but it certainly seemed to be true for Sentinels and Guides. As a Guide she didn't have it quite as bad, but cryosleep always left her feeling drained rather than well-rested. If she was unfortunate enough to be transporting a Sentinel in the passenger compartment of her ship, the discomfort became that much worse as her empathy picked up on their restlessness.
Sentinels and Guides were throwbacks from a distant time in human history when people lived in small groups on one planet and biology and trauma combined to bring Online tribal Sentinel protectors with enhanced physical senses and Guides with empathy to help balance a Sentinel's senses. The instincts of Sentinels and Guides compelled them to seek out a spiritually compatible match and bond together to protect the tribe.
The future was a lot more complicated.
Instinct became inconvenient when tribes were replaced by continent-spanning metropolises and migration between farflung solar systems became a common event. Plus, only a fraction of the human population even possessed Sentinel/Guide gifts and the ability to access the spiritual plane. You were hardwired to want a bond and need to protect your tribe, but millenia of conflicting environmental pressures had diluted instincts enough for people to find workarounds. Drugs could mute the mental and physical punishment for subverting biological programming, but as with everything, there were negative side effects.
It hurt not to bond, but most of the so-called Gifted lived without one. A high bonding compatibility between Sentinels and Guides was rare and coveted. You could bond without that spiritual alignment, but most partnerships like that didn't last.
Carolyn Fry was an Online Guide and empath. She'd trained but never registered her name to be put into the pool of those interested in meeting other Gifted and bonding. Most Sentinels were cops and she had zero interest in law enforcement. She had no plans of changing that either despite the painfully achy feeling of emptiness that only a bond with a Sentinel could fill. Stubborn was her middle name. She had no interest in surrendering to biology. Her career as a docking pilot was more important than some muscle-bound lunk's desire for a guide dog and she'd told that to the last three Sentinels who'd come sniffing around, trying to make her change her mind.
Although being unbonded was uncomfortable, being on suppression drugs felt even worse and slowed her reactions, which was dangerous in a spaceship pilot. To adapt, she built the strongest mental shields she could to protect herself against the emotions of others and allowed herself to view her three coworkers on the commercial transport ship Hunter-Gratzner as her tribe. The mental gymnastics mostly worked to protect her from her primitive instincts going haywire and the emotional neediness of the passengers pulling her in to try and protect them inconveniently. She was here to help herself and her friends, not random strangers.
And if she sometimes dreamed of waking up from cryosleep to find an adventure with a handsome Sentinel by her side instead of the same old boring routine of shuffling passengers and cargo back and forth across the galaxy where she rarely saw more than the metal walls of her ship and the nearest port hotel and bar before going under cryo again, well, there was nothing wrong with dreams as long as you knew they were unrealistic.
Until she was woken up abruptly halfway through a journey to see her ship being perforated with meteorites. The high-pitched popping sounds seemed so innocent compared to the sight of the holes blasting through the crew cryotubes across from her. In the flashing yellow emergency lights, the blood splattering the glass tubes looked violent orange.
Captain Mitchell, a hard but fair man, never finished waking up. His eyes had just opened when he died. Carolyn's mouth fell open in a low grunt as she felt the mental tether she kept on him snap.
Angela died seconds later. She'd never repay that bottle of wine and the ripped dress from their last leave together.
Of her tribe and crew, only Owens was left. Their abrupt loss hit her like a knife shoved in the back. She struggled to breathe through the disorientation of waking early and pain of their loss.
Reeling from the backlash and completely unprepared, she felt her mental shields crack. Emotions from forty simultaneously waking, disoriented, and scared passengers assaulted her and tumbled her mind out of her body. She began spiralling, lost and overwhelmed. Empathic shock would kill her as surely as the meteorites but she couldn't stop her fall into madness.
Then her mind slammed into a silver shield. It felt like being struck by a gong. The impact had their souls resonating in harmony, a strange beauty in the midst of trauma and tragedy. The mind was strong, so incredibly strong despite the many obvious areas of damage. The silver shield encircled her mind tightly, pressing in on her indecently close and closing out everything else in an intimate protection and invasion that made her instinctively push back, but he—definitely a he—had her pinned. The pressure of the push and pull had the effect of sealing the cracks in her mental shields as she wiggled against his hold. She wiggled but a part of her had no interest in escaping.
In the blessed silence she could only feel his mind now: focused, surprised, and intrigued. His mind felt both dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful. He pulled at her like nothing else ever had and she got the feeling that it was mutual. A mind like that was a juggernaut, powerful, disciplined, and stubborn. He would never stop until he got what he wanted.
What if he decided he wanted her? She would be possessed completely by his fire and find herself burned to ashes. She wouldn't survive it. The idea scared her.
The silver mind's focus turned to disappointment, followed swiftly by boredom and dismissal. She tried to feel grateful instead of stung when he roughly shoved her away from his mind and out of the passenger compartment, slamming her mind back into her own body.
Disoriented and mentally raw, she had no way to catch herself as her cryotube popped open and dumped her on the floor. Owens, her co-pilot and only remaining empathic link, landed on top of her, equally confused and fixating on the unexpected presence of gravity. When they discovered that they'd fallen out of their shipping lane and been caught in a planet's gravity well, she gave herself a single moment of panic before shoving everything from her mind but the need to survive and keep Owens, the last member of her tribe, safe.
As the ship fell into the planet's atmosphere, she tried every trick she could think of, both in and out of the book, to stop their fall. She failed. Owens sent out a distress signal but mid-message the communications array snapped off in the heat and turbulence of atmospheric entry. The nose of the ship sliced through the sky, refusing to level off and give the ship any lift. At this rate she'd crash face-first into the planet and they'd all burn together.
Unable to answer Owen's demands for more information, trying not to feel his fear and desperation on top of her own, she deployed the main air brakes. The ship slowed, but not enough. Breathing heavy, she purged the cargo compartment and trillions of credits worth of goods. Her life was more important. Owens was more important. The ship jolted and the angle of re-entry corrected slightly, but not enough.
"WHAT THE—was that a purge, Fry?!" Owens's voice echoed through her com.
The entire ship rattled and her instruments screamed in warning. She hit more switches with minimal results. Sweat stung her eyes as she looked up at the red handle over her head, the handle that would purge the passenger compartment. "It wasn't enough. I can't get the nose up!"
"Try again! Try everything again!" he shouted.
"You know something I don't, get up here and do it!" Licking her lips, she pulled her mental shields in close, blocking out everything she could. "I gotta dump more load." Her hand moved up to touch the red handle. She didn't know those people, not even the man belonging to that mesmerizing silver mind that both enticed and terrified her. She was a tribe of two. Owens was the only one she had to protect. Not strangers.
"You can't just—" Owens pitch went high before stalling out. He started again with a bad attempt at sounding calm, "Look, the Company says we protect those passengers."
"So we both die for a bunch of strangers because of the Company line? Screw that!"
"Don't you touch that handle, Fry! Don't you dare!"
Her hand lingered for another moment before she ripped it away and returned to other desperate and insane measures for trying to level out a ship never designed for emergency atmospheric entry. She had to kick several of the handles to get them to engage. They'd probably never been used since the ship had been built. She sealed every bulkhead she could to slow air loss and began opening exterior hatches. At last, with every airbrake and hatch open to create drag to slow descent and get the nose up, the ship finally started to level.
Then the hatches, not built to withstand such stresses, started shearing off. The shrapnel crashed into several airbrakes, taking out at least a quarter if not a third. The straps on her seat bit into her shoulders, bringing tears to her eyes. Bucking and squealing, the ship's nose dipped sharply again, filling her window with a terrifyingly foreign yellow-grey landscape without a hint of open horizon.
"Not gonna die for them." Making up her mind, she reached up and pulled the red handle to purge the passenger compartment.
An error bleeted from her screen. Airlock doors not secure. She pulled the handle again with the same message.
"OWENS!"
"These people are your tribe now. They depend on you to keep them safe and level out the ship, so do it!"
Swearing, Carolyn returned to her instruments, fighting the losing battle to get the nose up enough to survive. She hit a lucky pocket of air that gusted her sideways, allowing her to angle a fin enough to roll the nose up. It was all she had time to do before her windshield burst open, showering her with grit and pummeling her with the force of the air. The ship hit the ground and bounced, coming down again and skidding forward with the sound of a thousand interstellar engines firing. Throwing her arms in front of her face, she waited to die.
She lived.
But of the forty passengers and four crew who'd boarded the Hunter-Gratzner, she could only feel the emotions of eleven other minds. Right then she didn't care, not even that one of them was the silver mind from before. None of them mattered but for one: the last living member of her tribe.
Fighting free of her seat straps, she went searching for Owens. She found him still at his station. He had a metal bar impaled through his chest next to his heart. She would've traded all of the survivors out back for Owens to be up and uninjured at that moment.
He woke up just enough to yell, "Don't touch that handle!" before the waves of agony kept him from anything more than wet gasps and whimpers of pain.
She asked one of the passengers to get her a shot of painkillers, but the med kit was gone along with the back half of the cabin wall. The presence of the passengers felt intrusive and grating. Their emotions felt so needy, pulling at her, but all of her strength was centered on Owens.
Ordering them out, she did the only thing she could to help her friend. She couldn't save his life but she could make his death a little bit easier. Carolyn put her fingers on Owens' face. Hands trembling, he grasped at her wrists. She dropped her shields and made herself vulnerable, merging their emotions and taking on half his pain as her own. Her chest burned and her muscles trembled with the pain. He clung to her comfort, still hurting but at least a little less, his skin going cold as blood drained out to pool beneath his body. As his breath rattled from his lungs for the last time, his soul rose from his flesh and flashed away into the plane of spirits like a supernova.
Not disengaging in time and without the spiritual protections enjoyed by a trained shaman, the experience overwhelmed her Guide gifts, singed her empathy, and knocked her unconscious.
When Carolyn woke up, she was still slumped over Owens's cooling body. As she closed his eyes for the last time and stood, she noticed that her mental shields were in tatters. It didn't matter, however, because she couldn't sense the emotions of the other survivors anymore, just a faint buzzing. It felt like trying to taste with a badly burned tongue. Hopefully it would heal in time.
She'd lost her tribe and her empathy. She had no ship to pilot. All she had was her life.
But where there was life, there was hope. She was a survivor. One foot at a time, she had to move on. Standing up, she strode out into the harsh sunlight.
When Johns slotted into place by her side as co-leader of their ragged band of survivors, she looked at his shiny gold badge with the light red stripe banded by the silver of a registered, unbonded Sentinel on suppression drugs and wondered if he'd been the silver mind she'd touched, if he'd been the wounded but strong Sentinel mind she'd felt so drawn to during the crash. He could be prickly, but they were all under a lot of pressure. He could also be charming, handsome, and heroic, doing his best to protect them all from a terrifying killer like Riddick. She really wished her empathy would come back so she could know what he was feeling behind the lazy smiles instead of just guessing.
Part of her started to wonder if bonding with a Sentinel would really be that bad. An instinctual part of her spirit kept nudging at her that bonding was the only way she was going to survive this planet. Right now she was hurting and being wrapped in a pair of strong arms and a devoted and loving mind sounded really nice. She envied Shazza and Zeke for having each other as partners.
Until Zeke got killed in a hole in a ground and his body disappeared with Riddick as the only witness and probable murderer.
Then she met Riddick in person and everything stopped making sense.
"You better talk, because right now they're debating if they should just kill you and stop worrying about you getting someone else," she demanded, trying to stay on point and not get distracted staring at the imposing man tied between two posts in the wreckage of her ship. Something wasn't adding up with Zeke's death. "You told Johns you heard something?"
Sleek muscles bulged across his arms and chest, leading up to the kind of jawline that usually made her beeline for a man in a bar and take a nibble. His nose was too broad for conventional beauty and his full lips sensually cruel, yet she couldn't look away or manage to catch her breath. Even restrained he exuded danger, power, and confidence.
"You mean the whispers?" The sound of his voice just made it all worse, a darkly resonant tone best suited to dimly-lit bedrooms and midnight fantasies.
"What whispers?"
"The ones telling me to go for the sweet spot just to the left of the spine. Fourth lumbar down. The abdominal aorta. It's a metallic taste, human blood. Copperish. If you cut it with peppermint schnapps, that goes—"
"Do you want to shock me with the truth now?"
He was a killer, scary, irritating, and strangely magnetic, dangling the answers she wanted just out of reach, his words designed to shock and scare her, to take her measure.
"All you people are so scared of me. Most days, I take that as a compliment. But it ain't me you got to worry about now."
"Then what?"
He just smiled faintly.
Carolyn was frustrated, terrified, and unwittingly turned on. Something about him drew her. She hated that he could get to her like this, hated even more that he seemed to sense it. She tried to access her empathy but it stayed frustratingly fuzzy, an aching buzz. With her gifts on the fritz she hadn't even bothered telling the others she was a Guide. There was no point.
His eyes glinted strangely in the dark, calling to her. "Show me your eyes," she demanded abruptly, tired of his games.
"Come closer," he tempted in that bedroom voice.
She couldn't help but wipe sweaty palms down her thighs and obey, curiosity stronger than fear. When he lunged forward into the light, obviously intending to make her jump, she saw his eyes and felt a strange pull deep inside her chest. He obviously felt something too, because his smirk faltered and his eyes went wide, bridging attention to eyes covered with a sheen of silver, the same gorgeous silver as the mind she'd sensed just before the crash.
Breath catching, she felt frozen. She wanted to force him to deny it. He couldn't be the silver Sentinel. Riddick was a convicted killer, for goodness sakes, a mass murdering sociopath according to Johns. She was taking coincidence too far.
Carolyn didn't know what she'd have done next if Jack hadn't interrupted their stare-off to ask where to get eyes like that for himself. Riddick turned a charming smile on the kid and claimed he'd traded for the shine job from a prison doctor.
Once Jack left, Riddick returned to the main topic, catching her in those hypnotic silver eyes and leaning towards her against the pull of his chains. "Have I killed some people? Yes. Did I kill Zeke? No."
God help her, despite everything she'd been told she believed him. "Then where is his body?"
"Look deeper," he challenged, something in his face making her think he was talking about himself as well as Zeke.
But she didn't want to look deeper at Riddick. His words fit with the clues, which meant that the only way to find the real killer and clear Riddick—not that clearing Riddick was as important compared to finding the truth for Zeke and the other passengers of course—was to go into the bloody hole where Zeke had disappeared and see for herself.
She didn't know if she was trying to prove something to the group, to Riddick, or to herself, but it was something she felt like she had to do if she wanted to look herself in the eye when this was all over (already a shaky prospect).
The heavy and hot feeling of Riddick's eyes on her back as she walked away lingered with her all of the way into the cool dark hole underground, a hole which turned out to be filled with monsters.
AN: When my friend didn't get asked to Junior Prom in February of 2000, she asked me to go to a movie with her instead. Since I wasn't going either as a Senior, I said yes. I had no idea what this movie was when I sat down with my hidden bag of Twizzlers and smuggled in soda pop. Pitch Black blew my mind. It wasn't perfect, but nevertheless I was enthralled by the character development, the chemistry (both antagonistic and sexual), and how I kept getting knocked topsy turvy. We spent half the night analyzing the plot and characters and my love affair with Vin Diesel's voice continues to this day.
The scene where Fry lifts Riddick to his feet and Riddick looks into her eyes with this vulnerable expression and she jolts and you see blood dripping in the rain you don't know for a second if HE stabbed her. But she doesn't look angry or regretful. She looks at him like she's trying to tell him something important, that HE's important. And then you realize that a monster has her as she's yanked away into the air to die offscreen and he falls to the ground in shock and horror and denial, crying, "Not for me!" and you can see that her sacrifice guts him. That he doesn't think he deserves it. That it means something profound to him and he's not just shrugging this death off. That her words and actions have changed him. Moved him. Gah! It killed me. It still kills me.
Then in the next movie he does all these amazing things to try and save Jack (who's grown up into this unbelievably gorgeous woman named Kyra with great skin and curves despite being in prison (which bothered me but I'm probably being petty)) and fails to save her too. Sure he gets the necromonger throne, but he didn't want that. He wanted to save Jack/Kyra and ends the movie with his hand over his face. Poor Riddick!
He deserves a fix-it. I want Riddick to succeed in saving someone and find a bit of love and happiness. I want Fry to learn from her mistakes and live to become a better person after this crucible. I want 20 years of unresolved sexual tension to be resolved. And I want to do all this through the filter of Sentinel/Guide relations.