Not For Me

By Indygodusk

Chapter 2

Despite being called captain, all of the big decisions seemed to be made by committee. Except for Johns's handling of Riddick, it seemed. They'd just met to discuss supplies and the repair of the shuttle, only to be informed that Riddick was walking free among them in return for his promise to not hurt anyone.

Unhappy with Johns deciding such a huge thing all on his own, Carolyn nevertheless realized that it was too late for her objections to mean anything. No one elses had. She made sure everyone had their duties and dismissed the meeting. Everyone quickly scattered.

When Carolyn looked over her shoulder, she saw Shazza blocking Riddick from leaving. Curious and worried for the other woman, Carolyn hid in the open doorway to watch.

Shazza firmed her jaw and met Riddick's eyes boldly. "Here." She tossed him her oxygen canister and tubing. They'd been using hits of oxygen to help people acclimate to the thinner atmosphere of the planet, but the supply had quickly run out.

Carolyn was impressed by Shazza's courage and kindness, considering that during their last interaction Shazza had accused Riddick of killing Zeke and then kicked him in the head so hard she'd knocked him unconscious. A man might hold a grudge about that.

Catching the gift, Riddick's face went flat. He tossed the breather onto the floor at Shazza's feet with a curl of his lip. "What? Is it broken?"

Sucking in air through her teeth, Shazza put a hand on her hip and exhaled hard. "No, you ass, there's a few hits of oxygen left. It's an apology."

Even without her empathy working right, Carolyn could see what was going on. She was impressed. Shazza wasn't offering the oxygen as an insult or bribe to make Riddick leave her alone, she was making the offer because her personal honor demanded it and she was a fundamentally kind person, despite her gruff exterior and temper, a temper now pricked by his response. Glaring, Shazza shoved the tubing back towards Riddick with her boot, tossed her head to get her wild black curls out of her face, and stomped away, not acknowledging Carolyn hiding in the doorway.

Riddick looked wary, obviously unused to receiving gifts or apologies. Bending over, he picked up the tubing and stared at it for a long moment, muscles tight, before carefully hanging it over his shoulder. The corner of his mouth tilted down, almost a vulnerable expression.

It made something in Carolyn's chest ache. She slipped away before Riddick could notice her watching and misunderstand. And before she saw something else that made her care more than she should about a man like that.

Outside in the blazing sun, she felt a renewed urgency. Formulating plans in her head, she went to find Johns to get him to help coordinate bringing up all five power cells for the shuttle.

Instead of meeting her urgency with her own, Johns was adamant that they wait until the last minute. When pressed for reasons, he told her it was so Riddick didn't stab them all in the back, kill her, and pilot the shuttle away all by himself like he'd done during his escape from prison. Done talking, Johns turned his back on her and walked away.

It put her in a foul mood.

Choosing to focus on what was in her control, she turned to the problem of patching up the wings and hull of the decrepit shuttle to make it air-tight and space-worthy. The work was exhausting and took a headache-inducing amount of ingenuity over the next few days or weeks (it was hard to keep track of days when there was no night out here). She had to scavenge debris from both the crashed ship and the mining colony.

Despite Johns ordering Riddick around like a dog and giving him several tasks to keep him away from the shuttle, Riddick chose to interpret his orders liberally and joined her in her scavenging efforts when Johns was too busy to notice or do anything about it. She wasn't naive enough to believe he was helping purely out of the goodness of his heart. He wanted out of here as much as she did and was probably trying to figure out a way to do it without relying on the rest of them.

Though that didn't explain why he was always watching her and why the tension in his shoulders ratcheted down a notch when she joined the group and found him already there. Although her presence seemed to make the tension in his shoulders unwind, he had the opposite effect on her body. Having Riddick always watching her from the periphery unsettled her in ways she didn't want to examine too closely, making her pulse jump and sweat trickle down her spine. They worked mostly in silence but she felt anything but peaceful. He intimidated her, which she resented. He also intrigued her, which she resented even worse.

Every time she switched buildings when his back was turned, his nostrils flared and his head tilted. Combined with his claims to see in the dark and how far he could see even when wearing tinted goggles, plus how he'd heard the monsters underground who'd taken Zeke, the conclusion was as obvious as it was incomprehensible: Riddick had to be an Online Sentinel with enhanced senses. Was her Guide aura unconsciously helping his Sentinel relax and even out his senses in an alien environment? She wanted to feel resentful, but instead just felt more confused.

Just as well they weren't alone to talk since Jack was still tagging along after Riddick with his strange case of hero-worship. If they had been alone she'd have asked Riddick about being a Sentinel and probably gotten more than she'd bargained for with his reply, considering their last private interaction and how he dominated conversations when he chose to talk. She was already dealing with more crap than she wanted to right now. She didn't need the extra stress.

Like kids. Kids were stressful. Without direct orders, Jack quickly got bored with scavenger work and got the other boys to play annoying games nearby. It necessitated them jumping out and startling her constantly, intermixed with sharing the "exciting" discoveries they were making with their "beloved Captain." They were just kids, but her patience was already paper-thin, her emotional shields fragile, and her empathy buzzing painfully and not giving her anything useful. It made her snappy. When she snapped, the kids got this obviously hurt expression on their faces that just made her feel worse. They'd wander off for a while but the next day they were back at it again, helping a little and annoying her a lot.

Once she'd gathered everything useful and got to the point of actually patching up the wings and interior of the shuttle, her helpers vanished. Riddick disappeared to who knows where, Jack got conscripted by Shazza, and Imam took away the boys for scripture school. It left her alone in silence to focus. She told herself that she liked the quiet. It was true for the first hour, but after that, she started getting bored. Once she figured out a plan to patch up the ship, most of the actual repair work boiled down to forcing two different puzzles to fit together into one picture through the liberal application of scissors and glue.

Boredom turned into brooding.

The way everyone kept calling her Captain and looking at her so needily was starting to get to her. She was a pilot and a loner except for her small crew. She wasn't supposed to be Captain. The pressure of their expectations wasn't something she wanted to carry. Carolyn wasn't their Captain, she was the selfish person who'd tried to kill them all to save herself and Owens. They'd been faceless strangers at the time, but she'd failed to save Owens because he'd still chosen to put the lives of strangers above letting her save the two of them. She was mostly more grateful than mad about that nowadays since these people weren't strangers anymore.

Carolyn didn't want to think of herself as a bad person. She didn't want to keep carrying around shame for what she'd done. However, her attempt to redeem herself by showing she cared and going down to look for Zeke's body hadn't done any good. It had only almost gotten her killed and uncovered a nightmare monster. Those monsters had killed Zeke, all the people who used to live here, and even gotten Ali, Imam's youngest boy, once they moved into the settlement.

Another reason not to get attached to anyone here when people were still dying.

The few snatches of sleep she'd gotten in this ever sunlit place were filled with dreams of her death and a premonition that bonding with a Sentinel was the only way she'd survive to get off the planet. Carolyn Fry might be a Guide, but she didn't trust in dream premonitions, especially those designed to make her biological instincts happier than her intellect. She didn't want to bond to Johns. Or Riddick. Though a cop like Johns was a better choice than a convict if she really had to, right? Her emotions warred with her logic. She told them both to shut up. Sometimes a dream was just a dream.

Fry didn't want to become responsible for caring for and protecting a new Tribe so soon after losing her last one. Their loss still hurt. Unfortunately, it was hard not to care about people once you knew their faces and stories. It was doubly hard when they seemed determined to have you as the head of their ad-hoc family with or without your input. When this was all over it would be hard to forget Imam's prayers and optimism, the boys' curiosity and strength, Shazza's dreams for a new home, Jack's bravado, Paris's ramblings about art history (and alcohol), and the way Johns used to let her get things off her chest without condemning her (though her recent talks with him had lost much of their earlier ease).

Not to mention Richard B. Riddick. She didn't know how to categorize their interactions except to say that Riddick wasn't a man you quickly forgot. Despite how he still scared her, she also found him funny and smart, with a dry wit and intelligent observations. She wouldn't want to get trapped alone with him in an enclosed space, but she found herself liking him despite herself. This planet with its three suns and neverending daylight really was driving her crazy.

It didn't matter though because she was going to protect her heart from all of them. She was not going to imprint on these people and allow herself to be hurt when she lost them, especially not Sentinels like Riddick and Johns. She'd flirted with the thought of bonding to Johns when it wasn't physically possible, but now with her empathy closer to coming back Online and his suppression drugs surely running out, bringing him back Online too, she felt less and less willing to make herself that vulnerable. The more she got to know Johns, the less he felt like the partner she'd told herself to stop looking for but secretly still hoped to find. She certainly had no interest in quitting her job to follow after him, not that working for the Company was all that great, but she had no desire to become an intergalactic cop. And Riddick was a convicted criminal, which made him impossible too, not that she'd want him even if it was possible. Of course not.

No, these people were not going to be her new Tribe. She would not be responsible for their fate. They were just people working together for the common goal of getting off this rock before the sun went down and those monsters swarmed to the surface and killed everyone. She cared about them in a general sense because that was a normal human reaction to being around people in a survival situation like this, but nothing more. Once they got back up in the black they could all go back to being strangers with no hard feelings… couldn't they?

Okay, she might be lying to herself. However, sometimes you had to lie to yourself to get through the day. She told herself that if she could just get the shuttle up and running and everyone rescued, it would kill the guilt living in her gut since the crash. Then even if they found out what she'd done and rejected her, she could move on and sleep peacefully again knowing she'd redeemed herself.

Though even if she did exorcise that particular demon, she had a horrible feeling that a new guilt would take its place. Johns's plan to backstab Riddick and not set him free once they got out of here was going to haunt her. She wanted to trust in Johns, but he seemed to be hiding so much behind those pale blue eyes. If only her empathy would hurry up and fix itself! She couldn't read if Johns was telling her the truth and was starting to suspect that he was playing her just like he was playing Riddick.

But why?

Choosing the side of a convicted killer over that of a cop would be the height of stupidity. Carolyn Fry did not get this far by being stupid. She could only hope that once her Guide gifts came back Online she'd feel better about the situation and be able to chalk Riddick's return to prison as necessary for protecting the Tribe, whoever her new Tribe ended up being.

Guides were meant to bring harmony to Sentinels. Together they protected the Tribe and dispensed justice, at least that's the story she'd believed in wholeheartedly as a girl, even if she'd given up on finding a worthy partner or the fairy-tale of justice as an adult. Johns was a Sentinel (albeit a suppressed one, though once again he had to be switching Online any day now since without refrigeration his suppressants had to have spoiled). She should feel good about partnering with him and trusting in his duty to protect others as an intergalactic cop. If he knowingly betrayed the Tribe by using his gifts unjustly or to hurt instead of protect the vulnerable, his gifts would go Dormant and punish him with the pain of their loss. That's what she'd been taught, though admittedly she'd figured out how to work around the rules a bit when choosing to define the people in and out of her tribe to minimize her own instincts.

So how did she explain Riddick? He had to be an Online Sentinel. She found herself watching him more than she should. Despite being a convicted killer dragged back to prison after escaping on a hijacked prison transport, he hadn't gone dormant. That should be impossible, especially because he didn't seem to have any tribal instincts. Everything she knew said that Riddick should be Dormant. Instead, he had physical senses so advanced she'd only heard of something similar spoken of sheepishly in stories about mythically strong Alpha Sentinel Primes out on the frontier. He was clearly stronger, faster, and tougher than normal humans, and his sight, smell, and hearing exceeded any other Sentinel she'd ever seen or heard about.

Riddick's story about getting a surgical shine job on his eyes to see in the dark made no sense either. Over the years in spaceport bars she'd met her share of special ops soldiers surgically modified for wet work in dark places. Eyes didn't work like that without obvious external cybernetic prosthetics and regular doses of maintenance drugs.

She didn't know much of Riddick's history except for what Johns had told them and the little morsels Riddick let slip, but the more she saw and sensed from Riddick, the more she felt completely confused. Her instincts were telling her that Riddick was a dangerous killer, yes, but also that he was an inherently honorable and just man who'd rarely seen justice. She got the feeling that he liked scaring people because fear was the only way he'd ever gotten any respect. Yet since the chains had come off he'd kept his word about being helpful and not harming anyone. He was kind to the children when he couldn't avoid them and rarely lost his temper or raised his voice (outside of interacting with Johns). As far as she could tell, he hadn't even lied to them about anything except for maybe the story about his eyes.

He had so much control it was stunning, yet at the same time he exuded the energy of a feral animal so used to receiving and meting out violence that death had become commonplace. She had a feeling he could and would stab anyone who got in the way of his freedom, but that if you showed him your throat and lowered your eyes he wouldn't bother you. Unfortunately for her safety, she had a big mouth and difficulty lowering her eyes to anyone.

Riddick scared her. He could hurt her and not even care. Violence was such a big part of his nature that she would be stupid to ever discount him as a threat and label him safe. And yet... she felt drawn to him. She secretly wondered if any Guide had the power to bring peace to such a primitive and scarred Sentinel. Of what it would feel like to be needed by such a man. The challenge of it was enticing. Seductive.

Suicidal.

Personal survival was a whole lot more important than indulging in her curiosity. If she didn't get this ship fixed, worrying about which Sentinel to trust more so she could live with herself was a moot point. They'd all die down here, either killed by the monsters or killed by each other. Focusing on that cheerful thought, she returned to her repairs.

After several days of work, Johns finally agreed to bring up a single power cell for a hull integrity and systems check on the shuttle. He flatly refused to do more. Carolyn argued herself hoarse about bringing all five power cells up and just setting a guard to make sure Riddick didn't sneak on board and steal the shuttle, stranding the rest of them there, but Johns wouldn't budge. He told her one and that was that. It made her so frustrated.

She'd argue more but Johns had a way of playing up her fears as they spoke, reminding her that Riddick was a killer who'd most recently killed another pilot and making her doubt her own judgment. For all she knew Johns was right to be so cautious, but she was just so done with his hot and cold attitude. He didn't seem to care about the rest of them and it felt like nothing but keeping Riddick in line could motivate him to exert himself. How could he not be in a rush to leave? She was so sick of being stranded on this planet.

The model of the local solar system they'd found showed an eclipse of the planet dated twenty-two years ago this month. Riddick had theorized (very convincingly) that the settlement had been slaughtered by the creatures living underground during that eclipse. The sooner they got out of here the better. She did not want to be around when all three suns went dark and those monsters came up to hunt.

Doing the hull-integrity test on the shuttle was her next step in getting out of here.

AN: Next chapter is the shuttle scene. I love the shuttle scene and will be making it even more steamy!