They dozed in each other's arms for a while longer. Zemma felt much better; maybe she had been angry about not having sex when she wanted it? Still, there were some issues she wanted cleared up. When Riddick's breathing changed and she was sure he was awake but pretending to be asleep, she stroked his cheek lightly.
"Have you been reading that journal you make me write every day?"
"I told you I wouldn't."
"Then how did you know I was exercising?"
Riddick suppressed a grin. "I saw you looking in the mirror, making a muscle, and poking your bicep." He peeked one eye open at her, laughter in his gravelly voice, but not letting it come out and insult her. "Women only do that for one reason."
Zemma snorted. She'd thought he had his back to her in the shower that time.
Riddick's brow creased a little. "And running with Jack. How could I not notice that? You two thumping up and down all the ramps, slamming the doors behind you. You're getting too thin, Zemma." He opened both eyes to stare her into hers. "I can see your ribs, and your hip bones are sticking out." He stroked her collarbone and shoulder.
Zemma thought her collarbones were looking a little too obvious too, it was why she had started doing push ups in the first place, to put some muscle in her shoulders.
"Jack's thin…" she started lamely.
"Jack likes to try to pass for a boy. I don't sleep with boys. You need to eat more." He sounded very serious and concerned.
"Bleh. I hate rations. They taste nasty. They're grainy..."
"But they're good for you. Everything good for you tastes bad."
"Steak and lobster are good for you," Zemma faked a little pout.
"Get some of those protein bars, they aren't too bad."
"They're all gone."
"Jack must have stashed em, she couldn't possibly have eaten them all. Make her give em up. Kick her in the head if you have to."
Zemma smiled at the thought and sighed. "Jack was right about me. I had it easy on the Basilica."
"No one likes rations, Zem. You buy em because they're cheap and last forever. You eat em because you gotta. Eat what you can, sleep when you can; you never know how long you'll have to go without."
Zemma heard the past creeping into Riddick's voice. He was speaking from hard experience and she realized he must have eaten things she'd never consider, or maybe even imagine. "I'll do better," she sighed.
"That's my girl."
Zemma melted into him. She loved those words. "I wish Don would cook more."
"He wishes we could cook at all. But whatever it takes, I want you eating more. You cant build up a muscle," he squeezed her upper arm gently. "If your body is eating it for lunch."
Zemma hoped to still have that talk with Jack about Riddick even though she felt things were better between them, but never had the chance. Don wasn't happy Zemma had slept in with Riddick, and pulled her away from the breakfast table as soon as he saw her. She took her plate of grainy eggs with her.
At the bridge, Don called up her original schematic and then overlaid his own program.
"Zemma, this regulator… it's never going to work."
"Of course it will. It wont work as well as just keeping the tubes tied to the secondaries, but it will work."
"The power will overload the regulators after each use, they'll burn up." He pointed at the math.
Zemma sighed. She knew this. She was a tech, like her dad. "Of course they will, that's their purpose, not to overload the tubes, but filter up to every watt they can take. I figure we can make as many as we need. Reloading the cannons won't be quick, popping in the new circuitry won't take much more time. But…"
"You created a system meant to fail?"
"Of course not, they will work perfectly within their parameters, but that's not the point… we don't really need them, we can keep the tubes tied to the secondaries and the tubes will work just as well… I've even been thinking about how to make…"
"Then why bring up the regulators, Zemma?" He seemed more curious than curt.
Zemma didn't blush, or miss a beat. "Because Riddick wanted weapons off the mains. You told him he couldn't have weapons off the secondaries." Zemma kept a straight face.
Don blinked. Then he barked out a short laugh. "You knew all along we didn't need regulators to make this work."
Zemma dropped him a slow wink, rather like Jaron sometimes gave her when she was especially quick learning something. Don barked out another short laugh. Two in a row, he might not be able to laugh again for a month.
"He loves you too, you know." Don actually smiled a little. That is, his eyes crinkled, and one side of this mouth tweaked upwards briefly.
That shocked Zemma to speechlessness. She looked at Don as if she had never seen him before. Well, that wasn't quite true, she looked at him with much more emotion showing than that. She would have kept her poker face for a stranger.
He snorted at the lack of expression on Zemma's face. "You thought I didn't notice? Or couldn't?" He asked her dryly.
This time it was the corner of Zemma's mouth that tugged up. Don appeared to notice that the half smile didn't extend to her eyes: his narrowed.
"You do know he loves you, right?" His eyebrows rose a little in apparent surprise.
"I wouldn't go that far…" Zemma started out quietly, suddenly looking at the deck. "I know he feels something for me…"
Don nodded but Zemma didn't see it right away, still engrossed in the plas-flooring. He reached out to lift her chin, to meet her eyes with his.
"It's not easy for a man to say it for the first time, child," he told her soothingly.
"Have you…ever said it?" Zemma was emboldened by the strange look of compassion on Don's face. He smiled with his whole face this time, his eyes looking far away…into the past.
"Yes," he started slowly. "I was a young man for a long time. I said it more often than I meant it." He glanced at her, eyes sparkling, but seeking out any disapproval in this admittance. He didn't find any. "I hope I'll get to say it again in my mid-life; I hope I'll mean it enough for it to last into my old age."
He dropped his hand from her chin when he continued. "Riddick… I know his kind. He'll only say it once in his lifetime, but he'll mean it forever."
Zemma felt herself blushing. Don had never spoken so much on such a personal level. She wondered if perhaps she could talk to him of matters of her heart.
"Why do we fight so much?" Zemma hadn't intended to actually speak, but once she'd decided she might, she simply did. She'd blurted out what was on her mind, as she seemed to do more and more these days. Tears of anxiousness and simultaneous relief sprang into her eyes and she blinked them away quickly.
Don smiled again, his eyes searching her face. "Do you think you should never fight? A woman like you… a man like him?"
When Zemma didn't respond, didn't know how to respond, he went on, much to Zemma's ever growing surprise.
"How long were you on your own Zemma? I don't mean after the Purifier left on his fatal mission. I mean before that. You said he reached a point where he no longer spoke to you?"
"Yes,' she hesitated. The years seemed much greater spoken out loud. Her voice and her eyes dropped again. "A decade. He barely spoke to me at all for the last decade."
Don tsk'ed. "For years, you were on your own, dealing with no one, handling everything yourself."
Zemma nodded.
"You keep everything inside you, hidden. Except for him. Everything spills out of you when you're around him."
"How do you know?" She whispered, looking up again, staring at the stranger sitting opposite her. How could he know? Don, who seemed so closed and cold to everything and everyone…
He chucked, and she automatically counted it as number three. She decided she liked his soft derisive snort, which indicated amusement in a man who never otherwise showed any humor.
"I was young once. And I witnessed a great deal of love in my lifetime before the Mongers." Now he looked away, and Zemma thought he might be looking backwards again. "You remind me of someone. She always said what was on her mind too. She always knew what she wanted. She always seemed to know what to do…"
"But I never…" Zemma whispered desperately. She didn't think that described her at all. She'd been confused and frustrated for months; ever since she'd met Riddick, he'd thrown her completely out of her element.
Don patted her knee. His face returned from reminiscing to businesslike. "Tell me again about this cannon of yours."
Relieved, Zemma explained. Shortly, she was talking excitedly about the project. Don seemed to follow the technical jargon, nodding often, and she could see in his eyes when he leaped ahead of her words, but he allowed her to finish. He asked sharp questions, and offered clever improvements.
"I didn't know you were a tech," Zemma commented finally. Her respect for him increased even beyond how much the heart to heart had impressed her.
"I wasn't much, before the Mongers," he told her wryly, his eyes twinkling from the irony of anything good coming from the NecroMongers. "I was a… software… geek…"
Zemma didn't understand the term he used so self-depreciatingly, but returned his smile as he continued.
"Communications, surveillance, intelligence… But I had to learn a lot more to keep an eye on the Mongers without them keeping an eye on me. Thirty years is enough time to learn anything."
Zemma nodded. He potentially knew a lot more than her about some systems, certainly it was enough to keep her from detecting his and the other Furyan presences on board the ships for all those years. He seemed to read her mind, or maybe just her eyes.
"No, child, I wouldn't have thought of this myself. My skills were always geared toward watching, not creating. But once you started explaining, I could see where you were going with it. It'll work, not like a conventional weapon, but certainly effective."
Don went to work immediately on Zemma's ideas while she finished out her shift. Jack was nowhere to be seen on the monitors, but Zemma knew her location anyway - and assumed Don did too, or would if he suspected anything amiss.
Zemma checked Jack's homework and worried the girl would never learn more than 'basic' math. Certainly she showed no aptitude for the stuff that made up navigation. Still, Zemma reminded herself, the girl made improvements every day; impressive for someone with essentially no education what so ever.
Zemma wracked her brain to create more homework. Being a teacher was far more challenging than she ever would have thought possible. She rather understood Don snacking her in the back of the head when he was teaching her to pilot. Sometimes, when Jack seemed to completely forget what she was doing from one problem to the next, Zemma wanted to knock her in the back of the head too.
She took a break from what she considered her 'real' work, to scan through the 'make work' of the ship's systems and the tasks Don had left for her to do. All green. Zemma created a few trickier false reds for Jack later, and debated setting up a few for the boys just for a laugh. She decided Don wouldn't be fooled but might appreciate the humor, now that she knew he had some. She spent over an hour creating a ghost in the system that Don might overlook if he were actually busy. She made another, more obvious, one for Riddick to chase, if he bothered.
The she started scanning through the ship's monitors to see where everyone was hiding.
Don, as expected, was head first in an open control panel. When she keyed open the comm. she could hear him swearing, but almost pleasantly, as if he enjoyed the challenge and fully expected to win over the stubborn equipment.
It made her wonder if it was another common trait of Furyans, or just the men in her company: to always assume they would succeed.
She also wondered about the mystery woman Don had referred to… was it someone he, himself, had loved? She didn't think of Don as capable of such a thing before. Zemma certainly didn't have the idea that he was in love with her. His words had been of admiration, not longing.
Zemma found Riddick and Jack sparring in the cargo hold. Zemma was impressed with the girl's progress there too. She seemed faster, unquestionably more fluid and relaxed: telegraphing less. She must have said something funny because Riddick stopped in his tracks to laugh that huge diaphragm to the ceiling laugh that she liked to hear so much. She hit the comm. quickly, just to hear it.
Jack reacted to the change in the ready light from red to green with a twitch of her head in that direction followed by a wink towards the camera. She didn't comment to Riddick, who missed both movements. Zemma's brief stab of jealousy that Jack had been the one to elicit such a reaction from Riddick was replaced with friendly conspiracy. Jack knew Zemma was watching and listening. Jack was her friend, not her rival.
Zemma felt good: not so alone on the huge flight deck; not so at odds with Jack for Riddick's attentions.