Riddick had been anticipating the catharsis of a good fight. That, and he was really looking forward to seeing the look on Davis's face when he gutted him slowly. But the hangar was motionless and eerily silent when he rounded the last corner. The bay door had been blown off at some point and smoking bits of metal lay smoldering on the ground outside. He lowered his gun, feeling a little slighted and then feeling foolish for it.

There was a whisper of sound. A furious but almost silent scuffle going on over by the prison transport ship. The ship he needed. The only feasible way to get Jack off of that rock.

Riddick moved like shadow around the perimeter of the room.

The unforgiving sound of a gunshot put Riddick on his stomach, finger resting lightly on the trigger of his own gauge.

There was the sound of unresisting body meeting concrete. Apparently, the fight was over. Permanently.

The low grating of a ramp being lowered cut through the silence of the bay.

Davis. Riddick growled lowly, sending puffs of dust whirling around his face. His finger tapped thoughtfully, eagerly, on the trigger. And then he was gone, propelling himself over cargo crates. And bodies. There were lots of bodies.

Mostly Davis's crew, young kids. Some guards in their uniform gray. He hurtled over them, indiscriminate, uninterested in anything other than the rapidly diminishing gap between the ramp and the ship's hull.

He powered on, passing indistinct bodies. Until the last one – whoever lost that fight.

It was familiar in a way that none of the others were. Farris. Dammit. He almost stumbled, corrected his step, and flung himself towards the ramp.

He scrabbled over the top and landed ungracefully in a small holding bay. Davis stink was all present. Farris forgotten, Riddick felt himself smile.


I'm dead.

It made sense. She had died down there. Underground. Suffocated. She remembered that. It hurt. It still hurt. Fucking figured. Dead and still hurting. She snorted.

The sound echoed in her ears. She could still hear too.

And she could move. The muscle movement took a while, but she got her eyes open.

The option to stand up was eliminated swiftly. She ended up back on her hands and knees, coughing red into the sand.

Every breath hurt, but that was fine. She crawled an inch, and then a foot. It would be slow going, and that was fine too.


Someone had got to Davis already. There was a long ugly slash down the back of his vest. The man was hunched over the control floor, shaking, pumping fear and adrenaline into the air with every heartbeat.

Riddick sidestepped the small puddle of blood that was slowly seeping across the floor. He knew, disjointedly, that he was grinning.

It was beautiful, the way Davis's scrambling stopped when the barrel of the gauge pressed against the back of his skull.

Riddick could see both their reflections staring back at him from the front shield.

Davis's lips went white. Spittle flew. "You motherfucker. You think you and that cunt -"

Riddick twitched and Davis's temple was introduced, intimately, to the back end of a very, very heavy gun. And then Riddick was watching his own reflection stare back at him. He glared out of the blown open door of the hangar bay. It was almost dawn.


If anything, it was hotter in the hangar bay than it had been in the tunnel. She could see the Ishtar's shadow falling into the room. It would be dawn soon.

It would be over soon. She would burn, and Cobi would stay locked, frozen, in the cryo tube until the ship lost power or the inmates crawled up from below and got to her, which ever happened first.

She'd already made it this far. It couldn't hurt. She unstrapped the gauge from around her shoulder and leveled it on the ground. She didn't know who'd be coming around the corner, but she hoped….

"Riddick!"


Riddick's head whipped around, eyes narrowing. "Jack."

He glanced in between the limp body on the ground and the ship's single cryotube. A second later Davis's body was crammed inside and Riddick was hurtling off the ship's ramp at full speed, gun raised.

She had only planned on yelling once, but desperation overcame her and she found herself screaming for him until the sound of rapidly approaching steps cut her short. She squeezed the trigger a little harder, waiting.

"Jack."

She smiled. Asshole. The gun fell from her hand.


The sun was rising. He could see the heat waves radiating off the Ishtar's hull, so he knew that. Funny though, he was cold. So cold. Fire came roaring up over the crest of the mountain in front of him. He heard the faint popping sound of the Ishtar's engines exploding and smiled. It'd been years since he'd seen a proper sunrise anyways.


This time she was sure she was dead. In real life Riddick never came. He couldn't have taken them all. The sun came up and she died. Cobi was still sleeping in the Ishtar's holding bay. She wondered if dead people could still feel pain. She did. Figured.

"Wake up, Jack." Riddick's voice from nearby. She winced. Oh. Christ. Is he dead too? She felt a very real pang of heartache.

Dead people couldn't open their eyes, but Riddick's face blocked her field of vision anyways. "Are you dead too," she croaked.

He smirked, and she felt another tug of something very real, very close to love. "Not yet."

She nodded. Nothing made sense. Didn't matter though, being dead and all.

"That's good."

She closed her eyes.


She registered the cold first. A deep chill that made her bones ache when she tried to move.

Opening her eyes was like moving heaven and earth. She blinked rapidly under the glare of fluorescent lights.

She sat up gingerly. Looked around. She'd died and gone to…a med-bay?

"What the fuck?" Her tongue felt thick and clumsy in her mouth. She slipped off the gurney, stood a minute trying to get her bearings.

The door slid open and she turned, not knowing what to expect. It was Riddick. Her hand gripped the sheets. They felt very real to her.

"You dead?"

He leaned up against the door frame, crossing his arms. "Didn't we go over this already?"

She shook her head, ineffectively trying to clear the fog in her brain. "Am I?"

He stepped to her, eyebrow quirked. "Get back in the bed."

Reflexively, she snorted. Do dead people have reflexes?

"The hell? I'm dead. You can't tell me what to do."

"Sure about that," he asked, dubiously. "This could be your personal hell."

She blinked at that, stunned. And then, despite herself, she laughed. A flare of pain in her chest cut that short. She leaned unsteadily on the gurney, head swirling.

"Does being dead hurt," she wheezed, leaning on him as he lifted her back onto the bed. Dead or not, lying down felt a lot better.

Riddick's voice was thick with amusement, "Wouldn't know."

She closed her eyes. Nodded. "Where's Cobi?"

There was a long silence. She couldn't bring herself to open her eyes while waiting for his answer.

Finally, "She's here."

Her heart skipped a beat. "Alive?"

"Alive enough to pilot, yeah."

Huh? Things were beginning to go a little fuzzy again. "Pilot? She's ten years old."

"Twelve." She heard him rooting around in some drawers. "She flies better than you did."

She snorted, didn't resist when he rolled her onto her side and began changing her bandage.

"I'm still mad at you."

"I know." He moved around the bed, brow furrowed in concentration.

"You're still an ass."

He taped the bandage down, less than gently. "I know."

She smiled softly into the pillow. It was probably the morphine's after effects, but she felt good. "Hey, Riddick?"

He grunted, she smiled again. Typical. "Where's Farris?"

His hands paused.

"Oh." Her voice sounded small, even to her own ears. She lowered her head back onto the pillow, no longer smiling. "What-," she trailed off, less than certain that she wanted to finish that question. Farris had been her friend. But Riddick....

Thinking about it made her head hurt. Decided not to mince words. "Did you kill him?"

"No." She remembered to breathe. He didn't sound offended. He didn't sound anything but cautious, and that was making her twitchy. There was something else.

There's always something else.

"And Davis?" She tried for casual. She sounded sick.

Riddick offered nothing but silence.

Oh.

"Where?"

He met her stare with a blank look. "In cryo. I'm letting him heal up."

She wet her lips, tried to steady her voice."You're…turning him in?"

His face went dark. "No, Jack. I'm not."

She turned around, closed her eyes again. They didn't talk anymore.